The Echo Maker

Part Two: But Tonight on North Line Road

Faster than they gathered, the only witnesses disappear. They crowd together on the river for a few weeks, fattening; then they’re gone. On an invisible signal, the carpet unravels into skeins. Birds by the thousands thread away, taking their memory of the Platte with them. Half a million cranes disperse across the continent. They press north, a state or more a day. The heartiest will cover thousands more miles, on top of the thousand that brought them to this river.

Cranes that crowded into dense bird cities now scatter. They fly in families, lifelong mates with their one or two offspring, any that have survived the previous year. They head for the tundra, peat bogs and muskegs, a remembered origin. They follow landmarks — water, mountains, woods — places recovered from previous years, by a crane map, inside a crane’s head. Hours before the onset of bad weather, they will stop for the day, predicting storms on no evidence. By May, they find the nesting spots they left the previous year.

Spring spreads across the Arctic to their archaic cries. A pair that roosted at the roadside on the night of the accident, near to the overturned truck, home in on a remote stretch of coastal Alaska on the Kotzebue Sound. A seasonal switch flips in their brains as they near their nest. They turn fiercely territorial. They attack even their baffled yearling, the one they have nursed all this way back, driving it off with beak jabs and beating wings.

The blue-gray pair turn brown, from the iron rusting in these bogs. They coat themselves with mud and leaves, seasonal camouflage. Their nest is a moated heap of plants and feathers, three feet wide. They call to each other, with coiled, booming trombone wind-pipes. They dance, bowing deeply, kicking the brisk salt air, bowing again, leaping, spinning, cowling their wings, their throats arched backward in some impulse between stress and joy: ritual spring at the northern edge of being.

Suppose birds store, fixed as a photograph, the outlines of what they have seen. This pair is in their fifteenth year. They will have five more. By June, two new eggs, spotted gray ovals, will follow all the pairs already laid on this spot, a spot all those earlier years had stored in memory.

The pair take turns, as they always have, caring for the clutch. The northern days lengthen until, by the time the eggs hatch, light is continuous. Two colts emerge, already walking and ravenous. The parents trade off hunting for the voracious young, feeding them constantly — seeds and insects, small rodents, the trapped spare energy of the Arctic.

In July, the younger colt starves to death, killed by his older brother’s appetite. It has happened before, in most years: a life begun with fratricide. Alone, the surviving bird shoots up. In two months, he is fledged. As the long northern days collapse, his short test flights expand. Frost forms on the family’s nest these nights; ice crusting the bogs. By autumn, the young bird is ready to replace last year’s ousted child on the long trip back to winter grounds.

But first the birds molt, reverting to native gray. Something happens to their late-summer brains, and this isolated family of three recovers a larger motion. They shed the solitary need. They feed with others, roosting together at night. They hear nearby families passing overhead, threading the great funnel of the Tanana Valley. One day they lift up and join a self-forming V. They lose themselves in the moving strand. Strands converge in kettles, kettles merge in sheets. Soon, fifty thousand birds a day mass down the startled valley, their prehistoric blasts brilliant and deafening, a sky-wide braided river of cranes, tributaries that run for days.

There must be symbols in the birds’ heads, something that says again. They trace one single, continuous, repeating loop of plains, mountains, tundra, mountains, plains, desert, plains. On no clear signal, these flocks ascend a slow spiral, great twisting columns of lifting thermals that, with one glance at its parents, the new bird learns to ride.

Once, long ago, as the cranes massed for their autumn departure, they passed above an Aleut girl standing alone in a meadow. The birds flew down on her, beat their wings together, and lifted the girl upward in a great turning cloud, hiding her, trumpeting to drown out her calls. The girl rose on that twisting shaft of air and disappeared into the southward flock. So cranes still circle and call when they leave each autumn, reliving that capture of the humans’ daughter.

Long afterward, Weber could still pinpoint the moment when Capgras entered his life. Inked into his planner: Friday, May 31, 2002, 1:00 p.m., Cavanaugh, Union Square Cafe. The first copies of The Country of Surprise had just come off the press, and Weber’s editor wanted him in the city to celebrate. His third book: publication was hardly a novelty anymore. The two-hour train ride in from Stony Brook, by this point in Gerald Weber’s career, was more duty than thrill. But Bob Cavanaugh was eager to meet. Pumped, the young editor had said. Publishers Weekly had called the book “a wild tour of the human brain by a sage writing at the height of his powers.” Wild tour would play harshly in neurological circles, circles that hadn’t forgiven the success of Weber’s previous books. And something about the height of his powers depressed him. Nowhere but down, from there.

Weber dragged himself into Manhattan, walking from Penn Station down to Union Square briskly enough to get some aerobic benefit. The shadows were all wrong: still disorienting, more than eight months on. A patch of sky where there should be none. Weber hadn’t been in since early spring, when witnessing the unnerving light show — two massive banks of spotlights pointing into the air, like something out of his book’s chapter on phantom limbs. The images flared up in him again, the ones that had slowly extinguished over three-quarters of a year. That one, unthinkable morning was real; everything since had been a narcoleptic lie. He walked south through the unbearably normal streets, thinking he might get by just fine without ever seeing this city again.

Bob Cavanaugh greeted him at the restaurant with a bear hug, which Weber abided. His editor was trying not to snicker. “I told you not to dress up.”

Weber spread his arms. “This isn’t dressed up.”

“You can’t help yourself, can you? We really should do a coffee-table book full of sepia photos of you. The natty neuroscientist. The Beau Brummell of brain research.”

“I’m not that bad. Am I really that bad?”

“Not ‘bad,’ sir. Just delightfully…archaic.”

Lunch was Cavanaugh at his most charming. He ran down the latest buzz books and described how well Surprise was faring with the European agents. “Your biggest, by far, Gerald. I’m sure of that.”

“No need to set any records, Bob.”

They talked more high-speed industry gossip. Over an entirely gratuitous cappuccino, Cavanaugh at last said, “Okay, enough pleasantries. Let’s see your hole card, man.”

Thirty-three years had passed since Weber’s last hand of blackjack. Junior year of college, Columbus, teaching Sylvie the game. She’d wanted to play for sex favors. Nice game; no losers. But insufficient strategic depth to hold their interest for long.

“I’m not holding anything too surprising, Bob. I want to write about memory.”

Cavanaugh perked up. “Alzheimer’s? That kind of thing? Aging population. Declining abilities. Very hot topic.”

“No, not about forgetting. I want to write about remembering.”

“Interesting. Fantastic, in fact. Fifty-two Weeks to a Better—no, wait. Who’s got that kind of time? How about Ten Days to—”

“A lay overview of current research. What goes on in the hippocampus.”

“Ah! I see. Are the little dollar signs over my irises fading?”

“You’re a good sport, Robert.”

“I’m a shitty sport. But a terrific editor.” As he picked up the check, Cavanaugh asked, “Can you at least include a chapter on pharmaceutical enhancement?”

Back in Penn Station, as Weber stood under the departure board, waiting for the train out to Stony Brook, a man in a battered blue ski vest and grease-smeared corduroys waved at him in happy recognition. He might have been a former interview subject; Weber no longer recognized them all. More likely, this was one of many readers who didn’t realize that publicity photos and television were one-way media. They saw Weber’s receding snow line, the blue glint behind his wire-rims, the soft, avuncular half-dome and flowing gray beard — a cross between Charles Darwin and Santa Claus — and greeted him as if he were their harmless grandfather.

The ruined man drew up, smoothing his greasy vest, bobbing and chattering. Weber was too intrigued by the facial tics to move away. The words came in a babbling stream. “Hi, hey there. Great to run into you again. You remember our little venture out west — just the three of us? That illuminating expedition? Listen, can you do me something? No, no cash today, thanks. I’m flush. Just tell Angela, everything that happened out there is copasetic. It’s all okay, whoever she wants to be. Everyone’s okay, just who they are. You know that. Am I right? Tell me: Am I right?”

“You are most certainly right,” Weber said. Some form of Korsakoff’s. Confabulation: inventing stories to patch over the missing bits. Malnutrition from extended alcohol abuse; the fabric of reality rewoven by a vitamin-B deficiency. Weber spent the two-hour train ride back to Stony Brook scribbling notes about humans probably being the only creatures who can have memories of things that never happened.

Only: he had no idea where the notes were headed. He was suffering from something, perhaps the sadness of professional consummation. For a long time, longer than he had deserved, he’d known exactly what he wanted to write next. Now, everything seemed to be already written.

Back home, Sylvie hadn’t yet returned from Wayfinders. He sat down to the e-mail in that mix of buzz and dread that came from opening the inbox after too long. The last person north of the Yucatán to go online, he was now suffocating to death under instant communication. He flinched at the message count. He’d spend the rest of the evening just digging out. And yet, some ten-year-old in him still thrilled at diving into the day’s mail sack, as if it might yet hold a prize from a contest he’d forgotten having entered.

Several e-mails promised to resize any of Weber’s body parts to the scale of his choosing. Others offered offshore drugs to address every imaginable deficit. Mood changers and confidence boosters. Valium, Xanax, Zyban, Cialis. Lowest cost anywhere in the world. Also, his share of vast fortunes offered by exiled government officials of turbulent nations, apparently old friends. Interleaved among these were two conference invitations and another reading-tour request. A correspondent Weber had stopped replying to months before sent another objection to the treatment of religious feelings and the temporal lobe in The Three-Pound Infinity. And of course, the usual help-me petitions, which he referred to the Stony Brook Health Sciences Center.

That’s where he almost consigned the note from Nebraska, after the opening line. Dear Dr. Gerald Weber, my brother has recently survived a horrible automobile accident. Weber was finished with horrible accidents. He’d explored enough broken histories for a lifetime. With what time he had left, he wanted to return to an account of the brain in full flower.

But the next line kept him from hitting the Forward button. Since starting to talk again, my brother has refused to recognize me. He knows he has a sister. He knows all about her. He says she looks just like me. But I’m not her.

Accident-induced Capgras. Unbelievably rare, and immensely resonant. A species he’d never seen. But he was finished with that kind of ethnography.

He read the whole brief note twice through. He printed it out, reading it again on the page. He set it aside and worked on his new outline. Making little headway, he scanned the day’s headlines. Agitated, he rose and went to the kitchen, where he spooned several hundred illicit milk-fat calories straight from the pint container of organic ice cream. He returned to his study and fought time in a preoccupied cloud until Sylvie came home.

True Capgras resulting from closed-head trauma: the odds against it were unimaginable. A case so definitive challenged any psychological account of the condition and undermined basic assumptions about cognition and recognition. To selectively reject one’s next of kin, in the face of all evidence…He read the letter again, swept up by his old addiction. Another chance to see, up close, through the rarest imaginable lens, just how treacherous the logic of consciousness was.

Sylvie got back late. She fell through the front door, her mock sigh of relief unable to disguise the kick she’d gotten from her long day’s work. “Yo, Man — I’m home!” she chanted from the foyer. “No place like it. Where’d I put that husband?”

He was in the kitchen, pacing, the printed letter clutched behind his back. They kissed, subtler than in their blackjack days, a third of a century ago. More historical.

“The pair bond,” Sylvie decreed. She buried her nose in his sternum. “Name a more ingenious invention.”

“Clock radio?” Weber suggested.

She pushed him away and slapped his chest. “Bad husband.”

“How’s the new clubhouse holding up?” he asked.

“Still a dream. We should have moved offices years ago.”

They compared days. She was still racing from hers. Wayfinders was thriving, finding ways for a variety of clients even Sylvie hadn’t anticipated when she started the social services referral outfit, three years before. After years of drifting through unsatisfactory employment, she had at last come home to a vocation she’d never suspected. Careful to violate no professional confidences, she sketched out the gist of her most interesting cases while they prepared a squash risotto together. By the time they sat down to eat, Weber could recall exactly none of her stories.

They ate side by side, on barstools at the raised kitchen counter where they’d taken their meals together in nearly unbroken pleasure for the last ten years, since their lone daughter had left for college. He told her about lunch in the city with Cavanaugh. He described the Korsakoff’s sufferer in Penn Station. He waited until they were washing dishes to mention the e-mail. Stupid, really. They’d been together so long that any attempt to fake a casual tone only blurted the thing out, louder than intended.

She suspected at once. “I thought you were moving on to the memory book. That you wanted to graduate from…” She seemed dismayed, or perhaps he was projecting.

He held up his dish-towel hand, before she could repeat all his recent arguments. “Syl, you’re right. I really shouldn’t spend any more…”

She squinted at him and tested a grin. “Not fair, Man. This isn’t about my being right.”

“No. No, that’s true. You’re absolutely…I mean…” She laughed and shook her head. He draped the towel around his neck, a prizefighter between rounds. “It’s about what I’ve been wrestling with for the last several months. What I should be doing next.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake. It’s not like you’re backsliding on a crack cocaine habit or anything.”

She would know; she’d worked in a Brooklyn rehab center for almost a decade before bailing out to save herself and start Wayfinders. She shot him a look of skeptical trust, and he felt as he had, through all their years of changing climates: the undeserving beneficiary of her social-worker understanding.

“So what’s the crisis? It’s not like anyone’s holding you to public promises. If this is something that interests you, where’s the guilt?” She leaned toward him and picked a stray fleck of risotto out of his beard. “It’s just you and me, Man.” She grinned. “The general public don’t have to know that you don’t know your own mind!”

He groaned and pulled the folded-up e-mail out of the pocket of his still-creased trousers. He flicked the offending document with the nails of his right hand. He offered her the printout, as if the sheet exonerated him. “Accidental Capgras. Can you imagine?”

She just smiled. “So when will you see him? When’s he coming out?”

“Well, that’s the thing. He’s a bit banged up. And a bit hard up, too, I gather.”

“They want you to go there? I’m not saying…I’m just a little surprised.”

“Well, I do have to spend down the travel account. And for studying something like this, seeing him in situ is actually best. But maybe you’re right.”

She growled, exasperated. “Husband! We’ve been over this!”

“Seriously. I don’t know. Half a continent, for a volunteer consultation? I’d be without a lab. And traveling has become such a hassle. You practically have to strip before boarding the plane.”

“Hey! Doesn’t Tour Director take care of those things?”

He winced and nodded. Tour Director: all that was left of their combined religious upbringings. “Of course. I just think my field-examining days might be over. I need to reconstitute myself, Syl. I just want to stay home, write a harmless little science-journalism book. Keep the lab running, maybe sail a little. The whole domestic tranquility thing.”

“What you call your fifty-five-year-old’s exit strategy?”

“Spend some quality time with the wife…”

“The wife’s been neglecting you recently, I’m afraid. So stay home, already!” Her eyes taunted his. “Aha! I thought as much.”

He wagged his head, bemused by himself. She reached up and polished his bald spot, her ancient good-luck ritual. “You know?” he said. “I really thought I’d acquired a certain degree of self-mastery, at this point in my life.”

“‘Much of the work of the brain consists of hiding its work from us,’” she quoted.

“Nice. Has a ring to it. Where’s it from?”

“It’ll come back to you.”

“People.” He rubbed his temples.

“Quite the species,” Sylvia agreed. “Can’t live with them, can’t vivisect ’em. So what is it about this particular people that has you hooked again?” Her job, to talk him into what he’d already decided.

“A man who recognizes his sister, but does not credit the recognition. Apparently otherwise reasonable and cognitively unimpaired.”

She whistled low, even after a lifetime of hearing his tales. “Sounds like something for Sigmund.”

“It does have that ring. But at the same time, the clear result of injury. That’s what makes it so fantastic. It’s the kind of neither-both case that could help arbitrate between two very different paradigms of mind.”

“This is something you would like to see before you die?”

“Ah! Can we put that a little less terminally? The patient’s sister is aware of my work. She’s not sure that his doctors have fully grasped the case.”

“They do have neurologists in Nebraska, don’t they?”

“If they’ve come across Capgras at all outside their medical texts, it’ll have been as a feature of schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s.” He took the dish towel from around his neck and dried their two wineglasses. “The sister is asking for my help.” Sylvie studied him: Those are the ones you swore to stay away from. “Anyway, misidentification syndromes might reveal a lot about memory.”

“How do you mean?” He’d always loved that phrase of hers.

“In Capgras, the person believes their loved ones have been swapped with lifelike robots, doubles, or aliens. They properly identify everyone else. The loved one’s face elicits memory, but no feeling. Lack of emotional ratification overrides the rational assembly of memory. Or put it this way: reason invents elaborately unreasonable explanations to explain a deficit in emotion. Logic depends upon feeling.”

She chuckled. “This just in: male scientists confirm the bleeding obvious. So, sweetie. Take a trip. See the world. Nothing’s stopping you.”

“You wouldn’t mind if I went out? Just for a couple of days?”

“You know how much I’m scrambling myself right now. It would give me a chance to clear my own backlog. In fact, I think I’d better skip our video date for tonight. There’s a child HIV assessment I need to work up for tomorrow.”

“You wouldn’t think less of me if I…backslide?”

She looked up from the empty sink, startled. “Oh, my poor little Man. Backslide? This is your calling. It’s what you do.”

They kissed again. Amazing that the gesture still communicated so much, after three decades. He held back a lock of her mocha hair and grazed her forehead. Her hair was thinner than it had been in college, when they’d met. How searchingly beautiful she’d been. But lovelier to him now, at peace with herself at last. Lovelier, because graying.

She looked up at him, curious. Open.

“Thanks,” he said. “Now, if I can just survive the damn airport security…”

“You leave that to Tour Director. That’s what he does best.”

He called them all by fictional names. When the details of a life threatened anyone’s privacy, he substituted others. Sometimes he created a single case history from a composite of several people he’d studied. That much was standard professional practice, for everyone’s protection.

He described a woman once, well-known in the literature. In The Three-Pound Infinity, he called her “Sarah M.” Bilateral extrastriate damage to the middle temporal area left her suffering from akinetopsia, a rare, near-complete motion blindness. Sarah’s world had fallen under a perpetual strobe light. She couldn’t see things move. Life appeared to her as a series of still photographs, connected only by ghostly motion trails.

She washed and dressed and ate in time lapse. A turn of her head launched a series of clunking carousel slides. She couldn’t pour coffee; the liquid hung from the pot spout in icicles, and from one stopped moment to the next the table would fill with frozen coffee lakes. Her pet cat terrified her, blinking out and rematerializing elsewhere. The television stabbed at her eyes. A bird in flight made bullet holes in the windowpane of sky.

Of course, Sarah M. couldn’t drive, couldn’t walk in crowds, couldn’t even cross the street. She stood on the curb of her quiet town, paralyzed, the film stuck. A truck at a distance might mow her down, the second she placed her foot in the gutter. Still images piled up one after the other — incoherent, bisecting cubist tracers. Cars and people and objects reappeared at random.

Even her own moving body was no more than a series of sequential stiff poses, a game of Statuemaker. And yet, strangest of all: Sarah M. alone of all the world saw a kind of truth about sight, hidden from normal eyes. If vision depends upon the discrete flash of neurons, then there is no continuous motion, however fast the switches, except in some trick of mental smoothing.

Her brain was like anyone’s, except in losing this last trick. Her name was not Sarah. It might have been anything. She was there, in Weber’s strobing mind, when he stepped into the jetway at LaGuardia, and gone when he found himself, that same afternoon, dead center in the evacuated prairie, with no transition but a jump cut.

He stayed at a motel just off the interstate. The MotoRest — he chose it for its sign: WELCOME CRANE PEEPERS. The utter estrangement of it: I’ve a feeling we’re not in New York anymore. He and Sylvie had left the Midwest in 1970 and never looked back. Now the rolling openness of his birthright seemed as alien to him as Sojourner’s pictures beamed back from Mars. Outside the Lincoln airport rental, he’d panicked for a moment, finding himself with neither passport nor local currency.

Once inside the MotoRest lobby, he might have been anywhere. Pittsburgh, Santa Fe, Addis Ababa: the comforting, neutral pastels of global commuting. He’d stood on the same tawny carpet in front of the same teal check-in counter countless times before. A dozen brilliant, shiny apples sat in a basket on the reception desk, all the same shape and size. Real or decoration, he couldn’t tell until he sank a fingernail into one.

While the check-in clerk processed his credit card, Weber thumbed the stacks of tourist brochures. All of them were flush with red-crested birds. Masses of birds: like nothing he’d ever seen. “Where can I go see these?” he asked the clerk.

She looked embarrassed, as if his card had been rejected. “They’ve been gone for two months. They’re all up north now, sir. But you want to see them, just sit tight. They’ll be back.” She handed him his Visa, along with a key card. He went up to a room that pretended it had never been inhabited by anyone, one that promised to disappear, traceless, the instant Weber checked out.

Every surface in the room spouted cardboard messages. The staff welcomed him personally. They offered him a full range of goods and services. One piece of cardstock in the bathroom said that if he’d like to save the earth, he should leave his towel over the shower bar, and if not, he should throw it on the floor. The messages had been put out fresh that morning and would be replaced at his departure. Thousands like them, from Seattle to St. Petersburg. He might have been in any hotel room anywhere, except for the crane pictures above the bed.

He’d spoken with Karin Schluter before leaving New York. She’d been remarkably poised and informed. But when she phoned from downstairs, half an hour after he checked in, she was a different person. She sounded timid, nervous about coming up to the room. Clearly it was time for him to update the publicity shot. Perfect thing to tease Sylvie about, when he called her that night.

He came down to the lobby and met the victim’s only near relation. She was in her early thirties, dressed in tan cotton slacks and rose cotton blouse, what Sylvie called universal passport clothes. Weber’s dark suit — his standard travel fare — startled her and left her apologizing with her eyes before she could say hello. Dead-straight copper hair — her sole striking feature — hung down beneath the bottom of her shoulder blades. That spectacular fall upstaged her face, which, with some generosity, might be called fresh. Her decidedly corn-fed body was heading prematurely toward solemn. Healthy midwestern woman who might have run hurdles in college. As he looked at her, she primped unconsciously. But when she stood and walked toward him, her hand extended, she flashed him a brave, side-mouthed smile, altogether worth aiding.

They shook hands, Karin Schluter thanking him too profusely, as if he’d already cured her brother. Just the sight of him seemed to lift her. When he deflected her gratitude, she said, “I brought some documents.” She sat on a couch next to the lobby’s fake fireplace and spread a dossier on the coffee table: three months of handwritten notes combined with copies of everything the hospital and rehab center had given her. Hands weaving, she launched into her brother’s story.

Weber sat next to her. After a bit, he touched her wrist. “We should probably check in with Dr. Hayes, before anything else. Did he get my letter?”

“I spoke with him this morning. He knows you’re here. He says feel free to go see Mark, this afternoon. I have his notes somewhere.”

The paperwork spread in front of Weber, a guidebook to a new planet. He forced himself to ignore the file and listen to Karin Schluter’s version. Through three successive books, he’d championed the idea: facts are only a small part of any case history. What counted was the telling.

Karin said, “Mark accepts that there was an accident. But he doesn’t remember any of it. His mind’s a blank. Nothing, for twelve hours before he rolled the truck.”

Weber raked his salt-and-pepper beard. “Yes. That can happen.” Twenty years, and he’d almost mastered it: how to tell people that others had been there before them, without denying their private disaster. “It sounds like what’s called retrograde amnesia. Ribot’s law: older memories are more resilient than newer ones. The new perishes before the old.”

Her lips mirrored his as he spoke, struggling to stay alongside. She spread a palm on the stack of forms. “Amnesia? But his memory’s fine. He knows who everyone is. He remembers everything about…his sister. He just refuses to…” She pulled her lips against her teeth and bowed her head. The fall of red hair spilled across the papers. He could not imagine where such a refusal must leave her.

“You say he’s talking again without struggling. Does he sound different?”

She studied the air. “Slower. Mark was always a fast talker.”

“Does he search for words? Have you noticed any difference in his vocabulary?”

Her lopsided smile returned. “Aphasia, you mean?”

She botched the pronunciation. Weber just nodded.

“Vocabulary was never his big thing.”

He made a stab. “You’re close to your brother?” Capgras prerequisite. “You always have been?”

Her neck jerked back, defensively. “We’re the only family either of us has left. I’ve tried to look out for him, over the years. I’m a little older than him, but…I always tried to be around, until I absolutely had to go, for my own sanity. Mark’s not quite cut out for the world. He’s always depended on me, a bit. He and I have gone through some pretty strange family times together.” Flustered, she turned back to the file. She extracted two sheets. Her head turned, scanning the lines, lips moving again. “Here. This is what keeps nagging at me. When they first brought him into the emergency room after the accident, he was awake. He wasn’t even…Here: Glasgow Coma Scale. He wasn’t even in the danger area. They let me see him that night, just for a minute. He recognized me then. He was trying to talk to me. I know it. But you see, there’s this spike later in the morning. His intracranial pressure shoots way up.”

She might have been studying to become a surgical nurse. He thumbed his beard from underneath. Over the years, the gesture had managed to calm almost everyone. “Yes, that can happen. The skull is a fixed volume. If delayed swelling causes the brain to expand, it can be worse than the original impact.”

“Sure, I read about that. But shouldn’t his doctors have been monitoring? If I understand right, in the first few hours, they should have…”

Weber looked around the MotoRest lobby. Foolish, talking to her here. She’d been so measured over the phone. In person, she presented all the complications of need that Weber meant to retire from. But true Capgras from an accident: a phenomenon that could crown or crash any theory of consciousness. Something worth seeing.

“Karin? We spoke about this. I’m not a lawyer. I’m a scientist. I value your invitation to come talk to your brother. But I’m not here to second-guess anyone.”

She caught her breath. Her face flamed. She pulled at her shirt collar. She gathered her spray of hair and tied it up like a hank of rope. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I thought you…I should probably just take you to see Mark.”

Dedham Glen Nursing and Rehabilitation Center looked to Weber like an elite suburban high school. Peach, single-story, modular — something you’d never notice, unless a loved one were trapped inside.

“They won’t be keeping him here much longer,” Karin said. “The therapy has been great, but the coverage is topping out and he’s crazy to go home. His muscle strength is pretty much back. He’s dressing and bathing himself, getting along with people, mostly making sense. Compared to a few weeks ago, he’s as good as normal. Except when it comes to ideas about me.”

She piloted the car toward the visitors’ spaces near the front walk. “We put our mother here, when she got ill. She passed, five and a half weeks later. I thought I’d rather die myself than put Mark here. But it was the only choice.”

“Do you think he holds that against you?” Old habit: probing for psychological mechanism.

She reddened again. Her skin was instant litmus. She pointed to a picture window at the building’s corner. A medium-height, thin twenty-seven-year-old in a black sweatshirt and baby-blue knit cap stood stranded in mid-wave, his hand pressed to the glass. “You can ask him yourself, in a minute.”

Mark Schluter met his visitors halfway down the hall of his wing. He walked as if on crutches, pressing a hand to his right thigh. His face still bloomed with half-healed scars. Across his throat ran the tell-tale necklace of a tracheotomy. His black jeans sagged and his long-sleeve sweatshirt — too heavy for June — crept down his arms to his fingers. The shirt sported a card-playing, beer-drinking dog saying, What The Hell Do I Know? Tufts of returning hair stuck out from under the lip of his cap. He swung down the hall, playing at being a pendulum. He pulled up in front of Karin. “Is this the guy who’s going to get me out of this hellhole?”

The woman’s hands fled into the air. Her knot of hair came undone. “Mark. I told you Dr. Weber was coming today. Couldn’t you have put on a decent shirt?”

“Favorite shirt.”

“It isn’t appropriate, when talking to a doctor.”

He raised a stiff arm and pointed at her. “You’re not the boss of me. I don’t even know where you came from. The damn Arab terrorists could have parachuted you in here, special forces, as far as I know.” The storm blew over as fast as it appeared. Righteous indignation collapsed in sighs. He spread his palms, grinning at Weber. “You with the FBI or something?” A finger reached out and flipped Weber’s maroon dress tie. “I talked to you guys already.”

Karin was mortified. “It’s just a suit, Mark. You act like you’ve never seen a suit before.”

“I’m sorry. He looks like ‘The Fuzz.’” His fingers hung quote hooks in the air.

“He’s a neuropsychologist. And a famous writer.”

“Cognitive neurologist,” Weber corrected.

Mark Schluter rocked on his heels. Dank laughter poured out of him. “What’s that? Some kind of shrink?” Weber shook his head. “A shrink! So, like, who are you supposed to be?”

Weber tilted his head. “Tell me what you mean.”

“I mean: I already know who this lady thinks she is. How about you?”

Karin exhaled. “We discussed him yesterday, Mark. He just wants to talk to you. Let’s go back to your room and sit.”

Mark wheeled on her. “I warned you once. You’re not my damn mother, either.” He turned back to Weber. “I’m sorry. It’s just painful to me. She has these ideas. It’s hard to describe.” But when Karin headed down the hall, he hobbled along beside her, like a puppy on a leash.

The room was a modest version of Weber’s at the MotoRest, although hugely more expensive. Bed, dresser, desk, television set, coffee table, two chairs. A pair of cartoon Get Well cards in loud colors stood on the dresser. Next to them lay an ancient stuffed Curious George, missing one button eye. A boom box sat on the desk, surrounded by a pile of CD jewel boxes. A truck magazine sporting way too much chrome on its cover lay next to it, still shrink-wrapped. Weber flipped on his pocket digital tape recorder. He could ask permission later. “Nice room,” he prompted.

Mark frowned and looked around. “Well, I haven’t done much with it. But I’m not gonna be here long. Sooner torch this place than move in.”

“What kind of place is this?” Weber asked.

Mark sized him up out of the corner of his eye. “Isn’t it obvious?” Karin sat on the foot of the bed, her hair a cape around her shoulders. Her brother eased himself into a chair, flapping his tennis shoes on the floor and enjoying the clatter. He waved for Weber to sit in the chair opposite him. Weber lowered himself to the cushions. Mark giggled. “You supposed to be old, or something?”

“Ach. Not my favorite topic. So what exactly do they call this place?”

“Well, Doc.” Mark inclined his head. He gazed out from under his bunched eyebrows and whispered, “Some folks in these parts call it Dead Man’s Glands.”

Weber blinked, and Mark barked with pleasure. Karin sat despairing on the bed, picking at her slacks.

“How long have you been here?”

Mark shot an anxious glance at the bed. Karin averted her eyes, looking back at Weber. Mark cleared his throat. “Well, I’ll tell you. Pretty much forever?”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“Do you mean why I’m here and not home? Or why I’m here and not dead? Same answer, on both counts.” Mark pulled his sweatshirt taut and leaned forward. “Read the scriptshirt, man.” The card-playing, beer-drinking dog asking, What The Hell Do I Know?

“You don’t have to perform for him, Mark.”

“Hey! What do you care? You’re the one who wants me here.”

Weber asked, “So what do they do for you here?”

The boy-man turned contemplative. He stroked his bare chin. They might have been talking politics or religion. “Well, you know what this is. It’s — well, you know: a nursery home. Where they take you when you’re banged up and no good to anybody?”

“You got banged up?”

The face yanked back, snorting. “Put it this way? The doctors claim I’m not exactly what I was before.”

“Do you think they’re right?”

Mark shrugged. A spasm shot through him. One hand tugged the baby-blue cap over his brows. The other thrust out. “Ask her. She keeps telling them what I was.”

Karin pressed one wrist to her temple and stood. “Excuse me,” she apologized, and stumbled from the room.

Weber persisted. “You had an accident?”

Mark considered this: one of many possibilities. He slumped deeper into his chair, toeing the floor in front of him. “Well, I rolled my truck, you know. Totaled it. At least that’s what they tell me. They haven’t actually produced the evidence or anything. They’re not real big on evidence here.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Are you?” He sat up and leaned forward again. “Fantastic ’84 cherry-red Dodge Ram. Rebuilt engine block. Modified drive shaft. Totally pimped. You’d love it.”

He sounded like a typical American man in his twenties, from any of the big, empty states. Weber hooked his thumb toward the empty hallway. “Tell me about her.”

Mark’s hands picked at the knit cap. “Well, Doc. You know? It gets pretty complicated, pretty fast.”

“I can see that.”

“She thinks that if she does a perfect imitation, I’ll take her for my sister.”

“She isn’t?”

Mark tsked and waved his index finger in the air, a stubby, pink window wiper. “Not even close! Okay, so she looks a lot like Karin. But there are some obvious differences. My sister is like…a Labor Day picnic. This one’s a business lunch. You know: eye on the clock. My sister makes you feel safe. Easy. This one’s totally high maintenance. Plus, Karin is heavier. Actually a bit of a tub. This woman is almost sexy.”

“Does she sound at all—?”

“And they messed up the face a little. Know what I’m saying? Her expressions, or such. My sister laughs at my jokes. This one’s scared all the time. Weepy. Talk about hair trigger? Real easy to freak out.” He shook his head. Something long and silent passed through him. “Similar. Very similar. But worlds apart.”

Weber toyed with his ancient wire-rims. He stroked the crown of his balding head. Mark unconsciously fingered his cap. “Is she the only one?” Weber asked. Mark just stared at him. “I mean, is anyone else not what they seem?”

“Jesus, you’re the doctor, right? You ought to know that nobody’s ‘What They Seem.’” He hunched, peeking out through the scare quotes he formed next to his ears. “But I know what you’re saying. I’ve got this buddy, Rupp. That bastard and me do everything together. Something weird has happened to him, too. The fake Karin has him brainwashed or something. And they swapped my damn dog. Can you believe that? Beautiful border collie, black and white, with a little gold around the shoulders. Now what kind of sick person would want to…?” He stopped playing hockey with his toes. His hands fell to his lap. He leaned forward. “It’s like some horror flick, sometimes. I can’t figure out what’s going on.” His eyes filled with animal alarm, ready to ask even this stranger for help.

“Does…this woman know things that only your sister should know?”

“Well, you know. She could’ve learned that shit anywhere.” Mark twisted on his cushions, fists near his face, like a fetus warding off the world’s first blows. “Just when I most need my real sister, I’m supposed to accept this imitation.”

“Why do you suppose this is happening?”

Mark straightened and gazed at Weber. “Now, that’s a damn good question. Best question I’ve heard in a long time.” He stared off into the middle distance. “It’s got to have something to do with…what you were talking about. Rolling the rig.” For a minute, he was gone, wrestling with something too big for him. Then Mark came back. “Here’s what I’m thinking. Something happened to me, after…whatever happened.” He held his palm out, not even glancing at Weber. “My sister — my real sister — and Rupp, maybe, took the Ram somewhere where I wouldn’t be able to see it. Where it wouldn’t upset me. Then they got this other woman who looked like Karin, so I wouldn’t notice she was gone.” He looked up at Weber, hopeful.

Weber tilted one shoulder. “And how long has she been gone?”

Mark threw two hands above his head, then brought them back down across his chest. “For as long as this other one’s been here.” His face clouded in pain. “She’s not at her old place. I’ve tried her number. And it sounds like that job of hers canned her.”

“What do you suppose your sister might be doing?”

“Well, I don’t know. Getting the truck fixed up, like I said? Maybe she’s holding off contact until it’s ready. To surprise me?”

“For months?”

Mark curled his lip, sarcastically. “Have you ever repaired a truck? Takes some time, you know. To get it like new.”

“Your sister knows how to work on trucks?”

Mark snorted. “Does the pope shit on Catholics? She could probably strip that cheap Jap four-cylinder of hers down to washers and put it back together into something halfway decent, if she wanted to.”

“What kind of car does the other woman drive?”

“Ah!” Mark glanced sidelong at Weber, refusing to surrender. “You’ve noticed. Yes, she’s been pretty complete at copying the details. That’s what’s so scary.”

“Do you remember anything about the accident?”

Mark’s head spun through half a circle, cornered. “Shrink, let’s just relax and regroup for a minute, shall we?”

“Sure. I’m with you.” Weber leaned back and tucked his hands behind his head.

Mark regarded him, his mouth open. Slowly, the jaw firmed into a chuckle. “Serious? You for real?” A series of low, clunking thuds came out of him, the laughter of someone stuck in puberty. He kicked out his legs and folded his own hands behind his head, like a toddler imitating his father. “This is more like it! The good life.” He smiled and flashed Weber a thumbs-up. “You hear that Antarctica is breaking up?”

“I heard something like that,” Weber said. “Did you read that in the paper?”

“Naw. The tube. Newspapers are too full of conspiracy theories these days.” After a moment, he grew troubled again. “Listen. You’re a shrink. Let me ask you something. How easy would it be for a really good actress to…”

Karin returned, distressed to find the two of them stretched out as if on some vacation cruise. Mark jackknifed up. “Speak of the devil. Eavesdropping. I might’ve known.” He looked at Weber. “You want to get something to drink? Nice cold brew or something?”

“They let you have beer here?”

“Ha! Gotcha. Well, there’s a Coke machine out there, anyway.”

“Would you like to try some puzzles, first?”

“Beats a pig in a poke with a sharp stick.”

Mark seemed eager to play. The puzzles were timed. Weber had Mark cancel out lines scattered on a sheet of paper. He showed Mark a cartoon and asked him to circle as many objects whose names started with the letter O as he could find. “Can I just circle the whole thing and call it ‘obnoxious’?” Weber asked him to trace routes on a street map, following simple directions. He asked him to name all the two-legged animals he could think of. Mark rubbed his head, infuriated. “Pretty tricky of you. When you put it that way, you’re forcing me to think of only four-legged ones.”

Weber had Mark strike out all the numerals from a sheet of paper filled with letters. When Weber called time, Mark threw his pencil across the room in disgust, almost hitting Karin, who cowered by one wall. “You call these games? These are more screwed up than the stuff the therapists make me do.”

“How do you mean?” Weber asked.

“What do you mean, ‘How do you mean?’ Who the hell says, ‘How do you mean?’ Here. Look at this. See how you made everything so small? Deliberately trying to mess me up. And look at this ‘three.’ It looks exactly like a capital B. B for bastard. Then you try to distract me, by telling me I only have two minutes left.” His lip twisted and his eyes shut against their dampening.

Weber touched his shoulder. “Want to try another? Here’s one with shapes…”

“You do them, Shrink. You’re an educated man. I’m sure you can figure it out by yourself.” He swung his head, opened his mouth, and groaned.

Summoned by the sound, a woman appeared in the doorway. She wore a russet pleated skirt and a cream silk blouse. Weber felt he’d met her in some other capacity — the airport, the car rental, or the hotel front desk. A youthful forty, medium build, five foot nine, round cheekbones, cautious, inquiring eyes, a blue-black shoulder-length cowl of hair: the kind of face that imitated a minor celebrity. The woman seemed briefly to recognize Weber, as well. Not unheard of: his face got around. People who knew nothing about brain research sometimes remembered him from talk shows or magazines. But as quickly as she noticed, she looked away. She cocked an eyebrow at Karin, who beamed. “Oh, Barbara! Just in time, as always.”

“Any difficulties, here?” Her voice was wry, a little self-mocking. Difficulties Are Us. At the sound of his attendant, Mark’s twisting anger dissolved. He sat up, beaming. The aide beamed back. “Problems, friend?”

“I got no problems! That’s the guy with all the problems.”

The caretaker wheeled on Weber. She studied him, her face a nurse’s mask, the barest curl to her lips. “New admit?”

“The man is nothing but problems,” Mark shouted. “Check out his so-called puzzles, if you want to make yourself nuts.”

The woman stepped toward him and held out her hand. Stupidly, Weber handed over his battery of tests as if she were the chairman of a human subjects review board. She studied the documents. She riffled the pages, then looked him in the eye. “How much are the answers worth to you?” She glanced at Mark, her audience, now a ball of glee. Weber felt grateful for her defusing. Karin made the introductions. Barbara Gillespie returned Weber’s tests, a little sheepish.

“Ask her anything, Doc. She’s the only reliable thing around here. Best thing I’ve currently got on my side.”

Barbara crossed toward Mark, clucking in objection at the compliment. Weber watched the graceful woman bond with her charge. The pair reminded him of something — bonobos grooming each other, chattering in easy and instinctual reassurance. He felt a twinge of envy. Her rapport was natural and unstudied, more than Weber had felt with any of his patients for a long time, if ever. She embodied that open fellow feeling his books preached.

The two whispered to each other, one anxious and the other soothing. “Do you think I can ask him?” Mark asked.

Barbara patted Mark’s folder, suddenly all registered professional. “Absolutely. He’s a distinguished man. If you can talk to anyone, it’s him. I’ll come back later, for your workup.”

“Can I get that in writing?” Mark called after her.

Ms. Gillespie waved goodbye to Karin. Karin grazed the attendant’s forearm. Barbara curled her fingers at Weber as she left. Distinguished. So she had placed him. He turned to Karin, who shook her head in admiration. “My brother’s keeper.”

“I wish,” Mark snapped. “I wish she’d keep me. From you. Would you mind if I talked with the doctor here for a moment, in private? Person to person?”

Karin folded her hands together in front of her and left the room again. Weber stood, one hand holding the briefcase, the other pumping his milky beard. Question time had turned. Mark swung to face him.

“Look. You’re not working for her or anything? You’re not, like, involved with her or anything? Physically? Then would you mind getting in touch with my real sister? I can give you all the info I have for her. I’m starting to really worry. She may have no idea what’s happened to me. They may be feeding her a bunch of lies. If you could just make contact, it would help a lot.”

“Tell me a little bit more about her. Her character.” How did a Capgras patient see character? Could logic, stripped of feeling, see past the performance of personality? Could anyone?

Mark waved him off, squeezing his head. “How about tomorrow? My brain is bleeding. Come back tomorrow, if you feel like it. Just lose the suit and briefcase, all right? We’re all good people here.”

“You’ve got it,” Weber said.

“My kind of shrink.” Mark thrust out his hand, and Weber shook it.

Weber found Karin in the reception area, seated on a hard green vinyl sofa, the kind that could be sponged off in an emergency. Her eyes looked allergic to air. Two papery women with walkers slid past her, a foot race in suspended animation. One greeted Weber as if he were her son. Karin was explaining before he could sit down. “I’m sorry. It kills me to see him like that. The more he says he doesn’t know me, the less I know how to be toward him.”

“What does he think is different about you?”

She pulled herself together. “It’s strange. He glorifies me now. I mean her. In fact, he and I–I mean this me — struggle pretty much the same way we always did. We had kind of a rough time, growing up. I’ve tried to keep him from doing all the stupid things I’ve done, over the years. He needs me to be the voice of reason; he’s never had anyone else for that. Used to resent it like crazy, the straighter I kept him. But now he just resents me, and thinks she was some kind of saint.”

She stopped and smiled in apology, her mouth pumping like a trout’s. Weber offered his arm — clumsy, archaic, something he never did. He blamed Nebraska, the level, dry, buzz-filled June. The flat accents, the broad, stolid, agrarian faces — so chalky and secret — disoriented him, after decades in the loud, brown turmoil of New York. The faces out here shared a furtive knowledge — of land, weather, impending crisis — that sealed them off from interlopers. Half a day in this place, and already he felt how reticent a person might get, surrounded by so much grain.

She took his arm and stood. He led her out the main doors, down the sidewalk to the parking lot. He felt unsettled, the hamstrung sense that had plagued him throughout his neurology residency. He’d curtailed medical practice years ago, in favor of research and writing, in part, perhaps, to protect himself. In the last eighteen months, he’d grown worse. Just watching someone wire a macaque would soon prove crippling.

Karin Schluter hung on his arm, heading toward the parking lot. “You have a nice way with him,” she conceded. “I think he liked you.” She stared straight ahead as she spoke. She’d wanted more. Not even finished with the screening, and already Weber had let her down.

“Your brother is a lively personality. I like him very much.”

She stopped on the sidewalk. Her face turned raw. “What do you mean, ‘lively’? He’s not going to stay this way, is he? You can help him, right? Like the things you try, in your books…”

The real work was never with the injured. “Karin? Think back to the night of Mark’s accident. Do you remember imagining what might happen to him?”

She stood clasping herself, her face aflame. He kept a distance now. The June wind whipped her hair into a dozen tow lines. She pinched her eyes. “This isn’t what he’s like. He was quick. Sharp. A little crude. But he cared for everyone…”

Her hands were folded across her breasts, her face a ruddy mess, her eyes welling. He cupped her elbow and urged her down the walk toward the car. A casual observer might have seen a lovers’ quarrel. Weber turned and saw Mark, standing at his window. You’re not, like, involved with her? He swung back to the sister. “No,” Weber said. “This is not who he was. And he’ll be someone else a year from now.” As soon as he said it, he regretted even that harmless truism. Too easily turned into a promise.

The color in her face deepened. “I’m sure whatever you can do for him will help.”

More sure than he was. He could still make it back to Lincoln in time for an evening flight. Weber pressed his thumbnail into his palm and mastered himself. “To do anything for him, we have to learn who he has become. And to do that, we have to win his trust.”

“Trust me? He hates the sight of me. He thinks I’ve abducted his real sister. He thinks I’m a government robot spy.”

They reached her car. She stood still, keys in hand, waiting for him to work a miracle. “Tell me something,” he said. “Have you lost weight recently?”

Her mouth made a shocked O. “What—?”

He tried to smile. “Forgive me. Mark said that his real sister was considerably heavier.”

“Not considerably.” She straightened her belt. “I’ve lost a few pounds. Since our mother passed. I’ve been…working on myself. Starting over.”

“Do you know much about cars?”

She stared at him as if brain damage were endemic. Then guilty understanding stole into her eyes. “Unbelievable. I tried to get him to teach me, one summer, a few years ago. I was trying to impress…someone. Mark wouldn’t let me do anything but hand him wrenches. It was just a few days. But ever since, he’s been convinced that I have this secret love for camshafts, or what have you.”

She pressed the key fob and the car unlocked. He walked around to the passenger side and slid in. “And the way he was with the nurse, with Ms….?” He knew the name, but let her say it.

“Barbara. She does have a way with him, doesn’t she?”

“Would you say the way he talks to her is different from how he would have, before?”

She stared out the window at the open fields. The lime blush of the June prairie. She shook her head. “Hard to say. He didn’t know her before.”

He called Sylvie that night, from the MotoRest. He actually felt nervous dialing. “Hey, it’s me.”

“Man! I was hoping it might be you.”

“As opposed to the telemarketers?”

“Don’t shout, sweetie. I can hear you.”

“You know, I truly hate talking into this ridiculous thing. It’s like holding a saltine up to your face.”

“They’re supposed to be small, my love. That’s what makes them mobile. I take it this case isn’t going so great?”

“On the contrary, Woman. It’s staggering.”

“That’s good. Staggering is good, right? I’m glad for you. So tell me about it. I could use a good story right now.”

“Rough day?”

“That probation kid from Poquott who we were getting employment letters for mistook the UPS man for a SWAT team.”

Her voice still caught, even after years of such disasters. He searched for something useful, or just kind. “Anyone hurt?”

“Everyone will live. Including me. So tell me about your Capgras. Impaired recognition?”

“It feels like the opposite, in fact. Too attentive to small difference.”

Aside from the absurd makeup compact passing itself off as a phone, they might have been back in college, trading appraisals late into the night, long after curfew had sealed each of them in their separate dorms. He’d first fallen in love with Sylvie over the phone. Every time he traveled, the fact came back to him. They fell into a cadence, talking as they had almost every evening of their lives for a third of a century.

He described the bewildered man, his terrified sister, the antiseptic nursing facility, the oddly familiar attendant, the desolate town of twenty-five thousand, the dry June, the vacant, floating terrain in the dead center of nowhere. He wasn’t violating professional ethics; his wife was his colleague in these matters, in every way except the payroll. He described how bottomless it felt, watching recognition atomize into ever more exacting, distinct pieces. That woman laughed; this one’s scared. This one’s facial expressions are wrong. Doubles, aliens: splitting individuality into a hundred parts, preserving distinctions too subtle for normality to see.

“I’m telling you, Woman. No matter how often I see it, it chills me.”

“I thought you’d never seen this before.”

“Not Capgras. I mean the naked brain. Scrambling to fit everything together. Unable to recognize that it’s suffering from any disorder.”

“That’s only reasonable. Can’t afford to admit what’s happened. Sounds like a lot of my clients. Like me, in fact, sometimes.”

He hadn’t realized how much he needed to talk. The afternoon’s interview had excited him in a way that no one but Sylvie would understand. She asked for more details about Mark Schluter. He read her some notes. She asked, “Does he look her in the eyes when he talks to her?”

“I didn’t really notice.”

“Hm. That’s the kind of thing we here on Venus look for first.”

They wandered onto current events: the wildfires out west, the guilty verdict against the crooked giant accounting firm, and at last the indigo bunting she saw that morning at the feeder.

“Remember to renew your passport,” he said. “September’ll be here any minute.”

“Viva Italia. La dolce vita! Hey. By the way. When is your return flight? I jotted it down and stuck it on the refrigerator. I just seem to have misplaced the refrigerator.”

“Hang on. Let me get my briefcase.”

When he came back and picked up the phone, she was laughing. “Did you just put down your cell so that you could walk across the room?”

“What about it?”

“My sage. My sage at the height of his powers.”

“I can barely force myself to use one of these shoehorns. I absolutely refuse to walk around with one clamped to my face. It’s schizophrenia.”

She couldn’t stop chuckling. “Not even in private?”

“Private? What’s that?”

He gave her his flight information. They traded a few more stalling phrases, reluctant to say goodbye. He was still talking to her in his head for several sentences, after they hung up. He showered, hanging the towel over the bar—Help save the earth. He retrieved his digital voice recorder from his briefcase, then slipped between the stiff, cool sheets, where he replayed the day’s taped conversation. He listened again to the twenty-seven-year-old boy, lost to himself, busy exposing impostors the world could not make out.

Years ago, in Stony Brook, Weber had worked with a patient suffering from hemispatial neglect: the notorious “Neil,” from Weber’s first book, Wider Than the Sky. A stroke at fifty-five — the age Weber had now reached unscathed — left the office machine repairman with a lesion in his right hemisphere that overnight blotted out half his world. Everything to the left of Neil’s sight midline folded into nothing. When he shaved, Neil left the left side of his face untouched. When he sat down to breakfast, he failed to eat the left side of his omelette. He never acknowledged people who approached him from the left-hand side. Weber asked Neil to draw a baseball diamond. Neil’s third base trickled just off the edge of the pitcher’s mound. Even in Neil’s memory, recounting the day’s events, the left half of the world crumpled and collapsed. Closing his eyes and imagining himself in front of his house, Neil could see the garage on the right but not the sunroom on the left. When giving directions, he gave them all exclusively as a series of right turns.

This deficit went beyond vision. Neil couldn’t see that he wasn’t seeing. Half the map where he stored space itself was gone. Weber tried a simple experiment, a scene he dramatized in Wider Than the Sky. He held a mirror perpendicular to Neil’s right shoulder and made Neil look at an angle into the mirror. The area to the left of Neil’s body now appeared to Neil’s right. Weber held a silver good luck charm above Neil’s left shoulder and told Neil to reach for the charm. He might as well have asked the man to sail to a bearing that had fallen off the compass. Neil hesitated, then stabbed out. His hand crashed into the mirror. He fumbled against the glass, even groping behind it. Weber asked what he was doing. Neil insisted that the charm was “inside the mirror.” He knew what mirrors were; the stroke had left that intact. He knew it was crazy to think that the charm could be in the glass. But in his new world, space extended only to the right. Inside the mirror was the more likely of two unreachable places.

Cases such as Neil — thousands of them a year — suggested two truths about every normal brain, both of them shattering. First: what we took for a priori, absolute apprehension of real space in fact depended upon a fragile chain of perceptual processing. “Left” was as much in here as out there. Second: even a brain that thought it was measuring, orienting, and inhabiting plain-old given space might already, without the slightest notion, have lost as much as half a world.

No brain, of course, could completely credit this. Weber had liked Neil. The man absorbed a crushing blow without bitterness or self-pity. He made his adjustments and pressed on — if not forward, then northeasterly. But after the last set of examinations, Weber never saw Neil again. He had no idea what became of the man. Some other neglect wiped him out, reduced him to story. The man Weber had met and interviewed at length passed into the man he described in the pages of his book. He’d left “Neil” behind in the prose looking glass, lost somewhere, off in an imperceivable direction, an unreachable place deep inside the narrative mirror…

Weber woke early, from rough sleep. He showered to wick off the sluggishness, remembering, with a pang of conscience as the hot stream revived him, that he’d taken one just hours before. He made himself a packet of coffee in the complimentary coffeemaker, housed, for some reason, next to the bathroom sink. Then he sat at the writing desk, flipping through a rustic, hand-illustrated guidebook provided there.

The name “Nebraska” comes from an Oto word meaning flat water. The French, too, called the river that ran through it “Platte.”

Precisely how he’d pictured the place: a wide, flat hollow at the heart of the map, so level it would make Euclid blush. The real, rolling landscape surprised him. He sipped the grim coffee and examined the guidebook’s cartoon map. Towns dotted the blank space like so many circled wagons. He found Kearney — at 25,000, the fifth-biggest settlement in the state — in the southernmost oxbow of the Platte, cowering from too much openness.

To the north and west, the Gangplank, a great swatch of eroded sediment, juts out across what was once, 100 million years ago, the floor of a vast ocean…

Major Stephen Long’s 1820 expedition of Army Engineers called the area the Great American Desert. In his report to Washington, Major Long declared the crust of land “wholly unfit for cultivation and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture.” The expedition’s botanist and geologist concurred, noting the “hopeless and irreclaimable sterility” of a country that should “forever remain the unmolested haunt of the native hunter, the bison and the jackal.”

Herds of bison once scoured this basin. Brown rivers of meat flowed across the prairie, holding up wagon trains for days…

Herds all done away with, the book said. The jackal and the native hunter, too: cleared off. Prairie dog cities, their underground streets stretching for miles, drowned in poison. River otters, all but eliminated. Pronghorn, gray wolves: all shot. Page 23 showed a color plate of two mounted, moth-eaten carcasses in the State Museum in Lincoln. Only two larger species now survived in the region in any quantities:

For six weeks out of every year, cranes along the Platte outnumber humans several times over. They migrate over a quarter of the earth’s circumference, briefly stopping here for whatever scraps of waste grain they can scavenge.

He finished the coffee and rinsed the cup. He donned his coat and tie, then, remembering his promise to Mark Schluter, removed them. In his shirtsleeves, he felt naked. Down at the front desk, he snatched a cosmetically perfect if tasteless apple and called it breakfast. He followed his directions to Good Samaritan Hospital and made his way up to Neurology. Dr. Hayes’s nurse showed Weber into the office at once, trying not to stare at the famous personality.

The neurologist looked young enough to be Weber’s son. Gawky ectomorph with angry skin who steered his body like a legacy device. “I just want to tell you what an honor this is. I can’t believe I’m talking to you! I used to read your books like comics, back in med school.” Weber thanked him as graciously as he could. Dr. Hayes spoke deliberately, as if delivering a belated lifetime achievement award to a silent-film actor. “Incredible case, isn’t it? Like seeing Bigfoot stroll out of the Rockies and into your neighborhood supermarket. I actually thought of your stories when we worked him up.”

Fresh copies of Weber’s last two books sat on Hayes’s desk. The young neurologist picked them up.

“Before I forget, would you mind…?” He handed them to Weber, along with a heavy Waterman pen. “Could you make them out: ‘To Chris Hayes, my Watson in the strange case of The Man Who Doubled His Sister.’”

Weber searched the neurologist’s face for irony but found only earnestness. “I…Could I just…?”

“Or whatever you feel like writing,” Dr. Hayes said, crestfallen.

Weber wrote: For Chris Hayes, with thanks. Nebraska, June 2002. Man was not only the commemorating animal; he was the animal who insisted on commemorating in advance. Weber handed the books back to Hayes, who read the inscription with a tight-lipped smile. “So you met him yesterday. Eerie, isn’t it? I’m still disconcerted, talking to him, and it’s been months. Of course, our group will be writing him up for the journals.”

Bow shot. Weber held up his hands. “I don’t want to do anything to…”

“No, of course not. You’re writing for a popular audience.” Broadside. “There’s no overlap.” Hayes rolled out the complete history, including the pages no one had shown Karin Schluter. He showed Weber the paramedics’ notes, three lines of green ballpoint on a form dated Feb. 20, 2002: ’84 Dodge Ram, rolled off south shoulder of North Line Road, between 3200 and 3400W. Driver pinned upside down in vehicle. Unbelted, unreachable, and unresponsive. The one accessible door was crumpled beyond opening. The paramedics couldn’t enter or move the truck, for fear of crushing the victim. They could only wait for support and watch the police take photographs. Weber studied one of the pictures. “Wrong way up,” Hayes said. Weber flipped the image. A long-haired Mark Schluter hunched on top of himself, a glaze of blood seeping up his face through his open collar. His head bowed against the roof of the cab, in inverted prayer.

When the firemen arrived, they had to burn their way through a roof post with an acetylene torch. Weber pictured the scene: police lights strobing across frozen fields, flares circling the truck where it lay flipped in the roadside ditch. Uniformed people, their breath steaming, moving about in dreamlike, methodical activity. When the firemen at last torched through the roof post, the wreck shifted and the truck settled. The body crumpled on itself. The firemen scrambled under the wreck and drew the body clear. Mark Schluter briefly regained consciousness in the ambulance. The paramedics raced him to Kearney, the only hospital within six counties with any shot at keeping him alive.

Hayes proceeded to the medical charts. White male, twenty-seven, five ten, 160 pounds. He had lost considerable blood, most of it from a gash between his right third and fourth ribs, where he’d impaled himself on the spike of a metal model Prussian helmet fastened to his truck’s gear shift. His front scalp and face were heavily abraded. His right arm was dislocated and his right femur fractured. The rest of his body was badly scratched and bruised, but he was otherwise astonishingly intact.

“We use the word miracle a lot out here in the Plains States, Dr. Weber. But you don’t often hear the term thrown around a Level II trauma center.”

Weber studied the images that Hayes clipped to the light box. “This one qualifies,” he agreed.

“The closest thing to a Lazarus walk-away I’ve ever seen, even in my residency days in Chicago. Eighty miles an hour, on an icy country road in the dark. The man should have been dead, many times over.”

“BAC?”

“Funny you should ask. We see a lot of that, in the Kearney Emergency Room. But he came in at.07. Under the legal limit, even in the Cornhusker State. A few beers in the three hours before rolling his vehicle.”

Weber nodded. “Was he on anything else?”

“Not that we found. The ER attending logged him in at a Glasgow solid ten. E3-V3-M4. Eyes opening to speech. Withdrawing from pain. Some verbal response, although mostly inappropriate.”

Eight was the magic number. After six hours, half of all patients with Glasgow Coma Scale numbers of eight or lower gave up and died. Ten was considered moderate injury. “Something happened to him after admission?”

Weber was just playing professional detective. But Hayes grew defensive. “They stabilized him. All the protocols, even before determining whether he was insured. We have one of the highest rates of medical indigence in the country, out here.”

Weber had seen higher. Half the country couldn’t afford insurance. But he murmured approval.

“It took the paper-pushers an hour before they could locate his next of kin.”

Weber studied the paperwork. The victim’s pockets contained only thirteen dollars, a knock-off Swiss Army knife, a receipt for a tank of gas at a place in Minden dated that afternoon, and a single cyan-colored condom in a transparent package. Probably his good-luck charm.

“Apparently, his license flipped up under the dash when the truck rolled. The police found it while searching the vehicle for drugs. They located the sister up in Sioux City, and she gave phone consent for anything we needed. The trauma service got him going on mannitol, Dilantin…You can read everything. Pretty standard fare. Intracranial pressure steady at around 16 mm Hg. We got a little improvement right away. Motor response climbed. Some increase in verbal. Marked him up to a Glasgow twelve. Five hours after the admit, I would’ve told you that we were heading out of the woods.”

He took the file back from Weber and searched it, as if he still had a chance to head off what happened next. He shook his head. “Here’s the note from the next morning. ICP up to twenty, then spiking even higher. He had a small seizure. Some delayed bleeding, as well. We went to a ventilator as soon as we could. We decided to drill. Tracheotomy clearly indicated. His sister was here by then. She approved everything.” Dr. Hayes scoured the papers, looking for some shred that refused to come forward. “If you’re asking me, I’d say we caught everything as it arose.”

“It seems like it,” Weber said. Only, intracranial pressure had to be caught before it arose. Dr. Hayes blinked at him, perhaps resenting the national celebrity brought in to aid the poor locals. Weber stroked his beard. “I can’t imagine doing anything differently.” He glanced around Dr. Hayes’s office. All the right journals on the shelves, up to date and orderly. Framed diploma from Rush Medical and Nebraska Board Certification. On the desk, a picture of Hayes and a slim, honey-haired model, shoulder to shoulder on a ski lift. A world inconceivable to Mark Schluter, before or after his accident.

“Would you say that Mark shows any tendency toward confabulation?”

Hayes followed Weber’s glance, to the picture, the beautiful woman on the lift. “Not that I’ve noted.”

“I tried him on a battery of the standard tests yesterday.”

“Did you? I gave him everything, already. Here. Any scores you might need.”

“Yes, of course. I didn’t mean to suggest…But some time has passed…”

Dr. Hayes measured him. “He’s still under observation.” He offered Weber the folder again. “The data are all here, if you care for a look.”

“I’d love to see the scans,” Weber said.

Hayes produced a series of images and clipped them to his light box: Mark Schluter’s brain in cross section. The young neurologist saw only structure. Weber still saw the rarest of butterflies, fluttering mind, its paired wings pinned to the film in obscene detail. Hayes traced over the surreal art. Each shade of gray spoke of function or failure. This subsystem still chattered; this one had fallen silent. “You see what we’re dealing with, here.” Weber just listened to the younger man step through the disaster. “Something that looks like possible discrete injury near the anterior right fusiform gyrus, as well as the anterior middle and inferior temporal gyri.”

Weber leaned toward the light box and cleared his throat. He didn’t quite see it.

“If that’s what we’re looking at,” Hayes said, “it would fit the prevailing understanding. Both the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex intact, but a possible interruption of connection between them.”

Weber nodded. The current dominant hypothesis. Three parts needed to complete a recognition, and the oldest trumped all. “He gets an intact facial match, and that generates the appropriate associated memories. He knows his sister looks exactly like…his sister.”

“But no emotional ratification. Getting all the associations for a face without that gut feeling of familiarity. Pushed to a choice, cortex has to defer to amygdala.”

Weber smiled, despite himself. “So it’s not what you think you feel that wins out, it’s what you feel you think.” He fiddled with his wire frames, feeling out loud. “Call me archaic, but I still see some problems. For one, Mark doesn’t double every person that he cared for before the accident. He should still be able to draw upon auditory cues, behavioral patterns: all sorts of identification tools other than facial. Can flattened emotional response really defeat cognitive recognition? I’ve seen bilateral damage to the amygdala — patients with destroyed emotional responses. They don’t report that their loved ones have been replaced by impostors.” He sounded too effusive, even to himself.

Hayes was ready. “Well, you’ve heard of the emerging ‘two-deficit’ theory? Perhaps insult to the right frontal cortex is impeding his consistency-testing…”

Weber felt himself turning reactionary. The odds against multiple lesions, all exactly in the right place, had to be enormous. But the odds against recognition itself were even greater. “You know he thinks his dog is a double? That seems like more than just a rupture between the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex. I don’t doubt the contribution of lesions. Right hemisphere damage is no doubt implicated in the process. I just think we need to look for a more comprehensive explanation.”

Hayes’s tiniest facial muscles betrayed incredulity. “Something more than neurons, you mean?”

“Not at all. But there’s a higher-order component to all this, too. Whatever lesions he has suffered, he’s also producing psychodynamic responses to trauma. Capgras may not be caused so much by the lesion per se as by large-scale psychological reactions to the disorientation. His sister represents the most complex combination of psychological vectors in his life. He stops recognizing his sister because some part of him has stopped recognizing himself. I have always found it worthwhile to consider a delusion as both the attempt to make sense — as well as the result — of a deeply upsetting development.”

After a beat, Hayes nodded. “I’m…sure it’s all worth thinking about, if that interests you, Dr. Weber.”

Fifteen years ago, Weber would have launched a counterstrike. Now he found it comical: two docs marking their territory, ready to rear up and batter at each other like bighorn sheep. Ram tough. Well-being coursed through Weber, the simple poise of self-reflection. He felt like mussing Dr. Hayes’s hair. “When I was your age, the prevailing psychoanalytic bias had Capgras resulting from taboo feelings toward a loved one. ‘I can’t be feeling lust for my sister, ergo she’s not my sister.’ The thermodynamic model of cognition. Very popular in its day.”

Hayes rubbed his neck, embarrassed into silence.

“On the face of it, this case would single-handedly refute that possibility. Clearly Mark Schluter’s Capgras isn’t primarily psychiatric. But his brain is struggling with complex interactions. We owe him more than a simple, one-way, functionalist, causal model.” He surprised himself. Not by his belief, but by his willingness to speak it aloud to a physician this young.

The neurologist tapped the film on his light box. “All I know is what happened to his brain early on the morning of February 20.”

“Yes,” Weber said, bowing. All that medicine ever wanted to know. “It’s amazing that he has any integrated sense of self left at all, isn’t it?”

Dr. Hayes accepted the truce. “We’re lucky this particular circuit is so hard to disrupt. A handful of documented cases. If it were as common as, say, Parkinson’s, we’d all be strangers to each other. Listen, I’d like to help in any way possible. If we can do any further tests or imaging here at the hospital…”

“I have a few low-tech examinations I’d like to try before that. The first thing I want to do is get some galvanic skin response.”

The neurologist’s eyebrows shot up. “Something to try, I guess.”

Dr. Hayes walked Weber back to the parking lot. They’d been sealed in the consulting room long enough that the return to stark, prairie June caught Weber out. The still air expanded in his lungs, smelling like some archaic summer holiday. It hinted of something he’d last tasted in Ohio at age ten. He turned to see Dr. Hayes hunching next to him, his hand extended.

“Pleasure meeting you, Dr. Weber.”

“Please. Gerald.”

“Gerald. I look forward to seeing the new book. A nice break from work. And I want you to know I’m your biggest fan.”

He did not say still, but Weber heard it. Weber stood, one foot in the street. “I was hoping we could touch base again, before I head back east?”

Hayes brightened, ready to fawn or fight all over again. “Ah! Of course, if you have the time and interest.”

Time and interest…For years, he’d strictly rationed both. A name chair at a Research One University, a long list of respected articles about perceptual processing and cognitive assembly, and a pair of popular neuropsychology books that sold to wide audiences in a dozen languages: he’d never had much time or interest to spare. He’d already outlived his father by three years and had greatly outproduced him. And yet, Weber chanced to be working at the precise moment when the race was making its first real headway into the basic riddle of conscious existence: How does the brain erect a mind, and how does the mind erect everything else? Do we have free will? What is the self, and where are the neurological correlates of consciousness? Questions that had been embarrassingly speculative since the beginnings of awareness were now on the verge of empirical answer. Weber’s growing, dazed suspicion that he might live to see such wild philosophical phantoms solved, that he might even contribute to solving them, had pretty much driven out any other semblance of what, in popular parlance, had come to be called a real life. Some days it seemed that every problem facing the species was awaiting the insight that neuroscience might bring. Politics, technology, sociology, art: all originated in the brain. Master the neural assemblage, and we might at long last master us.

Weber had long ago commenced that extended retreat from the world that ambitious men begin to make around their fortieth year. All he wanted was to work. His old hobbies — guitar, paint box, tennis racket, verse notebooks — sat tucked away in corners of the too-big house, waiting for the day he might resurrect them. Only the sailboat gave him any sustained enjoyment now, and that, only as a platform for more cognitive reflection. He struggled to sit through feature films. He dreaded the periodic dinner-party invitation, although, truth be told, he generally enjoyed himself once the evening was under way, and hosts could always count on him to produce a bizarre conversational firework or two. Tales from the crypt, Sylvie called them: stories that proved to the assembled dinner guests that nothing they thought, saw, or felt was necessarily true.

He had lost no capacity for mundane delights. A walk around the mill pond still pleased him in any season, although he now used such strolls more to jog stalled thoughts than to see the ducks or trees. He still indulged in what Sylvie called foraging — constant low-level snacking, a weakness for sweets that he’d nursed since childhood. His wife first fell in love with him when he declared to her, at twenty-one, that heavy glucose metabolism was essential for sustained mental effort. When, at twice that age, his body began to change so profoundly that he no longer recognized it, he briefly struggled to curb the familiar pleasure before accepting the alien new shape as his own.

He still enjoyed his wife’s bedrock companionship. He and Sylvie still touched incessantly. Monkey grooming, they called it. Constant hand rubs while they read together, shoulder massages as they washed the dishes. “You know what you are?” she accused, pinching him. “Nothing but a dirty old neck-rub-philiac.” He answered only with happy groans.

At growing intervals that neither of them cared to calculate, they still played with each other. However fitful, the persistence of desire surprised them both. The previous year, on their thirtieth anniversary, he estimated the number of climaxes that he and little Sylvie Bolan had shared since their first foray in the top bunk in her dorm room in Columbus. One every third day, on average, for a third of a century. Four thousand detonations, joining them at the hip. Nights of animal ecstasy always amused them, coming back to themselves, to the embarrassment of speech. Curled up against his flank, giggling a little, Sylvie might say, “Thank you for the beautiful human sexuality, Man,” before padding off to the bathroom to clean herself. A person could only howl in abandonment so many times. Time didn’t age you; memory did.

Yes, the slowing body, the gradually depleting pleasure neurotransmitters had cooled them. But something else as well: what you loved well, you grew to resemble. He and the wife of his years now resembled each other so much that there could be no strangeness of desire between them. None except that impenetrable strangeness he’d given himself over to. The country of perpetual surprise. The naked brain. The basic riddle, on the verge of being solved.

He stood in throbbing music, waiting for Karin Schluter. Above his head, someone growled in techno-pain, begging for euthanasia. A lunch dive, a long line of kids in retro, acid-washed jeans, Weber stark among them, having forgone the coat and tie in favor of khakis and a knit vest. Karin suppressed her giggles as she walked up. “Aren’t you warm in that?”

“My thermostat runs a little low.”

“So I’ve noticed,” she teased. “Is that from all the science?”

She’d chosen a place on the local college campus called Pioneer Pizza. Her nerves from yesterday had settled. She played less with her hair. She smiled at the surrounding flock of students as the hostess seated them.

“I went to school here. Back when it was still Kearney State College.”

“When was that?”

She blushed. “Ten years. Twelve.”

“No way.” The words sounded ludicrous on his lips. They’d have sent Sylvie into convulsions. Karin just beamed.

“Those were wild days. A little too close to home for me, but still. My friends and I were the only people between Berkeley and the Mississippi to protest the Gulf War. This gang of Young Republicans man-handled my then-boyfriend, just for wearing a “No Blood For Oil” button. Tied him up with a yellow ribbon!” Her glee hid as fast as it had surfaced. She cast a guilty look around the restaurant.

“How about your brother?”

“You mean school? They pretty much had to give Mark an honorary high school diploma. Don’t get me wrong. He’s no idiot.” She worked her mouth, hearing her present tense. “He was always shrewd. He could read a teacher and figure out the barest minimum needed to pass her tests. Not that it took a genius to outsmart the Kearney High faculty. But Mark just wanted to fix up trucks and dink around with video games. He could twitch over a new game cartridge for twenty-four hours without even getting up to pee. I told him he should get a job as a play-tester.”

“How did he make a living, after graduation?”

“Well, ‘a living’…He flipped burgers until Dad threw him out of the house. Then he worked at the Napa parts store and lived like an Indian for a long time. His buddy Tom Rupp got him a job at the IBP plant in Lexington.”

“IBP?”

She wrinkled her nose, surprised at his ignorance. “Infernal Beef Packers.”

“Infernal…?”

Her face flushed. She pressed three fingers to her lips and blew on them. “I mean, Iowa. Although, you know: Iowa, Infernal. You have to squint to tell the difference.”

“He worked for a slaughterhouse?”

“He’s not a cow killer, or anything. That’s Rupp. Markie repairs their equipment.” She looked down again. “I guess I mean ‘repaired.’” She lifted her head and studied him. Her eyes were the color of oxidized pennies. “He’s not going back there anytime soon, is he?”

Weber shook his head. “I’ve learned not to make predictions, over the years. What we need, as in most things, is patience and cautious optimism.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m trying.”

“Tell me what you do.” Her lips traced his words, and she looked at him blankly. “Your work.”

“Oh!” She pressed her bangs with her right hand. “I’m a consumer relations agent for…” She stopped, surprised at herself. “Actually, I’m between job opportunities.”

“Your employers let you go? Because of this?”

Beneath the table, her knee pumped like a sewing machine. “I didn’t have any choice. I had to be down here. My brother comes first. It’s just the two of us, you know.” Weber nodded. She bubbled over with explanations. “I have a little war chest. My mother left us some life insurance money. It’s the right thing. I can start again, once he’s…” Her tone was optimistic, fishing.

The waitress came to take their orders. With a guilty glance around the room, Karin ordered the Supreme. Weber chose at random. When the waitress left, Karin eyed him. “I can’t believe it. You do it, too.”

“I’m sorry? What do I do?”

She shook her head. “I just thought that someone with your accomplishments…”

Weber grinned, puzzled. “I really have no idea…”

She flicked the air with her left hand. “Never mind. It’s nothing important. Something I notice in men, sometimes.”

Weber waited for Karin to explain. When she didn’t, he asked, “Did you bring the pictures?”

She nodded. She reached into her shoulder bag, a brightly patterned knit sack made by some indigenous people, and withdrew an envelope. “I picked ones that would mean the most to him.”

Weber took the photos and thumbed through them.

“That’s our father,” Karin said. “What can I say? Blind in one eye from an argument with the livestock. Ready to recite ‘The Face on the Barroom Floor’ anytime after the night’s third shot, at least when we were young; he didn’t go in much for poetry, in his later days. He started out as a farmer, but spent most of his life trying to break into the commercial class with a parade of get-rich-quick schemes. On a Christmas-card basis with every bailiff in bankruptcy court. He lost a lot of money selling privacy boxes. You hooked them up to your TV so the cable company couldn’t track what you watched. He came up with this idea for peddling identity-theft insurance. He only sold things that he couldn’t buy enough of himself. That was his downfall. The man thought the nine-digit zip code was a Democratic Party plot to control the movements of ordinary citizens. Even the local militia guys thought he was a little out there.”

“And he died…?”

“Four years ago. He couldn’t sleep. He just couldn’t sleep, and then he died.”

“I’m sorry,” Weber said, pointlessly. “How would you describe their relationship?”

She screwed up her mouth. “Nonstop slow-mo death match? Give or take a couple of happy camping trips. They liked to fish together, back when. Or working together on engines. Stuff where they didn’t have to talk. That next one’s our mom, Joan. She didn’t look quite that good by the end. Which was a year or so ago, I think I said.”

“You say she was a religious woman?”

“A big, big speaker in tongues. Even her ordinary English was pretty colorful. She often had the house exorcised. She was convinced that it hid the souls of children in torment. I was like, ‘Hello! Earth to Mom! I’ll name those tormented child souls for a dime!’” Karin took the picture of the pretty, chestnut-haired farm wife from Weber and studied it, sucking in her cheeks. “But she kept us alive through all the years of Dad’s self-employment schemes. Clerk-Typist III, here at the college.”

“How did Mark get along with her?”

“He worshiped the woman. Worshiped them both, really. He just sometimes did it while shouting and waving a blunt weapon around.”

“He was violent?”

She exhaled. “I don’t know. What’s ‘violent’ anymore? He was a teenage guy. Then, a guy in his twenties.”

“Did he share your mother’s…? Was he religious?”

She laughed until she had to hold her hands in the air. “Not unless you count Devil worship. No. That’s unfair. The black-magic phase was me. Here, look. Karin Schluter, high school senior. Your advanced Goth vampire look. Pretty scary, huh? Two years before that, I was a cheerleader. I know what you’re thinking. If my brother hadn’t had an accident to explain this Capgras, you’d be looking for a schizophrenia gene. That’s the Schluter family. Let’s see what else I’ve got.”

She talked him through the rest of the loose scrapbook. She had family photos going back to a great-grandfather, Bartlett Schluter, standing in front of the ancestral sod house as a young boy, his hair like corn silk. She had pictures of the beef-packing plant in Lexington, a five-hundred-thousand-square-foot, windowless box with a hundred forty-foot containers lined up alongside it, waiting to be hauled away by semis. She had portraits of Mark’s best friends, two scraggly men in their mid-twenties enjoying themselves with smoke, drink, and pool cues, one in a camouflage tee and the other in a shirt reading “Got Meth?” She had a photo of a gangly, black-haired, pale-blue woman in a hand-knit olive V-neck, radiating a fragile smile. “Bonnie Travis. The group’s moll.”

“This is in the hospital?”

“Mid-March. Those are Mark’s toes, with the little pedicure treatment. She thought it would be cute to paint them fuchsia.” Her words thickened with the injustice of affection. “Here: you wanted pictures that would excite him.”

A familiar face flashed in front of Weber. His own skin would have registered a change in conductivity.

“You’ve met Barbara. As you noticed, he’s completely gaga over her.”

The woman smiled sadly into the camera, forgiving the machine and its operator. “Yes,” Weber said. “Do you know why?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking. He responds to something in her. Her trust. Respect.” A note filled her voice: an envy that could go either way. I’d give him what this woman does, if he’d let me. Karin stroked the photo. “I can’t tell you what I owe this woman. Can you believe she works down at the bottom of the food chain? One baby step up from a volunteer. That’s for-profit health care for you. Put three greedy humans together, and they can’t tell their assets from their armpits.”

Weber smiled noncommittally.

“Here’s Mark’s pride and joy.” She fingered a picture of a narrow, vinyl-sided modular home, something Weber’s generation would have called a prefab. “This is the Homestar. That’s actually the name of the catalog building company. But that’s what he calls his, like it’s the only one in the world. My bad-ass, rebel brother, never prouder than the day he finally scraped together the six-thousand-dollar down payment, his toehold on the bottom rung of the middle class.” She bit her thumb tip. “What you call fleeing a precarious upbringing.”

“That’s where you’re living, while you’re in town?”

He might have served her a warrant. “Where else can I go? I’m out of a job. I don’t know how long this is going to go on.”

“Makes perfect sense,” he declared.

“It’s not like I’m rooting through his things.” She shut her eyes and blanched. He picked up a photo of five hirsute men with guitars and a trap set. She looked again. “That’s Cattle Call. A sorry house band at a bar called the Silver Bullet, outside town. Mark loves them. They were playing the night of his accident. That’s where Mark was, right before. Here’s his truck; I found a whole shoe box full of truck shots, in a closet at the Homestar. This could upset him.”

“Yes. Maybe we should skip that one for now.”

The pizzas came. His choice dismayed him: pineapple and ham. He couldn’t imagine having ordered it. Karin dug into her Supreme with gusto. “I shouldn’t be having pizza. I know I could eat better. Still, I don’t do much meat, except when I eat out. I’m surprised they can sell any cow parts at all, in this part of the country. You should hear what goes on at that plant. Ask Mark. It’ll put you off your feed for good. You know, they have to clip the horns to keep the crazed beasts from goring each other.”

It didn’t much hinder her appetite. Weber poked at his Hawaiian as if he were doing ethnography. At last the food gave out, along with their words.

“You ready?” she asked doubtfully, pretending she was.

At Dedham Glen, he asked for an hour alone with Mark. Her presence might jeopardize a clean skin response test.

“You’re the boss.” She smoothed her eyebrows and backed away, bobbing.

Mark was alone in his room, studying a bodybuilding magazine. He looked up and beamed. “Shrink! You’re back. Give me that one with crossing out the numbers and letters again. I’m ready for it now. I wasn’t ready for it yesterday.”

They shook hands. Mark was in a different shirt, this one listing a dozen Nebraska laws still on the books. Mothers may not perm their daughters’ hair without a state license. If a child burps in church, his parents may be arrested. He wore the knit cap from the day before, even in the close, summer room. “You by yourself today, or…?”

Weber just raised his eyebrows.

“Here. Have a seat. Take a load off. You’re supposed to be an old guy, remember?” He cawed like a raven.

Weber took his chair from yesterday, across from Mark, making the same groans to the same laughter. “Would you mind if I use a tape recorder while we talk?”

“That’s a tape recorder? You’re shitting me! Lemme see that thing. Looks more like a cigarette lighter. You sure you aren’t some Special-Ops…?” Mark tucked the machine up to his cheek. “‘Hello? Hello? If you can hear me, I’m being held hostage here against my will.’ Hey! Don’t look like that. Just busting your balls, is all.” He handed back the tiny machine. “So, how come you need a tape recorder? You got problems or something?” He spun his fingers around each ear.

“Something like that,” Weber admitted.

He’d used a tape recorder the day before. There’d been no way to ask permission, out of the gate. Yet he needed to be able to reproduce that first contact verbatim. He’d banked on getting retroactive permission. And now he had it, or close enough.

“Wow. Cool. Live on tape. You want me to sing?”

“You’re on. Hit it.”

Mark launched into a dead monotone, tone-deaf tune. Gonna open you up, gonna peel you out…He broke off. “So come on. Give me one of your so-called puzzles. Beats lying around and dying.”

“I’ve got some new ones. Picture mysteries.” He pulled the Benton Facial Recognition Test out of his briefcase.

“Mysteries? My whole damn life is a mystery.”

Mark recognized images of the same face from different angles, in different poses, under different lighting. But he couldn’t always tell when a glance was aimed at him. He did reasonably well identifying celebrities, although he called Lyndon Johnson “some high-ranking corporate goon” and Malcolm X “that guy Dr. Chandler on the hospital show.” He enjoyed the whole process. “This guy? He’s supposed to be a comedian, if yelling like there’s Ben-Gay on your scrotum is funny. So okay. This chick calls herself a singer, but that’s just because they took her dancing pole away.” He also did well separating actual faces from facelike shapes in drawings and photographs. Overall, his recognition scores were high normal. But he struggled with the emotions of conventional facial expressions. His responses tended to skew toward fear and anger. Given the circumstances, however, Mark’s numbers showed nothing that Weber could call pathological.

“Can we try one more thing?” Weber asked, as if it were the most natural request in the world.

“Whatever. Knock yourself out.”

He dove into his briefcase and pulled out a small galvanic skin response amplifier and meter. “How would you feel about me wiring you up?” He showed Mark the finger-clip electrodes. “It basically measures your skin conductivity. If you get excited, or feel tense…”

“You mean like a lie detector?”

“Yes, a little like that.”

Mark cackled. “No shit! Now we’re talking. Bring it on! I always wanted to try to bust one of those things.” He held out his hands. “Wire me up, Mr. Spock.”

Weber did, explaining every step. “Most people show a rise in skin conductivity when they see a picture of someone close to them. Friends, family…”

“Everybody sweats when they see Mom?”

“Exactly! I wish I’d put it that way in my last book.”

Of course the methodology was all wrong. There should have been a separate device operator and reader. His calibration trials were primitive at best. No randomizing, no double blind. No controls. Nothing in Karin’s pictures gave him any baseline. But he was not sending this data to a refereed journal. He was just getting a rough sense of this shattered man, of Mark’s attempts to tell himself back into a continuous story.

Mark raised his unwired hand. “I promise to tell the truth…etcetera, etcetera. So help me, Gosh.”

They looked at pictures together. Weber flipped through Karin’s photos, watched the bobbing needle, and scribbled down numbers.

“Hey! The Homestar! That’s my house. It’s a beautiful thing. They built that sucker to my personal specifications.”

The needle danced again. “There’s Duane-o. Look at that pudgy bastard. Knows a lot, even if he’s not the race’s brightest bulb. And that’s the Rupture. Check the cue technique. You’d want this guy on your side, in any — you know — situation. If you’re looking for your overall good times, these are the two to call.”

The picture of his sister — Karin as Goth vampire — produced little conductance. He closed his eyes and pushed the picture away. Weber fished. “Anyone you know?”

Mark looked down at the four-by-six glossy picture. “It’s…you know. The daughter from the Addams Family.”

The needle flickered at the picture of his great-grandfather. “The patriarch. This guy? He was sitting in that sod house when he was a kid, and a cow came crashing through the roof. Good times, back then.”

The IBF packing plant produced an anxious twitch. “That’s where I work. Christ, it’s been weeks. I hope to God they’re holding my spot. You think?”

Conscientiousness outliving its usefulness: Weber had seen it hundreds of times. Twenty years before, his eight-year-old daughter, Jessica, almost killed by a burst appendix, came back to awareness frantic that her oral report on the honey-dance of bees would be late.

“I can’t lose that job, man. It’s the best thing to happen to me since my father died. They need me to keep those hoppers going. I’ve got to get in touch with the boss, ASAP.”

“I’ll see what I can find out,” Weber told him.

The needle spiked again with the picture of Mark’s attendant. “Barbie Doll! So, all right, I know this Gillespie woman is like practically your age. But she’s still great. Sometimes I think she’s the only real person to survive the Android Invasion.”

He responded to the picture of Bonnie Travis as well. In fact, watching the meter as Mark studied her picture, Weber made out something Karin Schluter hadn’t mentioned.

Mark nodded at the photo of Cattle Call. The needle failed to suggest that Mark associated the local band with the anxiety of his last intact night. “These guys are okay. They’re not ready to play Omaha, or anything. But they’ve got a groove and a little bit of the High Lonesome, two things that aren’t easy to combine, I’m telling you. I’ll take you to hear them, if you’d like.”

“Might be interesting,” Weber said.

For Mark’s parents, another flat line. Mark stuck his unwired hand up underneath his knit cap, stretching it from the inside. “I know what you want me to say. This one looks like Harrison Ford, pretending to be my father. This one — somebody’s idea of my mother on a good day. But not even in the minor-league ballpark, really. Hang on a minute.” He gathered the stack of pictures and crumpled them. “Where’d you get these?”

Stupidly, Weber wasn’t ready for the question. He ran through the possible lies. He rested his face on his fist, looked Mark in the eye, and said nothing.

Mark grew frantic with theories. “You get these from her? Don’t you see what’s going on? I thought you were supposed to be some famous East Coast freak of intellect. She steals these good pictures from my friends. Then she hires actors who look a little like my family. Snaps a few shots. Boom! Suddenly, I’ve got a whole new history. And because nobody else knows any better, I’m stuck with it.” He slapped the picture of his parents with the back of his hand. He threw the stack of pictures on the table between them and tore the electrode leads off his fingers.

Weber picked up the photo of Mark Schluter’s father. “Can you say what exactly doesn’t seem…?”

Mark plucked the photo from his hands. He tore it down the middle, neatly bisecting his father’s head. He offered the pieces to Weber. “A gift for Miss Deep Space…” A gasp came from the hall. Mark scrambled to his feet. “Hey! You want to spy on me, come spy…” He swung toward the door, ready for a chase. Karin tumbled into the room.

She brushed past him and snatched the torn photo pieces. “What do you think you’re doing, tearing your own father?” She threatened him with the scraps. “How many of these do you think we have?”

It stopped him in place. Her sheer rage baffled him. Docile, he stood by as she fit the scraps together and inspected the damage.

“It can be taped,” she declared at last. She glared at her brother, shaking her head. “Why are you doing this?” She sat down on the bed, shaking. Mark sat down again, too, chastened by something too big to dope out. Weber just watched. His job description: watch and report. For twenty years, he’d built a reputation on exposing the inadequacy of all neural theory in the face of the great humbler, observation.

“What are you feeling right now?” he asked.

“Anger!” Karin shouted, before realizing the question wasn’t for her.

Mark’s voice, when it came, was even more mechanical than his eerie baseline. “What do you care?” He tilted his head toward heaven. “You don’t understand this. You come from New York, where everybody’s God, or something. Out here, people…My sister? She’s weird, but she’s my only ally on earth. Me and her, basically, against everybody. This woman?” He pointed and snorted. “You saw her try to attack me.” He sat down at the testing table and started to cry. “Where is she? I just miss her. I’d just like to see her again for five seconds. I’m afraid something may have happened to her.”

Karin Schluter echoed the moan. She raised her palms and took two steps toward the door, then stopped and sat down. The tape recorder was running. A part of Weber was already writing up this uncanny moment. Mark sat fiddling with the GSR meter. His eyes cast terrified looks around the room. He held the electrical leads in one hand. Then, as if convulsed by current, his fist clenched and he sat up. “Listen. I just had an idea. Can we try something? Can you just…?”

Mark offered Weber the leads. Weber thought to refuse, as affectionately as possible. But in two decades of field research, no one had ever refused his testing. He smiled and attached the contacts to his fingertips. “Fire when ready.”

Mark Schluter slid his pelvis forward. His limbs flailed like the blades of a tin windmill. From his jeans pocket he extracted a crumpled note. At the sight of it, his sister groaned again. Mark fixed his eyes on the meter. He unfolded the paper and handed it to Weber. In a frantic, leaky hand, almost unreadable, someone had scribbled:

I am No One

but Tonight on North Line Road

GOD led me to you

so You could Live

and bring back someone else.

“Look!” Mark cried out. “It moved. The needle jerked. It went right up to here. What does that mean? Tell me what that means.”

“You have to calibrate it,” Weber said.

“Have you seen this note before?” Mark kept his eye fixed on the meter. “Do you know who wrote this?”

Weber shook his head. “No.” Pure alien curiosity.

“It moved again! Man. Please don’t jerk me. We’re talking about my life, here.”

“I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you. But I don’t know anything about it.” Even to himself, he sounded fake.

Disgusted, Mark waved for him to remove the finger clips. He pointed toward the bed. “Hook her up.”

Karin was on her feet, both hands slicing the air. “Mark, I’ve told you all I know about the thing a hundred times.”

He wouldn’t quit until she sat and attached the leads to her fingers. Then, the barrage of questions. Who wrote this? Who found it? What does it mean? What am I supposed to do with it? She answered every accusation with increasing impatience.

“Nothing’s happening,” Mark cried. “Does that mean she’s telling the truth?”

It meant her skin was not changing conductance. “It doesn’t mean anything,” Weber said. “You have to calibrate it.”

Before Weber left that afternoon, he put it to Mark. “There’s a condition called Capgras. Very rarely, when the brain is hurt, people lose their ability to recognize—”

A primal howl cut him off. “Fuck. Don’t start with that, man. That’s what the Haz-doctor keeps saying. But he’s in on the whole thing. That woman is sucking his cock or something.” Mark, bare, stared at Weber, eyes begging. “I thought I could trust you, Shrinky.”

Weber fingered his beard. “You can,” he said, and fell silent.

“Besides,” the thin voice pleaded. “Isn’t it more scientific, just to go with the more likely explanation?”

Sylvie’s words that night from the MotoRest were honey out of stone. “Ah! I know that voice. Wait — don’t tell me. It’s the man who used to hang around here.”

He couldn’t remember everything he wanted to tell her. It didn’t matter. She was primed with her own stories.

“Your very clever daughter Jessica has just won an NSF grant for young researchers. Apparently, planet-hunting is still fundable, this year.” She quoted a handsome figure. “California will have to tenure her, just for the loot she’s bringing in.”

Jess, his Jess. My daughter, my ducats.

Sylvie launched into the day’s long adventure, her attempts to trap a family of raccoons that was holding regular book-club gatherings in the Weber attic. She planned to catch them alive and drive them around in circles for a long time in broad daylight, to bewilder them, before dropping them off behind a strip mall in Centereach.

At last she asked, “So what did you learn from your misidentifier today?”

He lay back on the rented bed, closed his eyes, and held the shoehorn of a phone against his cheek. “He’s got one thin scrap of sheet tin propped up between himself and dissolving. Just looking at him makes everything I think I know about consciousness melt into air.”

The conversation shifted; he had some trouble following where it wanted to go. He asked about the weather on Chickadee Way, how the place looked.

“Conscience Bay was just gorgeous, Man. Like glass. Like frozen time.”

“I can imagine,” he said. The needle would have jumped.

He worked late, going over his notes. A moist June chill that mocked his whole image of the Great Plains saturated his room. He could find no way to shut off the air conditioner or open a window. He lay in bed, in the amber glow of the clock, appraising himself. Midnight came and went, and his eyes wouldn’t close. He had seen the note before. Karin Schluter had Xeroxed it and stuffed the copy into the thick portfolio she’d shown him on his first day. Now, as he lay miles from sleep, he tried to decide whether he’d lied about not knowing it, or had just forgotten.

He’d seen true face blindness, and this wasn’t it. All his books described some flavor of agnosia — blindness to objects, blindness to places, blindness to age or expression or gaze. He’d written about people who couldn’t distinguish foods, cars, or coins, although some part of their brains still knew how to interact with the baffling objects. He’d told the story of Martha T., a devoted ornithologist, who overnight lost the ability to tell a wren from a red-bellied sapsucker, yet could still describe, in detail, how the birds differed. Several times in the books he described prosopagnosia. For truly vertiginous diseases, the brain was endlessly accommodating.

The Country of Surprise portrayed Joseph S. In his early twenties, he was shot in the head by a mugger’s small-caliber handgun, damaging a small region in his right inferotemporal region — the fusiform gyrus. He lost his ability to recognize acquaintances, friends, family, loved ones, or celebrities. He could walk past anyone and not know him, however often or recently they’d met. He even had trouble picking out his own mirror image.

“I know they are faces,” Joseph S. told Weber. “I can see the differences in each feature. But they aren’t distinctive. They mean nothing to me. Think of the leaves of an enormous maple. Put any two next to each other and you can see how different they are. But look up into the tree and try to name the leaves.”

Nothing to do with memory: Joseph could list in some detail accurate descriptions of features that friends of his ought to have. He just couldn’t recognize those features, when assembled into a face.

Despite his crippling damage, Joseph S. earned a doctorate in mathematics and pursued a successful university career. He scored off the charts on standard IQ tests, especially spatial reasoning, navigation, memory, and mental rotation. He described to Weber his elaborate compensatory systems: cues of voice, clothing, body type, and minute ratios of eye width to nose length to lip thickness. “I’ve gotten fast enough to fool a lot of people.”

Faces only: nothing else gave him trouble. In fact, he was better than most at picking out slight differences in nearly identical objects: pebbles, socks, sheep. But surviving in society depended upon performing staggering facial calculations constantly, as if they were child’s play. Joseph S. lived like a spy behind enemy lines, doing by laborious math and algorithm what everyone else did like breathing. Every moment out in public demanded vigilance. He said that the problem contributed to the breakup of his first marriage. His wife couldn’t bear his having to study her in order to pick her out of a crowd. “It very nearly cost me my current marriage, too.” He described seeing his second wife on campus one afternoon and embracing her. Only it wasn’t his wife. It was no one he knew.

“What we think of as a single, simple process,” Weber wrote,

is in fact a long assembly line. Vision requires careful coordination between thirty-two or more separate brain modules. Recognizing a face takes at least a dozen…We are hardwired for finding faces. Two Oreo cookies and a carrot can make an infant howl or laugh. Only: the many, delicate hardwires between modules can break at several different spots…

With varying damage to different areas, a person might lose his ability to distinguish sex, age, the emotional expression of a face, or the direction of someone’s attention. Weber described a patient who was completely unable to decide how attractive a given face seemed. In his own lab, he gathered data suggesting that some sufferers from face blindness were actually matching faces without their conscious minds knowing.

Few weeks went by when he didn’t receive letters from anxious readers struggling with some attenuated form of failing to recognize old acquaintances. Some were consoled by Weber’s bombshell: a simple neurological quirk that revealed how everyone suffered from a form of prosopagnosia. Even normal recognition fails when the observed face is upside down.

Mark Schluter was not face-blind. Just the reverse: he saw differences that were not there. He most resembled those people Weber had met for whom every change in expression could split into a new and separate person. That nightmare flashed across Weber’s closed lids just before he fell asleep, looking up into the million leaves of a tree towering above him, each leaf a life he had met once, a moment in a life, even a particular emotional aspect of that isolated moment, every look a separate object to identify, unique and multiplying into the billions, beyond anyone’s ability to simplify into names…

The third morning, he went alone to Dedham Glen. He needed more psychometry, to test for broader delusional tendencies. He found the place easily. Despite the tangled river valley, the town was a sheet of graph paper. Two days in this perfect grid and — barring any spatial-orienting lesions — one could find anything.

Three gigantic children were camped on the floor around Mark’s television. Mark, in his knit cap, sat between a badger in a prison outfit and a keg-chested man in hunting cap and sweats. Weber recognized them from Karin’s photographs.

On screen, a road through a rolling brown landscape reeled out from the horizon. The taillights of low-slung cars clawed across the veering asphalt. The three seated males jerked in unison with the taillights, jolting the way diabetic Jessica sometimes did, in the middle stages of insulin shock. The footage looked like home movies, handheld vérité motor sports overdubbed with a throbbing techno soundtrack. Then Weber saw the wires. Each of the trio was tethered by an umbilical to a game box. The race — part film, part cartoon — half derived from this trio’s brains.

The wires recalled Weber to graduate student days, the sunset of behaviorism: old laboratory experiments with pigeons and monkeys, creatures taught to want nothing except to press buttons and slide levers all day long, merging with the machine until they dropped from exhaustion. The three men had become the sinuous music, the serpentine road, the engine roar. But they showed no sign of dropping anytime soon. Changes on the screen produced changes in physiology, which fed back into the screen world.

The ribboning road bore hard to the right, floating, then falling. The cars lifted free, nosing into the air. Then the crunch of steel when chassis slammed back to earth and the three bodies absorbed the impact. The engines whined, choking on the pavement. The noise crashed like surf as the drivers ground for higher gears. Specks far down the chute of scenery swelled into other speeding vehicles, which the foreground cars scrambled to pass. No saying where the race unfolded. Somewhere empty. Some square state with more cows than people, midway between prairie and desert. A few tract homes, filling stations, strip malls — the tile set for heartland America. For a few seconds, it rained. Then the rain turned to sleet, sleet to snow. Daytime faded to dark. In another moment night lifted, as the race ground a few dozen more miles down the imaginary road.

Whatever damage Mark Schluter suffered, his thumbs and their wiring were still intact. Recent studies by a colleague of Weber’s suggested that enormous areas of the motor cortex of game-cartridge children were devoted to thumbs, and that many in the emerging species Homo ludens now favored their thumbs over their index fingers. The game controller had at last consummated one of the three great leaps of primate evolution.

The trio on the floor elbowed one another, their bodies extensions of the cars they piloted. They hit an open stretch where the road stopped whipping and became straightaway through sandy hills toward a looming finish line. The racers accelerated, jostling for position. They banked into a last hard right. One of the cars slid wide through the curve and fishtailed. The driver overcompensated, swinging back onto the road, into his companions’ vehicles. All three cars locked up and soared into a spectacular corkscrew. They came down, plowing into a file of slower cars cruising into the finish. One car ricocheted out of the pack and struck the filled grandstand. The screen turned a bright smear. People fled in all directions, termites from a torched hive. The car exploded into an oily flare. An arcing cry cracked open and fell back to earth as laughter. Out of the flames emerged a crash-suited figure, charred from helmet to boots, dancing crazily.

“Holy shit,” the badger felon said. “That’s what I call a big finish there, Gus.”

“Un-fucking-be-lieve-able,” the keg-chest confirmed. “Greatest fireball ever.”

But the third driver, the one Weber came to see, just droned. “Wait. Give me that puppy back. One more time.”

The engines dead, the badger glanced up and saw Weber in the doorway. He nudged Mark. “Company, Gus.”

Mark spun around, his eyes both lit and scared. Seeing Weber, he snorted. “That’s not company. That’s the Incredible Shrinking Man. Hey. This guy’s famous. Tons more famous than most people realize.”

“Pull up a spot,” the hunting cap offered. “We were just winding up, anyway.”

Weber reached into his pocket and turned on his voice recorder. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take another lap. I’ll just sit and collect my thoughts.”

“Hey! I’m forgetting myself. Where the hell are my manners?” Mark scrambled to his feet, shoving off of his cursing friends. “Shrinkster, meet Duane-o Cain. And this one here…” He pointed to the badger. “Hey, Gus. Who the hell you supposed to be, again?” The badger shot him the finger. Mark laughed, an emptying gas cylinder. “Whatever you say. This one’s Tommy Rupp. One of the world’s great drivers.”

Duane Cain snorted. “Driver? Putter, maybe.”

Weber watched the trio maneuver to a new starting line. He was thirty-four years old when he first saw one of these boxes. He’d gone to pick up seven-year-old Jessica from her girlfriend’s house. He found the girls parked in front of the tube and scolded them. “What kind of children are you, watching television on such a gorgeous day?”

The question reduced the girls to derisive howls. It wasn’t television, they sneered. It was, in fact, lobotomized table tennis stood on end. He watched in fascination. Not the game: them. The game was chunky, flat, and repetitive. But the two girls: they were off somewhere in deep symbolic space.

“How is this better than real Ping-Pong?” he asked tiny Jess. He genuinely wanted to know her answer. The same question haunted his work. What was it about the species that would save the symbol and discard the thing it stood for?

His seven-year-old sighed. “Dad,” she told him, with that first hint of contempt for adulthood and all its trouble with the obvious. “It’s just cleaner.”

His daughter never really looked back. Eight years later, she built her own computer from parts. By eighteen, she was using it to analyze the traces of light from a backyard telescope. Now almost thirty, living in Southern California, that most abstract of states, she was winning grants from the NSF for finding new planets, at least one of which would surely turn out to be cleaner than Earth.

The trio of boys conferred without words. They ran laps of intricate ballet beyond the reach of any choreographer. Weber studied Mark for signs of deficit. No saying how coordinated he had once been. But even now, Mark could run rings around Weber in any vehicle, real or phantom. He drove like a maniac. The occasional stunning fireball drew no more than a viscous laugh.

Weber was noting down Mark’s eye movements when a shout tore through the room. It seemed just another of the game’s shattering sound effects. He turned to see Karin in the doorway, her face aflame. Her hands were up, clutching the back of her skull. Her elbows flared. “Animals. What do you think you’re doing?”

The males scrambled to their feet. Tom Rupp recovered first. “We thought we’d come keep our friend company. He needed a little diversion.”

Her left hand grabbed her neck while her right cut the air. “Are you insane?”

Duane Cain twisted under the injustice. “You want to get back on the Prozac for a minute? We’re just here to supply companionship.”

Karin waved her nails at the video game, the road still snaking mindlessly across the screen. “Companionship? That’s what you call putting him through this again?” She shot Weber a look of betrayal.

“The man’s not objecting,” Rupp said. “Are you, buddy?”

Mark stood grasping his controller, one cheek screwed up. “We were just doing what we always do.” He held up the game pad. “What’s with the freaking?”

“Exactly.” Cain looked at Weber, then back at Karin. “See what we’re saying? It’s not like this is real, or anything. We’re not putting anybody through anything.”

“Don’t you two have jobs? Or have you become completely unemployable?”

Rupp stepped toward her, and she backed toward the door. “I took home thirty-one hundred dollars this month. How about you?” Karin crossed her arms under her breasts and looked down. Weber felt some old, unfinished business between them.

“Working?” Duane said. “It’s Sunday, for Christ’s sake.”

A giggle leaked out of Mark. “Even God didn’t bust his balls all the time, Sarge.”

“Go away,” she said. “Go kill some cows.”

Rupp smiled a little lemonade smile and flicked the back of his fingernails up his cheek. “Give it up, Ms. Gandhi. You take a hit out on a cow every time you bite into a burger. You know what I think? Our man here is right. Arab terrorists kidnaped Karin Schluter and replaced her with a foreign agent.”

Duane Cain glanced nervously at Weber. But Mark just laughed like a thudding cowbell. Karin sliced through the men toward her brother. Reaching him, she lifted the controller from his hands and placed it on the console. She popped the disc from the machine and the screen went blue. She crossed to Weber and handed him the platter of offending code. She touched his elbow. “Ask these two what they know about Mark’s accident.”

A cry issued from her brother. “Uh, hello? Are you on crack?”

“They used to play games like this, only out on real country roads.”

Mark leaned close to Weber. He whispered, “This is what I mean about her.”

Tom Rupp sneered. “This is defamation. Do you have the slightest evidence…?”

“Evidence! Don’t talk to me like I’m some dimwit policeman. Who do you think I am? I’m his sister. You hear me? His own flesh and blood. You want evidence? I’ve been out there. Three sets of tracks?”

Mark dropped into the chair next to Weber. “Out where? What tracks?” He curled up, clutching his elbows.

Duane Cain formed a T with his hands. “Deep breathing time. Would it kill anyone if we all just chilled for a second?”

“Maybe you’ve managed to fool the police. But I hold you personally responsible. If things never get better…”

“Hey!” Mark said. “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

Tom Rupp shook his head. “There’s something seriously wrong with you, Karin. You might want to consult with the professional while he’s here.”

“And then to make him play racing games, drag him through all that again, like nothing ever happened? Have you lost your minds?”

Mark sprang from his chair. “Who the hell do you think you are? You’ve got no power here!” He made for her, arms thrust outward. She turned, instinctively, into the arms of Rupp, who opened to protect her. Mark stopped short, hung his hands on his neck, and whimpered. Not what I meant. Not what you think.

Weber watched the free-for-all, already telling Sylvie. She would show him no sympathy. You’re the one who wanted to get out of the lab. Who wanted to see this thing up close, before you died.

Karin pushed herself from Rupp’s arms. “I’m sorry, but you two have to leave.”

“Already gone.” Rupp gave her a dress salute, snappy National Guard issue, which Mark, by reflex, mimicked.

Duane Cain wobbled his extended thumb and pinky at Mark. “Keep it real, bro. We’ll be back.”

When they were gone and calm returned, Weber turned to Karin. “Mark and I should probably work alone for a bit.” Mark pointed two fingers at her and chuckled. Karin’s face fell. She hadn’t thought Weber capable of such betrayal. She spun and fled the room. Weber followed her into the hall, calling her until she stopped. “I’m sorry. I needed to watch Mark with his friends.”

She exhaled and rubbed her cheeks. “With his friends? That part of him hasn’t changed.”

Something occurred to Weber, from reviewing the literature the night before. “How does your brother seem when you talk to him on the phone?”

“I…haven’t called him. I’m just here, every day. I hate phones.”

“Ah! We can bond over that.”

“I haven’t called him since the accident. No point. He’d just hang up on me. At least that’s one thing he can’t do face-to-face.”

“Would you like to try an experiment?”

She was ready to try anything.

Mark Schluter sat toying with a video-game controller, turning it over in his palms as if it were some sealed bivalve he couldn’t open. Something had gone out of the game. He looked up at Weber, imploring. “You making some secret plans with her?”

“Not exactly.”

“You think she’s right?”

“About what?”

“About those guys,” Mark snapped.

“I couldn’t say. What do you think?”

Mark flinched. He sucked in a mouthful of air and held it for fifteen seconds, fingering his tracheotomy scar. “You’re supposed to be Dr. Brainiac. You gotta explain all this crap to me.”

Weber fell back on professional training. “It might help us both figure out what happened if we worked through a few tests.” Not exactly a lie, per se. He’d seen stranger things happen. As hopes went, it was qualified enough.

Mark stroked his scarred face and sighed. “Fine. Whatever you got. Knock yourself out.”

They worked for a long time. Mark hunched over the tests, gripping a pen as doggedly as he’d gripped the controller. His focus was all over the road, but he managed to complete most of the tasks. He showed little cognitive impairment. His emotional maturity tested below average, but not much lower, Weber guessed, than the other parties to the morning’s confrontation. All of America would have tested below average on that, nowadays. Mark showed some features of depression. Weber would have been stunned if he didn’t. Borderline depression was a signal indicator of appropriate response, in the summer of 2002.

Other tests ferreted out paranoia. Until the mid 1970s, many clinicians maintained that Capgras was the by-product of a paranoiac condition. Another quarter-century had reversed cause and effect. Ellis and Young, in the late 1990s, suggested that patients who lose affective response to familiar people would reasonably become paranoid. So it always went, with ideas: go back far enough, and moving clouds caused the wind. Wilder reversals were on their way, should Weber live to witness them. The day would come when the last clean cause and effect would disappear into thickets of tangled networks.

But indisputably, Capgras and paranoia correlated. No surprise, then, when Mark’s scores showed mild paranoid tendencies. Just what horror the flashes of persecution and clowning held at bay, Weber’s tests could not determine.

Mark marveled at Weber’s professional patter. “Man! If I could talk like you, I’d be getting laid on a daily basis.” He launched into imitative psychobabble, almost convincing enough to earn him a comfortable wage somewhere on the West Coast.

Weber said, “I’m going to read you a story, and I want you to repeat it.” He took out the standard text and read at the usual speed. “‘Once upon a time, there was a farmer who fell ill. He went to the town doctor, but the doctor failed to cure him. The doctor told him, “Only a happy look will make you happy again.” So the farmer walked all through town looking for someone happy, but he could find no one. He went home. But just before he reached his farm, he saw a happy-looking deer racing across the hills, and began to feel a little better.’ Now you tell it back to me.”

“Whatever turns you on. So there’s this guy,” Mark growled. “Who got banged up and was in a depression. He went to the hospital, but nobody would help. They told him to go look for someone happier than he was. So he went downtown, but he couldn’t find anyone. So he went home. But on his way home, he saw this animal, and he thought, ‘That thing is happier than I am.’ The end.” He shrugged, waiting for his score and dismissing it at the same time.

That afternoon, at a break in the testing, Mark asked, “Did they build you, too?”

The recorder was still running. Weber turned nonchalant. The creature he was hunting relaxed in a patch of sunlight, just in front of him. “What do you mean?”

“Did they build you from parts, as well?” The simple tone of voice, the bodily ease: he might have been greeting a neighbor over the back fence. Sweetly polite, but poised over the bottomless pit.

“You don’t think I’m human?”

“‘I couldn’t say,’” Mark mimicked. “‘What do you think?’” His grazing eyes swung to some movement behind Weber. “Hey! Barbie Doll!”

Weber turned, startled. Barbara Gillespie stood just next to him, in a tailored, ochre skirt suit fit for a job interview. She greeted him covertly in the fraction of a second before addressing Mark. “Mr. S.! You are due for a complete oil change.”

Mark banked a glance at Weber, filled with criminal glee. “Don’t worry. It’s nowhere near as interesting as it sounds.”

Barbara looked at Weber. “Should I come back later? Do you two need more time?”

The tacit alliance unnerved Weber. “We were just wrapping up, in fact.”

She peeked at him, almost a question. She turned to Mark and pointed toward the bathroom. “You heard the doctor!”

Mark squeezed himself up on his feet. He bobbed through the bathroom door, then popped right out again. “Oh! I think I might need some help.”

Barbara shook her head. “Nice try, darling. Leave the towel on this time, okay?”

“She called me darling! You heard her, right, Shrink? You’ll testify in court?”

As the door closed again, Barbara turned to Weber. She held his gaze: again the unnerving connection. “Could you make a note that his sex drive seems unaffected?”

Weber touched his earlobe. “Forgive me for asking the lamest question on earth. Have we run across each other before?”

“You mean before a couple of days ago?”

He failed to smile. He’d reached an age when everyone he met fit into one of the thirty-six available physiognomic templates. The number of people he met once and never saw again had reached devastating proportions. He’d crossed a threshold, around fifty, when every new person he met reminded him of someone else. The problem was exacerbated when total strangers greeted him familiarly. He could pass someone in the halls of the university medical center, then see them six months later at the Stop ’N Shop, overwhelmed by a sense of collegial connection. The virgin prairies of Nebraska were a dream, after the minefields of Long Island and Manhattan. Yet he’d had two days to locate this woman, and still came up empty-handed.

Barbara tried not to smile. “I’d remember if we had.”

So she did know who he was, maybe had even read him. What was a nursing-home attendant in her early forties doing reading books like his? The thought was inexcusably bigoted, especially for a man who’d once devoted a whole chapter to the category errors and prejudices that haunt the human circuitry. He studied her, compelled by her unlikelihood. “How long have you been with Dedham Glen?”

She glanced skyward and made a comic calculation. “For a while, now.”

“Where were you before?” Absurd, trying to hit the moon with a few scattered stones in the dark.

“Oklahoma City.”

Colder and colder. “Same line of work?”

“Similar. I was at a large public facility down there.”

“What brought you to Nebraska?”

She smiled and dipped her head, like holding an apple under her chin. “I guess I just couldn’t take the hustle and bustle of the metropolis.” Something far away held her interest. Discovered, she turned shy. The look flustered him, although he’d asked for it. He looked away. Only the appearance of Mark Schluter in the bathroom doorway saved him. He was holding a towel in front of his naked body. The knit cap had disappeared, exposing the patchy, returning hair. Boyish, he beamed at his caregiver. “I’m ready for my pain now, ma’am.”

With two arching eyebrows, Barbara excused herself, weirdly intimate, like the two of them had grown up three houses down from each other, gone to grade school together, written each other hundreds of letters, flirted one evening with testing more serious waters, then backed away, honorary blood relations for life.

Weber gathered his papers and retreated to the lobby. He’d gotten what he’d come for, acquired the requisite data, seen up close one of the most bizarre aberrations the self could suffer. He had enough material now, if not for a write-up in the medical literature, at least for a haunting narrative case history. He could do little more, here. It was time to head home, resume the rounds of colloquium, classroom, laboratory, and writing desk, the routine that had provided his middle age with a degree of productive reflection wholly undeserved.

But before he left, he’d just ask Barbara Gillespie about Mark’s changes over the last several weeks. He had Dr. Hayes’s observations, of course, and Karin’s. But only this woman saw Mark constantly, with no investment to sway her. He sat in the lobby on one end of a dark vinyl sofa across from a palsied woman slightly younger than he in an epic struggle with the zipper on her unnecessary jacket. He wanted to help, but knew enough not to. He felt oddly nervous, waiting for Barbara, as if he were eighteen again, at a graduation dance. He checked his watch every two minutes. At the fourth check, he sprang to his feet, startling the jacket woman, who, frightened, tore her zipper back down to the starting line. He’d forgotten having asked Karin Schluter to phone her brother at exactly three o’clock, now just minutes away.

He hovered outside Mark’s closed door, shamelessly eavesdropping. He heard the woman talking, with laughing grunts from Mark. The phone rang. The boy cursed and called out, “I’m coming, I’m coming, already. Hold your damn horsemeat.”

Over the sound of banged furniture, Barbara’s voice soothed. “Take your time. They’ll wait.”

Weber knocked at the door and let himself in. A startled Barbara Gillespie looked up from where she had been flipping through magazines with her charge. Weber slipped into the room, closing the door behind him. Mark stood with his back turned, struggling with the phone. His arms shook as he shouted, “Hello? Who is this?” Then shocked silence. “Oh my God! Where are you? Where have you been?”

Weber glanced at Gillespie. The attendant was staring at him, guessing not only the caller but Weber’s role. Her eyes questioned him. His turn to look away, guilty.

Mark’s voice cracked and dampened, welcoming a loved one back from the dead. “You’re here? You’re in Kearney? Jesus. Thank God! Get over here, now. No! I am not listening to another word. I’m not talking to the phone, after all this. You won’t believe the shit I’ve been through. I can’t believe you weren’t around for this. I’m not…I’m just saying. Get over here. I need to look at you. I need to see. You know where I am? Oh, right, duh. Hurry your ass. Okay. No. Stop. I’m not talking. I’m hanging up now. You hear that?” He leaned down, demonstrating. “Hanging up.” He put the receiver on the hook. He lifted it up again, listening. He turned from the phone toward the others, glowing. He took Weber’s reappearance without comment. He was flying. “You are not going to believe who that was! Karin the S!”

Barbara cast a glance at Weber and rose. “Lots to do,” she announced. She mussed Mark Schluter’s bare head and brushed past Weber.

Weber brushed past the elated Mark and followed her out into the hallway. “Miss Gillespie,” he called, surprising even himself. “Would you have a minute?”

She stopped and shook her head, waiting for him to come toward her, out of Mark’s earshot. “It’s not fair.”

He nodded, too clinically. Her distress surprised him. Surely she dealt with worse, every day. “It’s a severe blow. But people are remarkably pliant. The brain will surprise us.”

She raised her eyebrow. “I mean the call.”

The accusation irritated him. She knew nothing of the literature, of differential diagnostics, of this man’s cognitive or emotional prospects. An hourly-wage staffer. He calmed himself. When the words came out, they were as level as the prairie horizon. “It’s something we needed to determine.”

The word formed in her face: We? “I’m sorry. I’m just an aide. The nurses and therapists can tell you a lot more. Excuse me. I’m running way late.” She knocked and disappeared into another patient’s room, two doors down.

Flustered, Weber returned to Mark’s. Mark was spinning on one heel. Seeing Weber, he pumped both hands in the air. “My damn sister! Can you believe it? She’ll be here in a minute. Man, she’s got a lot of explaining to do.”

Weber hadn’t really expected the experiment to succeed. Experimental bias, Dr. Hayes would call it. Redundant: merely proposing an experiment betrayed an expectation. Yes, he suspected this thing was more than a simple short circuit. For a disconnection between the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex to run roughshod over all higher cognition mocked any trust one put in consciousness. Whatever other reasons Weber’s reason had, some part of him hoped that a dramatic phone interaction might prove therapeutic. And maybe that was the greater cruelty, the wishful thinking that signed off on unapproved tests on live subjects.

Mark stopped pacing when Karin Schluter appeared, triumphant, in the doorway. Something had changed: she’d done something to her hair — cut and waved it. Powder-blue eyeliner and apricot lips. A pair of stone-washed jeans and a too-snug T-shirt with a paw print across her breasts reading, Kearney High School, Home of the Bearcats. Cheerleader Karin, the one before Goth Karin. Weber had given her one awful sliver of hope, and she’d run with it. She swept into the room, arms out, her face radiant with relief, ready to hug them both. But as she closed the gap, Mark recoiled.

“Don’t touch me! That was you on the phone? You haven’t tortured me enough? You had to pretend she was here? Where is she? What have you done with her?”

A cry came from both siblings. Weber turned away as the noise traveled down the hall, caught up with Barbara Gillespie, and confirmed her. The experiment had gotten away from him. But the results were all his.

That evening, with Sylvie, he recounted the day’s stories. How Mark and his friends played at racing, as if it meant nothing. How Karin had melted down, seeing them. How Mark had performed so strangely on the tests, and his explanations for every failure. How he’d soared at the sound of his sister, then shrieked at the sight of her. Weber didn’t mention the nurse’s aide half-accusing him on an ethics charge.

For every story he gave Sylvie, she told him one back. But by the next morning, he felt as if he’d invented all of hers.

Weber had worked with several patients who could not recognize their own body parts. Asomatognosia: it arose surprisingly often, almost always when strokes in the right hemisphere paralyzed a victim’s left side. He combined the subjects in print under the name Mary H. One sixty-year-old woman, the first of the Marys, claimed her ruined arm was “pestering” her.

Pestering how?

“Well, I don’t know whose it is. And I find that disturbing, Doctor.”

Could it be yours?

“Impossible, Doctor. Don’t you think I would know my own hand?”

He made her trace the limb with her own right hand, all the way down from her shoulder. Everything connected. So whose hand is this, then?

“It couldn’t be yours, could it, Doctor?”

But it’s connected to you.

“You’re a doctor. You know you can’t always believe what you see.”

Other, subsequent Marys gave their limbs names. One elderly woman called hers “The Iron Lady.” A male ambulance driver in his fifties called his “Mr. Limp Chimp.” They ascribed personalities to their arms, whole histories. They talked, argued with, even tried to feed them. “Come on, Mr. Limp Chimp. You know you’re hungry.”

They did everything but own them. One woman said her father left her his arm when he died. “I wish he hadn’t. It just falls on me. Falls on my chest, when I’m sleeping. Why did he want me to have this? It’s burdening me something awful.”

A forty-eight-year-old auto mechanic told Weber that the paralyzed arm next to him in bed was his wife’s. “She’s in the hospital, now. She’s had a stroke. She’s lost control of her arm. So…here it is. I guess I’m taking care of it for her.”

If that’s her arm, Weber asked, where’s yours?

“Well, right here, of course!”

Can you lift your arm?

“I am lifting it, Doctor.”

Can you clap your hands?

The lone, good right hand flapped in the air.

Are you clapping?

“Yes.”

I can’t hear anything, can you?

“Well, it’s soft all right. But that’s because there’s not a whole lot to clap about.”

Personal confabulation, the neurologist Feinberg called it. A story to link the shifting self back to the senseless facts. Reason was not impaired here; logic still worked on any other topic but this. Only the map of the body, the feel of it, had been fractured. And logic was not above redistributing its own indisputable parts in order to make a stubborn sense of wholeness true again. Lying in his rented room at 2:00 a.m., Weber could almost feel the fact in the limbs he lay numbering: a single, solid fiction always beat the truth of our scattering.

He woke fitfully, from a dream where his work had gone terribly wrong. He was still hypnopompic. Elevated pulse and damp skin. A cold process throbbed just below his sternum. Something had happened in New York that he needed to fix. His dream had been on the verge of naming it. Something that marred everything he’d made in the last two decades. Some change in climate, the wind turning against him, exposing the obvious, all the evidence that he was the last to notice. And for a moment before full consciousness, he remembered feeling the same low-grade dread on previous nights.

The spectral red glow of the clock said 4:10 a.m. Irregular meals and a strange environment, crashing blood sugar, sleep-doped prefrontal cortex, ancient physiological cycles linked to the earth’s spin: the same chemical flux behind any dark night of the soul. Weber closed his eyes again and tried to bring down his pulse, clear his mind of the night’s wild imaginings. He worked to locate himself and settle into the stream of his breathing, but he kept returning to a checklist of hazy indictments. It took until 4:30 a.m. to name what he was feeling: shame.

He’d always slept effortlessly, on demand. Sylvie marveled at him. “You must have the conscience of a choirboy.” She herself would miss a night’s sleep if she showed up so much as five minutes late for a dentist’s appointment. His only bad stretch of insomnia had been in his first months of medical school, after they’d moved from Columbus to Cambridge. Years later, he’d had several rough nights after giving up clinical practice. Then, another restless week after Jessica told the two of them her long-held secret, a disclosure that distressed Weber not because he objected in the slightest but because Jess had needed to hide it from them for so long. His own fault: all the times he’d teased his daughter about boys, admiring her leisurely approach to the hunt, he was killing bits of her.

He’d had stretches — the first year in his new Stony Brook lab; the sudden onset of his writing vocation — when he hadn’t needed sleep at all. He’d work past midnight, then rise after an hour or two with fresh ideas. And the same Sylvie who marveled that he could sleep within seconds of his head touching the pillow stood in awe of his ability to go night after night on almost nothing. “A camel, that’s what you are. A camel of consciousness.”

She wouldn’t have recognized him now. He lay still and tried to empty himself. Resting is as good as sleep, his mother always claimed, half a century ago. Did researchers ever really disprove folk wisdom? But even resting lay beyond him. By five-thirty, the longest eighty minutes he’d lived through in years, he gave up. He dressed in the dark and went downstairs. The lobby was empty except for a young Hispanic woman behind the desk, who whispered good morning and said that coffee wouldn’t be ready for half an hour. Weber gave her a sheepish wave. She was reading a college textbook — organic chemistry.

Dawn was starting to fuse. He made out shapes in the indigo light, but not yet colors. The street was lovely, cool, and dormant. He cut across the asphalt parkway toward the stunted commercial strip. A single light truck nosed around the Mobil station across the street. His ears adjusted, tuning in to complete cacophony. The dawn symphony: hoots and jeers, mocking whistles, chips, slides, arpeggios, and scales. At this hour, he stood little chance of being arrested for vagrancy. He stopped at the far end of the MotoRest parking lot, closed his filmy eyes, and listened.

The songs came on, mathematical, melodious, their elaborate patterns slowly mutating. Some were as singable as any human tune. He counted, sensitizing to the calls that played off one another, each a solo against a mass chorus. He lost count after a dozen, unsure where to lump and where to split. Every complex riff was identifiable, although Weber could identify none. Softer, in the middle distance, he heard the shush of cars along Interstate 80 whooshing like sprung balloons.

He opened his eyes: still in Kearney. A diffident commercial strip marked by a forest of metal sequoias bearing harsh, cheery signage. The usual gamut of franchises — motel, gas, convenience store, and fast food — reassured the accidental pilgrim that he was somewhere just like anywhere. Progress would at last render every place terminally familiar. He wandered into the intersection and sniffed his way toward town.

The arid chain stores along the strip gave way, in a handful of blocks, to gingerbread Victorians with wraparound porches. Just past these lay the core of an old downtown. The ghost of a prairie outpost, circa 1890, still looked out from the high, squared-off brick storefront façades. Light was rising. He could now read the posters in the shop windows: Celebrate Freedom Rally; Corvette Show; Faith In Bloom Garden Tour. He passed something called The Runza Hut, sealed up and dark, hiding its purpose from foreign interlopers.

The town shook itself awake. Three or four people moved along the street across from him. He passed a monument to the local dead of the two world wars. The whole tableau left him uneasy. The streets were too wide, the houses and shops too ample, too much wasted lot between them. Kearney had been conceived on too grand a scale, back when they gave land away for free, back before the place’s real destiny became clear. Its lanes were laid out in a grid of numbered streets and avenues, as if it had been in danger of sprouting into a full-scale Manhattan against the epic emptiness enclosing it.

Weber sat on a bench in front of the monument, searching through the last two days for what had so unsettled him. He considered Mark Schluter, the man’s uninterrupted, unthinking trust in his shattered self. But stopping and thinking about Mark proved a mistake. There on the too-spacious street, vertigo flooded back over Weber. Something crucial was escaping him. He had left himself vulnerable to some charge. The sidewalk widened and rolled under his feet. No rational explanation.

He stood and walked two more blocks, looking for anything open at this hour. A greasy spoon materialized across the way. He pushed open the door, rattling a Jesus fish on the glass. He recoiled, even as a cowbell on the inside handle announced him. At a central table, four weathered men in denim and caps that sported hybrid seed logos turned to look at him. He shied into the room and hovered by the cash register until a woman called from the kitchen, “Seat yourself, hon.”

He stumbled to a booth away from the farmers. As he dropped onto the spongy red seat, the night’s ordeal flared up again. Exactly the kind of low-grade agitation that responded nicely to the antianxiety medication that his colleagues now dished out in bulk. Knowing how quickly the body stopped making externally supplied substances, Weber tried not to take anything stronger than a multivitamin. Even these he had forgotten to pack, and so had taken nothing for the last three days. But so slight a change could not possibly account for this bout.

His fingers drummed on the booth’s gray Formica. From two feet above them, he watched them type. A laugh bubbled up from his clenched belly and broke over him. He took his typing hands and cradled them in each other. Diagnosis stared him in the face. He, the last life scientist to go online, was suffering from e-mail withdrawal.

The waitress appeared at boothside, dressed like something out of a movie: half ward nurse, half meter maid. His age, if she was a day: thirty years too old to wait on tables. He grinned at her, a reprieved idiot. The waitress shook her head. “Don’t you need a license to be that happy before you’ve had your coffee?” She held up two Pyrex coffee pots. He pointed to the one that wasn’t orange.

He’d forgotten about midwesterners. He could no longer read them, his people, the residents of the Great Central Flyover. Or rather, his theories about them, honed through his first twenty years of life, had died from lack of longitudinal data. They were, by various estimates, kinder, colder, duller, shrewder, more forthright, more covert, more taciturn, more guarded, and more gregarious than the mode of the country’s bean curve. Or else they were that mode: the fat, middle part of the graph that fell away to nothing on both coasts. They’d become an alien species to him, although he was one of them, by habit and birth.

He rubbed his bald spot and shook his head. With a little more edge, she asked, “What can I get you, hon?” He looked around the booth, confused. A half-sigh slipped out of her, the first of a long day. “You need a menu? We’ve got one of everything.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Spinach crêpes?”

Her mouth barely tightened. “Fresh out. Anything else, though.”

When she left with his order—two over easy, with twin pigs—he fished out his absurd cell phone. Like carrying around a little science-fiction phaser in his pocket. He’d slipped it into his trousers when he left his room, already contemplating a double descent into vice. He checked his watch, adding an hour for New York. Still too early. He eavesdropped on the table of weathered men, but what little they said was pressed into so fierce a shorthand that it might as well have been Pawnee. One of the circle, a bulbous face with luxurious ear and nose hair, whose blood-red cap read “IBP,” worked away on a toothpick, carving it into a tiny totem pole with his deft incisors. “You can’t let yourself get cocky,” the man said. “Those Arabs will walk across a desert to take revenge on a mirage.”

“Well, the Bible near says as much, already,” his tablemate agreed.

No need to alarm Sylvie, really. She could tell him nothing. Had there been anything wrong, she’d have mentioned it the night before. Besides, if she caught him using a cell phone from a public place to quell a nervous feeling, she’d never let him live it down.

The waitress brought his sausage and eggs. “You did say wheat toast, didn’t you, dear?” He nodded. They hadn’t mentioned toast, as far as Weber could remember. She poured him fresh coffee and turned toward the farmers’ table. She stopped and swung back around to him. “You’re the brain man from New York? The one who came out for a look at Mark Schluter.”

He flushed. “That’s right. How…?”

“Wish I could tell you it was psychic powers.” She spiraled the coffee pots near her ears. “My niece is a friend of the boys. She showed me a book of yours. Said you were out. We all think it’s a tragedy, what’s happened to Mark. But there’s some who say that if it hadn’t been that particular accident, it would’ve been another much like it. Bonnie says he’s pretty different these days. Not that he wasn’t kinda different before.”

“He’s bruised up, yes. But the brain is a surprising place. You’d be shocked what it can recover from.”

“This is what I am forever trying to tell my husband.”

Something clicked in him. He felt the thrill of dredging up something too small to merit remembering. “Your niece. Is she thin, light-complected? Long, straight, black hair down below her shoulders? Does she knit her own clothes?”

The waitress threw out one hip and tipped her head. “Now, I know for a fact she hasn’t met you yet.”

He spiraled his hands by his ears. “Psychic powers.”

“Ho-kay,” she said. “You got my dollar. I’ll go buy your damn book.”

She went to the circle of men and topped off their coffees. They flirted with her outrageously, joking about her pair of hot, bottomless pots. The same jokes that filled Long Island diners, jokes Weber had long ago stopped hearing in his native country. She leaned into the group, and they spoke together in soft voices. Surely about him. The alien species.

She came back his way, waving coffee pots in triumph. “You were looking at pictures of her at Pioneer Pizza. That fellow there—” She pointed with the decaf. “I won’t say ‘gentleman’—has a daughter who waited on you.”

Weber pressed his hand to his forehead. “I think I’m outnumbered here.”

“Small town for you, i’nit? Everybody’s somebody’s kin. Take that plate for you, hon? Or are you still working on it?”

“No, no. My labors now have ended.”

As soon as his waitress left, dread washed back over him. Coffee was a mistake, after such a night. He never drank caffeinated anymore. Sylvie had kept him clean for close to two years. Sausage, too: a gross miscalculation. Four days in Nebraska; four days away from the lab, the office, the writing desk. He checked his watch; still too early to call out east. But he called Bob Cavanaugh’s cell so infrequently that he’d earned the right to abuse it now.

His editor’s preemptive “Gerald!” knocked Weber back. Caller ID: one of the world’s truly evil technologies. The receiver was not supposed to know the sender before the sender knew the receiver. Weber’s own cell phone had Caller ID built into the dial screen. But he always averted his eyes. Cavanaugh sounded pleased. “I know why you’re calling!”

The words crawled up Weber’s spine. “Do you?”

“You haven’t seen them yet? I sent them as attachments, yesterday.”

“Seen what? I’m on the road. Nebraska. I haven’t—”

“God help you. What is it, still smoke signals out there?”

“No, I’m sure they…I just haven’t…”

“Gerald. Why are you whispering?”

“Well, I’m in a public place.” He looked around. No one in the restaurant was looking at him. They didn’t have to.

“Gerald Weber!” Affectionate but merciless. “You aren’t calling at this hour to ask how things are going?”

“Well, not entirely, no. I just—”

“Slippery slope, Gerald. Three more books and you’ll be asking for sales figures. I, for one, am delighted to witness your descent into humanity. Well, set your mind at rest. We’re off on a pretty good foot.”

“A pretty good foot? Is the creature in question a biped?”

“Ah, biology humor. The Kirkus review is a little mixed, but the Booklist is to die for. Hang on. I’m on the train. I copied myself on the laptop. I’ll read you the highlights.”

Weber listened. This couldn’t be it. He couldn’t be worried about the book. The Country of Surprise was the richest thing he’d ever written. It consisted of a dozen re-created case histories of patients who’d suffered what Weber studiously refused to call brain damage. Each of his twelve subjects had been changed so profoundly by illness or accident that each called into question the solidity of the self. We were not one, continuous, indivisible whole, but instead, hundreds of separate subsystems, with changes in any one sufficient to disperse the provisional confederation into unrecognizable new countries. Who could take issue with that?

Listening to the review, Weber was all islands. Cavanaugh stopped reading. Weber was supposed to respond. “Does that please you?” he asked his editor.

“Me? I think it’s great. We’re using it for the ad.”

Weber nodded, to someone half a continent away. “What didn’t Kirkus like?”

Another silence at the other end. Cavanaugh, finessing. “Something about the case histories being too anecdotal. Too much philosophy and not enough car chases. They may have used the word portentous.”

“Portentous in what sense?”

“You know, Gerald, I wouldn’t worry about it. Nobody can discover you anymore. You’ve become a big target; more points for taking you down than for praising you. It won’t hold us up in the slightest.”

“Do you have the piece handy?”

Cavanaugh sighed and retrieved the file. He read it to Weber. “There. Masochist. Now forget it. Fuck the peasants. So what are you doing in Nebraska? Something to do with the new project, I hope?”

Weber flinched. “Oh, you know me, Bob. Everything’s the new project.”

“Are you examining someone?”

“A young accident victim who thinks his sister is an impostor.”

“Strange. That’s what my sister thinks of me.”

Weber laughed, dutifully. “We all play ourselves.”

“This is for the new one? I thought I was buying a book about memory.”

“That’s what’s so interesting. His sister matches everything he remembers about her, but he’s ready to discard memory in favor of gut reaction. All the remembered evidence in the world can’t hold a candle to low-level hunch.”

“Wild. What’s the prognosis?”

“You’ll have to buy the book, Robert. Twenty-five bucks, at your local chain.”

“At that price, I’ll wait to read the reviews first.”

They hung up. Weber snapped back to the restaurant, the smell of bacon grease. The reception of his work was almost irrelevant. Only the act of honest observation mattered. And on that score he was covered. The morning’s anxiety had been an aberration. He couldn’t imagine what had triggered it. Perhaps that woman Gillespie’s unspoken accusation. He drained his coffee, searching the cup bottom. At the far table, the farmers exchanged jokes about agricultural extension agents. Weber listened without following.

“So the first fella says, ‘This bug don’t chew and spit up its cud like the other one.’ ‘Naw,’ the second fella tells him. ‘This one is a non-compost mantis.’”

His waitress reappeared. “Get you anything else, dear?”

“Just the check, thanks. Oh. And could I ask you something?” He felt mildly queasy again. Nothing. “You say that everyone is somebody’s kin out here. How about the Schluters?”

She gazed out the window, on a street slowly filling with moving bodies. “The father was kind of a loner. Joan Swanson had some family down in Hastings. But, you know, she was the kind of person who believed that the Kingdom was coming tomorrow afternoon, at 4:15 p.m. And nobody she knew was ready to make the cut. Tends to drive even family away.” She shook her head sadly and stacked the dirty dishes. “No, not much safety net for those two kids.”

He returned to Good Samaritan for a follow-up with Dr. Hayes. They reviewed Weber’s three days of materials. Hayes studied the GSR results, facial recognition scores, and psychological profiles. He asked a dozen questions, of which Weber could answer only a third. Hayes was impressed. “Strangest thing you could hope to see, and still come out intact!” He smacked the sheaf of notes. “Well, Doctor, you’ve raised my appreciation for the case. I suppose that’s good science for you. But what’s indicated now? How do we treat the condition and not just the symptom?”

Weber grimaced. “I’m not sure I know the difference, here. The literature has no systematic treatment studies. No real sample size to work with. Psychiatric origins are rare enough. Trauma-induced cases are almost fiction. If you want my opinion…”

The neurologist bared his palms: no sharp implements. “No turf in medicine. You know that.”

If Weber knew anything from a lifetime of research, it was exactly the opposite. “I’d recommend intensive, persistent cognitive behavioral therapy. It’s a conservative course, but worth pursuing. Let me give you a recent article.”

Hayes raised an eyebrow. “I suppose,” he said. “I suppose we could even get spontaneous melioration.”

Weber countered the attack. “It has happened. CBT has a track record in delusions. If nothing else, it can help address the anger and paranoia.”

Everything about Hayes radiated healthy skepticism. But the first rule of medicine was to do something. Useful or worthless, however irrelevant or unlikely — act. Hayes stood and offered Weber his hand. “I’ll be happy to refer him to Psych. And I look forward to seeing your piece, wherever it appears. Remember to spell my name with an ‘e.’”

There remained only to say goodbye. Weber arrived at Dedham Glen after Mark’s afternoon physical therapy. Karin was there, a chance to combine both farewells. He saw them from a distance, out on the front grounds, Karin sprawled on the grass fifty yards off, like some quarantined babysitter, while Mark sat on a metal bench underneath a cottonwood next to a woman Weber instantly recognized without having met. Bonnie Travis wore a sleeveless baby-blue blouse and denim skirt. Having removed his knit cap, she was placing a garland of woven dandelions around Mark Schluter’s head. She planted a twig in his hands, a garden Zeus’s scepter. Mark wallowed in the treatment. They looked up as Weber approached across the lawn, and Bonnie’s face broke out in a smile that could only have arisen in a state with fewer than twenty-two people per square mile. “Hey! I know you. You look just like your photograph.”

“You, too,” Weber answered.

Mark doubled over giggling. Only grabbing Bonnie kept him from falling off the bench.

“What?” Bonnie begged, laughing along. “What’d I say?”

“You’re both nuts.” Mark strafed them with his scepter.

“Splain, Markie.”

“Well, first off, a photo’s flat? And it’s, like, this big.”

Bonnie Travis cackled like a fiend. It struck Weber that they’d been recreating before his arrival, although he smelled nothing. Karin stood and walked over to Weber, her face filled with suspicion. “This is it, isn’t it?”

Mark reeled. “What’s happening? You exposed her? You’re arresting her?”

Weber addressed Karin. “I’ve spoken with Dr. Hayes. He’ll refer you to intensive cognitive behavioral therapy, as we discussed.”

“She’s going to the slammer?” Mark grabbed Bonnie’s forearm. “See? What’d I tell you? You didn’t believe me. This woman’s got a problem.”

“You’ll be involved,” Weber told her. As promises went, this was the feeblest.

Karin’s eyes interrogated Weber. “You’re not coming back?”

He gave her the look of friendly respect that had won him the trust of hundreds of altered, anxious people — all the reassurance he had just last night misplaced.

“You’re leaving?” Bonnie pouted. In truth, she looked nothing like her picture. “But you just got here.”

Mark jerked up. “Hang on. No, Shrinky. Don’t go. I forbid you!” He pointed his imperial trident at Weber. “You said you’d get me out of this joint. Who’s gonna spring me if you don’t?”

Weber arched his eyebrows but said nothing.

“Man! I gotta get home. Get back to work. That job is the only good thing I’ve got going. They’ll shit-can me if I hang out here any longer.”

Karin palmed her own temples. “Mark, we’ve been over this. You’re on disability. If the doctors feel you need more therapy, IBP’s insurance will…”

“I don’t need therapy; I need work. If those health people would just get off my back. I don’t mean you, Shrinky. Your head’s in the right place, at least.”

Mark had accepted Weber as spontaneously as he rejected his own sister. Nothing Weber had done deserved such trust. “Keep working on yourself, Mark.” Weber cringed at the sound of his own words. “You’ll be home in no time.”

Mark looked away, crushed. Bonnie leaned over and put her arm around him. He made a sound like a slapped dog. “Handing me back over to her! And after I proved…”

“Excuse me,” Weber said. “I need to check some things with the staff before I go.” He headed back to the facility and slipped inside. The reception area looked like the starting line of a wheelchair race. Weber approached the desk and asked for Barbara Gillespie. His pulse raced, vaguely criminal. The receptionist paged Barbara. She appeared, unsettled by the sight of him. Her eyes, that green alert: leave now. She tried for lightness. “Uh-oh. A medical authority.”

He found himself wanting to jest back. So he didn’t. “I’ve been speaking with Neurology at Good Samaritan.”

“Yes?” Instant professional register. Something in her knew what he was after.

“They’ve agreed to some CBT. I’d like to enlist your help. You have…such good rapport with him. Clearly, he dotes on you.”

She turned cautious. “CBT?”

“I’m sorry. Cognitive behavioral therapy.” Strange that she didn’t know. “Would you be interested?”

She smiled, despite herself. “On some days, yes. Definitely.”

He barked a single-syllable laugh. “I’m with you on that. I often…”

She nodded, reading him without explanation, the lightest touch. It struck him again, her absurd rank. Yet she excelled at what she did. Who was he to promote her beyond that calling? They shared a nervous moment, both of them searching for the final, forgotten detail. But no such detail existed, and he wouldn’t invent one.

“Thank you, then,” she told him. “Take care.” The words sounded hopelessly midwestern. Yet her voice — so coastal.

He rushed it out. “Can I ask you something? Have you, by any chance, read anything of mine?”

She looked around the room for support. “Yikes. Is this an exam?”

“Of course not.” He backed away.

“Because if it is, I’ll need to study first.”

He waved apology, mumbled his thanks, and broke for the outdoors. He imagined her eyes on his back all the way down the walk. He felt as he rarely did, as if he’d botched an interview. The morning’s nausea followed him down the walk.

Flanked by the two women, Mark sat enthroned on his bench while a smattering of rehab residents, caretakers, and visitors wandered the grounds of his lowland Olympus. A garland of dandelions, a scepter of cottonwood: how Weber would remember him. In Weber’s brief absence, Mark had changed again. The bitterness at betrayal had fled. He held up his rod and waved it at Weber in benediction. “God-speed, voyager. We send you back out upon your restless search for new planets.”

Weber stopped in mid-step. “How on earth…? What a bizarre coincidence.”

“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Bonnie said, her words a halo.

“There’s nothing but coincidence,” Karin countered.

Mark giggled. “What do you mean? Wait, wait: I mean…” He dropped his voice, mocking Weber’s authoritative baritone. “I mean: ‘How do you mean?’”

“My daughter’s an astronomer. That’s her work. She looks for new planets.”

“Dude,” Mark drawled. “You already told me.”

The fact shook him worse than the imagined coincidence. The sleepless night, the hot, sticky air wrecked his concentration and scattered his memory. He needed to be gone. He had two conference keynotes to deliver over the next three weeks, then a trip to Italy with his wife before classes in the fall.

Karin walked him to the parking lot. Her disappointment had deepened into stoic despair. “I guess I was expecting too much. When you told me about the brain being so surprising…?” She waved her fingers in front of her face. “I know. I’m not saying…Can you just tell me one thing? Don’t soften this.”

Weber braced.

“He must truly hate me, right? Some resentment so deep, to produce this. To single me out. Every night I lie in bed trying to imagine what I did to him, that he needs to erase me. I can’t remember anything that deserves this. Am I just repressing…?”

He took her arm again, stupidly, as he had just three days back, when they first walked this path. “This isn’t about you. There is probably a lesion…” Just the opposite of what he’d argued with Dr. Hayes. Obscuring the dynamics of most interest to him. “We talked about this. It’s a feature of Capgras. The subject only misidentifies the people closest to him.”

She snorted, acrid. “You always double the one you love?”

“Something like that.”

“So it is psychological.”

Aggravating hunch, in the mouth of another. “Look. You haven’t been singled out.”

“Yes I have. He’s accepting Rupp now.”

“I don’t mean Rupp. There’s his dog.”

She freed her arm, ready to be hurt. Then she softened in a way Weber hadn’t yet seen. “Yes. You’re right. And he loves Blackie more than anything that moves.”

At the curb, Weber made to shake her hand. With last-minute guilt, she embraced him. He stood still and suffered it. “Tell me if anything changes,” he said.

“Even if it doesn’t,” she promised, and turned away.

He woke early again, in fresh panic. The ceiling of a foreign room materialized just inches from his face. He sucked air, but his lungs wouldn’t expand. Not quite 2:30 a.m. By 3:15, he was still wondering how he’d forgotten telling Mark about Jess. He fought the urge to get up and listen to the session tapes. By 4:00, he took his vitals and thought he might be looking at something serious. When he could no longer lie still, he got up, showered, dressed, packed, checked out, and, hours early, drove the rental back east to the Lincoln airport, on the razor-like, featureless interstate.

As the plane passed over Ohio, he rallied. He looked down on a cloud-covered Columbus, imagining invisible landmarks under the patchy blanket. Places from a third of a century ago: the sprawling, centerless campus. The dilapidated student suburb where he and Sylvie had shared a bungalow. Downtown Columbus, the Scioto, the time warp of German Village, Short North, with its great used bookstore where he’d taken Sylvie on their first date. He still had the entire map, clearer with eyes closed.

By the wrinkled hills of Pennsylvania, his Nebraska interlude began to seem no more than a fleeting deficit. When he touched down at LaGuardia, he was himself again. His Passat waited in the long-term lot. The brittle, collaborative madness of the Long Island Expressway never looked more familiar or more beautiful. And at its far end — the familiar anonymity of home.