Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

There were more dangerous games, the police hinted. Could she tell them anything about his friends?

She said something vague about coworkers from IBP. A group of them, she claimed; a circle. She made Mark sound almost popular. Bizarre: she wanted even the police to think well of him. Even these men who wanted her to believe that someone had run her brother off the road. They didn’t care what happened to Mark. Mark was just a set of skids. Throughout the interview, she fingered the note hiding in her cloth shoulder bag. The note from Mark’s finder, the one who’d brought him back. I am No One …Could they charge her with suppressing evidence? But if she showed them, they would confiscate it, and she would lose her only talisman.

She asked who reported the accident. They said the accident was called in from a pay phone at the Mobil station just off the Kearney interstate exit, by a male of indeterminate age who refused to give a name.

The driver of one of the other two vehicles?

The cops couldn’t say, or wouldn’t. They thanked her as they let her go. They said she’d been very helpful. They said they were sorry for her brother, and wished him a speedy recovery.

So they can arrest him, she thought, smiling brightly and waving goodbye.

A rising comes that isn’t always death.A flight that doesn’t always end in breaking. He lies still through every imaginable light, the beams passing through him like he is water. He solidifies, but not all at once. He collects like salt when the sea evaporates. Flaking apart, even as he sets.

Now and then, a current floats him. Flings through his broken body. Mostly he falls back into accident. But sometimes a river lifts him, over the low gray hills, elsewhere.

His pieces still send and receive, but no longer to one another. Words trickle through his head. Less words than sounds. Goat head. Goat head. Just a clock ticking, no less than his heart. Sound spatters, like spilled oil. Goat head. Ram truck. Ram tough. Ram horn. Ghost ahead. Ram a ghost. Goat dead. Slam horn. Done. Breaking. Falling. Plunging under again, no bottom. Words click through his head, an endless freight. Sometimes he runs alongside, peering in. Sometimes these words peer out, finding him.

He is awake, or someplace near it. His body drifts on and off. Possible that he himself is here straight through. Only he doesn’t know it, when what his mind hooks to comes and goes.

Ideas hit him, or he hits them. A game always, scores pouring in, as standings change. Surrounded by people — seas of them — the crowd a huge, changing thought. He never knew himself. Every single human a separate line in a play so large and slow no one can hear it.

Time is just a yardstick for pain. And he’s got all the time in the world. Sometimes he jerks up, remembering, desperate to go, fix, undo. Mostly he lies still, signals of the disconnected world buzzing through him, a swarm of gnats he would catch and kill. They scatter when he reaches for them.

Something wonderful: he could count to anything, even all these swarms, just by adding one. Covering debts, bets. Hovering up by the highest number. In a lookout tower on a hill. People could do anything. They don’t know they’re gods, that they live through even death. People might make a hospital where they could keep every possible life alive. And then someday, life might return the favor.

A good kid once, the one he was in.

Little by little, there is no need. No falling, no rising. Just is.

People don’t have ideas. Ideas have everything.

Once he looks down and sees himself, his hand, throwing. So he has a hand, and the hand can catch. His body, formed through the flung ball. Knows repeats. Even without him, or anyone thinking so.

Something else he is supposed to remember. Something else to save someone. Desperate message. But maybe no more than this .

The health professionals descended on him.Increasingly, Karin got in the way, worthless as the therapists took over. But she stayed nearby, to help, where possible, bring her twenty-seven-year-old brother back from infancy. She opened up the possibility a crack, allowing herself to feel a hint of something that might in time become relief.

She wrote down the therapists’ routines, the relentless exercises. On page after perfect, empty page, she ordered Mark’s days. She noted the hour when he rose and put his feet on the floor. She described his first failed efforts to stand, grappled to the side of the bed. Looked at from up close, his eyebrows’ smallest spasm was a miracle. Her notebook was her punishment and her reward. Every word was like rebirth. Only Mark’s naked struggle kept her going. He would need these days replayed for him, months from now. And she would be ready.

The days of rehab drill numbed with crushing repetition. An orangutan would have started walking and talking, just to escape the torture. When Mark at last stood upright, Karin walked him in circles, first around the room, then around the nurses’ station, then around the floor. The tubes came off, untethering him. Together, in short, shuffling steps, they made a tiny solar system, orbits within orbits. Ungodly relief, a feeling she thought would never come again: just walking alongside him.

The windowed tube came out of his throat, leaving the passage open for words. Still, Mark didn’t talk. Karin copied his speech therapist, endlessly repeating: Ah. Oh. Oo. Muh muh muh. Tuh tuh tuh. Mark stared at her moving mouth, but wouldn’t imitate. He just lay in bed murmuring, an animal trapped under a bushel, afraid that the speaking creatures might silence it for good.

He alternated between docility and rage. Watching the therapists, she learned how to play each mood. She tried him out on television. Weeks before, he would have wallowed in it. But something about the quick cuts, flashing lights, and riotous soundtracks made him whimper until she shut it off.

One evening, she asked if he’d like her to read to him. He groaned a sound that wasn’t no . She started on an old issue of People ; he didn’t seem to mind. The next morning, she picked through The Second Story, the used book store on Twenty-fifth, until she found what she was after. The Boxcar Children. Surprise Island, Mystery Ranch , and Caboose Mystery : three of the original nineteen, volumes that floated through resale the way those orphaned children floated through their adult-damaged world. She stood in the store’s moldy stacks, flipping through the used inside covers until she found one with a shaky, imperious “M. S.” The curse of small-town life on a shallow river: your most prized possessions always turned up again, eternally resold.

She sat and read to him for hours. She read out loud until the visitors on the other side of the sliding curtain began to curse her under their breath. Reading calmed him, especially at night, when he slipped downward, back into the accident. As she read, his face struggled with the mystery of forgotten places. Sometimes, halfway through a sentence, she’d hit a word— button, pillow, Violet —that caused Mark to struggle up, trying to speak. She stopped calling the nurses. They only sedated him.

Years had passed since she’d read aloud. She mangled sentences and mispronounced words. Mark listened, his eyes like half-dollars, as if words were a new life form. Surely their mother must have read to them, in childhood. But Karin could form no image of Joan Schluter reading anything but advance accounts of End Time, even then, already breaking out all over.

Joan had gotten her first real glimpse of End Time at last, eighteen months earlier. Karin had kept a bedside vigil then, too, the opposite of this one. Their mother was struck by an eleventh-hour burst of words, all the words avoided in years of child rearing. Babe? Swear to me that if I start repeating myself, you’ll put me out of my misery. Hemlock in my prune juice.