Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Where you going, then? Home, I suppose?”

Her brain is loose and feral. She can say nothing.

“Sure,” he says. “Back to Siouxland. Sioux City Sue. So sue me already.”

“I’m staying, Mark. The Refuge says they can still use me. They’re a little shorthanded, now.” Water is not done with her.

He looks off, as if reading his words printed on the sealed window. “Makes sense, I guess. With Danny gone. Hey — somebody has to be him, if he won’t.”

So this is how it ends. So gradually that neither of them can feel the gears catch. She wants him to shake free all at once, to rise from his fever dream and see where they’ve been. But he’ll crush her again, this time from the other direction. Claim he knew who she was, all along. No firmness floods back into her. If anything, the whole structure seems even flimsier, with no injury to blame.

He stretches out his legs and crosses them, the imitation of repose. “So is Cain going to the slammer, or something? No, I forgot. Totally innocent. Know what they should do with that guy? They should send him to the next Iraq. Use him as a hostage.” He looks up, uncomprehending. “It was Barbara. Barbara out there, all along.”

He is six again, terrified. And she is everywhere, trying to comfort him. For once, he lets her, so fully broken. He squeezes his forehead, then shakes it. He covers his eyes with his hands.

“You know about all this?” She nods. “You know it was her?” He grasps his skull, the source of all confusion. She nods again. “But you didn’t know…before?”

She shakes her head hard. “No one knew.”

He tries to figure this. “And you were here…all along?”

He collapses into himself, not wanting an answer. When he pulls himself together again enough to talk, his words stun her.

“She says she’s finished. Says she’s nothing, now.”

She flares up, insulted that her brother should still care. Disgusted that the woman should give up on them, having come this far. More fraudulence. More wasted godliness. “Jesus Christ,” she spits. “A woman with her skills! Just because she fucked up, does she think the world can’t use her? We’re down to gallons here. Hours and ounces. And she’s going to roll over and die?”

Mark looks at her, bewildered. Some possibility lifts him up. His own loss means nothing. The accident gives him this. “Ask her,” he begs. Afraid to suggest even this little.

“Not me. I’ll never ask that woman for anything again.”

He sits up, clenched in the terror of animals. “You gotta ask her to work for you. I’m not just saying. This is my life we’re talking about.” He slows himself and breathes. He squeezes his eyes again. He points apologetically at the IV drip. “Man! I need to get back in the driver’s seat, here. What are they doing to me? Mr. Emotion all of a sudden. With the shit they’ve got figured out now? They could probably turn anyone into anyone else.”

It no longer seems to her like a delusion. Tomorrow will be worse.

He looks at her, forgetting everything but the immediate need. He circles her forearm with his fingers, measuring. “You haven’t been eating.”

“I have.”

“Food?” he asks, skeptically. “ She’s not that thin.”

“ Who? ”

“Come on! Don’t give me who . My sister.” And at her flash of panic, he laughs clear and deep. “Would you look at you! Relax. Just busting your chops.”

Mark leans back in the chair, stretches out his black cross-trainers, weaves his hands behind his head. It’s like he’s sixty-five, retired. In three months, her brother will be gone again, or his sister will, someplace the other won’t be able to follow. But for a little while, now, they know each other, because of their time away.

“At least somebody else is sticking around. That’s what I’m doing. Hang where you know. Where else can you go, with all hell breaking loose?”

Her nostrils quiver and her eyes burn. She tries to say nowhere , but she can’t.

“I mean, how many homes does one person get?” He waves his hand toward the gray window. “It’s not such a bad place to come back to.”

“Best place on earth,” she says. “Six weeks, every year.”

They sit for a while, not exactly talking. She can have him for her own, recuperating, for one minute more. But he grows agitated again. “This is what scares me: if I could go so long, thinking…? Then how can we be sure, even now…?”

He looks up anxiously, to see her crying. Frightened, he draws back. But when she doesn’t stop, he reaches over and shakes her arm. He tries to rock it, at a loss for anything that might calm her. He keeps talking, sing-song, meaningless, as to a little girl. “Hey. I know how you’re feeling. Rough days, for us two. But look!” He twists her around to the plate-glass window — a flat, overcast, Platte afternoon. “It’s not all so bad, huh? Just as good, in fact. In some ways, even better.”

She fights to retrieve her voice. “What do you mean, Mark? As good as what?”

“I mean, us. You. Me. Here.” He points out the window, approvingly: the Great American Desert. The inch-deep river. Their next of kin, those circling birds. “Whatever you call all this. Just as good as the real thing.”

There is an animal perpendicular to all the others.One that flies at right angles to the seasons. He makes the check-in, getting through security on instinct. Navigates on muscle memory. Only the drone of automatic reminders focuses him: Passengers are required to accompany their baggage at all times. Government regulations prohibit …

The airports are thick with war. In the waiting area in Lincoln, television monitors assault him. The twenty-four-hour news program forever loops its twenty-four seconds of news, and he can’t look away. Day Three , the deep bass keeps intoning, over synthesized brass, at every segment break. Magic drawing boards, tellustrators, computerized maps with movable battalions, and retired generals doing the play-by-play. Embedded journalists, prevented from reporting facts, pour out meandering speculation. All other world news stops.

In Chicago, more of the same: A taxi drives up to a checkpoint north of a city that may or may not be under occupation control. The driver waves for help. Four soldiers make the mistake of approaching. Even on his sixth time through the story, Weber sits transfixed, for the seventh time might end differently.

Airborne again, dragging back east in the skewed flyway, he grows transparent, thinner than film. A voice says, Please do not move about the cabin or congregate in the aisles. He grasps at the words, a life jacket. Something in his species is cut loose. The boy-man was right: Capgras truer than this constant smoothing-out of consciousness. He had a patient once — Warren, in The Country of Surprise —a thirty-two-year-old day-trader and weekend rock climber who rolled down the face of a steep ravine and landed on his forehead. Coming from his coma, Warren emerged into a world peopled by monks, soldiers, fashion models, movie villains, and creatures half human and half animal, all of whom spoke to him in the most natural way. Weber would destroy every copy of every word that bears his name for a chance to tell Warren’s story again, now that he knows what he’s talking about.

He is surrounded. Even the sealed cabin around him has grown septic with life. Everything is animate, green and encroaching. Dozens of millions of species seethe around him, few of them visible, even fewer named, ready to try anything once, every possible cheat and exploitation, just to keep being. He stares at his shaking hands, whole rain forests of bacteria. Insects burrow deep inside this plane’s wiring. Seeds abide in the cargo hold. Fungus under the cabin’s vinyl lining. Outside his little window flap, frozen in the airless air, archaea, super-bugs, and extremophiles live on nothing, in darkness, below zero, simply copying. Every code that has stayed alive until now is more brilliant than his subtlest thought. And when his thoughts die, more brilliant still.