Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“What are you talking about? Everything alive dances.” She laughed at his look of terror. “Just get out there and wiggle. Like you’re catching bugs.”

He was too spent to object. She towed him out to the middle of the dance floor, a tug pulling a wounded freighter. He scrambled along in her wake, looking for instructions, but none were forthcoming. Dancing in a bar with a woman he didn’t know: he felt queasy, the way he felt when going a day without work. But this was just simple, improvised, mutual shelter. The idea of anything illicit felt almost comical— assault with a dead weapon , he always joked with Sylvie. Weber and Barbara stirred and unfolded. All around them, people moved. Salsa and boogie. Box step and rhythmic stumble. Odd writhings to match the house band’s even odder Appalachian fiddling and thrashing guitars. Next to them, a younger couple stared at each other and vigorously kicked shit. Farther away, a Ponca descendant did a variation of the ground-stomp-and-scan, his partner soaring to full flight. Everywhere, knees kicking forward, shoulders flapping. The woman was right: everything alive shook itself under the pull of the moon.

She laughed at him. “You look great!”

He looked like a fool. A clumsy, autumn-honking fledgling. But his body pulsed with the beat of things. The music stopped, stranding them. Weber stood in a pool of shame, needing to fill the emptiness. “Do you suppose that Mark and his friends were dancing that night?”

She squinted at the possibility. “Bonnie said she wasn’t here. Not that there weren’t women involved. There certainly was drinking, as well as other substances. Mark has told me as much.”

The music started up again: heavy bluegrass metal. A wave came over Weber, light, omniscient. Even dancing felt too full to bear. “Come on,” he said. “We should go. Nothing to learn here.”

She felt it, too: he was sure of that. All the thrill of collapse. They might have been anyone, in any life, hiding from discovery. Her face, as unsteady as his, pretended to carelessness. She found the exit and they fell out of the cloud of smoke and noise into a star-filled sky. He felt the most improbable calm, the placidity of helplessness, and knew that she, too, had spilled into that silence with him. The air was dense and dry with harvest. His feet scuffed the gravel as he crossed toward the car. She grabbed his elbow, stopping him. “Shh. Listen!”

He heard it again, in the night’s version. Storms of insects, and the screeches of insect hunters. Now and then owls— Who cooks for you? Who looks for you? — and the antiphonal call of what could only be coyotes. Creatures, all of whom heard humans and knew them as just part of the wider network of sounds. Living things of every gauge for whom the roadside bar was just another mound in the continuous test of the landscape, just another swarming node in the biome to exploit.

She looked up at him, the loneliest woman he’d ever met, desperate for connection, for some proof that she hadn’t created this whole existence out of her own mind. He listened to the night, to the sound of her seclusion. But like Mark’s note-writing secret witness, he held dead still, hoping to be passed over. He broke from her questioning gaze and walked toward the car. By the time they reached the rental, he could no longer defend himself, even to himself, that easiest of audiences. Yes, he’d made himself return to right things with the Schluters, to square things with himself again. But here, in the sounds of the inhabited night, in the light graze of wind on his arm, in the look of this recluse woman, so burrowed outside life, he recognized the vanishing that he, too, was after.

Karin went to Karsh for advice.All of Daniel’s advice was clouded in morality. Medication, Daniel said, would cause more problems than it solved. But Daniel wasn’t Mark’s brother. Working for the cause was one thing. Sacrificing her blood relation to it was another.

She’d seen Karsh twice. Drinks, catch-up. Nothing criminal, nothing she couldn’t handle. She’d been pleasureless for so long that a few quick jolts barely reset the system. She got in touch, through his old secret e-mail alias. He suggested breakfast. “Kind of a switch, no? Post-game show, with no game.”

It used to madden her. All she wanted was to sit together, once, like civilized people, over a breakfast table, instead of slinking off like felons. She met him at Mary Ann’s, just down the street from his office. When she entered the diner, he jumped up and pecked her on the cheek. She flinched at the sudden move.

But just breakfast: she sat and ordered. The man’s mind was just what she needed, as brisk and brutal as an audit. She laid out Dr. Weber’s proposed medication. “Antipsychotic,” she whispered. Robert just nodded. She tried him on Daniel’s most frightening objections. “I’m afraid of leaving my brother doped up on mood-altering substances.”

Karsh shook his head and waved at their breakfast. “A cup of coffee is a mood-altering substance. A Spanish omelet. I seem to remember a little addiction of yours — that Swiss triangular chocolate? Don’t tell me a few tabs of that stuff never buzzed you.”

“This isn’t a chocolate bar, Robert. This is psychoactive.”

He shrugged and flapped his palms. “You’re behind the times, Rabbit. Half the people in the U.S. are on something psychoactive. Look around. See those people over there?” He waved somewhere between a table of four seniors in jogging suits and a family of Mennonites. “Almost even odds. Forty-five percent of America, on something behavior-modifying. Antianxieties. Antidepressants. Name your brew. Couldn’t function otherwise. The world is just too wired. I’m on a couple things myself, in fact.”

She looked at him, reeling. His fresh ease, that newfound comfort and humility: maybe just something he was taking. The softening of his features, the added layer of baby fat. All just chemical. But then, the brain itself was a wash of one mood-altering substance or another. So said every book she’d read since Mark’s accident. It sickened her. She wanted the real Karsh, not this tolerant philosopher, squidding all over the place. “But antipsychotic…”

He did this thing: his right hand perpetually checking his left wrist’s pulse. It used to make her nuts. Now it just scared her. Robert held his index finger in the air, turning preacher. “‘A gram is better than a damn.’”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t remember?” he gloated. “We had to read it in high school. You do remember high school, don’t you? Maybe you need some memory enhancers.”

“I remember taking you to the Sadie Hawkins Dance, and finding you out behind the levee, rooting around in that bitch Cricket Harkness like a truffle hound.”

“I thought we were talking literature here.”

“We were talking about my brother’s future.”

He bowed his head. “I’m sorry. Tell me what worries you. Best and worst cases.”

It felt good, just to be heard, without the perpetual, silent judgment. To smoke in front of a man — no hiding — felt even better. She told him all her fears for Mark: that he might hurt himself. That he might hurt someone else. That some new, uncanny symptom would crop up, leaving him one more step less human. That the medication might make him even less recognizable. “It’s tearing me up, Robert. I was packed and ready to go. And I couldn’t even do that. Mark is exactly right about me. I’m a stand-in. Look at my life. I’m a joke. One of those chameleon people. Nothing, at the core. Everybody’s girl Friday. He says I’m an impostor? He’s right. I’ve never done anything but go through the motions. Never wanted anything but what I thought someone else might want me to…”