Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Here we are. The hidey-hole. Catch and release,” Mark said. “Man with the most fish by 2:00 p.m. is the superior human being. Ready, set, go. Dude, you look like you’ve never baited a hook.”

“Only in self defense,” Weber said.

His father had taken him, every summer until he turned twelve — bluegill in a small stocked lake just over the Indiana line. His father told him the fish felt nothing, and he’d believed it, on no evidence at all. Nonsense; of course they felt pain. How could he not have seen it? He took Jess once, some nostalgic recreation, surf casting on Long Island’s South Fork, when she was still small. The expedition ended in disaster when she hooked a bass through the eye. He could still picture her, running up and down the beach, shrieking. That was the last time.

“Are you sure this is legal?” he asked Mark.

Mark just laughed. “I’ll take the rap for you, Shrink, if they bust us. I’ll keep your sheet clean.”

They fished from the shore, Mark cursing. “We should have stolen the damn boat from Rupp. It’s part mine, anyway. He’d probably shoot me in the back if I tried to take it now. Can you believe they lied to me? Whoever we were hunting together that night must have gotten to them. Turned them. Now I’ll never learn what went down.”

They fished deliberately, casting and reeling without conviction. Weber caught nothing. Mark enjoyed harassing him. “No wonder you’re wiping out. You cast like some girls’ sixteen-inch softball pitcher.”

Mark caught half a dozen midsized sunfish. Weber inspected the catch each time, before Mark threw it back. “Are you sure those are all different? I think you’re catching the same fish, again and again.”

“You must be shitting me! The first few were full of fight. This one’s completely limp. Nothing to do with one another.” Mark waded ankle deep in the water, shaking his head in amused disgust. “This look like any fish you know? You’ve finally lost it, Doc. Too much direct sunlight. Not good for someone in your line.” He stood like a heron, leaning forward, frozen in the reeds. He fished the way that Weber typed: in a distracted rapture. He’d needed to get Weber away from town, someplace slow enough to think and talk, without any danger of being overheard. “Why do you suppose they’re so worried about me, when I don’t know anything? This whole elaborate fantasy, just to keep me in the dark. Why not just kill me? They could have done that easily, in Intensive Care. Slipped into the room, switched off the machines. Pffft.”

“Maybe you know something that they want to find out.”

The idea stunned Mark. It stunned Weber more, to hear it come out of his mouth.

“That must be it,” Mark said. “Like the note says: kept alive, to bring back someone else. Do something with what I know. But I don’t fucking know what I know.”

“You know a lot,” Weber insisted. “About some things you know more than anyone else alive.”

Mark spun his neck, his eyes a barn owl’s. “I do?”

“You know what it means to be you. Now. Here.”

Mark looked back at the water, so defeated he couldn’t even rouse a rage. “Fuck if I do. I’m not even sure that this is here.”

He changed them both over to bass spinners, not in the hopes of catching anything on them in so small a pond, but for the simple pleasure of pulling them through the water. Weber marveled at his own ineptitude. Not just his failure to catch anything: his complete inability to sit still and enjoy himself. Wasting half a day, holding a stick with a string on it, while his whole career, all his professional duties, unraveled around him. But this was his professional duty now, his own self-selected job description. To sit still and watch, not some syndrome, but some improvising being . Without that, the reviewers were right and the rest of his life a lie.

Mark, meanwhile, had grown as placid as a bottom feeder. He tasted the air in large gulps. “You know, Shrink? I’ve been thinking. I think you and I might be related somehow. Aw, don’t give me that neurological look. You know what I’m saying, Sherlock. I’m just saying: collision paths, and all. Listen.” Mark dropped his voice, so none of the nearby chordates could pick him up. “You believe in guardian angels?”

It distressed Weber to remember: he had been the most devout of children. A kid who liked nothing better than to put on a white cassock and swing something brass and smoky. Even his parents had found him upsettingly spiritual. He’d considered it his personal responsibility, to tip the world toward ancient and reverent. His zeal for purity, some compulsive cleaning mania of the soul, had lasted, only mildly modified, all the way through adolescence, extending even to bouts of shame at failing to refrain from what he and his priest tacitly code-named susceptibility , the pleasure that diminished all grace, simply by being solitary. Even science had not wholly killed off his belief; his Jesuit teachers had kept faith and facts ingeniously harmonized. Then, in college, religion had died, overnight, unmarked and un-mourned, simply in his meeting Sylvie, whose boundless faith in human sufficiency led him to put away childish things. After that, his whole childhood seemed to have belonged to another person. Nothing to do with him. Nothing remained of that boy but the adult’s trust in the scalpel of science.

“No,” he answered. No angels but what selection left standing.

“No,” Mark echoed. “I didn’t figure. Me neither, until I got this note.” His face convulsed with thought. “You don’t think my sister could have written…? No, that’s insane. She’s like you. Realistic to a fault.”

They stood and watched the ripples of their lines race time to a standstill. Weber’s vision tunneled, tranced out on his lure. The air in all directions turned dark as the lake. He looked up into a ceiling of clouds like flour-flecked eggplant. Only then did he feel the drops of rain.

“Yep,” Mark confirmed. “T-storms. Saw it coming on the Weather Channel.”

“You saw this?” Water began to slap down all around them. “Then why on earth did you take us fishing?”

“Aw, come on. Grow up. Three-quarters of what they say on that show is paid for by some sponsor.”

Weber fluttered, but Mark would not be rushed getting the gear back into his tackle box. They made for the car, through pillars of falling water, Mark fatalistic, cackling strangely, and Weber running.

“What’s your hurry?” Mark yelled, above the pounding sluice. Lightning tore a seam in the sky, followed by so violent a crack that Mark fell back onto the ground. He sat there, laughing. “Knocked me on my literal ass!” Weber wavered between helping Mark up and saving his own life. He did neither, but stood in the middle of a grassy field, watching Mark struggle to his feet. Mark looked up, giggling into the torrent. “Try that again! I dare you!” The sky cracked open and he fell back to the ground.

By the time the two of them waded to the car, hail was pelting them. They slipped soaking into the front seat. A sheet of mothball stones blew up, slamming the rental hard enough to pockmark it.

Mark craned his head, gazing straight up through the windshield. “What do we still need, here? Locusts. Frogs. Firstborn.” He fell silent, inside the pounded gray cocoon. “Well, maybe we’ve had that one already.” The hail turned back to electrified rain, light enough to brave. Still, Weber did not start the car. At last Mark said, “So tell me something about yourself. When you were a kid or something. Doesn’t have to be the so-help-me-God or anything. Just a throwaway. Make it up if you want. How else am I supposed to know who you are?”