Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Mark strolled up the street, staggered. “This must have cost a fortune. I must be under massive observation. I only wish I knew why I’ve become so important.”

Bonnie took his arm. Karin expected her to say something religious, about how God kept even the sparrows under massive observation. But she surprised Karin with her intelligence by saying nothing.

Mark spun a full circle. “I’d like to know where exactly we are.”

Karin held her temples. “You saw how we came from town.”

“Well, I was kind of keeping an eye on the rear window.” He smiled, a little sheepish.

“South on County, and a straight shot west, eight miles down Greyser. Same as always. You saw everybody’s farms.”

He grabbed at her, stiffening. “Time out. Are you telling me that the whole town …?”

Karin tittered. She felt herself losing it. The stress of daily life in her brother’s newfound land was pulling her under. Kearney, Nebraska: a colossal fake, a life-sized, hollow replica. She’d thought as much herself, all the while growing up. And again, each time she returned during their mother’s final illness. Prairie World . Her giggles came harder. She wheeled and looked at Bonnie, a paralyzed, shiteating grin plastered on her face. The girl looked back, spooked, and not by Mark. “Help me,” Karin managed, before breaking into more little laughs.

Something in the other woman rose to the challenge. Bonnie guided Mark back to the Homestar, leaning into him and tracing large ovals in his back as if practicing her cursive. “That’s not what she’s saying, Marker. She’s saying this is it. Right here. Where you really live. And I’m telling you I will personally see to it that we get your nest exactly the way you want it.”

“Serious? Would that include you moving in? Oh yeah, a woman’s touch. The finer things in life. But I forget: you probably still want to hold out for the paperwork. Fully legal, and all that noise? No playing house?”

Bonnie blushed and steered him homeward. All back down the street, Mark pointed out little anomalies: a missing tree, the wrong car in a driveway. Every desperate feat of memory fed him a little. A neighbor’s tool shed fifteen feet too far west left him exultant. His visual recall floored Karin. Damage had somehow unblocked him, removing the mental categories that interfered with truly seeing. Assumption no longer smoothed out observation. Every glance now produced its own new landscape.

Back at the house, Blackie had broken free from her backyard tether and was pacing the front steps, panting wildly. She held back, yipping, remembering her abuse at her master’s hands at their last meeting. But longer memories got the better of her. As the humans approached, she bounded across the lawn, joyous and suffering, leaping forward but feinting sideways, ready to flee at the first confusion. Mark stood still, which emboldened the beast until she was all over him, throwing her paws against his torso, almost knocking him over. The lower the brain, the slower the fade. Love, in an earthworm, might never extinguish at all.

Mark took his pet’s paws and danced her, a waltz with little conviction. “Look at this pathetic thing! It doesn’t even know who it isn’t. Somebody trained it to be my dog, and now it doesn’t even know what else to be. I guess I’m going to have to take care of you, aren’t I, girl? Who else will, if I don’t?”

By the time the four of them got back inside, Mark was issuing a stream of authoritative commands to the ecstatic dog.

“So what the hell am I supposed to call you? Huh? What am I gonna call you? How about Blackie Two?”

The brute thing barked in ecstasy.

They’re after Mark Schluter’s ass:this much is obvious. A man would have to be a vegetable to miss that much. Setting him up in some kind of experiment, some of it so hokey that even a child still stuck on Santa would snicker. But some of it so complex he can’t even start figuring it.

Okay: something happened in the hospital, that night they operated. Some mistake they had to cover up. Or, no: the weirdness must have started hours before that. With the accident. Which clearly couldn’t have been an accident. Great driver flips a fantastic-handling vehicle on a razor-straight road in the middle of nowhere? Sure; you might believe that, if you’re brain dead.

But that’s when it started, the switchings and impostors, all the medical crap to get Mark Schluter to think that he isn’t who he thinks. He needs a witness, but nobody was there. Rupp, Cain: they swear they were nowhere. And the doctors surgically removed his memory of that night while he was on the operating table. The secret is out there, in the empty fields. But the fields are growing over, this summer’s crop covering up the evidence. He needs a witness, but nobody saw what happened that night except the birds. Catch himself one of those cranes, one that was there, alongside the river. Find him a sandhill, and swear it in. Scan its brain.

Because it all started with the accident. Now everyone’s all Mark, Mark, he’s different, he’s losing his grip. As if that’s the issue. As if he’s the one who’s changed. The real deal is hidden behind doubles. He has only one clue. One solid thing beyond doubt: the note. The words from the person who found him, the one spectator to that night’s events, before the weirdness set in. The note they tried to keep from him.

His only clue, so he’s got to be careful. Can’t act too eager. Take the days as they come. Rupp and Cain promise to take him truck shopping. Work is sending him checks for doing nothing. But that won’t last forever; he’s got to get back, eventually. For now, though, he sits tight and works his plan. He asks Bonnie Travis to take him to church. The girl belongs to one of those renegade Protestant splinter cells called The Waiters in the Upper Room, a so-called religion that, in one of the screwed-uppedest things he’s ever heard, actually has not-for-profit status. They meet early Sunday for marathon two-hour services in a converted real-estate office above the Second Life hobby shop. Bonnie has begged him for years to come to a service, to compensate for the assorted commandments they smashed together on Saturday nights.

He himself swore off religion the minute he turned sixteen and his father pronounced him fit for the damnation of his own choosing. Nobody’s going to be comfortable with the whole Left Behind thing after growing up with a mother on a first-name basis with the Big Smiter Himself. It bugs the crap out of Bonnie when Mark busts Jesus’ chops, so over the years they’ve gotten pretty good at ignoring the topic. It could be raining frogs and blood, and they’d be, like: You bring your umbrella? That’s why, when Mark asks her to take him to the Upper Room, the woman acts like all the seven seals have just started barking.

Of course, Mark! Just say the word.

Like, what word do I need to say? Methuselah? Vouchsafe ?

She laughs, at least. Sure; we can go anytime. This Sunday! And all the while, her face is going, Is this a joke? I’ve been praying for this for years.

She comes to get him in her car on Sunday morning. She’s looking quite deluxe, in a short, sky-blue dress with white collar, like a chrome woman singer in an MTV video fantasy about a 1950 corn-husker girl’s first communion. Really: he could pop himself off just looking at her, although that might not be entirely appropriate, given the circumstances. By the look she shoots him, he’s made some miscalculation. Can’t be his clothes: his fancy khakis — his wedding pants, Rupp calls them — a pretty clean denim shirt, and his best bolo tie. It’s something else that he can’t figure. Bonnie drives them to the Upper Room, all quiet. And she stays that way during the whole two-hour show, twitching her head side to side, just looking at him, like he’s got a spider crawling out of his nose. Afterward, back in the car, tugging at the hem of her dress like she suddenly doesn’t want it to be all that short, she’s pissed.