Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Gerald Weber. You’ve written about so many people suffering from so many extraordinary conditions. People who think that hot is cold and black is white. People who think they can see when they can’t. People for whom time has stopped. People who think their body parts belong to someone else. Can you tell us the strangest case you’ve ever witnessed?”

A freak show, unrolling live in front of millions of breakfasters. Just like the reviews accused. He wanted to ask her to start again. The seconds clicked off, each as large, white, and frozen as Greenland. He opened his mouth to answer and discovered that his tongue was super-glued to the back of his front teeth. He could not salivate or moisten the freeze-dried hollow of his throat. Every Australian on earth would think he was sucking on a lug nut.

Words came out, but in chunks, as if he’d just suffered a stroke. He mumbled something about his books countering the idea of “suffering.” Every mental state was simply a new and different way of being, different from ours only in degree.

“A person who has amnesia or experiences hallucinations isn’t suffering?” the man asked in a journalistic voice, ready for instruction. Yet his tone bore just a tinge of sarcasm about to flower.

“Well, let’s take hallucinations,” Weber said. The take came out closer to taste . He described Charles Bonnet syndrome, patients with damage to the visual pathway that left them at least partially blind. Bonnet patients often experienced vivid hallucinations. “I know a woman who often finds herself surrounded by animated cartoons. But Bonnet’s is common. Millions of people experience it. Yes, suffering is involved. Yet everyday, baseline consciousness involves suffering. We need to start seeing all these ways of being as continuous rather than discontinuous. Quantitatively rather than qualitatively different from us. They are us. Aspects of the same apparatus.”

The woman commentator tilted her head at him and smiled, a megadose of gorgeous skepticism. “You’re saying we’re all a little out there?” Her companion laughed antiseptically. Television.

He said he was saying delusional thinking was similar to ordinary thinking. Brains of any flavor produced reasonable explanations for unusual perceptions.

“That’s what lets you enter into mental states so different from your own?”

Like the worst traps, this one felt innocent. They steered toward the accusations about his work they’d found on the Internet. Do you really care about your patients, or are you just using them for scientific ends? Good controversy; better television. He felt the ambush develop. But he couldn’t see, his mouth was dry, and he hadn’t slept in days. He started to speak, sentences that sounded peculiar even before he formed them. He meant to say, simply, that everyone experienced passing moments of delusion, like when you look at the sunset and wonder, for an instant, where the sun goes. Such moments gave everyone the ability to understand others’ mental deficits. The words came out sounding as if he were confessing to intermittent insanity. Both hosts smiled and thanked him for coming on the show that morning. They segued seamlessly into a teaser about a Brisbane man who had a piece of coral the size of a cricket-ball crash through his bedroom roof. Then a commercial break, and assistants hustled him off the set, his debacle taped forever and soon replayable on the Web, at any time, by anyone, from anywhere on earth.

He called Bob Cavanaugh from the hotel. “I thought you’d want to know, before you heard from other quarters. Not good. There may be some fallout.”

After the maddening satellite uplink delay, Cavanaugh sounded only bemused. “It’s Australia, Gerald. Who’s going to know?”

How much had Mark changed?The question dogged Karin, in that hot summer, a third of a year on. She measured him constantly, comparing him against an image of him before the accident that changed with each day she spent with the new Mark. Her sense of him was just a running average, weighted in favor of the latest person who stood in front of her. She no longer trusted her memory.

He was certainly slower. Before the accident, even deciding how to handle their mother’s estate had taken him only twenty minutes. Now choosing whether to draw the blinds was like resolving the Middle East. A day became just long enough to sit down and figure out what he absolutely needed to do tomorrow, followed by a little necessary down time.

He was more forgetful. He could pour a bowl of cereal right next to the one he had left half-eaten. She told him several times a week that he was on disability, but he refused to believe it. His word blurs seemed almost playful to her. “Got to get back to work,” he declared. “Bring home the bankin’.” Seeing the president on the news, he groaned, “Not him again — Mr. Taxes of Evil.” He complained about his clock radio readout. “I can’t tell if it’s 10:00 a.m. or 10:00 FM.” Maybe this was still what all the books called aphasia . Or maybe Mark was goofing on purpose. She couldn’t remember if he’d ever been funny, before.

He was often childlike now; she could no longer deny it. Yet she’d spent years before the accident badgering him to grow up. The whole country was juvenile. The age was childlike. And when she watched him alongside Rupp and Cain, Mark did not always suffer by comparison.

The slightest trigger set him raging. But anger, too, was an old familiar. Back in first grade, when Mark’s teacher affectionately called him “an oddball” in front of the class, for bringing his lunch in a paper sack and not a metal lunch box, he’d cursed her in furious tears. Years later, when his father mocked him in a Christmas-dinner argument, the boy of fourteen sprang up from the table, ran up the stairs shrieking Happy damn Holidays , and put his fist through the maple-paneled bedroom door, winding up in the emergency room with three broken bones in his hand. And then there was the time a hysterical Joan Schluter tried to take shears to her son’s locks after Mark and Cappy fought over his bangs. The seventeen-year-old had exploded, kicking in the oven and threatening to sue both parents for abuse.

In fact, even the Capgras had some precedent. For three years before puberty, Mark had refined Mr. Thurman, his imaginary friend. Mr. Thurman confided to Mark, in top secret, that Mark had been adopted. Mr. Thurman knew Mark’s real family, and promised to introduce Mark when he was older. Sometimes Mr. Thurman made allowance for Karin, saying they were both foundlings, but related. Other times, they were drawn from different orphan lots. At those times, Mark consoled her, insisting they’d be better friends when they didn’t have to carry on in that sham family anymore. Karin had hated Mr. Thurman with a passion, often threatening to gas him while Mark slept.

The Capgras was changing her, too. She fought against her habituation. For a little while longer, she still saw it: his laughter, eerily mechanical. His bouts of sadness, just statements of fact. Even his anger, mere colorful ritual. He’d burst out with some seven-year-old’s declaration of love for Barbara, apropos of nothing. He’d go fishing with his buddies, mimic all the patter, sit in the boat casting and cursing his luck like the robot host of some television fishing show, going through the motions with fearful, flattened intensity, desperate to prove that he was still intact, inside the wrappings. For a little while longer, she knew the accident had blown them both away, and all the selfless attention from her in the world would never get them back. There was no back to get them to. For each new day, her own integrating memory increasingly proved that my brother was always like that .