The Echo Maker

  She sat stiff, her spine a spike. “What did you do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s lying in that ditch. You and your friend are right there.”

  “Are you kidding? He had three tons of metal on top of him. Every second counted. We did what we had to do. Spun around, ran back to town, and called it in.”

  “Neither of you has a cell phone? Jacking around with those ridiculous walkie-talkie toys, and no cell phone?”

  “We called it in,” he said. “Within minutes.”

  “Anonymously? And you never came forward, after. Never told the story. Changed your tires and pitched the guilty ones in the river.”

  “Listen to me. You don’t know anything.” His voice rose. “Those police types bust you first and ask questions later. They go after guys like me and Tommy. We threaten them.”

  “You, threaten? And he went along with it. Your friend Rupp. The Specialist.”

  “Look. You don’t believe me, even now. You think the police were going to believe us, the night of the accident?”

  “Why didn’t they lock you up?”

  “They questioned Tommy down at Riley, and he gave exactly the same story. The point is, we got the paramedics there as fast as possible. We didn’t have anything to add to the facts. We have no clue what happened to him. It wouldn’t have made any difference, our coming forward.”

  “It might have made a difference to Mark.”

  He screwed up his face. “It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

  Her need to believe him appalled her. She rose to her feet, rearranging things: the tracks, their order, her memory. Time threaded and rethreaded, slowed, buckled, and slammed into reverse. “The third car,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Cain said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a year.”

  “The third car,” she repeated. “The one that ran off the road, from behind him.” She crossed to him, ready to slam him again. “Were any cars coming toward you as you reached the spot? Any westbound cars, heading back toward town? Answer me!”

  “Yeah. We were watching, as we got close. We kept expecting him to blast past us. But then came this white Ford Taurus with out-of-state plates.”

  “What state?”

  “Rupp says Texas. I couldn’t tell. We were going a little fast, I told you.”

  “How fast was this Ford going?”

  “Funny you should ask. We both had the impression that it was crawling.” The thought sat him up. “Jesus. You’re right. This other car…this Ford came up just before we did, just after he…and they…You’re saying that they…What exactly are you saying?”

  She didn’t know what she was saying. Then or ever. “They didn’t stop either.”

  Cain shut his eyes, clamped his neck in one palm, and threw back his head. “It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

  “It might have,” she said. God led me to you.

  She got home crazy late. Daniel was waiting up for her, beside himself. “I thought something had happened to you. I thought…You might have been anywhere. You might have been hurt.”

  Might have been with the other man. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have called.” To placate him, she told him everything.

  He listened, but was no help. “Who called the accident in? Rupp and Cain? Not the other car? I thought it was this guardian…?”

  “Maybe they both called in.”

  “But I thought the police said…”

  “I don’t know, Daniel.”

  “But if the other car didn’t stop, why the note? Taking credit, for leaving the scene…?”

  “I have to sleep,” she explained. It was too late to call Mark and Bonnie. She didn’t know what she would say, anyway. What her brother could handle.

  She woke the next morning to the raging phone. The room was ablaze with light and Daniel had already left for the Refuge. She dragged herself up, out of animal dreams. “I’m coming. Hold on a minute, please. You checking up on me or something?”

  But when she lifted the receiver, the voice at the other end was thin and spectral. “Karin? It’s Bonnie. He’s having some kind of seizure, and I can’t get him out.”

  It had to be the hospital, again. A year’s long loop back to where he was, this time last March. Some migrating thing that can’t know any better. Mark Schluter back in Good Samaritan, not the same ward, but close enough. Restrained in bed, post-toxic, 450 mg of olanzapine flushed from his body.

  A dead man has tried to kill himself: the only way to fit things back together. Dystonic by the time the paramedics reached him. Intubation and gastric lavage, rushed to the hospital for intravenous fluids and cardiovascular monitoring, watched over by a staff who will ensure that he won’t try leaving again.

  He comes out of his second coma, a mere figment of the first. Conscious again, he refuses all attempts to communicate except to say, “I want to talk to Shrinky. I’ll only talk to Shrinky.”

  Dr. Hayes calls Weber with the news. Weber receives the report like a verdict, the fruit of his long, self-serving ambition. He calls Mark at once, but Mark refuses to talk. “No phones,” Mark tells the shift nurse. Every phone line is tapped. Every cable and satellite. “He’s got to come here, in person.”

  Weber makes several more efforts at contact, all without result. Mark is out of danger, at least for now. Weber has already entered into the case beyond the bounds of professional correctness. His last trip almost finished him. Any more involvement, and he’ll be done.

  But something in the neuroscientist now sees: responsibility has no limits. The case histories you appropriate are yours. If he does nothing, if he refuses the boy’s one request, if he abandons now what he has bungled so badly, then he surely is what his darkest voices already declare him. Tried to kill himself, because of me. No choice but return. Some long loop, back again. Tour Director makes him.

  No way to tell his wife. Tell Sylvie. After what he has already told her, any given reason will seem the worst of self-deceptions. She, who would not stretch out a hand now if Gerald Weber, celebrity author, tainted saint of neural insight, were burnt in effigy for bogus empathy: no possible way to explain to her.

  He braces for her response, but nothing prepares him for how badly his announcement shakes the woman. She takes it like some numb Cassandra who already guesses everything he hasn’t yet admitted. “What can you do for him? Anything the doctors out there can’t?”

  She asked him that question, a year ago. He should have listened to her then. He should listen now. He shakes his head, his mouth a mail slot. “Nothing I can think of.”

  “Haven’t you done enough, already?”

  “That’s the problem. The olanzapine was my idea.”

  She sits down hard in the breakfast nook. But still she masters herself, horribly true to form. “It wasn’t your idea that he take two weeks’ dosage at once.”

  “No. You’re right. That one wasn’t mine.”

  “Don’t do this to me, Gerald. What are you proving? You’re a good man. As good as your words. Why won’t you believe that? Why can’t you just…?”

  She stands and circles. She waits for him to raise the issue. She extends him that grim respect, wholly unearned. She will assume the woman is nothing, irrelevant, until he tells her otherwise. Will believe in him, even without trust. He must say something. But he can’t grace the fact, even by dismissing it.

  All things come down to belief. Belief in a gossamer too ephemeral to fool anyone. That will be the holy grail of brain studies: to see how tens of billions of chemical logic gates all sparking and damping each other can somehow create faith in their own phantom loops. “He’s in agony. He wants to talk to me. He needs something from me.”

  “And you? What do you need?” Her eyes probe him, bitterly. She looks palsied and pale, suffering from her own overdose.

  He answers, almost. “It costs me nothing. Some frequent flyer miles, a couple of days, and a few hundred out of the research account.
” She shakes her head at him, the closest she can come to derision. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I need to do this. I’m not an exploiter. Not an opportunist.”

  She has stood by, supportive, kept a hard-won poise these last few months, throughout his steady dissolving act. Every drop in his self-confidence has hammered her. “No,” she says, fighting for composure. She crosses to him; her hands scrabble at his shirt. “I don’t like this, Man. This is wrong. This is messed up.”

  “Don’t worry,” he says. As soon as the words leave his mouth, he feels the ridiculousness. The self is a burning house; get out while you can. He sees his wife, really sees her, for the first time since he stopped believing in his work. Sees the pea-green amphibian puckers under her eyes, the withering of her upper lip—when did she grow old? He sees in her flinching gaze how he frightens her. She can’t make him out. She’s lost him. “Don’t worry.”

  She shrinks from his words in disgust. “What the hell do you need? You need Famous Gerald? Famous Gerald can go hang himself. Do you need people to say that you…?” She bites into her lower lip and looks away. When she speaks again, it’s like a newscaster. “Will you be doing any sightseeing while you’re there?” Her face is bloodless, but her voice is casual. “Any old friends?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a small town.” And then—the debt of thirty years—he corrects himself. “I’m not sure. It’s likely.”

  She pushes away and crosses to the refrigerator. Her businesslike movement destroys him. She opens the freezer and removes two pieces of tilapia, to thaw for dinner. She takes the fish to the sink and runs cold water over them. “Gerald?” Idly curious, trying for acceptance, and missing by a cold mile. “Can you just tell me why?”

  He deserves her fury, even desires it. But not this calm acceptance. Gerald: just tell me why. So you will think well of me again. “I’m not sure,” he tells her. Repeating that in his mind, until he makes it true.

  Mark left no note before swallowing his antipsychotics. How could he, already dead? But even that lack of message accuses Karin. All this year he has called for her help, and all along she has failed him. Failed him in every way: failed to confirm his past, failed to permit his present, failed to recover his future.

  The old Schluter craziness settles on her, the inheritance she’s never been able to shed. Her first identity: guilty and deficient, whatever else she manages. She visits Mark in the hospital. She even brings Daniel, Mark’s oldest nonimaginary friend. But Mark refuses to talk to either of them. “Can you two just respectfully leave me to rot here in peace?” It’s Shrinky or no one.

  She surrenders him again to the health professionals, to the chemical correctives now dripping into his limp arms. She slips down her own Glasgow Scale. She can focus on nothing. Her concentration strays for hours at a stretch. At last she sees why her brother stopped recognizing her. Nothing to recognize. She has twisted herself past recognition. One small deceit laid on another, until even she can’t say where she stands or who she’s working for. Things she’s waffled on, denied, and lied about, things she’s hidden even from herself. All things to all people. Doing a conservationist and a developer at the same time. Making herself over, personality du jour. Imagination, even memory, all too ready to accommodate her, whoever her is. Anything for a scratch behind the ears. Scratch from anyone.

  She is nothing. No one. Worse than no one. Blank at the core.

  She must change her life. From the mess of her fouled nest, salvage something. Anything. The slightest, drab, creeping thing: it makes no difference, so long as it’s uncompromised and wild. She may be too late to get her brother back. But she might still rescue her brother’s sister.

  She buries herself in legwork for the Refuge, researching her pamphlets. Something to wake sleepwalkers and make the world strange again. The least dose of life science, a few figures in a table, and she begins to see: people, desperate for solidity, must kill anything that exceeds them. Anything bigger or more linked, or, in its bleak enduring, a little more free. No one can bear how large the outside is, even as we decimate it. She has only to look, and the facts pour out. She reads, and still can’t believe: twelve million or more species, less than a tenth of them counted. And half will snuff out in her lifetime.

  Crushed by data, her senses come weirdly alive. The air smells like lavender, and even the drab, late-winter browns feel more vivid than they have since sixteen. She’s hungry all the time, and the futility of her work doubles her energy. Her connections race. She’s like that case in Dr. Weber’s last book, the woman with fronto-temporal dementia who suddenly started producing the most sumptuous paintings. A kind of compensation: when one brain part is overwhelmed, another takes over.

  The web she glimpses is so intricate, so wide, that humans should long ago have shriveled up and died of shame. The only thing proper to want is what Mark wanted: to not be, to crawl down the deepest well and fossilize into a rock that only water can dissolve. Only water, as solvent against all toxic run-off, only water to dilute the poison of personality. All she can do is work, try to return the river to those we’ve stolen it from. Everything human and personal horrifies her now, everything except this doomed pamphleteering.

  Water wants something from her. Something only consciousness can deliver. She is nothing, as toxic as anything with an ego. A sham; a pretense. Nothing worth recognizing. But still, this river needs her, its liquid mind, its way of surviving…

  The world fills with luxuries she can’t afford. Sleep is one of them. When she does succumb, she and Daniel still share a bed. But touching has stopped, except by accident. He meditates more now, sometimes an hour at a shot, just to escape all the damage she has done him. She has battered him with betrayals; he absorbs the battering, as he absorbs all the race’s insults. He seems to her now a man who might absorb anything, someone who, alone of everyone she knows, has put away vanity and looked past himself. And this is what she has so resented in him. Of all the men she has ever been with, he now seems the only one fluid enough to be a decent father, to teach a child about everything outside us that must be recognized. But he would sooner die than bring another estranged human into this world. Another like her.

  He should have thrown her out months ago. No reason why he hasn’t. Maybe only residual love for her brother. Or just the care he extends to any creature. She must seem hideous to him, clutching, a brittle little shell of need. He can’t want her, and never really did. Yet he remains stubbornly if silently decent to her in all things. Her brother has almost died, and this man alone knows what that means. This man alone might help her cope. She lies in bed, her spine eight inches from his, aching just to reach back with one blind palm and touch the warm of him. Prove that he’s still there.

  The third day after Mark’s attempt, the Development Council indicates its willingness in principle to grant the Central Platte Scenic Natural Outpost the right to purchase water shares. She has dreaded the decision for weeks, but never really believed it would come. The combined Platte preservation groups respond in numb disarray. They’ve lost their footrace with the developers’ consortium, and in a series of hasty meetings, the alliance begins to crumble.

  If the decision demoralizes her, it crushes Daniel. He says nothing about the judgment but curt, stoic maxims. He finds the council beneath condemning. Something withers in him, some basic willingness to go on fighting a species that won’t be rehabilitated and can’t be beaten. He won’t talk to her about it, and she has lost her right to press him.

  She needs to square things by him. To fix one thing, for one real person, in all the debacle of recent days. Redeem his ill-placed trust and return something to the one man who loves her brother as much as she does.

  She has one thing she can give him, one thing only. The thing water wants. She almost talks herself into believing that she has worked toward this, all these months, just to be able to give it to him now. She knows what the gift will cost her; he will learn who she is, and wash his hands of her. The othe
r man, too. She will lose them both, everything that she has perjured herself to get. But she can give Daniel something worth far more than herself.

  She spends the day preparing him a vegan feast: broccoli almond seitan, skordalia, and coriander chutney. Even tahini rice pudding, for the man who considers dessert a sin. She flies around the kitchen, mixing and assembling, feeling almost steady. Blessed distraction, and the most effort she has expended on him since moving in. She’s done nothing for him, while he has tended to her every crisis. She has let their life be overgrown by the weed of her personality. Is it so impossible to be someone else, to make him a grateful meal for once? Even if it is their last.

  Daniel blows in on a cloud of distraction. He struggles to make sense of the feast. “What is all this? Some occasion?”

  It stings, but she needs it to. “There’s always occasion.”

  “True. Well.” His smile is crucified. He sits and spreads his hands, stunned at all the food. He hasn’t even taken off his coat. “My separation party, then.”

  She stops licking rice pudding off her finger. “What do you mean?”

  He’s placid, head bowed. “Quit the job.”

  She holds the counter, her head shaking. She drops onto the stool across from him. “What do you mean? What are you saying?” He can’t stop his work. Impossible: like a hummingbird on a hunger strike.

  He’s expansive, almost amused. “Split with the Refuge. An ideological parting of the ways. They seem to have decided that this whole crane theme park isn’t so bad after all. Something they can work with. Compromise is the better part of valor, you know. They’re circulating a memo saying that, properly run, the Outpost might even be beneficial for the birds!”

  A thing she herself believed in, well past the public hearing. “Oh, Daniel. No. You can’t let this happen.”

  He tilts an eyebrow at her. “Don’t worry. I’ve covered for you. Already talked it out with them. You can go on working there. They won’t hold it against you that you’re my…that you and I…”

  “Daniel.” She can’t take him in. They’ve lost. That’s what he’s saying. The fight is over. The river will be developed; more staging ground will vanish. He’s saying…but it’s impossible, what he’s saying. Quitting the Refuge. Leaping off into nothing. Death by disengagement.