Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Daniel held up his half-empty plate, eyes averted from the Medusa. The contortion only confirmed her, made things sadder. When the girl left, he turned the full force of his will on Karin, desperate to show a decency even she would have to affirm.

“We need to tell Weber about Mark. We’re in new territory here.”

Karin nodded, but could not look at him. Everything old, new again.

Back at last in his corner of the globe,his aerie on the shores of Conscience Bay, Weber touched ground. Sylvie was stalwart, of course, truly indifferent to what anyone aside from their daughter thought of them. Public judgment meant no more to her than spam. As far as Sylvie was concerned, consensus was the delusion. “We can’t think clearly alone, let alone in groups of two or three. And you want me to trust the marketplace ? Let’s see what they say about you in twenty years.”

The fate of Famous Gerald concerned her less than the epidemic of corporate scandals: Enron, WorldCom — the mega-billion-dollar fraud of the month. She read him the latest outrages over breakfast.

“Leaping lizards, Man. Can you believe what’s happening? We’re living in the age of mass hypnotism. As long as we keep clapping our hands and believing, the captains of industry will take care of us.”

He was grateful for the distraction, her righteous anger at corporate deception. She was right not to humor his private jitters. And yet a part of him resented her indifference, resented being upstaged by corporate crooks. Resented that she temperamentally could not be shaken by the sudden, summary judgment against him.

He began to check his Amazon ratings, each time he logged online. Cavanaugh had shown him the feature, back in the good times. He wanted a reality check. Public reviewers had a vested professional interest; the private reader did not. But the private ratings were all over the map. One star: Who Does This Guy Think He Is? Five stars: Ignore the Naysayers; Gerald Weber Does It Again. The praise was worse than the poison. Responses multiplied, like the snakes writhing in his family’s basement in the one recurring nightmare of his childhood. Scores more, each time he looked. Somehow, when he wasn’t looking, private thought gave way to perpetual group ratings. The age of personal reflection was over. From now on, everything would be haggled out in public feedback brawls. Call-in radio, focus groups every time anyone moved. Leo Tolstoy: 4.1. Charles Darwin: 3.0.

And yet, every time he logged off, nauseated by the relentless assessments, he found himself immediately wanting to check again, to see if the next response might erase the last mindless dismissal. He compared his numbers to those of other writers he was lumped with. Was he alone in this backlash? Who was the moment’s darling? Which of his colleagues had also fallen? How did the public manage to bank and wheel in such perfect synchrony, as if on signal?

He’d done nothing this time that he hadn’t done at least twice before. Perhaps that was the problem: he’d failed the endless collective appetite for novelty. No one wanted to be reminded of bygone enthusiasms. He’d become an icon of a former decade. Now he’d have to pay for all his previous acclaim.

And that was the ugly irony. When he’d started out, back in his thirties, his evening writing had been for no one. Pure reflection, a letter to Sylvie. Words to little Jess, for when she grew up. Just a way to understand his field a little more humanely, with a few more connections, those soft speculations forbidden by empiricism, the stuff science was really after but didn’t dare admit. Just something to refresh his sensibilities each evening. The human brain musing on itself.

Only the enthusiasm of a few close friends to whom he’d shown excerpts convinced him there might be an audience for such essays. Public approval meant nothing, until he had it. Now the thought of losing his audience shamed him. What started as a sideline had grown defining, a definition that vanished the moment he accredited it. He was only fifty-five. Fifty-six. How would he fill the next twenty years? There was the lab, of course. But he’d been little more than an administrator there for a long time. The curse of successful science: senior researchers inevitably became chief fund-raisers. He could not spend the next two decades raising funds.

Most of neuroscience had been discovered since Weber began research. The knowledge base was doubling every decade. One might reasonably guess that everything knowable about brain function would be known by the time his current graduate students retired. Cognition was heading toward its prime collective achievement: grasping itself. What self-image would be left to us, in light of the full facts? The mind might not endure its self-discovery. Might never be ready to know. What would the race do, with full knowledge? What new creature would the human brain build, to take its place? Some new, more efficient structure, stripped of its ancient ballast…

He went for long walks around the mill pond, until he began running into pleasant neighbors. He took the boat out onto Conscience Bay. The dinghy had lain upside down in the yard for so long that an opossum was nesting under it. Befuddled by daylight, the creature hissed at him as he uncovered it. Out along the Neck, drifting with the tide, he felt the wind twist the boat at will. He had embarrassed his wife and daughter in public. He’d become a matter of easy mockery.

He’d done nothing wrong, committed no conscious deception or serious error. He could still point to thirty years of reputable research, a tiny corner of the species’ crowning enterprise. Only his attempt to popularize that science had somehow gone wrong. To his surprise, he realized how he felt: seedy , caught in some infidelity.

September came, that bleak, first anniversary. What did private setback matter in the shadow of that shared trauma? He tried to recall the public dread of the year before, turning on the radio to find the world blown away. The force was intact, though the details were gone. His memory was surely worsening. Even simple stuff: the names of graduate students. A tune he’d known since childhood. The opening words of the Declaration of Independence. He obsessed over retrieval, proving to himself there was nothing wrong, which only made the blocking worse. He didn’t tell Sylvie. She would have just scoffed. Nor did he mention the bouts of depression. She would only have made excuses for him. Perhaps something was wrong with his HPA system, something that might account for all this emotional oversteering. He thought of self-prescribing a low dosage of deprenyl, but principle and pride prevented him.

In the last days of the month, when even Bob Cavanaugh had given up on the book and stopped calling, a short story came out in The New Yorker , where Weber had sometimes published his own meditations. The author was a woman still in her mid-twenties, apparently well-known, and well beyond whatever came after hip. A two-page humorous vignette, “From the Files of Dr. Frontalobe” took the form of a series of first-person case histories as told by their examining neuroscientist. The woman who used her husband as a tea cozy. The man who awakened from a forty-year coma with the urge to believe his elected officials. The man who turned multiple-personality in order to use the HOV lane. Sylvie laughed at the piece. “It’s affectionate. And anyway, it’s not about you, Man.”

“Who is it about?”

She flared her nostrils. “It’s about people. Infinitely peculiar packages of walking symptoms. The whole lot of us.”

“It’s laughing at people with cognitive deficits?” He sounded ludicrous, even to himself. He would have suggested they take a vacation, except that they just had.