Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Cognitive behavioral therapy is not about reasoning. It’s about emotional adjustment. Training patients to explore their belief systems. Helping them work on their sense of self. Giving them exercises to change…”

“Help Mark explore why he thinks I’m not who I am?” Whoever that was.

“We need to determine the strength of his delusion. It may be no more resistant to modification than any belief. Some people change political parties. People fall in and out of love. Religious persecutors get converted. We don’t know what goes on in a misidentification syndrome. We can’t cause it and we can’t make it go away. But we might be able to make it easier to live with.”

“Easier for…?” She modified. “So ‘easier’ is the best we can hope for?”

“That might be a lot.”

“Does Dr. Weber prescribe cognitive therapy for all his untreatable cases?”

His eyes flickered, a little glint that almost forgot its code of ethics. A glint that admitted: Well, you know, physicians often prescribe antibiotics for colds. “We wouldn’t recommend this referral if it had no chance of helping.”

The professional, closing ranks. But she might flush him out. “Would you have made this referral if Dr. Weber hadn’t visited?”

His smile darkened. “I have no trouble backing his recommendation.”

“But behavioral therapy for a lesion? That’s like talking somebody out of going blind.”

“A newly blind person could use help adjusting to blindness.”

“So this is just help adjusting? There’s nothing, then? Nothing medical? Even when he’s clearly getting worse?”

Dr. Hayes folded his index fingers to his lips. “Nothing else advisable. Remember, this isn’t for us. It’s for your brother.”

She stood and shook the neurologist’s hand, thinking, Whose brother? She confirmed Mark’s schedule with Dr. Tower’s scheduling nurse on her way out.

She reached a truce with Rupp and Cain.Whatever their sins against her brother, she couldn’t afford to go to war. She had no one else to draw on. Someone had to help watch Mark, especially at night, when things got rough. She’d lost the right to come and go. One bad evening, she volunteered to stay in his spare bedroom. He’d studied her so wildly it scared her back to Daniel’s. The next day, Karin called Tommy Rupp, the brains, for want of a better term, of the Muskrateers. She could deal with Rupp over the phone. Anything, so long as she didn’t have to look at him.

He was surprisingly decent, improvising a rotation that would keep constant tabs on Mark. The prospect of caretaking pleased him. “Just like the old days,” he told her. “He won’t think twice about us staying over.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Please don’t make him do any drugs. Not when he’s like this.”

Tommy chuckled. “Make? What do you take us for? We’re not monsters.”

“According to current neurological theory, everybody’s a monster.”

Humiliating memory lay between them, untouched. Years ago, Karin and Rupp had done each other, just for grins, late one September night on the front porch of her family’s house, while Mark, Joan, and Cappy Schluter were upstairs sleeping. Her senior year of college, with Rupp just out of high school. Almost like corrupting a minor. And she did corrupt him that night, drawing muffled squeals of disbelief from the boy that threatened to wake the whole house and get them both killed. She never knew why she’d initiated the one-shot entertainment. Curiosity. Simple thrill: the worst possible transgression. Maybe it gave her some leverage, dragging her brother’s friend behind the porch swing on a dry, brisk, pitch-black September night and doing the animal deed. Tom Rupp exercised an unnatural influence over Mark. Even at eighteen: too cool to show the slightest desire. Just along for the ride. Well, she gave him one. Not until afterward did Karin realize how much leverage she’d given the boy.

But he never told Mark. She would have known; Mark would have disowned her, nine years sooner. Rupp never mentioned the occasion again. He’d gladly have taken second helpings anytime, but he was way above asking. She could feel his question in the way he skulked around her, the same nagging question banging around the back of her own head every time she crossed Tom Rupp’s path: That girl still in there?

She’d had a thing for danger back then. And in the danger department, Tom Rupp was the Kearney High Bearcats’ Great White Hope. At the age of thirteen, he hitchhiked the 130 miles to Lincoln and smuggled himself into Farm Aid III, bringing back to his dumb-founded friends John Mellencamp’s fingerprints on a bottle of Myers’s Rum. At fifteen, he stole the four flags that flew outside the Twenty-second Street Municipal Building — city, state, nation, and POWMIA — and used them to decorate his room. Everyone in town knew who’d taken them except the police. He’d been a wrestler, placing fifth in state in the 152-pound class his sophomore year before dropping out of organized sports, proclaiming them “a training camp for prospective gays.” Mark, who’d struggled for years to make a name as a hustling but flatfooted guard with a mediocre outside jumper, gratefully dropped out with him.

Rupp trained Mark, quoting ominously from the classics he fed himself in strict, autodidact regimen. “Be on your guard against the good and the just! They would fain crucify those who devise their own virtue. They hate the lonesome ones.” Mark couldn’t always follow the man, but the diction always pumped him.

They picked up Duane Cain as their all-purpose sidekick in senior year. Cain had already succeeded in earning an eighteen-month suspended sentence for believing himself to be the first person ever to come up with an insurance fraud scheme. The three of them grew inseparable. They spent weeks rebuilding any internal-combustion engine that stood still long enough for them to strip it. They were at perpetual war with every other clique in school. Duane led them on nighttime raids involving that old Native American gesture of contempt, leaving a warm, coiled calling card on prominent display in the enemy’s front yard.

They enrolled together at U of N Kearney, Rupp finishing in four years, Mark and Duane managing a total of four between them. Rupp took a “telecommunications opening” in Omaha, abandoning Duane and Mark to lives of moving furniture and reading gas meters. Eight months later, Rupp was back in town, without explanations, but with a long-term plan to advance all three of their professional fates. He talked his way into a start at the Lexington packing plant, where he migrated from postprocessing over to the slaughter side, which paid three dollars more per hour. As soon as he amassed some seniority, he got jobs for his two friends. Duane joined One-shot Rupp on the zapping side, but Mark hadn’t the stomach for it, let alone the nose. Mark gladly stayed behind in machine maintenance and repair, saving enough money over three years for a down payment on the Homestar.

Alone of the trio, Tommy Rupp was ambitious. The Nebraska National Guard offered him a supplemental paycheck and even promised three-quarters of his tuition if he went back to school. All that, for only one weekend a month. It was a no-brainer. He tried to get the other Muskrateers to join up together. Free money, and gender-integrated patriotic service: the best legal deal anyone was going to hand the likes of them. But Duane and Mark chose to wait and see.

Rupp enlisted in July 2001 as an MOS 63B: Light-Wheel Vehicle Mechanic, the same stuff he loved to do all weekend, anyway. The 167th Cavalry. They tried to poison him in basic, and he had the souvenir commemorative videotape to prove it: stumbling from the qualification gas chamber, crawling out of the sealed room full of chlorobenzalmalononitrile where he and twenty-five other recruits had been ordered to remove their gas masks. Duane Cain took one look at the tape — Rupp the Ironman, falling to his knees in the dirt, choking and puking — and decided that national service was not in his foreseeable future. The video freaked Mark, too. He’d never been especially big on inhaling poisons.