Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Whatever turns you on. So there’s this guy,” Mark growled. “Who got banged up and was in a depression. He went to the hospital, but nobody would help. They told him to go look for someone happier than he was. So he went downtown, but he couldn’t find anyone. So he went home. But on his way home, he saw this animal, and he thought, ‘That thing is happier than I am.’ The end.” He shrugged, waiting for his score and dismissing it at the same time.

That afternoon, at a break in the testing, Mark asked, “Did they build you, too?”

The recorder was still running. Weber turned nonchalant. The creature he was hunting relaxed in a patch of sunlight, just in front of him. “What do you mean?”

“Did they build you from parts, as well?” The simple tone of voice, the bodily ease: he might have been greeting a neighbor over the back fence. Sweetly polite, but poised over the bottomless pit.

“You don’t think I’m human?”

“‘I couldn’t say,’” Mark mimicked. “‘What do you think?’” His grazing eyes swung to some movement behind Weber. “Hey! Barbie Doll!”

Weber turned, startled. Barbara Gillespie stood just next to him, in a tailored, ochre skirt suit fit for a job interview. She greeted him covertly in the fraction of a second before addressing Mark. “Mr. S.! You are due for a complete oil change.”

Mark banked a glance at Weber, filled with criminal glee. “Don’t worry. It’s nowhere near as interesting as it sounds.”

Barbara looked at Weber. “Should I come back later? Do you two need more time?”

The tacit alliance unnerved Weber. “We were just wrapping up, in fact.”

She peeked at him, almost a question. She turned to Mark and pointed toward the bathroom. “You heard the doctor!”

Mark squeezed himself up on his feet. He bobbed through the bathroom door, then popped right out again. “Oh! I think I might need some help.”

Barbara shook her head. “Nice try, darling. Leave the towel on this time, okay?”

“She called me darling! You heard her, right, Shrink? You’ll testify in court?”

As the door closed again, Barbara turned to Weber. She held his gaze: again the unnerving connection. “Could you make a note that his sex drive seems unaffected?”

Weber touched his earlobe. “Forgive me for asking the lamest question on earth. Have we run across each other before?”

“You mean before a couple of days ago?”

He failed to smile. He’d reached an age when everyone he met fit into one of the thirty-six available physiognomic templates. The number of people he met once and never saw again had reached devastating proportions. He’d crossed a threshold, around fifty, when every new person he met reminded him of someone else. The problem was exacerbated when total strangers greeted him familiarly. He could pass someone in the halls of the university medical center, then see them six months later at the Stop ’N Shop, overwhelmed by a sense of collegial connection. The virgin prairies of Nebraska were a dream, after the minefields of Long Island and Manhattan. Yet he’d had two days to locate this woman, and still came up empty-handed.

Barbara tried not to smile. “I’d remember if we had.”

So she did know who he was, maybe had even read him. What was a nursing-home attendant in her early forties doing reading books like his? The thought was inexcusably bigoted, especially for a man who’d once devoted a whole chapter to the category errors and prejudices that haunt the human circuitry. He studied her, compelled by her unlikelihood. “How long have you been with Dedham Glen?”

She glanced skyward and made a comic calculation. “For a while, now.”

“Where were you before?” Absurd, trying to hit the moon with a few scattered stones in the dark.

“Oklahoma City.”

Colder and colder. “Same line of work?”

“Similar. I was at a large public facility down there.”

“What brought you to Nebraska?”

She smiled and dipped her head, like holding an apple under her chin. “I guess I just couldn’t take the hustle and bustle of the metropolis.” Something far away held her interest. Discovered, she turned shy. The look flustered him, although he’d asked for it. He looked away. Only the appearance of Mark Schluter in the bathroom doorway saved him. He was holding a towel in front of his naked body. The knit cap had disappeared, exposing the patchy, returning hair. Boyish, he beamed at his caregiver. “I’m ready for my pain now, ma’am.”

With two arching eyebrows, Barbara excused herself, weirdly intimate, like the two of them had grown up three houses down from each other, gone to grade school together, written each other hundreds of letters, flirted one evening with testing more serious waters, then backed away, honorary blood relations for life.

Weber gathered his papers and retreated to the lobby. He’d gotten what he’d come for, acquired the requisite data, seen up close one of the most bizarre aberrations the self could suffer. He had enough material now, if not for a write-up in the medical literature, at least for a haunting narrative case history. He could do little more, here. It was time to head home, resume the rounds of colloquium, classroom, laboratory, and writing desk, the routine that had provided his middle age with a degree of productive reflection wholly undeserved.

But before he left, he’d just ask Barbara Gillespie about Mark’s changes over the last several weeks. He had Dr. Hayes’s observations, of course, and Karin’s. But only this woman saw Mark constantly, with no investment to sway her. He sat in the lobby on one end of a dark vinyl sofa across from a palsied woman slightly younger than he in an epic struggle with the zipper on her unnecessary jacket. He wanted to help, but knew enough not to. He felt oddly nervous, waiting for Barbara, as if he were eighteen again, at a graduation dance. He checked his watch every two minutes. At the fourth check, he sprang to his feet, startling the jacket woman, who, frightened, tore her zipper back down to the starting line. He’d forgotten having asked Karin Schluter to phone her brother at exactly three o’clock, now just minutes away.

He hovered outside Mark’s closed door, shamelessly eavesdropping. He heard the woman talking, with laughing grunts from Mark. The phone rang. The boy cursed and called out, “I’m coming, I’m coming, already. Hold your damn horsemeat.”

Over the sound of banged furniture, Barbara’s voice soothed. “Take your time. They’ll wait.”

Weber knocked at the door and let himself in. A startled Barbara Gillespie looked up from where she had been flipping through magazines with her charge. Weber slipped into the room, closing the door behind him. Mark stood with his back turned, struggling with the phone. His arms shook as he shouted, “Hello? Who is this?” Then shocked silence. “Oh my God! Where are you? Where have you been ?”

Weber glanced at Gillespie. The attendant was staring at him, guessing not only the caller but Weber’s role. Her eyes questioned him. His turn to look away, guilty.

Mark’s voice cracked and dampened, welcoming a loved one back from the dead. “You’re here? You’re in Kearney ? Jesus. Thank God! Get over here, now . No! I am not listening to another word. I’m not talking to the phone, after all this. You won’t believe the shit I’ve been through. I can’t believe you weren’t around for this. I’m not…I’m just saying. Get over here. I need to look at you. I need to see. You know where I am? Oh, right, duh. Hurry your ass. Okay. No. Stop. I’m not talking. I’m hanging up now. You hear that?” He leaned down, demonstrating. “Hanging up.” He put the receiver on the hook. He lifted it up again, listening. He turned from the phone toward the others, glowing. He took Weber’s reappearance without comment. He was flying. “You are not going to believe who that was! Karin the S!”