Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

She called Barbara for advice. “I don’t know what to do. I can change him with this drug, into God knows what. I can leave him who he is now. It’s too much power.”

She recited Daniel’s problems with pharmaceuticals. The nurse’s aide listened carefully. “I understand your friend’s fears, and I’m speaking to you as someone who has, in her life, given up cigarettes, caffeine, and processed sugar. I know you’re scared of anything that might make things worse. I can’t tell you what to do. But you need to look into this olanzapine as carefully as…”

“I’ve done that,” Karin snapped. “And the man who dumped this in my lap is gone. Barbara! Please?”

“I can’t advise. I’m not qualified. If I could make this choice for you, I would.”

Karin, who’d dreamed once of becoming this woman’s friend, even her confidante, hung up the phone hating her.

She increased her hours at the Refuge. If she’d had this work from the beginning — a river to give herself to — she might have become a different creature. They had her preparing pamphlets. Copy for fund raising and lobbying. Small-arms fire in the increasingly desperate war over water. The pros did the real work, of course. But even her gopher efforts contributed. Daniel, almost afraid to look at her growing wildness, walked her through the research materials, laying out the goals. “We need something to wake sleepwalkers,” he instructed her. “To make the world strange and real again.”

She was seeing Robert, too, every several days, when he could get away. They’d done nothing, at least nothing Wendy could use in court. They squeezed each other’s heads. There were certain lines on the skull Daniel had taught her about, and she showed Robert. Meridians. Powerful stuff, if you could find them. They spent hours outside, at Cottonmill Lake, under the skeletal trees, looking for them: pressure above the eye ridges, a track leading up and back to the crown of the head that, pressed hard, could absolutely pickle your senses. When she tapped into Robert’s lines, he’d lean back, shout “Wasabi!” and take his pulse.

The nights grew too cold to stay out of doors. But they had no place to go. They ended up steaming up her car, pulled over on the shoulders of dark country roads or in the far corners of abandoned box-store parking lots. They couldn’t use his car, because of Wendy’s acute sense of smell. The woman was, by her husband’s account, as olfactorially acute as a badger.

“It’s worse than being a teenager,” Karin groaned. “Damn it, Robert. I’m going to explode.”

Then they’d stop and turn back to touchless talk. They had reached the age when frustration offered more than delivery. It meant something, this holding on to technical fidelity. Cheating came later, when they returned to their respective mates.

It surprised her to discover: if she had to choose between fooling around and talk, she’d choose talk. That’s what she needed most from him, these days. His mind was so brutally other than Daniel’s, or her own. She thought faster around Robert. He was a huge, calculating extension of that PDA he was forever poking at. He could sit behind the steering wheel of the parked Corolla, fiddling with the handheld device like a newborn exploring a Playskool Activity Center. To her anxiety over starting Mark on drugs, he said, “Figure the costs. Count up the benefits. See which is bigger.”

“Listen to you. If only it were that easy.”

“It is that easy. Unless you want to make it harder. Come on! What else is there? The plus column and the minus column. Then the math.”

His clarity maddened her, but it kept her going.

“Really,” he told her. His voice was so calming — Peter Jennings visiting a junior high social studies class. “What’s to keep you from starting him on these antipsychotics and seeing what happens?”

“They’re hard to tail off of, once you start.”

“Hard on you, or hard for him?”

She slugged him, which he enjoyed. “What do I do if they work?”

He twisted in his seat to face her. He didn’t understand. How could he? She wasn’t sure she did. He shook his head. But his eyes were more amused than exasperated. She was his brainteaser, his handheld puzzle box.

She took his palm and stroked it with her thumb, their most dangerous transaction to date. “What would he be like, if he…came back?”

Robert sniffed. “Like he was. Your brother.”

“Right. But which one? Don’t look at me like that. You know what I’m saying. He could be such an aggressive prick. Always riding me.”

Karsh shrugged, the guilt of all mankind. “I’ve been known to, you know, be a bit that way myself.”

“It’s just that I can’t really…When I try to picture him, before? I can’t be sure I…He was really hairy, sometimes. Raging about my going off and saving myself, condemning him to the faith healer and the entrepreneur. Calling me a…Sometimes he really hated me.”

“He didn’t hate you.”

“How would you know?” His palms flew up, a bull’s-eye for her rage. “I’m sorry,” she rushed. “I’m just not sure I can do all that again.” They sat in silence. He checked his watch, then cranked the ignition. She did not have much time to ask it. “Robert? Do you think I ever resented him, back then? You know. Some kind of hidden…?”

Robert drummed the wheel. “Truth? Nothing hidden about it.”

She flared up, then hung her head. “But see? That’s part…I don’t really resent him now, like this. I…don’t really mind, anymore. His being who…”

“Don’t mind?” Karsh downshifted. “You mean you like him better this way?”

“No! Of course not. It’s just…I like his new idea of me, better than his old one. Well, not of me; you know: of ‘the real Karin.’ I like who he thinks I was. He defends the old me now, against everyone. Two years ago, the real Karin was a constant source of disappointment. I was forever letting him down. A tramp, a sell-out, a money-grubber, a pretentious middle-class wannabe, too good for my roots. Now the real Karin is some kind of victim of history. The sister I never quite managed to be.”

Karsh drove in silence. He looked as if he needed to flip open his pocket PC and start a spreadsheet ledger. Karin Schluter upgrade. Costs. Benefits.

“I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. Am I totally disgusting?”

Eyes on the road, he smiled, taunting. “Not totally.”

“I can’t believe that I told anyone. That I even admitted it to myself, out loud.”

They pulled up four blocks from his house, where he always got out and walked. He opened the driver’s-side door. “You told me because you love me,” he said.

She passed a hand over her face. “No,” she said. “Not totally.”

He called her at times, when his office was empty. They talked in stolen installments, whispering about nothing. Once they got past the essentials — what did he have for lunch? what was she wearing? — everything else devolved into current events. Was the Washington sniper a terrorist or just a self-made, rugged individual? Why weren’t the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq turning up anything? Should the Enron and ImClone executives be given their own reality television network? As good as outright phone sex to both of them.

She held out for fairness, and he for freedom. Each thought they might convert the other: that had always been their fatal attraction. Both agreed that the government was out of control. Only, she wanted to put it to decent use at last, while he wanted to put it down once and for all. A chance encounter with The Fountainhead had turned a sunny, self-effacing high school swimming champion into a Libertarian, although Karsh found even that name way too restricting. “Every competent person on earth is a kind of god, babe. Together, we’re unstoppable. Human ingenuity might accomplish anything. Name a material constraint, and we’re halfway to transcending it. Get out of our way and watch the miracles roll in.”