Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

True Capgras resulting from closed-head trauma: the odds against it were unimaginable. A case so definitive challenged any psychological account of the condition and undermined basic assumptions about cognition and recognition. To selectively reject one’s next of kin, in the face of all evidence…He read the letter again, swept up by his old addiction. Another chance to see, up close, through the rarest imaginable lens, just how treacherous the logic of consciousness was.

Sylvie got back late. She fell through the front door, her mock sigh of relief unable to disguise the kick she’d gotten from her long day’s work. “Yo, Man — I’m home!” she chanted from the foyer. “No place like it. Where’d I put that husband?”

He was in the kitchen, pacing, the printed letter clutched behind his back. They kissed, subtler than in their blackjack days, a third of a century ago. More historical.

“The pair bond,” Sylvie decreed. She buried her nose in his sternum. “Name a more ingenious invention.”

“Clock radio?” Weber suggested.

She pushed him away and slapped his chest. “Bad husband.”

“How’s the new clubhouse holding up?” he asked.

“Still a dream. We should have moved offices years ago.”

They compared days. She was still racing from hers. Wayfinders was thriving, finding ways for a variety of clients even Sylvie hadn’t anticipated when she started the social services referral outfit, three years before. After years of drifting through unsatisfactory employment, she had at last come home to a vocation she’d never suspected. Careful to violate no professional confidences, she sketched out the gist of her most interesting cases while they prepared a squash risotto together. By the time they sat down to eat, Weber could recall exactly none of her stories.

They ate side by side, on barstools at the raised kitchen counter where they’d taken their meals together in nearly unbroken pleasure for the last ten years, since their lone daughter had left for college. He told her about lunch in the city with Cavanaugh. He described the Korsakoff’s sufferer in Penn Station. He waited until they were washing dishes to mention the e-mail. Stupid, really. They’d been together so long that any attempt to fake a casual tone only blurted the thing out, louder than intended.

She suspected at once. “I thought you were moving on to the memory book. That you wanted to graduate from…” She seemed dismayed, or perhaps he was projecting.

He held up his dish-towel hand, before she could repeat all his recent arguments. “Syl, you’re right. I really shouldn’t spend any more…”

She squinted at him and tested a grin. “Not fair, Man. This isn’t about my being right.”

“No. No, that’s true. You’re absolutely…I mean…” She laughed and shook her head. He draped the towel around his neck, a prizefighter between rounds. “It’s about what I’ve been wrestling with for the last several months. What I should be doing next.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake. It’s not like you’re backsliding on a crack cocaine habit or anything.”

She would know; she’d worked in a Brooklyn rehab center for almost a decade before bailing out to save herself and start Wayfinders. She shot him a look of skeptical trust, and he felt as he had, through all their years of changing climates: the undeserving beneficiary of her social-worker understanding.

“So what’s the crisis? It’s not like anyone’s holding you to public promises. If this is something that interests you, where’s the guilt?” She leaned toward him and picked a stray fleck of risotto out of his beard. “It’s just you and me, Man.” She grinned. “The general public don’t have to know that you don’t know your own mind!”

He groaned and pulled the folded-up e-mail out of the pocket of his still-creased trousers. He flicked the offending document with the nails of his right hand. He offered her the printout, as if the sheet exonerated him. “Accidental Capgras. Can you imagine?”

She just smiled. “So when will you see him? When’s he coming out?”

“Well, that’s the thing. He’s a bit banged up. And a bit hard up, too, I gather.”

“They want you to go there ? I’m not saying…I’m just a little surprised.”

“Well, I do have to spend down the travel account. And for studying something like this, seeing him in situ is actually best. But maybe you’re right.”

She growled, exasperated. “Husband! We’ve been over this!”

“Seriously. I don’t know. Half a continent, for a volunteer consultation? I’d be without a lab. And traveling has become such a hassle. You practically have to strip before boarding the plane.”

“Hey! Doesn’t Tour Director take care of those things?”

He winced and nodded. Tour Director : all that was left of their combined religious upbringings. “Of course. I just think my field-examining days might be over. I need to reconstitute myself, Syl. I just want to stay home, write a harmless little science-journalism book. Keep the lab running, maybe sail a little. The whole domestic tranquility thing.”

“What you call your fifty-five-year-old’s exit strategy?”

“Spend some quality time with the wife…”

“The wife’s been neglecting you recently, I’m afraid. So stay home, already!” Her eyes taunted his. “Aha! I thought as much.”

He wagged his head, bemused by himself. She reached up and polished his bald spot, her ancient good-luck ritual. “You know?” he said. “I really thought I’d acquired a certain degree of self-mastery, at this point in my life.”

“‘Much of the work of the brain consists of hiding its work from us,’” she quoted.

“Nice. Has a ring to it. Where’s it from?”

“It’ll come back to you.”

“People.” He rubbed his temples.

“Quite the species,” Sylvia agreed. “Can’t live with them, can’t vivisect ’em. So what is it about this particular people that has you hooked again?” Her job, to talk him into what he’d already decided.

“A man who recognizes his sister, but does not credit the recognition. Apparently otherwise reasonable and cognitively unimpaired.”

She whistled low, even after a lifetime of hearing his tales. “Sounds like something for Sigmund.”

“It does have that ring. But at the same time, the clear result of injury. That’s what makes it so fantastic. It’s the kind of neither-both case that could help arbitrate between two very different paradigms of mind.”

“This is something you would like to see before you die?”

“Ah! Can we put that a little less terminally? The patient’s sister is aware of my work. She’s not sure that his doctors have fully grasped the case.”

“They do have neurologists in Nebraska, don’t they?”

“If they’ve come across Capgras at all outside their medical texts, it’ll have been as a feature of schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s.” He took the dish towel from around his neck and dried their two wineglasses. “The sister is asking for my help.” Sylvie studied him: Those are the ones you swore to stay away from. “Anyway, misidentification syndromes might reveal a lot about memory.”

“How do you mean?” He’d always loved that phrase of hers.

“In Capgras, the person believes their loved ones have been swapped with lifelike robots, doubles, or aliens. They properly identify everyone else. The loved one’s face elicits memory, but no feeling. Lack of emotional ratification overrides the rational assembly of memory. Or put it this way: reason invents elaborately unreasonable explanations to explain a deficit in emotion. Logic depends upon feeling.”