Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“So what were you talking about?” Weber asked Barbara. Exposed, off balance, drowning in the shallow end of the pool.

Her smile hinted at private communications. “I was just suggesting to young Mark here…”

“A.k.a. me…”

“…that it’s time for a new approach. If he wants to know what Karin wants…”

“She’s means the Pseudo-Sib—”

“If he wants to ‘get to the bottom of her,’ then the best plan is just to talk to her. Sit down and ask her everything. Who she thinks she is. Who she thinks he is. What she remembers about her past. Listen for any…”

“Kind of a sting operation, see? Draw her out. Really push the alibis and the briefings. Trip her up somewhere. Get something to pop out.”

“Mr. Schluter.”

Mark saluted. “Present and accounted for.”

“That’s hardly the spirit that we…”

“Hang on. All too exciting. I gotta pee. Seems like I have to pee all the time these days. Doc? How old do you need to be before you can reasonably be working on a prostate thing?” He didn’t wait for an answer.

Weber looked at Barbara, admiring. Her plan possessed a simple beauty, out of reach of neurological theory. No one — not the brain-as-computer people, not the Cartesians or neo-Cartesians, not the disguised revived behaviorists, not the pharmacologists or the functionalists or the Lesionnaires — none but some civilian would have suggested it. And it seemed no more destructive or helpless than anything science could come up with. It might accomplish nothing at all, and still be useful.

She avoided his eyes and murmured a question. He answered, “Mostly New York.”

She looked up, smiling in alarm. “I’m sorry! Did I say ‘Where?’ I meant ‘How?’”

“Oh,” he said. “Then the answer is, ‘Mostly shaky.’”

The words seemed to come from someone else. But they surprised him less than their instant comfort. Out from hiding, after months: he might say anything to her, this unlikely caretaker, this unreadable woman.

Barbara took his confession in stride. “Of course you’ve been. If you weren’t shaky, there’d be something wrong with you. Open season on you, right now.” Laying down her hand for him to see. A nurse’s aide, up on the latest New Yorker satire. But the most natural shared feeling imaginable. She looked up, the pupils of her hazel eyes as large as the spots on a masquerading moth. They knew him. “It’s all still about pecking order with humans, isn’t it? Even when the ranking is imaginary.”

“Not a contest I have much interest in.”

She reared back, that same look of amused skepticism she’d just given Mark. “Of course you have interest. This book is you. The hunters are circling. Nothing imaginary there. What are you going to do, roll over and die?”

The gentlest reprimand, a chide based on total loyalty. Utter confidence in him, but on what authority? An hour and a half of shared time, and reading his books. Yet she saw what Sylvie didn’t. The woman unsettled him; why? What was she doing reading book reviews? What was she doing here, at a former patient’s? Could these two be involved? The idea was mad. A private visit, months after Mark’s discharge: even less a part of her job description than of his. Yet here he was, too. She studied him, suspicious of his own hidden motives, and what answer could he give the return question? He stood and said nothing, ready to roll over and die.

Mark came out of the bathroom, still zipping. His head swung, as animated as Weber had ever seen him. “Okay, here’s the plan. Here’s what I’m going to do.”

His words sounded tinny and far away. Weber couldn’t make them out, over the nearer din. Barbara Gillespie’s face, that open oval, still regarded him, the simplest interrogation. His insides, airborne, answered for him.

The two of them ended up at a restaurant back in Kearney, one of those chains drawn up in Minneapolis or Atlanta and faxed around the nation. Historic, vanished America, reincarnated as comforting franchises. This one was supposed to be a silver mine from the 1880s, about four hundred miles out of place. But then, Weber had been to an identical one in Queens.

The ease of their conversation confused him. They spoke in the compressed, comic shorthand of people who’d known each other from childhood. Idioglossia, as shared as any. They picked at a deep-fat-fried onion, chatting without having to explain themselves. Of course they had Mark’s brain to talk about, a topic of inexhaustible interest to them both. “So how do you feel, personally, about his going on this medication?” Barbara’s voice gave away nothing, no hint of her own inclination.

Her interest in Mark nagged at him, indicting his own. Why should she be so intimate with the boy, when she shared even less with Mark than Weber did? He shook his head and combed his hand through the idea of his hair. “Hesitant, at best. I’m ordinarily conservative, when it comes to something so powerful. Every roll of the neurochemical dice is a bit of a crapshoot. Like trying to fix a ship in a bottle by shaking it. I’m not even a fan of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, before exhausting other possibilities.”

“Really? You must not suffer from depression.”

He was no longer sure. “Half the people who respond to them will respond to placebos. I’ve seen studies suggesting that fifteen minutes of exercise and twenty minutes of reading a day can do as much for depression as most popular medications.”

She blinked and tilted her head. “I read for three or four hours a day, and it doesn’t keep me particularly safe.”

A woman who read more than he did, who suffered her own dark bouts: he would have guessed neither fact. Now both seemed self-evident. “Yeah?” He twisted his mouth. “Try cutting back to twenty minutes.”

She grinned and flicked her forehead. “Yes, Doctor.”

“But this may be the right thing for him. The only path with any chance of helping.” Two different things, he knew. But he didn’t point out the difference.

She asked many questions, avid for the topic of Mark. Seamlessly, they drifted to Capgras, then reduplicative paramnesia, then inter-metamorphosis. She couldn’t get enough of anosagnosia: patients unable to see their symptoms, even when shown. “I can’t wrap my head around it. Do you think this man Ramachandran can be right? That there’s a little ‘devil’s advocate’ brain subsystem that goes on the blink?”

She’d read far more than just Weber’s books. And she was far too eager to talk about what she’d read. He listed hard, looking at her, ear almost on his shoulder, a gesture vaguely canine. He wanted to ask, So who are you, when you’re not yourself? He asked, “So how long have you been in nursing?”

She dipped her head. “I’m not really a nurse. You know that. I’m a nurse’s aide. A care attendant.” Furtive, she stole a fried ring from the onion bloom.

“And you never felt like getting licensed? You never thought of training as a therapist?” He began to form a theory: something had left her as panicked by the arena of public judgment as he was fast becoming. Another thing that linked them.

“Well, I haven’t been in the health business for very long.”

“What did you do before?”

Her eyes sparked. “Why do I feel like I’m the next case history?”

“I’m sorry. That was a bit pushy.”

“Oh, don’t apologize. I’m flattered, really. It’s been so long since anyone gave me the full interrogation.”

“I promise to quit prying.”

“No need. To tell the truth, it feels good to talk about…real things. I don’t get much chance…” Her eyes wandered off. He caught a glimpse of her, starved for any scrap of intellectual connection, here in a place where she had chosen exile, a place that distrusted intellect and resented words. Perhaps the only reason she responded to him.