The Echo Maker

  “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.

  “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 dist
ributed 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…”

  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.

  He saw her in green dungarees and white cotton shirt, climbing a wooden stepladder. The ladder was up against a white Cape Cod house, near the ocean. She was reaching up to the eaves. What did he know about her? Nothing at all. Nothing but what his prefrontal cortex might spin out of thin air and flotsam from the hippocampus. He saw her as a little girl with a black veil pulled down over her face, lighting a fifty-cent candle and placing it on an altar in an incense-choked church. What did he know about anyone? He saw her and Mark Schluter, in gray jumpsuits and yellow hardhats, inspecting a bouquet of gauges on a gleaming stainless-steel cylinder as tall as a house. He saw her hanging out of the passenger window of a trolling blue coupe driven by Karin Schluter, holding out a stuffed teddy bear to the winds. He saw himself, standing shoulder to shoulder with Barbara in a crowded courtroom somewhere like Kabul, trying to get legal custody of the Schluter brother and sister, but unable to make their request understood in any useful language.

  It struck him that he’d invented Nebraska. The whole story: some foray into a mixed, experimental genre, a morality play masquerading as journalism. He had no reliable memory of anything that had happened there. He could accurately reconstruct exactly none of Barbara Gillespie’s traits, let alone her features. Yet he could not stop summoning up recovered memories of her, all of them so detailed that he might have sworn they were documented data.