Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Over the decades, H.M. became one of the most studied subjects in medical history. Through massive daily repetition, he managed to learn that he was under observation. His constant testing became a source of painful pride. A hundred times a day, he would repeat, ‘At least I can help someone. At least I can help people understand.’ But he still had to be constantly reminded where he was and told, after decades, that he wouldn’t be going home to his mother and father that day.”

He watched the waterfall of curly hair overwhelm the woman’s earnest face. She looked very little like Sylvie, in fact. She just was her. The gentle, inward intensity. The game curiosity, ready for anything that study might throw her way. Weber snapped back to his restive audience, the seconds ticking. He elaborated the case’s details without having to think them. His students scribbled away. This is what they wanted: just the facts, solid and repeatable.

“Now, alongside H.M., I would like you to consider the story of David, a thirty-eight-year-old Illinois insurance agent, married with two young children, in perfect health, who displayed no unusual neurological conditions aside from the persistent belief that the Chicago Cubs were just a season away from a pennant.”

Polite laughter rippled through the auditorium, more diffident than last year. He looked up. Young Sylvie bit her lip, eyes on her notebook. Perhaps she pitied him.

“The first sign that something was amiss came when David, ordinarily an R.E.M. man, developed a passion for Pete Seeger.”

No response from the audience. Nor had there been the year before. These names had passed into cultural amnesia. Seeger had never existed. R.E.M. was now not even a fever dream.

“His wife found this odd, but wasn’t alarmed until a month later, when David started badmouthing his favorite author, J. D. Salinger, denouncing him as a public menace. He began to collect, although never to read, what he called ‘real books,’ which were limited to western and naval adventures. David’s style of dress began to change— regress , his wife called it. He wore a pair of bib overalls to the office. His wife tried to get him to see a doctor, but he insisted that he was fine. He was so lucid his wife doubted her own distress. He spoke often about recovering the person he had once been. Over and over again, he told his wife, ‘This is the way we all used to live.’

“He began to suffer from headaches and vomiting, lethargy and reduced alertness. One evening, David came home three hours later than usual. His wife was beside herself. He’d walked back from his office, twelve miles away, having sold the car to a colleague. His wife, frightened silly, shouted at him. He explained that cars were bad for the environment. He could bike to work, saving huge amounts of money that they could put away for the children’s college. His wife suspected some stress-induced personality disorder, a thing that used to be called an acute identity crisis…”

Young Sylvie scribbled a note into the tablet balanced on her thigh. Something about the way the elbows flared, the dip of the neck, both tough and vulnerable. Sensations bombarded Weber, all their old keys, those million moments that had disappeared, one chord after the other: studying together in the library until closing; Tuesday-night European art films at the Cineclub; long debates about Sartre and Buber; more or less continuous sex. Blindfolding her and running various swatches of cloth over her bare belly, to test her claim that she could feel colors. Sylvie always guessed right.

Traces, still intact. Everything he’d been was still on file, archived somewhere. But he’d misplaced the sensations of recall until this living ghost sat down in front of him in the scooped amphitheater, scribbling all the wrong notes into her own accreting record.

“David’s wife insisted that he call the person he sold the car to and buy it back the next day. He did. But a few weeks later, he failed to come home at all. Crossing the parking lot at his office, he grew so entranced by the changes of sky above him that he spent the night there, sitting on the asphalt, staring up into space. When the police found him the next morning, he was disoriented. His wife brought him to the hospital, where he was admitted to psychiatry, who quickly passed him to neurology. Without modern scanning technology, who knows how he might have been treated? But with a scan: look here at the caudal orbitofrontal cortex, where you will see a large, circumscribed neoplasm — a meningioma — growing for years, pressing into his frontal lobes and gradually incorporating itself into his personality…”

It struck Weber as he advanced the slide: his Nebraska waver was not the first blot on an otherwise perfect record. He’d never betrayed Sylvie, technically. But every so many years, Faithful Gerald nosed up to the brink. The year he turned fifty, he’d met a sculptress who lived in the Bay Area. They corresponded for a long time, maybe a year and a half, before she forced him to admit that she was nothing but his pure invention. Ten years ago, there had been a Japanese graduate research assistant, eager and expectant, just past thirty. A near-miss thing, by any measurement. She’d gone away when he turned cold. She, who could barely lift her eyes to his when speaking, left a note for him after her departure: In Japan, researchers at least have a day of mourning for all the test animals they’ve sacrificed …Each of these theoretical love affairs had been an exception: half a dozen exceptions, all told. He seemed to be a hit-and-run repeat offender. He told Sylvie each time, but after the fact, always downplaying the near disaster. Nothing went into the permanent record.

As the next slide clicked, he saw the truth: he wanted Barbara Gillespie. But why? The act she performed did not add up. Something in her life had gone as wrong as his. She already lived in the void he was entering. A huge thing, in hiding. She knew something he needed. Something in her could recall him.

But there was a more parsimonious explanation. How would these students diagnose it, given the facts? Banal midlife crisis? Pure biology, classic self-deception, or something more striking? Some deficit that would show up on a scan, some tumor, relentlessly pressing on his frontal lobes, imperceptibly recasting him…

He cleared his throat; the sound ruptured through the speakers above him. “David couldn’t see how badly he was altered, and not just because the change had been so gradual. Remember my lecture on anosagnosia, two weeks ago. The job of consciousness is to make sure that all of the distributed modules of the brain seem integrated. That we always seem familiar to ourselves. David didn’t want to be fixed. He thought he’d found his way back to something true, something that everyone else had abandoned.”

Young Sylvie raised her head and studied him. He filled with self-loathing. He could forgive the man with the list of pathetic, halfway infidelities. But the man whose unblemished self-image had so completely erased that list: What could such a person deserve beyond a slow and agonizing public exposure? He bent his shoulders and hung on to the podium. He felt anemic, and countered with more structural analysis, more functional anatomy. He lost himself in lobes and lesions. A soft beep from his watch declared time to wrap things up.

“So we have the stories of two very different deficits, two very different men, one who could not become his next consecutive self and another who plunged into it without control. One who was locked out of new memories and the other who manufactured them too easily. We think we access our own states; everything in neurology tells us we do not. We think of ourselves as a unified, sovereign nation. Neurology suggests that we are a blind head of state, barricaded in the presidential suite, listening only to handpicked advisors as the country reels through ad hoc mobilizations…”