Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Scalding water streamed over his neck and down his chest. He felt his shoulders relax, but he did not place too much faith in the feeling. The cortex’s body maps were fluid at best, and easily dismantled. He could alarm any undergraduate by having her slide her arms into two boxes with a window in the end of the right one. The student’s hand appeared in the window. Only: the hand in the window wasn’t her right one, but a cleverly superimposed reflection of her left. Asked to flex her right hand, the student saw, through the window, a hand that wouldn’t move. Instead of reaching the only logical conclusion — a trick of mirrors — the student would almost always feel a surge of terror, believing her hand to be somehow paralyzed.

Worse still: a subject who watched a rubber hand being stroked in synchrony with his own hidden hand would continue to feel the strokes, even when the stroking of his real hand stopped. The dummy hand didn’t even have to be lifelike, or even a hand. It could be a cardboard box or the corner of a table, and still the brain would absorb it as part of its body. A subject with a dowel strapped to the tip of one finger would gradually incorporate the dowel into his body image, extending his sense of finger inches too far.

The smallest warping could distort the map. Each fall, Weber asked his lecture full of undergrads to roll their tongue tips upside down, then run a pencil from the right to the left across their tongue’s bottom, now uppermost in their mouths. Every subject felt the pencil as if from underneath, running from left to right. He made other students don prismatic glasses until they normalized the image of an inverted world. When they removed the glasses and looked out again with their unaided eyes, the real, unfiltered landscape now presented itself, upside down.

Soapy rivulets ran over the apron of his belly and down his knobby legs. They reminded him of Jeffrey L., a man whose spine was crushed in a motorcycle accident. The wreck had sprawled Jeffrey upside down on an embankment, with his legs in the air, at the moment that his spinal cord was severed. He lost all use of his body below his neck, and should have lost all feeling as well. But Jeffrey still felt his inverted body, his feet hovering forever above his head. Another of Weber’s patients, Rita V., had been sitting with her wrists crossed when thrown from a horse. Ever afterward she lived in agony, wanting only to straighten her arms, which, in fact, lay perpetually extended at her sides. Still other quadriplegics reported no bodily sensation at all, simply the sense of existing as a floating head.

More disconcerting still were the phantom limbs. Nothing worse than excruciating pain in a limb that no longer existed, pain dismissed by the rest of the world as purely imaginary— all in your head —as if there were another kind. A person could suffer persistent tenderness in any removed part — lips, nose, ears, and especially breasts. One man continued to experience erections in his amputated penis. Another told Weber that he now enjoyed vastly intensified orgasms that reverberated through his missing foot.

Then there were the border wars, the brain maps of the amputated part invaded by nearby maps. Somewhere — God only knew in which book — Weber described discovering a largely intact and responsive hand blossoming across the face of an amputee, Lionel D. Touched high up on the cheekbone, Lionel felt it in his missing thumb. Grazed on the chin, he felt it in his pinkie. Splashing his face with water, he felt liquid trickle down his vanished hand.

Weber shut off the shower and closed his eyes. For a few more seconds, warm tributaries continued to stream down his back. Even the intact body was itself a phantom, rigged up by neurons as a ready scaffold. The body was the only home we had, and even it was more a postcard than a place. We did not live in muscles and joints and sinews; we lived in the thought and image and memory of them. No direct sensation, only rumors and unreliable reports. Weber’s tinnitus — just an auditory map, rearranged to produce phantom sounds in an undamaged ear. He would end up like one of his stroke patients, an extra left arm, three necks, a candelabrum full of fingers, each discreetly sensed, hiding under a hospital blanket.

And yet the ghost was real. People with lost feet, asked to tap their toes, lit up that part of their motor cortex responsible for walking. Even the motor cortex of intact people flashed, when they simply imagined walking. Seeing himself running from something, Weber felt his pulse shoot up, even as he stood immobile in the tub. Sensing and moving, imagining and doing: phantoms bleeding, one into the other. He could not, for a moment, decide which was worse: to be sealed in a solid room, thinking yourself outside; or to be freed to pass through the porous walls, into the protean blue…

Without reaching for a towel, he flipped off the bathroom light and moved back toward the dimly lit bed. He sat dripping on an upholstered chair. He had humiliated himself abroad. Back home, hundreds of subjects awaited him, real people he’d used as mere thought experiments. Every one of them throbbed in him and could not be cut out. The world had no place left, real or imagined, where he might put down.

She found a description online, at Mark’s house,in something called The People’s Free Encyclopedia . The site looked reputable, with footnotes and citations, but assembled in public, by community vote, leaving her as uncertain as ever.

FREGOLI SYNDROME: one of a rare group of delusional misidentification syndromes in which the sufferer is convinced that several different people are in fact all a single person of changing appearance. The syndrome takes its name from Leopoldo Fregoli (1867–1936), an Italian stage magician and mimic whose lightning ability to change his face and voice into any character astonished audiences…

Like Capgras Syndrome, Fregoli involves some disruption of the ability to categorize faces. Some researchers suggest that all misidentification delusions may exist along a spectrum of familiar anomalies shared by ordinary, nonpathological consciousness…

She told Daniel, over Chinese dinner. She’d pushed him into a night out, needing to escape his monk’s cell and talk in public. She’d dressed up, even used scent. But she’d forgotten about the logistical problems, which started as soon as Daniel got the menu. Daniel dining out: like a Calvinist minister at a rave. He wagged his head, whistling. “Eight dollars for a plate of beef and broccoli? Can you imagine, K.?”

The entrée was the restaurant’s loss leader. She battened down and waited.

“Eight dollars is a lot of money to the Crane Refuge.”

With matching grants and good management, they could buy and retire a square inch of marginal farmland. The waitress came to tell them the specials. The list of slaughtered fish, flesh, and fowl crucified Daniel.

“This ‘Chinese eggplant,’” he asked the blameless woman. “Would you know, offhand, how that’s prepared?”

“Vegetarian,” the waitress assured him, like the menu said.

“But is the eggplant fried in butter? Do they use milk fat in the preparation?”

“I could find out?” the waitress bleated.

“Would it be possible just to get a plateful of sliced vegetables? Raw carrots, cucumbers? That sort of thing?”

Karin had been crazy to suggest the outing, and he’d been crazy to agree. The beef and broccoli sounded like a dream, a cure to her growing whole-foods anemia. Weeks of living with Daniel had left her wasted. She peeked at him, the waitress hovering. His face was placid, like something being led up a ramp to the waiting stun gun. She ordered the tofu and bean threads.