Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“You know what it’s laughing at. What comedy always laughs at. Whistling past the graveyard. Nobody wants to believe that we’re what you people are saying we are.”

“ Us people ?”

“You know who I mean. You brain guys.”

“And what exactly are we saying that no one wants to hear? We brain guys?”

“Oh, the works. Objects may be closer than they appear. Equipment may give unexpected results. No warranty written or implied. Everything you know is wrong.”

That night, he got another e-mail from Nebraska. It came in alongside messages from friends and colleagues who wanted, with all the deniable aggression of good humor, to rub his nose in the New Yorker piece. He skipped to Karin Schluter’s note, again remembering not yet having responded to her notes earlier that summer. The critics were right. Mark Schluter had stopped existing once he could do nothing more for Weber.

Karin’s news electrified him. Her brother believed that someone was following him, in a variety of disguises. Mark was assembling a list of documented details proving that his entire town of Farview had been replaced between the night of his accident and the day he came out of his coma, for the express purpose of misleading him.

Weber had just come across a case in the clinical literature, from Greece of all mythic places, describing coexistence of Capgras and Fregoli in a single patient. Something truly remarkable was happening to Mark Schluter. A new, systematic workup might shed light on mental processes that weren’t even poorly understood, processes that only this devastating deficit could reveal. All the things nobody wants to hear.

But even as this thought took form, he had another. Gerald Weber, neurological opportunist. Violator of privacy and sideshow exploiter. He could not decide which would be worse: to follow up these new complications or to let this repeat appeal drop. These people had asked for help, and he had entered their story. Then he had forgotten them. They were still in distress, still looking to him. His one prescription — cognitive behavioral therapy — seemed to be making things worse. Even if Weber could do nothing more, he was obliged at least to listen and attend.

Karin Schluter’s note made no overt requests. “I don’t mean to push again, especially after hearing nothing back since July. But I heard your Public Radio interview, and given what you said about the brain’s plasticity, I somehow thought you would at least want to know what’s happening to Mark.” He looked up from his screen, out his window, onto the ancient maple that — when? — had broken out in the color of a May goldfinch. Nebraska at harvest: the last place on earth he wanted to go. What was the word again, for unreasonable fear of rolling, empty spaces?

Only more writing could save him. One concentrated report, published or not. One that might redeem whatever he’d botched with the last one. Not a case history: a life. He could secure, in advance, the goodwill of everyone involved. He could re-create Mark Schluter, no composites, no pseudonyms, no glossed-over detail, no hiding behind the clinical. Just the story of invented shelter, the scared struggle to build a theory big enough for wetware to live in.

He told Sylvie, after dinner the next night, while he was washing dishes. The whole transaction thickened with déjà vu. But he never imagined the announcement would upset her. “Back to Nebraska! Are you serious? You couldn’t get home fast enough the last time.”

“Just for a couple of weeks or so.”

“Two weeks! I don’t understand this. It’s sounds like…a complete reversal.”

“I think Tour Director wants me to do this.”

She was hefting the clean glasses out of the strainer, wiping them slowly, and putting them away in all the wrong places. “You’d tell me if anything was happening to you, wouldn’t you?”

He killed the spray of hot water. “Happening? What do you mean?” What could still happen, in his life?

“Anything…Any big rearrangements. If anything was, you know, truly messing with you? Or with Famous Gerald. You’d tell me?”

Weeks now. He put down the sponge, took the dish towel from her hands, folded it neatly in half, and hung it lengthwise on the handle of the stove. “Of course. Always. Everything. You know that.” He crossed back to her, placed three fingers on her temporal lobe. A mind scan; a scout’s kiss. “It’s only when I tell you things that I understand them myself.”

They find their way back down from the arctic.The family of three now fly with scores of others. In mid-morning, with the sun cooking the air into wide, rising columns, the birds lift up a mile or more above the earth. They float in growing flocks, dropping to the next thermal to the south, where they rise again. They reach fifty miles an hour, make five hundred miles a day, with little beating of wings. In the evenings, they glide to the surface and roost in shallow, open waters remembered from previous years. They sail in over harvested fields, feathered dinosaurs bugling, a last great reminder of life before the self.

The fledged crane colt follows his parents back to a home he must learn to come from. He must see the loop once, to memorize its markers. This route is a tradition, a ritual that changes only slightly, passed down through generations. Even small ripples — left down that valley, on past that outcrop — are preserved. Something in their eyes must match symbols. But how it’s done, no person knows and no bird can say.

They wing back down across the western states. Each day graces them with a tailwind. In the first week of October, the family roosts on the eastern prairies of Colorado. After daybreak, as they graze the fields, waiting for the ground to heat and the air to rise, the space around the fledged crane colt explodes. His father is hit. He sees his parent sprayed across the nearby earth. Birds scream into the shattered air, their brain stems pumping panic. This chaos, too, lays down a permanent trace, remembered forever: open season .

When the world sets again from the rush of blood, the young bird locates his mother. He hears her calling, half a mile off, circling traumatized. They wait two more days, searching, sounding some ghost of the unison call. Nothing can tell them; no way they can know. There is only circling and calling, waiting, a kind of religion, for the dead one to show. When he doesn’t, there is only yesterday, last year, the sixty million years before that, the route itself, the blind, self-organizing return.

The sandhills do not gather in Nebraska now. The Platte hosts no great fall staging. The cranes stop only briefly, in small groups. The mother brings her fledgling through, priming him. She leads him within ten yards of the spot where, late last February, she and her mate huddled themselves, yards from where the truck flipped over. She wades in the flat of the autumn river, ready to meet her mate again back here in the river’s loops, in opened, animal time, the standing now, the map whose edges wrap back on themselves.

But her mate is not in this place, either. She grows jittery again, remembering that ancient incident, the trauma of last spring. Something bad once happened here, as loud and deadly as the new, fatal wrong. A kind of forecast, that grainy irritant in the widow crane’s mind is all that remains of what happened that night. All eyewitness accounts have disappeared into the present of animals. No one can say what a bird might have seen, what a bird might remember.