Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Long afterward, Weber could still pinpointthe moment when Capgras entered his life. Inked into his planner: Friday, May 31, 2002, 1:00 p.m., Cavanaugh, Union Square Cafe. The first copies of The Country of Surprise had just come off the press, and Weber’s editor wanted him in the city to celebrate. His third book: publication was hardly a novelty anymore. The two-hour train ride in from Stony Brook, by this point in Gerald Weber’s career, was more duty than thrill. But Bob Cavanaugh was eager to meet. Pumped , the young editor had said. Publishers Weekly had called the book “a wild tour of the human brain by a sage writing at the height of his powers.” Wild tour would play harshly in neurological circles, circles that hadn’t forgiven the success of Weber’s previous books. And something about the height of his powers depressed him. Nowhere but down, from there.

Weber dragged himself into Manhattan, walking from Penn Station down to Union Square briskly enough to get some aerobic benefit. The shadows were all wrong: still disorienting, more than eight months on. A patch of sky where there should be none. Weber hadn’t been in since early spring, when witnessing the unnerving light show — two massive banks of spotlights pointing into the air, like something out of his book’s chapter on phantom limbs. The images flared up in him again, the ones that had slowly extinguished over three-quarters of a year. That one, unthinkable morning was real; everything since had been a narcoleptic lie. He walked south through the unbearably normal streets, thinking he might get by just fine without ever seeing this city again.

Bob Cavanaugh greeted him at the restaurant with a bear hug, which Weber abided. His editor was trying not to snicker. “I told you not to dress up.”

Weber spread his arms. “This isn’t dressed up.”

“You can’t help yourself, can you? We really should do a coffee-table book full of sepia photos of you. The natty neuroscientist. The Beau Brummell of brain research.”

“I’m not that bad. Am I really that bad?”

“Not ‘bad,’ sir. Just delightfully…archaic.”

Lunch was Cavanaugh at his most charming. He ran down the latest buzz books and described how well Surprise was faring with the European agents. “Your biggest, by far, Gerald. I’m sure of that.”

“No need to set any records, Bob.”

They talked more high-speed industry gossip. Over an entirely gratuitous cappuccino, Cavanaugh at last said, “Okay, enough pleasantries. Let’s see your hole card, man.”

Thirty-three years had passed since Weber’s last hand of blackjack. Junior year of college, Columbus, teaching Sylvie the game. She’d wanted to play for sex favors. Nice game; no losers. But insufficient strategic depth to hold their interest for long.

“I’m not holding anything too surprising, Bob. I want to write about memory.”

Cavanaugh perked up. “Alzheimer’s? That kind of thing? Aging population. Declining abilities. Very hot topic.”

“No, not about forgetting. I want to write about remembering.”

“Interesting. Fantastic, in fact. Fifty-two Weeks to a Better —no, wait. Who’s got that kind of time? How about Ten Days to —”

“A lay overview of current research. What goes on in the hippocampus.”

“Ah! I see. Are the little dollar signs over my irises fading?”

“You’re a good sport, Robert.”

“I’m a shitty sport. But a terrific editor.” As he picked up the check, Cavanaugh asked, “Can you at least include a chapter on pharmaceutical enhancement?”

Back in Penn Station, as Weber stood under the departure board, waiting for the train out to Stony Brook, a man in a battered blue ski vest and grease-smeared corduroys waved at him in happy recognition. He might have been a former interview subject; Weber no longer recognized them all. More likely, this was one of many readers who didn’t realize that publicity photos and television were one-way media. They saw Weber’s receding snow line, the blue glint behind his wire-rims, the soft, avuncular half-dome and flowing gray beard — a cross between Charles Darwin and Santa Claus — and greeted him as if he were their harmless grandfather.

The ruined man drew up, smoothing his greasy vest, bobbing and chattering. Weber was too intrigued by the facial tics to move away. The words came in a babbling stream. “Hi, hey there. Great to run into you again. You remember our little venture out west — just the three of us? That illuminating expedition? Listen, can you do me something? No, no cash today, thanks. I’m flush. Just tell Angela, everything that happened out there is copasetic. It’s all okay, whoever she wants to be. Everyone’s okay, just who they are. You know that. Am I right? Tell me: Am I right?”

“You are most certainly right,” Weber said. Some form of Korsakoff’s. Confabulation: inventing stories to patch over the missing bits. Malnutrition from extended alcohol abuse; the fabric of reality rewoven by a vitamin-B deficiency. Weber spent the two-hour train ride back to Stony Brook scribbling notes about humans probably being the only creatures who can have memories of things that never happened.

Only: he had no idea where the notes were headed. He was suffering from something, perhaps the sadness of professional consummation. For a long time, longer than he had deserved, he’d known exactly what he wanted to write next. Now, everything seemed to be already written.

Back home, Sylvie hadn’t yet returned from Wayfinders. He sat down to the e-mail in that mix of buzz and dread that came from opening the inbox after too long. The last person north of the Yucatán to go online, he was now suffocating to death under instant communication. He flinched at the message count. He’d spend the rest of the evening just digging out. And yet, some ten-year-old in him still thrilled at diving into the day’s mail sack, as if it might yet hold a prize from a contest he’d forgotten having entered.

Several e-mails promised to resize any of Weber’s body parts to the scale of his choosing. Others offered offshore drugs to address every imaginable deficit. Mood changers and confidence boosters. Valium, Xanax, Zyban, Cialis. Lowest cost anywhere in the world. Also, his share of vast fortunes offered by exiled government officials of turbulent nations, apparently old friends. Interleaved among these were two conference invitations and another reading-tour request. A correspondent Weber had stopped replying to months before sent another objection to the treatment of religious feelings and the temporal lobe in The Three-Pound Infinity . And of course, the usual help-me petitions, which he referred to the Stony Brook Health Sciences Center.

That’s where he almost consigned the note from Nebraska, after the opening line. Dear Dr. Gerald Weber, my brother has recently survived a horrible automobile accident. Weber was finished with horrible accidents. He’d explored enough broken histories for a lifetime. With what time he had left, he wanted to return to an account of the brain in full flower.

But the next line kept him from hitting the Forward button. Since starting to talk again, my brother has refused to recognize me. He knows he has a sister. He knows all about her. He says she looks just like me. But I’m not her.

Accident-induced Capgras. Unbelievably rare, and immensely resonant. A species he’d never seen. But he was finished with that kind of ethnography.

He read the whole brief note twice through. He printed it out, reading it again on the page. He set it aside and worked on his new outline. Making little headway, he scanned the day’s headlines. Agitated, he rose and went to the kitchen, where he spooned several hundred illicit milk-fat calories straight from the pint container of organic ice cream. He returned to his study and fought time in a preoccupied cloud until Sylvie came home.