Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

The cameras caught the writer’s surprise. Hesitating, he said, “I hope not. There are protocols. I always disguise the names, and often the biographical details, when they’re important. Sometimes one case history actually combines two or more stories, to bring out a condition’s most salient features.”

“You mean they’re fiction?” asked another. Weber paused to think, and the camera grew restive. Karin returned to biting her cuticle and Barbara sat upright, a perfect statuette.

Mark spoke first, for all of them. “This totally blows. Can we see what’s on Springer?”

The night Weber flew back east from the empty plains,he was all over Sylvie. Late June, but cool and piercing in Setauket, more like a North Shore golden fall than the start of summer. He picked up his car from the long-term lot at LaGuardia and listened to Brahms piano quartets all the way home on the absurdly clogged LIE. All the way out, he pictured his wife, thirty years of her changing face. He remembered that day, a decade or so into their marriage, when he’d asked her, surprised, “Is your hair getting straighter as we get older?”

“What are you talking about? My hair? I used to perm it. You didn’t know that? Ah, scientists.”

“Well. If it’s not on a scan, it can’t really be trusted.”

She pummeled his soft underbelly, in reply.

But that first night back from Nebraska, he noticed. Woman . Maybe it was the dressing up. They had to go out that evening, to a fund-raiser in Huntington. Some halfway-house shelter that Sylvie’s Wayfinders were sponsoring. She was dressed already when he pulled in. “Ger! There you are. I was getting nervous. You should have called me, let me know you were on the way.”

“Called? I was in the car, Woman.”

She laughed her laugh, helpless but to forgive. “You know that little phone you’ve been carrying around? It works while you’re moving. One of its selling points. Never mind. I’m just glad that Tour Director got you home safely.”

She wore a blouse of Italian silk, something new, pale bashful lilac, the color of first buds. Around her still-smooth neck hung a thin hank of freshwater pearls, and two tiny seashells clung to her ears. Who was this woman?

“Man. Don’t just stand there! Philanthropists of all stripes have paid to see you in a monkey suit.”

He undressed her that night, for the first time in years. Then he gazed on her, looking.

“Mmm,” she said, ready to frolic too, if a little abashed at them both. She laughed at his touch. “Hmm? Where did this come from all the sudden? They put something in the water out there in Nebraska?”

They played with each other, with nothing left to learn. After, she lay on her back next to him, still breathing hard, holding his hand as if they were courting. She recovered words first. “As the Behaviorist said, ‘That was clearly great for you. Was it good for me?’”

He had to snort, rolling onto his problem back and looking out over the rising hillock of his stomach. “I suppose it has been some time. Sorry about that, Woman. I’m not the man I was, back when.”

She rolled onto her side and rubbed his shoulder, the one he’d blown out ten years ago, in his mid-forties, and never managed entirely to repair. “I like this part of life,” she said. “Slower, fuller. I like that we don’t have sex just all the time.” Vintage Sylvie. She meant: much at all. “It makes each experience…It’s newer, somehow, when there’s enough time in between to rediscover…”

“Inventive. Absolutely inspired. ‘Rediscover.’ Most people see the glass nine-tenths empty. My wife sees it one-tenth full.”

“That’s why you married me.”

“Ah! But when I married you…”

She groaned. “The glass was one-tenth over the lip.”

He spun over onto his sore shoulder and regarded her, alarmed. “Really? Did we have sex too often back then?”

Her laughs bobbled out of her, buggies over speed bumps. She pressed her face into the pillow, delighted and red. “I think that might be the first time in human history anyone ever asked that question anxiously.”

He saw it in her face, the thought crossing into her before he could speak it out loud. “The relentlessness of marriage.” He chuckled. Their old euphemism, picked up from a classic family saga they’d read out loud to each other, back in grad school. Later, after Jess, they amused each other by calling it sexuality . Mock clinical. Foreplay: Are you at all disposed toward sexuality? And afterward: Some top-drawer sexuality, that. Neuropsychology — the home version.

That night, her gaze found him through the folds of sheets, deeply amused by her pet possession, secure in her knowledge of him, constantly refreshed. “Somebody loves me,” she sang, a sturdy tonette of an alto, half muffled by the pillow. “I wonder who?”

She fell asleep in minutes. He lay in the dark, listening to her snore, and after a while, the snore turned, for the first time ever in his ears, away from an inanimate rasp, like the creak of the bed, into the shush of an animal, something trapped but preserved in the body, vestigial, released through sleep by the pull of the moon.

With 100,000 copies in print and generally fair prepublication reviews, The Country of Surprise rolled out to a reading public hungry for the alien within. The book felt like the culmination of a long second career, one Weber never expected to have. He’d said nothing to anyone except Cavanaugh and Sylvie, but this book would be his last excursion of its kind. His next book, if he was given time to write it, would be for a very different audience.

He hated promotion, having to perform himself in public. He’d gotten away with it so far, thanks to skilled colleagues and motivated grad students covering in the lab. But he could not afford more time away from research, now that brain research had been thrown wide open. Imaging and pharmaceuticals were opening the locked-room mystery of the mind. The decade since the publication of Weber’s first book had produced more knowledge about the final frontier than the previous five thousand. Goals unimaginable when Weber began The Country of Surprise were now tossed around at the most reputable professional conferences. Esteemed researchers dared to talk about completing a mechanical model of memory, finding the structures behind qualia, even producing a full functional description of consciousness. No popular anthology Weber might compile could match such prizes.

The art of the meditative case history belonged to after-hours. Somehow it had muscled in and become his day job. Too soon for that. Ramon y Cabal, the Cronos in Weber’s pantheon, said that scientific problems were never exhausted; only scientists were. Weber wasn’t exhausted yet. The best was yet to be.

Yet he’d interrupted work to travel thousands of miles to the Central Plains to do the Capgras interview. Granted, his current lab project concerned left-hemisphere orchestration of belief systems and the alteration of memories to fit them. But anything he learned from talking to the Nebraska Capgras sufferer was anecdotal at best. A few days back at Stony Brook and he began to see the trip as the last of a long series of surveys that would now give way to more systematic, solid research.

Yet something in him did not like where knowledge was heading. The rapid convergence of neuroscience around certain functionalist assumptions was beginning to alienate Weber. His field was succumbing to one of those ancient urges that it was supposed to shed light on: the herd mentality. As neuroscience basked in its growing instrumental power, Weber’s thoughts drifted perversely away from cognitive maps and neuron-level deterministic mechanisms toward emergent, higher-level psychological processes that could, on his bad days, sound almost like élan vital . But in the eternal split between mind and brain, psychology and neurology, needs and neurotransmitters, symbols and synaptic change, the only delusion lay in thinking that the two domains would remain separate for much longer.