Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

She coughed a phlegmy laugh. “Never really left! Stuck in a stupid loop.” She swept her hand in the air. “Worse than the damn birds.”

He flinched, but forgave her.

After lunch, they made fresh sightings: redstarts, pipits, a solitary golden-crowned kinglet, even a vagrant male Lewis’s woodpecker passing through. Grassland gave few hiding places. Daniel taught her how to see without being seen. “The trick is to make yourself small. Shrink your sphere of sound inside your sphere of sight. Widen your periphery; watch only motion.” He made her sit still for fifteen minutes, then forty, then an hour, just watching, until her backbone threatened to split open and eject some other creature from her cracked shell. But stillness was salutary, like most pain. Her concentration was shot. She needed slowing, focusing. She needed to sit silent with someone from choice, not from injury. Her brother still refused to recognize her; his persistence had grown truly spooky. She could not imagine the bizarre, unstable symptom lasting as long as it had. Motionless for an hour, on a rise of returning bluestem, inside a bubble of wild silence, she felt her helplessness. As she shrunk and the sea of grass expanded, she saw the scale of life — millions of tangled tests, more answers than there were questions, and a nature so swarmingly wasteful that no single experiment mattered. The prairie would try out every story. One hundred thousand pairs of breeding swifts pumped eggs into everything from rotting telephone poles to smoking chimneys. A plague of starlings wheeled overhead, descended, Daniel said, from a handful of birds released into Central Park a century ago by a drug maker who wanted America to have all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare. Nature could sell at a loss; it made up in volume. Guess relentlessly, and it didn’t matter if almost every guess was wrong.

Daniel was just as profligate. The man who denied himself even hot showers lavished her with attentions all afternoon. He interpreted markings and tracks for her. He found her a wasp’s nest, an owl pellet, and a tiny bleached warbler skull beyond the skill of any jeweler. “Do you know that Whitman line?” he asked her. “‘After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains.’”

He meant to give comfort. But it sounded to her relentless, indiscriminate, indifferent: much like what her brother had become.

When they got home from the day’s exploration, Daniel handed her a shirt box that had sat in the back of his twenty-year-old Duster for the last month. She’d guessed it was for her, waiting for him to find the nerve to give it. She opened the flimsy carton, already preparing some show of gratitude for whatever natural-history exhibit he’d found her. The box flapped open, and she was the specimen inside. Every trinket she’d ever given him. They sat in the lot behind his apartment as she sifted through the embalmed past. Notes in her elvish scrawl, written in colors of pen she never could have owned, punch lines of running jokes that now meant nothing to her, even half-finished attempts at poems. Pairs of ticket stubs to films she couldn’t have seen with him. Sketches from back when she could draw. A postcard from her mishap in Boulder: “I knew I should have sold the stock options last month.” A plastic action figure of Mary Jane, Spiderman’s object of desire. Karsh had given it to her, claiming she was the spitting image. Karin had passed it on to Daniel — stupid tease — instead of melting the thing down to dioxins as she should have.

By all evidence, she’d never given him anything of value. But he’d kept it all. He even had her mother’s obituary from The Hub , clipped long after he should have consigned the whole box to an incinerator. His zeal was as spooky as Mark’s distance. She looked at this time capsule of scraps, horrified. She wasn’t worth preservation.

Daniel watched her, stiller than when birding. “I just thought, if you were feeling a little rootless, K.S., that you might like…” He held out his hand, ten years snug in his palm. “I hope this doesn’t seem obsessive.”

She clutched the box, unnerved by his pointless conservation, but unable to scold him. His entire worldly possessions fit into two suitcases, and he’d kept this. She could start to give him real things, gifts she picked out just for him, things it wouldn’t be pathetic to preserve. He could use a light spring coat, for starters.

“Can I just…Could I hang on to this for a little? I need to…” She pressed the box, then her forehead. “It’s all still yours. I’m just…”

He seemed pleased, but she was too shaken to be sure. “Keep them,” he said. “Keep them as long as you like. Show Mark, if you feel like it.”

Never, she thought. Never. Not the sister she wanted him to recognize.

Despite Mark’s refusal to acknowledge her, he rebuked her when she skipped an afternoon. “Where were you? Had to meet your handlers or something? My sister would never have cut out like that, without saying. My sister is very loyal. You should have learned that when you trained to replace her.”

The words filled her with hope, even as they demoralized her.

“Tell me something. What the hell am I still doing in rehab?”

“You were really hurting, Mark. They just want to make sure you’re one hundred percent before they send you back home.”

“I am a hundred percent. One hundred and ten. Fifteen. Don’t you think I’m the best judge of that? Why would they believe their tests before they believe me?”

“They’re just being careful.”

“My sister wouldn’t have left me in here to rot.”

She was beginning to wonder. Even though any small change in routine still rattled him, Mark grew steadily more like himself. He spoke clearer, confusing fewer words. He scored higher on the cognition tests. He could answer more questions about his past, from before the accident. As he grew more reasonable, she couldn’t help trying to prove herself. She dropped casual details, things only a Schluter could know. She would wear him down with common sense, inescapable logic. One gray April afternoon, taking him for a spin around Dedham Glen’s artificial duck pond in the drizzle, she mentioned their father’s stint as a rainmaker, flying his converted crop duster.

Mark shook his head. “Now, where in the world did you learn that? Bonnie tell you? Rupp? They think it’s weird, too, how much like Karin you are.” His face grew overcast. She saw him think: She should be here by now. They won’t tell her where I am. But he was too suspicious to speak the thought out loud.

What did it mean to be related, if he refused relations? You couldn’t call yourself someone’s wife unless they agreed; years with Karsh had taught her that. You weren’t someone’s friend just by decree, or she’d be surrounded by support. Sister was no different, except technically. If he never again recognized her as his flesh and blood, what difference would all her objections make?

Their father had a brother once. Luther Schluter. They learned about him overnight, when Karin was just thirteen and Mark almost nine. Cappy Schluter suddenly insisted upon taking them to a mountainside in Idaho, even though it meant missing a week of school. We’re going to visit your uncle. As if they should have suspected such a person’s existence all along.

Cappy Schluter dragged his children across Wyoming in a burgundy and mint Rambler station wagon while Joan rode shotgun. Neither child could read in a moving car without vomiting, and Cappy forbade the radio because of all the subliminal messages that manipulated the unconscious listener. So they had only their father’s stories of the young Schluter brothers to see them across 890 miles of the earth’s most ruthless scenery. He got them from Ogallala to Broadwater on tales of his family’s Sandhills days, first as Kincaid Act homesteaders, and then, when the government pulled the land out from underneath them, as ranchers. From Broadwater to the Wyoming border, he entertained them with accounts of his older brother’s hunting skills: four dozen rabbits nailed to the barn’s southern wall, seeing the family through the winter of ’38.