Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

He looked out into the blunted audience. No good. Bhloitov was furious. The clinging turtleneck woman’s eyes wandered. Miss Nurfraddle seemed ready to call the attorney general on her BlackBerry and arrest Weber for violations of the Patriot Act. He could not bear to look at young Sylvie. He saw himself reflected in their faces, a neurological freak show, a case.

How could he tell them? Energy fell on an ancient cell; the cell registered. Some prodding set off a chemical cascade that incised the cell and changed its structure, forming a cast of the signals that fell on it. Eons later, two cells clasped, signaling each other, squaring the number of states they might inscribe. The link between them altered. The cells fired easier with each fire, their changing connections remembering a trace of the outside. A few dozen such cells slung together in a lowly slug: already an infinitely reshaping machine, halfway to knowing . Matter that mapped other matter, a plastic record of light and sound, place and motion, change and resistance. Some billions of years and hundreds of billions of neurons later, and these webbed cells wired up a grammar — a notion of nouns and verbs and even prepositions. Those recording synapses, bent back onto themselves — brain piggy-backing and reading itself as it read the world — exploded into hopes and dreams, memories more elaborate than the experience that chiseled them, theories of other minds, invented places as real and detailed as anything material, themselves matter, microscopic electro-etched worlds within the world, a shape for every shape out there , with infinite shapes left over: all dimensions springing from this thing the universe floats in. But never hot or cold, solid or soft, left or right, high or low, but only the image, the store. Only the play of likeness cut by chemical cascades, always undoing the state that did the storing. Semaphores at night, cobbling up even the cliff they signaled from. As he once wrote: Unsponsored, impossible, near-omnipotent, and infinitely fragile …

No hope of showing them that. He could at best reveal the countless ways the signals got lost. Shattered at any joint: space without dimension, effect before cause, words cut loose from their reference. Show how anyone might vanish into spatial neglect, might swap up with down and before with after. Sight without knowing, recall without reason, tea parties of personalities fighting it out for control over the bewildered body, yet always continuous, whole to themselves. As consistent and complete as these bright and skeptical students now felt.

“One last case, in our few seconds left. Here is a lateral cross section, showing damage to the anterior cingulate gyrus. Remember that this area takes input from many higher sensory regions and connects to areas controlling higher-level motor functions. Crick writes about a woman with just such damage, who lost her ability to act upon or even form intentions. Akinetic mutism: all desire to talk, think, act, or choose was gone. With forgivably human excitement, Crick declared that we had located the seat of the will.”

The bell rang, saving and damning him. Students began evacuating, even as he scrambled to conclude. “So much for an introductory look at the enormously complex question of mental integration. We know a little about the parts. We know considerably less about how they cohere into a whole. For our last session, we’ll look at the strongest candidates for an integrated model of consciousness. If you don’t have the article on the binding problem, get one from your discussion leader before you leave.”

With a bang of desks and slam of books, the students rose to go. What would he say the following week, to sum up a discipline drifting away from him? Long after his science delivered a comprehensive theory of self, no one would be a single step closer to knowing what it meant to be another. Neurology would never grasp from without a thing that existed only deep in the impenetrable inside.

Students emptied the hall, smoldering up the aisles in clumps of mutiny. A feeling came over Weber, a desire to supplement genuine neuroscience with half-baked literature, fiction that at least acknowledged its own blindness. He would make them read Freud, the prince of storytellers: Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences. He would give them Proust and Carroll. He would assign Borges’s “Funes,” the man paralyzed by perfect memory, destroyed by the fact that a dog seen in profile at three-fifteen had the same name as that dog seen from the front a minute later. The present, almost intolerable, it was so rich and bright. He would tell them the story of Mark Schluter. Describe what meeting the boy-man had done to him. Make some motion that their mirror neurons would be forced to mimic. Lose them in the maze of empathy.

The usual stragglers clustered around the podium. He tried to listen to each question, to give each observation his full attention. Four students, suffering end-of-semester anxieties. Just behind the first wave, four more waited. He scanned the hall, not knowing what he looked for. Then he saw her, hovering, halfway up the left-hand aisle. Young Sylvie, looking back at him. She stood, debating with herself. She had a message for him, for the boy he’d once been, but she couldn’t wait. She had some future place to get to.

He tried to rush the questioners, each with a reassuring smile. The crowd began to thin, and he looked up, surprised, into the face of Bhloitov. This close, Weber saw that the anarchist’s black hair was dyed. He had on a studded leather arm bracelet and, peeking below his left sleeve, a bright red and cyan Virgin of Guadalupe. His downy mustache was split by a faint scar — imperfectly repaired cleft lip. Weber glanced up into the hall. Young Sylvie, hesitant, started to drift away. He looked back at the anarchist, trying to master himself. “Sir. How can I help you?”

Bhloitov flinched, blinked, and backed away a little. “Your account of that, that meningioma. David?” His voice apologized. Weber nodded him on. “I’m wondering…I think that maybe my father…”

Weber looked up, desperate reflex. Sylvie had on her backpack and was marching upstairs to the auditorium exit. He watched her all the way up, as Bhloitov murmured and effaced himself. She never turned to look back. Where are you going? Weber called in symbol space. Come back. It’s me. Still here.

It was time to retire. He could no longer trust himself in the classroom, let alone the lab. He could find some volunteer work, adult literacy or science tutoring. In the twenty years he had left, he could learn another foreign language or write a neurological novel. He had stories enough, anyway. He would never have to publish it.

He stayed on campus until early evening, submerged in invented labor, the steady swapping of letters of recommendation that comprised academic existence. It felt like atonement, scutwork. For a dose of phenylethylamine, he prescribed himself a dozen ounces of chocolate. Recently, it had helped lift the cloak of winter evenings.

The strange thing was, he felt almost no desire for Barbara Gillespie. Perhaps he found her attractive, in the abstract. But even now, his imagined transactions never involved anything more than harmless clasping. She was like — what? Neither family nor friend; certainly not mere lover. Some relation that hadn’t yet been invented. He didn’t want to possess her. He wanted only to investigate, with the usual battery of questionnaires, what had collapsed her, and why it felt so acquitting to be with her. He wanted to break her down, to draw her out. Get her history and vita. She’d said almost nothing in the few minutes they’d actually spent in each other’s presence. Yet she knew something about Mark that he was blundering to find.