Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

At last he said, “I’ll put the belt on. But you have to take me.”

“Where?” she said, knowing.

“I want to see where it happened.”

“Mark. You don’t, really.”

He stared straight ahead, into his own universe. He spun his hand around his head, the sign for gone . “I might as well never have been there.”

“We can’t. Not tonight. It’ll be pitch-black. You won’t be able to see a thing.”

“I can’t even see that much, now.”

“Let me take you home. I promise you, we’ll go first thing in the morning.”

He turned on her. “That would be convenient, wouldn’t it? Take me back ‘home,’ call your people, and then go and smooth out everything, while I’m sleeping. And I wouldn’t ever know the difference.”

Solid shapes, artfully altered in the night, data manipulated while their backs were turned. Everything certain, carried away downstream.

“Tampering with the scene of the crime,” he said. He flipped the glove compartment of her Corolla up and down.

“Crime? What do you mean? What crime?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Going through the ditch and removing the evidence. Laying down false tracks.”

“Mark, anybody who wanted to tamper with the evidence has had almost half a year. There’s no evidence left . Why would they wait until now?”

“Because I didn’t want a look, until now.”

His jiggling accelerated, and she reached out and stopped his hand. “There’s nothing left to see. It’s all been washed away or grown over.”

He sat up, excited. “You agree with me, then? Somebody’s altering every clue I might have to crack this thing?”

This thing. His life. “Nature, Mark.” Overgrowing all that ever happened. “Put your seat belt back on. Let’s go.”

He did as instructed, but on the condition that she stay the night in the Homestar where he could keep an eye on her. “I have this hide-a-backache thing in my front room you can sleep on.” They rode back to Farview in silence. Mark wouldn’t let her play the radio, not even KQKY, which he claimed no longer played the kind of music it used to. At his house, Mark asked for her car keys, to put under his pillow. “I’ve been sleeping kind of hard. I probably wouldn’t hear you if you snuck off during the night.”

While her brother showered, Karin called Daniel. She tore him out of deep meditation. She told him about the evening and said she was staying at Mark’s. “See you tomorrow?” she said, wanting off the phone. For just an instant, he failed to respond. He didn’t believe her. She closed her eyes and teetered. History under the floorboards, waiting to flame up.

Daniel grew solicitous. “Is everything all right? Would you like me to come over?”

“Who’s that?” Mark demanded, materializing in the living room doorway, dangling a towel in front of him and dripping on the gold pile carpeting. “I told you not to contact anyone.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Karin said into her cell, then powered off.

“Who was that? Damn it. I can’t turn my back on you for a second.”

“That was Daniel Riegel.” Mark cocked a forearm in front of him, warding off the name. “We’ve been seeing each other for, for a little while. I guess I’m living with him, you could say. It’s good with him, Mark. After all the crap we dumped on each other. Finally good between us.” She didn’t add: because of you.

“Danny Riegel? Mother Naked boy?” He sat, still damp, on the arm of his Naugahyde recliner, abstractedly toweling his chest. A little late, Karin looked away. “So you two really are an item?”

“He came to see you in the hospital.” Stupid, forced, irrelevant.

“He did? Danny Riegel. Well, he can’t hurt me. He wouldn’t hurt an amoeba. He can’t be in on any big doings. Not Danny Riegel. But, shit. How did you know to get involved with him? That’s really eerie. My sister and him were, like, some tape loop. They must have programmed you in advance, put it in your DNA, or something.”

She turned back to him, past fatigue, slipping back into what she would have to do every day for the rest of her life, if she stayed on nursing him. “Mark, go for the easy solution, for once. The obvious.”

“Ha! In this life? You’ve lost it.”

He wrapped the towel around his waist and helped her open the sofa bed. Later, after midnight, she lay on that mat of shifting ball bearings and razor springs, listening in the dark for movement. Everything was alive: air conditioning cutting on and shuddering off, lightweight creatures scuffling in the walls, warm-blooded branches tapping the window, something the size of a subcompact reconnoitering the azaleas, insects excavating her ear, their beating wings like dentist’s drills drawing near her eardrum. And every creak sounded like her brother, whoever he was, slipping into the living room.

After a habitual, puffed-sugar breakfast, Karin brought him out to North Line Road. The early-morning air was already asbestos, ready to break one hundred humid degrees before noon. Yet Mark wore his long black jeans. He couldn’t get used to the scars on his legs and didn’t want anyone thinking that was how he looked. The stretch of shimmering road seemed almost featureless: sedge-lined pasture and grassy fields, the rare road sign and scrub tree, and crossroads named only with numbers. But Karin pulled over within thirty feet of the accident.

“This is it? You sure this is where I rolled it?”

Wordless, she left the car. He followed. They combed the deserted road in opposite directions. They might have been a vacationing couple, stopping to search for a map that had blown out of their car window. The scene offered even less than when she’d come with Daniel, nothing except the brute business of nature, the base of the whole pyramid, too small and sprawling to bother with: a green, ground-hugging cover running all the way to the horizon, with a trickle of melting asphalt burned through it.

Mark drifted across the road, as baffled as the herd of Simmental on the hillock three hundred yards to his right. Only, the drifting cows didn’t shake their heads.

“Which way was I going?” She pointed west, back toward town. Whatever evidence he sought had long ago been whisked away by forces intent on erasing his life. “See? Nothing here. Told you. It’s all been moved out.” He squatted and brushed the asphalt with one palm. At length, he dropped to the ground and sat on the drooping road edge, his arms around his knees. She came over to him, to beg him to move off onto the shoulder. Instead, she dropped down beside him, both of them targets for any passing vehicle faster than a combine. He didn’t look up. He held his arms in the air, lifting the emptiness. “We were at the Bullet. I remember that.”

“Who?” she whispered, trying to sound as blank as he.

“Me, Tommy, Duane. Couple guys from the plant. Music, the band, I think. It was cold. I was arm-wrestling somebody. And that’s it. Total blank. I don’t even remember getting in the truck. Nothing, until I’m sitting up in a hospital bed drooling on myself. How long was that? Weeks? Months? Like I’m locked away somewhere and somebody else is living my life.” The monotone came out of him, in poor computer speech.

She rested her arm on his shoulder and he didn’t pull away. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Just try to…”

He tapped her arm and pointed. An ancient Pontiac wagon lumbered in from the east. They rose to their feet and moved a yard off the road. The car slowed to a stop in front of them, its windows open. The seats were piled high with gear — boxes full of clothing, stacks of dishes, books, tools, even a corsage of plastic flowers. In the back, an air mattress lay covered with a ratty cotton blanket. A thick-featured, crimson-faced man of seventy, unmistakably Winnebago, leaned across the front seat. “Car trouble?”