Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Invite him anyway,” Bonnie suggested. “He can leave when the fun starts.”

“What friend?” Mark, outside the kitchen window, pressed his nose to the screen. “Who are you talking about?”

“You banging somebody?” Rupp asked, with polite interest.

Duane savored his rare informational advantage. “Old news, Gus. She’s shacking up with Riegel. What country have you dudes been living in?”

“Danny Riegel? Bird Boy? Again? ” Rupp toasted Karin with a beer can wrapped in a foam Koozie. “That’s priceless. Why didn’t I see that coming? I mean, coming back ? The annual migration.”

Duane snickered. “That dude is going to save the planet someday.”

“More than you’ll ever do,” Bonnie chided.

Karin scoped Mark through the kitchen screen. He sat back down on his patio chair, holding a piece of ice to his forehead. He wrestled with the name, fitting the long past into the five seconds of fleeting present where he now lived. Someone pretending to be his sister, shacking up with a boy who, in another life, had once been his inseparable companion. Who’d once shacked up with his actual sister. Impossible to assemble. How many lives was one person supposed to dope out in this life?

Over the cookout, the boys decided where America would strike next. Duane and Mark proposed various countries, and Tommy rated how hard each one would be to take out. Bonnie — a tinted daguerreotype with half a pound of steak on a paper plate balancing on her knee — listened, as if to a speech she had to memorize for her job at the Archway. “Don’t you just feel sorry for them sometimes? Foreigners?”

“Well,” Rupp said, doubtfully. “It’s not like they’re just being naïve.”

“Reverend Billy says this thing with Iraq is actually predicted in the Bible,” Bonnie contributed. “Something that has to happen, before the end.”

Karin suggested that every dropped bomb might be creating more terrorists.

“Jesus.” Mark shook his head. “You’re a bigger traitor than my sister. I’m beginning to think you’re not affiliated with the government at all!”

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir collapsed in exhaustion and was replaced by deeply affirmative Christian country rock. Groups of neighbors, camped over their own scattered cookouts, called out holiday greetings. The sun set and the bugs came out and the first tentative sprigs of fireworks tested the dark. The first Independence Day celebrations since the attacks, and the indolently exploding colored missiles felt both helpless and defiant. Tommy Rupp shot off a dozen “Exploding Terror Heads” he’d picked up at a roadside tent near Plattsmouth: colorful figures of Hussein and bin Laden that whistled skyward and burst into streamers.

Karin watched her brother in the shooting light. His eyes swung toward heaven, flinched at each explosion, then cackled at the flinching. His face, now green, now blue, now red, mouthed the same astonishment as all of Farview at this barrage of light they could no longer afford but couldn’t do without. She saw him look around, trying to catch the attention of his friends, searching for confirmation none of them could give. Under the fall of a massive chrysanthemum, he turned and caught her staring at him. And brief as that flash, his eyes finding hers, the slightest sign of kinship issued from him: You’re lost here, too, aren’t you?

Weber’s life began veering in late July.When plaintive chirps issued from a pile of his clothes, he thought it an animal. First Sylvie’s struggles to evict the raccoon family from the attic, now a plague of locusts in the living quarters. Only the chirps’ regularity made him recall the cell phone. He dug up the burrowing thing and stuck it to his face. “Weber.”

“Big Daddy. Calling to wish you your day in the sun.”

“Hey, Jess. It’s you!”

His daughter, in her astronomical aerie in Southern California, wishing him a happy fifty-sixth. Whatever the awkwardness between them, Jessica always observed the forms. She flew back east for three or four days every Christmas. She sent them trinkets on Mother’s and Father’s Days — films and music, vain attempts to educate her parents in popular culture. She even remembered their anniversary, a thing no self-respecting child ever did. And she called them without fail on their birthdays, however halting the calls.

“You sound surprised. You know there’s caller ID on the screen of your phone.”

“Get thee behind me. Besides, how do you know which phone I’m on?”

“Daddy? Brain fart.”

“Oh. Right. Forget that. How come you’re calling on this cell thing, anyway?” Wrong foot, as usual, out of the gate.

“I thought you might enjoy birthday greetings from your daughter.”

“I guess I’m not used to this ring-tone yet.”

“You’re not using it? You’re sorry I got it for you?”

“I’m using it. I use it to call your mother, when I’m on the road.”

“If you don’t like it, Father, you can bring it back.”

“Who said I don’t like it?”

“Get Mom to return it for you. She knows how to move about freely in the retail world.”

“I like it. It’s handy.”

“Fine. Listen, I’m telling you this now so you won’t spin out when it happens. I’m thinking about getting you a DVD player for Christmas.”

“What’s wrong with tapes?”

His daughter snickered. “So, what birthday is this, anyway?”

“Sorry. We’ve stopped counting.” The mere sound of each other’s voices returned him to his thirties and her to thirteen.

Jess had never been big with words. She preferred figures. But she liked the phone, an unimpeachably clean technology. As a teen, she went through the obligatory phone stage — long, near-silent sessions with her friend Gayle while she played Tetris and Gayle watched cable, a medium the Webers managed to duck. The girls would breathe at each other for hours at a shot, punctuated only by Jess’s occasional reports of high scores or interrogations of Gayle’s plot synopses: “He’s kissing her? Where? Why? ” Sylvie would sweep through every half-hour, insisting, “You girls start talking or give it up.”

Her phone behavior was much the same now, only Tetris had given way to Hubble scans. Weber could hear her computing on the other end; the furtive clacking of keys. Applying for grants or querying enormous online astronomical databases. She said nothing for some seconds. At last, he asked, “How’s the planet hunting?”

“Fine,” she clicked. “I’ve got Keck time in August. We’re looking to supplement the radial-velocity method with…You aren’t really interested, are you?”

“Of course I am. You found anything small, warm, and water-bearing yet?”

“No. But I promise your choice of half a dozen before I come up for tenure.”

“You’re filling in all the required promotion forms?”

She sighed. “Yes, Parental Unit.” One of the rising stars among young cosmologists, and he was fretting about her paperwork.

“How’s the new insulin pump working?”

“Oh my God. Best two months’ salary I’ve ever spent. Absolutely life-changing. I feel like a new person.”

“Really? That’s fantastic. So it’s keeping you from crashing?”

“Not entirely. Zuul still inhabits me from time to time. Capricious little fiend. Came and took me over in the middle of the night last week. First time in a long time. Scared the crap out of both of us.”

Say her name , Weber willed Jess. But she didn’t. “So how is…Cleo?”

“Father!” She sounded almost amused. He blessed the screens of distracting data on her end. “Don’t you think it’s strange that you would ask about my dog before you asked about my mate?”