Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“This is in the hospital?”

“Mid-March. Those are Mark’s toes, with the little pedicure treatment. She thought it would be cute to paint them fuchsia.” Her words thickened with the injustice of affection. “Here: you wanted pictures that would excite him.”

A familiar face flashed in front of Weber. His own skin would have registered a change in conductivity.

“You’ve met Barbara. As you noticed, he’s completely gaga over her.”

The woman smiled sadly into the camera, forgiving the machine and its operator. “Yes,” Weber said. “Do you know why?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking. He responds to something in her. Her trust. Respect.” A note filled her voice: an envy that could go either way. I’d give him what this woman does, if he’d let me. Karin stroked the photo. “I can’t tell you what I owe this woman. Can you believe she works down at the bottom of the food chain? One baby step up from a volunteer. That’s for-profit health care for you. Put three greedy humans together, and they can’t tell their assets from their armpits.”

Weber smiled noncommittally.

“Here’s Mark’s pride and joy.” She fingered a picture of a narrow, vinyl-sided modular home, something Weber’s generation would have called a prefab. “This is the Homestar. That’s actually the name of the catalog building company. But that’s what he calls his, like it’s the only one in the world. My bad-ass, rebel brother, never prouder than the day he finally scraped together the six-thousand-dollar down payment, his toehold on the bottom rung of the middle class.” She bit her thumb tip. “What you call fleeing a precarious upbringing.”

“That’s where you’re living, while you’re in town?”

He might have served her a warrant. “Where else can I go? I’m out of a job. I don’t know how long this is going to go on.”

“Makes perfect sense,” he declared.

“It’s not like I’m rooting through his things.” She shut her eyes and blanched. He picked up a photo of five hirsute men with guitars and a trap set. She looked again. “That’s Cattle Call. A sorry house band at a bar called the Silver Bullet, outside town. Mark loves them. They were playing the night of his accident. That’s where Mark was, right before. Here’s his truck; I found a whole shoe box full of truck shots, in a closet at the Homestar. This could upset him.”

“Yes. Maybe we should skip that one for now.”

The pizzas came. His choice dismayed him: pineapple and ham. He couldn’t imagine having ordered it. Karin dug into her Supreme with gusto. “I shouldn’t be having pizza. I know I could eat better. Still, I don’t do much meat, except when I eat out. I’m surprised they can sell any cow parts at all, in this part of the country. You should hear what goes on at that plant. Ask Mark. It’ll put you off your feed for good. You know, they have to clip the horns to keep the crazed beasts from goring each other.”

It didn’t much hinder her appetite. Weber poked at his Hawaiian as if he were doing ethnography. At last the food gave out, along with their words.

“You ready?” she asked doubtfully, pretending she was.

At Dedham Glen, he asked for an hour alone with Mark. Her presence might jeopardize a clean skin response test.

“You’re the boss.” She smoothed her eyebrows and backed away, bobbing.

Mark was alone in his room, studying a bodybuilding magazine. He looked up and beamed. “Shrink! You’re back. Give me that one with crossing out the numbers and letters again. I’m ready for it now. I wasn’t ready for it yesterday.”

They shook hands. Mark was in a different shirt, this one listing a dozen Nebraska laws still on the books. Mothers may not perm their daughters’ hair without a state license. If a child burps in church, his parents may be arrested. He wore the knit cap from the day before, even in the close, summer room. “You by yourself today, or…?”

Weber just raised his eyebrows.

“Here. Have a seat. Take a load off. You’re supposed to be an old guy, remember?” He cawed like a raven.

Weber took his chair from yesterday, across from Mark, making the same groans to the same laughter. “Would you mind if I use a tape recorder while we talk?”

“That’s a tape recorder? You’re shitting me! Lemme see that thing. Looks more like a cigarette lighter. You sure you aren’t some Special-Ops…?” Mark tucked the machine up to his cheek. “‘Hello? Hello? If you can hear me, I’m being held hostage here against my will.’ Hey! Don’t look like that. Just busting your balls, is all.” He handed back the tiny machine. “So, how come you need a tape recorder? You got problems or something?” He spun his fingers around each ear.

“Something like that,” Weber admitted.

He’d used a tape recorder the day before. There’d been no way to ask permission, out of the gate. Yet he needed to be able to reproduce that first contact verbatim. He’d banked on getting retroactive permission. And now he had it, or close enough.

“Wow. Cool. Live on tape. You want me to sing?”

“You’re on. Hit it.”

Mark launched into a dead monotone, tone-deaf tune. Gonna open you up, gonna peel you out …He broke off. “So come on. Give me one of your so-called puzzles. Beats lying around and dying.”

“I’ve got some new ones. Picture mysteries.” He pulled the Benton Facial Recognition Test out of his briefcase.

“Mysteries? My whole damn life is a mystery.”

Mark recognized images of the same face from different angles, in different poses, under different lighting. But he couldn’t always tell when a glance was aimed at him. He did reasonably well identifying celebrities, although he called Lyndon Johnson “some high-ranking corporate goon” and Malcolm X “that guy Dr. Chandler on the hospital show.” He enjoyed the whole process. “This guy? He’s supposed to be a comedian, if yelling like there’s Ben-Gay on your scrotum is funny. So okay. This chick calls herself a singer, but that’s just because they took her dancing pole away.” He also did well separating actual faces from facelike shapes in drawings and photographs. Overall, his recognition scores were high normal. But he struggled with the emotions of conventional facial expressions. His responses tended to skew toward fear and anger. Given the circumstances, however, Mark’s numbers showed nothing that Weber could call pathological.

“Can we try one more thing?” Weber asked, as if it were the most natural request in the world.

“Whatever. Knock yourself out.”

He dove into his briefcase and pulled out a small galvanic skin response amplifier and meter. “How would you feel about me wiring you up?” He showed Mark the finger-clip electrodes. “It basically measures your skin conductivity. If you get excited, or feel tense…”

“You mean like a lie detector?”

“Yes, a little like that.”

Mark cackled. “No shit! Now we’re talking. Bring it on! I always wanted to try to bust one of those things.” He held out his hands. “Wire me up, Mr. Spock.”

Weber did, explaining every step. “Most people show a rise in skin conductivity when they see a picture of someone close to them. Friends, family…”

“Everybody sweats when they see Mom?”

“Exactly! I wish I’d put it that way in my last book.”

Of course the methodology was all wrong. There should have been a separate device operator and reader. His calibration trials were primitive at best. No randomizing, no double blind. No controls. Nothing in Karin’s pictures gave him any baseline. But he was not sending this data to a refereed journal. He was just getting a rough sense of this shattered man, of Mark’s attempts to tell himself back into a continuous story.