Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Small talk, but all talk. Say it, say if, say at . Say it’s an easy it. Echo. Lala.

Finished, over and done, just then. Now he’s not. That’s why they make him talk. Prove he’s with the living things, not stones.

Not sure why he’s here, or how. He’s taken an acid dent. Something else dented worse, but wordy people won’t say. All those things to talk about, millions of moving things, and that’s never one anyone mentions. Most times when they’re talking, nothing happens. Nothing but what’s already right here. What happened to him is a thing even living things won’t say.

She kept reading to Mark: all she could do.Mark’s face stayed placid through the stories’ struggles. He just rode those sentences, their boxcar rhythm. But the most predictable read-aloud went right up Karin’s spine. The scene where the twelve-year-old boy is felled by a blow to the skull as he sneaks into a derelict house and is bound and gagged in the root cellar made her shut the book, unable to read on. Closed head trauma had ruined her. Even children’s fiction now went real.

The Muskrateers came by for repeat offenses. “Didn’t we promise?” Tommy Rupp asked. “Didn’t we say we’d help bring the man back?” He and Cain produced foam footballs outfitted with tail fins, handheld electronic games, even radio-controlled cars. Mark responded, first with flattened bafflement, then with machine-like glee. He made more hand-eye headway in half an hour with his friends than he did in days with the physical therapist.

Duane was all consultation. “What’re you doing with your rotator cuff there, Mark? Watch the rotator cuff. It’s what you call a flash-point.”

Rupp kept them on task. “Will you hold up with the medicine man bit and let Gus here throw the ball? Am I right, Gus?”

“Right, Gus,” Mark said, watching the commotion as if in instant replay.

Bonnie showed up every few days. Mark reveled in her visits. She always brought joy stuff : rubber animals wrapped in metallic paper, washable tattoos, fortunes sealed in ornamental envelopes. You will soon embark on an unforeseen adventure …She was better than a book. She could go on forever with funny stories of living in a covered wagon along the interstate that never quite reached its homestead tract. She showed up once in her faux pioneer outfit. Mark looked at her in wonder, half birthday boy, half child molester. Bonnie brought him a disc player and ear buds, something Karin had failed to think of. She produced a box of discs — chick music, sighs about the blindness of guys — nothing Mark would ever have been caught dead listening to. But under the headphones, Mark closed his eyes, smiled, and tapped his thigh with his fingers.

Bonnie liked to listen along to the stories that Karin read aloud. “He’s following every word,” she insisted.

“You think?” Karin asked, grasping at any hope.

“You can see it in his eyes.”

Her optimism was an opiate. Karin already depended on her, worse than cigarettes.

“Can I try something?” Bonnie asked, touching her shoulder. Her hands probed Karin incessantly, turning every word into a confidence. She cozied up to Mark, one palm coaxing, the other restraining. “Ready, Marker? Show us what you’re made of. Here we go. One, two, buckle my…?”

He gazed at her, slack-jawed, smitten.

“Come on, buddy. Focus!” She sang again: “One, two, buckle my…”

“Shoe.” The syllable came out, a pitched moan. Karin gasped at the first proof that somewhere deep down, Mark still made meaning. Her brother, who only a few weeks before, had repaired complex slaughterhouse machinery, could now complete the first line of a nursery rhyme. She pressed her jaw, mouthing, Yes!

Bonnie carried on, giggling like water in a brook. “Three, four. Knock at the…”

“…door!”

“Five, six, pick up…”

“…shit.”

Karin broke into mortified laughter. Bonnie reassured the crestfallen Mark. “Hey! Two out of three. You’re doing fantastic.”

They tried him on “Hickory Dickory Dock.” Mark, his face strained with ecstatic concentration, scored perfectly on dock, clock, down , and dock . Bonnie began, “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring,” but getting far enough in to remember the words that came next, broke off in mumbled apologies.

Karin took over. She tried him on a verse Bonnie had never heard. But for the two Schluter siblings, the four lines condensed all the icy chill of childhood. “I see the moon,” Karin prompted, sounding just like their mother, back when Joan Schluter’s rhymes weren’t yet devil exorcisms. “And the moon…”

Mark’s eyes widened, a rush of comprehension. His lips closed around a hopeful grimace. “Sees me!”

“God bless the moon,” Karin assured him, that old singsong. “And…?”

But her brother held still, pressed against his chair, staring at some creature unknown to science that suddenly appeared in silhouette on the horizon at dusk.

Karin sat beside Mark one afternoon, refreshing him on the rules for checkers, when a shadow moved across the board. She twisted to see a familiar figure in a navy pea coat hovering over her shoulder. Daniel’s hand reached for her but didn’t touch. He called to Mark, a gentle hello, as if the two of them hadn’t shunned each other for the last decade. As if Mark weren’t sitting robot-like in a hospital chair.

Mark’s head snapped back. He scrambled up onto the chair, faster than he’d moved since the accident, pointing and wailing, “God, oh God! Help me. See see see?”

Daniel stepped forward to calm Mark. Mark climbed up over the chair back, screaming, “Miss it, miss it.” Karin backed Daniel out of the room as a floor nurse rushed in. “I’ll call you,” she said. Their first face-to-face in three years. She squeezed his hand, criminal. Then she rushed back to calm her brother.

Mark was still seeing things. Karin worked to comfort him. But she couldn’t figure out what he’d seen, in the long shadow falling out of nowhere. He lay in bed, still shaking. “See?” She hushed and lied to him, saying she saw.

She went to Daniel, after the hospital calamity.He felt just as she remembered him: steady, mammalian, familiar. He looked unchanged since high school: the long, sandy hair, the wisp of goatee, the narrow, vertical face: a gentle seed-eater. His continuity comforted her, now that all else had changed. They talked for fifteen minutes, four feet from each other across his kitchen table, nervous and sick with reassurance. She rushed away before breaking anything, but not before they agreed to meet again.

Their difference in age had vanished. Daniel had always been a child: Markie’s grade, Markie’s friend. Now he was older than she was, and Mark was an infant between them. She started calling Daniel at all hours for help with the endless overwhelming decisions: claims forms, disability, the papers for Mark’s move to rehab. She trusted Daniel as she should have trusted him, years ago. He could always find the best available answer. More: he knew her brother, and could guess what Mark would want.

Daniel didn’t open to her all at once. He couldn’t have, this time around. He was no longer who he’d been, if only because of what she had done to him. That he spent time with her at all left her amazed, ashamed, and grateful. She didn’t know what their new contact meant or what, if anything, might be in it for him. For her, seeing him meant the difference between bobbing and going under. After another day in the chaos of Mark’s new kingdom, she found herself inventing reasons to contact Daniel. She could voice anything with him, from the wildest hope for Mark’s latest tiny triumph to her fear that he was sliding back. Daniel would meet her every word with inward reserve, and keep her to some middle, steady path.