Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Weber stopped in mid-step. “How on earth…? What a bizarre coincidence.”

“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Bonnie said, her words a halo.

“There’s nothing but coincidence,” Karin countered.

Mark giggled. “What do you mean? Wait, wait: I mean…” He dropped his voice, mocking Weber’s authoritative baritone. “I mean: ‘ How do you mean?’”

“My daughter’s an astronomer. That’s her work. She looks for new planets.”

“Dude,” Mark drawled. “You already told me.”

The fact shook him worse than the imagined coincidence. The sleepless night, the hot, sticky air wrecked his concentration and scattered his memory. He needed to be gone. He had two conference keynotes to deliver over the next three weeks, then a trip to Italy with his wife before classes in the fall.

Karin walked him to the parking lot. Her disappointment had deepened into stoic despair. “I guess I was expecting too much. When you told me about the brain being so surprising…?” She waved her fingers in front of her face. “I know. I’m not saying…Can you just tell me one thing? Don’t soften this.”

Weber braced.

“He must truly hate me, right? Some resentment so deep, to produce this. To single me out. Every night I lie in bed trying to imagine what I did to him, that he needs to erase me. I can’t remember anything that deserves this. Am I just repressing…?”

He took her arm again, stupidly, as he had just three days back, when they first walked this path. “This isn’t about you. There is probably a lesion…” Just the opposite of what he’d argued with Dr. Hayes. Obscuring the dynamics of most interest to him. “We talked about this. It’s a feature of Capgras. The subject only misidentifies the people closest to him.”

She snorted, acrid. “You always double the one you love?”

“Something like that.”

“So it is psychological.”

Aggravating hunch, in the mouth of another. “Look. You haven’t been singled out.”

“Yes I have. He’s accepting Rupp now.”

“I don’t mean Rupp. There’s his dog.”

She freed her arm, ready to be hurt. Then she softened in a way Weber hadn’t yet seen. “Yes. You’re right. And he loves Blackie more than anything that moves.”

At the curb, Weber made to shake her hand. With last-minute guilt, she embraced him. He stood still and suffered it. “Tell me if anything changes,” he said.

“Even if it doesn’t,” she promised, and turned away.

He woke early again, in fresh panic. The ceiling of a foreign room materialized just inches from his face. He sucked air, but his lungs wouldn’t expand. Not quite 2:30 a.m. By 3:15, he was still wondering how he’d forgotten telling Mark about Jess. He fought the urge to get up and listen to the session tapes. By 4:00, he took his vitals and thought he might be looking at something serious. When he could no longer lie still, he got up, showered, dressed, packed, checked out, and, hours early, drove the rental back east to the Lincoln airport, on the razor-like, featureless interstate.

As the plane passed over Ohio, he rallied. He looked down on a cloud-covered Columbus, imagining invisible landmarks under the patchy blanket. Places from a third of a century ago: the sprawling, centerless campus. The dilapidated student suburb where he and Sylvie had shared a bungalow. Downtown Columbus, the Scioto, the time warp of German Village, Short North, with its great used bookstore where he’d taken Sylvie on their first date. He still had the entire map, clearer with eyes closed.

By the wrinkled hills of Pennsylvania, his Nebraska interlude began to seem no more than a fleeting deficit. When he touched down at LaGuardia, he was himself again. His Passat waited in the long-term lot. The brittle, collaborative madness of the Long Island Expressway never looked more familiar or more beautiful. And at its far end — the familiar anonymity of home.

When animals and humans still shared the same language,the Cree recount, Rabbit wanted to go to the moon. Rabbit asked the strongest birds to take him, but Eagle was busy and Hawk couldn’t fly so high. Crane said he would help. He told Rabbit to hold on to his legs. Then he went for the moon. The journey was long and Rabbit was heavy. Rabbit’s weight stretched out Crane’s legs and bloodied Rabbit’s paws. But Crane reached the moon, with Rabbit hanging on to him. Rabbit patted Crane in thanks, his hands still bleeding. So Crane got his long legs and blood-red head.

Back then, too, a Cherokee woman was courted by both Hummingbird and Crane. She wanted to marry Hummingbird, because of his great beauty. But Crane proposed a race around the world. The woman agreed, knowing Hummingbird’s speed. She didn’t remember that Crane could fly at night. And, unlike Hummingbird, Crane never tired. Crane flew in straight lines, where Hummingbird flew in every direction. Crane won the race with ease, but the woman still rejected him.

All the humans revered Crane, the great orator. Where cranes gathered, their speech carried miles. The Aztecs called themselves the Crane People. One of the Anishinaabe clans was named the Cranes— Ajijak or Businassee —the Echo Makers. The Cranes were leaders, voices that called all people together. Crow and Cheyenne carved cranes’ leg bones into hollow flutes, echoing the echo maker.

Latin grus , too, echoed that groan. In Africa, the crowned crane ruled words and thought. The Greek Palamedes invented the letters of the alphabet by watching noisy cranes in flight. In Persian, kurti , in Arabic, ghurnuq : birds that awaken before the rest of creation, to say their dawn prayers. The Chinese xian-he , the birds of heaven, carried messages on their backs between the sky worlds.

Cranes dance in southwestern petroglyphs. Old Crane Man taught the Tewa how to dance. Australian aborigines tell of a beautiful and aloof woman, the perfect dancer, turned by a sorcerer into a crane.

Apollo came and went in crane form, when visiting the world. The poet Ibycus, in the sixth century B.C., beaten senseless and left for dead, called out to a passing flock of cranes, who followed the assailant to a theater and hovered over him until he confessed to the astonished crowd.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses , Hera and Artemis turn Gerania into a crane, to punish the Pygmy queen for her vanity. The Irish hero Finn fell off a cliff and was caught in the air by his grandmother, when she changed into a crane. If cranes circled overhead above American slaves, someone would die. The First Warrior who fought to create ancient Japan took the form of a crane at death and flew away.

Tecumseh tried to unite the scattered nations under the banner of Crane Power, but the Hopi mark for the crane’s foot became the world’s peace symbol. The crane’s foot— pie de grue —became that genealogist’s mark of branching descent, pedigree .

To make a wish come true, the Japanese must fold a thousand paper cranes. Twelve-year-old Sadako Sasaki, stricken with “atom bomb sickness,” made it to 644. Children worldwide send her thousands, every year.

Cranes help carry a soul to paradise. Pictures of cranes line the windows of mourning houses, and crane-shaped jewelry adorns the dead. Cranes are souls that once were humans and might be again, many lives from now. Or humans are souls that once were cranes and will be again, when the flock is rejoined.