Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

He disembarked and sat in LAX for eight hours, waiting for his rebooked flight. By the time he boarded, he’d lost all sense of time. Somewhere out over the middle of the Pacific, he developed mild gaze tinnitus. When he looked to the left, he heard ringing in his ears. When he looked straight, the ringing went away. He thought about canceling his speech and returning to New York. The problem worsened throughout the in-flight dinner and movie. But after the forgettable film, the symptoms vanished.

He was so late clearing passport control in Sydney that he had to head straight to his first interviews, even before checking into his hotel. The first interview turned into a banal personality profile. The second was one of those disasters where the uninformed interviewer wanted Weber to comment on everything except his work. Could classical music actually make your baby smarter? How close were we to cognition-enhancing drugs? Weber was so jet-lagged he practically hallucinated. He heard his sentences growing longer and less grammatical. By the time the Australian journalist asked whether America could really hope to win the war on terrorism, he was saying injudicious things.

He was too tired to sleep that night. The next day was the conference. He walked about the cavernous convention center, bumping into chairs and office tables. Everyone recognized him, but most attendees looked away when he caught their eyes. For his part, he fought the urge to assign a five-digit Diagnostic and Statistical Manual code to everyone who came up to shake his hand. The crowd flowed through the conference rooms, whispering and laughing, displaying, preening, praising and faulting, flocking, forming factions, picking fights, plotting overthrows. He watched a middle-aged man and woman shriek upon seeing each other, embrace, and chatter in tandem. He waited to see them comb bugs out of each other’s scalps and eat them. The evolutionary psychologists had that much right, at least. Older creatures still inhabited us, and would never vacate.

A morning of panels confirmed his impression that the field was paying undue respect to a handful of skilled showmen, some no older than his daughter. This, too, was science: fashions came and went; theories rose and vanished for all sorts of reasons, not all of them scientific. He had no more appetite for following the latest craze than he had for sitting through an entire baseball game. For one, few of the new theories could be tested. But the field was fundable and in a hurry, and they asked only that he give an entertaining keynote. A cartoonish tale-teller could do that much.

By mid-afternoon, he was seeing double. He sat through a baggy discussion of the phenomenology of synesthesia. He listened to a sensorimotor account of the origin of reading. He heard a fierce debate between cognitivists and new behaviorists on orbitofrontal damage and emotional processes. The one lecture of use to him examined the neurochemistry of the trait that truly separated humans from other creatures: boredom.

There followed an excruciating mass dinner during which his table mates — three American researchers he knew by reputation — baited him about the shaky reviews. Was it a statistical fluke, or some more significant shift in popular taste? Even the word popular sounded pointed. Pushed, he replied, “I suppose I have enjoyed the kind of attention that inevitably produces a backlash.” He heard how self-serving the words were, even as they left his mouth, words these three researchers would now broadcast. The whole conference would hear them, by the time he gave his speech.

One of the conference organizers, a “holistic psychotherapist” from Washington, gave him an introduction so luminous it sounded mocking. Only when Weber stood behind the podium, at a moment that Sydney insisted was 8:00 p.m., did he realize the whole invitation might have been a setup. He looked out across a grassland peppered with the smiling, expectant faces of a species that hunted in packs.

He hated to read talks. Usually, he spoke from an outline, delivering freewheeling, campfire performances. But when he wandered from the script that night, vertigo hit him. He stood high on a towering cliff, water pounding over it. What was acrophobia anyway, if not the half-acknowledged desire to jump? He stayed close to the printed word, but with the stage lights on him and his eyes playing tricks, he kept losing his place. As he read aloud, he realized he’d pitched the talk too low. These were scientists, researchers. He was feeding them armchair descriptions, waiting-room stuff. He scrambled to add technical detail that got away from him even as he added it.

The speech wasn’t a total disaster. He’d sat through worse. But it was no keynote, not worth the honorarium they paid. He took questions, mostly slow, fat lobs over the plate. The group felt sorry for him, seeing that the kill had already been made. Someone asked if he thought that the narrative impulse might actually have preceded language. The question had nothing to do with the talk he’d just delivered. It seemed to refer, if anything, to the Harper’s accusation that he’d missed his true calling, that Gerald Weber was, deep down, a fabulist.

He made it through the reception without further humiliation. The ordeal left him ravenous, just hours after dinner, but the reception offered nothing but Shiraz and greasy herring squares on crackers. The entire room developed Klüver-Bucy: popping things in their mouths like babies, carrying on a little too manically, mewling nonsense syllables to each other, propositioning anything that moved.

He didn’t get back to the hotel until after midnight. He wasn’t sure if he could call Sylvie. He couldn’t even calculate the time difference. He lay awake, thinking of the answers he should have given, seeing the cracks in his ceiling as frozen synapses. Sometime after 3:00 a.m., it occurred to him that he himself might be an extremely detailed case history, a description of personality so minutely realized that it only thought it was autonomous…

At night, the brain grows strange to itself. He knew the precise biochemistry behind “sundowner syndrome”—the intense exaggeration of medical symptoms, during hours of darkness. But knowing the biochemistry didn’t reverse it. Eventually, he must have fallen asleep, because he woke up from a dream in which people were plunging like missiles into a large body of water and emerging in molten proto-forms. Dreaming: that compromise solution for accommodating the vestigial brain stem. He woke to the phone, a wakeup call he’d forgotten asking for. It was still dark. He had thirty minutes to shower, eat, and cross town to the television studios for a live appearance on a morning news show. Five minutes on breakfast television, something he’d done half a dozen times before. He arrived at the studios with his mind still back at the hotel. They took him into Makeup and powdered him. He removed his glasses. Not vanity, really. Glasses under television lights became mirrors. He met with the show editor, who briefed him from photocopied notes and Internet printouts. The Harper’s review peeked out of the stack. The editor seemed to be discussing a book written by someone else.

Weber sat in the cramped green room, watching a tiny monitor as the guest before him struggled to look natural. Then his turn came. They led him onto a tech-encircled set filled with glowing living room furniture. Around the couch, a small artillery unit of cameras dollied in and out. Without his glasses, the world was a Monet. They sat him next to the commentator, who looked down into what seemed to be a coffee table but was in fact a prompter. Next to this man, a woman: symbolic wife. The woman introduced him, garbling several facts. The first question came from nowhere.