Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Something in the crane is trapped halfway, in the middle between now and when. A fourteenth-century Vietnamese poet sets the birds forever halfway through the air:

Clouds drift as days pass;

Cypress trees are green beside the altar,

The heart, a chilly pond under moonlight.

Night rain drops tears of flowers.

Below the pagoda, grass traces a path.

Among the pine trees, cranes remember

The music and songs of years ago.

In the immensity of sky and sea,

How to relive the dream before the lamp of that night?

When animals and people all spoke the same language, crane calls said exactly what they meant. Now we live in unclear echoes. The turtledove, swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming, says Jeremiah. Only people fail to recall the order of the Lord.

Something was wrong, the moment Karin calledupstairs to his hotel room. His voice didn’t match the picture on his books. Its folksy tone broadcast compassion, but his words were pure health professional. In the flesh, he looked like one of those poised, balding experts who sit on New England porch swings in autumn answering questions for edutainment TV in maddeningly soft, self-assured voices. The man who came to Nebraska wasn’t the author of those rich, embracing books. When she’d tried to present Mark’s history, Gerald Weber failed to honor what he claimed lay at the heart of all good medicine. He didn’t listen. She might as well have been speaking to her ex-boss, to Robert Karsh, or even to her own father.

Four days later the national expert disappeared. He did nothing but administer a few tests and tape a few conversations, gathering material for his own ends. Helpless to treat the problem itself, he prescribed nothing but a vague program of cognitive behavioral therapy. He blew into town, toyed with everyone’s hopes, even played on Mark’s friendship. Then he blew out again, suggesting that all parties just learn to live with the syndrome. She had trusted him, and he’d delivered nothing but philosophy.

Yet true to herself, she never once confronted him. Up to the moment that he turned his back on them, she flattered the man’s credentials, sure that if she were just polite enough, this gray-haired, bearded, well-spoken specialist would defeat Capgras and retrieve both her brother and her. Daniel had asked several times to meet the doctor. She’d put him off. Daniel never called her on it, but he didn’t have to. A week after Weber left, the obvious hit her: she’d preened for this old man. Anything, to win his help.

Three weeks after the neuroscientist abandoned them, Karin was playing Ping-Pong with Mark, in the day room. Mark liked the game enough that he’d play even with her, providing she never won. Barbara rushed in, excited. “Dr. Weber is going to be on Book TV tomorrow. Reading from his new work.”

“Shrinky on television? Real television? Like, nationwide? I told you that the man was famous, but would you believe me? He’s going to be a household word.”

“ Book TV? ” Karin asked. How did you hear about this?”

The aide shrugged. “Pure luck.”

“Were you watching for this?” Karin asked. “Or did he tell you…?”

Barbara flushed. “I keep an eye on that cable program. Old, bad habit. I’m down to only a few shows I can watch safely. The ones where nothing explodes and where they don’t tell me when to laugh.”

Mark tossed his paddle in the air and almost caught it. “The Incredible Shrinking Man, on the idiot box. Can’t miss that, now can we?”

The next day, the three of them huddled around the set in Mark’s room. Karin chewed her cuticles, even before they introduced the man. Humiliating, watching someone you knew play himself in front of cameras. Barbara was flinching, too. She chattered more in the six minutes of Gerald Weber’s introduction than she had in six weeks of caring for Mark. Karin finally had to shush her.

Only Mark enjoyed the proceedings. “The home-team favorite is stepping up to the plate in the clutch situation. The crowd is nervous. They’re looking for the long ball.” But when Dr. Weber finally strode out to the podium in front of the restrained Book TV audience, Mark cried, “What the hell’s going on? Is this some idea of a joke?”

Both women tried to calm him. Mark rose to his feet, a pillar of righteousness. “What kind of bull balls is this? That’s supposed to be Shrinky? Not even close.”

Under the television lights, distorted by broadcast and the strain of public appearance, the man was indeed changed. Karin glanced at Barbara, who returned the look, her thick eyebrows crumpled. Weber’s hair now swept back dramatically over his thinning crown. The beard had been teased out, florid, almost French. And the dark suit had vanished in favor of a collarless burgundy shirt that appeared to be silk. He seemed taller on camera, and his shoulders flared, almost combative. When he started to read, prose poured out of him in Old Testament cadences. The words themselves were so wise, so attuned to the subtle nuances of human nature that they seemed written by someone already dead. This was the real Gerald Weber, who, for obscure reasons, on his short Nebraska junket, had hidden himself under an empty wheat bushel.

Mark paced in tight, outraged circles. “Who’s this guy supposed to be? Billy Graham or someone?” Karin nodded like a bobblehead. Barbara couldn’t take her eyes off the speaking image. “Somebody’s taking that studio audience for a ride. None of them have seen the real Shrinky, up close and personal. And nobody knows to ask us!”

Karin blocked out her brother and listened. Weber read:

Conciousness works by telling a story, one that is whole, continuous, and stable. When that story breaks, consciousness rewrites it. Each revised draft claims to be the original. And so, when disease or accident interrupts us, we’re often the last to know.

The words of the man rolled over Karin Schluter, seducing her all over again. “You’re right,” she told Mark. “You are exactly right.” Nobody had seen the real Weber. Not the New York studio audience; not the three of them.

Mark stopped pacing to assess her. “What the hell do you know? You probably had something to do with this. You’re the one who brought him here. Maybe that’s the real Shrinky, and the Shrinky you passed off on us is a fraud.”

Barbara reached up to rub his shoulders. He froze, like a kitten stroked between its eyes. Placid, Mark sat back down and watched. “We’re more like coral reefs,” Dr. Weber was reading. “Complex but fragile ecosystems…” The three of them stared at the performance of the stranger in the silk shirt. Weber told a story of a forty-year-old woman called Maria who suffered from something named Anton’s syndrome.

I sat and chatted with her in her impeccably furnished Hartford home. She was a lively, attractive woman who’d been a successful attorney for many years. She seemed happy and intact in every way, except that she thought she could see. When I suggested to her that she might actually be blind, she laughed at the absurdity and struggled to disprove me. This she attempted to do with remarkable vigor and skill, giving long, vivid descriptions of what was happening just then, outside her window. These scenes had great consistency and detail; she simply did not realize that the images were not coming in through her eyes…

The reading lasted no more than fifteen minutes. But all three were squirming in eternity as Weber finished the passage to polite applause. Then the questions began. A respectful student asked about the difference between scientific writing and writing for the public. A retired woman wanted to address the scandal of national health care. Then someone asked if Weber had any qualms about violating his subjects’ privacy.