Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

She’d forgotten what he was like in these places, places the rest of the civilized world depended on. When the waitress brought his sliced cucumbers, he just slid them around the plate with his fork, quibbling with them.

“It doesn’t seem possible for him to suffer both conditions at once,” she said. “I mean, Capgras is about underidentifying. Fregoli sounds like the exact opposite.”

“K.? We probably want to be careful with the self-diagnosis.”

“Self…? What do you mean, ‘ self …’?”

“Lay person’s. You and I aren’t qualified to diagnose him. We need to go back to Good Samaritan.”

“To Hayes? He practically insulted me, the last time. Daniel, I have to say, I’m a little surprised. Since when have you defended organized medicine? I thought they were all faith healers. ‘Native Americans have forgotten more medicine than Western technology has yet discovered.’”

“Well, that’s basically true. But they didn’t have many car accidents, back when the First Nations discovered their medicine. If I knew a Native American with experience in closed-head trauma, I’d recommend him above anyone you’ve talked to.”

He didn’t mention Gerald Weber by name. He didn’t have to. Daniel had taken an irrational dislike to the man without having met him.

“I have to tell Dr. Weber,” Karin said. She meant she’d already written him.

“Do you?” Daniel grew blissfully calm. Like he was meditating.

“Well, he is one of the leading…” But then, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was just famous. Not quite the same thing. “I promised I’d let him know if Mark changed.” Daniel had changed; so had Mark’s friends. She herself had altered, more than any of them.

Daniel studied his fingertips. “Is there any downside to contacting him?”

“Aside from more humiliation and disappointment?”

The waitress came to ask how everything was. “Wonderful,” Daniel said, smiling.

After she left, Karin asked, “Did we go to school with her?”

Daniel grinned out the side of his mouth. “She’s a decade younger than us.”

“No way! You think?” They ate in silence. At last she said, “Daniel, I’m making him worse.”

He objected nobly; that was his job. But all the evidence was against him.

“Really. I think the strain of seeing me every day, of not being able to recognize — it’s breaking him apart. I haven’t been able to do much of anything for him. And now he’s getting new symptoms. It’s me. The sight of me is messing him up. I’m making him…”

Daniel trained his full calm on her, but his alpha state was wavering. “We don’t know what he would’ve been like, if you hadn’t been here all this time.”

“Your life certainly would have been simpler, wouldn’t it?”

He grinned again, as if she’d just cracked a joke. “Emptier.”

Empty as she felt. Empty as all her gestures turned out to be. She ran her fork through her bean curds, like a scythe. “You know the strangest part? He doesn’t think I’m her; and he’s never going to think I’m her. So if I just took off — stopped torturing him, got a job, started to work my way back out of debt — it wouldn’t be like she was abandoning him at all. His sister. He’d never hold it against me. He’d celebrate!”

She saw the flash in his eye before he could suppress it. She was spooking him. She would pull him down, too. She was doing to Daniel what Mark was doing to her. Soon she would be a stranger to him. Then to herself. Better for Daniel, too, her exit.

He shook his head, marvelously certain. “ He wouldn’t be the casualty.”

“What? Stay for myself?” The worst imaginable reason. The words pushed her a million miles away from him, off on an airless planet. “You’re preoccupied,” she said.

He shook his head, a little sadly.

“Y’are,” she accused, trying to clown. “I read in one of my brain books that women are ten times more sensitive at detecting another’s internal states than men.”

Daniel stopped badgering a split bell pepper and set down his fork. “But we’re talking about you,” he said. “About Mark…”

“I’d love to discuss something else for a while.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking…Strange days at the Crane Refuge. But I feel funny talking about anything so…while we’re facing…”

“Talk,” she said. And to her vague sense of betrayal, he did.

The Refuge, he told her, was heading for a shootout. For years, combined environmental groups had kept the river’s management honest by threatening to invoke the Endangered Species Act if demands on the Central Platte dropped the flow below levels needed to sustain wildlife. They’d surrendered that threat after the establishment of environmental accounts — guaranteed levels of flow set aside for wildlife by the three states that lived off the river.

But now the precarious scheme of water-rights trading was teetering. The system of winter recharge basins no longer accommodated all the groups that wanted to drink from the stream. In the most recent round of negotiations, the Refuge had alienated everybody but the cranes. “They’re coming after us from all sides. I was down by the river yesterday, just west of the old wagon bridge, cutting across the rise. I’ve been walking those fields since I was six. All of a sudden, this farmer comes down a row toward me. Jeans, big mud boots, work shirt, and a shotgun draped over his forearm like a tennis racket. He just rolls up to me, all smiles, and says, ‘You’re with the people trying to save those damn birds, aren’t you? You have any idea how much damage those birds do?’ I walk faster, to avoid trouble, and he starts shouting: ‘It took Americans hundreds of years to turn this swampland into beautiful farms. And you people want to turn it back into swamps again. Better get yourself some protection. Watch your back. It’s in your own best interests.’ Can you believe it? He actually threatened me!”

“I believe it,” she said. “I’ve been warning you for years.”

He giggled, the clicks of a squirrel. “ Watch my back? ”

“Not everyone here believes in putting birds ahead of people.”

“Those birds are the best thing this place has going. You’d think people would realize that. But no: all the local agreements that took us a decade to hammer out are breaking down. Kingsley Dam, relicensed for forty years. Insane! You should come work for us, K. We need a fighter. We need everyone we can get.”

“Yes,” she said, and almost meant it now.

“I’m telling you, greed has run amok. The Development Council, whoring itself for this new consortium of builders. They promised there wouldn’t be any new building. That’s what we’d fought for, and won. A freeze on large-scale development for ten years. They’re selling us out, like we’re the new Pawnee.”

“Consortium?” She stacked her tofu into pyramids on her plate. She knew who he meant, without his saying. And he knew her question, before she asked.

“A wolf pack of local wheelers and dealers. You wouldn’t happen to know…? You haven’t heard anything about this, have you?” He scanned her, his face uncertain.

“Nothing.” Karsh. “Should I have?”

He shrugged and shook his head, apologetic. “We know which developers are involved, but we don’t know what they’re after. They have their eye on some parcels of land for a new project. Some open tract, near the river. We blocked them two years ago. Snatched four dozen acres out from underneath them. They’re gearing up for war again, now that they know we’re broke. They’re convening the Development Council after the November elections.”

“What are they after?” She brushed at the tablecloth.