Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Pretty good,” Mark said, eyes, as always, glued to the road. “I think all this therapy is starting to make her feel a little better.”

Before the fourth session, Mark demanded to visit Intensive Care. He picked a floor nurse at random, told her the story and showed the note. The startled woman promised to pass along anything she heard.

“See that?” he asked, as Karin steered him toward Dr. Tower’s floor. “She was stonewalling. Claiming they didn’t let anyone in to see me that first night except my next of kin. But you told me they let you in. It doesn’t add up, does it?”

She shook her head, surrendering to the laws of his world. “No, Mark. It really doesn’t.”

She spent the hour of his session sitting in the hospital cafeteria, calculating the degree of her self-delusion. Therapy was doing nothing for him. She was clinging to medical science the same way her mother clung to Revelation. Weber’s scientific assurances had seemed so rational. But then, Mark seemed rational to himself. And increasingly clearer-eyed than she.

When he came out of the session, Karin suggested dinner. “How about Grand Island, the Farmer’s Daughter Café?”

“Holy crap!” Pleasure and fear struggled over his face. “That’s my favorite place to eat in this whole forsaken life. How did you know that? You talk to the guys?”

She felt ashamed for everything human. “I know you. I know what you like.”

He shrugged. “Hey! Maybe you have weird powers you don’t know about. We should run some tests.”

Mark and his friends loved to drive forty-five miles for the same bloody beef they could get anywhere in half a dozen places in Kearney. Karin had never understood the Farmer’s Daughter’s appeal, but she was glad now for the ride. Mark, hostage, sat next to her, thoughtful, for most of an hour. Riding shotgun— the death seat , he called it — he scanned the fields of wheat, beans, and corn, scouring the landscape for the slightest thing that didn’t fit. He read the road signs out loud: “Adopt-a-highway. Adopt a highway ! Who would’ve thought so many of our nation’s roads were orphaned?”

She waited until the sleepy stretch between Shelton and Wood River to question him. Medicine had betrayed her; she could betray medicine. “So what’s the worst thing about Dr. Tower?”

His head was nearly on the dash, peering up at a raptor circling above them. “She’s getting on my nerves. She wants to know all this crap that happened twenty million years ago. What’s different, what’s the same. I tell her: You want ancient history? Go buy an ancient history book.” The hawk fell away behind them. Mark straightened and leaned over toward her. “‘What did you do when you were little and your sister made you angry?’ What’s the point? I mean, it’s weird, don’t you think? Trying to find out so much about me. Change the way I look at things.”

Her pulse quickened at his conspiratorial tone. She remembered their covert adolescent resistance, surviving their parents’ worst certainties. Now he offered a new alliance. She could join him, however crazy. They’d both have what they needed. She sucked air, dizzy to toady to him. “First of all, Mark. No one is making you do anything.”

“Whew. That’s a relief.”

“Dr. Tower just wants to understand what’s on your mind now.”

“Why don’t they just stick me back inside one of those scanners? Damn, they’ve got to work the kinks out of those things. You ever been inside one of those tubes? Damn racket. Like having your skull worked on in a body shop. And you can’t move. Chin all strapped in. Mess you up good, if you’re not messed up already. Computerized mind reading.”

She let it drop until Grand Island. Summer along the Platte: the shimmering mirage, the burnt-green wall of flattening heat that made the Plains everyone else’s model of godforsaken barrenness released Karin. The surging, Lego grid of Chicago had oppressed her. The Rockies left her edgy. L.A.’s wraparound glitz felt like hysterical blindness. This place, at least, she knew. This place alone was open and empty enough to disappear in.

The Farmer’s Daughter occupied an old 1880s storefront with cherry wood wainscoting and bits of rusting farm implements hanging on the walls. Nebraska playing itself. The grandmotherly hostess greeted them as long-lost friends, and Karin replied with like effusion. “They’ve changed this place around,” Mark insisted, in their booth. “I don’t know. Rehabbed. It used to be newer.” And when they ordered: “The menu’s the same, but the food’s relapsed.” He ate with resolve, but little joy.

“Dr. Tower just wants to get a sense of your thoughts,” Karin insisted. “That way, she can, you know, kind of put things back together.”

“I see. I see. You think I’m coming apart?”

“Well.” She knew she was. “How do you feel?”

“That’s what that damn doctor keeps asking. I never felt better. Felt a whole lot worse, I’ll tell you that much.”

“No question. You’re worlds better than you were, this time five months ago.”

He laughed at her. “How can you have ‘this time’ five months ago?”

She waved her hands, flustered. Every word her mind fingered melted into meaningless figures of speech. “Mark, for days after they cut you out of that truck, you couldn’t see, you couldn’t move, you couldn’t talk. You were barely human. You’ve worked a miracle since then. That’s the word the doctors use: miracle.”

“Yep. Me and Jesus.”

“So now, with all the ground you’ve gained, Dr. Tower can help you even more. She might find some things that could make you feel better.”

“Not having had that accident would make me feel better. You going to finish those potatoes?”

“Mark, this is for real. You want to feel more like yourself again, don’t you?”

“What are you talking about?” He giggled again, approximately. “I feel exactly like myself. Who else am I supposed to feel like?”

More than she could claim. She let the matter fall. When the modest meal check came, she reached to take it. He snatched her hand. “What are you doing? You can’t pay for this. You’re the woman.”

“It was my idea.”

“True.” Mark toyed with the pepper shaker, figuring. “You want to pay for my dinner? I don’t get it.” His voice searched for a teasing tone. “Is this some kind of date? Oh, no. Wait. I forgot. Incest.”

The waitress came and took Karin’s credit card. Soon it would be maxed out and she’d have to start another. In another five months, her mother’s life insurance, the sum that Karin hadn’t wanted to dip into, the money she was supposed to use to do good things, would be wiped out, too.

“This absolutely proves you can’t be my sister. My sister is the cheapest person I’ve ever met. Except for maybe my father.”

She jerked back, wounded. But his blank face stopped her. He was probably right. Her whole life she’d clutched, panicked, at anything buoyant enough to float her free from the maelstrom of Cappy and Joan. And all her hoarding had depleted her. So it went, with safety: the more you guarded, the less you had. She would make up for it, now. Mark would cost her no less than everything. She would spend what life she’d had, to pay for the life he couldn’t even see he’d lost. Did it count as generosity, if you had no choice?

“Next one’s on you,” she said. “Come on, let’s go home.”

By the time they left Grand Island, night was falling. Ten miles out of town, Mark took off his seat belt. It shouldn’t have unnerved her. Just the opposite: the old Mark never wore his belt. Here he was, coming back to normal, trusting her again. But she panicked. “Mark,” she shouted. “Buckle up.” She reached to help, and he slapped her hand. Shaking, Karin pulled over onto Highway 30’s dark shoulder. She refused to continue until he fastened. He seemed perfectly happy to sit there in the dark, enjoying their Mexican standoff.