Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

She took his arm and stood. He led her out the main doors, down the sidewalk to the parking lot. He felt unsettled, the hamstrung sense that had plagued him throughout his neurology residency. He’d curtailed medical practice years ago, in favor of research and writing, in part, perhaps, to protect himself. In the last eighteen months, he’d grown worse. Just watching someone wire a macaque would soon prove crippling.

Karin Schluter hung on his arm, heading toward the parking lot. “You have a nice way with him,” she conceded. “I think he liked you.” She stared straight ahead as she spoke. She’d wanted more. Not even finished with the screening, and already Weber had let her down.

“Your brother is a lively personality. I like him very much.”

She stopped on the sidewalk. Her face turned raw. “What do you mean, ‘lively’? He’s not going to stay this way, is he? You can help him, right? Like the things you try, in your books…”

The real work was never with the injured. “Karin? Think back to the night of Mark’s accident. Do you remember imagining what might happen to him?”

She stood clasping herself, her face aflame. He kept a distance now. The June wind whipped her hair into a dozen tow lines. She pinched her eyes. “This isn’t what he’s like. He was quick. Sharp. A little crude. But he cared for everyone…”

Her hands were folded across her breasts, her face a ruddy mess, her eyes welling. He cupped her elbow and urged her down the walk toward the car. A casual observer might have seen a lovers’ quarrel. Weber turned and saw Mark, standing at his window. You’re not, like, involved with her? He swung back to the sister. “No,” Weber said. “This is not who he was. And he’ll be someone else a year from now.” As soon as he said it, he regretted even that harmless truism. Too easily turned into a promise.

The color in her face deepened. “I’m sure whatever you can do for him will help.”

More sure than he was. He could still make it back to Lincoln in time for an evening flight. Weber pressed his thumbnail into his palm and mastered himself. “To do anything for him, we have to learn who he has become. And to do that, we have to win his trust.”

“Trust me ? He hates the sight of me. He thinks I’ve abducted his real sister. He thinks I’m a government robot spy.”

They reached her car. She stood still, keys in hand, waiting for him to work a miracle. “Tell me something,” he said. “Have you lost weight recently?”

Her mouth made a shocked O. “What—?”

He tried to smile. “Forgive me. Mark said that his real sister was considerably heavier.”

“Not considerably .” She straightened her belt. “I’ve lost a few pounds. Since our mother passed. I’ve been…working on myself. Starting over.”

“Do you know much about cars?”

She stared at him as if brain damage were endemic. Then guilty understanding stole into her eyes. “Unbelievable. I tried to get him to teach me, one summer, a few years ago. I was trying to impress…someone. Mark wouldn’t let me do anything but hand him wrenches. It was just a few days. But ever since, he’s been convinced that I have this secret love for camshafts, or what have you.”

She pressed the key fob and the car unlocked. He walked around to the passenger side and slid in. “And the way he was with the nurse, with Ms….?” He knew the name, but let her say it.

“Barbara. She does have a way with him, doesn’t she?”

“Would you say the way he talks to her is different from how he would have, before?”

She stared out the window at the open fields. The lime blush of the June prairie. She shook her head. “Hard to say. He didn’t know her before.”

He called Sylvie that night, from the MotoRest. He actually felt nervous dialing. “Hey, it’s me.”

“Man! I was hoping it might be you.”

“As opposed to the telemarketers?”

“Don’t shout, sweetie. I can hear you.”

“You know, I truly hate talking into this ridiculous thing. It’s like holding a saltine up to your face.”

“They’re supposed to be small, my love. That’s what makes them mobile. I take it this case isn’t going so great?”

“On the contrary, Woman. It’s staggering.”

“That’s good. Staggering is good, right? I’m glad for you. So tell me about it. I could use a good story right now.”

“Rough day?”

“That probation kid from Poquott who we were getting employment letters for mistook the UPS man for a SWAT team.”

Her voice still caught, even after years of such disasters. He searched for something useful, or just kind. “Anyone hurt?”

“Everyone will live. Including me. So tell me about your Capgras. Impaired recognition?”

“It feels like the opposite, in fact. Too attentive to small difference.”

Aside from the absurd makeup compact passing itself off as a phone, they might have been back in college, trading appraisals late into the night, long after curfew had sealed each of them in their separate dorms. He’d first fallen in love with Sylvie over the phone. Every time he traveled, the fact came back to him. They fell into a cadence, talking as they had almost every evening of their lives for a third of a century.

He described the bewildered man, his terrified sister, the antiseptic nursing facility, the oddly familiar attendant, the desolate town of twenty-five thousand, the dry June, the vacant, floating terrain in the dead center of nowhere. He wasn’t violating professional ethics; his wife was his colleague in these matters, in every way except the payroll. He described how bottomless it felt, watching recognition atomize into ever more exacting, distinct pieces. That woman laughed; this one’s scared. This one’s facial expressions are wrong. Doubles, aliens: splitting individuality into a hundred parts, preserving distinctions too subtle for normality to see.

“I’m telling you, Woman. No matter how often I see it, it chills me.”

“I thought you’d never seen this before.”

“Not Capgras. I mean the naked brain. Scrambling to fit everything together. Unable to recognize that it’s suffering from any disorder.”

“That’s only reasonable. Can’t afford to admit what’s happened. Sounds like a lot of my clients. Like me, in fact, sometimes.”

He hadn’t realized how much he needed to talk. The afternoon’s interview had excited him in a way that no one but Sylvie would understand. She asked for more details about Mark Schluter. He read her some notes. She asked, “Does he look her in the eyes when he talks to her?”

“I didn’t really notice.”

“Hm. That’s the kind of thing we here on Venus look for first.”

They wandered onto current events: the wildfires out west, the guilty verdict against the crooked giant accounting firm, and at last the indigo bunting she saw that morning at the feeder.

“Remember to renew your passport,” he said. “September’ll be here any minute.”

“ Viva Italia. La dolce vita! Hey. By the way. When is your return flight? I jotted it down and stuck it on the refrigerator. I just seem to have misplaced the refrigerator.”

“Hang on. Let me get my briefcase.”

When he came back and picked up the phone, she was laughing. “Did you just put down your cell so that you could walk across the room?”

“What about it?”

“My sage. My sage at the height of his powers.”

“I can barely force myself to use one of these shoehorns. I absolutely refuse to walk around with one clamped to my face. It’s schizophrenia.”

She couldn’t stop chuckling. “Not even in private?”

“Private? What’s that?”

He gave her his flight information. They traded a few more stalling phrases, reluctant to say goodbye. He was still talking to her in his head for several sentences, after they hung up. He showered, hanging the towel over the bar— Help save the earth. He retrieved his digital voice recorder from his briefcase, then slipped between the stiff, cool sheets, where he replayed the day’s taped conversation. He listened again to the twenty-seven-year-old boy, lost to himself, busy exposing impostors the world could not make out.