Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

But when Karin pulled up in her car, he refused to get in. He stood on the curb, surrounded by his bags. He was capless now, his hair a thin pelt. His face clouded, remembering. “You want to roll this little Jap thing off the road somewhere, with me inside. That’s the plan? You want to finish what was supposed to happen the first time?”

“Mark, get in the car. If I wanted to hurt you, would I risk my own life doing it?”

“You hear that, everybody? You heard what the woman said?”

“Mark, please. You’ll be fine. Just get in the car.”

“Let me drive. I’ll get in if you let me drive. See? She won’t give me the keys. I always drive my sister everywhere. She never drives when we’re together.”

“Ride with me,” Bonnie said.

He considered the suggestion. “That might work,” he said. “But this woman has to wait here for ten minutes after we leave. I don’t want her trying anything funny.”

The air was ripe with manure and pesticide. The fields — matted soybeans, shin-high corn, pastures flecked with cows resigned to their fate — unrolled in all directions. When Karin reached the Homestar, Mark was on the front stoop, his head in Bonnie’s lap, crying. Bonnie stroked the fuzz on his skull, doing her best to console him. Seeing Karin approach, Mark sat up and howled. “Just tell me what’s going on. First my truck, then my sister. Now they’ve got my house.”

His elbows flung upward, while his whole body cowered. His neck craned in three directions, as if the next attack might come from anywhere. She looked behind her, and through his eyes, saw the winking, familiar neighborhood go strange. She turned back to where he sat clawing his concrete front steps. He was staring at her, searching for someone, the one she had been once but wasn’t any longer. The only one who might help him. His need for her tore her up, worse than her own helplessness.

The women consoled him for a long time. They pointed out the streets, the houses, the lone sugar maple he’d planted in the desert of lawn, the gouge in the left-hand garage edge that he’d made eight months before. Karin prayed for one of the neighbors to come out and say hello. But all living things hid themselves in the face of this epidemic.

Karin considered bundling him back into Bonnie’s car and returning him to Dedham Glen. But his moaning gradually gave way to dazed chuckles. “They did an incredible job. They got almost everything right. Jesus! How much did this cost? It’s like some billion-dollar film of my life. The Harry Truman Story .”

At last he went inside. He stood next to Bonnie in the front room, head swiveling in amazement, his tongue clucking. “My father used to tell me they did the moon landing on a sound stage in Southern California. I always thought he was nuts.”

Karin snorted. “He was nuts, Mark. You remember how he thought the navy could quantum-rearrange the molecules in a battleship to make it invisible?”

Mark studied her. “How do you know they can’t?” He checked with Bonnie, who shrugged. He looked back at the life-sized image of his home, shaking his head in disbelief. Karin sat on the fake sofa, large parts of her dying. This fog would never blow over. Soon her brother would be right: their whole life, a copy of itself. While Bonnie unloaded Mark’s things from the car, Karin tried to rally. She took Mark on a tour of the house. She showed him the crack in the corner of the medicine-chest mirror. She raked through his clothes closet, all his summer cutoffs and legible T-shirts waiting for him. She opened the drawer full of loose photos, including dozens of the two of them together. She pointed out the magazine rack, with its three new back issues of Truckin’ Magazine .

In all this sprawl, his eyes landed on her replacement poster. His face darkened. “That’s not the picture I had up here.”

Karin groaned. “Okay. Let me explain.”

“That’s not mine. I’d never touch a thing that looked like that. That’s the crappiest body molding I’ve ever seen.”

Karin blinked before realizing he meant the truck. “Mark, that’s my fault. I tore yours. Accidentally. That’s a replacement I put up.”

He stopped and squinted at her. “Exactly the kind of shit my sister used to do.”

For a moment, she could breathe. Her arms went out to him, tentative but desperate. “Oh, Mark! Mark…? I’m sorry if anything I ever said or did…”

“But my sister would have known better than to replace a classic 1957 Chevy Cameo Carrier with some 1990 Mazda piece of crap.”

She broke down. Her silent, curdled tears perplexed him enough that he touched one hand to her forearm. The gesture thrilled her more than anything since his return to speech. She composed herself, laughed off her sniffles, and dismissed the moment with a wave. “Listen, Mark. I have to confess something. I never knew as much about the whole truck thing as I probably led you to believe.”

“Exactly what I’m saying. But thanks for admitting it. Simplifies life a little.”

He took over the tour, pointing out every beer coaster that had been moved since the night of his accident. He tsked as they walked, shaking his head and repeating, “No, no, no. This house is no Homestar.”

Bonnie brought in his duffel bags. She started following him around. “We’ll fix things, Marker. Get everything just the way you want.”

Karin sat on the bed, head in hands, listening to Mark repudiate his beloved mail-order home. But the strength of his memory for the smallest particulars gave her forbidden hope. She herself could no longer recognize her own condo, on those quick trips to South Sioux City to ready it for sale.

“Wait,” he said. “I know how to tell once and for all whether this house is real or not. You two stay here. Don’t look! Don’t let me catch either of you spying.”

He headed toward the kitchen. Bonnie quizzed Karin with a look. Karin slumped, knowing what Mark was after. She heard him drop to his knees and root around in the cabinet underneath the sink. Some old, inherited shame stopped her from calling out, old family secrets that sealed them off from each other.

He came back triumphant. “I told you this place is a fake. Something of mine is missing. Something they wouldn’t duplicate.” He looked at Bonnie, significantly. Bonnie, leaning against a bar stool, glanced at Karin. Karin needed only say: Mark, I flushed your stash down the toilet. But she couldn’t. Couldn’t say she knew he was doing shit, maybe even on the night of the accident. It would make no difference, anyway. He’d just come up with another theory, untroubled by anything so slight as the facts.

Mark came and sat next to her on the sofa. He seemed about to put his arm around her. “I know you have to pretend ignorance. That’s your job. I accept that. But just tell me whether I’m in danger. We’ve gotten to know each other well enough over the last couple of months for you to give me that much. You’d tell me if they were going to hurt me again, wouldn’t you?”

Karin waved her hands, a chimp struggling with sign language. Bonnie answered for her. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you, Mark. Not while we’re around.”

“I mean, Christ! They wouldn’t go through all this expense if they just meant to finish the job that they bungled back on 2/20/02. Am I right? C’mon. Let’s have a look outside.”

He left the house and walked up Carson Street. The women followed. All twelve houses on his block were variations on the Homestar. The recently air-dropped subdivision contained the first new structures to be added to the backwater town of Farview since the farm crisis. Drapes fluttered up and down the street, but no one came outdoors to make small talk with a brain-damaged slaughterhouse machinist.