Richard Powers: The Echo Maker

But when it came to humans, no one quite knew what to make of the boy. He’d made some mistakes as a kid: burning down the corn crib while shooting off tinfoil-wrapped matches. Getting caught playing with himself behind the rotting chicken coop. Killing a five-hundred-pound newly weaned calf by lacing its feed with a bowl of mixed medicines, convinced it was in pain. Worse, he spoke with a lisp until the age of six, which pretty much convinced both parents he was possessed. For weeks, their mother made him sleep under a wall exorcised with a cross anointed with oil, which shed droplets on his head as he slept.

At seven, he took to spending long hours in the afternoons in a meadow half a mile from their house. When their mother asked him what he did there for hours at a time, he replied, “Just play.” When she asked with who, he said, at first, “No one,” and later, “With a friend.” She refused to let him leave the house until he told her the friend’s name. He answered with a shy smile: “His name is Mr. Thurman.” He went on to tell the panicked woman all the great times that he and Mr. Thurman had together. Joan Schluter called in the entire Kearney police force. After a stakeout of the meadow and a thorough cross-examination of the boy, the police told the frantic parents that Mr. Thurman not only had no criminal record, he had no record whatsoever, outside of their son’s head.

Karin was Mark’s only hope of surviving adolescence. When he turned thirteen, she tried to show him how to save himself. It’s easy , she claimed. She’d discovered in high school, to her shock, that she could make even the elites like her by letting them dress her and instruct her musical tastes. People like people who make them feel secure. He didn’t know what the word meant. You need a brand , she told him. Something recognizable. She pushed him into chess club, cross-country, Future Farmers, even the thespians. Nothing stuck until he stumbled upon the group that would take him in because he passed the simple audition of failing to fit in anywhere else — the group of losers that freed him from her.

After he found his tribe, she could do little more for him. She concentrated on saving herself, finishing her sociology degree, the first ever in a family that looked on college as a form of witchcraft. She pressured Mark to follow her at UNK. He made it through one year, never having the heart to upset his many advisors by actually declaring a major. She moved to Chicago, answering phones for a Big Five accounting firm on the eighty-sixth floor of the Standard Oil Building. Her mother used to call long-distance, just to listen to her phone-receptionist voice. “How’d you learn how to sound like that? That’s not right! That can’t be good for your vocal cords.” From Chicago she went to Los Angeles, the greatest city on earth. She tried to tell Mark: You could be lots of things out here. You could find work anywhere. They’re begging for easygoing people out here. Your parents aren’t your fault, she told him. You could come out here and nobody would ever have to know about them. Even when her own launch began to fall back to earth, she still believed: people liked people who made them feel more secure.

When Mark was himself again, she would restart them both. She’d get him on his feet, listen to him, help him find what he needed to be. And this time she’d take him away with her, someplace reasonable.

She’d saved the note, and read it daily. A kind of magic charm: Tonight on North Line Road GOD led me to you. Surely that note writer — the saint who had discovered the wreck and come to the hospital on the night of the accident — would return to make real contact, now that Mark was awake. Karin waited patiently, for a long-delayed explanation. But no one came by to identify himself or explain anything.

A spring bouquet arrived from the IBP plant. Two dozen of Mark’s coworkers signed the Get Well Soon card, some adding jokey, off-color encouragements Karin couldn’t decode. The whole county knew what had happened to Mark: a police siren couldn’t go off in the Big Bend region without everyone between Grand Island and North Platte telling you exactly who had screwed up, and how.

A few days after the trach tube change, Mark’s best friends at last visited. Karin heard them when they were still down the hall.

“Damn, it’s a cold universe out there.”

“Tell me about it. My ’nads have migrated up into my eye-sockets.”

They rolled into the room, Tommy Rupp in black flak jacket and Duane Cain in Thinsulate-stuffed camouflage. The Three Muskrateers, reunited for the first time since the accident. They showered Karin with upbeat greetings. She fought the urge to ask where they’d been. Rupp strode up to Mark where he lay whimpering in bed and offered him a palm. Mark, from some deep reflex, flipped him a high five.

“Jesus, Gus. They really did a number on you.” Rupp waved at the monitors. “Can you believe this? All this gear, just for you.”

Duane hung back, squeezing his neck. “He’s making headway, don’t you think?” He turned to Karin, standing behind him at bedside. Tattoos crept out from under the collar of his long underwear, a cartoon of red muscles stung onto his hairless chest, as detailed and realistic as an anatomy text. He looked flayed alive. He whispered to Karin, slow and booming, for all those just emerging from a coma. “This is fucking inconceivable. Happened to exactly the person who didn’t deserve it.”

Rupp took her elbow. “Our man’s in pretty rough shape.”

Her arm went hot from the wrist up. The curse of the red-headed: she flushed faster than a pheasant from the brush. She withdrew her arm and smoothed her cheeks. “You should have seen him last week.” She couldn’t control her tone.

A look passed from Cain to Rupp: The woman is hurting, man. Don’t let the Madame Mao thing get you. Cain’s face was clear, earnest, working with her. “We’ve been calling in. We understand he just recently woke up.”

Rupp had Mark’s clipboard chart and was shaking his head. “Are they doing anything at all useful for him?” The world needed new management, a fact so obvious that only a select few knew it.

“They had to reduce pressure on his brain. He wasn’t responding to anything.”

“But he’s coming back now,” Rupp declared. He turned back to Mark and fisted his shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Gus? Full return. Old times again.”

Mark lay still, staring.

Karin blurted, “You’re seeing him at the best he’s been since…”

“We’ve been keeping track,” Duane insisted. He scratched his tattoo muscles. “We’ve been following.”

A river of phonemes flowed from the bed. Mark’s arms snaked out. His mouth went Ah…ah, kee-kee-kee .

“You’re upsetting him,” Karin said. “He shouldn’t get worked up.” She wanted to kick them out, but Mark’s activity excited her.

“Are you kidding?” Rupp pulled an empty chair up to the bedside. “A visit is the best thing for him. Any non-insane doctor will tell you that.”

“Man needs his friends,” Duane echoed. “Raise his serotonin levels. You’re familiar with serotonin?”

Karin stopped her hands from flying upward. She nodded, despite herself. She grabbed her elbows for balance and walked out of the room. On her way out the door, she heard the chairs shuffle and Tommy Rupp say, “Slow down there, bro. Chill. What do you want to say? One tap for yes, two for no…”

If anyone knew what had happened that night, those two did. But she refused to ask them in front of Mark. She left the hospital, drifting toward Woodland Park. Late afternoon, under a purple-brown sky. March had launched one of its false springs, the kind that got the whole town to lower its guard before slamming it with another arctic blast. Steam trails rose up from the dirty piles of snow. She cut through downtown Kearney, a business district hosed for as far into the future as anyone could see. Falling commodities prices, rising unemployment, aging population, youth flight, family farms selling out to agribusiness for dirt and change: geography had decided Mark’s fate long before his birth. Only the doomed stayed on to collect.