He rushed it out. “Can I ask you something? Have you, by any chance, read anything of mine?”
She looked around the room for support. “Yikes. Is this an exam?”
“Of course not.” He backed away.
“Because if it is, I’ll need to study first.”
He waved apology, mumbled his thanks, and broke for the outdoors. He imagined her eyes on his back all the way down the walk. He felt as he rarely did, as if he’d botched an interview. The morning’s nausea followed him down the walk.
Flanked by the two women, Mark sat enthroned on his bench while a smattering of rehab residents, caretakers, and visitors wandered the grounds of his lowland Olympus. A garland of dandelions, a scepter of cottonwood: how Weber would remember him. In Weber’s brief absence, Mark had changed again. The bitterness at betrayal had fled. He held up his rod and waved it at Weber in benediction. “God-speed, voyager. We send you back out upon your restless search for new planets.”
Weber stopped in mid-step. “How on earth…? What a bizarre coincidence.”
“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Bonnie said, her words a halo.
“There’s nothing but coincidence,” Karin countered.
Mark giggled. “What do you mean? Wait, wait: I mean…” He dropped his voice, mocking Weber’s authoritative baritone. “I mean: ‘How do you mean?’”
“My daughter’s an astronomer. That’s her work. She looks for new planets.”
“Dude,” Mark drawled. “You already told me.”
The fact shook him worse than the imagined coincidence. The sleepless night, the hot, sticky air wrecked his concentration and scattered his memory. He needed to be gone. He had two conference keynotes to deliver over the next three weeks, then a trip to Italy with his wife before classes in the fall.
Karin walked him to the parking lot. Her disappointment had deepened into stoic despair. “I guess I was expecting too much. When you told me about the brain being so surprising…?” She waved her fingers in front of her face. “I know. I’m not saying…Can you just tell me one thing? Don’t soften this.”
Weber braced.
“He must truly hate me, right? Some resentment so deep, to produce this. To single me out. Every night I lie in bed trying to imagine what I did to him, that he needs to erase me. I can’t remember anything that deserves this. Am I just repressing…?”
He took her arm again, stupidly, as he had just three days back, when they first walked this path. “This isn’t about you. There is probably a lesion…” Just the opposite of what he’d argued with Dr. Hayes. Obscuring the dynamics of most interest to him. “We talked about this. It’s a feature of Capgras. The subject only misidentifies the people closest to him.”
She snorted, acrid. “You always double the one you love?”
“Something like that.”
“So it is psychological.”
Aggravating hunch, in the mouth of another. “Look. You haven’t been singled out.”
“Yes I have. He’s accepting Rupp now.”
“I don’t mean Rupp. There’s his dog.”
She freed her arm, ready to be hurt. Then she softened in a way Weber hadn’t yet seen. “Yes. You’re right. And he loves Blackie more than anything that moves.”
At the curb, Weber made to shake her hand. With last-minute guilt, she embraced him. He stood still and suffered it. “Tell me if anything changes,” he said.
“Even if it doesn’t,” she promised, and turned away.
He woke early again, in fresh panic. The ceiling of a foreign room materialized just inches from his face. He sucked air, but his lungs wouldn’t expand. Not quite 2:30 a.m. By 3:15, he was still wondering how he’d forgotten telling Mark about Jess. He fought the urge to get up and listen to the session tapes. By 4:00, he took his vitals and thought he might be looking at something serious. When he could no longer lie still, he got up, showered, dressed, packed, checked out, and, hours early, drove the rental back east to the Lincoln airport, on the razor-like, featureless interstate.
As the plane passed over Ohio, he rallied. He looked down on a cloud-covered Columbus, imagining invisible landmarks under the patchy blanket. Places from a third of a century ago: the sprawling, centerless campus. The dilapidated student suburb where he and Sylvie had shared a bungalow. Downtown Columbus, the Scioto, the time warp of German Village, Short North, with its great used bookstore where he’d taken Sylvie on their first date. He still had the entire map, clearer with eyes closed.
By the wrinkled hills of Pennsylvania, his Nebraska interlude began to seem no more than a fleeting deficit. When he touched down at LaGuardia, he was himself again. His Passat waited in the long-term lot. The brittle, collaborative madness of the Long Island Expressway never looked more familiar or more beautiful. And at its far end—the familiar anonymity of home.
Part Three
God Led Me To You
I once saw, on a flowerpot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree, I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse.
—Loren Eiseley, The Night Country, “The Brown Wasps”
When animals and humans still shared the same language, the Cree recount, Rabbit wanted to go to the moon. Rabbit asked the strongest birds to take him, but Eagle was busy and Hawk couldn’t fly so high. Crane said he would help. He told Rabbit to hold on to his legs. Then he went for the moon. The journey was long and Rabbit was heavy. Rabbit’s weight stretched out Crane’s legs and bloodied Rabbit’s paws. But Crane reached the moon, with Rabbit hanging on to him. Rabbit patted Crane in thanks, his hands still bleeding. So Crane got his long legs and blood-red head.
Back then, too, a Cherokee woman was courted by both Hummingbird and Crane. She wanted to marry Hummingbird, because of his great beauty. But Crane proposed a race around the world. The woman agreed, knowing Hummingbird’s speed. She didn’t remember that Crane could fly at night. And, unlike Hummingbird, Crane never tired. Crane flew in straight lines, where Hummingbird flew in every direction. Crane won the race with ease, but the woman still rejected him.
All the humans revered Crane, the great orator. Where cranes gathered, their speech carried miles. The Aztecs called themselves the Crane People. One of the Anishinaabe clans was named the Cranes—Ajijak or Businassee—the Echo Makers. The Cranes were leaders, voices that called all people together. Crow and Cheyenne carved cranes’ leg bones into hollow flutes, echoing the echo maker.
Latin grus, too, echoed that groan. In Africa, the crowned crane ruled words and thought. The Greek Palamedes invented the letters of the alphabet by watching noisy cranes in flight. In Persian, kurti, in Arabic, ghurnuq: birds that awaken before the rest of creation, to say their dawn prayers. The Chinese xian-he, the birds of heaven, carried messages on their backs between the sky worlds.
Cranes dance in southwestern petroglyphs. Old Crane Man taught the Tewa how to dance. Australian aborigines tell of a beautiful and aloof woman, the perfect dancer, turned by a sorcerer into a crane.
Apollo came and went in crane form, when visiting the world. The poet Ibycus, in the sixth century B.C., beaten senseless and left for dead, called out to a passing flock of cranes, who followed the assailant to a theater and hovered over him until he confessed to the astonished crowd.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hera and Artemis turn Gerania into a crane, to punish the Pygmy queen for her vanity. The Irish hero Finn fell off a cliff and was caught in the air by his grandmother, when she changed into a crane. If cranes circled overhead above American slaves, someone would die. The First Warrior who fought to create ancient Japan took the form of a crane at death and flew away.
Tecumseh tried to unite the scattered nations under the banner of Crane Power, but the Hopi mark for the crane’s foot became the world’s peace symbol. The crane’s foot—pie de grue—became that
genealogist’s mark of branching descent, pedigree.
To make a wish come true, the Japanese must fold a thousand paper cranes. Twelve-year-old Sadako Sasaki, stricken with “atom bomb sickness,” made it to 644. Children worldwide send her thousands, every year.
Cranes help carry a soul to paradise. Pictures of cranes line the windows of mourning houses, and crane-shaped jewelry adorns the dead. Cranes are souls that once were humans and might be again, many lives from now. Or humans are souls that once were cranes and will be again, when the flock is rejoined.
Something in the crane is trapped halfway, in the middle between now and when. A fourteenth-century Vietnamese poet sets the birds forever halfway through the air:
Clouds drift as days pass;
Cypress trees are green beside the altar,
The heart, a chilly pond under moonlight.
Night rain drops tears of flowers.
Below the pagoda, grass traces a path.
Among the pine trees, cranes remember
The music and songs of years ago.
In the immensity of sky and sea,
How to relive the dream before the lamp of that night?
When animals and people all spoke the same language, crane calls said exactly what they meant. Now we live in unclear echoes. The turtledove, swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming, says Jeremiah. Only people fail to recall the order of the Lord.
Something was wrong, the moment Karin called upstairs to his hotel room. His voice didn’t match the picture on his books. Its folksy tone broadcast compassion, but his words were pure health professional. In the flesh, he looked like one of those poised, balding experts who sit on New England porch swings in autumn answering questions for edutainment TV in maddeningly soft, self-assured voices. The man who came to Nebraska wasn’t the author of those rich, embracing books. When she’d tried to present Mark’s history, Gerald Weber failed to honor what he claimed lay at the heart of all good medicine. He didn’t listen. She might as well have been speaking to her ex-boss, to Robert Karsh, or even to her own father.
Four days later the national expert disappeared. He did nothing but administer a few tests and tape a few conversations, gathering material for his own ends. Helpless to treat the problem itself, he prescribed nothing but a vague program of cognitive behavioral therapy. He blew into town, toyed with everyone’s hopes, even played on Mark’s friendship. Then he blew out again, suggesting that all parties just learn to live with the syndrome. She had trusted him, and he’d delivered nothing but philosophy.
Yet true to herself, she never once confronted him. Up to the moment that he turned his back on them, she flattered the man’s credentials, sure that if she were just polite enough, this gray-haired, bearded, well-spoken specialist would defeat Capgras and retrieve both her brother and her. Daniel had asked several times to meet the doctor. She’d put him off. Daniel never called her on it, but he didn’t have to. A week after Weber left, the obvious hit her: she’d preened for this old man. Anything, to win his help.
Three weeks after the neuroscientist abandoned them, Karin was playing Ping-Pong with Mark, in the day room. Mark liked the game enough that he’d play even with her, providing she never won. Barbara rushed in, excited. “Dr. Weber is going to be on Book TV tomorrow. Reading from his new work.”
“Shrinky on television? Real television? Like, nationwide? I told you that the man was famous, but would you believe me? He’s going to be a household word.”
“Book TV?” Karin asked. How did you hear about this?”
The aide shrugged. “Pure luck.”
“Were you watching for this?” Karin asked. “Or did he tell you…?”
Barbara flushed. “I keep an eye on that cable program. Old, bad habit. I’m down to only a few shows I can watch safely. The ones where nothing explodes and where they don’t tell me when to laugh.”
Mark tossed his paddle in the air and almost caught it. “The Incredible Shrinking Man, on the idiot box. Can’t miss that, now can we?”
The next day, the three of them huddled around the set in Mark’s room. Karin chewed her cuticles, even before they introduced the man. Humiliating, watching someone you knew play himself in front of cameras. Barbara was flinching, too. She chattered more in the six minutes of Gerald Weber’s introduction than she had in six weeks of caring for Mark. Karin finally had to shush her.
Only Mark enjoyed the proceedings. “The home-team favorite is stepping up to the plate in the clutch situation. The crowd is nervous. They’re looking for the long ball.” But when Dr. Weber finally strode out to the podium in front of the restrained Book TV audience, Mark cried, “What the hell’s going on? Is this some idea of a joke?”
Both women tried to calm him. Mark rose to his feet, a pillar of righteousness. “What kind of bull balls is this? That’s supposed to be Shrinky? Not even close.”
Under the television lights, distorted by broadcast and the strain of public appearance, the man was indeed changed. Karin glanced at Barbara, who returned the look, her thick eyebrows crumpled. Weber’s hair now swept back dramatically over his thinning crown. The beard had been teased out, florid, almost French. And the dark suit had vanished in favor of a collarless burgundy shirt that appeared to be silk. He seemed taller on camera, and his shoulders flared, almost combative. When he started to read, prose poured out of him in Old Testament cadences. The words themselves were so wise, so attuned to the subtle nuances of human nature that they seemed written by someone already dead. This was the real Gerald Weber, who, for obscure reasons, on his short Nebraska junket, had hidden himself under an empty wheat bushel.
Mark paced in tight, outraged circles. “Who’s this guy supposed to be? Billy Graham or someone?” Karin nodded like a bobblehead. Barbara couldn’t take her eyes off the speaking image. “Somebody’s taking that studio audience for a ride. None of them have seen the real Shrinky, up close and personal. And nobody knows to ask us!”
Karin blocked out her brother and listened. Weber read:
Conciousness works by telling a story, one that is whole, continuous, and stable. When that story breaks, consciousness rewrites it. Each revised draft claims to be the original. And so, when disease or accident interrupts us, we’re often the last to know.
The words of the man rolled over Karin Schluter, seducing her all over again. “You’re right,” she told Mark. “You are exactly right.” Nobody had seen the real Weber. Not the New York studio audience; not the three of them.
Mark stopped pacing to assess her. “What the hell do you know? You probably had something to do with this. You’re the one who brought him here. Maybe that’s the real Shrinky, and the Shrinky you passed off on us is a fraud.”
Barbara reached up to rub his shoulders. He froze, like a kitten stroked between its eyes. Placid, Mark sat back down and watched. “We’re more like coral reefs,” Dr. Weber was reading. “Complex but fragile ecosystems…” The three of them stared at the performance of the stranger in the silk shirt. Weber told a story of a forty-year-old woman called Maria who suffered from something named Anton’s syndrome.
I sat and chatted with her in her impeccably furnished Hartford home. She was a lively, attractive woman who’d been a successful attorney for many years. She seemed happy and intact in every way, except that she thought she could see. When I suggested to her that she might actually be blind, she laughed at the absurdity and struggled to disprove me. This she attempted to do with remarkable vigor and skill, giving long, vivid descriptions of what was happening just then, outside her window. These scenes had great consistency and detail; she simply did not realize that the images were not coming in through her eyes…
The reading lasted no more than fifteen minutes. But all three were squirming in eternity as Weber finished the passage to polite applause. Then the questions began. A respectful student asked about the difference between scientific writing and writing for the public. A retired woman wanted to address the scandal of national health care.
Then someone asked if Weber had any qualms about violating his subjects’ privacy.
The cameras caught the writer’s surprise. Hesitating, he said, “I hope not. There are protocols. I always disguise the names, and often the biographical details, when they’re important. Sometimes one case history actually combines two or more stories, to bring out a condition’s most salient features.”
“You mean they’re fiction?” asked another. Weber paused to think, and the camera grew restive. Karin returned to biting her cuticle and Barbara sat upright, a perfect statuette.
Mark spoke first, for all of them. “This totally blows. Can we see what’s on Springer?”
The night Weber flew back east from the empty plains, he was all over Sylvie. Late June, but cool and piercing in Setauket, more like a North Shore golden fall than the start of summer. He picked up his car from the long-term lot at LaGuardia and listened to Brahms piano quartets all the way home on the absurdly clogged LIE. All the way out, he pictured his wife, thirty years of her changing face. He remembered that day, a decade or so into their marriage, when he’d asked her, surprised, “Is your hair getting straighter as we get older?”
“What are you talking about? My hair? I used to perm it. You didn’t know that? Ah, scientists.”
“Well. If it’s not on a scan, it can’t really be trusted.”
She pummeled his soft underbelly, in reply.
But that first night back from Nebraska, he noticed. Woman. Maybe it was the dressing up. They had to go out that evening, to a fund-raiser in Huntington. Some halfway-house shelter that Sylvie’s Wayfinders were sponsoring. She was dressed already when he pulled in. “Ger! There you are. I was getting nervous. You should have called me, let me know you were on the way.”
“Called? I was in the car, Woman.”
She laughed her laugh, helpless but to forgive. “You know that little phone you’ve been carrying around? It works while you’re moving. One of its selling points. Never mind. I’m just glad that Tour Director got you home safely.”