They sit for a while, not exactly talking. She can have him for her own, recuperating, for one minute more. But he grows agitated again. “This is what scares me: if I could go so long, thinking…? Then how can we be sure, even now…?”
He looks up anxiously, to see her crying. Frightened, he draws back. But when she doesn’t stop, he reaches over and shakes her arm. He tries to rock it, at a loss for anything that might calm her. He keeps talking, sing-song, meaningless, as to a little girl. “Hey. I know how you’re feeling. Rough days, for us two. But look!” He twists her around to the plate-glass window—a flat, overcast, Platte afternoon. “It’s not all so bad, huh? Just as good, in fact. In some ways, even better.”
She fights to retrieve her voice. “What do you mean, Mark? As good as what?”
“I mean, us. You. Me. Here.” He points out the window, approvingly: the Great American Desert. The inch-deep river. Their next of kin, those circling birds. “Whatever you call all this. Just as good as the real thing.”
There is an animal perpendicular to all the others. One that flies at right angles to the seasons. He makes the check-in, getting through security on instinct. Navigates on muscle memory. Only the drone of automatic reminders focuses him: Passengers are required to accompany their baggage at all times. Government regulations prohibit…
The airports are thick with war. In the waiting area in Lincoln, television monitors assault him. The twenty-four-hour news program forever loops its twenty-four seconds of news, and he can’t look away. Day Three, the deep bass keeps intoning, over synthesized brass, at every segment break. Magic drawing boards, tellustrators, computerized maps with movable battalions, and retired generals doing the play-by-play. Embedded journalists, prevented from reporting facts, pour out meandering speculation. All other world news stops.
In Chicago, more of the same: A taxi drives up to a checkpoint north of a city that may or may not be under occupation control. The driver waves for help. Four soldiers make the mistake of approaching. Even on his sixth time through the story, Weber sits transfixed, for the seventh time might end differently.
Airborne again, dragging back east in the skewed flyway, he grows transparent, thinner than film. A voice says, Please do not move about the cabin or congregate in the aisles. He grasps at the words, a life jacket. Something in his species is cut loose. The boy-man was right: Capgras truer than this constant smoothing-out of consciousness. He had a patient once—Warren, in The Country of Surprise—a thirty-two-year-old day-trader and weekend rock climber who rolled down the face of a steep ravine and landed on his forehead. Coming from his coma, Warren emerged into a world peopled by monks, soldiers, fashion models, movie villains, and creatures half human and half animal, all of whom spoke to him in the most natural way. Weber would destroy every copy of every word that bears his name for a chance to tell Warren’s story again, now that he knows what he’s talking about.
He is surrounded. Even the sealed cabin around him has grown septic with life. Everything is animate, green and encroaching. Dozens of millions of species seethe around him, few of them visible, even fewer named, ready to try anything once, every possible cheat and exploitation, just to keep being. He stares at his shaking hands, whole rain forests of bacteria. Insects burrow deep inside this plane’s wiring. Seeds abide in the cargo hold. Fungus under the cabin’s vinyl lining. Outside his little window flap, frozen in the airless air, archaea, super-bugs, and extremophiles live on nothing, in darkness, below zero, simply copying. Every code that has stayed alive until now is more brilliant than his subtlest thought. And when his thoughts die, more brilliant still.
The man in the seat next to him, debating all the way to eastern Ohio, at last summons up the courage to ask, “Don’t I recognize you?”
Weber flinches, a lopsided, phantom grin stolen from one of his patients. “I don’t think so.”
“Sure. The brain guy.”
“No,” Weber says.
The stranger examines him, suspiciously. “Sure. The Man Who Mistook His Life for a…”
“Not me,” Weber insists. “I’m in reclamation.”
Stewardesses skitter up and down the aisle. A passenger across from him scoops mashed animal into her giant mouth. Weber’s body crumples inside his stain-wrecked suit. His thoughts skim like water striders. Nothing is left of him except these new eyes.
Inside his own teeming head, the last day’s images come home to roost. In his seat behind the wing, Weber plays the last scene repeatedly—reframing, rethreading, returning. Mark in his room at Good Samaritan, watching the same vacant, embedded broadcasts of war as the rest of the clueless world. Watching relentlessly, as if, should he watch these armies long enough, he might recognize an old friend. The cognitive neuroscientist stands at bedside, flinching under the wall-mounted television, forgetting why he’s there until the patient reminds him. “Leaving already? What’s your hurry? You just got here.”
He is spread as thin as life. He holds his hands up to apologize. Light passes clean through them.
Mark gives him a used paperback, My Antonia. “For the trip. I read it in a little book club I was in. Kind of a chick-flick thing. Needs a good helicopter chase to become a classic. Naked scuba scene, or something. But real Nebraskaland. I kind of bought into it, finally.”
Weber reaches to take the cast-off story. A hand snakes out and grabs his.
“Doc? There’s something I can’t get. I saved her. I’m…that woman’s guardian. Can you believe that? Me.” The words are thick and foreign in his mouth, a curse worse than the misread note. “What am I supposed to do with that?”
Weber stands still, frozen in the glare. His question, too. She will be with him, unshakable, wherever he heads. Accidental turned resident. Nothing anyone can do for anyone, except to recall: We are every second being born.
Mark begs Weber, his eyes flashing with the dread that only consciousness allows. “They need her at the Refuge. Ask my sister. They need a researcher. A journalist. Whatever the hell she is, they need her.” His voice would deny all personal involvement. “Man, she can’t just walk. It’s not like she’s some free agent. Some separate…She’s hip-deep in this place now, like it or not. Do you think I could…? What do you think she’d…?”
Powerless to know what anyone else might do. To know what it feels like to be anybody.
“My sister won’t ask her. And I don’t dare. The way we left it? After the things I said to her? She’ll hate me forever. She’ll never want to talk to me again.”
“You might try her,” Weber says. Pretending again, on no authority. On no evidence but a lifetime of case histories. “I think you might try.”
He himself tries only to prolong. If Tour Director even remembers Weber, he is taking no calls. But something else is messaging, too soft to hear. Through the plane’s plastic window, the lights of unknown cities blink beneath him, hundreds of millions of glowing cells linked together, swapping signals. Even here, the creature spreads countless species deep. Flying, burrowing, creeping things, every path sculpting all the others. A flashing electrical loom, street-sized synapses forming a brain with miles-wide thoughts too large to read. A web of signals spelling out a theory of living things. Cells by sun and rain and endless selection assembling into a mind the size of continents now, impossibly aware, omnipotent, but fragile as mist, cells with a few more years to discover how they connect and where they might go, before they gutter out and return to water.
He fingers Mark’s book throughout the flight, flips through at random as if this buried record might still predict what’s coming. The words are more obscure than the most intricate brain research. Whiffs of prairie, a thousand varieties of tallgrass come off the pages. He reads and rereads, retaining nothing. He scans Mark’s margin notes, the desperate scribbles next to any passage that might lead forward out of permanent confusion. Toward the end, the swathes of shaky highlighter grow wild and wider:
This had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to thos
e early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
He looks up from the page and fractures. No whole left to protect, nothing more solid than braided, sparking cells. What the scans suggest he has seen up close, in the field: older kin still perching on his brain stem, circling back always, down along the bending water. He blunders toward that fact, the only one large enough to bring him home, falling backward toward the incommunicable, the unrecognized, the past he has irreparably damaged, just by being. Destroyed and remade with every thought. A thought he needs to tell someone before it, too, goes.
A voice calls to disembark. In the rising crush, he stands and grapples for his carry-on, shedding himself on everything he touches. He stumbles down the jet bridge into another world, swapped out by impostors at every step. He needs her to be there, on the other side of the baggage claim, though he has lost all right to hope it. There, holding his name on a little card, printed cleanly so he can read it. Man, the card must say. No: Weber. She will be the one holding it, and that is how he must find her.
Also by Richard Powers
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
Prisoner’s Dilemma
The Gold Bug Variations
Operation Wandering Soul
Galatea 2.2
Gain
Plowing the Dark
The Time of Our Singing
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Powers
All rights reserved
A portion of this work was originally published, in slightly different form, in Black Clock no. 3.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Powers, Richard, 1957–
The echo maker / Richard Powers.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-3747-0654-8
1. Capgras syndrome—Fiction. 2. Neurologists—Fiction. 3. Nebraska—
Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.O92E27 2006
813'.54—dc22
2006000093
www.fsgbooks.com
Richard Powers, The Echo Maker
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