Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

The man who opened the door to Weber was some foreigner. All Mark’s scars had healed and his hair had grown out. He stood like a fledgling god, somewhere between Loki and Bacchus. He seemed only mildly surprised to see Weber.

“Shrinky! Am I glad it’s you. Where the hell have you been? You won’t believe what’s been going on around here.” He scouted the yard behind Weber before ushering him in. He shut the door and leaned against it, excited. “Before I say anything: What have you heard?”

All clinical interviews should take place in the subject’s home. Weber learned more about Mark in five minutes in his living room than in all their previous encounters. Mark sat him in the overstuffed chair and brought him a bottle of Mexican beer with some honey-roasted peanuts. He shushed Weber and went to root around in the bedroom. He returned with a pad of paper and a pen. He gestured to Weber to start his recorder, the two of them old collaborators. “Okay, let’s tackle this thing, once and for all.”

Mark was remarkably animated, spinning a story that smoothed out all the breaks. He raced through the answers before Weber even asked the questions. He traced a single, clean line of thought: all his friends were conspiring to hide what had happened that night. Cain and Rupp knew; they’d been talking to him on the walkie-talkie just as he flipped over. But they’d lied to him about it. His sister knew, so she’d been replaced, to keep her from telling. Like the guardian note-writer, she was probably locked up somewhere. Daniel Riegel was somehow trailing him, for reasons unknown. “Like I’m some creature or something. He’s a big tracker, you know. He can find wild things invisible to the naked eye. Things you and I don’t even know are there.”

Your fake sister’s boyfriend following you around in disguise: Freud might do more than the MRI. Surely the phenomenon had to be something more than a dissociation between ventral and dorsal recognition pathways. But what did psychological mean anymore, except a process that did not yet have a known neurobiological substrate? Weber made no theories about Mark’s new belief. His job now was just to help this new mental state adjust to itself. He would never again leave himself open to charges of failed compassion. He would let Mark write the book.

What did it feel like to be Mark Schluter? To live in this town, work in a slaughterhouse, then have the world fracture from one moment to the next. The raw chaos, the absolute bewilderment of the Capgras state twisted Weber’s gut. To see the person closest to you in this world, and feel nothing. But that was the astonishment: nothing inside Mark felt changed. Improvising consciousness saw to that. Mark still felt familiar; only the world had gone strange. He needed his delusions, in order to close that gap. The self’s whole end was self-continuation.

Mark, at least, was still himself — more than Gerald Weber could claim. Method-acting, Weber tried to inhabit the man who sat in front of him, weaving theories. Weber might more easily have channeled Karin, her frightened research, her desperate, self-effacing e-mails. How could he inhabit Mark Schluter, the oblivious Capgras sufferer, when he couldn’t even inhabit Mark Schluter, the healthy truck customizer and slaughterhouse technician? He could no longer even imagine what it felt like to be Gerald Weber, that confident researcher from last spring…

“Everyone born around here is in on the cover-up. You and Barbie Doll are the last two people I can trust.”

What did Mark suppose was being covered up? Worse: What made him think he could trust Weber? As a rule, Weber never humored patients’ delusions. Yet he humored everyone else, every day of the week. The Pakistani cabbie on the way to LaGuardia, with his theories about Al Qaeda links to the White House. The security agent at the airport, making him remove his belt and shoes. The woman in the plane seat next to him who grabbed his arm at takeoff, sure the cabin would explode at fifteen hundred feet. Humoring Mark was status quo.

“So I was apparently talking to the guys on these communicators. Them in Rupp’s truck, me in mine. We were on to something, chasing. And one of us had to be stopped. Funny thing? This woman playing Karin? She kept hinting those two were there, and I didn’t listen.”

Something had happened to Mark, the night of his accident. And his friends had lied to him. Weber himself couldn’t account for the guardian’s note or interpret the swerving sets of tire tracks. His own explanation for why the world now felt different to Mark wasn’t even partially satisfying. Mark had been thinking about his internal state longer and deeper than anyone. Weber could afford to humor his theories. Maybe humoring was empathy by another name.

Slumping on his couch with his shoulder on the armrest and a throw pillow between his knees, Mark launched his best hypothesis. He leaned toward a secret biological project. “Experimental breakthrough. Like the kind of thing my father was always trying to hit on. But big, on the scale only the government could swing. And it’s got to do with birds. Otherwise, why would Birdman Danny be after me?”

For that, too, Weber had no explanation.

“The whole thing must be pretty hush-hush. Otherwise, we’d have heard about it, right? So here’s what I’m thinking. All this stuff started the minute I came out of the hospital. They did something to me when I was under the knife. Okay, so K2 says I wasn’t ‘under the knife,’ in so many words. But I had a bolt coming out the head, right? A little spigot? They could inject crap, draw it out. I could be dreaming this whole situation, right now. They could have implanted this whole meeting with you, right into my cere-beanie.”

“Then they injected me, too. Because I am convinced that I’m here, too.”

Mark squinted at Weber. “Really? Are you saying…? Wait a minute. Get the hell out of here! It doesn’t mean that at all.”

He scribbled on his notepad. He leaned back on the sofa and put his feet up on the coffee table, staring across the room. He jerked up, raising his arm and pointing his shaking finger. He stood unsteadily and walked over to his computer. He tapped his monitor repeatedly with his index-finger nail. “It never occurred to me. Simply never dawned…You think it’s possible that the last several months of Mark Schluter’s life have been programmed in a government machine?”

Weber could not say that it wasn’t possible.

“That would go a long way toward explaining why I feel like I’ve been living in a video game. One where I can’t beat the level and advance to the next.”

Weber suggested they go outside and stroll down toward the river. A little nervously, Mark agreed. The brisk air worked on Mark. The longer they talked, the more adamant Mark became. It struck Weber that maybe he’d been helping the man create this illness. Iatrogenic. Collaboration between doctor and patient.

“So I’m on the walkie-talkie to my buds. We’re communicating, we’re chasing this thing down. All of a sudden, I see something on the road. I flip the truck. So the question is: What did I see? What was out there in the middle of the road that night? There just aren’t too many choices.”

Weber conceded the point.

“Someone who wasn’t supposed to be out there. I’m not saying terrorists, necessarily. Could be working for either side.”

They walked back along a dusty gravel road through two walls of russet corn days away from harvesting. Autumn, the season that always crippled Weber with anticipation. The cool, dry, alerting breeze got to Weber as it hadn’t for years. His pulse quickened, tricked by the perfect day into thinking something was about to happen. At his side, Mark walked, grim and resigned. His stride no longer showed any injury.