The Echo Maker

  They took walks. She dragged him to Fondel’s Auction, the old Wednesday-night county-wide ritual. It felt like the guiltiest of heavens, being anywhere but the hospital. Daniel never bid on anything, but he approved of all secondhand resale: Keeps things out of the land-fill. For her part, she indulged her old childhood obsession with the ghosts of previous owners still hiding out in discarded things. She walked up and down the long folding tables, fingering every dented pan and frayed rug, inventing stories for how they’d gotten here. They bought a lamp together, its stem made out of a statue of the Buddha. How such a thing had ever come to Buffalo County or why it was abandoned there only the wildest invention could explain.

  On their seventh outing, shopping in the vegetable section of the Sun Mart for an impromptu dinner, he called her K.S. for the first time in years. She’d always loved the nickname. It made her feel like someone else, a key team member in an efficient organization. You’ll make a difference somewhere, he told her, back before either of them had a clue how little difference the world allowed. A real contribution, K.S. I know it. Now, lifetimes later, choosing mushrooms, he slipped back into the name, as if no time had passed. “If anyone can bring him back, it’s you, K.S.” She might still make a difference, if only to her brother.

  She invented destinations for them, errands they needed to run. One warming weekend, she suggested a walk down by the river. Almost by accident, they found themselves at the old Kilgore bridge. Neither of them hinted that the place meant anything. Ice still crusted the water’s edge. The last cranes were departing on the long run north to their summer breeding grounds. But she could still hear them, invisible overhead.

  Daniel scooped up small pebbles and angled them into the river. “Our Platte. I do love this river. A mile wide and an inch deep.”

  She nodded, grinning. “Too thick to drink and too thin to plow.” Grade school lessons, as familiar as the times tables. Under the skin, just from growing up here. “Some river, if you stand it on its side.”

  “No place like it, huh?” His mouth hooked sideways, a look almost mocking, in anyone but Daniel.

  She shoved him gently. “You know, growing up? I was convinced that Kearney was totally hot shit.” He winced. She’d forgotten; he hated when she swore. “The center of the continent. Mormon Trail, Oregon Trail, Transcontinental Railroad, Interstate 80?”

  He nodded. “And a trillion birds passing through on the Central Flyway.”

  “Exactly. Everything crossing, right through town. I figured it was just a matter of time before we became the next St. Louis.”

  Daniel smiled, bowed his head, and stuck his hands in his navy pea coat. “Crossroads of the nation.”

  Being together—just being—was easier than she dared believe. She hated the girlish waves of anticipation, almost obscene, given what had brought them back. She was trading on disaster, using her damaged brother to make things right with her own past. But she couldn’t help herself. Something was about to happen, a good thing she hadn’t engineered, somehow the result of Mark’s catastrophe. She and Daniel were edging toward new territory, quiet, stable, and maybe even guiltless, a place she’d never thought possible. A place that could only help Mark.

  They walked halfway out across the bridge. The pinned pony trusses swayed beneath their feet. The Platte’s north channel slipped beneath them. Daniel pointed out dens and burrows, encroaching vegetation, slight changes in the riverbed that she couldn’t make out. “Lots of action today. Blue-winged teal, there. Pintail. The grebes are early this year, for some reason. Look there! Is that a phoebe? Who are you? Come back. I can’t see who you are!”

  The old bridge shook and she slipped her arm under the sleeve of his coat. He stopped and appraised her: a shocking accidental. She looked down and saw her hand swinging his like some schoolchild’s. Valentine’s and Memorial Day rolled into one. He grazed the back of his fingers over the new copper penny of her hair. A naturalist’s experiment.

  “Do you remember when I used to quiz you on the species?”

  She held still under his hand. “Hated it. I was so pitiful.”

  His hand lifted to point to a cottonwood, barely budding. Something sat in the branch, small, flecked with yellow, and as jittery as she felt. No name she knew. Names would only have obliterated the thing. The nameless bird opened its throat, and out came the wildest music. It sang senselessly, sure that she could follow. All around, answers sprang up—the cottonwood and the Platte, the March breeze and rabbits in the undergrowth, something downstream slapping the water in alarm, secrets and rumors, news and negotiation, all of interlocked life talking at once. The clicks and cries came from everywhere and ended nowhere, making no judgment and promising nothing, just multiplying one another, filling the air like the river its bed. Nothing at all was her, and for the first time since Mark’s accident, she felt free of herself, a release bordering on bliss. The bird sang on, inserting its own collapsed song inside all conversation. The timelessness of animals: the kinds of sounds her brother made, crawling out of his coma. This was where her brother now lived. This was the song she would have to learn, if she wanted to know Mark again.

  Something trumpeted overhead, a last, late remnant of the mass now on their way to the Arctic. Daniel looked up, searching. Karin saw nothing except gray cirrus.

  “Those birds are doomed,” Daniel said.

  She grabbed his arm. “That was a whooper?”

  “Whooper? Oh no. Sandhills. You’d know a whooper.”

  “I didn’t think…But the whoopers are the ones…”

  “The whoopers are already gone. Couple hundred left. They’re just ghosts. Have you ever seen one? They’re like…hallucinations. Dissolving as you look at them. No: the whoopers are over. But the sandhills are just now staring down the barrel.”

  “The sandhills? You’re kidding. There must be thousands…”

  “Half a million, give or take.”

  “Whatever. You know me and numbers. I’ve never seen so many sandhills as I’ve seen this year.”

  “That’s a symptom. The river’s being used up. Fifteen dams, irrigation for three states. Every drop used eight times before it reaches us. The flow is a quarter of what it was before development. The river slows; the trees and vegetation fill in. The trees spook the cranes. They need the flats—someplace to roost where nothing can sneak up on you.” He spun in a slow half-circle, eyes scouring. “This is their only safe stopover. No other spot in the center of the continent they can use. They’re brittle—a low annual recruitment rate. Any large habitat break will be the end. Remember, the whoopers used to be as plentiful as the sandhills. A few more years, and we can say goodbye to something that’s been around since the Eocene.”

  He was still that straggler her brother had adopted, the scrawny long-distance walker who saw things the rest of them couldn’t. He was the person Markie might once have become. Little Mark. Animals like me.

  “If they’re so threatened, why are there so many…?”

  “They used to roost along the whole Big Bend: a hundred and twenty miles or more. They’re down to sixty, and shrinking. The same number of birds crammed into half the space. Disease, stress, anxiety. It’s worse than Manhattan.”

  Anxiety-stricken birds: she stifled a laugh. Something in Daniel mourned more than the cranes. He needed humans to rise to their station: conscious and godlike, nature’s one shot at knowing and preserving itself. Instead, the one aware animal in creation had torched the place.

  “We’re crowding them into one of the greatest spectacles going. That’s why crane tourism has exploded. Big business now, and every spring we use even more water. So the show will be even more spectacular next year.” Daniel spoke almost sympathetically, straining to understand. But his own ability to grasp the race was shrinking faster than the habitat.

  He shuddered. She touched his chest, and by impulse, he folded her into a mournful kiss confused by its cause. His hand slipped across the spark of her hair into her suede
jacket’s open collar. She took him against her, wrong in more ways than she could count. Excitement was shameful, under the circumstances. But that thought just excited her worse. The embrace lifted her up above the last few weeks. Her body gave in to cold spring elation. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t be alone.

  Stealing back to town on that surveyor’s plumb line of a road, through rolling fields fuzzed with their first green, she asked him. “He’s never going to be the same, is he?”

  Daniel watched the road. She’d always loved that about him. He never spoke until he meant to. He tilted his head and at last said, “Nobody’s ever who they were. We just have to watch and listen. See where he’s going. Meet him there.”

  She put her hand up under his coat. She rubbed his flank without thinking, imagined them running off the road, flipping over, until he gently held her wrist and stole a puzzled look at her.

  They sat in his apartment, by candlelight, as if they were still young and sharing a first Christmas. She huddled in front of his space heater. Daniel smelled like a woolen blanket just out of storage. He cradled her from behind and unbuttoned her shirt. She curled into the threat of doing this again.

  The down on her lower back stiffened under his stroking fingers. He traced the curve of her abdomen, looking on with the same hungry surprise as he had the first time, eight years ago. “See?” she repeated from memory. “My appendectomy scar. Had it since I was eleven. Not very attractive, is it?”

  He laughed again. “Wrong the first time. Still wrong, years later!” He nuzzled her armpit with the tip of his nose. “Some women never learn.”

  She rolled him over and rose, one of his feathered, gray priestesses, neck extended. Another endangered species, in need of conserving. She straightened herself above him, displaying.

  When they were still again, she gave him the surrender he hadn’t asked for. “Daniel? What was it? That bird in the tree?”

  He lay on his back, a scarecrow vegan. His slack muscles held his own years of suppressed questions that he would never dare ask. In the dark, he scanned their shared life list, the species they had seen that day. “It’s…called a lot of things. You and me, K.S.? We can call it anything we want.”

  Karin was looping Mark around the floor in their daily steeplechase when he had his first abstract thought. Mark still walked as if tethered. He stopped to listen at a patient’s room. Someone was sobbing, and an older voice said, “It’s all right. Never mind all this.”

  Mark listened, smiling. He raised his hand and announced, “Sadness.” There in the corridor, the feat of intellect startled Karin into tears.

  She was there again, for his first complete sentence. The occupational therapist was helping Mark cope with buttons, and Mark just spit out the words like an oracle: “There are magnetism waves in my skull.” He covered his face in both fists, seeing what he was, now that he could name it. In a dam-burst, sentences began pouring out of him.

  By the next evening, he was conversing—slow, fuzzy, but understandable. “Why is this room so weird? This isn’t the food I eat. This place is just like a hospital.” Eight times an hour, he asked what had happened to him. Each time, he sat shocked by the news of the accident.

  That night, as she said goodbye, Mark jumped up and pressed the windows, trying to open the sealed safety glass. “Am I asleep? Am I gone? Wake me up—this is someone else’s dream.”

  She went to the window and embraced him. She led him away from banging on the glass. “Markie, you’re awake. You’ve had a very big day. Rabbit is here. I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

  He followed her back to his plastic bedside chair, his prison. But when she sat him down, he looked up, dazed. He shoved at the apron of her coat. “What are you doing here, anyway? Who sent you?”

  Her skin went metal. “Stop it, Mark,” she said, harsher than intended. Sweet again, she teased, “You think your sister wouldn’t look after you?”

  “My sister? You think you’re my sister?” His eyes drilled her. “If you think you’re my sister, there’s something wrong with your head.”

  She grew eerily clinical. She reasoned with him, laying out the evidence, like reading aloud another children’s story. The calmer she was, the more it upset him. “Wake me up,” he wailed. “This isn’t me. I’m stuck in someone else’s thoughts.”

  She kept Daniel up all night, shuddering with the memory of it. “You can’t imagine what he looked like when he said it. ‘You think you’re my sister?’ So certain. Not even a second thought. You can’t know what that felt like.”

  All night long, Daniel listened. She’d forgotten how patient he was. “He’s made a big step. He’s still putting everything together. The rest will come quickly.”

  By morning, she was ready again to believe him.

  Days later, Mark was still denying her. He assembled everything else: who he was, where he worked, what had happened to him. But he insisted that Karin was an actress who looked very much like his sister. After many tests, Dr. Hayes gave it a name. “Your brother is manifesting a condition called Capgras syndrome. It’s one of a family of misidentification delusions. It can occur in certain psychiatric conditions.”

  “My brother is not mentally ill.”

  Dr. Hayes winced. “No. But he’s facing some massive challenges. Capgras is also reported in closed-head trauma, although that’s incredibly rare. Damage in precise, probably multiple spots…there are only a couple of cases in the literature. Your brother is the first accident-induced Capgras patient I’ve ever seen.”

  “How can the same symptom have two completely different causes?”

  “That’s not clear. It may not be a single syndrome.”

  Multiple ways of mistaking your blood relations. “Why is he doing it?”

  “In some hard-to-measure way, you don’t match up with his image of you. He knows he has a sister. He remembers everything about her. He knows you look like her and act like her and dress like her. He just doesn’t think you are her.”

  “He knows his friends. He recognizes you. How can he know strangers, and not—”

  “The Capgras sufferer almost always misidentifies his loved ones. A mother or father. A spouse. The part of his brain that recognizes faces is intact. So is his memory. But the part that processes emotional association has somehow disconnected from them.”

  “I don’t seem like his sister to him? What does he see when he looks at me?”

  “He sees what he always sees. He just doesn’t…feel you sufficiently to believe you.”

  A lesion that damaged only the sense of loved ones. “He’s blind to me emotionally? And so he decides…?” Dr. Hayes gave a chilling nod. “But his brain, his…thinking isn’t damaged, is it? Is this the worst thing we’ll have to face? Because if it is, I’m sure I can…”

  The doctor lifted a palm. “The only thing certain in head injury is uncertainty.”

  “What’s the treatment?”

  “For now, we need to watch, see how he develops. There may be other issues. Secondary deficits. Memory, cognition, perception. Capgras sometimes shows spontaneous improvement. The best thing now is time and tests.”

  He used the phrase again, two weeks later.

  She didn’t believe Mark had any syndrome. His mind was just sorting out the chaos of injury. Every day left him more like his old self. A little patience, and the cloud would lift. He’d already come back from the dead; he would come back from this smaller loss. She was who she was; he’d have to see that, as he got clearer. She took the setback the way the therapists told her to, one baby step in front of the other. She worked on Mark, not pushing anything. She walked him down to the cafeteria. She answered his strange questions. She brought him copies of his two favorite truck-modding magazines. She encouraged and reinforced his memories, vaguely alluding to family history. But she had to pretend not to know too much about him. She tried once or twice; any claim of intimacy led immediately to trouble.

  One day he asked, “Can you at least f
ind out how my dog is doing?” She promised to. “And for God’s sake, would you please get my sister here, already? She probably hasn’t even heard.” She had learned enough by then to say nothing.

  She held herself together in front of Mark. But at night, alone with Daniel, she nursed her worst fears. “I quit my job. I’m back in a town I can’t escape, in my brother’s house, living off savings. I’ve been sitting for weeks, helpless, reading children’s stories. And now he says I’m not me. It’s like he’s punishing me for something.”

  Daniel only nodded and warmed her hands. She did like that about him: if there was nothing to say, he said nothing.

  “I’ve been doing so well, for so long. He’s so much better than he was. He couldn’t even open his eyes. Why should this be so scary? Why can’t I just sit still with this, wait it out?”

  His fingers soothed the knobs of her spine, drawing all the static charge out of her. “Pace yourself,” he said. “He’s going to need you for a long time.”

  “I wish he did need me. He looks at me like I’m worse than a stranger. Cuts right through me. If I could just…if he would just say what he needs.”

  “Hiding is natural,” Daniel said. “A bird will do anything, not to reveal that it’s hurt.”

  Her brother drove his body like the worst student driver. Sometimes he lurched ahead, blasting past all speed limits. Other times, a crack in the linoleum would rattle him. Some days he solved every puzzle the therapists invented. Other days, he couldn’t chew without biting his tongue.

  He remembered nothing of the accident. But he could make new memories again. For that, Karin was ready to thank any power. He still asked twice a day how he’d gotten here, but now mostly to challenge her smallest change in phrasing. “That’s not what you said last time.” He asked often about his truck, whether it was as banged up as he was. She gave him the vaguest answers.