Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

He was still that straggler her brother had adopted, the scrawny long-distance walker who saw things the rest of them couldn’t. He was the person Markie might once have become. Little Mark. Animals like me.

“If they’re so threatened, why are there so many…?”

“They used to roost along the whole Big Bend: a hundred and twenty miles or more. They’re down to sixty, and shrinking. The same number of birds crammed into half the space. Disease, stress, anxiety. It’s worse than Manhattan.”

Anxiety-stricken birds: she stifled a laugh. Something in Daniel mourned more than the cranes. He needed humans to rise to their station: conscious and godlike, nature’s one shot at knowing and preserving itself. Instead, the one aware animal in creation had torched the place.

“We’re crowding them into one of the greatest spectacles going. That’s why crane tourism has exploded. Big business now, and every spring we use even more water. So the show will be even more spectacular next year.” Daniel spoke almost sympathetically, straining to understand. But his own ability to grasp the race was shrinking faster than the habitat.

He shuddered. She touched his chest, and by impulse, he folded her into a mournful kiss confused by its cause. His hand slipped across the spark of her hair into her suede jacket’s open collar. She took him against her, wrong in more ways than she could count. Excitement was shameful, under the circumstances. But that thought just excited her worse. The embrace lifted her up above the last few weeks. Her body gave in to cold spring elation. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t be alone.

Stealing back to town on that surveyor’s plumb line of a road, through rolling fields fuzzed with their first green, she asked him. “He’s never going to be the same, is he?”

Daniel watched the road. She’d always loved that about him. He never spoke until he meant to. He tilted his head and at last said, “Nobody’s ever who they were. We just have to watch and listen. See where he’s going. Meet him there.”

She put her hand up under his coat. She rubbed his flank without thinking, imagined them running off the road, flipping over, until he gently held her wrist and stole a puzzled look at her.

They sat in his apartment, by candlelight, as if they were still young and sharing a first Christmas. She huddled in front of his space heater. Daniel smelled like a woolen blanket just out of storage. He cradled her from behind and unbuttoned her shirt. She curled into the threat of doing this again.

The down on her lower back stiffened under his stroking fingers. He traced the curve of her abdomen, looking on with the same hungry surprise as he had the first time, eight years ago. “See?” she repeated from memory. “My appendectomy scar. Had it since I was eleven. Not very attractive, is it?”

He laughed again. “Wrong the first time. Still wrong, years later!” He nuzzled her armpit with the tip of his nose. “Some women never learn.”

She rolled him over and rose, one of his feathered, gray priestesses, neck extended. Another endangered species, in need of conserving. She straightened herself above him, displaying.

When they were still again, she gave him the surrender he hadn’t asked for. “Daniel? What was it? That bird in the tree?”

He lay on his back, a scarecrow vegan. His slack muscles held his own years of suppressed questions that he would never dare ask. In the dark, he scanned their shared life list, the species they had seen that day. “It’s…called a lot of things. You and me, K.S.? We can call it anything we want.”

Karin was looping Mark around the floor in their daily steeplechase when he had his first abstract thought. Mark still walked as if tethered. He stopped to listen at a patient’s room. Someone was sobbing, and an older voice said, “It’s all right. Never mind all this.”

Mark listened, smiling. He raised his hand and announced, “Sadness.” There in the corridor, the feat of intellect startled Karin into tears.

She was there again, for his first complete sentence. The occupational therapist was helping Mark cope with buttons, and Mark just spit out the words like an oracle: “There are magnetism waves in my skull.” He covered his face in both fists, seeing what he was, now that he could name it. In a dam-burst, sentences began pouring out of him.

By the next evening, he was conversing — slow, fuzzy, but understandable. “Why is this room so weird? This isn’t the food I eat. This place is just like a hospital.” Eight times an hour, he asked what had happened to him. Each time, he sat shocked by the news of the accident.

That night, as she said goodbye, Mark jumped up and pressed the windows, trying to open the sealed safety glass. “Am I asleep? Am I gone? Wake me up — this is someone else’s dream.”

She went to the window and embraced him. She led him away from banging on the glass. “Markie, you’re awake. You’ve had a very big day. Rabbit is here. I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

He followed her back to his plastic bedside chair, his prison. But when she sat him down, he looked up, dazed. He shoved at the apron of her coat. “What are you doing here, anyway? Who sent you?”

Her skin went metal. “Stop it, Mark,” she said, harsher than intended. Sweet again, she teased, “You think your sister wouldn’t look after you?”

“My sister? You think you’re my sister?” His eyes drilled her. “If you think you’re my sister, there’s something wrong with your head.”

She grew eerily clinical. She reasoned with him, laying out the evidence, like reading aloud another children’s story. The calmer she was, the more it upset him. “Wake me up,” he wailed. “This isn’t me. I’m stuck in someone else’s thoughts.”

She kept Daniel up all night, shuddering with the memory of it. “You can’t imagine what he looked like when he said it. ‘You think you’re my sister?’ So certain. Not even a second thought. You can’t know what that felt like.”

All night long, Daniel listened. She’d forgotten how patient he was. “He’s made a big step. He’s still putting everything together. The rest will come quickly.”

By morning, she was ready again to believe him.

Days later, Mark was still denying her. He assembled everything else: who he was, where he worked, what had happened to him. But he insisted that Karin was an actress who looked very much like his sister. After many tests, Dr. Hayes gave it a name. “Your brother is manifesting a condition called Capgras syndrome. It’s one of a family of misidentification delusions. It can occur in certain psychiatric conditions.”

“My brother is not mentally ill.”

Dr. Hayes winced. “No. But he’s facing some massive challenges. Capgras is also reported in closed-head trauma, although that’s incredibly rare. Damage in precise, probably multiple spots…there are only a couple of cases in the literature. Your brother is the first accident-induced Capgras patient I’ve ever seen.”

“How can the same symptom have two completely different causes?”

“That’s not clear. It may not be a single syndrome.”

Multiple ways of mistaking your blood relations. “Why is he doing it?”

“In some hard-to-measure way, you don’t match up with his image of you. He knows he has a sister. He remembers everything about her. He knows you look like her and act like her and dress like her. He just doesn’t think you are her.”

“He knows his friends. He recognizes you . How can he know strangers, and not—”

“The Capgras sufferer almost always misidentifies his loved ones. A mother or father. A spouse. The part of his brain that recognizes faces is intact. So is his memory. But the part that processes emotional association has somehow disconnected from them.”