Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

The man in the seat next to him, debating all the way to eastern Ohio, at last summons up the courage to ask, “Don’t I recognize you?”

Weber flinches, a lopsided, phantom grin stolen from one of his patients. “I don’t think so.”

“Sure. The brain guy.”

“No,” Weber says.

The stranger examines him, suspiciously. “Sure. The Man Who Mistook His Life for a …”

“Not me,” Weber insists. “I’m in reclamation.”

Stewardesses skitter up and down the aisle. A passenger across from him scoops mashed animal into her giant mouth. Weber’s body crumples inside his stain-wrecked suit. His thoughts skim like water striders. Nothing is left of him except these new eyes.

Inside his own teeming head, the last day’s images come home to roost. In his seat behind the wing, Weber plays the last scene repeatedly — reframing, rethreading, returning. Mark in his room at Good Samaritan, watching the same vacant, embedded broadcasts of war as the rest of the clueless world. Watching relentlessly, as if, should he watch these armies long enough, he might recognize an old friend. The cognitive neuroscientist stands at bedside, flinching under the wall-mounted television, forgetting why he’s there until the patient reminds him. “Leaving already? What’s your hurry? You just got here.”

He is spread as thin as life. He holds his hands up to apologize. Light passes clean through them.

Mark gives him a used paperback, My Antonia . “For the trip. I read it in a little book club I was in. Kind of a chick-flick thing. Needs a good helicopter chase to become a classic. Naked scuba scene, or something. But real Nebraskaland. I kind of bought into it, finally.”

Weber reaches to take the cast-off story. A hand snakes out and grabs his.

“Doc? There’s something I can’t get. I saved her. I’m…that woman’s guardian. Can you believe that? Me .” The words are thick and foreign in his mouth, a curse worse than the misread note. “What am I supposed to do with that?”

Weber stands still, frozen in the glare. His question, too. She will be with him, unshakable, wherever he heads. Accidental turned resident. Nothing anyone can do for anyone, except to recall: We are every second being born.

Mark begs Weber, his eyes flashing with the dread that only consciousness allows. “They need her at the Refuge. Ask my sister. They need a researcher. A journalist. Whatever the hell she is, they need her.” His voice would deny all personal involvement. “Man, she can’t just walk. It’s not like she’s some free agent. Some separate…She’s hip-deep in this place now, like it or not. Do you think I could…? What do you think she’d…?”

Powerless to know what anyone else might do. To know what it feels like to be anybody.

“My sister won’t ask her. And I don’t dare. The way we left it? After the things I said to her? She’ll hate me forever. She’ll never want to talk to me again.”

“You might try her,” Weber says. Pretending again, on no authority. On no evidence but a lifetime of case histories. “I think you might try.”

He himself tries only to prolong. If Tour Director even remembers Weber, he is taking no calls. But something else is messaging, too soft to hear. Through the plane’s plastic window, the lights of unknown cities blink beneath him, hundreds of millions of glowing cells linked together, swapping signals. Even here, the creature spreads countless species deep. Flying, burrowing, creeping things, every path sculpting all the others. A flashing electrical loom, street-sized synapses forming a brain with miles-wide thoughts too large to read. A web of signals spelling out a theory of living things. Cells by sun and rain and endless selection assembling into a mind the size of continents now, impossibly aware, omnipotent, but fragile as mist, cells with a few more years to discover how they connect and where they might go, before they gutter out and return to water.

He fingers Mark’s book throughout the flight, flips through at random as if this buried record might still predict what’s coming. The words are more obscure than the most intricate brain research. Whiffs of prairie, a thousand varieties of tallgrass come off the pages. He reads and rereads, retaining nothing. He scans Mark’s margin notes, the desperate scribbles next to any passage that might lead forward out of permanent confusion. Toward the end, the swathes of shaky highlighter grow wild and wider:

This had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

He looks up from the page and fractures. No whole left to protect, nothing more solid than braided, sparking cells. What the scans suggest he has seen up close, in the field: older kin still perching on his brain stem, circling back always, down along the bending water. He blunders toward that fact, the only one large enough to bring him home, falling backward toward the incommunicable, the unrecognized, the past he has irreparably damaged, just by being. Destroyed and remade with every thought. A thought he needs to tell someone before it, too, goes.

A voice calls to disembark. In the rising crush, he stands and grapples for his carry-on, shedding himself on everything he touches. He stumbles down the jet bridge into another world, swapped out by impostors at every step. He needs her to be there, on the other side of the baggage claim, though he has lost all right to hope it. There, holding his name on a little card, printed cleanly so he can read it. Man , the card must say. No: Weber . She will be the one holding it, and that is how he must find her.