Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

No one saw his own symptoms. No one knew who others knew him to be.

Sylvie twisted his shirt, wincing at his silence. “Listen to me. I would gladly trade every recognition you have ever managed to have my husband back and working for himself again.”

But her husband, stripped of recognitions, was no one Sylvie would recognize. He was a breath from telling her what he now felt certain of: the basic immorality of his books. Two words that would have finished them faster than any infidelity, imagined or real.

Lecturing at the Medical Center in seventeen minutes. All she wanted, finally, was for him to master his own life again, as he had for decades, ever since they’d met as Columbus undergrads. Her Man. The man who threw himself into every activity, not because of where it might lead, but for the innate strangeness of raw engagement. The man who had taught her that any life one came across was infinitely nuanced and irreproducible. Go teach. Go learn. How much more flavor do you want? How much bigger could you hope to make yourself?

As he toyed with his grapefruit, something struck the window of the breakfast nook with a sickening thump. He knew before he turned around. When he did turn, he saw the bird struggling away, broken: a large male cardinal who, for the last two weeks, had been attacking his reflection in the nook window, thinking himself an intruder on his own territory.

He stood in front of the quarter-bowl of students, fiddling with his wireless mic and fighting that sense of deceit that hit him before every lecture now. The students were the same as any year: upper-middle white kids from Ronkonkoma and Comack, trying on every identity from Prison Yard Tattoo to LaCoste alligator. But their manner had changed this semester, turned sardonic. They had passed around the public indictments of him by e-mail and instant messenger. They still wrote down every word he said, but more now to catch him out, to root out charlatanism, their pens angled in challenge. They wanted science, not stories. Weber could no longer tell the difference.

He tested the mic and focused the projector. He looked up into the Greek theater filled with college seniors. Feral facial hair was making a comeback. And the piercings, of course, the heavy hardware: he would never adjust to that. The grandchildren of Levittown, with rods through their eyebrows and noses. As a plump tattooed girl in the fourth row made her last legal cell call before the bell— Hey, I’m in my neuro lecture —he watched her tongue stud glisten in the sheen of saliva, a surprising little freshwater pearl.

Looking into this bowl of world-weary twenty-one-year-olds, he couldn’t help assigning them case histories. Since his last curtailed visit to see Mark Schluter, the world had broken out in Dickens and Dostoyevsky. The feverish anarchist, Bhloitov, stretched out sideways on a bank of three chairs in the back row. The high-strung stickler, Miss Nurfraddle, in the aisle seat two rows from the podium, fussed over her perfectly aligned texts. From the center of the auditorium, a slim man with slick black hair, Slavic or Greek, glared at Weber when the lecture failed to begin at the stroke of the hour. What was there in life worth such anger?

Every soul in this room would look upon itself in time with amused disgust. I never dressed like that. Never scribbled notes so earnestly. I couldn’t have thought such things. Who was that pathetic creature? The self was a mob, a drifting, improvised posse. That was the subject of today’s lecture, all the lectures he had given, since meeting his ruined Nebraska meatpacker. No self without self-delusion.

Two seats down from the slick-haired Greek sat the woman in this semester’s class that he avoided looking at. They came and went every year, growing eternally younger. They were not all beautiful. But each played at being older than her age, eyebrows raised a nanometer too high. This one, eight rows up, right in his fovea, in a clinging peach turtleneck, smiled at him, her round face flushed, eager for anything he might say.

The sister, Karin, had said something, the first time they met for lunch. An accusation. I can’t believe it. You do it, too. I just thought that someone with your accomplishments… He thought he hadn’t known what she was talking about. But he had. And he did — did do it, too.

He cast a last look at his notes: organized ignorance. Next to the brain, all human knowledge was like a lemon drop next to the sun. “Today I want to tell you the stories of two very different people.” His disembodied voice came out of speakers high up on the walls, full of amplified authority. The last fragments of nattering conversation fell away. The word stories drew a suppressed snicker. Bhloitov stared at Weber’s first slide, a coronal cross section, with open skepticism. Miss Nurfraddle pleaded with a digital voice recorder. The turtlenecked woman gazed at Weber with pliant curiosity. The others betrayed no emotion beyond mild boredom.

“The first is the account of H.M., the most famous patient in the literature of neurology. One summer day half a century ago, just across the Sound from here, an ignorant and overzealous surgeon, trying to cure H.M.’s worsening epilepsy, inserted a narrow silver pipette into H.M.’s hippocampus — this gray-pink area right here — and sucked it out, along with most of his parahippocampal gyrus, amygdala, and entorhinal and perirhinal cortexes — here, here, and here. The young man, roughly your age, was awake through the entire procedure.”

So, suddenly, was this entire room.

“Those of you with functioning hippocampi who attended last week’s lecture will not be surprised to learn that, along with all the tissue evacuated through the pipette, came H.M.’s ability to form new memories…”

Weber heard his florid showmanship, and it made him ill. But he’d told the story so many times over the years, in lectures as well as in his own neurological novelistic books, that he could tell it no other way. He clicked through the slides, recounting the outcome by heart: H.M. returning halfway to the land of the living, his personality intact, but unable to tag new experience.

“You’ve read Dr. Cohen’s account of H.M. Four days of tests, and each time the examiner left the room and came back, he had to introduce himself all over again. Decades had passed since his surgery.H.M. felt them as if they were days.”

A doctor’s first duty is to ask forgiveness. Where did that come from? A film he and Sylvie had seen together, in grad school. Film and line had shaken them as only couples in their early twenties can be shaken. Not long after that night, he committed to his future career. And around the same time, Sylvie must have committed to him for life. A doctor’s first duty is to ask forgiveness. He should have spent a moment every evening, begging forgiveness from everyone he’d inadvertently harmed that day.

“H.M.’s memory of the past was intact, even impressive. When shown a picture of Muhammad Ali, he said, ‘That’s Joe Louis.’ Asked again, two hours later, he responded identically, as if for the first time. He was trapped in a vault, frozen at the moment just before his operation. He couldn’t even learn that he was locked in an eternal present. He had no idea what had happened to him. Or rather: the part of him that knew couldn’t convey the fact to his conscious recollection. Several times an hour he would repeat, ‘I’m having a little argument with myself.’ He was plagued by a perpetual fear that he’d done something wrong and was being punished for it.”

Weber looked up past a row of horror-thrilled faces and saw her. He stopped speaking, disoriented. She had slipped into the hall, a secret auditor. Sylvie. Sylvie at twenty-one, in Ohio. She sat a quarter of the way up the slope, just inside the left-hand aisle, gazing at the slides, a spiral notebook on her crossed legs, her pen touching her top lip. On her folding desktop sat all the course’s texts. Here they were, at term’s end, and he’d never noticed her.