Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

He wouldn’t quit until she sat and attached the leads to her fingers. Then, the barrage of questions. Who wrote this? Who found it? What does it mean? What am I supposed to do with it? She answered every accusation with increasing impatience.

“Nothing’s happening,” Mark cried. “Does that mean she’s telling the truth?”

It meant her skin was not changing conductance. “It doesn’t mean anything,” Weber said. “You have to calibrate it.”

Before Weber left that afternoon, he put it to Mark. “There’s a condition called Capgras. Very rarely, when the brain is hurt, people lose their ability to recognize—”

A primal howl cut him off. “Fuck. Don’t start with that, man. That’s what the Haz-doctor keeps saying. But he’s in on the whole thing. That woman is sucking his cock or something.” Mark, bare, stared at Weber, eyes begging. “I thought I could trust you, Shrinky.”

Weber fingered his beard. “You can,” he said, and fell silent.

“Besides,” the thin voice pleaded. “Isn’t it more scientific, just to go with the more likely explanation?”

Sylvie’s words that night from the MotoRest were honey out of stone. “Ah! I know that voice. Wait — don’t tell me. It’s the man who used to hang around here.”

He couldn’t remember everything he wanted to tell her. It didn’t matter. She was primed with her own stories.

“Your very clever daughter Jessica has just won an NSF grant for young researchers. Apparently, planet-hunting is still fundable, this year.” She quoted a handsome figure. “California will have to tenure her, just for the loot she’s bringing in.”

Jess, his Jess. My daughter, my ducats.

Sylvie launched into the day’s long adventure, her attempts to trap a family of raccoons that was holding regular book-club gatherings in the Weber attic. She planned to catch them alive and drive them around in circles for a long time in broad daylight, to bewilder them, before dropping them off behind a strip mall in Centereach.

At last she asked, “So what did you learn from your misidentifier today?”

He lay back on the rented bed, closed his eyes, and held the shoehorn of a phone against his cheek. “He’s got one thin scrap of sheet tin propped up between himself and dissolving. Just looking at him makes everything I think I know about consciousness melt into air.”

The conversation shifted; he had some trouble following where it wanted to go. He asked about the weather on Chickadee Way, how the place looked.

“Conscience Bay was just gorgeous, Man. Like glass. Like frozen time.”

“I can imagine,” he said. The needle would have jumped.

He worked late, going over his notes. A moist June chill that mocked his whole image of the Great Plains saturated his room. He could find no way to shut off the air conditioner or open a window. He lay in bed, in the amber glow of the clock, appraising himself. Midnight came and went, and his eyes wouldn’t close. He had seen the note before. Karin Schluter had Xeroxed it and stuffed the copy into the thick portfolio she’d shown him on his first day. Now, as he lay miles from sleep, he tried to decide whether he’d lied about not knowing it, or had just forgotten.

He’d seen true face blindness,and this wasn’t it. All his books described some flavor of agnosia — blindness to objects, blindness to places, blindness to age or expression or gaze. He’d written about people who couldn’t distinguish foods, cars, or coins, although some part of their brains still knew how to interact with the baffling objects. He’d told the story of Martha T., a devoted ornithologist, who overnight lost the ability to tell a wren from a red-bellied sapsucker, yet could still describe, in detail, how the birds differed. Several times in the books he described prosopagnosia. For truly vertiginous diseases, the brain was endlessly accommodating.

The Country of Surprise portrayed Joseph S. In his early twenties, he was shot in the head by a mugger’s small-caliber handgun, damaging a small region in his right inferotemporal region — the fusiform gyrus. He lost his ability to recognize acquaintances, friends, family, loved ones, or celebrities. He could walk past anyone and not know him, however often or recently they’d met. He even had trouble picking out his own mirror image.

“I know they are faces,” Joseph S. told Weber. “I can see the differences in each feature. But they aren’t distinctive. They mean nothing to me. Think of the leaves of an enormous maple. Put any two next to each other and you can see how different they are. But look up into the tree and try to name the leaves.”

Nothing to do with memory: Joseph could list in some detail accurate descriptions of features that friends of his ought to have. He just couldn’t recognize those features, when assembled into a face.

Despite his crippling damage, Joseph S. earned a doctorate in mathematics and pursued a successful university career. He scored off the charts on standard IQ tests, especially spatial reasoning, navigation, memory, and mental rotation. He described to Weber his elaborate compensatory systems: cues of voice, clothing, body type, and minute ratios of eye width to nose length to lip thickness. “I’ve gotten fast enough to fool a lot of people.”

Faces only: nothing else gave him trouble. In fact, he was better than most at picking out slight differences in nearly identical objects: pebbles, socks, sheep. But surviving in society depended upon performing staggering facial calculations constantly, as if they were child’s play. Joseph S. lived like a spy behind enemy lines, doing by laborious math and algorithm what everyone else did like breathing. Every moment out in public demanded vigilance. He said that the problem contributed to the breakup of his first marriage. His wife couldn’t bear his having to study her in order to pick her out of a crowd. “It very nearly cost me my current marriage, too.” He described seeing his second wife on campus one afternoon and embracing her. Only it wasn’t his wife. It was no one he knew.

“What we think of as a single, simple process,” Weber wrote,

is in fact a long assembly line. Vision requires careful coordination between thirty-two or more separate brain modules. Recognizing a face takes at least a dozen…We are hardwired for finding faces. Two Oreo cookies and a carrot can make an infant howl or laugh. Only: the many, delicate hardwires between modules can break at several different spots…

With varying damage to different areas, a person might lose his ability to distinguish sex, age, the emotional expression of a face, or the direction of someone’s attention. Weber described a patient who was completely unable to decide how attractive a given face seemed. In his own lab, he gathered data suggesting that some sufferers from face blindness were actually matching faces without their conscious minds knowing.

Few weeks went by when he didn’t receive letters from anxious readers struggling with some attenuated form of failing to recognize old acquaintances. Some were consoled by Weber’s bombshell: a simple neurological quirk that revealed how everyone suffered from a form of prosopagnosia. Even normal recognition fails when the observed face is upside down.

Mark Schluter was not face-blind. Just the reverse: he saw differences that were not there. He most resembled those people Weber had met for whom every change in expression could split into a new and separate person. That nightmare flashed across Weber’s closed lids just before he fell asleep, looking up into the million leaves of a tree towering above him, each leaf a life he had met once, a moment in a life, even a particular emotional aspect of that isolated moment, every look a separate object to identify, unique and multiplying into the billions, beyond anyone’s ability to simplify into names…