The Echo Maker

  “No,” he answered. No angels but what selection left standing.

  “No,” Mark echoed. “I didn’t figure. Me neither, until I got this note.” His face convulsed with thought. “You don’t think my sister could have written…? No, that’s insane. She’s like you. Realistic to a fault.”

  They stood and watched the ripples of their lines race time to a standstill. Weber’s vision tunneled, tranced out on his lure. The air in all directions turned dark as the lake. He looked up into a ceiling of clouds like flour-flecked eggplant. Only then did he feel the drops of rain.

  “Yep,” Mark confirmed. “T-storms. Saw it coming on the Weather Channel.”

  “You saw this?” Water began to slap down all around them. “Then why on earth did you take us fishing?”

  “Aw, come on. Grow up. Three-quarters of what they say on that show is paid for by some sponsor.”

  Weber fluttered, but Mark would not be rushed getting the gear back into his tackle box. They made for the car, through pillars of falling water, Mark fatalistic, cackling strangely, and Weber running.

  “What’s your hurry?” Mark yelled, above the pounding sluice. Lightning tore a seam in the sky, followed by so violent a crack that Mark fell back onto the ground. He sat there, laughing. “Knocked me on my literal ass!” Weber wavered between helping Mark up and saving his own life. He did neither, but stood in the middle of a grassy field, watching Mark struggle to his feet. Mark looked up, giggling into the torrent. “Try that again! I dare you!” The sky cracked open and he fell back to the ground.

  By the time the two of them waded to the car, hail was pelting them. They slipped soaking into the front seat. A sheet of mothball stones blew up, slamming the rental hard enough to pockmark it.

  Mark craned his head, gazing straight up through the windshield. “What do we still need, here? Locusts. Frogs. Firstborn.” He fell silent, inside the pounded gray cocoon. “Well, maybe we’ve had that one already.” The hail turned back to electrified rain, light enough to brave. Still, Weber did not start the car. At last Mark said, “So tell me something about yourself. When you were a kid or something. Doesn’t have to be the so-help-me-God or anything. Just a throwaway. Make it up if you want. How else am I supposed to know who you are?”

  Weber could think of nothing. He’d worked his entire life to efface his past, no biography except what would fit on the flaps of a book. He looked at Mark, trying to think of some story. “I liked to adore girls from a distance, without telling them.”

  Mark curled his lip and shook his head. “Done that. Very little ROI. How’d you ever get married, Romeo?”

  “My friends mounted an intervention. They set me up on a blind date. I was supposed to go to a coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon and find a woman who looked exactly like Leslie Caron. I got there, and nobody in the place even remotely fit the description. It turns out the woman got cold feet. But I didn’t know, so I just stood there in a haze, analyzing every female in the place, thinking: Well, could be, maybe…You know: brown hair, bilateral symmetry…A waitress asked if she could help me. I told her I was hoping to find a woman who looked like Leslie Caron. She mistook me for a brash young man with a sense of humor. Three years later we were married.”

  “You’re shitting me. You married a total accident? You’re a maniac.”

  “I was pretty young.”

  “And did she look anything like…Lindsay Whozit?”

  “Nothing at all. Maybe a tiny Natalie Wood thing. But more like…the woman I was going to marry.”

  Mark looked out through the wraparound waterfall, his glee collapsing. “You’re saying fate? Two inches to the left, and your life is somebody else’s. She’s just standing there, making a living, and bang: your lifelong companion. I’d say somebody was looking out for you.” Weber started the engine. Mark stayed his arm. “Only—we don’t believe in that angel shit, do we? Guys like us?”

  Weber now saw how badly he’d failed the man and his sister. He wouldn’t do so again. He made calls, tapping his network of colleagues. To a person, they were discomfited to hear from him, assuming he’d gone off somewhere to die of public disgrace. But Mark’s story fascinated them. None had ever worked with anything like it. And no two of them proposed the same course of action, except the pair who suggested leaving a nonthreatening condition alone. Most sounded grateful when Weber said goodbye.

  He worked the broadband connection in his hotel lobby, late into the night. He logged into all the medical indexes, exploring every clinical reference in the literature. He’d done as much before, but cursorily. The patient had been Dr. Hayes’s; Weber was just a visiting interviewer. He’d looked at the literature, enough to conclude that no real literature existed. What few cases he had found bore no direct bearing.

  On a second trip through the most current databases, a single abstract jumped out at him. Butler, P. V. Seventeen-year-old man with Capgras delusions following traumatic brain injury. Treatment and outcome: Delusional ideation fully resolved within 14 days of commencement of olanzapine 5 mg daily.

  He checked the date: August 2000. Two years old, in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. No excuse for having missed it on first look, not with electronic search. But he hadn’t really been looking, the first time. The sister had begged him for some treatment, but Weber hadn’t wanted Capgras to be treatable with yet one more newly marketed miracle pill. Psychopharmacology: hit or miss, hard to tune, ripe with side effects, symptom-masking, and once begun, difficult to tail off of. Medicine’s next generation would surely remember Weber’s as sadly as Weber remembered his father’s. The general level of barbarism receded, but never as quickly or completely as thought. Or maybe he was the last barbarian. Months of unnecessary suffering, because of Weber’s eyes-averted Puritanism. Because he’d never considered Mark anything but a good story.

  Karin came to meet him at the hotel. She even came up to his room, bringing her boyfriend for protection. For no reason, Daniel Riegel, a perfectly decent man, made Weber acutely uncomfortable. Spontaneous unease, hidden in some association: the goatee, the loose-fitting collarless shirt, the aura of calm self-acceptance. Karin was understandably anxious. He’d hurt her with his quick departure the first time, and baffled her by agreeing to a second. Her lips moved as Weber spoke, struggling against the hope that he might still help. How she’d gone on hoping that, Weber could only dimly imagine. How hope itself got selected for, over the eons, Weber had no clue.

  He had straightened his room before their arrival, squirreling his possessions away in closets and drawers. He’d missed a pair of socks, a milkshake cup, and his bedside reading—The Seven Pillars of Wisdom—and couldn’t now retrieve them without calling attention. The room gave no real place to sit, and he lost the rhythm of a real office visit. For their part, Karin and her Daniel walked into the meeting as if dragging into court. And Weber hadn’t even presented them with options yet.

  He described his follow-up visit with Mark. Mark’s condition definitely had grown more pronounced. Spontaneous improvement no longer seemed likely. Behavioral therapy had failed. “I do still believe that Mark is in no danger of harming anyone,” he pronounced. Karin gasped, which irked him. “I think it’s time to try something more aggressive. I recommend that Mark be started on a low-dosage regimen of olanzapine.”

  Karin sat blinking at the word. “Is this something new?” New since June?

  Daniel challenged him. “What kind of drug is that, exactly?”

  Weber felt like pulling rank. Instead, he just raised his eyebrows.

  “I mean…is it a…what category? Is it an antidepressant?”

  “It’s an antipsychotic.” Weber found the exact tone of professional assurance. But reflex fear struck both listeners. Karin reddened. “Mark isn’t psychotic. He’s not even…”

  Weber was ready with the necessary reassurances. “Mark isn’t schizophrenic, but he’s developed complicated symptoms. This drug is effective in countering those symptom
s. It was very successful in a similar case…elsewhere.”

  Daniel bridled. “We wouldn’t want to dope him or put him in some kind of chemical straitjacket.” He checked with Karin, who did not back him up.

  “He wouldn’t be in a chemical straitjacket.” No more than everyone, always. “A small number of people experience lethargy, and some put on some weight. Olanzapine adjusts levels of various neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine. If it works for Mark, it will reduce his agitation and confusion. With luck, there’s a chance it could leave him more lucid, less susceptible to extraordinary explanations.”

  “Luck?” Karin asked.

  Weber smiled and spread his hands. “It’s medicine’s great ally.”

  “He would recognize me again?” Ready to try anything.

  “No guarantees. But there does seem to be a precedent.”

  Daniel geared up for moral battle. “Don’t these drugs lead to dependency?”

  “Olanzapine is not addictive.” Weber didn’t say how long Mark would have to take it, for the simple reason that he didn’t know.

  Daniel persisted. He’d heard stories. Antipsychotics producing social withdrawal, flattened affect. Weber gently pointed out the obvious: Mark was already worse. Daniel began a list of every side effect known to medication. Weber nodded, fighting his irritation. He wanted to see the man in distress, repenting. “This is a newer drug, one of the so-called atypical antipsychotics. It has notably fewer side effects than most.”

  Karin sat on the lip of the purple hotel chair, her leg pumping. Postural hypotension and akathisia: two of olanzapine’s side effects. Sympathetic suffering, in advance. “Daniel means…we’re just afraid the medicine might turn Mark into someone else.”

  Exactly the result she was asking Weber to produce. Weber wavered, then gave in to saying, “But he’s someone else now.”

  The consultation broke up with all three of them ruffled. Weber felt stymied. Daniel Riegel withdrew in dignified dismay. Karin was all over the emotional highway. She badly wanted the magic bullet, but couldn’t move without failing someone. Love me, and tell me I’m doing right. “If you’re sure it will lessen his symptoms,” she fished, but Weber would promise nothing. “I need to think about this. Weigh things.”

  “Take all the time you need,” Weber told her. All the time in the world.

  He called Sylvie, went out for dinner, showered, read, even wrote a little, although not well. When he checked his e-mail, there was already a letter from Daniel. He’d been frightened by information he found online, a site announcing, “Olanzapine is used to treat schizophrenia. It works by decreasing unusually high levels of brain activity.” The letter overflowed with links to malpractice sites, lists of known and suspected side effects of the drug. The note itself was infuriatingly careful. Did Weber know that olanzapine produced drastic changes in blood-sugar levels? A pending suit even claimed that olanzapine had “turned some people into diabetics.” Daniel disclaimed his own role in the decision-making. “But I’d like to help Karin make the right choice.”

  The blessing of endless information: the Internet, democratizing even health care. Suppose we gave all pharmaceuticals an Amazon rating. The wisdom of crowds. Do away with experts altogether. Weber inhaled and began his reply. Here was precisely why the medical profession erected multiple barriers between its practitioners and their clients. A mistake, even to answer this e-mail. But he did, as caringly as possible. A debt to pay off. He was aware of the drug’s possible side effects, and he’d mentioned them at their meeting. His own daughter was a diabetic, and he had no desire to induce the condition in anyone. He didn’t want to suggest any course of action that Karin wasn’t completely comfortable with. Daniel was doing the right thing by informing her in every way possible. The decision was entirely Karin’s to make, but Weber stood ready to assist in any way possible. He copied the message to her.

  He fell asleep to questions of his own, for which he had no higher appeal. What had triggered such continuous surprise in him, this sense of awakening from a long sham? Why had this case unsettled him and not the hundreds before it? Not since puberty had he so doubted his impulses. When would he feel discharged, paid up, ready again to trust himself? He had become a matter of intense clinical fascination, the subject of his own open experiment…

  The next morning, he walked through town, searching for the diner where he’d breakfasted once, months before. The air was crisp and bracing, readying him for anything. Clear and unbroken, robin’s-egg blue to all four compass points, however far he walked. The buildings, houses, cars, grass, and tree trunks all shone forth, supersaturated. He might have been inside some Kodachrome harvest festival. Dirt and dried cornstalk in his nose: he couldn’t remember the last time he’d smelled anything so baldly. He felt as he had at seventeen, when, as a Dayton Chaminade senior, he’d set himself the task of writing one Persian-style ghazal a day. Back then, he knew he would become a poet. Now he filled with this sense of awful fraudulence, new lyric possibilities.

  He’d let his critics convince him. Something had eroded, the core pleasure in his accomplishment. All three books now seemed uniformly shallow, vain, and self-serving. The braver Sylvie had been in the face of his unnerving, the more certain he was that he’d let her down, that she’d lost some basic faith in him and was too scared to admit it. Who knew how Karin Schluter must see him?

  After much random turning, he stumbled upon the diner. Inescapable grid: no town for getting lost in. Ready to push through the door and challenge the waitress’s memory, he glanced up through the glass. Karin Schluter sat in a corner booth across from a man distinctly not Daniel Riegel. This man, in a thin teal tie and charcoal suit, looked as if he could buy the conservationist with the loose change that had fallen through his pocket into his jacket lining. The couple held hands across the breakfast-strewn table. Weber backed away from the door, turned, and kept walking. Perhaps she’d seen him. He turned and headed down the street. Over his shoulder, he glanced at the storefronts across the way: trim law offices, a dark, cluttered music shop with a cracked front window, a video store flying a white pennant whose festive letters read “Wednesday is Dollar Day.” Behind the bright aluminum siding and plastic signage poked bits of brick and corbels from the 1890s. The whole town lived in continuous retrograde amnesia.

  No one could ask him to do more than he’d now done. He’d spent more time with Mark than any clinician could afford. He’d found the best available treatment. He’d made himself available to Karin, in her decision. He would not profit from the visit in any way. In fact, the whole trip had cost him considerable time and money. But he didn’t yet feel like leaving. He was not yet square with Mark. He walked back to the hotel, grabbed a breakfast-like-object from the buffet, got in the rental, and drove out to Farview.

  In a field two miles out of town, he passed a boxy green brontosaur combine that was ravaging the rows of standing corn. The fields gained a stark, minimal beauty in dying. Nothing could ever sneak up on you, here in these blank horizons. The winters would be the hardest, of course. He should like to try a February here. Weeks of snow-crusted, subzero air, the winds pouring down from the Dakotas with nothing to slow them for hundreds of miles. He looked out over a grain-fringed rise at an old farm just one upgrade beyond sod house. He pictured himself in one of these gray-white clapboards, connected to humanity by no medium more advanced than radio. It seemed to him, as he drove, one of the last places left in the country where you would have to face down the contents of your own soul, stripped of all packaging.

  A few years before, River Run Estates had been a single field of wheat or soy. And just decades before that, a dozen kinds of grasses for which Weber had no name. Twenty years on, twenty hundred, it would devolve into grasses again, no memory at all of this brief human interlude. Another car sat in Mark’s driveway; he guessed whose. Weber’s pulse shot up, surprised fight-or-flight. He checked his face in his rearview mirror: he looked like a bleached garden gno
me. He arrived at the front door with no plausible reason, either professional or personal, but Mark opened as if expecting him. Weber saw her over Mark’s shoulder, seated at the kitchen table. She was smiling at him, sheepish, familiar. He still couldn’t say who she reminded him of. A first hint of awareness broke over him, and he ignored it. She welcomed him, an old confidant. He winced back, the guilty grin you use, clearing customs with contraband in your bag.

  Mark shook him by the shoulders in dull delight. “So you’re both here, the last two people I can trust. That’s pretty interesting all by itself. Don’t you think that’s interesting? The only people still with me are the ones I’ve met since the accident. Come on in. Sit down. We were just going over possible plans. Ways to flush the guilty parties out of the underbrush.”

  Barbara sucked in her cheeks and raised her eyebrows. “That wasn’t quite what we were talking about, Mark.”

  Weber admired her deadpan. It seemed impossible that she’d never had children.

  “Give or take,” Mark said. “Don’t bust me on a technicality.”