Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Exactly the result she was asking Weber to produce. Weber wavered, then gave in to saying, “But he’s someone else now.”

The consultation broke up with all three of them ruffled. Weber felt stymied. Daniel Riegel withdrew in dignified dismay. Karin was all over the emotional highway. She badly wanted the magic bullet, but couldn’t move without failing someone. Love me, and tell me I’m doing right . “If you’re sure it will lessen his symptoms,” she fished, but Weber would promise nothing. “I need to think about this. Weigh things.”

“Take all the time you need,” Weber told her. All the time in the world.

He called Sylvie, went out for dinner, showered, read, even wrote a little, although not well. When he checked his e-mail, there was already a letter from Daniel. He’d been frightened by information he found online, a site announcing, “Olanzapine is used to treat schizophrenia. It works by decreasing unusually high levels of brain activity.” The letter overflowed with links to malpractice sites, lists of known and suspected side effects of the drug. The note itself was infuriatingly careful. Did Weber know that olanzapine produced drastic changes in blood-sugar levels? A pending suit even claimed that olanzapine had “turned some people into diabetics.” Daniel disclaimed his own role in the decision-making. “But I’d like to help Karin make the right choice.”

The blessing of endless information: the Internet, democratizing even health care. Suppose we gave all pharmaceuticals an Amazon rating. The wisdom of crowds. Do away with experts altogether. Weber inhaled and began his reply. Here was precisely why the medical profession erected multiple barriers between its practitioners and their clients. A mistake, even to answer this e-mail. But he did, as caringly as possible. A debt to pay off. He was aware of the drug’s possible side effects, and he’d mentioned them at their meeting. His own daughter was a diabetic, and he had no desire to induce the condition in anyone. He didn’t want to suggest any course of action that Karin wasn’t completely comfortable with. Daniel was doing the right thing by informing her in every way possible. The decision was entirely Karin’s to make, but Weber stood ready to assist in any way possible. He copied the message to her.

He fell asleep to questions of his own, for which he had no higher appeal. What had triggered such continuous surprise in him, this sense of awakening from a long sham? Why had this case unsettled him and not the hundreds before it? Not since puberty had he so doubted his impulses. When would he feel discharged, paid up, ready again to trust himself? He had become a matter of intense clinical fascination, the subject of his own open experiment…

The next morning, he walked through town, searching for the diner where he’d breakfasted once, months before. The air was crisp and bracing, readying him for anything. Clear and unbroken, robin’s-egg blue to all four compass points, however far he walked. The buildings, houses, cars, grass, and tree trunks all shone forth, supersaturated. He might have been inside some Kodachrome harvest festival. Dirt and dried cornstalk in his nose: he couldn’t remember the last time he’d smelled anything so baldly. He felt as he had at seventeen, when, as a Dayton Chaminade senior, he’d set himself the task of writing one Persian-style ghazal a day. Back then, he knew he would become a poet. Now he filled with this sense of awful fraudulence, new lyric possibilities.

He’d let his critics convince him. Something had eroded, the core pleasure in his accomplishment. All three books now seemed uniformly shallow, vain, and self-serving. The braver Sylvie had been in the face of his unnerving, the more certain he was that he’d let her down, that she’d lost some basic faith in him and was too scared to admit it. Who knew how Karin Schluter must see him?

After much random turning, he stumbled upon the diner. Inescapable grid: no town for getting lost in. Ready to push through the door and challenge the waitress’s memory, he glanced up through the glass. Karin Schluter sat in a corner booth across from a man distinctly not Daniel Riegel. This man, in a thin teal tie and charcoal suit, looked as if he could buy the conservationist with the loose change that had fallen through his pocket into his jacket lining. The couple held hands across the breakfast-strewn table. Weber backed away from the door, turned, and kept walking. Perhaps she’d seen him. He turned and headed down the street. Over his shoulder, he glanced at the storefronts across the way: trim law offices, a dark, cluttered music shop with a cracked front window, a video store flying a white pennant whose festive letters read “Wednesday is Dollar Day.” Behind the bright aluminum siding and plastic signage poked bits of brick and corbels from the 1890s. The whole town lived in continuous retrograde amnesia.

No one could ask him to do more than he’d now done. He’d spent more time with Mark than any clinician could afford. He’d found the best available treatment. He’d made himself available to Karin, in her decision. He would not profit from the visit in any way. In fact, the whole trip had cost him considerable time and money. But he didn’t yet feel like leaving. He was not yet square with Mark. He walked back to the hotel, grabbed a breakfast-like-object from the buffet, got in the rental, and drove out to Farview.

In a field two miles out of town, he passed a boxy green brontosaur combine that was ravaging the rows of standing corn. The fields gained a stark, minimal beauty in dying. Nothing could ever sneak up on you, here in these blank horizons. The winters would be the hardest, of course. He should like to try a February here. Weeks of snow-crusted, subzero air, the winds pouring down from the Dakotas with nothing to slow them for hundreds of miles. He looked out over a grain-fringed rise at an old farm just one upgrade beyond sod house. He pictured himself in one of these gray-white clapboards, connected to humanity by no medium more advanced than radio. It seemed to him, as he drove, one of the last places left in the country where you would have to face down the contents of your own soul, stripped of all packaging.

A few years before, River Run Estates had been a single field of wheat or soy. And just decades before that, a dozen kinds of grasses for which Weber had no name. Twenty years on, twenty hundred, it would devolve into grasses again, no memory at all of this brief human interlude. Another car sat in Mark’s driveway; he guessed whose. Weber’s pulse shot up, surprised fight-or-flight. He checked his face in his rearview mirror: he looked like a bleached garden gnome. He arrived at the front door with no plausible reason, either professional or personal, but Mark opened as if expecting him. Weber saw her over Mark’s shoulder, seated at the kitchen table. She was smiling at him, sheepish, familiar. He still couldn’t say who she reminded him of. A first hint of awareness broke over him, and he ignored it. She welcomed him, an old confidant. He winced back, the guilty grin you use, clearing customs with contraband in your bag.

Mark shook him by the shoulders in dull delight. “So you’re both here, the last two people I can trust. That’s pretty interesting all by itself. Don’t you think that’s interesting? The only people still with me are the ones I’ve met since the accident. Come on in. Sit down. We were just going over possible plans. Ways to flush the guilty parties out of the underbrush.”

Barbara sucked in her cheeks and raised her eyebrows. “That wasn’t quite what we were talking about, Mark.”

Weber admired her deadpan. It seemed impossible that she’d never had children.

“Give or take,” Mark said. “Don’t bust me on a technicality.”