Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

September came, and then the attacks. Alongside the rest of the world, the trio hung on the endlessly looping, slow-motion, cinematic insanity. From the Central Plains, New York was a black plume on the farthest horizon. Troops were securing the Golden Gate Bridge. Anthrax started turning up in the nation’s sugar bowls. Then the bombs began to fall in Afghanistan. A broadcaster in Omaha declared, It’s payback time , and all along the river came stony, unanimous assent.

Rupp called it simple self-defense. Early and often, he explained that America couldn’t afford to sit and wait for some new fanatical operative dreaming of seventy-two virgins to smallpox the country in its sleep. The terrorists weren’t going to stop until everyone looked just like them. Duane fretted over Tommy’s future. But Rupp was philosophical. Freedom wasn’t free. Besides, the army had no targets to send the Guard after.

By winter, America rose up striking at targets everywhere. Rupp’s duty time increased, and a few guys he served with were dragged off to Fort Riley, Kansas. On the third of February, just after the president delivered his hunt-them-down State of the Union address and Washington lost track of bin Laden, Mark came to Rupp and said he’d changed his mind. He wanted to serve, despite the chlorobenzalmalononitrile. Rupp welcomed the news like an Amway distributor entitled to a cut. They hit the recruitment center together, and Mark went shopping. MOS 63G: Fuel and Electrical Systems Repairer. He wasn’t sure he could pass the qualifying test, but figured it couldn’t be much harder than what he did for IBP. He signed a letter of intent, and he and Rupp celebrated by going out and shooting.22s at pop cans out on country fence posts for a couple of hours. He called Karin late that night, his words slurred and swirling. He told her the whole story. He sounded different, his voice prouder, more serene then she’d heard him in a while. Like he was already a soldier. A credit to the country.

She told him not to go through with it. He laughed at her fears. “Who’s going to protect your way of life, if not me? I just wish I’d gone with it sooner. So obvious. I can do this. Remember Dad and Mom?” She said she did. “They both passed, convinced I was a slacker. You don’t think I’m a slacker, do you?”

He’d enlisted for her. Karin told him to quit, to invoke the forty-eight-hour escape clause. But hearing herself destroying her brother’s one bid for self-esteem, she backed down. And maybe he was right. Maybe she, too, needed to pay for privilege. Two weeks later, he was lying upside down in a frozen roadside ditch, his tour of patriotic duty over.

Karin dealt with the Guard’s recruiting officers while Mark was still in Good Samaritan. She tried to exempt Mark from the agreement altogether. But the best she could manage was a temporary medical waiver, subject to review. One more dangling uncertainty to live under. After a while, the whole idea of security felt like a sucker punch. The Guard would claim Mark, if they deemed him fit to serve. Meanwhile, Rupp drilled for all of them. Duane lent his moral support by sporting a T-shirt that read, The Marines Are Looking for a Few Good Women , complete with appropriate field-guide illustration.

But Duane did help Rupp and Bonnie guard the Homestar. Karin watched, from as close as Mark would allow. Mark basked in the company, never wondering why his homecoming festivities went on for weeks. So long as the guests hung around and the refrigerator kept replenishing itself, he seemed ready to live for the moment.

Karin hovered on the sidelines, appealing to Rupp’s peculiar sense of duty. “Will you watch him when he smokes? He hasn’t smoked for months. I’m terrified he’s going to forget what he’s doing and burn the house down.”

“Hey. Lighten up. Except for a few bizarre theories, the man is basically back to normal.”

She couldn’t argue. She no longer knew what normal meant. “Can you at least go easy on the beer?”

“This? This piss can’t hurt anybody. It’s low-carb.”

When she drove by the Homestar at night, the lights were always on. That meant raunchy martial-arts film festivals followed by all-night video-game binges. She abided them now. Even the insane NASCAR game couldn’t be any worse than cognitive therapy, for bringing him back to life. The screen was the only place he could be happy now, racing without thinking, free from the suspicion that things didn’t add up. But the game made him crazy, too. Before his spinout, his thumbs had been faster than his eyes. Now, he remembered all that he once could do, but not how to do it. That enraged him. Then she was glad for Rupp and Cain. No one else could protect her from his outbursts. Now that his body had healed, he might maim her before he even knew it. She was a government agent, a robot. He might take her head off in a minute, to find the wires. One bout of confused fury and she’d be no one.

Cain and Rupp contained his rage. They learned how to handle him: let him blow up, then stick the game controller back in his hands. The routine became part of the general festivities.

On Independence Day, everyone gathered to watch the fireworks. The boys got an early start, filling an oil drum with iced beer and grilling a quarter of a calf from the plant over an open pit. When Karin showed up, they were listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing patriotic lyrics grafted onto Sousa marches. The sound waves battered her as she pulled into the subdivision. Duane was working to tame an ice-cream maker, reasoning with the unruly gear. Mark laughed at him, more naturally than he’d laughed since the accident. “Your machine has diarrhea.”

“I’ll beat this bastard. And I’ll fix the tape deck afterward. Show me a machine I can’t whup. I think it’s a polarity problem. You familiar with those?”

The whole show amused Mark so much he didn’t even challenge Karin’s arrival. “Look who’s here! It’s okay — you’re a citizen, too. Nice little touch, anyway. The Fourth of July is my sister’s all-time favorite. Let’s dedicate this one to her, wherever she is. Her, and all the missing Americans.”

She hadn’t had a good thing to say about the holiday since she was ten. But maybe he meant that ten-year-old Karin. Those two small children, their eyes gold sparklers, sick with fear and thrill when their father detonated an artillery barrage of illegal Class B fireworks in the north forty.

“She’s gotta be abroad,” Mark said, a cloud passing over him. “Abroad or in prison. I’d have heard from her if she was in the States. Today of all days. I’m telling you: maybe there’s things to her life that I just didn’t know about.”

Bonnie showed up straight from work at the River Road Archway, still in her pioneer’s bonnet and ankle-length cotton dress. She was about to duck into Mark’s bathroom and change into her civvies when Mark stopped her. “Hey! Why don’t you stay this way? I like you this way.” He waved at her calico-printed bodice. “Nobody does that stuff anymore. I miss all that shit.”

She stood, a giggling museum diorama. “What do you mean, ‘ miss ’?”

“You know: olden days. Americana. Sort of sexy. It relaxes me.”

Despite the salacious abuse she took from Rupp and Cain, she stayed in costume, fussing in the kitchen to prepare the impromptu feast alongside Karin in her cutoffs and bare midriff. Denim, duck-hunting camouflage, legible tees, and a fake calico bonnet: America at two and a quarter centuries.

“Where’s your friend?” Bonnie asked Karin.

“What friend?” Mark called from the patio.

Karin considered snapping that frilly, calico neck. “He’s at home. He’s…” She waved her hand vaguely at the stereo system, the massed choral Sousa marches. “He hates military displays. He can’t take the explosions.”