The Echo Maker

  The words had to mean something. Even if they weren’t quite thoughts, he flung them with the force of meaning. She was walking him down a crowded hospital corridor when Mark popped out with “Got a lot on our plates right now.”

  She threw her arms around him and squeezed him in joy. He knew. He could say. All the reward she needed.

  He pulled free and turned away. “You’re turning that dirt into clay.”

  She followed his gaze. There in the hall’s hum, she finally heard it. With an animal precision hers had lost, his ears picked up stray pieces of the surrounding conversations and wove them together. Parrots exhibited more native intelligence. She pulled his chest up against her face and began to cry.

  “We’ll get through this,” he said, his arms dead at his sides. She pushed him back and examined his face. His eyes said less than nothing.

  But she fed and walked and read to him tirelessly, never doubting that he would come back. She had more energy for rehabilitation than she’d had for any job she’d ever worked.

  Brother and sister were alone together the next morning when a voice like a cartoon mouse broke over them. “Hey! How’s today treating the two of you?”

  Karin jumped up with a shout and threw her arms around the intruder. “Bonnie Travis. Where have you been? What took you so long?”

  “My bad!” the mouse girl said. “I wasn’t sure whether…”

  Her eyes pinched and she worked her lower lip. She touched Karin’s shoulders in a burst of fear. Brain damage. Worse than contagious. It turned the innocent cagey and unnerved the surest believer.

  Mark sat on the end of the bed in jeans and a green work shirt, his palms curled on his knees and his head erect. He might have been pretending to be the Lincoln Memorial. Bonnie Travis hugged him. He made no sign of feeling the embrace. She sprang up from the botched gesture. “Oh, Marker! I wasn’t sure how you were going to look. But you look real good to me.”

  His head was shaved, with two great riverbeds scarring the patchy watershed. His face, still scabbed over, looked like a ten-inch peach pit. “Real good,” Mark said. “Wasn’t sure, but could good should be good.”

  Bonnie laughed and her Camay face flushed cherry Kool-Aid. “Wow! Would you listen to you! I heard from Duane you couldn’t talk, but I am reading you loud and clear.”

  “You talked to those two?” Karin asked. “What are they telling people?”

  “Looking good,” Mark said. “Pretty pretty pretty.” The reptile brain, creeping out to sun itself.

  Bonnie Travis giggled. “Well, I did clean up a little before I came.”

  Words came flowing out of the mouse girl, meaningless, trivial, stupid, lifesaving words. The Travis high-speed pelting, which for years had maddened Karin, now felt like a steady April downpour, raising the water table, recharging the soil. Babbling, Bonnie Travis picked at her plum wool skirt and lumpy hand-knit sweater, its patches of olive yarn converging on the color of the Platte in August. On her neck chain, a Kokopelli danced and played the flute.

  The year before, after their mother’s funeral, Karin had asked Mark, Are you two an item? She your woman now? Wanting some protection for him, however little.

  Mark had just grunted. Even if she was, she wouldn’t realize.

  Bonnie told a motionless Mark all about her new job, the latest change from her steady waitressing. “I’m telling you, I’ve just landed every woman’s dream occupation. You’ll never guess what it is in a million years. I didn’t even know it existed. Docent for the new Great Platte River Road Archway Monument. Did you two know that our new arch is the only monument in the whole world that straddles an interstate? I can’t understand why it’s still not doing very well.”

  Mark listened, mouth open. Karin closed her eyes and basked in beautiful human inanity.

  “I get to dress up as a pioneer woman. I’ve a floor-length cotton dress? And a truly sweet bonnet with a little beak. The whole nine yards. And I have to answer any visitor’s questions as if I were the real deal. You know, like it’s still one hundred and fifty years ago. You’d be amazed at what people ask.”

  Karin had forgotten just how intoxicatingly pointless existence could be. Mark hung on the edge of the bed, a sandstone pharaoh, staring at Bonnie’s intricate, moving mouth. Afraid to stop talking, she chattered on about the tepees lining the I-80 exit ramp, the simulated buffalo stampede, the life-size Pony Express station, and the epic story of the building of the Lincoln Highway. “And you get all that for only $8.25. Can you believe some people think that’s expensive?”

  “It’s a steal,” Karin said.

  “You’d be amazed, all the places people come from. Czech Republic. Bombay. Naples, Florida. Most of the folks stop to see the birds. They’re getting incredibly famous, those birds. Ten times as many crane peepers as we used to get just six years ago, according to my boss. Those birds are putting our town on the map.”

  Mark started laughing. At least it sounded like laughter, slowed to a crawl. Even Bonnie flinched. She stuttered and laughed, herself. She could think of nothing more to say. Her lips curdled, her cheeks flushed, and her eyes filled with tears.

  It came time for Karin to change Mark’s shoes and socks, the old circulation ritual from bed-bound weeks that she kept up because she had nothing else to do. Mark sat docile as she removed his Converse All-Stars. Bonnie pulled herself together and helped with the other foot. Holding Mark’s bare feet, she asked, “Want me to do your toes?”

  He seemed to mull over the idea.

  “You want to paint his…? He’d have a fit.”

  “Just for fun. It’s something we’ve played with, in the past. He loves it. Calls them his hind claws. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s really not that kinky. Marker?”

  He didn’t move his head or blink. “He loves it,” he said, his voice thick and sad. Bonnie clapped her hands and looked at Karin. Karin shrugged. The girl dove into her fringed bag, digging out a supply of nail polish stashed away for just this possibility. Bonnie made Mark lie back and surrender his feet to the process. “Iced Cherry? How about Bruise? No. Frostbite? Frostbite it is.”

  Karin sat and watched the ritual. She’d come back six years too late to help Mark. Whatever she did for him now, however far she rehabilitated him, he would return to this. “I’ll be right back,” she promised, and left the room. Coatless, she cut a surveyor’s line to the Shell station she’d been daydreaming about for a week. She pasted a sum on the counter and asked for a pack of Marlboros. The cashier laughed at her: two dollars short. Six years since she’d thought of buying a cigarette, and the price had doubled while she was stupidly staying clean. She made up the difference and dragged the prize outside. She put one to her lips, already buzzing from the taste of the filter. With a shaking hand, she lit it and drew in. A cloud of indescribable relief expanded in her lungs and inked into her limbs. Eyes closed, she smoked half the cigarette, then carefully stubbed it out and slipped the unsmoked half back into the pack. When she returned to the hospital, she sat on a cold bench in the horseshoe drive, just outside the sliding glass doors, and smoked the other half. She would brake her descent as much as possible, a long, slow ride back to exactly where she’d been before her six brutally won years. But she’d savor every baby step back down into enslavement.

  In Mark’s room, the pedicure was wrapping up. Mark sat on the bed, studying his toes the way a sloth might study a film of a tree branch. Bonnie fluttered about him, twittering. “Perfect timing,” she told Karin. “Could you take our picture?” Bonnie rooted through her magic bag and produced a disposable camera. She lined up alongside Mark’s hind claws, the lime of her eyes wildly complimenting the purple she’d applied to him.

  As Karin swung the plastic viewfinder up to her eye, her brother smiled. Who knew what he knew? Karin couldn’t even vouch for Bonnie.

  Blissful Bonnie retrieved her camera. “I’ll make copies for you both.” She rubbed Mark’s shoulder. “We’re going to have a lot of fun when
you’re one hundred percent together again.”

  He grinned and studied her. Then one hand shot out for her sweater-covered breasts while the other grabbed his crotch. Syllables dripped from his mouth: Fork, fuck a fox, sock suck cunt me…

  She squealed, jumped back, and swatted away his hand. She clutched her chest and caught her breath, shaking. The shaking turned to high-strung giggles. “Well, maybe not that much fun.” But she kissed his healing skull as she left. “Love you, Marker!” He tried to stand up and follow her. Karin held him back, petting and calming him until he shrugged her off and swung away onto the bed, arching upward, his eyes full of pain. Karin followed Bonnie out into the hallway. Around the door frame, out of sight, Bonnie stood crying.

  “Oh, Karin! I am so sorry. I tried my hardest to be up. I had no idea. They told me to be ready for anything. But not this.”

  “It’s okay,” Karin lied. “This is just how he is right now.”

  Bonnie insisted on a long embrace, which Karin returned, for her brother’s sake.

  Pulling away at last, Karin asked, “Do you know what happened that…? Did the boys tell you anything…?”

  Bonnie waited, eager to answer anything. But Karin just turned away and let her go. Back in the room, she found Mark on the bed, leaning back on his arms, head tilted up, inspecting the ceiling, as if he’d paused while exercising and forgot to resume living.

  “Mark? I’m back. Just the two of us again. Are you all right?”

  “One hundred percent,” he said. “Back together.” He shook his head sagely and turned toward her. “Maybe not that much fun.”

  First he’s nowhere, then he’s not. The change steals over, one life stepping through another. Just as he crosses back, he sees the nowhere he’s been. Not even a place until feeling flows in. And then, he loses all the nothing he was.

  Here is a bed he lives in. But a bed bigger than the town. He lies along its giant length, a whale in the street. Beached creature blocks long. Off-beam ocean thing come back to life-crushing weight, dying of gravity.

  Nothing large enough to carry him here or lift him away. Flattened belly running the whole road length. Flukes snagged on fences, stabbed by sharp tree peaks. Lying alongside white wooden boxes with pitched roofs, smoke curling from crayon chimneys, a child’s scribbled home.

  This whale is pain, and searing cold. Bursts of fact his skin tells him. Planted in this flat prairie, dumped by a wave that went out too fast. Great jaws bigger than a garage flap on the ground, sounding. Every cry from the cavern throat shakes walls and breaks windows. Far away, blocks down—the stranded beast’s tail flaps. Hemmed in by houses, pinned by this instant low tide.

  Miles of air above press down so hard the whale can’t breathe. Can’t lift his own lungs. Dying in dried ocean, smothered underneath the thing it now must inhale. Largest living thing, almost God, stretched out flat, muscles beaten. Only his heart, as big as the courthouse, keeps pounding.

  He wants death, if he wants anything. But death rolls away with the retreating water. His breathing is an earthquake. The whale gasps and rolls, crushing lives underneath it, as it is crushed by air. Storms rage in its head. Spears and cables drape down his sides. His skin peels off in sheets of blubber.

  Weeks, months, and the groans of the rotting mountain of animal subside. The scattered town drifts back. Tiny, land-born lives poke at the monster with pins and needles, hack at him, reclaiming their crushed homes. Birds pick at his decaying flesh. Squirrels tear off chunks, bury them for the coming winter. Coyotes polish his bones to shining ivory. Cars drive under his huge, vaulting ribs. Stoplights hang from the knobs of his spine.

  Soon, his bones sprout branches and leaves. Residents crawl through him, seeing no more than street, stone, trees.

  His parts come back to him, so slowly he can’t know. He lies in the shrinking bed, taking stock. Ribs: yes. Belly: check. Arms: two. Legs: too. Fingers: many. Toes: maybe. He does this always, with changing results. Makes a list of himself, like old rebuilt machines. Remove. Clean. Replace. List again.

  The place that threw him away now wants him back too bad. People push sounds on him, endless free samples. Words, by the way people say them. How how how now now now? Something he might hear in the fields at night, if he stopped to listen. Mark mark mark, they make him. Cackles, copying with every new user. No use. Silence can’t cover him. They read him off of papers, speak him out. They merge him, move him on, make him up from scratch. Words without tongue. He, tongue without words.

  Mark Schluter. Shoes, shirt, service. Huge loops of him. Steps he takes. Round around and back again. Repeat as needed. Something settles out, a him big enough for him to climb back in. In noise and rush, he keeps deep down. Sometimes a field of corn, the popping stalks talking to him. He never knew that all things talk. Had to slow to hear. Other times, a mud flat, flow in an inch of water. His body a small craft. The hairs on his limbs are oars, beating the current. His body, countless microscopic creatures banded together in need.

  At last notions climb out his throat. Belching, birthing words. Baby wolf spiders, scattering off the back of their mother sound. Every curved line in the world is saying. Branches tapping the glass. Tracks in the snow. “Lucky” is there, circling alongside. “Pretty,” panting, happy to see him. “Good,” a purple flower stabbing up through the lawn.

  One last broken moment and he might still feel: something in the road that ruined me. But then mending brings him back, to the smear of thoughts and words.

  Some days his rage was so bad that even lying still infuriated him. Then the therapists asked her to leave. Help out by vanishing. She camped out in Farview, in her brother’s modular home. She fed his dog, paid his bills, ate off of his plates, watched his television, slept in his bed. She smoked only out on the deck, in the frosty March wind, on a damp director’s chair inscribed BORN SCHLUTER, so his living room wouldn’t stink of cigarettes when he finally came home. She tried to keep to one cigarette an hour. She forced herself to slow, taste the smoke, close her eyes, and just listen. At dawn and dusk, as her ears sensitized, she could hear the sandhills’ bugle call underneath the neighbor’s militant exercise videos and the long-haul eighteen-wheelers pounding up and down the interstate. She would hit the filter in seven minutes, and be checking her watch again fifteen minutes later.

  She might have called half a dozen old friends, but didn’t. When she went into town to shop, she hid from old classmates. But she couldn’t avoid them all. Acquaintances stepped out of some movie version of her past, playing themselves, only nicer than they’d ever been in real life. Their sympathy hungered for details. What was Mark like? Would he ever be back to normal? She told them he was almost there.

  She had one phone number, still in her fingers. On those days when Mark defeated her, she would come home with half a gallon of her old college-favorite Gallo, get quietly smashed while watching the Classic Movies Channel, then dial a few digits, just for the surge of the forbidden. Four numbers in, and she remembered that she wasn’t dead yet. Anything might still happen. She’d quit him like cigarettes, though purging him from her system had taken longer. Karsh: slick, dexterous, unrepentant Robert Karsh, Kearney HS Class of ’89, Most Likely to Make a Difference, the eternal angle-worker whom she’d once had to order out of a car 150 miles from anywhere, the only soul other than her brother who could always see right through her. She heard his voice, part evangelist, part pornographer, already bringing her back to herself, only three more digits away from her probing fingers.

  A decade of chemical craving—anger and longing, guilt and resentment, nostalgia and fatigue—flooded through her as she dialed the reflex number. But she always stopped short of follow-through. She didn’t really want him: just some proof that her brother wouldn’t drag her down with him into the buried kingdom of brain damage.

  The intoxicating ritual self-abasement mixed with the Gallo and the ever-denser cigarettes to make her glow, a color all hers again. She would put on one of Mark’s
bootlegged CDs—his one-hit thrasher bands, masters of the blissfully relentless. Then she’d spread back onto his bed and fall endlessly down into the mattress, skydiving through pure air. She’d touch herself as Robert had—still alive—while Mark’s dog looked on from the doorway, baffled. The simple tests of her body graduated by degrees into pleasure, so long as she could keep her hands from thinking.

  A point of moral pride: she dialed the whole number only once. In late March, the days lengthening, she took her brother for one of his first spins outside the hospital. They walked around the grounds, Mark deep in a focus she couldn’t penetrate. The air around them filled with spring’s first insect drones. The winter aconite was already fading, and the crocuses and daffodils pushed through the last clumps of snow. A white-fronted goose flew overhead. Mark’s head snapped back. He couldn’t see the bird, but when he looked down, his face burned with memory. He broke into a smile wider than any she’d seen on him since their father died. His mouth hung open, readying the word goose. She urged him on with her hands and eyes.

  “G-G-G-go goo god damn. Damn it to hell. God shit piss bitch. Suck a flaming cunt up your ass.”

  He smiled proudly. She gasped and pulled away, and his face fell. She fought off the rush of tears, took his arm again in fake calm, and turned him back toward the building. “It’s a goose, Mark. You remember them. You’re kind of a silly goose yourself, you know that.”

  “Shit piss fuck,” he chanted, studying his shuffling feet.

  This was injury, not her brother. Just sounds: meaningless, buried things brought up by trauma. He didn’t mean to assault her. She told herself this all the way back to Farview. But she no longer believed anything she told herself. All the hopes that had carried her for weeks dissolved in that stream of mocking profanity. She found her way to the Homestar in the pitch dark. Inside, she went straight to the phone and dialed Robert Karsh. Her steady, years-long rise to self-sufficiency was ready to submit again.