The Echo Maker

Part One: I Am No One

Cranes keep landing as night falls. Ribbons of them roll down, slack against the sky. They float in from all compass points, in kettles of a dozen, dropping with the dusk. Scores of Grus canadensis settle on the thawing river. They gather on the island flats, grazing, beating their wings, trumpeting: the advance wave of a mass evacuation. More birds land by the minute, the air red with calls.

A neck stretches long; legs drape behind. Wings curl forward, the length of a man. Spread like fingers, primaries tip the bird into the wind’s plane. The blood-red head bows and the wings sweep together, a cloaked priest giving benediction. Tail cups and belly buckles, surprised by the upsurge of ground. Legs kick out, their backward knees flapping like broken landing gear. Another bird plummets and stumbles forward, fighting for a spot in the packed staging ground along those few miles of water still clear and wide enough to pass as safe.

Twilight comes early, as it will for a few more weeks. The sky, ice blue through the encroaching willows and cottonwoods, flares up, a brief rose, before collapsing to indigo. Late February on the Platte, and the night’s chill haze hangs over this river, frosting the stubble from last fall that still fills the bordering fields. The nervous birds, tall as children, crowd together wing by wing on this stretch of river, one that they’ve learned to find by memory.

They converge on the river at winter’s end as they have for eons, carpeting the wetlands. In this light, something saurian still clings to them: the oldest flying things on earth, one stutter-step away from pterodactyls. As darkness falls for real, it’s a beginner’s world again, the same evening as that day sixty million years ago when this migration began.

Half a million birds — four-fifths of all the sandhill cranes on earth — home in on this river. They trace the Central Flyway, an hourglass laid over the continent. They push up from New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, hundreds of miles each day, with thousands more ahead before they reach their remembered nests. For a few weeks, this stretch of river shelters the miles-long flock. Then, by the start of spring, they’ll rise and head away, feeling their way up to Saskatchewan, Alaska, or beyond.

This year’s flight has always been. Something in the birds retraces a route laid down centuries before their parents showed it to them. And each crane recalls the route still to come.

Tonight’s cranes mill again on the braided water. For another hour, their massed calls carry on the emptying air. The birds flap and fidget, edgy with migration. Some tear up frosty twigs and toss them in the air. Their jitters spill over into combat. At last the sandhills settle down into wary, stilt-legged sleep, most standing in the water, a few farther up in the stubbled fields.

A squeal of brakes, the crunch of metal on asphalt, one broken scream and then another rouse the flock. The truck arcs through the air, corkscrewing into the field. A plume shoots through the birds. They lurch off the ground, wings beating. The panicked carpet lifts, circles, and falls again. Calls that seem to come from creatures twice their size carry miles before fading.

By morning, that sound never happened. Again there is only here, now, the river’s braid, a feast of waste grain that will carry these flocks north, beyond the Arctic Circle. As first light breaks, the fossils return to life, testing their legs, tasting the frozen air, leaping free, bills skyward and throats open. And then, as if the night took nothing, forgetting everything but this moment, the dawn sandhills start to dance. Dance as they have since before this river started.

Her brother needed her. The thought protected Karin through the alien night. She drove in a trance, keeping to the long dogleg, south down Nebraska 77 from Siouxland, then west on 30, tracking the Platte. The back roads were impossible, in her condition. Still shattered from the telephone’s stab at two a.m.: Karin Schluter? This is Good Samaritan Hospital in Kearney. Your brother has had an accident.

The aide wouldn’t say anything over the phone. Just that Mark had flipped over on the shoulder of North Line Road and had lain pinned in his cab, almost frozen by the time the paramedics found and freed him. For a long time after hanging up, she couldn’t feel her fingers until she found them pressed into her cheeks. Her face was numb, as if she had been the one lying out there, in the freezing February night.

Her hands, stiff and blue, clawed the wheel as she slipped through the reservations. First the Winnebago, then the rolling Omaha. The scrub trees along the patchy road bowed under tufts of snow. Winnebago Junction, the Pow Wow grounds, the tribal court and volunteer fire department, the station where she bought her tax-free gas, the hand-painted wooden shingle reading “Native Arts Gift Shop,” the high school—Home of the Indians—where she’d volunteer-tutored until despair drove her off: the scene turned away from her, hostile. On the long, empty stretch east of Rosalie, a lone male her brother’s age in a too-light coat and hat—Go Big Red—tracked through the roadside drift. He turned and snarled as she passed, repelling the intrusion.

The suture of the centerline drew her downward into the snowy black. It made no sense: Mark, a near-professional driver, rolling off an arrow-straight country road that was as familiar to him as breathing. Driving off the road, in central Nebraska — like falling off a wooden horse. She toyed with the date: 02/20/02. Did it mean anything? Her palms butted the wheel, and the car shook. Your brother has had an accident. In fact, he’d long ago taken every wrong turn you could take in life, and from the wrong lane. Telephone calls coming in at awful hours, as far back as she could remember. But never one like this.

She used the radio to keep herself awake. She tuned in to a crackpot talk-radio show about the best way to protect your pets from water-borne terrorist poisonings. All the deranged, static voices in the dark seeped into her, whispering what she was: alone on a deserted road, half a mile from her own disaster.

What a loving child Mark had been, staffing his earthworm hospital, selling his toys to stave off the farm foreclosure, throwing his eight-year-old body between their parents that hideous night nineteen years ago when Cappy took a loop of power cord to Joan. That was how she pictured her brother, as she fell headlong into the dark. The root of all his accidents: too caring by half.

Outside Grand Island, two hundred miles down from Sioux, as the day broke and the sky went peach, she glimpsed the Platte. First light glinted off its muddy brown, calming her. Something caught her eye, bobbing pearl waves flecked with red. Even she thought highway hypnosis, at first. A carpet of four-foot birds spread as far as the distant tree line. She’d seen them every spring for more than thirty years, and still the dancing mass made her jerk the wheel, almost following her brother.

He’d waited until the birds returned to spin out. He’d been a mess already, back in October, when she drove this same route for their mother’s wake. Camping out with his beef-packing friends in the ninth circle of Nintendo hell, starting in on the six-packs for liquid brunch, fully loaded by the time he headed in to work on the swing shift. Traditions to protect, Rabbit; family honor. She hadn’t had the will then, to talk sense to him. He wouldn’t have heard her, if she had. But he’d made it through the winter, even pulled himself together a little. Only for this.

Kearney rose up: the scattered outskirts, the newly extruded super-store strip, the fast-food grease trough along Second, the old main drag. The whole town suddenly struck her as a glorified I-80 exit ramp. Familiarity filled her with a weird, inappropriate calm. Home.

She found Good Samaritan the way the birds found the Platte. She spoke to the trauma doctor, working hard to follow him. He kept saying moderate severity, stable, and lucky. He looked young enough to have been out partying with Mark earlier that night. She wanted to ask to see his med school diploma. Instead she asked what “moderate severity” meant, and nodded politely at the opaque answer. She asked about “lucky,” and the trauma doctor explained: “Lucky to be alive.”

Firemen had cut him out of his cab with an acetylene torch. He might have lain there all night, coffined against the windshield, freezing and bleeding to death, just off the shoulder of the country road, except for the anonymous call from a gas station on the edge of town.

They let her into the unit to see him. A nurse tried to prepare her, but Karin heard nothing. She stood in front of a nest of cables and monitors. On the bed lay a lump of white wrapping. A face cradled inside the tangle of tubes, swollen and rainbowed, coated in abrasions. His bloody lips and cheeks were flecked with embedded gravel. The matted hair gave way to a patch of bare skull sprouting wires. The forehead had been pressed to a hot grill. In a flimsy robin’s-egg gown, her brother struggled to inhale.

She heard herself call him, from a distance. “Mark?” The eyes opened at the sound, like the hard plastic eyes of her girlhood dolls. Nothing moved, not even his eyelids. Nothing, until his mouth pumped, without sound. She leaned down into the equipment. Air hissed through his lips, above the hum of the monitors. Wind through a field of ready wheat.

His face knew her. But nothing came out of his mouth except a trickle of saliva. His eyes pleaded, terrified. He needed something from her, life or death. “It’s okay; I’m here,” she said. But assurance only made him worse. She was exciting him, exactly what the nurses had forbidden. She looked away, anywhere but at his animal eyes. The room burned into her memory: the drawn curtain, the two racks of threatening electronic equipment, the lime sherbet — colored wall, the rolling table alongside his bed.

She tried again. “Markie, it’s Karin. You’re going to be all right.” Saying it made a kind of truth. A groan escaped his sealed mouth. His hand, stuck with an IV tube, reached up and grabbed her wrist. His aim stunned her. The grip was feeble but deadly, drawing her down into the mesh of tubes. His fingers feathered at her, frantic, as if, in this split second, she might still keep his truck from wiping out.

The nurse made her leave. Karin Schluter sat in the trauma waiting room, a glass terrarium at the end of a long corridor smelling of antiseptics, dread, and ancient health magazines. Rows of head-bowed farmers and their wives, in dark sweatshirts and overalls, sat in the squared-off, padded apricot chairs alongside her. She figured them: Father heart attack; husband hunting accident; child overdose. Off in the corner, a muted television beamed images of a mountain wasteland scattered with guerrillas. Afghanistan, winter, 2002. After a while, she noticed a thread of blood wicking down her right index finger, where she’d bitten through her cuticle. She found herself rising and drifting to the restroom, where she vomited.

Later, she ate, something warm and sticky from the hospital cafeteria. At one point, she stood in one of those half-finished stairwells of poured concrete meant to be seen only when the building was on fire, calling back to Sioux City, the massive computer and home electronics company where she worked in consumer relations. She stood smoothing her rumpled bouclé skirt as if her supervisor could see her over the line. She told her boss, as vaguely as she could, about the accident. A remarkably level account: thirty years of practice hiding Schluter truths. She asked for two days off. He offered her three. She started to protest, but switched at once to grateful acceptance.

Back in the waiting room, she witnessed eight middle-aged men in flannel standing in a ring, their slow eyes scanning the floor. A murmur issued from them, wind teasing the lonely screens of a farmhouse. The sound rose and fell in waves. It took her a moment to realize: a prayer circle, for another victim who’d come in just after Mark. A makeshift Pentecostal service, covering anything that scalpels, drugs, and lasers couldn’t. The gift of tongues descended on the circle of men, like small talk at a family reunion. Home was the place you never escape, even in nightmare.

Stable. Lucky. The words got Karin through to midday. But when the trauma doctor next talked to her, the words had become cerebral edema. Something had spiked the pressure inside her brother’s skull. Nurses tried cooling his body. The doctor mentioned a ventilator and ventricular drain. Luck and stability were gone.

When they let her see Mark again, she no longer knew him. The person they took her to the second time lay comatose, his face collapsed into some stranger’s. His eyes wouldn’t open when she called his name. His arms hung still, even when she squeezed them.

Hospital personnel came to talk to her. They spoke to her as if she were brain-damaged. She pumped them for information. Mark’s blood alcohol content had been just under the Nebraska limit — three or four beers in the hours before rolling his truck. Nothing else noticeable in his system. His truck was destroyed.

Two policemen took her aside in the corridor and asked her questions. She answered what she knew, which was nothing. An hour later, she wondered if she’d imagined the conversation. Late that afternoon, a man of fifty in a blue work shirt sat down next to her where she waited. She managed to turn and blink. Not possible, not even in this town: hit on, in the trauma-unit waiting room.

“You should get a lawyer,” the man said.

She blinked again and shook her head. Sleep deprivation.

“You’re with the fellow who rolled his truck? Read about him in the Telegraph. You should definitely get a lawyer.”

Her head would not stop shaking. “Are you one?”

The man jerked back. “Good God, no. Just neighborly advice.”

She hunted down the newspaper and read the flimsy accident account until it crumbled. She sat in the glass terrarium as long as she could, then circled the ward, then sat again. Every hour, she begged to see him. Each time, they denied her. She dozed for five minutes at a shot, propped in the sculpted apricot chair. Mark rose up in her dreams, like buffalo grass after a prairie fire. A child who, out of pity, always picked the worst players for his team. An adult who called only when weepy drunk. Her eyes stung and her mouth thickened with scum. She checked the mirror in the floor’s bathroom: blotchy and teetering, her fall of red hair a tangled bead-curtain. But still presentable, given everything.

“There has been some reversal,” the doctor explained. He spoke in B waves and millimeters of mercury, lobes and ventricles and hematomas. Karin finally understood. Mark would need surgery.

They slit his throat and put a bolt into his skull. The nurses stopped answering Karin’s questions. Hours later, in her best consumer-relations voice, she asked again to see him. They said he was too weakened by the procedures. The nurses offered to get something for her, and Karin only slowly realized they meant medication.

“Oh, no thanks,” she said. “I’m good.”

“Go home for a while,” the trauma doctor advised. “Doctor’s orders. You need some rest.”

“Other people are sleeping on the floor of the waiting room. I can get a sleeping bag and be right back.”

“There’s nothing you can do right now,” the doctor claimed. But that couldn’t be; not in the world she came from.

She promised to go rest if they let her see Mark, just for a moment. They did. His eyes were still closed, and he responded to nothing.

Then she saw the note. It lay on the bed stand, waiting. No one could tell her when it had appeared. Some messenger had slipped into the room unseen, even while Karin was shut out. The writing was spidery, ethereal: immigrant scrawl from a century ago.

I am No One

but Tonight on North Line Road

GOD led me to you

so You could Live

and bring back someone else.

A flock of birds, each one burning. Stars swoop down to bullets. Hot red specks take flesh, nest there, a body part, part body.

Lasts forever: no change to measure.

Flock of fiery cinders. When gray pain of them thins, then always water. Flattest width so slow it fails as liquid. Nothing in the end but flow. Nextless stream, lowest thing above knowing. A thing itself the cold and so can’t feel it.

Body flat water, falling an inch a mile. Torso long as the world. Frozen run all the way from open to close. Great oxbows, age bends, lazy delayed S, switch current to still as long as possible the one long drop it already finishes.

Not even river, not even wet brown slow west, no now or then except in now and then rising. Face forcing up into soundless scream. White column, lit in a river of light. Then pure terror, pealing into air, flipping and falling, anything but hit target.

One sound gets not a word but still says: come. Come with. Try death.

At last only water. Flat water spreading to its level. Water that is nothing but into nothing falls.

She checked into one of those crane-tourist places off the interstate. It seemed to have just fallen off the back of a truck. They gouged her for a room. But she was close to the hospital — all that mattered. She stayed one night, then had to find something else. As next of kin, she qualified for the shelter house a block from the hospital, a hostel subsidized with the pocket change of the world’s largest global fast-food cartel. The Clown House, she and Mark had called it, back when their father was dying of fatal insomnia four years before. It had taken the man forty days to die, and at the last, when he finally agreed to go to the hospital, their mother sometimes stayed overnight at the Clown House to be near him. Karin could not face that memory, not now. Instead, she drove to Mark’s place, half an hour away.

She navigated out to Farview, where Mark had bought a catalog house just months after their father’s death with his portion of the meager inheritance. She got lost and had to ask for directions to River Run Estates from the Walter Brennan impersonator at the Four Corners Texaco. Psychological. She’d never wanted Mark living there. But after Cappy died, Mark listened to no one.

At last she found the modular Homestar, the pride of Mark’s adulthood. He’d bought it just before starting as a Maintenance and Repair Technician II at the meat packing plant in Lexington. The day Mark wrote the down-payment check, he ran around town celebrating as if he’d just gotten engaged.

A fresh loop of dog shit welcomed her inside the front door. Blackie cowered in the living room corner, whimpering in guilty confusion. Karin let the poor creature out and fed her. In the postage-stamp yard, the border collie reverted to herding things — squirrels, snow motes, fence posts — anything to convince the humans that she was still worthy of love.

The heat was down. Only her brother’s habit of never completely shutting off a tap had kept the pipes from bursting. She scooped the cone of shit into the frosty yard. The dog crept up to her, willing to make friends, but wanting first to know Mark’s whereabouts. Karin lowered herself to the stoop and pressed her face into the frozen railing.

Shivering, she went back inside. She could ready the house for him, at least: cleaning that hadn’t been done in weeks. In what her brother called the family room, she straightened the stacks of truck-customization and cheesecake magazines. She gathered scattered discs and stacked them behind the paneled bar that Mark, with limited success, had installed himself. A poster of a girl in a black leather bikini slung over a vintage truck’s hood sagged off the bedroom wall. Disgusted, she tore it down. Only when she looked at the scraps in her hands did she see what she’d done. She found a hammer in the utility closet and tried to tack the poster back up, but it was too torn. She threw it in the bin, cursing herself.

The bathroom was a science-fair project in full bloom. Mark had no cleaning supplies except pipe cleaners and Black Leather Soap. She searched the kitchen for vinegar or ammonia, but found nothing more solvent than Old Style. Under the sink, she turned up a rag-filled bucket with a can of scouring powder that thumped when she lifted it. She twisted the lid and it popped open. Inside was a packet of pills.

She sat down on the kitchen floor and cried. She considered heading back to Sioux City, cutting her losses and resuming her life. She picked at the pills, her fingers flipping them. Dollhouse accessories or sports equipment: white plates, red barbells, tiny purple saucers with unreadable monograms. Who was he hiding them from, down there, besides himself? She thought she recognized the local favorite: Ecstasy. She’d taken some once, two years ago in Boulder. Had spent the evening mind-merging with friends and hugging perfect strangers. Numb, she held a pill and rubbed it against her sagging tongue. She tore it away and fed the whole stash down the disposal. She let the yipping Blackie back inside. The dog nosed around her calves, needing her. “It’s all right,” she promised the creature. “Everything’s going to be back again, soon.”

She moved on to the bedroom, a museum of cows’ teeth, colored minerals, and hundreds of exotic bottle caps mounted on homemade stands. She inspected the closet. Alongside the mostly dark denim and corduroy, three grease-stained jumpsuits with the IBP logo hung on a hook above his caked work boots, the ones he wore every day, heading to the slaughter. The thought sliced through her: things she should have handled the day before. She phoned the plant. Iowa Beef Processors: World’s largest supplier of premium beef, pork, and allied products. She got an automated menu. Then another. Then chirpy music, then a chirpy person, then a croaky person who kept calling her ma’am. Ma’am. Somewhere along the line, she’d become her own mother. A personnel counselor walked her through the steps to start Mark’s disability. For the hour it took to transact the forms, she felt the release of being useful. The pleasure of it burned.

She called her own employers, up in Sioux. They were a big outfit, the third-largest computer vendor in the country. Years ago, in the early days of the PC clone boom, they’d broken out of the pack of identical mail-order vendors on the simple gimmick of running herds of Holsteins in their ads. Mark had laughed at her when she’d dragged back to Nebraska from Colorado and got a job with them. You’re going to work complaints for the Cow Computer Company? She couldn’t explain. After years of what she’d thought of as career advancement — graduating from phone receptionist in Chicago to ad-copy saleswoman for trendy trade magazines in Los Angeles, progressing to right-hand woman and finally company face for two dotcom entrepreneurs in Boulder who were going to make millions with an online world where people could develop rich alter egos, but who ended up suing each other — she’d slammed back down to earth. Past thirty, she had no more time or pride to risk on ambition. Nothing wrong with honest gruntwork for a secure company that lacked all pretension. If her fate lay in consumer relations, she would relate to consumers as expertly as humanly possible. In fact, she’d discovered a hidden aptitude for complaint-handling. Two e-mails and fifteen minutes on the phone, and she could convince a customer ready to firebomb the outfit that she and her multi-thousand-employee firm wanted nothing more than the man’s lifelong friendship and respect.

She couldn’t explain to her brother or anyone: status and satisfaction meant nothing. Competence was all. At long last, her life had stopped misleading her. She had a job she performed well, a new one-bedroom condo near the river in South Sioux, even a nice little shared nervousness with a friendly mammal in tech support that threatened to turn into a relationship any month now. Then this. One phone call, and reality found her out again.

No matter. Nothing in Sioux needed her. The one that really needed her lay in the hospital, on a dark island, with no other family to look out for him.

She reached her office manager, smoothing her hair as he came on the line. He looked up her vacation days and said she could stay out until a week from the coming Monday. As self-effacingly as she could, she explained that she wasn’t sure that would be enough. It probably had to be enough, her manager said. She thanked him, apologized again, hung up, and returned to more furious cleaning.

With only dish soap and paper towels, she brought Mark’s place back to livable. She studied herself in the bathroom mirror as she cleaned the spatter-spots: a thirty-one-year-old professional soother, three and a half pounds overweight with red hair eighteen inches too long for her age, desperate for something to fix. She could rise to this. Mark would be back soon, gleefully respattering the mirror. She would return to Cow Computer country, where people respected the work she did and only strangers asked her for help. She smoothed her dry cheeks back toward her ears and slowed her breathing. She finished the sink and tub, then went out to the car and checked her backpack: two pullovers, a pair of twill slacks, and three changes of underwear. She drove out to the Kearney outlet strip and bought a sweater, two pairs of jeans, and some moisturizer. Even that much tempted fate.

I am No One, but Tonight on North Line Road…She asked around the trauma unit about the note. By all accounts, it had simply appeared on the bedside stand shortly after Mark’s admission. A Hispanic clerical nurse with an elaborate crucifix necklace studded with turquoise boulders insisted that no one but Karin and hospital personnel had been allowed to see him for the first thirty-six hours. She produced the paperwork to prove it. The nurse tried to confiscate the slip of paper, but Karin refused to surrender it. She needed it for Mark, when he came to.

They moved him from trauma to a room where she could sit with him. He lay stretched on the bed, a felled mannequin. Two days later, he opened his eyes for half a minute, only to squeeze them shut. But they opened again, at dusk that evening. Over the next day, she counted six more eye openings. Each time, he looked out on some living horror film.

His face began moving like a rubber costume mask. His unplugged gaze sought her out. She sat at bedside, slipping on scree at the lip of a deep quarry. “What is it, Mark? Tell me. I’m here.”

She begged the nurses for something to do, anything, however small, that might help. They gave her special nylon socks and basketball high-tops to put on Mark and remove again, every few hours. She did this every forty minutes, massaging his feet as well. It kept his blood circulating and prevented clots. She sat at bedside, squeezing and kneading. Once, she caught herself sub-vocalizing her old 4-H pledge:

my Head to clearer thinking,

my Heart to greater loyalty,

my Hands to larger service,

and my Health to better living…

as if she were back in high school and Mark were her project for the county fair.

Larger service: she’d looked for it her whole life, armed with nothing more than a bachelor’s in sociology from UNK. Teacher’s aide on the Winnebago reservation, volunteer at homeless feeding stations in downtown L.A., pro bono clerical worker for a law firm in Chicago. For the sake of a prospective boyfriend in Boulder, she’d even briefly served as street demonstrator in antiglobalization marches, chanting out the protests with a zeal that could not mask her profound sense of silliness. She would have stayed home forever, given herself to keeping her family intact, had it not been for her family. Now the last other member of it lay next to her, inert, unable to object to her services.

The doctor put a metal tap in her brother’s brain, draining it. Monstrous, but it worked. The pressure in his skull dropped. The cysts and sacs shrank. His brain now had all the room it needed. She told him as much. “All you need to do now is heal.”

Hours went by in a heartbeat. But the days stretched out without end. She sat by the bed, cooling his body with special chilling blankets, taking off his shoes and putting them on again. All the while, she spoke to him. He never showed any hint of hearing, but she kept talking. The eardrums still had to move, the nerves behind them ripple. “Brought you some roses from the IGA. Aren’t they pretty? They smell good, too. The nurse is changing the empties on the drip again, Markie. Don’t worry; I’m still here. You’ve got to get up and see the cranes this year, before they go. They’re out of this world. I’ve never seen so many of them. Coming into town in packs. Bunch of them landed on the roof of the McDonald’s. They’re up to something. Jeez, Mark. Your feet are ripe. They smell like a bad Roquefort.”

Smell my feet. Her ritual punishment for any transgression, starting the year he passed her in strength. She smelled his stagnant body again, for the first time since they were children. Roquefort and curdled puke. Like the feral kitten they found hiding under the porch when she was nine. Sweet-sour, like the forest of mold on the slice of moist bread Mark left in a covered dish on top of the furnace vent in fifth grade, for a science fair, and forgot about. “We’ll draw you a good bubble bath when you get home.”

She told him about the stream of visitors to his comatose neighbor’s bed: women in smock dresses; men in white shirts and black trousers, like 1960s Mormons on their missions. He took in all her stories, stonelike, his smallest face muscles stilled.

In week two, an older man came into the shared room wearing a puffy coat that made him look like a shiny blue Michelin man. He stood at the bed of Mark’s unconscious roommate, shouting. “Gilbert. Boy? You hear me? Wake up, now. We don’t have time for such foolishness. That’s enough, hear. We got to get on back home.” A nurse came to check on the commotion and led the protesting man away. After that, Karin stopped speaking to Mark. He didn’t seem to notice.

Dr. Hayes said that the fifteenth day was the point of no return. Nine-tenths of closed-head trauma victims who came back came back by then. “The eyes are good news,” he told her. “His reptilian brain is showing nice activity.”

“He has a reptile brain?”

Dr. Hayes smiled, like a doctor in an old public health film. “We all do. A record of the long way here.”

Clearly he wasn’t from around these parts. Most locals hadn’t come the long way. Both Schluter parents believed evolution was Communist propaganda. Mark himself had his doubts. If all the millions of species are constantly evolving, how come we’re the only ones who got smart?

The doctor elaborated. “The brain is a mind-boggling redesign. But it can’t escape its past. It can only add to what’s already there.”

She pictured those mangled Kearney mansions, glorious old wooden Victorians enlarged with brick in the 1930s and again in the 1970s with pressboard and aluminum. “What’s his reptile brain…doing? What kind of nice activity?”

Dr. Hayes reeled off names: medulla, pons, midbrain, cerebellum. She copied the words into a tiny spiral notebook where she recorded everything, to look up later. The neurologist made the brain sound more rickety than the old toy trucks Mark used to assemble from discarded cabinet parts and sawn-off detergent bottles.

“What about his higher…? What’s above reptile — some kind of bird?”

“The next higher structure is the mammalian.”

Her lips moved as he talked, assisting. She couldn’t help it. “And my brother’s?”

Dr. Hayes grew guarded. “That’s harder to say. We don’t see any explicit damage. There is activity. Regulation. The hippocampus and amygdala seem intact, but we did see some spiking in the amygdala, where some of the negative emotions, like fear, start.”

“You’re saying my brother is afraid?” She waved off the doctor’s reassurances, thrilled. Mark was feeling. Fear or anything: it didn’t matter. “What about his…human brain? The part above the mammal?”

“He’s piecing himself back together. Activity in his prefrontal cortex is struggling to synchronize into consciousness.”

She asked Dr. Hayes for every pamphlet the hospital had on head injury. She underlined all the hopeful suggestions in green fine-line marker. The brain is our last frontier. The more we learn about it, the more we see how much more there is to know. The next time she met Dr. Hayes, she was ready.

“Doctor, have you considered any of the new head-injury treatments?” She scrambled in her shoulder bag for her little spiral notebook. “Neuroprotective agents? Cerestat? PEG-SOD?”

“Wow. I’m impressed. You’ve done your homework.”

She tried to look as competent as she wanted him to be.

Dr. Hayes steepled his fingers and touched them to his lips. “Things happen fast in this field. PEG-SOD has been discontinued, after poor results in a second Phase III trial. And I don’t think you want cerestat.”

“Doctor.” Her client-relations voice. “My brother is struggling to open his eyes. You say he may be terrified. We’ll take anything you can give him.”

“All research on cerestat — Aptiganel — has been halted. A fifth of all patients taking it have died.”

“But you have other drugs, don’t you?” She looked down at her notebook, tremoring. At any moment, her hands would turn to doves and fly away.

“Most are still in the early testing. You’d have to be in a clinical trial.”

“Aren’t we, already? I mean…” She waved toward her brother’s room. In the back of her mind, she heard the radio jingle: Good Samaritan Hospital…the largest medical facility between Lincoln and Denver.

“You’d have to change hospitals. Go where they’re running the studies.”

She looked at the man. With proper grooming, he could be the advice doctor on breakfast television. If he saw her at all, it was only as a complication. He probably found her pathetic, in every measurable way. Something in her reptilian brain hated him.

Rises up in flooded fields. There is a wave, a rocking in the reeds. Pain again, then nothing.

When sense returns, he is drowning. Father teaching him to swim. Current in his limbs. Four years old, and his father floating him. Flying, then flailing, then falling. His father grabbing his leg, pulling him under. Holding him beneath the surface, stiff hand pressing down his head until all bubbles stop. River will bite, boy. Be ready.

But there is no bite, no ready. There is only drown.

There comes a pyramid of light, burning diamonds, twisting fields of stars. His body threads triangles of neon, a tunnel rising. The water over him, his lungs on fire, and then he explodes upward, toward air.

Where his mouth was, just smooth skin. Solid swallows up that hole. House remodeled; windows papered over. Door no more a door. Muscles pull lips but no space to open. Wires only, where words were. Face bent wrong and folded up into its own eyes. Slipped in a metal bed, the hell he must be in. His smallest move a pain worse than dying. Maybe death is done already. Done all ways, in one tip of his life and lifting. Who’d want to live after such a fall?

A room of machines, the space he can’t reach. Something splits out from him. People move in and smooth away too fast. Faces push up to his mouthless face, pushing words into him. He chews them and puffs sound back. Someone says be patient, but to not him. Be patient, be a patient is what he must be.

This may be days. No saying. Time flaps about, wings broken. Voices pass, some circle back, but one’s as close to always there as there is. A face almost his face, so close it wants something of him, if only at least words. That face a she and like water weeping. Nothing she is will say what happened.

One need tries to tear out of him. Need to say, more than the need to be. If a mouth, then all would be out. Then this she would know what happened, know his death wasn’t what it seems.

Pressure fills, like fluid crushed. His head: endless pressure, buried already. Sap streams out of his inner ear. Blood out his gorged eyes. Killing pressure, even after all that seeps out of him. A million more schooling thoughts than his brain can hold.

A face hovers near, forming words on fire. Says Mark, stay, and he would die to make her stop keeping him alive. He pushes back against the thing collapsing him. Muscles pull but skin won’t move. Something slack. He works forever to winch the tendons in his neck. At last his head tilts. Later, lifetimes, lifts the edge of his upper lip.

Three words would save him. But all muscles can’t free one sound.

Thoughts throb in a vein. Red pulses his eyes again, then that one white shaft shooting up from the black he blasted through. Something in the road he’ll never reach now. Screaming up close as his life rolled. Someone here in this room, who will die with him.

The first word comes. It surfaces through a bruise wider than his throat. The skin grown over his mouth tears clear and a word forces through the bloody opening. I. The word hisses, taking so long she’ll never hear. I didn’t mean.

But words change to flying things as they hit the air.

Two weeks in, Mark sat up and moaned. Karin was at his bedside, five feet from his face. He buckled at the waist, and she screamed. His eyes twisted around and found her. Her scream turned into a laugh, then a sob, while his eyes twitched over her. She called his name, and the face underneath the tubes and scars flinched. Soon a raft of care-givers filled the room.

Much had happened underground, in the days he lay frozen. Now he poked out, like winter wheat through snow. He turned his head, craning his neck. His hands thrust out clumsily. His fingers picked at the invasive hardware. He hated most his gastric feeding tube. As his arms got better at clawing it, the nurses imposed soft restraints.

Now and then, something spooked him, and he thrashed to escape it. Nights were the worst. Once when Karin was leaving for the day, a wave of chemicals bucked through him and he surged upright, scrambling almost to his knees on his hospital bed. She had to wrestle him down to keep him from tearing out his hoses.

She watched him return, hour by hour, as in some grim Scandinavian film. Sometimes he gazed at her, weighing if she was edible or a threat. Once, a surge of animal sexuality, forgotten in the next moment. At times she was a crust he tried to brush from his eyes. He shot her that liquid, amused look he’d given her one night when they were teens, each of them crawling home from their respective assignations, drunk. You, too? I didn’t know you had it in you.

He started vocalizing — groans muffled by the tracheotomy tube, a secret, vowel-free language. Every rasp lacerated Karin. She badgered the doctors to do something. They measured scar tissue and cranial fluid, listening to everything but his frantic gurgling. They swapped his trach tube for a fenestrated one, pierced with tiny holes, a window in Mark’s throat wide enough for sounds to pass through. And every one of her brother’s cries begged for something Karin couldn’t identify.

He was back to how she’d first seen him, when she was four, staring down from the second-story landing on a lump of meat wrapped in a blue baby blanket her parents had just dragged home. Her earliest memory: standing at the top of the stairs, wondering why her parents bothered cooing over something far stupider than the outdoor cats. But she soon learned to love this baby, the greatest toy a girl could ask for. She hauled him around like a doll for a year until he finally took a few dazed steps without her. She jabbered at him, wheedled and bribed, kept crayons and bits of food just out of reach until he called for them by their real names. She’d raised her brother, while her mother was busy laying up treasures in heaven. Karin had gotten Mark to walk and talk once already. Surely, with help from Good Samaritan, she could do it twice. Something in her almost prized this second chance to raise him right this time.

Alone by his bed between nurses’ visits, she started talking to him again. Her words might focus his brain. None of the neurology books she pored over denied that possibility. No one knew enough about the brain to say what her brother might or might not hear. She felt as she had through childhood, putting him to bed while their parents were out wailing on homesteader hymns around the neighbor’s Hammond chord organ, before their parents’ first bankruptcy and the end of socializing. Karin, from the earliest age, playing babysitter, earning her two dollars by keeping her little brother alive for another night. Markie, skyrocketing from an overdose of Milk Duds and cherry colas, demanding they count to infinity or run telepathic experiments on each other or relate long epics from Animalia, the country humans couldn’t get to, populated by heroes, rogues, tricksters, and victims, all based on the creatures of their family farm.

Always animals. The good ones and the evil, the ones to protect and the ones to destroy. “You remember the bull snake in the barn?” she asked him. His eyes flickered, watching the idea of the creature. “You must have been nine. Took a stick and killed it all by yourself. Protecting everyone. Went to Cappy and bragged, and he beat the shit out of you. ‘You just cost us eight hundred dollars’ worth of grain. Don’t you know what those creatures eat? What have you got for brains, boy?’ Last snake you ever killed.”

He studied her, the edges of his mouth working. He seemed to be listening.

“Remember Horace?” The injured crane they’d adopted when Mark was ten and Karin fourteen. Winged by a power line, the bird had ditched on their property during the spring migration. It went into a dance of total panic as they approached. They spent an afternoon closing in, letting the bird adjust to them, until it resigned itself to capture.

“Remember, when we washed him, how he took the towel from you with his beak and started drying himself? Instinct, like how they coat themselves with mud to darken their feathers. But God. We thought that bird was smarter than any human being alive. Remember how we tried to teach it to shake?”

All at once, Mark started keening. One arm tomahawked and the other swung wide. His torso slashed upward and his head thrust out. Tubes tore off and the monitor alarm squealed. Karin called the attendants while Mark flapped about on the sheets, his body lurching toward her. She was in tears by the time the orderly showed. “I don’t know what I did. What’s wrong with him?”

“Would you look at that,” the orderly said. “He’s trying to hug you!”

She ran up to Sioux, to put out fires. She’d missed her return-to-work date, and she’d reached the limit of what she could ask for by phone. She went in to talk to her supervisor. He listened to the details, shaking his head with concern. He had a cousin, hit in the skull with a seven iron once. Damaged a lobe that sounded like varietal. Never the same afterward. Her supervisor hoped that wouldn’t happen to Karin’s brother.

She thanked him, and asked if she could stay out just a little while longer.

How much longer?

She couldn’t say.

Wasn’t her brother in the hospital? Didn’t he have professional care?

She could take an unpaid leave, she bargained. Just for a month.

Her supervisor explained that the Family Medical Leave Act did not extend to siblings. A brother, in the eyes of the medical-leave law, was not family.

Maybe she might give notice, and they could hire her back when her brother was better.

It wasn’t impossible, the supervisor said. But he could guarantee nothing.

This hurt. “I’m good,” she said. “I’m as good as anyone else on the lines.”

“You’re better than good,” the supervisor conceded, and even now she swelled with pride. “But I don’t need good. I just need here.”

She cleaned out her cubicle in a daze. A few embarrassed officemates expressed concern and wished her well. Over before she’d really started. A year ago, she’d thought she might rise in the firm, make a career, start a life up here with people who knew only her friendly readiness and nothing of her messy past. She should have known that Kearney — the Schluter touch — would come back to claim her. She considered walking down to tech support, to break the news to her flirtation, Chris. Instead, she called him on her cell phone from the parking lot. When he heard her voice, he gave her the silent treatment, both barrels. Two weeks without a call or e-mail. She kept apologizing until he talked. When he got over his sulk, Chris was all concern. He asked what had happened. Bottomless familial shame blocked her from telling all. She’d made herself witty for him, light, easygoing, even sophisticated, by local standards. In fact, she was just a shit-kicker raised by zealots, with a shiftless brother who’d managed to reduce himself to infancy. Family emergency, she just repeated.

“When are you coming back?”

She told him the emergency had just cost her her job. Chris cursed the firm nobly. He even threatened to go have it out with her supervisor. She thanked him, but said he had to think about himself. His own job. She didn’t know this man, and he didn’t know her. Yet when he didn’t argue with her, she felt betrayed.

“Where are you?” he asked. She panicked and said home. “I can come down,” he volunteered. “This weekend, or some time. Help out. Anything you need.”

She held the phone away from her spasming face. She told him he was too good, that he shouldn’t have to worry like that about her. This made him sullen again. “That’s okay, then,” he said. “Nice knowing you. Take care. Have a good life.”

She hung up, cursing. But life in Sioux had never really belonged to her. It was, at most, a binge of simplicity that she now had to detox from. She drove to her condo to check on the place and pack a more realistic wardrobe. The trash hadn’t been taken out in weeks and the place reeked. Mice had chewed through her matching plastic sealable bowls, and lentils covered the counters and beautiful new floor. The philodendrons, schefflera, and peace lily were all past saving.

She cleaned up, shut off the water main, and paid the delinquent bills. No new monthly paycheck would cover them. Locking the door behind her as she left, she wondered how much more she might have to give up, for Mark. On the ride back south, she tapped all the anger-management tricks they’d given her in job training. They played across her windshield like PowerPoint slides. Number One: It’s not about you. Number Two: Your plan is not the world’s. Number Three: The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

She owed her own competence to raising her brother. He was her psychology experiment: Given another parent, with everything else the same, could her own flesh and blood grow up worthwhile? But in exchange for her selfless care, he gave her back, at best, an endless supply of his chief attribute: total aimlessness. Animals like me, the eleven-year-old claimed. And they did, without fail. Everything on the farm trusted him. Even ladybugs would crawl fearlessly across his face, finding a place in his eyebrows to nest. What do you want to be when you grow up? she once made the mistake of asking. His face burst with excitement: I could be a real good chicken calmer.

But when it came to humans, no one quite knew what to make of the boy. He’d made some mistakes as a kid: burning down the corn crib while shooting off tinfoil-wrapped matches. Getting caught playing with himself behind the rotting chicken coop. Killing a five-hundred-pound newly weaned calf by lacing its feed with a bowl of mixed medicines, convinced it was in pain. Worse, he spoke with a lisp until the age of six, which pretty much convinced both parents he was possessed. For weeks, their mother made him sleep under a wall exorcised with a cross anointed with oil, which shed droplets on his head as he slept.

At seven, he took to spending long hours in the afternoons in a meadow half a mile from their house. When their mother asked him what he did there for hours at a time, he replied, “Just play.” When she asked with who, he said, at first, “No one,” and later, “With a friend.” She refused to let him leave the house until he told her the friend’s name. He answered with a shy smile: “His name is Mr. Thurman.” He went on to tell the panicked woman all the great times that he and Mr. Thurman had together. Joan Schluter called in the entire Kearney police force. After a stakeout of the meadow and a thorough cross-examination of the boy, the police told the frantic parents that Mr. Thurman not only had no criminal record, he had no record whatsoever, outside of their son’s head.

Karin was Mark’s only hope of surviving adolescence. When he turned thirteen, she tried to show him how to save himself. It’s easy, she claimed. She’d discovered in high school, to her shock, that she could make even the elites like her by letting them dress her and instruct her musical tastes. People like people who make them feel secure. He didn’t know what the word meant. You need a brand, she told him. Something recognizable. She pushed him into chess club, cross-country, Future Farmers, even the thespians. Nothing stuck until he stumbled upon the group that would take him in because he passed the simple audition of failing to fit in anywhere else — the group of losers that freed him from her.

After he found his tribe, she could do little more for him. She concentrated on saving herself, finishing her sociology degree, the first ever in a family that looked on college as a form of witchcraft. She pressured Mark to follow her at UNK. He made it through one year, never having the heart to upset his many advisors by actually declaring a major. She moved to Chicago, answering phones for a Big Five accounting firm on the eighty-sixth floor of the Standard Oil Building. Her mother used to call long-distance, just to listen to her phone-receptionist voice. “How’d you learn how to sound like that? That’s not right! That can’t be good for your vocal cords.” From Chicago she went to Los Angeles, the greatest city on earth. She tried to tell Mark: You could be lots of things out here. You could find work anywhere. They’re begging for easygoing people out here. Your parents aren’t your fault, she told him. You could come out here and nobody would ever have to know about them. Even when her own launch began to fall back to earth, she still believed: people liked people who made them feel more secure.

When Mark was himself again, she would restart them both. She’d get him on his feet, listen to him, help him find what he needed to be. And this time she’d take him away with her, someplace reasonable.

She’d saved the note, and read it daily. A kind of magic charm: Tonight on North Line Road GOD led me to you. Surely that note writer — the saint who had discovered the wreck and come to the hospital on the night of the accident — would return to make real contact, now that Mark was awake. Karin waited patiently, for a long-delayed explanation. But no one came by to identify himself or explain anything.

A spring bouquet arrived from the IBP plant. Two dozen of Mark’s coworkers signed the Get Well Soon card, some adding jokey, off-color encouragements Karin couldn’t decode. The whole county knew what had happened to Mark: a police siren couldn’t go off in the Big Bend region without everyone between Grand Island and North Platte telling you exactly who had screwed up, and how.

A few days after the trach tube change, Mark’s best friends at last visited. Karin heard them when they were still down the hall.

“Damn, it’s a cold universe out there.”

“Tell me about it. My ’nads have migrated up into my eye-sockets.”

They rolled into the room, Tommy Rupp in black flak jacket and Duane Cain in Thinsulate-stuffed camouflage. The Three Muskrateers, reunited for the first time since the accident. They showered Karin with upbeat greetings. She fought the urge to ask where they’d been. Rupp strode up to Mark where he lay whimpering in bed and offered him a palm. Mark, from some deep reflex, flipped him a high five.

“Jesus, Gus. They really did a number on you.” Rupp waved at the monitors. “Can you believe this? All this gear, just for you.”

Duane hung back, squeezing his neck. “He’s making headway, don’t you think?” He turned to Karin, standing behind him at bedside. Tattoos crept out from under the collar of his long underwear, a cartoon of red muscles stung onto his hairless chest, as detailed and realistic as an anatomy text. He looked flayed alive. He whispered to Karin, slow and booming, for all those just emerging from a coma. “This is fucking inconceivable. Happened to exactly the person who didn’t deserve it.”

Rupp took her elbow. “Our man’s in pretty rough shape.”

Her arm went hot from the wrist up. The curse of the red-headed: she flushed faster than a pheasant from the brush. She withdrew her arm and smoothed her cheeks. “You should have seen him last week.” She couldn’t control her tone.

A look passed from Cain to Rupp: The woman is hurting, man. Don’t let the Madame Mao thing get you. Cain’s face was clear, earnest, working with her. “We’ve been calling in. We understand he just recently woke up.”

Rupp had Mark’s clipboard chart and was shaking his head. “Are they doing anything at all useful for him?” The world needed new management, a fact so obvious that only a select few knew it.

“They had to reduce pressure on his brain. He wasn’t responding to anything.”

“But he’s coming back now,” Rupp declared. He turned back to Mark and fisted his shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Gus? Full return. Old times again.”

Mark lay still, staring.

Karin blurted, “You’re seeing him at the best he’s been since…”

“We’ve been keeping track,” Duane insisted. He scratched his tattoo muscles. “We’ve been following.”

A river of phonemes flowed from the bed. Mark’s arms snaked out. His mouth went Ah…ah, kee-kee-kee.

“You’re upsetting him,” Karin said. “He shouldn’t get worked up.” She wanted to kick them out, but Mark’s activity excited her.

“Are you kidding?” Rupp pulled an empty chair up to the bedside. “A visit is the best thing for him. Any non-insane doctor will tell you that.”

“Man needs his friends,” Duane echoed. “Raise his serotonin levels. You’re familiar with serotonin?”

Karin stopped her hands from flying upward. She nodded, despite herself. She grabbed her elbows for balance and walked out of the room. On her way out the door, she heard the chairs shuffle and Tommy Rupp say, “Slow down there, bro. Chill. What do you want to say? One tap for yes, two for no…”

If anyone knew what had happened that night, those two did. But she refused to ask them in front of Mark. She left the hospital, drifting toward Woodland Park. Late afternoon, under a purple-brown sky. March had launched one of its false springs, the kind that got the whole town to lower its guard before slamming it with another arctic blast. Steam trails rose up from the dirty piles of snow. She cut through downtown Kearney, a business district hosed for as far into the future as anyone could see. Falling commodities prices, rising unemployment, aging population, youth flight, family farms selling out to agribusiness for dirt and change: geography had decided Mark’s fate long before his birth. Only the doomed stayed on to collect.

She walked past solid A-frames crumbling away to tar-paper shacks. She wove from Avenue E to Avenue I, between Thirty-first and Twenty-fifth, inside a life-sized photo album of her past. The house of the boy she first loved; the house of the boy she first failed to make love with. The house of her girlfriend of twenty years, who disowned her one day, six weeks after getting married: apparently something the new husband said. This was the town she’d tried three times to escape, each time recalled by perverse family disaster. Kearney had a head-stone all picked out for her, and her job was only to walk randomly around these graveyard streets until she stumbled upon it.

Before Joan Schluter died, she’d given her daughter a stiff cardboard photograph of Great-Grandfather Swanson standing in front of his crumbling house, that chapel to desolation, twenty-five miles northwest of what would become Kearney. The man in the picture held half of his library — either Pilgrim’s Progress or the Bible: the photo was too blurry to tell. On the mud wall of the soddie behind him, dangling from a stag’s antler, hung a gilded birdcage, purchased out east at great expense and dragged a thousand miles overland in an oxcart, taking up precious cargo space that might have stored tools or medicines. The birdcage was more urgent. The body could survive any isolation. Then there was the mind.

Now residents had a cage still more gilded: cheap broadband. The Internet had hit Nebraska like liquor hitting a Stone Age tribe — the godsend every sandhills homesteader descendant had been waiting for, the only way to survive such vacancy. Karin herself abused the Web daily, up in the Sioux metropole: travel sites, auction sites selling discounted but very serviceable clothes, fancy gift foods for winning over her workmates, and, once or twice, the occasional dating service. The Net: a last-ditch cure for prairie blindness. But her dabbling was nothing compared to Mark’s addiction. He and his friends manned two dozen online avatars between them, talking Pig Latin to chat-room housewives, posting long comments on conspiracy theory blogs, uploading questionable images to crazedpics.com. Half their after-plant hours consisted of building up experience points for fantasy characters in various alternate worlds. It panicked her, the number of hours he was willing to spend somewhere purely imaginary. Now he was locked in deeper space, a place where instant messages couldn’t reach. And everything she’d feared the Web might do to him now seemed like heaven.

She wandered around town long enough to outlast his friends’ click-impaired attention spans. The streetlights came on, on those streets that had lights. Now the blocks scrolled and repeated, the streets a simulation more predictable than one of Mark’s online games. She doubled back on Central toward the hospital, keen to get her brother back to herself again.

But Rupp and Cain were still there, kicked back in their hospital chairs. Mark was sitting up in bed. The three of them were playing catch with a wadded-up ball of paper. Mark’s throws were wild. Some went backward, hitting the wall behind him. He threw the way a sailor-suited chimp might ride a tricycle. But he was throwing. The resurrection froze her, Mark’s biggest leap since his truck left the road. Cain and Rupp lobbed him underhand bloopers, which he stabbed at, half a second late. The makeshift ball bounced off his chest, his face, his flailing hands. And every humiliating hit produced a sound that could only be the thickest laughter. She wanted to scream. She wanted to clap with joy.

In the hallway, as they left, she thanked her brother’s friends. What did it matter? The surviving part of her was beyond pride.

Rupp waved her off. “He’s still in there. Don’t worry. We’ll dig him out.”

She started to ask whether they’d been together, the night of the accident. But she didn’t want to jeopardize this brief alliance. She showed them the note. “Do you know anything about this?”

They both shrugged. “No idea.”

“It’s important,” she said. But they denied all knowledge.

Duane Cain, retreating crablike down the corridor, called back to her. “You wouldn’t know what happened to the Ram, by any chance?”

She stared at him, baffled. Old Testament sacrifices. Barnyard rituals.

“I mean: Was his truck totally totaled? We could, you know…We could look it over for you, if you want.”

The police questioned her again. She’d spoken to them the day after the accident but had no memory of the meeting. Later, when she was in better shape, they came back for details. Two officers kept her for forty minutes in a hospital conference room. They asked if she knew anything about her brother’s activities on the evening of the accident. Had he been with anyone? Had he spoken to her about any recent personal problems, any change at work, anything he might have been struggling with? Was he distressed or depressed?

The questions skidded inside her. Her brother trying to off himself — the idea was so crazy she couldn’t answer it. She’d lived fifteen feet away from Mark for more than half of her life. She knew his junior high school social studies grades, the brand of his underwear, his favorite color jujube, the middle name and perfume of every girl he’d ever craved. She could complete any sentence he spoke before it left his mouth. Even in jest, he’d never once mentioned wanting to die.

They asked if he’d been angry or aggressive in recent weeks. Not unusually so, she told them. They said he’d been at the Silver Bullet, a seedy bar on Route 183. She told them he went there often, after work. He was a controlled driver. He never drove unless he felt sober. The truck was his baby.

They wanted to know if he ever did anything more than drink. She told them no, and it felt just like the truth. She would have sworn to it in a court of law.

Did her brother recently make or receive any threats? Did he ever mention involvement in violent or dangerous activities?

It was winter. The roads were slick. Something like this happened every other week. Were they saying this wasn’t a simple accident?

They had calculated Mark’s velocity from his skid marks. As his truck left the road, he was braking from a top speed of eighty miles an hour.

The figure shook her. But she gave away nothing. She tried again: he was out in the middle of the night, driving too fast for conditions, and he lost the edge of the road.

He wasn’t alone, the police told her. There were three sets of tire tracks on the stretch of North Line where he lost control. As they reconstructed it, an eastbound light truck had veered over the center line into Mark’s lane, cutting him off before straightening out and leaving the scene. Mark, heading west, had veered in front of this skid, first hard to the right, then across the road, ending up flipped over in the left-hand ditch. A third vehicle, a midsized sedan also heading west, drove off the shoulder on the right-hand side of the road, its tailing distance apparently giving it barely enough time to shoulder safely.

The description unfolded in front of her, some weirdly cut, handheld-camera reality show. Somebody had lost control, right in front of Mark. He couldn’t slam on his brakes, because of the person behind him.

The investigating officers pointed out the odds against three vehicles converging by chance on an empty stretch of country road, after midnight on a weekday, at least one of them traveling at eighty miles an hour. They explained that Mark fell into a high-risk group: Nebraska small-town male under the age of thirty. They asked if her brother ever raced. Racing on deserted highways at night — one of the area’s occasional pastimes.

If they were racing, she asked, wouldn’t they all have been heading the same direction?

There were more dangerous games, the police hinted. Could she tell them anything about his friends?

She said something vague about coworkers from IBP. A group of them, she claimed; a circle. She made Mark sound almost popular. Bizarre: she wanted even the police to think well of him. Even these men who wanted her to believe that someone had run her brother off the road. They didn’t care what happened to Mark. Mark was just a set of skids. Throughout the interview, she fingered the note hiding in her cloth shoulder bag. The note from Mark’s finder, the one who’d brought him back. I am No One…Could they charge her with suppressing evidence? But if she showed them, they would confiscate it, and she would lose her only talisman.

She asked who reported the accident. They said the accident was called in from a pay phone at the Mobil station just off the Kearney interstate exit, by a male of indeterminate age who refused to give a name.

The driver of one of the other two vehicles?

The cops couldn’t say, or wouldn’t. They thanked her as they let her go. They said she’d been very helpful. They said they were sorry for her brother, and wished him a speedy recovery.

So they can arrest him, she thought, smiling brightly and waving goodbye.

A rising comes that isn’t always death. A flight that doesn’t always end in breaking. He lies still through every imaginable light, the beams passing through him like he is water. He solidifies, but not all at once. He collects like salt when the sea evaporates. Flaking apart, even as he sets.

Now and then, a current floats him. Flings through his broken body. Mostly he falls back into accident. But sometimes a river lifts him, over the low gray hills, elsewhere.

His pieces still send and receive, but no longer to one another. Words trickle through his head. Less words than sounds. Goat head. Goat head. Just a clock ticking, no less than his heart. Sound spatters, like spilled oil. Goat head. Ram truck. Ram tough. Ram horn. Ghost ahead. Ram a ghost. Goat dead. Slam horn. Done. Breaking. Falling. Plunging under again, no bottom. Words click through his head, an endless freight. Sometimes he runs alongside, peering in. Sometimes these words peer out, finding him.

He is awake, or someplace near it. His body drifts on and off. Possible that he himself is here straight through. Only he doesn’t know it, when what his mind hooks to comes and goes.

Ideas hit him, or he hits them. A game always, scores pouring in, as standings change. Surrounded by people — seas of them — the crowd a huge, changing thought. He never knew himself. Every single human a separate line in a play so large and slow no one can hear it.

Time is just a yardstick for pain. And he’s got all the time in the world. Sometimes he jerks up, remembering, desperate to go, fix, undo. Mostly he lies still, signals of the disconnected world buzzing through him, a swarm of gnats he would catch and kill. They scatter when he reaches for them.

Something wonderful: he could count to anything, even all these swarms, just by adding one. Covering debts, bets. Hovering up by the highest number. In a lookout tower on a hill. People could do anything. They don’t know they’re gods, that they live through even death. People might make a hospital where they could keep every possible life alive. And then someday, life might return the favor.

A good kid once, the one he was in.

Little by little, there is no need. No falling, no rising. Just is.

People don’t have ideas. Ideas have everything.

Once he looks down and sees himself, his hand, throwing. So he has a hand, and the hand can catch. His body, formed through the flung ball. Knows repeats. Even without him, or anyone thinking so.

Something else he is supposed to remember. Something else to save someone. Desperate message. But maybe no more than this.

The health professionals descended on him. Increasingly, Karin got in the way, worthless as the therapists took over. But she stayed nearby, to help, where possible, bring her twenty-seven-year-old brother back from infancy. She opened up the possibility a crack, allowing herself to feel a hint of something that might in time become relief.

She wrote down the therapists’ routines, the relentless exercises. On page after perfect, empty page, she ordered Mark’s days. She noted the hour when he rose and put his feet on the floor. She described his first failed efforts to stand, grappled to the side of the bed. Looked at from up close, his eyebrows’ smallest spasm was a miracle. Her notebook was her punishment and her reward. Every word was like rebirth. Only Mark’s naked struggle kept her going. He would need these days replayed for him, months from now. And she would be ready.

The days of rehab drill numbed with crushing repetition. An orangutan would have started walking and talking, just to escape the torture. When Mark at last stood upright, Karin walked him in circles, first around the room, then around the nurses’ station, then around the floor. The tubes came off, untethering him. Together, in short, shuffling steps, they made a tiny solar system, orbits within orbits. Ungodly relief, a feeling she thought would never come again: just walking alongside him.

The windowed tube came out of his throat, leaving the passage open for words. Still, Mark didn’t talk. Karin copied his speech therapist, endlessly repeating: Ah. Oh. Oo. Muh muh muh. Tuh tuh tuh. Mark stared at her moving mouth, but wouldn’t imitate. He just lay in bed murmuring, an animal trapped under a bushel, afraid that the speaking creatures might silence it for good.

He alternated between docility and rage. Watching the therapists, she learned how to play each mood. She tried him out on television. Weeks before, he would have wallowed in it. But something about the quick cuts, flashing lights, and riotous soundtracks made him whimper until she shut it off.

One evening, she asked if he’d like her to read to him. He groaned a sound that wasn’t no. She started on an old issue of People; he didn’t seem to mind. The next morning, she picked through The Second Story, the used book store on Twenty-fifth, until she found what she was after. The Boxcar Children. Surprise Island, Mystery Ranch, and Caboose Mystery: three of the original nineteen, volumes that floated through resale the way those orphaned children floated through their adult-damaged world. She stood in the store’s moldy stacks, flipping through the used inside covers until she found one with a shaky, imperious “M. S.” The curse of small-town life on a shallow river: your most prized possessions always turned up again, eternally resold.

She sat and read to him for hours. She read out loud until the visitors on the other side of the sliding curtain began to curse her under their breath. Reading calmed him, especially at night, when he slipped downward, back into the accident. As she read, his face struggled with the mystery of forgotten places. Sometimes, halfway through a sentence, she’d hit a word—button, pillow, Violet—that caused Mark to struggle up, trying to speak. She stopped calling the nurses. They only sedated him.

Years had passed since she’d read aloud. She mangled sentences and mispronounced words. Mark listened, his eyes like half-dollars, as if words were a new life form. Surely their mother must have read to them, in childhood. But Karin could form no image of Joan Schluter reading anything but advance accounts of End Time, even then, already breaking out all over.

Joan had gotten her first real glimpse of End Time at last, eighteen months earlier. Karin had kept a bedside vigil then, too, the opposite of this one. Their mother was struck by an eleventh-hour burst of words, all the words avoided in years of child rearing. Babe? Swear to me that if I start repeating myself, you’ll put me out of my misery. Hemlock in my prune juice.

This, spoken while clutching Karin’s wrist, forcing her gaze.

If you ever see the signs. Going on and on? About nothing? Even if it seems like no big deal. Promise me, Kar. Bag over my head. I do not care to stick around for that particular last act.

But, Ma, that’s against the Word of God.

Not in my Bible. Show me where.

Ending your own life?

That’s just the thing, Kar. I wouldn’t be!

I see. You want me to go to hell for you. Thou shalt not kill.

This isn’t killing. This is Christian charity. We did it for animals all the time, back on the farm. Promise me, Kar. Promise me.

Ma, watch out. You’re repeating yourself. Don’t put me into a difficult situation here.

You see what I’m saying. No fun.

Fun was not something Joan Schluter had ever had to worry about. Yet in extremity, she’d said tender things: ghastly, loving apologies for her failure as a parent. Near the end, she asked: Karin, will you pray with me? and Karin, who’d sworn never to talk to God again, even if He started the conversation, bowed her head and mouthed along.

There will be some insurance money, Joan told her. Not a lot, but some. For both of you. Can you do something good with it?

What do you mean, Ma? What good do you want me to do?

But her mother no longer knew what good was. Only that it needed doing.

From the thick of The Woodshed Mystery, Karin said, “You know what, Mark? After an upbringing like ours? We’re lucky there’s anything left of us at all.”

“Left us,” her brother agreed. “Anything.”

She surged to her feet, clapping a cry back into her mouth. She stared at him. He just sank in the sheets, hiding until the danger passed. “Jesus, Mark. You talked. You can say things.”

“Jesus Jesus. Mark. Jesus,” he said. And then fell silent.

“Echolalia,” Dr. Hayes called it. “Perseveration. He’s imitating what he hears.”

Karin would not be dimmed. “If he can say a word, it must mean something, right?”

“Ah! You’re pushing up against questions neurology can’t answer yet.”

Mark’s speech traced the same tight loops his walking did. One afternoon it was “chick, chick, chick, chick,” for most of an hour. It sounded like a symphony to her. Rousing him for a walk, Karin said, “Come on, Mark, let’s tie your shoes.” This launched a barrage of “tie shoes, tissues, die your noose.” He kept it up until she, too, felt brain-damaged. But exhilarated: in the hypnotic repetition, she thought she heard “too tight shoes.” A few loops later, he produced, “Shoofly, don’t tie me.”

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.

The little girl answered. Better her than her older brother. The girl’s drawled “Hello” had two too many syllables. Seven years old. What kind of parents let their seven-year-old girl answer the phone after dark?

Karin fished up the girl’s name. “Ashley?”

The tiny voice returned a broad, trusting, Cartoon Network “Yeesss!” Austin and Ashley: names that could scar a child for life. Karin hung up, and instinctively dialed another number, one she’d considered calling for weeks.

When he picked up, she said, simply, “Daniel.” After an ambushed pause, Daniel Riegel said, “It’s you.” Such relief surged through Karin that she couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t called him earlier. He might have helped, as early as the night of the accident. Someone who knew Mark. The real Mark, the kind one. Someone she could talk to about both past and future.

“Where are you?” he asked.

She started to giggle. Horrified, she got hold of herself. “Here. I mean, Farview.”

In his naturalist’s voice, the hush he used in the field to point out things that were easily scared away, Daniel said, “For your brother.”

It felt like telepathy. Then she remembered: small town. She sunk into his soft questions. The release of answering was beyond description. She reversed herself with every sentence: Mark was getting better by leaps and bounds; he was worse than helpless. He could think and identify things and even talk; he was still trapped in the wreck, walking like a trained bear and chattering like a perverted parrot. Daniel asked how she was coping. She was doing fine, considering. The days were long, but she could handle them. With help, her voice begged, despite herself.

She considered asking Daniel to meet her somewhere, but couldn’t risk scaring him. So she just talked, her voice curling like surf. She tried to sound for him like the capable woman she had almost become. She had no right even to contact the man. But her brother had nearly died. Disaster trumped the past and gave her temporary asylum.

Until the age of thirteen, her brother and Daniel had been joined at the hip, twin nature boys turning up ornate box turtles, stumbling on bobwhite nests, camped outside burrows that they dreamed of inhabiting. Then, in high school, something happened. Sometime during sophomore year, from one class period to the next, they fell out. Long, protracted war, with a static front. Danny stayed with the animals and Mark abandoned them for people. “Growing up,” Mark explained, as if love of nature were an adolescent fixation. He never had anything to do with Daniel again. Years later, when Karin started dabbling with Daniel herself, neither boy ever mentioned the other to her.

She and Daniel spun out, almost as soon as they’d started. She ran off to Chicago, then on to Los Angeles, before crawling home, humbled. Daniel, untiring idealist, welcomed her back without questions. Only when he overheard her mimicking him in whispers on the phone to Karsh did Daniel kick her out. She fled to her brother for support. But when Mark, loyal to her, started bad-mouthing Daniel, hinting at dark secrets in the past, Karin turned on him so harshly they didn’t speak for weeks.

Now Daniel’s voice reassured her: she was better than her past. He’d always said as much, and now life had dealt her a challenge that would prove him right. Daniel’s tone threatened to convince her. Human stupidity meant nothing, least of all what humans thought it meant. You could brush it away like a wisp of insect silk grazing your face. Unintended cruelties didn’t matter. All that mattered now was her brother. Daniel asked about Mark’s care, good questions she should have asked the therapists long before. She listened to him as if to a forgotten favorite song, one that distilled a whole chapter of life into three minutes. “I’d be happy to come to the hospital,” he said.

“Well, he’s not making much of anyone, just yet.” Something in her didn’t want him seeing Mark as he was now. What she wanted from Daniel was stories, stories of Mark, before. Things she wasn’t sure she was remembering right, after too many days at bedside.

She did remember to ask Daniel about his own life. The distraction helped, even if she couldn’t focus on the details. “How are things at the Sanctuary?”

He had quit the Sanctuary in despair at their compromises. He now worked for the Buffalo County Crane Refuge, a smaller, more limber and confrontational group. Work at the Sanctuary had been steady and well-intentioned, but far too accommodating. The Refuge was harder-line. “If you want to save something that’s been around for millions of years, you can’t be moderate.”

How contemptible she’d been, ever to take this man lightly. His gentle firmness was worth ten of her and Karsh put together. She couldn’t believe that he would still talk to her. The accident permitted that, too. Made everyone briefly better than they were. Put the present above the past. She’d been circling in a snowstorm, frostbitten and near collapse, and she’d stumbled on a lean-to with a fire. She wanted this conversation to go on, slowly meandering nowhere. For the first time since the hospital’s call, she felt she could do whatever disaster required. If she could just call this man from time to time.

Daniel asked about her life before the wreck. He asked in a soft aside, as if lying motionless in a field, looking through binoculars. “I’ve been managing,” she told him. “Learning a lot about myself. It turns out I have some skill, working with upset people.” She described all the responsibilities she’d had, in the job she’d just lost. “They say they might be able to hire me back, when this is all over.”

“Have you been seeing anyone?”

She started to giggle again. Something was truly wrong with her. Something skidding out of control. “Only my brother. Nine or ten hours a day.” Even telling him that much terrified her. But how infinitely better it was to be terrified than dead. “Daniel? It would be really good if we could sit for a minute. If you have the time to see me. I don’t want to burden you. This is…a handful, is all. I know I’m the last person with any right to ask you…But I don’t quite know how to do this by myself.”

Long after they hung up, she heard him saying, “Of course. I would like that. Too.”

She could learn, she told herself, falling asleep. Learn how not to be her knee-jerk, self-protecting self. The time for constantly rebuffing imagined slights was over. The accident changed everything, gave her a chance to undo all her old hit-and-runs. The last few weeks had emptied her — just having to look at Mark laid bare. How easy now, to float above herself, gaze down on all the killing needs that controlled her, and see them for the phantoms they were. Nothing had the power to hurt her except for what power she gave it. Every barrier she’d ever chafed against was no more than a Chinese finger lock that opened instantly when she stopped pulling. She could simply watch, learn about the new Mark, listen to Daniel without having to understand him. Other people were about themselves, not about her. Everyone alive was at least as scared as she was. Remember that, and a person might come to love anyone.

Echo caca. Cocky locky. Caca lala. Living things, always talking. How you know they’re living. Always with the look, with the listen, with the see what I mean. What can things mean, that they aren’t already? Live things make such sounds, just to say what silence says better. Dead things are what they are already, and can shut up in peace.

Humans the worst. All over him with their words. Worse than cicadas on a warm night. Or all frog, more or legs. Listen to the spurts. Listen to those birds. But birds might be louder. His mother told him. The less the thing, the louder the ring. Take the wind: all that noise, just going nowhere from nothing for no reason, and there’s no thing on earth less than the wind.

Someone says he’s missing the birds. How can that be? The birds are always coming. How can he miss them, when they aren’t even missing? Animals must be more like rocks. Saying only what they are. A longer now, a shorter then, living in the place he’s just come from.

He knew what that place is, but now it’s just saying.

They make him say a lot, humans. They take him out spinning, and it’s murder. Hell in a hall, bumper to bumper, worse than freeways, people flying all ways too fast to miss. And still they want talk, even while moving. Like talk isn’t crazy enough. But once they work him, they let him lie. Sleeping old dogs, up to new tricks. This he loves: when they give him his body back, and no need. Loves just lying still in the world buzz, all channels at once pouring through his skin.

He has to work some, with time come back. Up and attic, there and bath again. Have him living in a boxcar now. Old train with others orphaned like him. He’s lived in worse. Not easy to say just where he is. So he says nothing. Some things say him. What’s on his mind hops off. Thoughts come out, not thoughts he knew he had. No one always knows what he means. This can’t bother him. He doesn’t really, either.

A girl comes by he’d like to do. Maybe already did. That would make it good, though. Could go. Do each other, always. Encore. One car, for the two of them, doing it. Those birds mate for good, after all. The birds he’s missing. Who are humans, to do better? Pair forever. Teach their kids to reach the top of the earth and find their way back, the way-back way he found.

Those birds are smart. His father always told him. A dad who knew those birds so well he used to kill them.

Something killing him to remember, just now, but it goes.

Small talk, but all talk. Say it, say if, say at. Say it’s an easy it. Echo. Lala.

Finished, over and done, just then. Now he’s not. That’s why they make him talk. Prove he’s with the living things, not stones.

Not sure why he’s here, or how. He’s taken an acid dent. Something else dented worse, but wordy people won’t say. All those things to talk about, millions of moving things, and that’s never one anyone mentions. Most times when they’re talking, nothing happens. Nothing but what’s already right here. What happened to him is a thing even living things won’t say.

She kept reading to Mark: all she could do. Mark’s face stayed placid through the stories’ struggles. He just rode those sentences, their boxcar rhythm. But the most predictable read-aloud went right up Karin’s spine. The scene where the twelve-year-old boy is felled by a blow to the skull as he sneaks into a derelict house and is bound and gagged in the root cellar made her shut the book, unable to read on. Closed head trauma had ruined her. Even children’s fiction now went real.

The Muskrateers came by for repeat offenses. “Didn’t we promise?” Tommy Rupp asked. “Didn’t we say we’d help bring the man back?” He and Cain produced foam footballs outfitted with tail fins, handheld electronic games, even radio-controlled cars. Mark responded, first with flattened bafflement, then with machine-like glee. He made more hand-eye headway in half an hour with his friends than he did in days with the physical therapist.

Duane was all consultation. “What’re you doing with your rotator cuff there, Mark? Watch the rotator cuff. It’s what you call a flash-point.”

Rupp kept them on task. “Will you hold up with the medicine man bit and let Gus here throw the ball? Am I right, Gus?”

“Right, Gus,” Mark said, watching the commotion as if in instant replay.

Bonnie showed up every few days. Mark reveled in her visits. She always brought joy stuff: rubber animals wrapped in metallic paper, washable tattoos, fortunes sealed in ornamental envelopes. You will soon embark on an unforeseen adventure…She was better than a book. She could go on forever with funny stories of living in a covered wagon along the interstate that never quite reached its homestead tract. She showed up once in her faux pioneer outfit. Mark looked at her in wonder, half birthday boy, half child molester. Bonnie brought him a disc player and ear buds, something Karin had failed to think of. She produced a box of discs — chick music, sighs about the blindness of guys — nothing Mark would ever have been caught dead listening to. But under the headphones, Mark closed his eyes, smiled, and tapped his thigh with his fingers.

Bonnie liked to listen along to the stories that Karin read aloud. “He’s following every word,” she insisted.

“You think?” Karin asked, grasping at any hope.

“You can see it in his eyes.”

Her optimism was an opiate. Karin already depended on her, worse than cigarettes.

“Can I try something?” Bonnie asked, touching her shoulder. Her hands probed Karin incessantly, turning every word into a confidence. She cozied up to Mark, one palm coaxing, the other restraining. “Ready, Marker? Show us what you’re made of. Here we go. One, two, buckle my…?”

He gazed at her, slack-jawed, smitten.

“Come on, buddy. Focus!” She sang again: “One, two, buckle my…”

“Shoe.” The syllable came out, a pitched moan. Karin gasped at the first proof that somewhere deep down, Mark still made meaning. Her brother, who only a few weeks before, had repaired complex slaughterhouse machinery, could now complete the first line of a nursery rhyme. She pressed her jaw, mouthing, Yes!

Bonnie carried on, giggling like water in a brook. “Three, four. Knock at the…”

“…door!”

“Five, six, pick up…”

“…shit.”

Karin broke into mortified laughter. Bonnie reassured the crestfallen Mark. “Hey! Two out of three. You’re doing fantastic.”

They tried him on “Hickory Dickory Dock.” Mark, his face strained with ecstatic concentration, scored perfectly on dock, clock, down, and dock. Bonnie began, “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring,” but getting far enough in to remember the words that came next, broke off in mumbled apologies.

Karin took over. She tried him on a verse Bonnie had never heard. But for the two Schluter siblings, the four lines condensed all the icy chill of childhood. “I see the moon,” Karin prompted, sounding just like their mother, back when Joan Schluter’s rhymes weren’t yet devil exorcisms. “And the moon…”

Mark’s eyes widened, a rush of comprehension. His lips closed around a hopeful grimace. “Sees me!”

“God bless the moon,” Karin assured him, that old singsong. “And…?”

But her brother held still, pressed against his chair, staring at some creature unknown to science that suddenly appeared in silhouette on the horizon at dusk.

Karin sat beside Mark one afternoon, refreshing him on the rules for checkers, when a shadow moved across the board. She twisted to see a familiar figure in a navy pea coat hovering over her shoulder. Daniel’s hand reached for her but didn’t touch. He called to Mark, a gentle hello, as if the two of them hadn’t shunned each other for the last decade. As if Mark weren’t sitting robot-like in a hospital chair.

Mark’s head snapped back. He scrambled up onto the chair, faster than he’d moved since the accident, pointing and wailing, “God, oh God! Help me. See see see?”

Daniel stepped forward to calm Mark. Mark climbed up over the chair back, screaming, “Miss it, miss it.” Karin backed Daniel out of the room as a floor nurse rushed in. “I’ll call you,” she said. Their first face-to-face in three years. She squeezed his hand, criminal. Then she rushed back to calm her brother.

Mark was still seeing things. Karin worked to comfort him. But she couldn’t figure out what he’d seen, in the long shadow falling out of nowhere. He lay in bed, still shaking. “See?” She hushed and lied to him, saying she saw.

She went to Daniel, after the hospital calamity. He felt just as she remembered him: steady, mammalian, familiar. He looked unchanged since high school: the long, sandy hair, the wisp of goatee, the narrow, vertical face: a gentle seed-eater. His continuity comforted her, now that all else had changed. They talked for fifteen minutes, four feet from each other across his kitchen table, nervous and sick with reassurance. She rushed away before breaking anything, but not before they agreed to meet again.

Their difference in age had vanished. Daniel had always been a child: Markie’s grade, Markie’s friend. Now he was older than she was, and Mark was an infant between them. She started calling Daniel at all hours for help with the endless overwhelming decisions: claims forms, disability, the papers for Mark’s move to rehab. She trusted Daniel as she should have trusted him, years ago. He could always find the best available answer. More: he knew her brother, and could guess what Mark would want.

Daniel didn’t open to her all at once. He couldn’t have, this time around. He was no longer who he’d been, if only because of what she had done to him. That he spent time with her at all left her amazed, ashamed, and grateful. She didn’t know what their new contact meant or what, if anything, might be in it for him. For her, seeing him meant the difference between bobbing and going under. After another day in the chaos of Mark’s new kingdom, she found herself inventing reasons to contact Daniel. She could voice anything with him, from the wildest hope for Mark’s latest tiny triumph to her fear that he was sliding back. Daniel would meet her every word with inward reserve, and keep her to some middle, steady path.

They could have no real future, after the humiliations of their past. But they could make a better past than the one they’d mangled. Mark’s struggles engaged them. Their vicarious work, undoing old pettiness: measuring how far Mark had come, and how far he had to go.

Daniel brought Karin books from libraries as far away as Lincoln, accounts of brain damage, carefully selected to lift her hope. He copied articles, the latest neurological research, which he helped her decode. He called to check in, prompting her on what to ask the therapists. It felt like life again, letting him carry her for a while. Once, her gratitude so overwhelmed her that she couldn’t resist a rushed, deniable hug.

She began to see Daniel with new eyes. Some part of her had always dismissed him, a neo-hippie inclined to righteousness, a little too organically pure, hovering above the herd. Now she felt her long unfairness. He simply wanted people to be as selfless as they should be, humbled by the million supporting links that kept them alive, as generous with others as nature was with them. Why did he waste his time with her, after what she’d done to him? Because she asked him to. What could he possibly get from their new connection? Simply the chance to do things right, at last. Reduce, reuse, recycle, retrieve, redeem.

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 find 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.

His outward progress was breathtaking. Even his friends were shocked by the great leaps of evolution, from one visit to the next. He talked more than he had before the accident. He swung from bouts of rage into a sweetness he’d lost at the age of eight. She told him the doctors wanted to move him out of the hospital. Mark glowed. He thought he was going home. “Can you tell my sister I’ve got the green light? Tell her Mark Schluter is out of here. Whatever’s been holding her up, she’ll know where to find me.”

She bit her lip and refused even to nod. She’d read in one of Daniel’s neurology books never to humor delusions.

“She’ll be worried about me. Man, you have to promise me. Wherever she’s gone, she needs to know what’s happening. She was like always looking after me? That’s her big thing. Personal claim to fame. Saved my life once. My father came this close to snapping my neck like a pencil. I’ll tell you about it someday. Personal stuff. But trust me: I’d be dead without my sister.”

It tore her up, to look on and say nothing. And yet, she felt a sick fascination at the chance to learn what Mark really said about her when talking to someone else. She could survive this, for however long it took him to come back to reason. And his reason was solidifying daily.

“Maybe they’re keeping her away from me. Why won’t they let me talk to her? Am I somebody’s science project? They want to see if I’ll mistake you for her?” He saw her distress, but mistook it for indignation. “Hey, okay. You’ve helped me, too, in your own way. You’re here every day. Walking, reading, whatever. I don’t know what you want. But I’m the grateful recipe.”

“Recipient,” she said. He stared at her, baffled. “You said ‘recipe.’ You mean ‘recipient.’”

He scowled. “I was using the singular. You look a lot like her, you know? Maybe not quite as pretty. But damn close.”

A wave of vertigo rolled over her. Steadying herself, she reached into her shoulder pouch and pulled out the note. “Look at this, Mark! I’m not the only one who has been looking out for you.” Unplanned therapy. She knew he needed to recover more, before plunging back into the accident. But she thought it might shake him loose, bring him back to himself. Prove her authority, somehow.

He fisted the paper and stared at it. He squinted from different distances, then handed it back to her. “Tell me what it says.”

“Mark! You can read. You just read two pages for the therapist this morning.”

“Holy jump up and sit down. Anybody ever tell you you sound exactly like my mother?”

The woman she’d spent her life trying not to become. “Here. Have another look.”

“Hey! It’s not my problem, all right? I mean, look at that creeping thing. That’s not writing. Some kind of spiderweb. Tree bark or something. You tell me what it says.”

The writing was spectral. It snaked like their Swedish grandmother’s illegible longhand. Karin put the writer at eighty years old, an ancient immigrant afraid of making any contact that would require surrendering information to a database. She read the words off the scrap, although she’d long ago memorized them. I am No One but Tonight on North Line Road GOD led me to you so You could Live and bring back someone else.

Mark pressed the scar that flowed up his forehead. He took the note back from her. “What’s that supposed to mean? God led somebody? Well, if God’s so big on me, how come He took my perfect truck and flipped it in the first place? Whoosh. Like shooting craps with me.”

She took his arm. “You remember that?”

He shook off her hand. “So you’ve been telling me. Like twenty times a day. How could you forget?” He fingered the note. “No, man. That’s too many steps. Just to get my attention? Not even God takes that many steps.”

What their mother had said the year before, about her wasting death: You’d think the Lord would be a little more efficient.

“Whoever wrote this note found you, Mark. They came to see you in Intensive Care. They left you this. They wanted you to know.”

A noise tore out of him, the squeal of a dog whose hind legs were just run over by his master’s station wagon. “Know what? What am I supposed to do with this? Go help somebody else come back from the dead? How do I do that? I don’t even know where the dead are.”

Cold clawed up Karin’s spine. Dark things, games the police had hinted at. “What do you mean, Mark? What are you saying?”

He waved his arms around his head, warding off evil like a swarm of bees. “How am I supposed to know what I mean?”

“What…dead people don’t you…?”

“I don’t even know who is dead. I don’t know where my sister is. I don’t even know where I am. This whole so-called hospital could be a movie studio where they take people to fool them into thinking that everything’s regular.”

She mumbled apologies. The note meant nothing. She reached to take it back. But he grabbed it away from her.

“I need to find who wrote this. This person knows what happened to me.” He scrambled in his back pockets, his favorite baggy, low-riding, black jeans that Karin had brought him from home. “Shit! I don’t even have a wallet to put this in. No social certificate card. No fucking photo ID! No wonder I’m nowhere.”

“I’ll bring your wallet tomorrow.”

He stared up at her, his face flared. “How are you going to get into my home to get it?” When she said nothing, his shoulders collapsed. “Well, I suppose if they can operate on your brain without you even knowing, they’ve probably got the keys to your damn house.”

They ask Mark Schluter who he thinks he’s supposed to be. Sounds like an easy one, but their questions all have little tricks. Always more to them than you might think. God knows why, but they try to trip him up. All he can do is answer and stay cool.

They ask him where he lives. He points to all the medical crap, everybody running around in whites. Shouldn’t they be telling him? They change the question: Does he know his home address? Mark Schluter, 6737 Sherman, Kearney, Nebraska. Reporting for duty. They go: Is he sure? How sure do they want him to be? They ask if his house is in Kearney or Farview. Just another desperate attempt to confuse him. Sure, he lives in Farview now. But they never said he needed to answer in the present tense.

They ask him what he does. Trick question. Hang with his friends. Go hear bands, at the Bullet or elsewhere. Check for ground effects on eBay. Do vids. Watch TV. Run the dog. He’s got a thief character online whose stats he builds up when nothing else is happening. He does not say the obvious: that they’re treating him like an online character himself.

Is that all? All he does? Well, they don’t have to know all. Not their business, what goes on behind closed doors. But no; they’re like: What does he do to make a living? Where does he work? Well, why didn’t they ask as much in the first place?

He tells them about Utility Maintenance and Repair II. Which machines are a bitch and which are cake to maintain. Only in his third year, and already earning sixteen big ones an hour. They don’t ask him how he feels about the animals, which is just as well. He hates it when people ask. Everybody eats the damn animals; somebody has to kill them. And that’s not even him: all he does is watch over the gear. He gets to wondering why they want to know so much about the plant. He hasn’t been in for a few days, and perhaps there’s funny stuff afoot. Certain people might want his job. It’s decent money and good work, especially in a recession. Tons of guys would kill for worse.

They ask him who’s the vice president under the first bush. Insane. What next? Senators in the trees? They tell him to count backward from a hundred by threes. Is this a particularly useful skill, might one inquire? They give him tons of quizzes — circling things, crossing them out, and whatnot. Even here, they jerk him around, make the print way too small, or give him ten seconds to do half an hour of work. He tells them he likes his life and doesn’t really want to audition for anything else; if they want to fire him from the test program, feel free. They just laugh and give him more tests.

Something weird about all this grilling. Doctors saying they’re his friends. Tests proving he can’t do certain things, when obviously he can. They should be testing the woman who’s impersonating his sister.

His buds come by, but even they are strange. Duane-o seems regular enough. You can’t duplicate him. Get him started on any topic — terrorism, whatever: Are you familiar with the concept of jihad? Here’s the thing the State Department doesn’t understand about the Islamicists. They can’t help belonging to a foreign country.

Islamicists? I thought they were called Muslims. Am I wrong in calling them Muslims?

Well, “wrong.” Wrong is a relative term. Nobody’s going to call you “wrong,” per se…

A stream of unbelievably meaningless crap, like only the Cain Man can deliver. Rupp looks and sounds okay, too, but there’s something off with his timing. Tommy Rupp is never off. The man who got Mark hired at the plant, who taught him how to shoot, who turned Mark on to undreamed-of alternate experiences: One-shot Rupp, of everyone, should be able to explain what’s going on.

He asks Rupp if he knows anything about the chick who’s pretending to be Karin. The guy gives him a look like Mark’s turned werewolf. Something has infiltrated the man’s food supply. He’s so uptight all the time, like it’s always somebody’s funeral. Real Ruppie never gave a shit. He knew how to have a time. Real Ruppie could stand in the cooler all day long, toting cow quarters around and not even feel it. Nothing ever froze that guy. This guy is frozen constantly.

The whole setup is deeply disturbing, and all Mark can do is roll with it. They’re hiding something from him, something bad. His truck, destroyed. His sister, missing. Everyone claims innocence. No one will tell him about the accident or the hours just before and after it. He can only sit tight, play dumb, and see what he can learn.

Duane-o and Rupp make him play five-card. Therapy, they say. So okay: he’s not doing anything else. But they use trick cards where the clubs and spades look the same. The deck is funny, too, with way too many sixes, sevens, and eights. They play for IBP packing stickers; Mark’s stack vanishes like the buffalo. They keep telling him he’s already drawn cards, when he hasn’t. A dumbass game for pissants. He tells them as much. They’re like: Schluter, this is your favorite game of all time. He doesn’t bother correcting them.

They spend a lot of time listening to mix CDs that Duane downloads and burns. A lot has happened to music while Mark was away. The songs jack with him. Jesus! Would you listen to this? Weirdest stuff I’ve ever heard. What is this, country metal?

This upsets Rupp. Stop squirming and use your ears, Gus. Country metal! You still on morphine, or something?

Country metal exists, Cain insists. It’s a totally recognized genre. You’re not onto that? Duane’s the real Cain, no matter what.

But the looks those two shoot each other make Mark want to hide. When they’re near, he can’t hear himself think. Too much happening at once for him to see what’s wrong. But when they’re gone, he has no leads to follow. You can’t explain what you can’t see.

Problem is, the Karin look-alike seems so real. He’s sitting by himself, respecting the laws, listening to something restful, when she comes by to harass him. She won’t quit with the sister act. She hears the music. Hawaiian vocal trios?

I don’t know. They’re like Polynesian polkas, or something.

She’s all: Where’d you get this?

No say. An orderly gave it to me, for being a nice guy.

Mark? Are you serious?

What? You think I stole it from some Alzheimer’s spaceman? What do you care? Are you tracking my activities now?

She goes: You really enjoy listening to this?

Well, come on. What’s not to love?

It’s just that…No, I’m sure you do. I bet it’s good. Her eyes, all red and puffy, like someone’s salted them.

You don’t know me. I listen to this stuff all the time. I like to listen to, you know, stupid music. When nobody’s around. Under the helmet — the, the earmuffs.

Like he’s just told her he’s into cross dressing, or something. All cranked up. I’m sure, she says. Me, too.

He doesn’t quite get it. It really tortures her. He doesn’t get anything. He needs to talk less, watch more. He could write things down, but the pages might be used as evidence.

Even Bonnie, beautiful simple Bonnie, has changed on him. She’s like a ghost, something out of an old TV show, little pioneer cap and dress down to the floor. She’s got some new life or something, living on roots, in a grass-covered trench, like a giant prairie dog, out by the Interstate Arch. She has to pretend her mother dies in a snowstorm and her father dies from drought, like something out of the freaking Bible, even though her parents are both alive and living in a gated community outside Tucson. Nobody’s quite what they say they are, and he’s just supposed to laugh and play along.

But she’s still sexy as a pay channel, even in the ankle-length dress. So he doesn’t argue with her. In fact, the whole getup is kind of hot, especially the antique cap. It cheers him to sit next to her and gawk while she designs little cards and such. Get Well thingies for total strangers in the rooms next to his. Postcards of newborns in bassinets to send to lawmakers in Washington. He sits up close, helping, painting inside the lines with one hand while keeping his other on her. If nobody else is there, she’ll let him put his fingers just about anywhere.

But the cards won’t cooperate. He stabs one, and the tip of his pen dents the tabletop. What the hell is wrong with these things? he asks. This looks like shit.

She jumps. She’s scared of him. But she puts her arm around him. You’re doing great, Marker. It’s amazing how good. You were pretty beaten up there, for a while.

Was I? But I’m getting back now, right? To where I was?

Already are. Just look at you!

He studies her, but can’t tell if she’s lying. He wipes his fucked-up eyes. He pulls out his own Get Well card, for comparison: I am No One…Well, join the club. You’re not alone.

Weeks passed that Karin couldn’t account for. While the therapists were examining her brother, testing his memory and grasp of ordinary detail, she was losing days. Some part of her was out of sync. Small wonder, with Mark twice a day calling her an impostor. Not days she much cared to remember.

They moved Mark to the rehab facility. It crushed him. “So this is what ‘discharge’ means. This place is worse than where I was. It’s just a minimum-security hospital. What happens if I jump bail?”

In fact, Dedham Glen was a fair step up from Good Samaritan. All pastels and river stone, the place might have been a low-end retirement community. He never mentioned recognizing the place where they’d consigned their mother in her final illness. Mark had his own room, the halls were cheerier, the food better, and the staff more capable than at the colder, more sterile hospital.

Best of all was Barbara Gillespie, the nurse’s aide for his wing. Though new to the facility and surely pushing forty, Barbara worked with the zeal of the self-employed. From the start, she and Mark seemed to have known each other forever. Barbara could always tell, better than Karin, what Mark was asking for, even when Mark himself didn’t know. Barbara made the rehab clinic feel like a family holiday timeshare. She was so assuring that both Schluter siblings tried to please her by acting healthier than they really were. Around Barbara, Karin found herself believing in total cures. Mark fell in love with her within days, and Karin soon followed. She lived for her exchanges with the attendant, inventing little problems to consult her about. In Karin’s dreams, she and Barbara Gillespie were as close as sisters, consoling each other over Mark’s damage as if they’d both known him since infancy. In waking life, Barbara was almost as consoling, preparing Karin for the hurdles still ahead.

Karin studied Barbara at every chance, trying to imitate her self-possession and easy grace. She described her to Daniel one night in his dark monk’s cell. She tried not to sound too fawning. “She’s always completely with you when she talks to you. More present than any person I’ve ever met. Never out in front of or behind herself. Not working on the next patient, or the last one. Wherever she happens to be, that’s where she is. I’m always either undoing the last three stupid things I’ve done or fending off the next three. But Barbara, she’s just…centered. Right there. You have to see her in action. She’s the perfect nurse for Mark. Completely comfortable with him. Listens to all his theories, even when I want to press his face into a pillow. She’s more at home in her body than anyone I’ve ever seen. I’ll bet you there’s no one in the world she’d rather be.”

Daniel put a hand on her forearm, cautioning her in the dark. She lay back on his futon on the floor of a room so bare his three potted plants seemed like remainders in nature’s clearance sale. His basement apartment’s few furnishings were all retreads. His bookshelves — full of USGS publications, Conservation Service pamphlets, and field guides — were made from stacked orange crates. His work desk was an old oak door recovered from a demolition and laid out on sawhorses. Even his refrigerator was a refurbished dorm-room mini-cube, picked up at Goodwill for ten dollars. He kept his apartment a dim sixty degrees. Of course he was right: the only defensible way of life. But she already had plans to make the place livable.

“The woman has her own internal thermometer,” she said. “Her own atomic clock. The last person on earth who’s not prorating her time. She’s just so even. So tranquil. A bubble of steady attentiveness.”

“Sounds like she’d make a good birder.”

“Mark never rattles her, even when he’s completely out there. None of the residents unnerve her, and some are as spooky as you get. She has no expectations about who people are supposed to be. She just sees you, sees whoever is in front of her.”

“What does she do for him?”

“Officially? She’s the general attendant. Keeps the schedule, does light therapy, takes care of his routine needs, checks in five times a day, monitors his craziness, cleans up after him. She’s the most under-employed person I know, including me. I can’t understand why she’s not running the place.”

“If she were running the place, she wouldn’t be caring for your brother.”

“True.” Fake sagacious monosyllable: copying Daniel. Her old chameleon complex. Be the one you’re with.

“Career advancement can be toxic,” Daniel said. “A person should do what they love, whatever the status.”

“Well, that’s Barbara, all right. She picks his dirty underwear off the floor like she’s doing ballet.” Daniel’s hand traced cautious circles on her arm. It dawned on her: he was jealous of this woman, of Karin’s description. Patience was his secret vanity, something he wanted to do better than anyone else. “She sits and listens to Mark while he launches these bizarre notions, like everything he’s saying is totally plausible. Like she completely respects him. Then she just explores things with him, without condescension, until he sees where he’s gone wrong.”

“Hmm. Was she ever in the Scouts?”

“But she seems somehow sad to me. Totally stoic, but sad. No wedding ring, or any tan lines from one. Who knows? It’s just so odd. She’s exactly who I’ve tried to be my whole life. Daniel? Do you believe there are purposes out there?”

He pretended confusion. The man lived like an anchorite and meditated four times a day. He’d sacrificed his life to protecting a river tens of thousands of years old. He worshipped nature. He’d put Karin herself on a pedestal since childhood. By any measure, he was faith incarnate. And still, the word purpose made him nervous.

She waffled. “It doesn’t have to be…Call it anything. Ever since the accident, I’ve thought: Maybe we’re all on invisible paths? Paths we’re supposed to follow, without knowing. Ones that really lead somewhere?”

He tensed on the bed. The rapids of his breath cascaded across her breasts. “I don’t know, K.S. Do you mean your brother’s accident was meant to lead you to this woman?”

“Not me. Him. You know what his life was like, before. Look at his friends, for God’s sake. Barbara Gillespie is the first nonloser he’s been taken with since…” She rolled to face him, draping her arm over his flank. “Since you, all right?”

He winced at the forlorn compliment. The bond of childhood, broken with puberty. The Danny Riegel whom Mark once loved was not this man lying across a foot-wide gap from her. “You think this might be his…path? This woman has arrived to save him from himself?”

She drew back her arm. “Don’t make it sound so crude.” At least he didn’t mock her, as the other man would have. But she heard herself, how desperate she was. She’d end up like her mother, using the Living Scriptures volume like a Magic 8 Ball.

“Does this woman need to be fate?” Daniel asked. “Couldn’t she just be something lucky in his life, for a change?”

“But he would never have met her without the accident.”

Daniel stood and walked to the window, stark naked, oblivious. Like a wild child. The chill of his apartment didn’t touch him. He tried on the idea. She loved that in him, his eternal willingness to try her on. “No one is on a separate path. Everything connects. His life, yours, hers, his friends’…mine. Other…”

Watching him stare out the window on all those tangled paths, she thought of the policemen’s three sets of linked tracks. Three that they saw and measured. How many drivers sped by that night, leaving no trace? She sat up in bed, covering her bareness with the blanket. “You’re the most mystical person I know. You’re always proclaiming some living essence we can’t even…” Robert Karsh had mocked him mercilessly. The Ent Man. The Druid. Green Giant Junior. Karin had joined in — any cruelty, to be affirmed.

Daniel spoke to something out the window. “One million species heading toward extinction. We can’t be too choosy about our private paths.”

The words reproached her. She felt the slap. “My brother was almost killed. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. Whether he’ll be able to work again, whether his brain, his personality…Don’t begrudge me for needing a little faith to survive this.”

In silhouette against the window, he grabbed the crown of his head. “Begrudge? My God, no!” He came back to the bed. “Never.” He stroked her hair, contrite. “Of course there are forces bigger than us.”

She felt it in his stroking hand: forces so big that our paths mean nothing to them.

“I love you,” he said. Ten years after the fact, yet somehow premature. “You seem to me everything that’s best about humans. You’ve never felt more decent to me than you do right now.” Frail, he meant. Needy. Mistaken.

She let his judgment ride. She burrowed into his meager chest, trying to smother her own words even as they came out. “Tell me that something right could still come out of this.”

“It can,” he said. Any cruelty, to affirm. “If this woman can help Mark, then she’s our path.”

Daniel meditated: his version of a plan. She had to leave the apartment whenever he drew his legs up into the lotus. She wasn’t afraid of bothering him; he was oblivious, once tuned to his breathing. It just upset her to see him so tranquil and removed. She felt abandoned, as if all her problems with Mark were just impediments to Daniel’s transcendence. He never tranced out for more than twenty minutes at a time, at least by her watch. But to Karin, that always threatened to become forever.

“What do you want from it?” she asked, trying to sound neutral.

“Nothing! I want it to help me want nothing.”

She fisted her skirt hem. “What does it do for you?”

“It makes me more…an object to myself. Disidentified.” He rubbed his cheek and glanced upward, eleven o’clock. “Makes my insides more transparent. Reduces resistance. Frees up my beliefs, so that every new idea, every new change isn’t so much…like the death of me.”

“You want it to make you more fluid?”

His head bobbed, like she’d just met him halfway. She found the idea almost hideous. Mark had become fluid. She could not be any more fluid than Mark’s accident now forced her to be. What she wanted — what she needed from Daniel — was dry land.

The last crane disappeared, and Kearney returned to itself. The crane peepers — twice as many as had visited just five years before — vanished with the migrants. The whole town relaxed at not having to play itself for another ten months. Famous each spring, for something that at best resented you: it screwed up a place’s self-image.

Other birds came in the cranes’ wake. Wave after wave, birds by the millions passed through the tiny waist of a continent-sized hourglass. Birds Karin Schluter had seen since childhood but had never noticed: Daniel knew them all by name. He carried around alphabetized life lists of all 446 Nebraska species—Anas, Anthus, and Anser, Buteo, Branta, and Bucephala, Calidris, Catharus, Carduelis—covered in penciled checks and smudged, unreadable field notes.

Karin went birding with him, a way of staying sane. On afternoons when Mark raged against her and she needed to escape, she and her birder went northwest into the sandhills, northeast into the loess, or east and west along the twisting braids of river. She whipsawed between elation and guilt over abandoning her brother, even for an afternoon. She felt as she had at ten, returning home from a summer’s evening of hide-and-seek to realize, only when her mother shrieked at her, that she’d left her little brother curled up in a concrete culvert, waiting to be found.

Only outside, in the warming air, did Karin sense how close she’d come to collapse. Another week of caring for Mark and she’d have begun believing his theories about her. She and Daniel picnicked near the sandpit wetlands just southwest of town. She’d just bitten down on a slice of cucumber when her whole body began trembling so hard she couldn’t swallow. She bent down and covered her quaking face. “Oh my God. What would I have done, back here, with what’s happened to him, without you?”

He lifted her shoulders. “I’ve done nothing. I wish there was something I could do.” He offered her his handkerchief, the last man in North America to blow his nose into cloth. She used it, making horrible noises and not caring.

“I can’t get away from here. I’ve tried, so many times. Chicago. L.A. Even Boulder. Every time I make a start, try to pass myself off as normal, this place drags me back. My whole life, I’ve dreamed of self-sufficiency, far away. Look how far I’ve gotten! South Sioux.”

“Everyone comes home, sometime.”

She coughed a phlegmy laugh. “Never really left! Stuck in a stupid loop.” She swept her hand in the air. “Worse than the damn birds.”

He flinched, but forgave her.

After lunch, they made fresh sightings: redstarts, pipits, a solitary golden-crowned kinglet, even a vagrant male Lewis’s woodpecker passing through. Grassland gave few hiding places. Daniel taught her how to see without being seen. “The trick is to make yourself small. Shrink your sphere of sound inside your sphere of sight. Widen your periphery; watch only motion.” He made her sit still for fifteen minutes, then forty, then an hour, just watching, until her backbone threatened to split open and eject some other creature from her cracked shell. But stillness was salutary, like most pain. Her concentration was shot. She needed slowing, focusing. She needed to sit silent with someone from choice, not from injury. Her brother still refused to recognize her; his persistence had grown truly spooky. She could not imagine the bizarre, unstable symptom lasting as long as it had. Motionless for an hour, on a rise of returning bluestem, inside a bubble of wild silence, she felt her helplessness. As she shrunk and the sea of grass expanded, she saw the scale of life — millions of tangled tests, more answers than there were questions, and a nature so swarmingly wasteful that no single experiment mattered. The prairie would try out every story. One hundred thousand pairs of breeding swifts pumped eggs into everything from rotting telephone poles to smoking chimneys. A plague of starlings wheeled overhead, descended, Daniel said, from a handful of birds released into Central Park a century ago by a drug maker who wanted America to have all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare. Nature could sell at a loss; it made up in volume. Guess relentlessly, and it didn’t matter if almost every guess was wrong.

Daniel was just as profligate. The man who denied himself even hot showers lavished her with attentions all afternoon. He interpreted markings and tracks for her. He found her a wasp’s nest, an owl pellet, and a tiny bleached warbler skull beyond the skill of any jeweler. “Do you know that Whitman line?” he asked her. “‘After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains.’”

He meant to give comfort. But it sounded to her relentless, indiscriminate, indifferent: much like what her brother had become.

When they got home from the day’s exploration, Daniel handed her a shirt box that had sat in the back of his twenty-year-old Duster for the last month. She’d guessed it was for her, waiting for him to find the nerve to give it. She opened the flimsy carton, already preparing some show of gratitude for whatever natural-history exhibit he’d found her. The box flapped open, and she was the specimen inside. Every trinket she’d ever given him. They sat in the lot behind his apartment as she sifted through the embalmed past. Notes in her elvish scrawl, written in colors of pen she never could have owned, punch lines of running jokes that now meant nothing to her, even half-finished attempts at poems. Pairs of ticket stubs to films she couldn’t have seen with him. Sketches from back when she could draw. A postcard from her mishap in Boulder: “I knew I should have sold the stock options last month.” A plastic action figure of Mary Jane, Spiderman’s object of desire. Karsh had given it to her, claiming she was the spitting image. Karin had passed it on to Daniel — stupid tease — instead of melting the thing down to dioxins as she should have.

By all evidence, she’d never given him anything of value. But he’d kept it all. He even had her mother’s obituary from The Hub, clipped long after he should have consigned the whole box to an incinerator. His zeal was as spooky as Mark’s distance. She looked at this time capsule of scraps, horrified. She wasn’t worth preservation.

Daniel watched her, stiller than when birding. “I just thought, if you were feeling a little rootless, K.S., that you might like…” He held out his hand, ten years snug in his palm. “I hope this doesn’t seem obsessive.”

She clutched the box, unnerved by his pointless conservation, but unable to scold him. His entire worldly possessions fit into two suitcases, and he’d kept this. She could start to give him real things, gifts she picked out just for him, things it wouldn’t be pathetic to preserve. He could use a light spring coat, for starters.

“Can I just…Could I hang on to this for a little? I need to…” She pressed the box, then her forehead. “It’s all still yours. I’m just…”

He seemed pleased, but she was too shaken to be sure. “Keep them,” he said. “Keep them as long as you like. Show Mark, if you feel like it.”

Never, she thought. Never. Not the sister she wanted him to recognize.

Despite Mark’s refusal to acknowledge her, he rebuked her when she skipped an afternoon. “Where were you? Had to meet your handlers or something? My sister would never have cut out like that, without saying. My sister is very loyal. You should have learned that when you trained to replace her.”

The words filled her with hope, even as they demoralized her.

“Tell me something. What the hell am I still doing in rehab?”

“You were really hurting, Mark. They just want to make sure you’re one hundred percent before they send you back home.”

“I am a hundred percent. One hundred and ten. Fifteen. Don’t you think I’m the best judge of that? Why would they believe their tests before they believe me?”

“They’re just being careful.”

“My sister wouldn’t have left me in here to rot.”

She was beginning to wonder. Even though any small change in routine still rattled him, Mark grew steadily more like himself. He spoke clearer, confusing fewer words. He scored higher on the cognition tests. He could answer more questions about his past, from before the accident. As he grew more reasonable, she couldn’t help trying to prove herself. She dropped casual details, things only a Schluter could know. She would wear him down with common sense, inescapable logic. One gray April afternoon, taking him for a spin around Dedham Glen’s artificial duck pond in the drizzle, she mentioned their father’s stint as a rainmaker, flying his converted crop duster.

Mark shook his head. “Now, where in the world did you learn that? Bonnie tell you? Rupp? They think it’s weird, too, how much like Karin you are.” His face grew overcast. She saw him think: She should be here by now. They won’t tell her where I am. But he was too suspicious to speak the thought out loud.

What did it mean to be related, if he refused relations? You couldn’t call yourself someone’s wife unless they agreed; years with Karsh had taught her that. You weren’t someone’s friend just by decree, or she’d be surrounded by support. Sister was no different, except technically. If he never again recognized her as his flesh and blood, what difference would all her objections make?

Their father had a brother once. Luther Schluter. They learned about him overnight, when Karin was just thirteen and Mark almost nine. Cappy Schluter suddenly insisted upon taking them to a mountainside in Idaho, even though it meant missing a week of school. We’re going to visit your uncle. As if they should have suspected such a person’s existence all along.

Cappy Schluter dragged his children across Wyoming in a burgundy and mint Rambler station wagon while Joan rode shotgun. Neither child could read in a moving car without vomiting, and Cappy forbade the radio because of all the subliminal messages that manipulated the unconscious listener. So they had only their father’s stories of the young Schluter brothers to see them across 890 miles of the earth’s most ruthless scenery. He got them from Ogallala to Broadwater on tales of his family’s Sandhills days, first as Kincaid Act homesteaders, and then, when the government pulled the land out from underneath them, as ranchers. From Broadwater to the Wyoming border, he entertained them with accounts of his older brother’s hunting skills: four dozen rabbits nailed to the barn’s southern wall, seeing the family through the winter of ’38.

To get his children through Wyoming, Cappy Schluter resorted to grim detail about every opponent Luther Schluter had bested on his way to third place in the Nebraska state wrestling championship. “Your uncle is a powerful man,” he repeated, three times over a two-mile stretch. “A powerful man who could take anything. Saw three men die before he was old enough to vote. The first was a grade school friend who drowned in grain while the two boys were playing in a silo. The second was an old ranch hand who popped an aneurysm while arm-wrestling and expired in the crook of Luther’s arm. The third was his own father, when the two of them went out to rescue fourteen head of cattle stranded in a snowstorm.”

“Uncle Luther’s father?” Mark asked, from the backseat. Karin shushed him, but Cappy just sat ramrod straight, his Korean War — vet posture, hearing nothing.

“Three men before voting age, and one woman, not long after.”

The kids sat in the backseat, traumatized. For most of the trip, Mark withdrew into a cocoon against his door handle and muttered to his secret friend, Mr. Thurman. The hundreds of miles of confidential murmuring between boy and phantasm infuriated Karin; she couldn’t visualize her own best flesh-and-blood girlfriend, ten hours away, let alone an imaginary companion. By Casper, she was riding Mark. Their mother took to whacking them from the front seat, first with the rolled up Rand McNally and then with her hardback copy of Come Judgement. Cappy just gripped the wheel and drove, that grotesque Adam’s apple jutting from his throat making him look like a stalking heron.

At last they arrived at their uncle’s, a man who, until three weeks ago, hadn’t even figured in a family photograph. Whatever power the man had possessed was long gone. This uncle could not have withstood the breeze from a flapping barn door. Luther Schluter, a furnace repairman holed up on a solitary cliff near Idaho Falls, began almost immediately to spout even more bountiful theories than their father. Washington and Moscow had concocted the Cold War together to keep their populations in line. The world was awash in oil that multinationals kept a spigot on for their own profits. The AMA knew that television caused brain cancer, but kept quiet about it for the kickbacks. How was the drive? Car give any trouble?

Of their years of estrangement, Cappy and Luther said nothing. They sat at opposite ends of a ratty sofa in front of the river stone hearth in Luther’s hand-built cabin, one of them calling out a name from their Nebraska childhood and the other identifying. Luther told his niece and nephew fantastic tales about young Cappy: how he’d gotten the gash through the bridge of his nose by dropping a granite boulder that he was lifting over his head on a dare. How he was married to a girl before Joan. How he did time over a misunderstanding involving a two-ton Chevy grain truck and thirty-eight bales of hay. With every fable, their father grew stranger. Strangest of all was how Cappy Schluter sat still and abided the remembrances, in awe of this sallow, shaky old man. The children had never seen their father so cowed by anyone. Their mother, too, put up with comments from the recovered relative that she wouldn’t have suffered from Satan.

They left after two days. Luther gave each child five dollars in silver and a copy of The Outdoor Survival Field Manual to share. Karin made him promise to come out to Nebraska, pretending not to understand that the man would be dead within four months. As they left, Karin’s new uncle grasped Cappy with two talons. “She did what she did. I never meant her memory no disrespect.”

Cappy barely nodded. “I made things worse,” he said. The two men shook stiff hands, and took leave. Karin remembered nothing of the trip home.

Uncles from nowhere and siblings disappearing. On Dedham Glen’s fake duck pond, she felt Mark’s distress. She was causing it, by not being who she was. His amygdala, she remembered. His amygdala can’t talk with his cortex. “Do you remember Uncle Luther?” she asked. Tugging at him, maybe unfairly.

Mark hunched against the wind in the baseball jacket and blue knit stocking cap he’d taken to wearing to hide the scars under his returning hair. He walked as if performing acrobatics. “Don’t know about you, but I got no uncles.”

“Come on, Mark. You remember that trip. A third of the United States, to visit a guy they hadn’t even bothered to tell us about.” She grabbed his arm too hard. “You remember. Sitting in the backseat for hundreds of miles, not even allowed to pee, you and your friend Mr. Thurman, chatting away like the two of you…”

He pulled his arm free and froze. He narrowed his eyes and pressed his cap. “Man, do not mess with the insides of my head.”

She apologized. Mark, shaken, asked to go back in. She steered him toward the building. Mark zipped and unzipped his coat, thoughts racing. He seemed for a moment about to break free, to know her. At the door of the lobby, he murmured, “I wonder whatever happened to that guy.”

“He died. Right after we got back home. That was the point of the trip.”

Mark stumbled, his face twisted. “What the fuck?”

“Serious. They’d had some fight about their mother’s death. Cappy had cut the man off, for saying…But the minute he heard Luther was dying…”

Mark snorted and waved her off. “Not that guy. He was never anything to me. I mean Mr. Thurman.”

She stood gaping, appalled.

Mark just laughed, low and clicking. “I mean, imaginary friends: do they go bug another whacko kid when you’re done with them? And hey!” His face screwed up, mystified. “Whoever told you about that trip? They got it all wrong.”

Jack is that person’s father, but that person isn’t Jack’s son. Who is that person? The question’s obviously meaningless, to anybody who thinks twice. The questioner should be in rehab, not him. How in living hell should he know who that person is? Could be anyone. But they keep asking him such crap, even when he politely points out that it might all be just a wee bit screwy. Today the questioner is a woman fresh from the university in Lincoln, about Mark’s age. Not a dog, but with an awful growl, spewing out craziness like:

A girl goes into a store to apply for a job. She fills in the application form. The manager looks at her data and says: “Yesterday we got an application from someone with your same last name, same parents, and exact same birthday, down to the year.” “Yes,” the girl explains. “That was my sister.” “So you must be twins,” the manager concludes. “No,” the girl says. “We’re not.”

And Mark is supposed to figure out what the hell they are. So…what? One of them is adopted or something?

But no, the university chick tells him, with a mouth like two little bait worms doing it. Useful little mouth, probably, in a pinch. But a pain in the ass at the moment, with its trick questions. She tells him: two girls with the same last name, the same parents, the same date of birth. Yes, they’re sisters. But no, not twins.

Do they look alike, or anything?

Super Questioner says it’s not important.

It is important, Mark tells her. You’re telling me that if two girls who have to be twins say they aren’t twins and you can’t tell whether they’re lying or not by looking at them and seeing if they look identical, that’s not important?

Let’s go on to the next question, Super Questioner says.

I’ve a better idea, Mark says. We go into that supply closet and get to know each other.

I don’t think so, the worms say. But they twitch a bit.

Why not? Might be nice. I’m a good guy.

I know that. But we’re supposed to be learning about you.

Uh, what better way to learn about me?

Let’s try the next question.

So you’re saying, if I get the next question right…?

Well, not exactly.

Let me ask you a sister question: Where’s mine? Can you talk to the authorities, please?

But she won’t. She won’t even tell him the twins answer. She says if he comes up with anything, let her know. It bugs the crap out of him. The question is so supremely fucked up it keeps him awake at night. He thinks about it, in his little room in the Cripple Home. He just lies there, in the bed they’ve made for him, thinking about the twins who claim they aren’t twins. Thinking about Karin, where she might be, the truth about what has happened to her, the facts that no one will mention. The docs say he’s got a syndrome. The docs must be in on the con.

Maybe it’s some kind of sex riddle. You know, like: Want to meet my sister? He tries it on Duane and Ruppie. Duane-o says: It may have something to do with Parthian Genesis. Are you familiar with Parthian Genesis? Also known as the phenomenon of virgin birth.

Rupp busts Cain’s chops. You been eating mad cow? It has no answer, Rupp declares. And he’s one smart bastard. If Rupp can’t figure it out, it’s unfigurable.

Maybe you’ve confused the question, Duane-o suggests. There’s a phenomena called garbling. It’s like the game of telephone…

Chill, Potato Head, Ruppie blasts him. Too much mercury ingestion. You’re in a tuna-fish fog. The game of telephone! Christ.

I’ve got Collapse on my cell, Mark says. Used to be great. But somebody screwed with my settings.

Look, Rupp says. It’s simple logic. What’s the definition of twin? Two people, born of the same parents, at the same time.

Just what I said, Mark says. How come they don’t examine you, too?

Rupp gets upset. What’re you complaining about? You’re living la vida loca, man. Maid service, hot meals. Cable. Skilled women giving you workouts.

Could be worse, Duane agrees. You could be one of those Afghani terrorists down in Gitmo. None of them going anywhere, anytime soon. How about that American they captured? Was that guy high, drunk, crazy, brainwashed, or what?

Mark shakes his head. The whole world’s on crack. The therapists, working overtime to get Mark to think there’s something wrong with him. The fake Karin, trying to distract him. Rupp and Duane, as clueless as he is. The only one he trusts is his friend Barbara. But she works for the enemy, just a lowly guard here at Sing Sing Lite.

Rupp is deep in thought. Maybe they’re two test-tube babies, he says. Those sisters. Two different embryos, implanted…

Remember the Schellenberger twins? Duane-o asks, all stoked. Anybody ever have sex with them?

Rupp scowls. Clearly someone had sex with them, Einstein. Didn’t one of them go away to foal, senior year?

I knew it had something to do with sex, Mark says. You can’t have twins without sex, right?

I meant anybody of the three of us, Duane-o whines.

Rupp shakes his head. I wish that Barbara Gillespie had a twin. Can you imagine? What you call your twofer!

Duane-o howls like a coyote. That chick’s old, man.

So? Means you don’t have to teach her anything. The woman’s killer, I tell you. You gotta know she’s got some deep waves going, under those still waters.

She does have a great walk. If they gave an Oscar for walking, she’d have a shelf full of little bald homonculi. You two are familiar with the concept of the homunculus?

Then Mark is raging. He’s shouting, and can’t stop himself. Get the hell out of here. I don’t want you here.

He frightens them. His friends — if they are his friends — are scared of him. They’re all: What? What did we do? What’s got into you?

Leave me alone. I’ve got things to figure out.

He’s on his feet, pushing them out of the room while they try to reason with him. But he’s sick of reason. All three of them are shouting at one another when Barbara appears from nowhere. What’s wrong? she asks. And he starts spraying. He’s sick of it all. Sick of being kept in this holding tank. Sick of the deceptions, everybody pretending things are exactly normal. Sick of trick questions with no answer, and people pretending there is one.

What questions? Barbara asks. And just the sound of her, coming from that moon-round face, calms him a little.

Two sisters, Mark says. Born at the same time, to the same parents. But they say they’re not twins.

Barbara sits him down, and she’s soothing his shoulders. Maybe they’re two-thirds of triplets, she says.

Rupp smacks himself on the forehead. Brilliant. The woman is brilliant.

Duane waves his hands in the air for a timeout. You know, I was thinking about triplets. Right at the beginning. But I didn’t say it.

Of course you were, latent boy. We were all thinking about triplets. It’s obvious. Face it. You’re a idiot. I’m a idiot. The whole human race is a idiot.

Mark Schluter tenses under the woman’s arm, fighting rage. So why am I the only one locked up?

Two days later, Barbara Gillespie comes to take him for a walk.

Don’t I need to check with my parole board? he asks.

Very funny, she says. This place isn’t that bad and you know it. Come on. Let’s go outside.

Outside is not exactly to be trusted. Much wilder than before his bang-up. They say it’s April, but one confused April, doing a pretty good January imitation. The wind cuts through his jacket and his skull freezes, even underneath his cap. His head is always cold now. His hair takes forever to grow back; something to do with the feed here.

Barbara practically pushes him out of the foyer. Watch your step there, sweetie. But once they’re out, all she wants to do is hang around the bench by the parking lot.

Fine, he says. The Great Out of Doors. I give it five stars. Can we go back inside?

But Barbara keeps him out, teasing. She takes his arm as if they’re an old couple. Which would be okay with him. In a pinch.

Five more minutes, friend. You never know what might come along and surprise you, if you wait long enough.

Tell me about it. Like this terrible accident I apparently had.

Barbara points her finger, all excited. Well, would you look who’s here!

A car rolls up to the curb, as if by chance. Unmistakably feeb Corolla, with the big dimple on the passenger door. His sister’s car. His sister, at last. Like rising from the dead. He jumps up and starts shouting.

Then he sees through the windshield, and crashes again. He can’t take it anymore. It isn’t Karin, but the not-so-secret agent who has replaced her. There’s a dog in the passenger seat, pressed to the glass, clawing at the top of the window to make it go down. Another border collie, like Mark’s. Smartest breed there is. The dog sees Mark through the window, and it’s frantic to get at him. It bursts through the door the instant Barbara opens it. Before Mark can move, the pretty creature is all over him, herding. Up on its hind legs, muzzle skyward, letting out these pathetic yips and howls. That’s the thing about dogs. There isn’t a human being in the world worthy of any dog’s welcome.

The actress Karin comes out of the driver’s door. She’s crying and laughing all at once. Look at that, she says. You’d think she thought she’d never see you again!

The dog is leaping dead vertical into the air. Mark puts out his arms to fend off the attack. Barbara braces him. Would you look who’s here! Barbara says. Look who has been dying to see you. She leans down and nuzzles at the dog. Yes, yes, yes you are — back together! The dog yips at Barbara, that border collie — crazed affection, then assaults Mark again.

Quit with the licking. Get out of my face, will you? Can somebody please leash this thing?

Pretend sister hangs on the driver’s door, her face one of those birthday streamers gone soggy. You’d think he punched the woman in the gut or something. She starts to rag him again. Mark! Look at her! What other animal on earth could love you like that?

The dog starts this confused little squealing. Barbara moves toward the fake Karin, calling her sweetie, saying: It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. You did a good thing. We can try again later.

What later? Mark groans. Try what? What the hell is this about? This dog is mad. Rabies or something. Somebody put this beast down, before it bites me.

Mark! Look at her! It’s Blackie.

The agent’s dog starts yapping in bafflement. It’s got that much right. Blackie? You gotta be shitting me. Down!

Maybe he makes a motion, like he’s gonna strike the dog, because Barbara steps in between Mark and the howling thing. She gathers up the dog and waves at the imitation Karin like it’s time to get back in the car.

Mark goes a little wild. You think I’m nuts! You think I’m blind. It’s going to take a lot more than this to fool me.

Barbara bundles the howling animal back into the car and Karin starts the ridiculous four-cylinder engine. The miserable cur spins in circles on the passenger seat, whining and staring at Kopy Karin. Mark curses everything that moves. Don’t bug me anymore. Don’t ever let that thing back in my sight.

Later, when he’s alone again, he feels a little bad about it all. It’s still eating at him the next day, after he sleeps on it. When Barbara comes to check on him, he tells her. I shouldn’t have yelled at that dog. It wasn’t the dog’s fault. Certain human beings were just using it.

Karin dragged Daniel out to North Line Road. She’d shunned the scene for two months, as if it might harm her. But she needed to understand what had happened that night. When she at last summoned the courage to see the site, she brought protection.

Daniel pulled off the road where Mark must have spun out. The intervening weeks had erased most of the evidence the police had mentioned. The two of them picked through the shallow shoulder ditch on the south side of the road, looking for all the world as if they were tracking an animal. Bring your sphere of sound inside your sphere of sight. They crawled over the new spring sedge and grasses, the pokeweed, thistle, and vetch. Nature’s job was to grow over, turn the past into now.

Daniel found a patch of ground dusted with glass, invisible to anyone but a naturalist. Karin’s eyes adjusted. She saw where the truck must have lain for hours, upside down. They climbed to the road, crossed over to the north side, and drifted back east, toward where Mark had lost control. The road was empty, the middle of the afternoon in the thaw of the year. The surface was layered in smears. She couldn’t tell the age of a given track, or what had made it. She walked two hundred yards in each direction, with Daniel in her wake. The forensics investigators must have combed this stretch, re-creating that night from a few ambiguous measurements.

Daniel saw it first — a faint pair of westbound burn marks, all but erased by the weather, that swerved into the eastbound lane. Karin’s eyes picked it out; the violent skid feinted to the right before veering, as close to a left turn as a light truck at high speed could make. She worked her way along the lip of the skid, head down, searching for something. Against the long, low, bathwater-gray horizon, with her fall of carrot hair hanging in the windless air, she might have been some Bohemian immigrant farm girl gleaning the fields for grain. She spun around like a struck animal, flinching as the accident unfolded in front of her. When Daniel reached her, she was still shuddering. She pointed down at a second set of tire skids at her feet.

The second skid broke one hundred feet in front of the first. Another vehicle coming from the west had careened into the oncoming lane, where it fishtailed before swinging back into its own. From the start of the second car’s jag, Karin looked east and downward into the ditch where her brother had landed, the hole down which her own solidity disappeared.

She read the snaking lines: the car coming from town, perhaps blinded by Mark’s headlights, must have lost control and swerved into Mark’s lane, just in front of him. Startled, Mark dipped right, then swung back hard to the left, the only slim chance of survival. The swing was too sharp, and his truck left the road.

She stood with her toe on the tire mark, shaking. A car approached; she and Daniel drifted to the southern shoulder. A townie woman of about forty in a Ford Explorer with a ten-year-old girl strapped in the backseat pulled over to ask if everything was okay. Karin tried to smile and waved her on.

The police had mentioned a third set of tracks. She took Daniel and crossed to the north side of the road. Side by side, they tracked back eastward, like foraging juncos. Daniel’s tracking eye again discovered the invisible signs, a patch of crushed, sandy ground, two faint hints of wheel scrape that had not yet vanished in the spring thaw. Karin pinned Daniel’s arm. “We should have brought a camera. By summer, every one of these tracks will be gone.”

“The police must have photographs on file.”

“I don’t trust their pictures.” She sounded like her brother. He tried gentle reassurance, which she shook off. She scanned the tracks. “These people must have come up behind Mark. The whole thing happened in front of them. They had to roll off the road here. They must have sat awhile, level with him, then pulled back onto the road and headed on to Kearney. Left him lying in the ditch. Didn’t even step out of their car.”

“Maybe they saw how bad it was. Better to get to a phone fast.”

She scowled. “From the Mobil station on Second, halfway through town?” She scanned the road, from the modest rise toward the east to the shallow declivity in the direction of Kearney. “What are the odds? It’s five o’clock on a beautiful spring weekday, and look at the traffic this road gets. A car every four minutes? What are the odds, after midnight, at the end of February…?” She studied Daniel. But Daniel wasn’t calculating. Asked for numbers, Daniel returned only consolation. “I’ll tell you the odds,” she said. “Somebody swerving by accident in front of you on a deserted country road? Zero. But there’s something that would make those odds a lot higher.”

He stared at her, as if another Schluter had just gone delusional.

“Party games,” she told him. “The police were right.”

The wind picked up, the early evening turning. Daniel hunched, swinging his head through a half-circle. He had gone to school with all three boys; he knew their proclivities. It wasn’t hard to see: a punishing February night, machines with too much horsepower, young men in their twenties in a country sick with thrills, sports, war, and their many combinations. “What kind of party games?” He looked down at the oily pavement as if he were meditating. In profile, his face framed by shoulder-length sandy hair, he looked even more like an elfin archer escaped from a marathon dice-dungeon crawl. How had he grown up in rural Nebraska without her brother’s friends beating the life out of him?

She grasped his skinny upper arm and drew him back down the road toward their car. “Daniel.” She shook her head. “You wouldn’t know how to play if they strapped you in a NASCAR racer and put a cinder block on the accelerator.”

Mark still limped and contusions still lined his face, but otherwise he seemed almost healed. Two months after the accident, strangers who talked to him might have found him a little slow and inclined toward strange theories, but nothing outside the local norm. Karin alone knew how unready he was to fend for himself, let alone tend to complex packing plant equipment. His days were laced with flashes of paranoia, outbursts of pleasure and rage, and increasingly elaborate explanations.

She worked tirelessly for his protection, even as he tortured her. “My sister would have got me out of this place by now.” My sister always got me out of all my jams. I’m in the biggest jam of my life. You’ve failed to get me out. Therefore, you can’t be my sister. The syllogism made a kind of demented sense.

She’d heard the complaint countless times before. But reaching some limit, she melted down. “Stop it, Mark. I’ve had enough. You’re doing this to me for no reason. I know you’re suffering, but this whole denial thing is not helping any. I’m your damn sister, and I’ll prove it to you in a court of law if I have to. So just stop jerking me around and get over it. Now.”

The instant the words were out of her mouth, she knew she’d set her cause back by weeks. And the look he flashed her then was like some wild thing, cornered. He looked almost ready to hurt her. She’d read the articles: the rate of violent behavior in Capgras patients was well above average. A young Capgras sufferer from the British Midlands, to prove that his father was a robot, had cut the man open to expose the wires. There were worse things than being called an impostor.

“Never mind,” she said. “Forget I said that.”

His face went from wild to bewildered. “Exactly,” he said, a little tentative. “Now you’re talking my language.”

He was not ready to face the world. She fought to delay Mark’s discharge, and to keep both the HMO and the IBP insurance people at bay. She worked on Dr. Hayes, almost flirting with him, to keep him signing off on the necessary paperwork.

But even with excellent medical coverage, Mark could not stay in rehabilitation much longer. Karin, unemployed now, was tapping her savings. She began to dip into her mother’s life-insurance legacy. Do some good with this. “I’m not sure this is the kind of thing she intended the money for,” she told Daniel. “Not exactly an emergency. Not exactly world-changing.”

“Of course this is good,” Daniel assured her. “And please don’t worry about money.” Almost too polite to say the word. Lilies of the field, etc. The ease of Daniel’s assurance almost angered her. But she started letting Daniel pay all the daily expenses — groceries and gas — and each time he did, she felt stranger. Mark, she insisted, would be more or less back to himself any week now. But time and institutional patience were running out. And her own sense of competence was fading.

Daniel did what he could to stave off her money panic. One afternoon, apropos of nothing, he said, “You could come work for the Refuge.”

“Doing what?” she asked, half hoping this might be an answer.

He looked away, embarrassed. “Office help? We need a congenial, competent set of hands. Maybe do some fund raising.”

She tried to grin, grateful. Of course: fund raising. The core of every job description in the nation, from schoolchildren on up to the president.

“We need people who can make others feel good about themselves. Experience in customer relations would be perfect!”

“Yes,” she said, thoughtfully. Meaning he was too good and she relied on him for too much already. Added to her mother’s money, a little part-time income could stabilize her. But she could not shake the belief that Mark would soon recover fully and she could go reclaim her own job — the she that she had made, out of nothing.

No war chest she might build could stave off the bills she’d face, if the insurance people signed off. When claims anxieties and physician consultations defeated her, Karin sought out Barbara Gillespie. She hit up the aide for pep talks so often that she worried that Barbara would start fleeing her on sight. But the woman had bottomless patience. She listened to Karin’s fears and groaned in sympathy at tales of the medical bureaucracy. “Off the record? It’s a business, as market-driven as a used-car dealership.”

“Only not as up-front. At least you can trust a used-car salesman.”

“I’m with you on that,” Barbara said. “Just don’t tell my boss, or I’ll be selling some fine pre-owned vehicles myself.”

“Never, Barbara. They need you.”

The woman waved off the compliment. “Everyone’s replaceable.” The smallest turn of her wrist had something classic to it — the urban proficiency that Karin had aspired to for fifteen years. “I’m only doing my job.”

“But it’s not just a job for you. I watch you. He tests you.”

“Nonsense. You’re the one being tested here.”

These graceful rebuffs only fed Karin’s admiration. She probed Barbara for anything from her professional experience that gave hope of further improvement. Barbara wouldn’t talk about other patients. She focused on Mark, as if he were the sum of her experience. The extreme tact frustrated Karin. She needed a female confidante, someone to commiserate with. Someone who would remind her that she was who she was. Someone who could reassure her that persistence wasn’t stupid.

But Barbara’s professional care turned all topics back to Mark. “I wish I knew more about things he really cares about. Beef packing. Truck customization. Not my strongest subjects, I’m afraid. But the things he’ll talk about — it’s a surprise a day. Yesterday, he wanted my considered opinion on the war.”

Karin felt a twinge of jealousy. “Which war?”

Barbara grimaced. “The latest one, in fact. He’s fascinated with Afghanistan. How many recent trauma sufferers pay any attention to the outside world?”

“Mark? Afghanistan?”

“He’s a remarkably alert young man.”

The phrase, its curt insistence, accused Karin. “I wish you could have seen him…before.”

Barbara gave her patent head-tilt, both ready and reserved. “Why do you say that?”

“Mark was a real number. He could be incredibly sensitive. He had his wild moments — mostly getting back at our father and mother. And he ran with the wrong crowd. But he was really a sweet guy. Instinctively kind.”

“But he’s a sweet guy now. The sweetest! When he’s not confused.”

“This isn’t him. Mark wasn’t cruel or stupid. Mark wasn’t so angry all the time.”

“He’s just scared. You must be, too. I’d be a mess, if I were you.”

Karin wanted to melt into the woman, hand over everything, let Barbara take care of her, the way she had tried to take care of Mark. “You would’ve liked him. He cared for everybody.”

“I do like him,” Barbara said. “As he is.” And her words filled Karin with shame.

By May, Karin was beside herself. “They’re not doing anything for him,” she told Daniel.

“You say they work with him all day long.”

“Busy work. Mindless stuff. Daniel? Do you think I should move him?”

He spread his fingers. Where? “You said that Barbara woman was wonderful with him.”

“Barbara, sure. If Barbara were his primary physician, we’d be cured. Okay, so the therapists get him to tie his shoes. That doesn’t help much, does it?”

“It helps a little.”

“You sound just like Dr. Hayes. How did that man ever get certified? He won’t do anything. ‘Wait and watch.’ We need to do something real. Surgery. Drugs.”

“Drugs? You mean mask the symptoms?”

“You think I’m just a symptom? His fake sister?”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Daniel said. And for a minute, he turned foreign.

She held out her palms, apologizing and defending all at once. “Look. Please don’t…please just stay with me on this. I just feel so helpless. I’ve done nothing at all for him.” And to his look of utter incredulity, she said, “His real sister would have.”

Trying to make himself useful, Daniel brought her two more paperbacks. The books were written by a Gerald Weber, an apparently well-known cognitive neurologist from New York. Daniel had come across the name in the news, regarding a much-anticipated new book about to appear. He apologized for not finding him sooner. Karin studied the author’s photo, a gentle, gray-haired man in his fifties who looked like a playwright. The contemplative eyes gazed just alongside the lens. They seemed to find her out, already half-suspecting her story.

She devoured the books in three straight nights. For chapter after bewildering chapter, she could not stop reading. Dr. Weber’s books compiled a travelogue of every state that consciousness could enter, and from his first words, she felt the shock of discovering a new continent where none had been. His accounts revealed the brain’s mind-boggling plasticity and neurology’s endless ignorance. He wrote in a modest voice and ordinary style that placed more faith in individuals’ stories than in prevailing medical wisdom. “Now more than ever,” he declared, in Wider Than the Sky, “especially in the age of digital diagnosis, our combined well-being depends less on telling than on listening.” No one had yet listened to her. This man suggested that she might be worth hearing.

Dr. Weber wrote:

Mental space is larger than anyone can think. A single brain’s 100 billion cells make thousands of connections each. The strength and nature of these connections changes every time use triggers them. Any given brain can put itself into more unique states than there are elementary particles in the universe…If you were to ask a random group of neuroscientists how much we know about how the brain forms the self, the best would have to answer, “Almost nothing.”

In a succession of personal case histories, Weber showed the endless surprise folded inside the most complex structure in the universe. The books filled Karin with an awe she’d forgotten she could still feel. She read of split brains fighting over their oblivious owners; of a man who could speak sentences but not repeat them; of a woman who could smell purple and hear orange. Many of the stories made her thankful that Mark had avoided all the fates worse than Capgras. But even when Dr. Weber wrote about people stripped of words, stuck in time, or frozen in premammalian states, he seemed to treat them all like his nearest kin.

For the first time since Mark sat up and spoke, she felt guarded optimism. She was not alone; half of humanity was partly brain-damaged. She read every word of both books, her synapses changing as she devoured the pages. The writer sounded like some masterful, future intelligence. She couldn’t be sure of the path that Mark’s accident laid out for her. But somehow, she knew it crossed this man’s.

By his own accounts, Dr. Weber had never visited any land quite like the one her brother now inhabited. Karin sat down to write him, consciously mimicking his style. It felt like the longest of long shots, to somehow win the attention of this larger-than-life researcher. But she might make the very wildness of Mark’s Capgras irresistible to such a man.

She wrote with little hope that Gerald Weber would respond. But already, she imagined what would happen if he did. He would see in Mark a story like the ones his books described. “The people inside these changed lives differ from us only in degree. Each of us has inhabited these baffling islands, if only briefly.” The odds against his even reading her note were great. But his books described far stranger things as if they were commonplace.

“These books are incredible,” she told her lover. “The author is amazing. How did you find him?”

She was in Daniel’s debt again. On top of everything else, he had given her this thread of possibility. And she, once again, had given him nothing. But Daniel, as ever, seemed to need nothing but the chance to give. Of all the alien, damaged brain states this writing doctor described, none was as strange as care.