Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

What? I was just… what ? How was I supposed to know?

You told me you weren’t there, Mark says. You lied to me.

We weren’t there , they say, together. Rupp silences Cain with a look. He turns to Mark, begging. You had one in your truck. We were just…we’d just bought the things.

That was the game? Your little walkie-talkie speak? That was you? Goat-head?

You invented it, man. It made you laugh. We were just doing the CB thing, yakking at each other at a distance, when you…

Mark Schluter is a statue. Pure sandstone. You, too . You’re in on this whole thing. They start talking at once, trying to explain, clouding the facts. Mark puts his hands over his ears. Let me out. Stop this truck. Let me out right here.

Marker. Don’t be crazy, man. We’re two miles from Farview.

They argue, but he’s not listening. I’m walking. I’m out of this thing.

He gets violent, so finally they have to drop him. But for a long time they trail alongside him in the truck, at walking speed, trying to talk him back in. Trying, as always, to further confuse him, before the Chevy pulls off in an angry squeal.

They didn’t touch each other,the night of the restaurant fight. The next day, they talked in kind, obliging monosyllables. They slunk through the house, doing small favors for each other. All the next week, Daniel was self-effacing, patient, devoted, pretending they still inhabited that sunlit upland safe from their old nightmare. He acted as if she were the one who had slipped, and he, selfless, were forgiving her. She let him, encouraged him, even as it enraged her. That’s who she was.

Obviously, he had no idea what was best for him or what he needed. He had only that maddening mask of selflessness. She wanted to scream: Go, sample, taste. Find yourself. I know I’m not good enough; you tell me as much, in every patient acquiescence. Instead, she said nothing. The truth would only have incensed him. She understood him now. Saint Daniel: needing to transcend the rest of the race. Needing to prove that a human could be better than humans, could be as pure as an instinctive animal. But he needed her confirmation. Some part of her was willing to grant that he might be as good a man as she had any chance of meeting in this world. She loved his sad insistence that any bruise might be healed. But his glance of doubt, of vague disappointment, that constant looking for something a little more worthy and shining…Virtuous, sacrificial, long-suffering: and slowly choking her.

Her smallest suggestion that Daniel might be as frail as anyone threw him into a tailspin. Panicked, he worked to please her, labored for the relationship as if it were endangered. He cleaned and cooked, splurged on delicacies — morels and macadamias. He found her articles on Fregoli syndrome and indulged her every fear. At night, he rubbed her back with tiger balm, finally pressing her almost as hard as she asked.

She made love to him, imagining herself the woman whom he was imagining. Afterward, she was seized by frantic tenderness, a last-ditch effort to catch herself and fix them. “Daniel,” she whispered in his ear, in the dark. “Danny? Maybe we need to think about something small. Something new. Something a little of both of us.”

She touched his mouth and saw him smile in a sliver of moonlight. Ready to go almost anywhere she needed him. He spoke no objection aloud, but one, minute muscle in his upper lip was wrong, saying: No babies. No more humans. You see what they do.

She saw, at least, what he thought of her chances as a mother. Saw, at bottom, how he really imagined her.

At week’s end, Mark told her he was quitting therapy. The news blindsided her. She felt as she had at eight, the first time Cappy Schluter went bankrupt and the repossessors came to auction off their living room. Her last hope for rehabilitating Mark vanished. She pleaded with him, so drained from prolonged lack of sleep that she actually wept. Her tears bewildered Mark. But finally, he shook his head. “This is mental health? What we’re shooting for, here? Not for me, brother. Last thing I want is health that good.”

She drove out to Dedham Glen to consult Barbara. Months had passed since Mark’s stay, but Karin half-expected him to come shuffling down the hall, berating her. She sat on the plasticized couch across from the receptionist’s, primping anxiously, waiting for Barbara. When Barbara did walk by, her face clenched at the ambush. She had always told Karin to come to her for anything. Perhaps she’d been lying. But she rallied fast and managed a game smile. “Hey, friend! Is everything okay?”

They sat and talked in the community television room, surrounded by the dazed and incontinent. “I’m no lawyer,” Barbara told her. “I’m crazy even to think about advising you. I’m guessing you could force the issue, if you wanted. You’re his legal guardian now, right? But what good would that do you? Forced therapy isn’t likely to help. It would only convince Mark that you were persecuting him.”

“Maybe I am persecuting him. Just by not being who he thinks. Everything I do just makes him worse.”

Barbara covered Karin’s hand in the shell of hers. Her touch did more for Karin than Daniel’s. Yet even Barbara’s care kept its counsel. “It must feel that way, at times.”

“It feels that way always. How can I know the right thing to do, if I can’t trust how things feel?”

“You’ve written to Gerald Weber? That’s the right thing.”

Karin felt the urge to open completely to her, to tell Barbara the simple and defensible truth that she’d never felt so helpless in her life. But she knew enough about human brains now, damaged or otherwise, not even to think of going there. She needed a woman, someone to confirm her, to remind her of the worth of casual warmth, to save her from endless male dismissal. A girl’s crush. No, more: she loved this woman, for everything Barbara had done for them. But her first word would drive Barbara away. She listened to herself drop into a tone of pure invitation. “Do you have children, Barbara?” Ready, if rebuked, to deny all attempted intimacy.

Barbara’s “No” gave nothing away.

“But you are married?”

This time, no meant not anymore . Something in Karin leapt up at the admission, as if she might yet be able to give this woman something back. But she couldn’t be sure what she was allowed to ask. “You’re alone?”

Impulse broke across the woman’s face before she could suppress it. Someone isn’t? Her face softened. “Not really. I have this.” She shrugged, her upward palms taking in the television room. “I have my work.”

Karin snorted, before she could stop herself. She felt the real question she’d long needed to ask. “What do you get from this place?”

Barbara smiled. The Mona Lisa might have been a bouncing contestant on tell-all television, next to her. “Connection. Solidity. My…friends. New ones all the time.”

Her eyes said Mark . Karin flashed on something illicit, ready to suspect even Christian charity. If Barbara had been a man, the police would have been all over the situation. Mark, her friend ? Connection, with these patients, trapped in their own collapsing bodies, people who couldn’t hold a spoon or pick one up off the floor where it fell? One harsh thought opened onto another, and she slipped into resentment. Resentment that this woman wouldn’t give her a tenth of what she happily gave a brain-damaged man fifteen years younger than herself. Resentment that Barbara had Mark and she did not. The thought pinched shut her eyes and twisted her face. Resentment: the family name for need. Couldn’t this woman see how close the two of them were?