Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

She walked past solid A-frames crumbling away to tar-paper shacks. She wove from Avenue E to Avenue I, between Thirty-first and Twenty-fifth, inside a life-sized photo album of her past. The house of the boy she first loved; the house of the boy she first failed to make love with. The house of her girlfriend of twenty years, who disowned her one day, six weeks after getting married: apparently something the new husband said. This was the town she’d tried three times to escape, each time recalled by perverse family disaster. Kearney had a head-stone all picked out for her, and her job was only to walk randomly around these graveyard streets until she stumbled upon it.

Before Joan Schluter died, she’d given her daughter a stiff cardboard photograph of Great-Grandfather Swanson standing in front of his crumbling house, that chapel to desolation, twenty-five miles northwest of what would become Kearney. The man in the picture held half of his library — either Pilgrim’s Progress or the Bible: the photo was too blurry to tell. On the mud wall of the soddie behind him, dangling from a stag’s antler, hung a gilded birdcage, purchased out east at great expense and dragged a thousand miles overland in an oxcart, taking up precious cargo space that might have stored tools or medicines. The birdcage was more urgent. The body could survive any isolation. Then there was the mind.

Now residents had a cage still more gilded: cheap broadband. The Internet had hit Nebraska like liquor hitting a Stone Age tribe — the godsend every sandhills homesteader descendant had been waiting for, the only way to survive such vacancy. Karin herself abused the Web daily, up in the Sioux metropole: travel sites, auction sites selling discounted but very serviceable clothes, fancy gift foods for winning over her workmates, and, once or twice, the occasional dating service. The Net: a last-ditch cure for prairie blindness. But her dabbling was nothing compared to Mark’s addiction. He and his friends manned two dozen online avatars between them, talking Pig Latin to chat-room housewives, posting long comments on conspiracy theory blogs, uploading questionable images to crazedpics.com. Half their after-plant hours consisted of building up experience points for fantasy characters in various alternate worlds. It panicked her, the number of hours he was willing to spend somewhere purely imaginary. Now he was locked in deeper space, a place where instant messages couldn’t reach. And everything she’d feared the Web might do to him now seemed like heaven.

She wandered around town long enough to outlast his friends’ click-impaired attention spans. The streetlights came on, on those streets that had lights. Now the blocks scrolled and repeated, the streets a simulation more predictable than one of Mark’s online games. She doubled back on Central toward the hospital, keen to get her brother back to herself again.

But Rupp and Cain were still there, kicked back in their hospital chairs. Mark was sitting up in bed. The three of them were playing catch with a wadded-up ball of paper. Mark’s throws were wild. Some went backward, hitting the wall behind him. He threw the way a sailor-suited chimp might ride a tricycle. But he was throwing. The resurrection froze her, Mark’s biggest leap since his truck left the road. Cain and Rupp lobbed him underhand bloopers, which he stabbed at, half a second late. The makeshift ball bounced off his chest, his face, his flailing hands. And every humiliating hit produced a sound that could only be the thickest laughter. She wanted to scream. She wanted to clap with joy.

In the hallway, as they left, she thanked her brother’s friends. What did it matter? The surviving part of her was beyond pride.

Rupp waved her off. “He’s still in there. Don’t worry. We’ll dig him out.”

She started to ask whether they’d been together, the night of the accident. But she didn’t want to jeopardize this brief alliance. She showed them the note. “Do you know anything about this?”

They both shrugged. “No idea.”

“It’s important,” she said. But they denied all knowledge.

Duane Cain, retreating crablike down the corridor, called back to her. “You wouldn’t know what happened to the Ram, by any chance?”

She stared at him, baffled. Old Testament sacrifices. Barnyard rituals.

“I mean: Was his truck totally totaled? We could, you know…We could look it over for you, if you want.”

The police questioned her again.She’d spoken to them the day after the accident but had no memory of the meeting. Later, when she was in better shape, they came back for details. Two officers kept her for forty minutes in a hospital conference room. They asked if she knew anything about her brother’s activities on the evening of the accident. Had he been with anyone? Had he spoken to her about any recent personal problems, any change at work, anything he might have been struggling with? Was he distressed or depressed?

The questions skidded inside her. Her brother trying to off himself — the idea was so crazy she couldn’t answer it. She’d lived fifteen feet away from Mark for more than half of her life. She knew his junior high school social studies grades, the brand of his underwear, his favorite color jujube, the middle name and perfume of every girl he’d ever craved. She could complete any sentence he spoke before it left his mouth. Even in jest, he’d never once mentioned wanting to die.

They asked if he’d been angry or aggressive in recent weeks. Not unusually so, she told them. They said he’d been at the Silver Bullet, a seedy bar on Route 183. She told them he went there often, after work. He was a controlled driver. He never drove unless he felt sober. The truck was his baby.

They wanted to know if he ever did anything more than drink. She told them no, and it felt just like the truth. She would have sworn to it in a court of law.

Did her brother recently make or receive any threats? Did he ever mention involvement in violent or dangerous activities?

It was winter. The roads were slick. Something like this happened every other week. Were they saying this wasn’t a simple accident?

They had calculated Mark’s velocity from his skid marks. As his truck left the road, he was braking from a top speed of eighty miles an hour.

The figure shook her. But she gave away nothing. She tried again: he was out in the middle of the night, driving too fast for conditions, and he lost the edge of the road.

He wasn’t alone, the police told her. There were three sets of tire tracks on the stretch of North Line where he lost control. As they reconstructed it, an eastbound light truck had veered over the center line into Mark’s lane, cutting him off before straightening out and leaving the scene. Mark, heading west, had veered in front of this skid, first hard to the right, then across the road, ending up flipped over in the left-hand ditch. A third vehicle, a midsized sedan also heading west, drove off the shoulder on the right-hand side of the road, its tailing distance apparently giving it barely enough time to shoulder safely.

The description unfolded in front of her, some weirdly cut, handheld-camera reality show. Somebody had lost control, right in front of Mark. He couldn’t slam on his brakes, because of the person behind him.

The investigating officers pointed out the odds against three vehicles converging by chance on an empty stretch of country road, after midnight on a weekday, at least one of them traveling at eighty miles an hour. They explained that Mark fell into a high-risk group: Nebraska small-town male under the age of thirty. They asked if her brother ever raced. Racing on deserted highways at night — one of the area’s occasional pastimes.

If they were racing, she asked, wouldn’t they all have been heading the same direction?