Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Visiting the Homestar one early July afternoon, Karin found Mark watching a travel documentary featuring a gentle, anemic priest stumbling around Tuscany. Mark sat entranced, as if he’d just chanced upon the most extraordinary reality TV. He greeted Karin, excited. “Hey, guy. Look at this place! Unbelievable. People living there for millions of years. And stones even older than that.”

Karin watched with him. He abided her now, a habit as upsetting as earlier hostilities. The travelogue ended, and Mark surfed the other channels. He buzzed his old favorites — motor and contact sports, music videos, manic comedies. But he flinched at the noise and speed. He could no longer open up the pipe that connected him to the outside world without overflowing. After five minutes of a rerun of his favorite syndicated farce, he asked, “Could that accident have made me psychic?”

She faked calm. “What do you mean?”

“It’s like I can tell every joke before they even crack it.”

He settled on a nature show about the three species of primitive egg-laying mammals, something he would not have been caught dead watching before the accident. “Jesus. What are those things? Somebody really screwed up on the design specs. Birds with hair!”

This was the Mark she remembered from childhood. Curious and tender, with no sudden moves. He’d grown baffled enough to want her there, sitting next to him on the narrow sofa. She had him just as she wanted. She could make tea for him, might even extend her arm across the sofa and touch his shoulder, and he’d bear it. The thought traumatized her. She stood and paced the room. Unthinkable: Tuscany, echidnas, and her brother. She stared at him where he sat on the couch, knitting his brows at the backward mammals, a charade of excitement. “Just look at that thing! Abandoned by evolution. Left behind. That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.” He looked up and saw her pacing. “Hey. Would you sit down a minute? You’re making me nervous.”

She sat back on the couch next to him. He leaned toward her, turning on his idea of charm. He rested a hand on her thigh and launched into his daily litany. “How about driving me over to Thompson Motors? I can get a used F-150 for nothing. Trick it out. You gotta help me, though, because they stole my checkbook. Left me my address thingie, but the names and numbers are messed up.”

“I don’t know, Mark. That’s probably not such a great idea yet.”

“No?” He scowled and raised his helpless hands. “Whatever.” He picked up a week-old copy of the Kearney Hub left on the coffee table as a place mat and flipped through the used-truck listings that he’d already penned up. She reached forward and pressed the power on the remote. He whirled on her. “Would you mind? I’m watching that. You don’t really care about the egg mammals, do you? You don’t care much about any species except yourself.”

“Mark, the egg mammals are over.”

“The hell they are. Living fossils. Greatest survival story in vertebrate history. Over? No way. Look! What is…that’s…some kind of a sea unicorn or something.”

“That’s a new show, Mark.”

“What the fuck do you know? It’s all the same show.” By way of proof, he flipped the clicker back around the channels. “Hey. Look at this one. Based on a true story. Doesn’t anyone make movies based on fake stories, anymore?” He clicked some more, landing on Court TV. “All right? Satisfied? Jeez. Not from around here, are you?”

While Mark read his newspaper, she watched two neighbors sue each other over a garden plot they’d purchased together. After a while, she asked, “Would you like to go for a walk?”

He jerked up, alarmed. “Walk where?”

“I don’t know. Down to Scudder’s meadow? We could shoot for the river. Get out of the subdivision, anyway.”

He looked at her with pity, that she’d think this possible. “I don’t think so. Maybe tomorrow.”

They sat for a long time, reading to a background of televised litigation. She fixed him a tuna melt for dinner. He walked her to the door when she left. “Damn it! Look at that. Night again. I don’t know how I had time to work all day, when I was working. That reminds me: Infernal Beef. I should call the plant, shouldn’t I? Gotta get back to the workaday, know what I’m saying? Can’t live on free money forever.”

He started cognitive behavioral therapy with Dr. Tower. Karin drove him to Kearney, in what Mark called “the little Jap car.” He’d given up the idea that she might try to crash and kill him. Or perhaps he’d just reconciled himself to fate.

The treatment called for six weekly assessments followed by twelve “adjustment sessions,” with as many follow-ups as necessary, through the next year. Karin drove him to Good Samaritan for the appointments, then walked around town for the hour. The hospital staff asked her not to talk with Mark about the therapy until they had her join the later sessions. She swore she wouldn’t. After the second session, the question slipped out before she heard herself asking. “So how is it, talking to Dr. Tower?”

He turned clinical. “Okay, I guess. Doesn’t hurt to look at her. Little slow on the uptake, though. Man, you have to tell the woman everything a hundred times. She thinks you might be real. Maddening.”

Barbara came by, three times a week. She would drop in unannounced, always an event. Out of her hospital clothes, in gray shorts and burgundy tee, she was summer personified. Karin admired her bare arms and legs, wondering again about the woman’s age. Barbara turned Mark into a water-drinking duck toy, constantly bobbing, game for anything she asked. And all the things she asked for felt like games. She took him to the grocery store and made him shop for himself. That course had never occurred to Karin, who stocked Mark’s kitchen each week, keeping him both fed and dependent. Barbara, though, was merciless. She’d make no decisions for him, however much he appealed to her. “Hey, Barbie. Which of these do I really like better? You remember, from all those years in our little health hotel? Am I a sausage guy or a bacon guy?”

“I’ll tell you how you can find out. Just watch yourself, and see which one you pick.” She turned him loose, condemned to freedom in all the terror of American abundance, mounting interventions only in the matter of sprayable cheese and chocolate marshmallow cereal.

Barbara played video games with him, even the racing program. Mark loved it: a fish on wheels he could beat every time, even with one thumb tied behind his back. She got him on cribbage. Mark loved the epic contests, which often left him begging for mercy. “Is this how you get your kicks? A grown woman, beating up on beginners?”

Karin overheard. “Beginner? You don’t remember playing this forever, with your mother, as a child?”

He scoffed at the idiocy. “Playing forever ? My mother as a child ?”

“You know what I’m saying. Using sheets of worthless Green Stamps as stakes.”

Mark lifted his head from the cards, to sneer. “My mother did not play cribbage. Playing cards were the increments of the Devil.”

“That was later, Mark. When we were little, she was still a card addict. Don’t you remember? Hey. Don’t ignore me.”

“Playing cards. With my mother. My mother as a child .”

Three months — no; thirty years — of frustration thickened the air around her. “Oh, for God’s sake! Don’t be such a gnat-skull.” She listened to the echo, horrified at herself. Her eyes sought Barbara’s, pleading temporary insanity. Barbara checked Mark. But Mark just tipped his head back and snorted.

“Gnat-skull. Where’d you learn that? My sister used to call me that, too.”