Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

She’s all: Where’d you get this?

No say. An orderly gave it to me, for being a nice guy.

Mark? Are you serious ?

What? You think I stole it from some Alzheimer’s spaceman? What do you care? Are you tracking my activities now?

She goes: You really enjoy listening to this?

Well, come on. What’s not to love?

It’s just that…No, I’m sure you do. I bet it’s good. Her eyes, all red and puffy, like someone’s salted them.

You don’t know me. I listen to this stuff all the time. I like to listen to, you know, stupid music. When nobody’s around. Under the helmet — the, the earmuffs.

Like he’s just told her he’s into cross dressing, or something. All cranked up. I’m sure, she says. Me, too.

He doesn’t quite get it. It really tortures her. He doesn’t get anything. He needs to talk less, watch more. He could write things down, but the pages might be used as evidence.

Even Bonnie, beautiful simple Bonnie, has changed on him. She’s like a ghost, something out of an old TV show, little pioneer cap and dress down to the floor. She’s got some new life or something, living on roots, in a grass-covered trench, like a giant prairie dog, out by the Interstate Arch. She has to pretend her mother dies in a snowstorm and her father dies from drought, like something out of the freaking Bible, even though her parents are both alive and living in a gated community outside Tucson. Nobody’s quite what they say they are, and he’s just supposed to laugh and play along.

But she’s still sexy as a pay channel, even in the ankle-length dress. So he doesn’t argue with her. In fact, the whole getup is kind of hot, especially the antique cap. It cheers him to sit next to her and gawk while she designs little cards and such. Get Well thingies for total strangers in the rooms next to his. Postcards of newborns in bassinets to send to lawmakers in Washington. He sits up close, helping, painting inside the lines with one hand while keeping his other on her. If nobody else is there, she’ll let him put his fingers just about anywhere.

But the cards won’t cooperate. He stabs one, and the tip of his pen dents the tabletop. What the hell is wrong with these things? he asks. This looks like shit.

She jumps. She’s scared of him. But she puts her arm around him. You’re doing great, Marker. It’s amazing how good. You were pretty beaten up there, for a while.

Was I? But I’m getting back now, right? To where I was?

Already are. Just look at you!

He studies her, but can’t tell if she’s lying. He wipes his fucked-up eyes. He pulls out his own Get Well card, for comparison: I am No One …Well, join the club. You’re not alone.

Weeks passed that Karin couldn’t account for.While the therapists were examining her brother, testing his memory and grasp of ordinary detail, she was losing days. Some part of her was out of sync. Small wonder, with Mark twice a day calling her an impostor. Not days she much cared to remember.

They moved Mark to the rehab facility. It crushed him. “So this is what ‘discharge’ means. This place is worse than where I was. It’s just a minimum-security hospital. What happens if I jump bail?”

In fact, Dedham Glen was a fair step up from Good Samaritan. All pastels and river stone, the place might have been a low-end retirement community. He never mentioned recognizing the place where they’d consigned their mother in her final illness. Mark had his own room, the halls were cheerier, the food better, and the staff more capable than at the colder, more sterile hospital.

Best of all was Barbara Gillespie, the nurse’s aide for his wing. Though new to the facility and surely pushing forty, Barbara worked with the zeal of the self-employed. From the start, she and Mark seemed to have known each other forever. Barbara could always tell, better than Karin, what Mark was asking for, even when Mark himself didn’t know. Barbara made the rehab clinic feel like a family holiday timeshare. She was so assuring that both Schluter siblings tried to please her by acting healthier than they really were. Around Barbara, Karin found herself believing in total cures. Mark fell in love with her within days, and Karin soon followed. She lived for her exchanges with the attendant, inventing little problems to consult her about. In Karin’s dreams, she and Barbara Gillespie were as close as sisters, consoling each other over Mark’s damage as if they’d both known him since infancy. In waking life, Barbara was almost as consoling, preparing Karin for the hurdles still ahead.

Karin studied Barbara at every chance, trying to imitate her self-possession and easy grace. She described her to Daniel one night in his dark monk’s cell. She tried not to sound too fawning. “She’s always completely with you when she talks to you. More present than any person I’ve ever met. Never out in front of or behind herself. Not working on the next patient, or the last one. Wherever she happens to be, that’s where she is. I’m always either undoing the last three stupid things I’ve done or fending off the next three. But Barbara, she’s just… centered . Right there. You have to see her in action. She’s the perfect nurse for Mark. Completely comfortable with him. Listens to all his theories, even when I want to press his face into a pillow. She’s more at home in her body than anyone I’ve ever seen. I’ll bet you there’s no one in the world she’d rather be.”

Daniel put a hand on her forearm, cautioning her in the dark. She lay back on his futon on the floor of a room so bare his three potted plants seemed like remainders in nature’s clearance sale. His basement apartment’s few furnishings were all retreads. His bookshelves — full of USGS publications, Conservation Service pamphlets, and field guides — were made from stacked orange crates. His work desk was an old oak door recovered from a demolition and laid out on sawhorses. Even his refrigerator was a refurbished dorm-room mini-cube, picked up at Goodwill for ten dollars. He kept his apartment a dim sixty degrees. Of course he was right: the only defensible way of life. But she already had plans to make the place livable.

“The woman has her own internal thermometer,” she said. “Her own atomic clock. The last person on earth who’s not prorating her time. She’s just so even . So tranquil. A bubble of steady attentiveness.”

“Sounds like she’d make a good birder.”

“Mark never rattles her, even when he’s completely out there. None of the residents unnerve her, and some are as spooky as you get. She has no expectations about who people are supposed to be. She just sees you, sees whoever is in front of her.”

“What does she do for him?”

“Officially? She’s the general attendant. Keeps the schedule, does light therapy, takes care of his routine needs, checks in five times a day, monitors his craziness, cleans up after him. She’s the most under-employed person I know, including me. I can’t understand why she’s not running the place.”

“If she were running the place, she wouldn’t be caring for your brother.”

“True.” Fake sagacious monosyllable: copying Daniel. Her old chameleon complex. Be the one you’re with.

“Career advancement can be toxic,” Daniel said. “A person should do what they love, whatever the status.”

“Well, that’s Barbara, all right. She picks his dirty underwear off the floor like she’s doing ballet.” Daniel’s hand traced cautious circles on her arm. It dawned on her: he was jealous of this woman, of Karin’s description. Patience was his secret vanity, something he wanted to do better than anyone else. “She sits and listens to Mark while he launches these bizarre notions, like everything he’s saying is totally plausible. Like she completely respects him. Then she just explores things with him, without condescension, until he sees where he’s gone wrong.”