Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

So that’s three strikes, and by the rules of the game, he’s out of there. Only, Mark is still in the thick of shit. He’s looking at real unemployment. The whole thing is a life-and-death video game, on a countdown timer to detonation. He’s got until the anniversary of his accident to figure out what they did to him on the operating table. His one hope is to find his finder, the note-writer, his guardian angel, the only one who knows everything.

A plan comes to Mark, something he should have thought of a while ago. Would have, too, if it hadn’t been for all the craziness around these parts. Simple enough, and the beauty of the plan lies in how it forces the hand of the authorities. He’ll go public. He’ll put the note on Crime Solvers . Everybody in four counties will see the plastic-laminated thing pressed up against their TV screens. I am No One, but Tonight on North Line Road …If any real, unbrainwashed people who know what happened that night are left alive, they’ll have to come forward. And if the Powers That Be try to snag and silence them, all of central Nebraska will know.

A year ago, he’d never have considered stooping so low. The show is just too pathetic: the worst kind of local television brain-scrambler. A female reporter and a male policeman run all over the Big Bend region, pretending to be interested in everybody’s so-called unsolved mysteries, while all they really want to do, obviously, is run off into the wheat fields somewhere off camera and drill each other silly. And the tangled, baffling cases they go after? Three-quarters of them are clueless women bleating about how they haven’t seen their husbands for weeks. Lady, have you tried your teenage Mexican housekeeper’s apartment? Once in a blue moon they show some interesting stuff, like the two applicator tanks full of anhydrous ammonia stolen off a siding in Holdrege that turned up in this big old subterranean meth facility in Hartwell. Or the Prairie Bigfoot, this sasquatch thing spotted at night rooting through people’s trash barrels in North Platte, and subsequently reported all over the place from Ogallala to Litchfield, which turned out to be this telco wire guy’s illegal escaped pet sun bear: one very confused creature, whacked out by a few hundred hysterical, hallucinating humans.

But Crime Solvers is his last hope. He does a phone interview with their “story hunter,” also known as unpaid student intern. They’re interested, and they send the famous Tracey Barr over in person, along with a camera guy, to film him. The Homestar, on the idiot box. Or at least the fake Homestar. Tracey Barr herself, in his living room. He wants to call the guys, get them over to gawk, maybe even get them on camera. Then he remembers he can’t really call the guys anymore.

The statuesque Miss Barr is a bit older and not quite as sexual in person. Not as sexual, shall we say, as a certain Bonita Baby, in her homestead garb. Nevertheless, Tracey — she asks him to call her Tracey, believe it or don’t — is impressive, in a kind of black tube skirt and backward ruby blouse kind of way. Fortunately, Mark remembers to dress up, too: his fancy green long-sleeve Izod. Present from Bonnie Before.

Tracey wants the whole story. Of course, Mark Schluter doesn’t have the whole story. That’s the point of dragging in the Grime Patrol in the first place. And he’s learned that when he does tell everything he knows, people go weird on him. He doesn’t want to trip any more mines than he has to. The less the station knows about the big picture, the better. He gives her the basic package: accident, tire tracks, hospital, sealed ICU, and the note on the bedside table, waiting for him when he comes back to himself weeks later. She eats it up. They film all over the yard and house: Mark alone, gazing off into fields. Mark with photo of truck. Mark with Blackie Two, because who’s going to know the difference? Mark holding note, showing note to Tracey. Tracey reading note out loud. And most important: full-screen closeup of note, so everyone at home can see the handwriting and read every word.

Tracey drags him out to North Line, to film him at the scene of the crime. They’re joined by this week’s Cop on the Case, Sergeant Ron Fagan, who, it turns out, knows Karin from high school, perhaps even in the Old Testament sense. He keeps asking Mark about his sister. Like “the police” don’t know about the switch. How’s that sister of yours? She’s real nice. She still in town? She dating anyone? Quite creepy: this big guy in a uniform, probing to see how much Mark suspects. Mark ducks the questions without, he hopes, getting in any deeper than he’s already in.

But Officer Fagan is masterful with Tracey, going on about the accident-scene evidence: the tracks that cut Mark off and the ones that ran off the road behind him. You mean like a squeeze? Tracey asks. And with a straight face, the cop says he doesn’t want to leap to conclusions. Leap, after almost a year. Says they have no match on the treads, no leads on the vehicles…

Unfortunately, he also mentions the speed Mark was going when he flipped. It’s a figure that isn’t going to endear him to any potentially watching guardians. Mark had no idea he’d been going so fast. It dawns on him that the car behind him must have been pursuing. He was evading, and he blasted right into the ambush.

They set up the accident-scene camera at the wrong spot. Right road, wrong stretch. Mark objects, but they blow him off. They claim the backdrop looks better here; more picturesque or something. The cop waves his hands like a conductor, pointing out what happened where, but it’s all wrong. All fake. Mark tells them, maybe a little too loud. Tracey commands him to shut up. He yells back: How the hell is the person who found him going to recognize the place and come forward, if the show doesn’t even show the right spot?

Well, they all look at him like he’s just escaped from Floor Five. But they relocate to the real spot, rather than push it. They film him walking along his little stretch, which is nuts when you think about it, since he wasn’t exactly in walking shape that night. But hey: Hollywood. It’s mild and dry — light jacket weather, with a teasing wind and all the fields taken in. But he’s absolutely freezing, cold at his core, so cold he might as well be lying there, pinned in a ditch, in February, his face pressed through the broken windshield in a slurry of ice.

Another prairie winter,the thing Karin Schluter had fled her whole adult life. She’d been raised on stories of the killer of ’36, with its month of unbroken subzeros, or ’49, with its forty-foot drifts of snow, or the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard of 1888, with its one-day drop of eighty degrees dotting the landscape with frozen statues. This one was nothing. And still, she feared for her survival.

The cardboard browns and gunmetal grays took over. The last of the squashes and pumpkins dried off their vines, and everything sane went south or underground. Longer nights settled in, hooding the town early. Most nights, the wind kept her up; few places on the globe had air so loud. She suffered her traditional November break, that sense that she’d crashed through the world’s guard rail and now lay under the unbroken gauze of Nebraska sky, unable to do anything but wait for spring and someone to discover her.

She’d have diagnosed herself with seasonal affective disorder, but she refused to believe in recently invented diseases. Riegel tried to get her to sit under his plant grow lights. “It’s all about sun. Your number of hours of sunlight per day.”

“You want to trick my body with fluorescent lights? That doesn’t seem very natural to me.” She felt herself sniping at him more as the days shortened, but couldn’t stop herself. He suffered in noble silence, which only made things worse. She rushed to apologize with small kindnesses, telling him again how grateful she was for the work, the most meaningful work she’d ever put her hand to. The next day, she’d snipe again.