Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Hmm. Was she ever in the Scouts?”

“But she seems somehow sad to me. Totally stoic, but sad. No wedding ring, or any tan lines from one. Who knows? It’s just so odd. She’s exactly who I’ve tried to be my whole life. Daniel? Do you believe there are purposes out there?”

He pretended confusion. The man lived like an anchorite and meditated four times a day. He’d sacrificed his life to protecting a river tens of thousands of years old. He worshipped nature. He’d put Karin herself on a pedestal since childhood. By any measure, he was faith incarnate. And still, the word purpose made him nervous.

She waffled. “It doesn’t have to be…Call it anything. Ever since the accident, I’ve thought: Maybe we’re all on invisible paths? Paths we’re supposed to follow, without knowing. Ones that really lead somewhere?”

He tensed on the bed. The rapids of his breath cascaded across her breasts. “I don’t know, K.S. Do you mean your brother’s accident was meant to lead you to this woman?”

“Not me. Him. You know what his life was like, before. Look at his friends, for God’s sake. Barbara Gillespie is the first nonloser he’s been taken with since…” She rolled to face him, draping her arm over his flank. “Since you, all right?”

He winced at the forlorn compliment. The bond of childhood, broken with puberty. The Danny Riegel whom Mark once loved was not this man lying across a foot-wide gap from her. “You think this might be his…path? This woman has arrived to save him from himself?”

She drew back her arm. “Don’t make it sound so crude.” At least he didn’t mock her, as the other man would have. But she heard herself, how desperate she was. She’d end up like her mother, using the Living Scriptures volume like a Magic 8 Ball.

“Does this woman need to be fate?” Daniel asked. “Couldn’t she just be something lucky in his life, for a change?”

“But he would never have met her without the accident.”

Daniel stood and walked to the window, stark naked, oblivious. Like a wild child. The chill of his apartment didn’t touch him. He tried on the idea. She loved that in him, his eternal willingness to try her on. “No one is on a separate path. Everything connects. His life, yours, hers, his friends’…mine. Other…”

Watching him stare out the window on all those tangled paths, she thought of the policemen’s three sets of linked tracks. Three that they saw and measured. How many drivers sped by that night, leaving no trace? She sat up in bed, covering her bareness with the blanket. “You’re the most mystical person I know. You’re always proclaiming some living essence we can’t even…” Robert Karsh had mocked him mercilessly. The Ent Man. The Druid. Green Giant Junior . Karin had joined in — any cruelty, to be affirmed.

Daniel spoke to something out the window. “One million species heading toward extinction. We can’t be too choosy about our private paths.”

The words reproached her. She felt the slap. “My brother was almost killed. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. Whether he’ll be able to work again, whether his brain, his personality…Don’t begrudge me for needing a little faith to survive this.”

In silhouette against the window, he grabbed the crown of his head. “Begrudge? My God, no!” He came back to the bed. “Never.” He stroked her hair, contrite. “Of course there are forces bigger than us.”

She felt it in his stroking hand: forces so big that our paths mean nothing to them.

“I love you,” he said. Ten years after the fact, yet somehow premature. “You seem to me everything that’s best about humans. You’ve never felt more decent to me than you do right now.” Frail, he meant. Needy. Mistaken.

She let his judgment ride. She burrowed into his meager chest, trying to smother her own words even as they came out. “Tell me that something right could still come out of this.”

“It can,” he said. Any cruelty, to affirm. “If this woman can help Mark, then she’s our path.”

Daniel meditated: his version of a plan. She had to leave the apartment whenever he drew his legs up into the lotus. She wasn’t afraid of bothering him; he was oblivious, once tuned to his breathing. It just upset her to see him so tranquil and removed. She felt abandoned, as if all her problems with Mark were just impediments to Daniel’s transcendence. He never tranced out for more than twenty minutes at a time, at least by her watch. But to Karin, that always threatened to become forever.

“What do you want from it?” she asked, trying to sound neutral.

“Nothing! I want it to help me want nothing.”

She fisted her skirt hem. “What does it do for you?”

“It makes me more…an object to myself. Disidentified.” He rubbed his cheek and glanced upward, eleven o’clock. “Makes my insides more transparent. Reduces resistance. Frees up my beliefs, so that every new idea, every new change isn’t so much…like the death of me.”

“You want it to make you more fluid?”

His head bobbed, like she’d just met him halfway. She found the idea almost hideous. Mark had become fluid. She could not be any more fluid than Mark’s accident now forced her to be. What she wanted — what she needed from Daniel — was dry land.

The last crane disappeared, and Kearney returned to itself. The crane peepers — twice as many as had visited just five years before — vanished with the migrants. The whole town relaxed at not having to play itself for another ten months. Famous each spring, for something that at best resented you: it screwed up a place’s self-image.

Other birds came in the cranes’ wake. Wave after wave, birds by the millions passed through the tiny waist of a continent-sized hourglass. Birds Karin Schluter had seen since childhood but had never noticed: Daniel knew them all by name. He carried around alphabetized life lists of all 446 Nebraska species— Anas, Anthus , and Anser, Buteo, Branta , and Bucephala, Calidris, Catharus, Carduelis —covered in penciled checks and smudged, unreadable field notes.

Karin went birding with him, a way of staying sane. On afternoons when Mark raged against her and she needed to escape, she and her birder went northwest into the sandhills, northeast into the loess, or east and west along the twisting braids of river. She whipsawed between elation and guilt over abandoning her brother, even for an afternoon. She felt as she had at ten, returning home from a summer’s evening of hide-and-seek to realize, only when her mother shrieked at her, that she’d left her little brother curled up in a concrete culvert, waiting to be found.

Only outside, in the warming air, did Karin sense how close she’d come to collapse. Another week of caring for Mark and she’d have begun believing his theories about her. She and Daniel picnicked near the sandpit wetlands just southwest of town. She’d just bitten down on a slice of cucumber when her whole body began trembling so hard she couldn’t swallow. She bent down and covered her quaking face. “Oh my God. What would I have done, back here, with what’s happened to him, without you?”

He lifted her shoulders. “I’ve done nothing. I wish there was something I could do.” He offered her his handkerchief, the last man in North America to blow his nose into cloth. She used it, making horrible noises and not caring.

“I can’t get away from here. I’ve tried, so many times. Chicago. L.A. Even Boulder. Every time I make a start, try to pass myself off as normal, this place drags me back. My whole life, I’ve dreamed of self-sufficiency, far away. Look how far I’ve gotten! South Sioux.”

“Everyone comes home, sometime.”