Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

He’d had stretches — the first year in his new Stony Brook lab; the sudden onset of his writing vocation — when he hadn’t needed sleep at all. He’d work past midnight, then rise after an hour or two with fresh ideas. And the same Sylvie who marveled that he could sleep within seconds of his head touching the pillow stood in awe of his ability to go night after night on almost nothing. “A camel, that’s what you are. A camel of consciousness.”

She wouldn’t have recognized him now. He lay still and tried to empty himself. Resting is as good as sleep, his mother always claimed, half a century ago. Did researchers ever really disprove folk wisdom? But even resting lay beyond him. By five-thirty, the longest eighty minutes he’d lived through in years, he gave up. He dressed in the dark and went downstairs. The lobby was empty except for a young Hispanic woman behind the desk, who whispered good morning and said that coffee wouldn’t be ready for half an hour. Weber gave her a sheepish wave. She was reading a college textbook — organic chemistry.

Dawn was starting to fuse. He made out shapes in the indigo light, but not yet colors. The street was lovely, cool, and dormant. He cut across the asphalt parkway toward the stunted commercial strip. A single light truck nosed around the Mobil station across the street. His ears adjusted, tuning in to complete cacophony. The dawn symphony: hoots and jeers, mocking whistles, chips, slides, arpeggios, and scales. At this hour, he stood little chance of being arrested for vagrancy. He stopped at the far end of the MotoRest parking lot, closed his filmy eyes, and listened.

The songs came on, mathematical, melodious, their elaborate patterns slowly mutating. Some were as singable as any human tune. He counted, sensitizing to the calls that played off one another, each a solo against a mass chorus. He lost count after a dozen, unsure where to lump and where to split. Every complex riff was identifiable, although Weber could identify none. Softer, in the middle distance, he heard the shush of cars along Interstate 80 whooshing like sprung balloons.

He opened his eyes: still in Kearney. A diffident commercial strip marked by a forest of metal sequoias bearing harsh, cheery signage. The usual gamut of franchises — motel, gas, convenience store, and fast food — reassured the accidental pilgrim that he was somewhere just like anywhere. Progress would at last render every place terminally familiar. He wandered into the intersection and sniffed his way toward town.

The arid chain stores along the strip gave way, in a handful of blocks, to gingerbread Victorians with wraparound porches. Just past these lay the core of an old downtown. The ghost of a prairie outpost, circa 1890, still looked out from the high, squared-off brick storefront façades. Light was rising. He could now read the posters in the shop windows: Celebrate Freedom Rally; Corvette Show; Faith In Bloom Garden Tour. He passed something called The Runza Hut, sealed up and dark, hiding its purpose from foreign interlopers.

The town shook itself awake. Three or four people moved along the street across from him. He passed a monument to the local dead of the two world wars. The whole tableau left him uneasy. The streets were too wide, the houses and shops too ample, too much wasted lot between them. Kearney had been conceived on too grand a scale, back when they gave land away for free, back before the place’s real destiny became clear. Its lanes were laid out in a grid of numbered streets and avenues, as if it had been in danger of sprouting into a full-scale Manhattan against the epic emptiness enclosing it.

Weber sat on a bench in front of the monument, searching through the last two days for what had so unsettled him. He considered Mark Schluter, the man’s uninterrupted, unthinking trust in his shattered self. But stopping and thinking about Mark proved a mistake. There on the too-spacious street, vertigo flooded back over Weber. Something crucial was escaping him. He had left himself vulnerable to some charge. The sidewalk widened and rolled under his feet. No rational explanation.

He stood and walked two more blocks, looking for anything open at this hour. A greasy spoon materialized across the way. He pushed open the door, rattling a Jesus fish on the glass. He recoiled, even as a cowbell on the inside handle announced him. At a central table, four weathered men in denim and caps that sported hybrid seed logos turned to look at him. He shied into the room and hovered by the cash register until a woman called from the kitchen, “Seat yourself, hon.”

He stumbled to a booth away from the farmers. As he dropped onto the spongy red seat, the night’s ordeal flared up again. Exactly the kind of low-grade agitation that responded nicely to the antianxiety medication that his colleagues now dished out in bulk. Knowing how quickly the body stopped making externally supplied substances, Weber tried not to take anything stronger than a multivitamin. Even these he had forgotten to pack, and so had taken nothing for the last three days. But so slight a change could not possibly account for this bout.

His fingers drummed on the booth’s gray Formica. From two feet above them, he watched them type. A laugh bubbled up from his clenched belly and broke over him. He took his typing hands and cradled them in each other. Diagnosis stared him in the face. He, the last life scientist to go online, was suffering from e-mail withdrawal.

The waitress appeared at boothside, dressed like something out of a movie: half ward nurse, half meter maid. His age, if she was a day: thirty years too old to wait on tables. He grinned at her, a reprieved idiot. The waitress shook her head. “Don’t you need a license to be that happy before you’ve had your coffee?” She held up two Pyrex coffee pots. He pointed to the one that wasn’t orange.

He’d forgotten about midwesterners. He could no longer read them, his people, the residents of the Great Central Flyover. Or rather, his theories about them, honed through his first twenty years of life, had died from lack of longitudinal data. They were, by various estimates, kinder, colder, duller, shrewder, more forthright, more covert, more taciturn, more guarded, and more gregarious than the mode of the country’s bean curve. Or else they were that mode: the fat, middle part of the graph that fell away to nothing on both coasts. They’d become an alien species to him, although he was one of them, by habit and birth.

He rubbed his bald spot and shook his head. With a little more edge, she asked, “What can I get you, hon?” He looked around the booth, confused. A half-sigh slipped out of her, the first of a long day. “You need a menu? We’ve got one of everything.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Spinach crêpes?”

Her mouth barely tightened. “Fresh out. Anything else, though.”

When she left with his order— two over easy, with twin pigs —he fished out his absurd cell phone. Like carrying around a little science-fiction phaser in his pocket. He’d slipped it into his trousers when he left his room, already contemplating a double descent into vice. He checked his watch, adding an hour for New York. Still too early. He eavesdropped on the table of weathered men, but what little they said was pressed into so fierce a shorthand that it might as well have been Pawnee. One of the circle, a bulbous face with luxurious ear and nose hair, whose blood-red cap read “IBP,” worked away on a toothpick, carving it into a tiny totem pole with his deft incisors. “You can’t let yourself get cocky,” the man said. “Those Arabs will walk across a desert to take revenge on a mirage.”

“Well, the Bible near says as much, already,” his tablemate agreed.

No need to alarm Sylvie, really. She could tell him nothing. Had there been anything wrong, she’d have mentioned it the night before. Besides, if she caught him using a cell phone from a public place to quell a nervous feeling, she’d never let him live it down.