Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“You’re…by yourself? No friends? You’re not married?”

She laughed. “The proper question these days is: ‘How many times?’”

“I’m sorry! Crass of me.”

“You say ‘sorry’ a lot. One might almost think you meant it. Anyway: twice. The first time was a twenty-something temporary insanity. No-fault. The second one left when I took too long deciding on the kid thing.”

“Hang on. He divorced you for not having children?”

“He needed an heir.”

“What was he, the king of England?”

“A lot of men are.”

He studied her face, needing neuroscience to immunize him against beauty. He saw her as she would look in her late seventies, plagued by Alzheimer’s and sitting vacant at an empty window. “And you didn’t want children?”

“About these neural subsystems,” she said. “Just how many of them are there? I’m getting a ramshackle, electoral-college feel.”

She was using him. And not even him , but just an available, crowded brain, something to bounce herself off of. “Ah! Politics. I should probably go home now.”

He didn’t go home. They sat talking until the waitress cut off their coffee refills. Even in the parking lot, leaning against his car in the leaf-crackling air, they kept talking. They returned to Mark, to retrograde amnesia, to whether the memory of that night was still inside, theoretically retrievable, if not by him.

“He talks about being at a bar,” Weber said. “Some roadside dance house.”

She smiled, the most solitary smile he’d ever seen. “Want to see the place?”

Only then did Weber see he’d been fishing.

“Call your wife first,” she instructed.

“How did you…?”

“Please. You’ve been with me all evening. I told you I’ve been married. I know the drill.”

So Weber stood in the parking lot, checking in with Sylvie for the night, while the unreadable woman walked in loops under a street-light fifty yards away, giving him privacy, hugging herself in her too-thin suede coat.

They took his rental to the Silver Bullet. When he started the engine, the radio roared to life — the classical station he’d found, coming in from Lincoln. He flicked it off. “Wait!” she told him. “Go back.”

He flipped it on again and nosed out of the parking lot, onto the deserted road. High unaccompanied voices wove through each other, borne up by a curtain of brass. Music from another planet, antiphony, a lost way of thought.

“My God,” she said. She sounded ill. He glanced over at her. In the darkness, her face was taut and her eyes wet. She held up an objecting palm and looked away. “Sorry.” Her voice was damp. “Listen to me! ‘Sorry.’ I sound like you. Sorry . It’s nothing. Don’t mind me.”

“Monteverdi,” he guessed. “Something you know?”

She shook her head, hard. “I’ve never heard anything like it.” She listened as if to an old crystal set broadcasting news of a foreign invasion. After half a chorus, she reached and turned off the radio. They drove out of town along dark country roads, in silence, Barbara navigating with only hand gestures. When she spoke again, her voice was casual. “This is the road. This is Mark’s stretch.”

He studied it, but could see nothing. Utterly featureless. They might have been anywhere between South Dakota and Oklahoma. They rode along in the autumn dark, the headlights just bright enough to push them ahead forever through total ignorance.

The dance house was deafening, music so loud it trampolined on his eardrums. “At least it’s not topless night,” Barbara yelled. “That’s the band that was playing the night of the accident. Mark’s favorite.”

He wanted to say that he knew all about the band, that he knew as much about Mark’s musical tastes as she did. It angered him, that her care for Mark was so spontaneous, while his was full of motives.

They found a booth in the corner. She went to the bar and brought back two pale beers in ribbed plastic cups. She leaned across the table and shouted into his ear, “‘You may ask yourself: How did I get here?’ ”

“How’s that?”

She looked at him, checking if he was serious. “Nothing. Talkin’ ’bout my generation.”

He spread his arms out in a fan. “Are these people all regulars?” She shrugged: Most of them . “Some of them were here, the night that Mark and his friends…?” The music swallowed his words.

She leaned into him, elbows on the table. “The police have talked to everyone. Nobody knows anything. Nobody ever does.”

They sat in the confined booth and drank, each periscoping the room. He measured her. Up close, her face was like some child’s, counting the days to its birthday. The woman’s inexplicable isolation disturbed him. Something had happened to seal her inside a pose, some bizarre collapse of confidence that left her eking out a life far beneath her ability. She had lost something of herself, or thrown it away, refusing to compete, declining to take part in that collective enterprise that every day grew more unstoppable. Could damage to the prefrontal cortex have turned her into a hermit? No damage necessary. He recognized her, her withdrawal. Something bound them together. Something more than the unthinkable weirdness of Capgras — the orphan in their shared custody — had estranged them both. She had been through a crisis much like the one that now eroded him.

She caught his eye, probing. She reached across the narrow booth and took his wrist. “So this is what you mean by ‘Mostly shaky’?”

Even as she held it, he could not control the palsied limb. His whole body: tremoring as if he’d just tried to lift something many times his own weight over his head.

She leaned in and lifted his chin. “Listen to me. They’re no one. They have no power over you.”

It took him a moment to identify them : the court of public opinion. “Clearly they do,” he said. More power over him than he had over himself. The human cortex had first evolved by way of navigating intricate social rank. Half of cognition, the chief selection pressure now in play: the herd in the head.

And shaped for it by the power of them , her brain read his. “What do you care about that monkey-troop stuff? Grooming and jockeying. Nothing matters but your own sense of work.”

All sense of his work was gone. Only the summary judgment remained. She tilted her head at him, searching. And at that one helpless gesture, the words flowed out of him. “That’s the problem. Everything the reviewers say is perfectly true. My work is highly suspect.”

Almost elating, to admit as much to this woman. She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “Why are you saying that?”

“I didn’t come out here to help the man. Not originally.” The music battered away; all around him, people were at work making other people. He could bear to look at nothing more complex than the foam on his beer. “Simple narcissism, to think I could help him in the first place. What more can I do but hand him some chemical shotgun—‘Here, take this, and let’s cross our fingers and hope for the best’?”

She stroked his knuckles with the back of her thumb, as if she had been doing it forever.

“What good is all the brain science in the world to him? Arrogance, really. A kind of charlatanism. What am I even doing out here?”

She kept a steady pressure on his fingers and said nothing. Her spine curved forward. Something in her shared his sense of deception, took it into her own body. Only her eyes assured him: empathy meant vertigo. She shook his wrist in the air. It had almost stopped quivering. “ Basta . Enough flagellation. Let’s dance.”

He shrank back against the back of the booth, stunned. “I don’t dance.”