Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Barbara cast a glance at Weber and rose. “Lots to do,” she announced. She mussed Mark Schluter’s bare head and brushed past Weber.

Weber brushed past the elated Mark and followed her out into the hallway. “Miss Gillespie,” he called, surprising even himself. “Would you have a minute?”

She stopped and shook her head, waiting for him to come toward her, out of Mark’s earshot. “It’s not fair.”

He nodded, too clinically. Her distress surprised him. Surely she dealt with worse, every day. “It’s a severe blow. But people are remarkably pliant. The brain will surprise us.”

She raised her eyebrow. “I mean the call.”

The accusation irritated him. She knew nothing of the literature, of differential diagnostics, of this man’s cognitive or emotional prospects. An hourly-wage staffer. He calmed himself. When the words came out, they were as level as the prairie horizon. “It’s something we needed to determine.”

The word formed in her face: We? “I’m sorry. I’m just an aide. The nurses and therapists can tell you a lot more. Excuse me. I’m running way late.” She knocked and disappeared into another patient’s room, two doors down.

Flustered, Weber returned to Mark’s. Mark was spinning on one heel. Seeing Weber, he pumped both hands in the air. “My damn sister! Can you believe it? She’ll be here in a minute. Man, she’s got a lot of explaining to do.”

Weber hadn’t really expected the experiment to succeed. Experimental bias, Dr. Hayes would call it. Redundant: merely proposing an experiment betrayed an expectation. Yes, he suspected this thing was more than a simple short circuit. For a disconnection between the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex to run roughshod over all higher cognition mocked any trust one put in consciousness. Whatever other reasons Weber’s reason had, some part of him hoped that a dramatic phone interaction might prove therapeutic. And maybe that was the greater cruelty, the wishful thinking that signed off on unapproved tests on live subjects.

Mark stopped pacing when Karin Schluter appeared, triumphant, in the doorway. Something had changed: she’d done something to her hair — cut and waved it. Powder-blue eyeliner and apricot lips. A pair of stone-washed jeans and a too-snug T-shirt with a paw print across her breasts reading, Kearney High School, Home of the Bearcats . Cheerleader Karin, the one before Goth Karin. Weber had given her one awful sliver of hope, and she’d run with it. She swept into the room, arms out, her face radiant with relief, ready to hug them both. But as she closed the gap, Mark recoiled.

“Don’t touch me! That was you on the phone? You haven’t tortured me enough? You had to pretend she was here? Where is she? What have you done with her? ”

A cry came from both siblings. Weber turned away as the noise traveled down the hall, caught up with Barbara Gillespie, and confirmed her. The experiment had gotten away from him. But the results were all his.

That evening, with Sylvie, he recounted the day’s stories. How Mark and his friends played at racing, as if it meant nothing. How Karin had melted down, seeing them. How Mark had performed so strangely on the tests, and his explanations for every failure. How he’d soared at the sound of his sister, then shrieked at the sight of her. Weber didn’t mention the nurse’s aide half-accusing him on an ethics charge.

For every story he gave Sylvie, she told him one back. But by the next morning, he felt as if he’d invented all of hers.

Weber had worked with several patientswho could not recognize their own body parts. Asomatognosia: it arose surprisingly often, almost always when strokes in the right hemisphere paralyzed a victim’s left side. He combined the subjects in print under the name Mary H. One sixty-year-old woman, the first of the Marys, claimed her ruined arm was “pestering” her.

Pestering how?

“Well, I don’t know whose it is. And I find that disturbing, Doctor.”

Could it be yours?

“Impossible, Doctor. Don’t you think I would know my own hand?”

He made her trace the limb with her own right hand, all the way down from her shoulder. Everything connected. So whose hand is this, then?

“It couldn’t be yours, could it, Doctor?”

But it’s connected to you.

“You’re a doctor. You know you can’t always believe what you see.”

Other, subsequent Marys gave their limbs names. One elderly woman called hers “The Iron Lady.” A male ambulance driver in his fifties called his “Mr. Limp Chimp.” They ascribed personalities to their arms, whole histories. They talked, argued with, even tried to feed them. “Come on, Mr. Limp Chimp. You know you’re hungry.”

They did everything but own them. One woman said her father left her his arm when he died. “I wish he hadn’t. It just falls on me. Falls on my chest, when I’m sleeping. Why did he want me to have this? It’s burdening me something awful.”

A forty-eight-year-old auto mechanic told Weber that the paralyzed arm next to him in bed was his wife’s. “She’s in the hospital, now. She’s had a stroke. She’s lost control of her arm. So…here it is. I guess I’m taking care of it for her.”

If that’s her arm, Weber asked, where’s yours?

“Well, right here, of course!”

Can you lift your arm?

“I am lifting it, Doctor.”

Can you clap your hands?

The lone, good right hand flapped in the air.

Are you clapping?

“Yes.”

I can’t hear anything, can you?

“Well, it’s soft all right. But that’s because there’s not a whole lot to clap about.”

Personal confabulation , the neurologist Feinberg called it. A story to link the shifting self back to the senseless facts. Reason was not impaired here; logic still worked on any other topic but this. Only the map of the body, the feel of it, had been fractured. And logic was not above redistributing its own indisputable parts in order to make a stubborn sense of wholeness true again. Lying in his rented room at 2:00 a.m., Weber could almost feel the fact in the limbs he lay numbering: a single, solid fiction always beat the truth of our scattering.

He woke fitfully,from a dream where his work had gone terribly wrong. He was still hypnopompic. Elevated pulse and damp skin. A cold process throbbed just below his sternum. Something had happened in New York that he needed to fix. His dream had been on the verge of naming it. Something that marred everything he’d made in the last two decades. Some change in climate, the wind turning against him, exposing the obvious, all the evidence that he was the last to notice. And for a moment before full consciousness, he remembered feeling the same low-grade dread on previous nights.

The spectral red glow of the clock said 4:10 a.m. Irregular meals and a strange environment, crashing blood sugar, sleep-doped prefrontal cortex, ancient physiological cycles linked to the earth’s spin: the same chemical flux behind any dark night of the soul. Weber closed his eyes again and tried to bring down his pulse, clear his mind of the night’s wild imaginings. He worked to locate himself and settle into the stream of his breathing, but he kept returning to a checklist of hazy indictments. It took until 4:30 a.m. to name what he was feeling: shame.

He’d always slept effortlessly, on demand. Sylvie marveled at him. “You must have the conscience of a choirboy.” She herself would miss a night’s sleep if she showed up so much as five minutes late for a dentist’s appointment. His only bad stretch of insomnia had been in his first months of medical school, after they’d moved from Columbus to Cambridge. Years later, he’d had several rough nights after giving up clinical practice. Then, another restless week after Jessica told the two of them her long-held secret, a disclosure that distressed Weber not because he objected in the slightest but because Jess had needed to hide it from them for so long. His own fault: all the times he’d teased his daughter about boys, admiring her leisurely approach to the hunt, he was killing bits of her.