The Echo Maker

  “Frostbite,” Bonnie remembers.

  “Frostbite,” Karen agrees. “Do me.”

  They work together, like technicians. Bonnie steps back to admire her handiwork. “Killer,” she says, which must be good. “Armed and dangerous. You could eat men like a frog eats flies. He won’t know what hit him. Killer, I’m telling you.”

  Karin sits still and cries. She takes the crestfallen makeup artist and hugs her. Bonnie hugs back, clutching, an accomplice before the fact.

  Then Karin is downtown, the same spot where she first flushed out Robert Karsh. Early evening, and his office empties onto the street. He’s among the last. When he glides out the door and sees her, he stops in surprise. She turns and closes the distance to him, trying not to think, humming the word killer to herself, a protecting spell. He comes up to meet her. His chin is out, and his eyes are everywhere.

  “Jesus,” he says. “Look at you.” He wants her, even now, even after what she’s done. Maybe more, because of it. He wants to take her off behind the burning bushes and do it right there, like lower vertebrates. “Well,” he says. “Your friend Daniel seems to have gotten the Development Council’s attention.” He doesn’t need to add: mine, too. He smiles, his scary, wholesale smile. The smile is so Karsh she can’t help smiling back. “You gave away the whole show. Spilled pretty much everything I told you in confidence. Okay: maybe not everything. But all the business stuff.” He’s still smiling, as if at his little Ashley, the girl Karin has never been allowed to meet. “Maybe this was all about business, huh? From the beginning?”

  “Robert?” Her voice flies a little, until she rides it down. “I wish I could take credit for that. I wish I’d been that smart.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly set us back. Complicated the game. Major personal embarrassment, for me. A scramble to keep my ass out of the fire. Hey: keeps things interesting. The price of learning what I mean to you.”

  She shakes her head. “You always knew that. Better than I did.”

  “But, hey. If this project doesn’t happen right in Farview, we’ll do it somewhere downstream. You think you’re going to stop us from building? You think growth is just going to go away? Who are you? You aren’t even…”

  “I’m not even anyone,” she says.

  “I didn’t say that. I’m just saying that whatever the community needs is going to get built. Eventually. If not next year…”

  Too self-evident even to counter. Even now, his eyes say, Let’s go somewhere. Get a room. Twenty minutes. Silk dress, doing its job. And she feels nothing, a nothing that fills and lifts her. She stands dead still, unable to stop shaking her head. “I erased myself for you.” Bewildered that she did; bewildered that she still might. She looks at him, scavenging for her past. “You think you knew me. You think you know me!” Years of effort, and she might pass him on the street and not feel a peep. Karsh, too: mimetic Capgras, a smile that fails to acknowledge anything, standing there grinning like he’s just bribed the grade school teacher with an infected apple.

  And still, they are connected. She turns and slices a straight line back through town, this town she hates and will never be rid of. And all down the block, at her back, she hears him calling, half amused, “Babe? Come on, Rabbit. Hey! Let’s talk this out.” Easy, understanding, sure she will be back, if not now, then this time next year.

  They talk for longer than Weber can say. And with every answer Mark needs, Weber grows less certain. That pack of Scouts, waving faulty flashlights in the woods at night, is scattered. All his life, he has known himself to be just this makeshift troop. Only now, something undams in him, and knowing goes real.

  They talk until Mark’s theories start to sound plausible, until Mark believes that Weber has grasped the size of the facts. They talk until the chemicals in the IV drip dampen the activity of his synapses, calming him.

  But something in him still struggles. One palm on his temples, the other on his nape. “You know, they can do anything that they want to me. Drugs. Electroshock. Even surgery, if that’s what it takes. I’ll happily let them inside again, if they just get it right this time. I can’t live with this halfway bullshit anymore.” He closes his eyes and growls like a cornered wolf. “Hate this feeling that I’ve made everything up. That I’m some totally invented asshole. But there’s one thing I know I did not invent.” He contorts his body, reaches to his bedside drawer, and pulls out the note. It refuses to decay; the lamination has turned it permanent. He throws it down on the sill. “I wish to God I did invent it. I wish there were no guardian. But there it is. And what in God’s name are we supposed to do about it?”

  Weber does nothing except wait until the chemicals take Mark, and he sleeps. Then Weber totters down the hospital hall. He sits for a moment in a glass terrarium of a waiting room, filled with individuals all promised a high-tech miracle. A girl, twenty at the outside, sits in a cushioned orange chair, reading aloud from an oversized, garish picture book to a four-year-old on her lap. “Did you ever wonder how the miracle of you began?” She reads sweetly, reassuringly. “You didn’t come from monkeys. Not from some jellyfish in the sea. No! You began when God decided…”

  He looks up, and it’s as if he has willed her into being, there in front of him. The sister, in green silk. “Did you see him?” he asks. His voice sounds strange to him.

  Karin shakes her head. “He’s sleeping. Unconscious.”

  Weber nods. Un-conscious. Wrong, that the negation should stand for something so many billions of years older than the negated.

  “Will he be all right?”

  There’s something in the question he can’t penetrate. Will anyone? “He’s safe. For now.” They stand near each other, saying nothing. He sees the hundred small muscles around her eyes reading his, even as his fit to hers. “He’s under the impression that he might be part bird.”

  She smiles in slow pain. “I know the feeling.”

  “He feels that the emergency room surgeons swapped…”

  Her brusque nod cuts him off. “Old story,” she says. “Not surprising, given the look of them.”

  She has gone demented—something in the water supply. “The surgeons?”

  Her face creases like a child’s, a girl who has just discovered the total hoax of words. “No, the birds.”

  “Ah. I’ve never seen them.”

  She looks at him, like he’s just said he has never felt pleasure. She checks her watch. “Let’s go,” she says. “We’ve just time.”

  They hide in an abandoned pit blind as dusk comes down. They sit on an old trysting tarp she had in her trunk, she still in Bonnie’s green silk dress, he in coat and tie. She’s taken him to a roost that only natives know—a private farm, a secret uninhabited trespass. The pit is chilly, the field around them littered with last year’s brown corn stalk stubs and waste grain. Just beyond the field, the sandy banks of the river serpentine. A few birds already gather. She folds her hands in front of her face, like a kid learning to pray. He looks at the thicket of birds a hundred yards from them, then back at her. This is it? The mythic spectacle?

  She grins and shakes her head at his doubt. She brushes his shoulder: wait. Life is long out here. Longer than you think. Longer than you can think.

  For a moment in the chill dusk, he lifts. The sky slips from peach to garnet to blood. A thread ripples across the light: a kettle of cranes home in from nowhere. They make a sound, prehistoric, too loud and carrying for their body size. A sound he remembers from before he hears it.

  He and the woman crouch on the ground. His spine hums with cold. Another thread floats down on the still air. Then another. The fibers of bird catch and join, an unraveled cloth coming back together. Threads appear from all compass points, the sky crimson, shot through with veins of black. The wings bank and yaw, slip or skate up again, before winding back in a slow cyclone. Soon the sky fills with tributaries, a river of birds, a mirror Platte meandering through heaven. And every part of it, calling.

  The birds a
re huge, much bigger than he imagined. Their wings pump slow and full, the long primaries arcing high above the body, then drooping well below, a shawl perpetually resettled over forgetting shoulders. Necks stretch out while legs dangle behind, and in the middle, the slight bulge of body, like a child’s toy suspended between strings. A bird lands twenty feet from the blind. It shakes out its wings, a span longer than Weber. Behind this one, hundreds more fall in. And the roosting in this private field is just a sideshow, nothing compared to the climaxes in the larger sanctuaries. The calls collect and echo, a single splintering, tone-deaf chorus stretching miles in every direction, back into the Pleistocene.

  He thinks: Sylvie should see this. The most natural thought in the world. Sylvie and Jess. Not Jess, but Jessie, at eight or nine, when a city of birds would have astounded her. Did he ever come close to that child? Did that self-shaping little girl deserve some more feeling father?

  In threaded clumps, the birds coast back to earth. They collapse from grace into earthbound stumbling. The diminishment would be comic if it weren’t so painful. A thousand floating cranes succumb to gravity. They spot the humans and carry on, deep in the constantly meandering present. For as long as there have been prairies and sandy banks and the idea of safety here, birds have gathered in these braids. This century, they graze on field corn. Next century: whatever scraps this place might still supply.

  The icy ground numbs him. He jumps at the sound of her voice, from a distant planet. “Look! That one, there.” He lifts his head to see. It’s him, in the roadside dance house, alongside Barbara Gillespie, wrestling his body into joy. The crane dances, weirdly deliberate. It tosses twigs into the air. It cowls its fingers and kinks itself like a rapper. Then the bird and its mate rise to the alert, necks extended, eyes on something invisibly far off, their beaks parallel, signing the air. They alternate, then synchronize, looping their calls into unison.

  He locates something in the pirouetting pair. Some clue to his own dissolve. And then, in trivial telepathy, something even science could explain, she reads his thoughts: “Why did you come back? Was it for Mark? Or for her?”

  He can’t even play dumb.

  Her grin twists into a sneer. “Everybody saw. Obvious.”

  “Saw what?” They can have seen nothing. He’s only just seen, himself. But even his slow science converges on the obvious: the first person is always the last to know.

  She talks to someone out in the field. “Daniel says she called him. A year ago, before Mark’s accident. Asking him all sorts of questions about the Refuge. He says she’s a spy. A researcher, working for the developers. Does that sound crazy to you? Like one of Mark’s theories?”

  He would say something if he could. He’d have a thought, and even give it, but he is slipping back down, underneath words.

  She examines him, the two of them reversed, she the doctor and he the subject. “Something’s happened to you.”

  “Yes,” he says. He sees that something, thousands of it, combing the fields, a whisper away.

  She closes her eyes and lies down on the frosty ground. He eases back beside her, on his side, his head in his crooked arm. He looks at her, at the open country of her, as the last amber flecks of light die, searching for the woman of a year ago. Now she looks back. “I don’t know what I needed from you. Writing you about Mark. I don’t know what I needed from him. From anyone.” She flicks her palm out at the damning evidence, the bird-crammed field. What is there possibly to need?

  She looks away, self-conscious. She sits up, points at a nearby pair: two large and agitated birds, walking with their wings out, jabbering. One bugles a melody, four notes of spontaneous surprise. The other picks up the motive and shadows it. The sound stabs him: creation chattering to itself, locking him out. True speech, beyond any but a crane’s ability to decode. The speaking pair fall silent, scouring the ground for evidence. They could be detectives, or scientists. Life incommunicable, even to life.

  He looks at the woman, her face lined with the same thought, as clearly as if he has put it there: What does it feel like, to be a bird?

  “There,” she declares, nodding at the walking pair. “That’s what Mark’s talking about.” Her nose flares, red and raw. Her head shakes in disbelief. “They used to just unzip, and be us. Or we’d peel off our skin and go with them. Oldest story in the book.” She takes his profile, but when he turns back toward her, she swings away. “The sad thing is, though, they can’t love. They mate for life. Follow their partners every year for thousands of miles. Raise their young together. Fake a broken wing to lure a predator away from their chicks. Even sacrifice themselves to save their young. But no. Ask any scientist. Birds can’t love. Birds don’t even have a self! Nothing like us. No relation.”

  He can only begin to see all the things she holds against him. He would apologize, if he could speak.

  The larger of the walking pair turns and fixes him. Something looks out from the prehistoric bird, a secret about him, but not his. A look of pure wildness, all the hard intelligence of simply being that Weber has forgotten.

  But the woman is talking. She is saying things, faraway things, with great urgency. She tells him about the water wars. How the preservers have won for a moment. How they will lose, forever afterward. She has seen all the numbers, and no power exists large enough to stop them. Her face sets into an ugly mask. She shakes her arm at the staring bird, who takes fright and skims away. “How can we not want this? Just this, exactly as it is. If people only knew…”

  But if people knew, this field would be buried in crane peepers.

  “How long do you suppose we have?” she asks. “God, what is wrong with us? You’re the expert. What is it in our brains that won’t…?”

  The sky is dark now, and he can’t see what she points at. Each of them sits sealed off in their own private pit blind, looking out on an unthinkably long night.

  She speaks out loud, as if already there were only memory. “I remember the first time my father took us out here. We were little. Me, Mark, and my father, sitting in this field. This one. Early morning, before the sun was up. You have to see these creatures in the morning. The evening show is pure theater. But the morning is religion. The three of us at dawn, still happy. And my father, still the wisest man alive. I can hear him. He told us how they navigated. He was a small-plane pilot, and he loved how they followed landmarks to find this exact spot, year after year. How they recognized individual fields. ‘Damn straight, cranes remember. Hang on to things like a bat hangs to a barn rafter.’ And the first time I saw those birds circle up into the air and disappear, I kept looking at the sky, thinking, Hey, me too. Take me with. Awful feeling. Empty. Like: Where’d I go bad?”

  Her fingers brush her eyebrows. He knows her now, the thing in her that had once so repelled him. Her weakness. Her need to do right by the world.

  “Some kind of lesson for us. His idea of fatherhood. Going on and on about blood, family, how even the birds take care of their own. Scared the crap out of both of us. He squeezed us both until it hurt, made us swear. ‘If anything ever happens—and it will—you two never, never give up on each other.’”

  These last words are so swallowed, Weber must supply them. Then she looks away, strong again, more composed than he can even fake, gazing across the wetlands, past the progress that will destroy them.

  “He was wild, my father. Totally lost touch with the rest of the race. He always told me I would come to nothing. Pretty much ensured it.” She turns and grabs Weber’s arm in the dark. She needs him to contradict. Needs him to say it’s not too late to change her life. Not too late for real work at last, the only work that matters. “If you had raised me…If you had raised Mark and me? Someone who knew what you know?” She might have come to this calling sooner, while there was still time.

  Weber stays silent, too scared to confirm or deny. But she’s already taken what she needs from him. She shakes her head at him and says, “Unsponsored, impossible, near-omnipotent, and infi
nitely fragile…”

  He struggles to place the words, written by someone who once was him. Her face, flush with the idea, begs him to remember. If all forged, then all free. Free to play ourselves, free to impersonate, to improvise, free to image anything. Free to weave our minds through what we love. What lots we all might learn about this river. What places water might still get out and see.

  He spends the night awake in his rented cubicle, his brain on fire. His cell phone rings twice, but he doesn’t take it. He stares at the hell-red LED of the bedside alarm, watching the minutes hang. He will go to Dedham Glen, ask to see her file. No: they would deny him access. He isn’t authorized. He could ask her supervisor: When did she come to this facility? What job did she do before this one? But the supervisor would just stonewall him, or worse.

  He’s out in front of her bungalow at 4:00 a.m. He sits in the rental in total darkness, all the time in the world to decide not to torch his life. But then, it’s burned already—Chickadee, Conscience Bay, Sylvie, the lab, his writing, Famous Gerald—all consumed, months ago. He cannot even fake the role now. Not even his wife would believe the act. He wills himself downward, falling. There is a need to be no one, one that will forever hide its precise location from neuroscience’s probes. He steps from the car and wanders to her stoop, into the chaos he has made.

  Barbara comes puffed and bleary to the door, the first hint of awareness on her. She tilts her head and smiles, almost expecting him. And the last, solid part of him dissolves in air. “You okay?” she asks, inviting and uncertain. “I didn’t know you were back.”

  His head rocks, as easy as breathing.

  Wordless, she lets him in. Only when she flicks on the dim overhead light in a bare foyer—an abandoned vacation cottage on the shores of a northern lake, circa 1950—does she ask, “Have you seen Mark?”

  “Yes. Have you?”

  She drops her head. “I’ve been afraid to.”