Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Maybe.” He rubbed his wide Baldwin face in his hand, amused by his own zeal. “But this new…development. It’s something different. This one’s a good thing, Karin.”

“And big,” she said, neutral.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard, but this is a beautiful project. I always wanted to do at least one thing in my life that would make you proud of me.”

She spun to face him. His words came out of nowhere, out of her own head, so wholly unearned that she teared up. She’d always dreamed that a few years of absence might make him like her more. She steadied herself with one arm, sucking air and pressing the other palm into an eye. Too much display: she had to stop. He placed his hand on her neck, and half a year of extinction lifted from her. Broad daylight. Not caring who saw. The old Robert Karsh could never have done that.

They sat still until her tears stopped and he removed his hand. “Miss you, Rabbit. Miss the side by side.” She didn’t reply. He mumbled something about maybe being able to get away for half an hour or something, next Tuesday night. She nodded, twitching like an awn of soft wheat on a windless day.

To make her proud of him . No one on the planet was who you thought he was. She got control of her face, staring down the street to the left. The town must look pretty different to you . She swung back toward him, a solid, sardonic look all prepared. But he was looking off at a clump of four office workers in their twenties, three of them women, heading back into the Municipal Building after their hour away.

“You probably have to get back to work,” she said.

He turned, grinned, and shook his boyish head. Her misguided mammal heart slammed again.

“Go,” she told him. The word sounded light, nonchalant. “Go ahead. You must be starving.”

“Maybe I will just…grab a little something?” She waved him away, dismissal, benediction. He needed something more. “Tuesday?”

She just looked at him, a minute tightening around her eyes: What do you think?

She said nothing to Daniel that evening. Not really deception; telling him — inviting the wrong conclusion — would have been deceptive. Even now, he was keen to prove that he could love her largest anxiety, remain as devoted to her as he was to the blameless birds. And she did love that core of his that didn’t know how to be tainted. Her brother — Mark before —had been right: Daniel was a tree. A decades-long trunk, tilting toward the sun. No victory or defeat, only constant bending. Every time she hurt him, he grew a little. That night, he seemed almost fully grown.

Over dinner — couscous with currants — the claustrophobia of recent days caught up with them. Daniel sat across from her at the old farmhouse table, his elbows on the oak, the steeple of his fingers pressed together against his lips. He threatened to disappear into reflection. He stood and stacked the dirty dishes. His quiet care as he took them to the sink betrayed the fact: she was defeating him. Breaking down his green ideals.

He placed the dishes in the basin and began to scrub them with a cup of lukewarm water. As always, when he did the dishes, he leaned his head on the cabinets protruding above the sink. Over years, the paint on the cabinet had worn away in a small oval, from the oils in his hair. She did love him.

“Daniel?” she asked. Almost like real small talk. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Yes? Tell me.” He still sounded ready to go anywhere. His old pagan Christianity: Do animals hold grudges? He was a good man, the kind of good man that only a truly insecure person could find contemptible.

“I’ve been a leech on you. A parasite, really.”

He spoke to the basin. “Not at all.”

“I have been. I’ve been so preoccupied with Mark. Out with him all the time. Afraid to get a job with real hours, in the event…in case…”

“Of course,” Daniel said.

“I need work. I’m making us both nuts.”

“Not at all.”

“I was thinking…that I could help,” she whispered. “If it were still available…the job that you talked about, at the Refuge?” She would die a fund raiser.

He set down the dish rag and faced her. His eyes bored into her, ready to shine. One offer of help and his wariness fell away. The worst no longer occurred to him, and the best seemed already half-confirmed. How badly he needed to believe in her. “If you just need money…”

“This wouldn’t be just money.” Not just water; not just air. Not, she told herself, just anything.

“Because we couldn’t pay much, right away. Tight times, at the moment.” He was so sure she would rise to what was best in her that she almost backed out. “But, man, do we need you right now.”

And shouldn’t need be enough? Something needed her more than Mark ever would. She studied Daniel for hints of unaffordable charity. Would he cook books, risk his professional standing, just to keep her straight? Could anyone trust anyone who trusted anyone so much? She held his eyes; he didn’t look away. He needed her absolutely, but not for herself. For something larger. Once, that had been all she’d ever wanted. She rose and crossed to where he stood. She kissed him. Sealed, then. What Mark wouldn’t take from her, she would give elsewhere. The Refuge would be amazed at her energies.

The following Tuesday, she met Robert Karsh again.

Four months on, and the placewas another country. The shin-high fields of green he’d driven through last June now waved gold and brown. Identical route from the Lincoln airport westward, in an interchangeable rental, yet everything around him had altered. Not just the simple turn of a season: more roll now, more tangled range, drumlins and pitches, rifts and concealed copses disturbing the perfect expanse of agribiz, surprise features where Weber had seen only the peak of emptiness. He’d missed everything, the first time through.

So why, in the final twenty miles before Kearney, did it feel so familiar? Like returning to the sealed summer house to retrieve some article of clothing mistakenly left behind. He needed no map, just drove from the exit ramp to the MotoRest on inner compass. The marquee out front still read “Welcome Crane Peepers,” already ready for next spring’s migration, now only four and a half months away.

He felt he was on a spiritual retreat, recharging his cells, wiping the slate clean. Signs in his room still asked him to spare a towel and save the earth. He did, and went to bed oddly tranquil. He woke refreshed. At the breakfast buffet — healthy midwestern spread, with three kinds of sausage — it struck him that his writing should never have become anything more than private meditation, a daily devotion for himself and a few friends. He could start again, with the extraordinary Mark Schluter. He had come back not so much to document Mark as to help his story forward into the total unknown. Neuroscience might finally be powerless to settle this desperately improvising mind. But he might help Mark improvise.

He followed Karin’s directions out to Farview, River Run Estates, on numbered roads as right-angled as rationality pretended to be. He found the house, in a subdivision cowering in the middle of an enormous harvested field, bounded on one side by the snaking line of cottonwoods and willows that declared the hidden river. He sat in his rental for a moment, gazing at the house: mail-order, springform, something that hadn’t been there yesterday and certainly wouldn’t be there tomorrow. Walking up to the wood-laminated door, he had the passing feeling, not of déjà vu, but of déjà ecrit, of a passage he’d written long before that was only now coming true.