Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Back at Dayton Chaminade High, Weber had begun intellectual life as a confirmed Freudian — brain as hydraulic pipe for mind’s spectacular waterworks — anything to confound his priest teachers. By graduate school, he’d taken to persecuting Freudians, although he’d tried to avoid the worst Behaviorist excesses. When the cognitive counterrevolution broke, some small operant-conditioned part of him held back, wanting to insist, Still not the whole story. As a clinician, he’d had to embrace the pharmacology onslaught. Yet he’d felt a real sadness — the sadness of consummation — hearing a subject who’d struggled for years with anxiety, suicidal guilt, and religious zeal tell him, after the successful tuning of his doxepin dosages, “Doctor, I’m just not sure what I was so upset about, all that time.”

He knew the drill: throughout history, the brain had been compared to the highest prevailing level of technology: steam engine, telephone switchboard, computer. Now, as Weber approached his own professional zenith, the brain became the Internet, a distributed network, more than two hundred modules in loose, mutually modifying chatter with other modules. Some of Weber’s tangled subsystems bought the model; others wanted more. Now that the modular theory had gained ascendancy over most brain thinking, Weber drifted back to his origins. In what would surely be the final stage of his intellectual development, he now hoped to find, in the latest solid neuroscience, processes that looked like old depth psychology: repression, sublimation, denial, transference. Find them at some level above the module.

In short, it now began to occur to Weber that he may have traveled out to Nebraska and studied Mark Schluter in order to prove, to himself at least, that even if Capgras were entirely understandable in modular terms, as a matter of lesions and severed connections between regions in a distributed network, it still manifested in psychodynamic processes — individual response, personal history, repression, sublimation, and wish fulfillment that couldn’t be reduced entirely to low-level phenomena. Theory might be on the verge of describing the brain, but theory alone could not yet exhaust this brain , hard-pressed by fact and frantic with survival: Mark Schluter and his impostor sister. The book waiting for Weber to write, after this book tour.

They took Mark home: no other place to take him.When the celebrity brain scientist left, offering his one slight recommendation, Dr. Hayes could no longer keep Mark under observation at Dedham Glen. Karin fought the decision tooth and nail. Mark, for his part, was more than ready to go.

Before he could move back into the Homestar, Karin had to move out. She’d lived in the modular home for months, keeping the dog alive, performing routine maintenance. She’d thrown out Mark’s contraband and waged war against the invading plant and animal life. Now she had to erase all evidence that she’d ever occupied the campsite.

“Where will you go?” Daniel asked. They lay side by side, face up on his futon on his bare, oak floor. Six in the morning, Wednesday, deep in June. In recent weeks, she’d spent more nights in his monk’s cell. She’d taken over his kitchen and sneaked cigarettes in his bathroom, running the water and blowing the smoke out the open window into the complicit air. But she never kept even a spare pair of socks in the empty drawer he prepared for her.

She rolled on her side, so he might spoon her. Talking was easier that way. Her voice was disembodied. “I don’t know. I can’t afford two leases. I can’t even afford one. I…I’ve put my place in South Sioux up for sale. I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want…What am I doing here? How much longer can I…? Back to zero, after everything that I’ve managed…But I can’t leave him. You know what he’s like now. You know what would happen, if I left him alone.”

“He wouldn’t be alone.”

She spun around and stared at him in the growing light. Whose side are you on? “If I leave him to his friends, he’ll be dead by the end of the year. They’ll shoot him in some hunting accident. They’ll have him out racing again.”

“There are others of us around, to help look after him. I’m here.”

She leaned in and pressed him. “Oh, Daniel. I don’t get you. Why are you so good? What’s in it for you?”

He put his hand on her flank and stroked, as he might stroke a newborn deer. “I’m a not-for-profit.”

She ran a finger along his neck. He was like the birds. Once the route was taught him, he stayed on it, returning, so long as there was still a place, always turning home. “The two of you combined are breaking my heart.”

They looked at each other, neither of them volunteering. He nodded just a little: totally ambiguous. “Small steps,” he said.

She bowed her head, her copper waterfall. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Simple. You can be here. You can stay here, with me.”

He could not have said it better. Neither concession nor command. Just a statement, the best possibility for them both. “Small steps,” she said. Just for a little while. Just until Mark…“You won’t resent me if…?”

A reflex pain passed across his face. What had she ever let him resent? He shook his head, decency outweighing memory. “If you won’t hold it against me .”

“It won’t be long,” she promised him. “There’s not much more I can do. Either he gets better soon or…” She stopped, seeing Daniel’s face. She’d meant to reassure that she would not invade his territory. Only as she spoke the words did she hear them as a slap.

She leaned into him again, limbs tangling, fragile, the first time in years that they lingered with each other in broad daylight. She felt it in the pallet of his chest, tasted it in his mouth’s pinched bliss. In the interests of getting wrong right, he might forgive her everything. Everything but safety and hiding.

She evacuated the Homestar, erasing her tracks. Daniel, the expert tracker who could hold still and disappear into thin air, helped. She restored Mark’s chaos to the state she remembered. She scattered the CDs. She bought another girlie poster to replace the one she’d destroyed: a blond in a slightly torn gingham dress holding a large monkey wrench in greasy hands, poised over a blood-red pickup. She had no idea what to do about Blackie. She considered bringing the dog to Daniel’s too, at least until they saw how Mark would be, once home. In his present state, Mark might attack the thing, lock it out of the house, feed it bulk laxatives. Daniel would have been fine with another creature sharing his sanctuary. But Karin couldn’t do it to the dog.

Dr. Hayes signed off on the discharge, and Dedham Glen released Mark Schluter to the care of the only kin who recognized him, even if he failed to return the favor. Barbara asked if she could help.

“Bless you,” Karin said. “I think I have Moving Day handled. It’s next week I’m worried about. And the week after that. Barbara, what am I supposed to do? The insurance won’t cover extended nursing, and I’m going to have to start working.”

“I’ll still be here. He’ll have his regular appointments with the cognitive therapist. And I can come check in on him, if that would help.”

“How? You’ve given us too much already. I can’t even think about repaying…”

The aide radiated eerie calm. Her hand on Karin’s shoulder carried absolute certainty. “Things work out. Everybody gets repaid, one way or another. Let’s see how things go.”

Karin asked Bonnie Travis to help her get Mark home. Mark made the rounds at the facility, saying goodbye to his fellow inmates. “See?” he told them. “It’s not a death sentence. They let you go, eventually. If they don’t, call me and I’ll come bust you out.”