Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Hayes’s tiniest facial muscles betrayed incredulity. “Something more than neurons, you mean?”

“Not at all. But there’s a higher-order component to all this, too. Whatever lesions he has suffered, he’s also producing psychodynamic responses to trauma. Capgras may not be caused so much by the lesion per se as by large-scale psychological reactions to the disorientation. His sister represents the most complex combination of psychological vectors in his life. He stops recognizing his sister because some part of him has stopped recognizing himself. I have always found it worthwhile to consider a delusion as both the attempt to make sense — as well as the result — of a deeply upsetting development.”

After a beat, Hayes nodded. “I’m…sure it’s all worth thinking about, if that interests you, Dr. Weber.”

Fifteen years ago, Weber would have launched a counterstrike. Now he found it comical: two docs marking their territory, ready to rear up and batter at each other like bighorn sheep. Ram tough. Well-being coursed through Weber, the simple poise of self-reflection. He felt like mussing Dr. Hayes’s hair. “When I was your age, the prevailing psychoanalytic bias had Capgras resulting from taboo feelings toward a loved one. ‘I can’t be feeling lust for my sister, ergo she’s not my sister.’ The thermodynamic model of cognition. Very popular in its day.”

Hayes rubbed his neck, embarrassed into silence.

“On the face of it, this case would single-handedly refute that possibility. Clearly Mark Schluter’s Capgras isn’t primarily psychiatric. But his brain is struggling with complex interactions. We owe him more than a simple, one-way, functionalist, causal model.” He surprised himself. Not by his belief, but by his willingness to speak it aloud to a physician this young.

The neurologist tapped the film on his light box. “All I know is what happened to his brain early on the morning of February 20.”

“Yes,” Weber said, bowing. All that medicine ever wanted to know. “It’s amazing that he has any integrated sense of self left at all, isn’t it?”

Dr. Hayes accepted the truce. “We’re lucky this particular circuit is so hard to disrupt. A handful of documented cases. If it were as common as, say, Parkinson’s, we’d all be strangers to each other. Listen, I’d like to help in any way possible. If we can do any further tests or imaging here at the hospital…”

“I have a few low-tech examinations I’d like to try before that. The first thing I want to do is get some galvanic skin response.”

The neurologist’s eyebrows shot up. “Something to try, I guess.”

Dr. Hayes walked Weber back to the parking lot. They’d been sealed in the consulting room long enough that the return to stark, prairie June caught Weber out. The still air expanded in his lungs, smelling like some archaic summer holiday. It hinted of something he’d last tasted in Ohio at age ten. He turned to see Dr. Hayes hunching next to him, his hand extended.

“Pleasure meeting you, Dr. Weber.”

“Please. Gerald.”

“Gerald. I look forward to seeing the new book. A nice break from work. And I want you to know I’m your biggest fan.”

He did not say still , but Weber heard it. Weber stood, one foot in the street. “I was hoping we could touch base again, before I head back east?”

Hayes brightened, ready to fawn or fight all over again. “Ah! Of course, if you have the time and interest.”

Time and interest…For years, he’d strictly rationed both. A name chair at a Research One University, a long list of respected articles about perceptual processing and cognitive assembly, and a pair of popular neuropsychology books that sold to wide audiences in a dozen languages: he’d never had much time or interest to spare. He’d already outlived his father by three years and had greatly outproduced him. And yet, Weber chanced to be working at the precise moment when the race was making its first real headway into the basic riddle of conscious existence: How does the brain erect a mind, and how does the mind erect everything else? Do we have free will? What is the self, and where are the neurological correlates of consciousness? Questions that had been embarrassingly speculative since the beginnings of awareness were now on the verge of empirical answer. Weber’s growing, dazed suspicion that he might live to see such wild philosophical phantoms solved, that he might even contribute to solving them, had pretty much driven out any other semblance of what, in popular parlance, had come to be called a real life . Some days it seemed that every problem facing the species was awaiting the insight that neuroscience might bring. Politics, technology, sociology, art: all originated in the brain. Master the neural assemblage, and we might at long last master us .

Weber had long ago commenced that extended retreat from the world that ambitious men begin to make around their fortieth year. All he wanted was to work. His old hobbies — guitar, paint box, tennis racket, verse notebooks — sat tucked away in corners of the too-big house, waiting for the day he might resurrect them. Only the sailboat gave him any sustained enjoyment now, and that, only as a platform for more cognitive reflection. He struggled to sit through feature films. He dreaded the periodic dinner-party invitation, although, truth be told, he generally enjoyed himself once the evening was under way, and hosts could always count on him to produce a bizarre conversational firework or two. Tales from the crypt, Sylvie called them: stories that proved to the assembled dinner guests that nothing they thought, saw, or felt was necessarily true.

He had lost no capacity for mundane delights. A walk around the mill pond still pleased him in any season, although he now used such strolls more to jog stalled thoughts than to see the ducks or trees. He still indulged in what Sylvie called foraging — constant low-level snacking, a weakness for sweets that he’d nursed since childhood. His wife first fell in love with him when he declared to her, at twenty-one, that heavy glucose metabolism was essential for sustained mental effort. When, at twice that age, his body began to change so profoundly that he no longer recognized it, he briefly struggled to curb the familiar pleasure before accepting the alien new shape as his own.

He still enjoyed his wife’s bedrock companionship. He and Sylvie still touched incessantly. Monkey grooming , they called it. Constant hand rubs while they read together, shoulder massages as they washed the dishes. “You know what you are?” she accused, pinching him. “Nothing but a dirty old neck-rub-philiac.” He answered only with happy groans.

At growing intervals that neither of them cared to calculate, they still played with each other. However fitful, the persistence of desire surprised them both. The previous year, on their thirtieth anniversary, he estimated the number of climaxes that he and little Sylvie Bolan had shared since their first foray in the top bunk in her dorm room in Columbus. One every third day, on average, for a third of a century. Four thousand detonations, joining them at the hip. Nights of animal ecstasy always amused them, coming back to themselves, to the embarrassment of speech. Curled up against his flank, giggling a little, Sylvie might say, “Thank you for the beautiful human sexuality, Man,” before padding off to the bathroom to clean herself. A person could only howl in abandonment so many times. Time didn’t age you; memory did.

Yes, the slowing body, the gradually depleting pleasure neurotransmitters had cooled them. But something else as well: what you loved well, you grew to resemble. He and the wife of his years now resembled each other so much that there could be no strangeness of desire between them. None except that impenetrable strangeness he’d given himself over to. The country of perpetual surprise. The naked brain. The basic riddle, on the verge of being solved.