Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

She chuckled. “This just in: male scientists confirm the bleeding obvious. So, sweetie. Take a trip. See the world. Nothing’s stopping you.”

“You wouldn’t mind if I went out? Just for a couple of days?”

“You know how much I’m scrambling myself right now. It would give me a chance to clear my own backlog. In fact, I think I’d better skip our video date for tonight. There’s a child HIV assessment I need to work up for tomorrow.”

“You wouldn’t think less of me if I…backslide?”

She looked up from the empty sink, startled. “Oh, my poor little Man. Backslide? This is your calling. It’s what you do .”

They kissed again. Amazing that the gesture still communicated so much, after three decades. He held back a lock of her mocha hair and grazed her forehead. Her hair was thinner than it had been in college, when they’d met. How searchingly beautiful she’d been. But lovelier to him now, at peace with herself at last. Lovelier, because graying.

She looked up at him, curious. Open.

“Thanks,” he said. “Now, if I can just survive the damn airport security…”

“You leave that to Tour Director. That’s what he does best.”

He called them all by fictional names.When the details of a life threatened anyone’s privacy, he substituted others. Sometimes he created a single case history from a composite of several people he’d studied. That much was standard professional practice, for everyone’s protection.

He described a woman once, well-known in the literature. In The Three-Pound Infinity , he called her “Sarah M.” Bilateral extrastriate damage to the middle temporal area left her suffering from akinetopsia, a rare, near-complete motion blindness. Sarah’s world had fallen under a perpetual strobe light. She couldn’t see things move. Life appeared to her as a series of still photographs, connected only by ghostly motion trails.

She washed and dressed and ate in time lapse. A turn of her head launched a series of clunking carousel slides. She couldn’t pour coffee; the liquid hung from the pot spout in icicles, and from one stopped moment to the next the table would fill with frozen coffee lakes. Her pet cat terrified her, blinking out and rematerializing elsewhere. The television stabbed at her eyes. A bird in flight made bullet holes in the windowpane of sky.

Of course, Sarah M. couldn’t drive, couldn’t walk in crowds, couldn’t even cross the street. She stood on the curb of her quiet town, paralyzed, the film stuck. A truck at a distance might mow her down, the second she placed her foot in the gutter. Still images piled up one after the other — incoherent, bisecting cubist tracers. Cars and people and objects reappeared at random.

Even her own moving body was no more than a series of sequential stiff poses, a game of Statuemaker. And yet, strangest of all: Sarah M. alone of all the world saw a kind of truth about sight, hidden from normal eyes. If vision depends upon the discrete flash of neurons, then there is no continuous motion, however fast the switches, except in some trick of mental smoothing.

Her brain was like anyone’s, except in losing this last trick. Her name was not Sarah. It might have been anything. She was there, in Weber’s strobing mind, when he stepped into the jetway at LaGuardia, and gone when he found himself, that same afternoon, dead center in the evacuated prairie, with no transition but a jump cut.

He stayed at a motel just off the interstate.The MotoRest — he chose it for its sign: WELCOME CRANE PEEPERS. The utter estrangement of it: I’ve a feeling we’re not in New York anymore. He and Sylvie had left the Midwest in 1970 and never looked back. Now the rolling openness of his birthright seemed as alien to him as Sojourner ’s pictures beamed back from Mars. Outside the Lincoln airport rental, he’d panicked for a moment, finding himself with neither passport nor local currency.

Once inside the MotoRest lobby, he might have been anywhere. Pittsburgh, Santa Fe, Addis Ababa: the comforting, neutral pastels of global commuting. He’d stood on the same tawny carpet in front of the same teal check-in counter countless times before. A dozen brilliant, shiny apples sat in a basket on the reception desk, all the same shape and size. Real or decoration, he couldn’t tell until he sank a fingernail into one.

While the check-in clerk processed his credit card, Weber thumbed the stacks of tourist brochures. All of them were flush with red-crested birds. Masses of birds: like nothing he’d ever seen. “Where can I go see these?” he asked the clerk.

She looked embarrassed, as if his card had been rejected. “They’ve been gone for two months. They’re all up north now, sir. But you want to see them, just sit tight. They’ll be back.” She handed him his Visa, along with a key card. He went up to a room that pretended it had never been inhabited by anyone, one that promised to disappear, traceless, the instant Weber checked out.

Every surface in the room spouted cardboard messages. The staff welcomed him personally. They offered him a full range of goods and services. One piece of cardstock in the bathroom said that if he’d like to save the earth, he should leave his towel over the shower bar, and if not, he should throw it on the floor. The messages had been put out fresh that morning and would be replaced at his departure. Thousands like them, from Seattle to St. Petersburg. He might have been in any hotel room anywhere, except for the crane pictures above the bed.

He’d spoken with Karin Schluter before leaving New York. She’d been remarkably poised and informed. But when she phoned from downstairs, half an hour after he checked in, she was a different person. She sounded timid, nervous about coming up to the room. Clearly it was time for him to update the publicity shot. Perfect thing to tease Sylvie about, when he called her that night.

He came down to the lobby and met the victim’s only near relation. She was in her early thirties, dressed in tan cotton slacks and rose cotton blouse, what Sylvie called universal passport clothes. Weber’s dark suit — his standard travel fare — startled her and left her apologizing with her eyes before she could say hello. Dead-straight copper hair — her sole striking feature — hung down beneath the bottom of her shoulder blades. That spectacular fall upstaged her face, which, with some generosity, might be called fresh. Her decidedly corn-fed body was heading prematurely toward solemn. Healthy midwestern woman who might have run hurdles in college. As he looked at her, she primped unconsciously. But when she stood and walked toward him, her hand extended, she flashed him a brave, side-mouthed smile, altogether worth aiding.

They shook hands, Karin Schluter thanking him too profusely, as if he’d already cured her brother. Just the sight of him seemed to lift her. When he deflected her gratitude, she said, “I brought some documents.” She sat on a couch next to the lobby’s fake fireplace and spread a dossier on the coffee table: three months of handwritten notes combined with copies of everything the hospital and rehab center had given her. Hands weaving, she launched into her brother’s story.

Weber sat next to her. After a bit, he touched her wrist. “We should probably check in with Dr. Hayes, before anything else. Did he get my letter?”

“I spoke with him this morning. He knows you’re here. He says feel free to go see Mark, this afternoon. I have his notes somewhere.”

The paperwork spread in front of Weber, a guidebook to a new planet. He forced himself to ignore the file and listen to Karin Schluter’s version. Through three successive books, he’d championed the idea: facts are only a small part of any case history. What counted was the telling.