Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Mark,” she said. She expected him to flinch apology. She’d been with Daniel that long.

“Right. I read about him in the Hub . Nightmare.”

In remarkably few words, they maneuvered to the bench in front of the war memorial. He sat next to her, in broad day, center of town. Caution to the wind. He kept asking if she wanted something — a sandwich, maybe something fancy. She kept shaking her head. “You eat,” she said. It would be a while before she ate again. He waved off the idea of food, insisting that this was even bigger than nutrition. He asked for details about Mark and sat still for a surprising amount of them, compared to the Robert Karsh of four years ago. He shook his head and said things like Twilight Zone or Invasion of the Body Snatchers . Crude, crass, banal. But words like home.

As easy as breathing, she unloaded. She told him everything, making her collapse seem almost comical. “He’s been my entire life for the last six months. But he’s decided I’m never going to be me again. And after half a year? He’s right.”

“Oh, you’re still you, let me tell you. A few new wrinkles, maybe.” Robert’s motto: The asshole of truth . The more brutally truthful, the better. He had ten times the self-knowledge Daniel had. He’d always almost relished admitting all the women he lusted after. I’m a man, Rabbit. We’re programmed to look. Everything worth looking at. Brutal truth was why she was sitting with him now, in the center of town, in front of the war memorial, in plain view of everyone.

His voice chilled her — the sound of time starting up again. His hair had the slightest rime of frost now, over his ears. His shirt stretched over his belt, rather than bunching. Otherwise unchanged: a slightly squashed, forgotten Baldwin brother, just a little too wide-faced to make it into the movies, and so, suppressed by the rest of the clan. Something nagged at her, some small difference. Maybe just a matter of pacing. He’d grown just two clicks slower, more open, peaceful. A touch of the acid, neutralized. Less slick, less aggressive, less self-satisfied. Or maybe he was just on his best behavior. Anyone could be anything, for an hour.

He took her elbow, like she was blind and he was helping her cross the street. She didn’t pull away. “Why did you take so long?”

The catch in his voice shocked her. “What do you mean?”

“To look me up?”

“I didn’t look you up, Robert. I was walking downtown. You found me.”

He grinned, warmed by her transparent lie. “You called me last spring.”

“Me? I don’t think so.” Then she remembered the curse of caller ID.

“Well, it was your brother’s number. But he was still in the hospital.” The smirk, more teasing than sadistic. “Somehow, I just assumed it was you.”

She closed her eyes. “I got your daughter. Ashley? I realized, the second I heard her…I’m sorry. Stupid. Wrong.” She recalled her mother’s words, the day before she died: Even mice don’t spring the same trap twice .

“Well,” he said. “I’ve seen worse crimes against humanity.” He pulled out a small black agenda from his coat pocket, flipping back to spring. He showed her the note, in his icy, clean handwriting: Rabbit, phone . Her brother’s pet name for her, from childhood. The name she never should have told Karsh. The name she thought she’d never hear herself called again. “I wish you’d stayed on the line. I might have helped.”

Not a sentiment the old Robert Karsh could even have faked. Their meeting might end here; she might never see him again and still feel vindicated, a thousand times better about herself than he’d last made her feel. “You’re helping now,” she said.

Robert returned the talk to Mark. The symptoms fascinated him, the prognosis depressed him, and the medical response outraged him. “Let me know when Dr. Author gets back. I’d like to run a few tests on him.”

She did not describe Barbara to Karsh. She didn’t want those two meeting, even in imagination. “Tell me about you,” she asked. “What have you been doing?”

He waved at the surrounding buildings. “All this! When were you through last? The town must look pretty different to you.”

The town looked like Brigadoon. The Land That Time Forgot. She tittered. “I was thinking that nothing has changed since Roosevelt. Teddy.”

He grimaced as if she’d kneed him. “You’re kidding, right?” He looked around, through three compass points, as if he himself might be hallucinating. “The fastest growing non-metro city in Nebraska. Maybe the eastern Plains!”

She swallowed her laughter into hiccups. “I’m sorry. Really…I have noticed a few new…things. Especially out near the interstate.”

“I can’t believe you. This place is undergoing a renaissance. Improvements under way everywhere.”

“Closing in on perfection, Bob-o.” The name slipped out of her. The one she’d sworn never to use again.

He looked ready to inflict full frontal assault, like the old days. Instead, he buffed his skull with his knuckles, a little hangdog. “You know, Rabbit? You were right about me. We built a lot of shit. Nothing substandard, but still. A lot of strip mall and cinder-block apartment complexes I have to atone for, come Judgment. Fortunately, most of it will blow away in the next high wind.” He hummed a high-pitched rendition of the tornado music from The Wizard of Oz . She laughed, despite herself. “But we’re different now. We’ve brought in two new partners, and we’re lots more ambitious.”

“Robert. Ambition was never your problem.”

“No, I mean good ambition. We were involved with the Arch!”

She hiccupped again. But he glowed with an Eagle Scout pride that stunned her. Inconceivable that she’d ever been afraid of this man. She’d simply mistaken him, never understood what he was really after.

“It took me a while to realize, but good conscience actually sells. You just have to teach people how to recognize their own best interests. We pushed through the paper recycling plant. Have you been out to see that? State of the art. I call it Mea Pulpa …”

She asked him about new projects. As soon as was safe, she fished. Something big and new, out near Farview? Bluntness was best with him. He didn’t try to hide; he never had. He stared at her question, his surprise threatening to become desire. “Where on earth did you hear that? You’re talking about a top-secret business deal there, missy!”

“Small town.” Why she’d spent her adult life trying to leave it. Why she’d never be able to.

He wanted to know how much she knew. But he refused to ask. Instead, he just gazed, a look as intimate as an arm around her waist. “Wait a minute. You haven’t been talking to the Druid again? How is the world of sacred ecoterrorism these days?”

“Don’t be spiteful, Bob-o.”

He beamed. “You’re right. Anyway, he and I are practically in the same business now. Building a better future. From each according to his abilities.”

She looked up at him, disgusted, delighted. The four blocks of downtown that she could see did feel somehow revived. Maybe Kearney really was resurrecting, back to its glory days of a hundred years earlier, when buoyant Gilded Age residents actually lobbied to move the capital from Washington to their miracle city at the nation’s center. That bubble had burst so badly it took Kearney a century to recover. But to hear Karsh go on about broadband, the access grid, satellite streams, and digital radio: geography was dead, and imagination was once again the only limit to growth.

Half an hour, and already she was thinking like him. She waved at a renovated bank across the street, big arm movements, like a magician’s assistant or an actress selling appliances on the Home Shopping Network. “Are you responsible for this one?”