Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Unknown commodity. Mystery? Lock and key thing? How old is she?”

He wanted to stop talking for good. But talking was his penance. “Pushing fifty,” he said, lying by a decade. A pointless lie — forty hardly qualified as a younger woman — after the harder truth. Barbara was younger. But youth was irrelevant.

“She remind you of someone?”

And it came to him. “Yes.” That aura of having evaded life. One step outside and above it. The same angelic pretense as the author of those three books. And yet, that private frenzy, just beneath the surface of her flawless act. “Yes. I seem to be linked to her. She reminds me of me.”

He might as well have slapped Sylvie. “I don’t understand.”

The two of us . He pressed his palms into his eye sockets until his lids splashed green and red. “There’s something to her that connects. That I need to understand.”

“You’re saying it’s not physical? That it’s more…?”

And then, what he’d tried to tell Karin Schluter, a thing he could not entirely bring himself to believe: “Everything’s physical.” Chemical, electrical. Synapses. Fire or not.

She fell back on the bed, next to him. “Come on,” she grinned, grappling the sheets for safety. “What does this floozy have that I don’t?”

He covered his bald spot with both hands. “Nothing. Except for being a totally unreadable story.”

“I see.” Between brave and bitter. Either one would kill him. “No real chance of competing with that, is there?”

At last he roused himself and encircled her, drew her shaking head into his chest. “Competition’s over. No contest. You have…all my knowledge. All my history.”

“But not all your mystery.”

“I don’t need mystery,” he claimed. Mystery and love could not survive each other. “I just need to get a hold of myself.”

“Gerald. Gerald. Is this the best midlife crisis you can manage?” Her spine collapsed and she burst into tears. She let him hold her. After some time, she surfaced, wiping her damp, red face. “Do I have to buy complicated underwear from the Internet, or something?”

They broke out in choked laughs, scalded with compassion.

The encounter shook them, worse than Weber imagined. Sylvie was still heartbreakingly herself, and he kicked himself for his idiocy every time she smiled gamely at him. After thirty years, she should have taken the news with wry fatigue, realized that he was hers by default, buried under the fossil record of experience. Should have patted him on the head and said, Dream on, my little man; the world is still your proving ground. Should have known he was going nowhere, except in symbols.

But a life of neuroscience had proved that symbols were real. No place else to live. They passed each other in the den and embraced. They touched each other’s forearms in the laundry room. They sat alongside each other on their stools at meals as they had always done, both of them brightened by danger, trading casual theories about UN weapons inspectors or harbor seal sightings in the Sound. Sylvie’s face was clear and bright, but far away, like a color-enhanced nebula beamed back from the Hubble. She refused to ask how he was, the only question that mattered to her. It bruised his chest to look at her. All that unbearable care would crush him.

A few years back, Giacomo Rizzolati’s group in Parma had been testing motor-control neurons in a macaque’s premotor cortex. Every time the monkey moved its arm, the neurons fired. One day, between measurements, the monkey’s arm-muscle neurons began firing like crazy, even though the monkey was perfectly still. More testing produced the mind-boggling conclusion: the motor neurons fired when one of the lab experimenters moved his arm. Neurons used to move a limb fired away simply because the monkey saw another creature moving, and moved its own imaginary arm in symbol-space sympathy.

A part of the brain that did physical things was being cannibalized for making imaginary representations. Science had at last laid bare the neurological basis of empathy: brain maps, mapping other mapping brains. One human wit quickly labeled the find the monkey-see monkey-do neurons, and all others followed suit. Imaging and EEG soon revealed that humans, too, were crawling with mirror neurons. Images of moving muscles made symbolic muscles move, and muscles in symbol moved muscle tissue.

Researchers rushed to flesh out the staggering find. The mirror-neuron system extended beyond the surveillance and performance of movement. It grew tendrils, snaking into all sorts of higher cognitive processes. It played roles in speech and learning, facial decoding, threat analysis, the understanding of intention, the perception of and response to emotions, social intelligence, and theory of mind.

Weber watched his wife moving about the house, going about her days. But his own mirror neurons failed to fire. Mark Schluter had gradually dismantled his most basic sense of acquaintance, and nothing would ever seem familiar or linked again.

Jess came home for three days at Christmas. She brought the mate. Sheena. Shawna. Jess noticed nothing wrong. In fact, her parents’ closeness— the lovebirds in winter —became the running joke between Jess and her cultural studies scholar. “I warned you: disgusting displays of hetero-bourgeois devotion like you witness only in the bowels of Red America.” The three women soon condensed into a trio, running out to vineyard tastings on the North Fork or over to Fire Island for frigid beachcombing, leaving him to solitary “testosterone musings.” When the girls left, Sylvie settled into a post-holiday empty-nest funk. Only long hours of social-service referral at Wayfinders seemed to help.

He fantasized about treating his own holiday descent with piracetam, a nootropic with no known toxicity or addictive properties. For years, he’d read amazing claims about the drug’s ability to enhance cognition by stimulating the flow of signals between the hemispheres. Several researchers he knew took it with small dosages of choline, a synergistic combination said to produce greater increases in memory and creativity than either drug taken alone. But he was too cowardly to experiment with a mind already so altered.

The Country of Surprise showed up on no end-of-year lists except the ones for dubious achievement. Its rapid disappearance almost relieved Weber — no lasting evidence. Sylvie ministered to him with studied indifference, which only made him sad. They were sitting in front of a fire on Sunday evening after New Year’s when he made some crack about Famous Gerald forgetting to come down the chimney this year. She laughed. “You know what? To hell with Famous Gerald. I could kiss Famous Gerald goodbye right now and never miss him. A postcard once a year from Club Med Maldives would do.”

“That strikes me as unnecessarily cruel,” he said.

“Cruel?” She smacked the brick mantel with real force. Her hands stabbed out at the pent-up weeks when she’d said nothing. “Jesus, Man. Can you tell me when this is going to be over?”

Her eyes burned, and he saw the size of her fear. Of course: having to sit by and watch his private deterioration, unsure where or whether it would ever end. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ve not been…”

She took a series of deep breaths, willing herself down. She came to the couch where he sat and pressed her hand into his chest. “What are you doing to yourself? What’s this about? Reputation? Public judgment is nothing but shared schizophrenia.”

He shook his head, pressed two fingers into his neck. “No. Not reputation. You’re right: reputation is…beside the point.”

“What then, Gerald? What is the point?”