The Echo Maker

Part Three: God Led Me To You

When animals and humans still shared the same language, the Cree recount, Rabbit wanted to go to the moon. Rabbit asked the strongest birds to take him, but Eagle was busy and Hawk couldn’t fly so high. Crane said he would help. He told Rabbit to hold on to his legs. Then he went for the moon. The journey was long and Rabbit was heavy. Rabbit’s weight stretched out Crane’s legs and bloodied Rabbit’s paws. But Crane reached the moon, with Rabbit hanging on to him. Rabbit patted Crane in thanks, his hands still bleeding. So Crane got his long legs and blood-red head.

Back then, too, a Cherokee woman was courted by both Hummingbird and Crane. She wanted to marry Hummingbird, because of his great beauty. But Crane proposed a race around the world. The woman agreed, knowing Hummingbird’s speed. She didn’t remember that Crane could fly at night. And, unlike Hummingbird, Crane never tired. Crane flew in straight lines, where Hummingbird flew in every direction. Crane won the race with ease, but the woman still rejected him.

All the humans revered Crane, the great orator. Where cranes gathered, their speech carried miles. The Aztecs called themselves the Crane People. One of the Anishinaabe clans was named the Cranes—Ajijak or Businassee—the Echo Makers. The Cranes were leaders, voices that called all people together. Crow and Cheyenne carved cranes’ leg bones into hollow flutes, echoing the echo maker.

Latin grus, too, echoed that groan. In Africa, the crowned crane ruled words and thought. The Greek Palamedes invented the letters of the alphabet by watching noisy cranes in flight. In Persian, kurti, in Arabic, ghurnuq: birds that awaken before the rest of creation, to say their dawn prayers. The Chinese xian-he, the birds of heaven, carried messages on their backs between the sky worlds.

Cranes dance in southwestern petroglyphs. Old Crane Man taught the Tewa how to dance. Australian aborigines tell of a beautiful and aloof woman, the perfect dancer, turned by a sorcerer into a crane.

Apollo came and went in crane form, when visiting the world. The poet Ibycus, in the sixth century B.C., beaten senseless and left for dead, called out to a passing flock of cranes, who followed the assailant to a theater and hovered over him until he confessed to the astonished crowd.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hera and Artemis turn Gerania into a crane, to punish the Pygmy queen for her vanity. The Irish hero Finn fell off a cliff and was caught in the air by his grandmother, when she changed into a crane. If cranes circled overhead above American slaves, someone would die. The First Warrior who fought to create ancient Japan took the form of a crane at death and flew away.

Tecumseh tried to unite the scattered nations under the banner of Crane Power, but the Hopi mark for the crane’s foot became the world’s peace symbol. The crane’s foot—pie de grue—became that genealogist’s mark of branching descent, pedigree.

To make a wish come true, the Japanese must fold a thousand paper cranes. Twelve-year-old Sadako Sasaki, stricken with “atom bomb sickness,” made it to 644. Children worldwide send her thousands, every year.

Cranes help carry a soul to paradise. Pictures of cranes line the windows of mourning houses, and crane-shaped jewelry adorns the dead. Cranes are souls that once were humans and might be again, many lives from now. Or humans are souls that once were cranes and will be again, when the flock is rejoined.

Something in the crane is trapped halfway, in the middle between now and when. A fourteenth-century Vietnamese poet sets the birds forever halfway through the air:

Clouds drift as days pass;

Cypress trees are green beside the altar,

The heart, a chilly pond under moonlight.

Night rain drops tears of flowers.

Below the pagoda, grass traces a path.

Among the pine trees, cranes remember

The music and songs of years ago.

In the immensity of sky and sea,

How to relive the dream before the lamp of that night?

When animals and people all spoke the same language, crane calls said exactly what they meant. Now we live in unclear echoes. The turtledove, swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming, says Jeremiah. Only people fail to recall the order of the Lord.

Something was wrong, the moment Karin called upstairs to his hotel room. His voice didn’t match the picture on his books. Its folksy tone broadcast compassion, but his words were pure health professional. In the flesh, he looked like one of those poised, balding experts who sit on New England porch swings in autumn answering questions for edutainment TV in maddeningly soft, self-assured voices. The man who came to Nebraska wasn’t the author of those rich, embracing books. When she’d tried to present Mark’s history, Gerald Weber failed to honor what he claimed lay at the heart of all good medicine. He didn’t listen. She might as well have been speaking to her ex-boss, to Robert Karsh, or even to her own father.

Four days later the national expert disappeared. He did nothing but administer a few tests and tape a few conversations, gathering material for his own ends. Helpless to treat the problem itself, he prescribed nothing but a vague program of cognitive behavioral therapy. He blew into town, toyed with everyone’s hopes, even played on Mark’s friendship. Then he blew out again, suggesting that all parties just learn to live with the syndrome. She had trusted him, and he’d delivered nothing but philosophy.

Yet true to herself, she never once confronted him. Up to the moment that he turned his back on them, she flattered the man’s credentials, sure that if she were just polite enough, this gray-haired, bearded, well-spoken specialist would defeat Capgras and retrieve both her brother and her. Daniel had asked several times to meet the doctor. She’d put him off. Daniel never called her on it, but he didn’t have to. A week after Weber left, the obvious hit her: she’d preened for this old man. Anything, to win his help.

Three weeks after the neuroscientist abandoned them, Karin was playing Ping-Pong with Mark, in the day room. Mark liked the game enough that he’d play even with her, providing she never won. Barbara rushed in, excited. “Dr. Weber is going to be on Book TV tomorrow. Reading from his new work.”

“Shrinky on television? Real television? Like, nationwide? I told you that the man was famous, but would you believe me? He’s going to be a household word.”

“Book TV?” Karin asked. How did you hear about this?”

The aide shrugged. “Pure luck.”

“Were you watching for this?” Karin asked. “Or did he tell you…?”

Barbara flushed. “I keep an eye on that cable program. Old, bad habit. I’m down to only a few shows I can watch safely. The ones where nothing explodes and where they don’t tell me when to laugh.”

Mark tossed his paddle in the air and almost caught it. “The Incredible Shrinking Man, on the idiot box. Can’t miss that, now can we?”

The next day, the three of them huddled around the set in Mark’s room. Karin chewed her cuticles, even before they introduced the man. Humiliating, watching someone you knew play himself in front of cameras. Barbara was flinching, too. She chattered more in the six minutes of Gerald Weber’s introduction than she had in six weeks of caring for Mark. Karin finally had to shush her.

Only Mark enjoyed the proceedings. “The home-team favorite is stepping up to the plate in the clutch situation. The crowd is nervous. They’re looking for the long ball.” But when Dr. Weber finally strode out to the podium in front of the restrained Book TV audience, Mark cried, “What the hell’s going on? Is this some idea of a joke?”

Both women tried to calm him. Mark rose to his feet, a pillar of righteousness. “What kind of bull balls is this? That’s supposed to be Shrinky? Not even close.”

Under the television lights, distorted by broadcast and the strain of public appearance, the man was indeed changed. Karin glanced at Barbara, who returned the look, her thick eyebrows crumpled. Weber’s hair now swept back dramatically over his thinning crown. The beard had been teased out, florid, almost French. And the dark suit had vanished in favor of a collarless burgundy shirt that appeared to be silk. He seemed taller on camera, and his shoulders flared, almost combative. When he started to read, prose poured out of him in Old Testament cadences. The words themselves were so wise, so attuned to the subtle nuances of human nature that they seemed written by someone already dead. This was the real Gerald Weber, who, for obscure reasons, on his short Nebraska junket, had hidden himself under an empty wheat bushel.

Mark paced in tight, outraged circles. “Who’s this guy supposed to be? Billy Graham or someone?” Karin nodded like a bobblehead. Barbara couldn’t take her eyes off the speaking image. “Somebody’s taking that studio audience for a ride. None of them have seen the real Shrinky, up close and personal. And nobody knows to ask us!”

Karin blocked out her brother and listened. Weber read:

Conciousness works by telling a story, one that is whole, continuous, and stable. When that story breaks, consciousness rewrites it. Each revised draft claims to be the original. And so, when disease or accident interrupts us, we’re often the last to know.

The words of the man rolled over Karin Schluter, seducing her all over again. “You’re right,” she told Mark. “You are exactly right.” Nobody had seen the real Weber. Not the New York studio audience; not the three of them.

Mark stopped pacing to assess her. “What the hell do you know? You probably had something to do with this. You’re the one who brought him here. Maybe that’s the real Shrinky, and the Shrinky you passed off on us is a fraud.”

Barbara reached up to rub his shoulders. He froze, like a kitten stroked between its eyes. Placid, Mark sat back down and watched. “We’re more like coral reefs,” Dr. Weber was reading. “Complex but fragile ecosystems…” The three of them stared at the performance of the stranger in the silk shirt. Weber told a story of a forty-year-old woman called Maria who suffered from something named Anton’s syndrome.

I sat and chatted with her in her impeccably furnished Hartford home. She was a lively, attractive woman who’d been a successful attorney for many years. She seemed happy and intact in every way, except that she thought she could see. When I suggested to her that she might actually be blind, she laughed at the absurdity and struggled to disprove me. This she attempted to do with remarkable vigor and skill, giving long, vivid descriptions of what was happening just then, outside her window. These scenes had great consistency and detail; she simply did not realize that the images were not coming in through her eyes…

The reading lasted no more than fifteen minutes. But all three were squirming in eternity as Weber finished the passage to polite applause. Then the questions began. A respectful student asked about the difference between scientific writing and writing for the public. A retired woman wanted to address the scandal of national health care. Then someone asked if Weber had any qualms about violating his subjects’ privacy.

The cameras caught the writer’s surprise. Hesitating, he said, “I hope not. There are protocols. I always disguise the names, and often the biographical details, when they’re important. Sometimes one case history actually combines two or more stories, to bring out a condition’s most salient features.”

“You mean they’re fiction?” asked another. Weber paused to think, and the camera grew restive. Karin returned to biting her cuticle and Barbara sat upright, a perfect statuette.

Mark spoke first, for all of them. “This totally blows. Can we see what’s on Springer?”

The night Weber flew back east from the empty plains, he was all over Sylvie. Late June, but cool and piercing in Setauket, more like a North Shore golden fall than the start of summer. He picked up his car from the long-term lot at LaGuardia and listened to Brahms piano quartets all the way home on the absurdly clogged LIE. All the way out, he pictured his wife, thirty years of her changing face. He remembered that day, a decade or so into their marriage, when he’d asked her, surprised, “Is your hair getting straighter as we get older?”

“What are you talking about? My hair? I used to perm it. You didn’t know that? Ah, scientists.”

“Well. If it’s not on a scan, it can’t really be trusted.”

She pummeled his soft underbelly, in reply.

But that first night back from Nebraska, he noticed. Woman. Maybe it was the dressing up. They had to go out that evening, to a fund-raiser in Huntington. Some halfway-house shelter that Sylvie’s Wayfinders were sponsoring. She was dressed already when he pulled in. “Ger! There you are. I was getting nervous. You should have called me, let me know you were on the way.”

“Called? I was in the car, Woman.”

She laughed her laugh, helpless but to forgive. “You know that little phone you’ve been carrying around? It works while you’re moving. One of its selling points. Never mind. I’m just glad that Tour Director got you home safely.”

She wore a blouse of Italian silk, something new, pale bashful lilac, the color of first buds. Around her still-smooth neck hung a thin hank of freshwater pearls, and two tiny seashells clung to her ears. Who was this woman?

“Man. Don’t just stand there! Philanthropists of all stripes have paid to see you in a monkey suit.”

He undressed her that night, for the first time in years. Then he gazed on her, looking.

“Mmm,” she said, ready to frolic too, if a little abashed at them both. She laughed at his touch. “Hmm? Where did this come from all the sudden? They put something in the water out there in Nebraska?”

They played with each other, with nothing left to learn. After, she lay on her back next to him, still breathing hard, holding his hand as if they were courting. She recovered words first. “As the Behaviorist said, ‘That was clearly great for you. Was it good for me?’”

He had to snort, rolling onto his problem back and looking out over the rising hillock of his stomach. “I suppose it has been some time. Sorry about that, Woman. I’m not the man I was, back when.”

She rolled onto her side and rubbed his shoulder, the one he’d blown out ten years ago, in his mid-forties, and never managed entirely to repair. “I like this part of life,” she said. “Slower, fuller. I like that we don’t have sex just all the time.” Vintage Sylvie. She meant: much at all. “It makes each experience…It’s newer, somehow, when there’s enough time in between to rediscover…”

“Inventive. Absolutely inspired. ‘Rediscover.’ Most people see the glass nine-tenths empty. My wife sees it one-tenth full.”

“That’s why you married me.”

“Ah! But when I married you…”

She groaned. “The glass was one-tenth over the lip.”

He spun over onto his sore shoulder and regarded her, alarmed. “Really? Did we have sex too often back then?”

Her laughs bobbled out of her, buggies over speed bumps. She pressed her face into the pillow, delighted and red. “I think that might be the first time in human history anyone ever asked that question anxiously.”

He saw it in her face, the thought crossing into her before he could speak it out loud. “The relentlessness of marriage.” He chuckled. Their old euphemism, picked up from a classic family saga they’d read out loud to each other, back in grad school. Later, after Jess, they amused each other by calling it sexuality. Mock clinical. Foreplay: Are you at all disposed toward sexuality? And afterward: Some top-drawer sexuality, that. Neuropsychology — the home version.

That night, her gaze found him through the folds of sheets, deeply amused by her pet possession, secure in her knowledge of him, constantly refreshed. “Somebody loves me,” she sang, a sturdy tonette of an alto, half muffled by the pillow. “I wonder who?”

She fell asleep in minutes. He lay in the dark, listening to her snore, and after a while, the snore turned, for the first time ever in his ears, away from an inanimate rasp, like the creak of the bed, into the shush of an animal, something trapped but preserved in the body, vestigial, released through sleep by the pull of the moon.

With 100,000 copies in print and generally fair prepublication reviews, The Country of Surprise rolled out to a reading public hungry for the alien within. The book felt like the culmination of a long second career, one Weber never expected to have. He’d said nothing to anyone except Cavanaugh and Sylvie, but this book would be his last excursion of its kind. His next book, if he was given time to write it, would be for a very different audience.

He hated promotion, having to perform himself in public. He’d gotten away with it so far, thanks to skilled colleagues and motivated grad students covering in the lab. But he could not afford more time away from research, now that brain research had been thrown wide open. Imaging and pharmaceuticals were opening the locked-room mystery of the mind. The decade since the publication of Weber’s first book had produced more knowledge about the final frontier than the previous five thousand. Goals unimaginable when Weber began The Country of Surprise were now tossed around at the most reputable professional conferences. Esteemed researchers dared to talk about completing a mechanical model of memory, finding the structures behind qualia, even producing a full functional description of consciousness. No popular anthology Weber might compile could match such prizes.

The art of the meditative case history belonged to after-hours. Somehow it had muscled in and become his day job. Too soon for that. Ramon y Cabal, the Cronos in Weber’s pantheon, said that scientific problems were never exhausted; only scientists were. Weber wasn’t exhausted yet. The best was yet to be.

Yet he’d interrupted work to travel thousands of miles to the Central Plains to do the Capgras interview. Granted, his current lab project concerned left-hemisphere orchestration of belief systems and the alteration of memories to fit them. But anything he learned from talking to the Nebraska Capgras sufferer was anecdotal at best. A few days back at Stony Brook and he began to see the trip as the last of a long series of surveys that would now give way to more systematic, solid research.

Yet something in him did not like where knowledge was heading. The rapid convergence of neuroscience around certain functionalist assumptions was beginning to alienate Weber. His field was succumbing to one of those ancient urges that it was supposed to shed light on: the herd mentality. As neuroscience basked in its growing instrumental power, Weber’s thoughts drifted perversely away from cognitive maps and neuron-level deterministic mechanisms toward emergent, higher-level psychological processes that could, on his bad days, sound almost like élan vital. But in the eternal split between mind and brain, psychology and neurology, needs and neurotransmitters, symbols and synaptic change, the only delusion lay in thinking that the two domains would remain separate for much longer.

Back at Dayton Chaminade High, Weber had begun intellectual life as a confirmed Freudian — brain as hydraulic pipe for mind’s spectacular waterworks — anything to confound his priest teachers. By graduate school, he’d taken to persecuting Freudians, although he’d tried to avoid the worst Behaviorist excesses. When the cognitive counterrevolution broke, some small operant-conditioned part of him held back, wanting to insist, Still not the whole story. As a clinician, he’d had to embrace the pharmacology onslaught. Yet he’d felt a real sadness — the sadness of consummation — hearing a subject who’d struggled for years with anxiety, suicidal guilt, and religious zeal tell him, after the successful tuning of his doxepin dosages, “Doctor, I’m just not sure what I was so upset about, all that time.”

He knew the drill: throughout history, the brain had been compared to the highest prevailing level of technology: steam engine, telephone switchboard, computer. Now, as Weber approached his own professional zenith, the brain became the Internet, a distributed network, more than two hundred modules in loose, mutually modifying chatter with other modules. Some of Weber’s tangled subsystems bought the model; others wanted more. Now that the modular theory had gained ascendancy over most brain thinking, Weber drifted back to his origins. In what would surely be the final stage of his intellectual development, he now hoped to find, in the latest solid neuroscience, processes that looked like old depth psychology: repression, sublimation, denial, transference. Find them at some level above the module.

In short, it now began to occur to Weber that he may have traveled out to Nebraska and studied Mark Schluter in order to prove, to himself at least, that even if Capgras were entirely understandable in modular terms, as a matter of lesions and severed connections between regions in a distributed network, it still manifested in psychodynamic processes — individual response, personal history, repression, sublimation, and wish fulfillment that couldn’t be reduced entirely to low-level phenomena. Theory might be on the verge of describing the brain, but theory alone could not yet exhaust this brain, hard-pressed by fact and frantic with survival: Mark Schluter and his impostor sister. The book waiting for Weber to write, after this book tour.

They took Mark home: no other place to take him. When the celebrity brain scientist left, offering his one slight recommendation, Dr. Hayes could no longer keep Mark under observation at Dedham Glen. Karin fought the decision tooth and nail. Mark, for his part, was more than ready to go.

Before he could move back into the Homestar, Karin had to move out. She’d lived in the modular home for months, keeping the dog alive, performing routine maintenance. She’d thrown out Mark’s contraband and waged war against the invading plant and animal life. Now she had to erase all evidence that she’d ever occupied the campsite.

“Where will you go?” Daniel asked. They lay side by side, face up on his futon on his bare, oak floor. Six in the morning, Wednesday, deep in June. In recent weeks, she’d spent more nights in his monk’s cell. She’d taken over his kitchen and sneaked cigarettes in his bathroom, running the water and blowing the smoke out the open window into the complicit air. But she never kept even a spare pair of socks in the empty drawer he prepared for her.

She rolled on her side, so he might spoon her. Talking was easier that way. Her voice was disembodied. “I don’t know. I can’t afford two leases. I can’t even afford one. I…I’ve put my place in South Sioux up for sale. I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want…What am I doing here? How much longer can I…? Back to zero, after everything that I’ve managed…But I can’t leave him. You know what he’s like now. You know what would happen, if I left him alone.”

“He wouldn’t be alone.”

She spun around and stared at him in the growing light. Whose side are you on? “If I leave him to his friends, he’ll be dead by the end of the year. They’ll shoot him in some hunting accident. They’ll have him out racing again.”

“There are others of us around, to help look after him. I’m here.”

She leaned in and pressed him. “Oh, Daniel. I don’t get you. Why are you so good? What’s in it for you?”

He put his hand on her flank and stroked, as he might stroke a newborn deer. “I’m a not-for-profit.”

She ran a finger along his neck. He was like the birds. Once the route was taught him, he stayed on it, returning, so long as there was still a place, always turning home. “The two of you combined are breaking my heart.”

They looked at each other, neither of them volunteering. He nodded just a little: totally ambiguous. “Small steps,” he said.

She bowed her head, her copper waterfall. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Simple. You can be here. You can stay here, with me.”

He could not have said it better. Neither concession nor command. Just a statement, the best possibility for them both. “Small steps,” she said. Just for a little while. Just until Mark…“You won’t resent me if…?”

A reflex pain passed across his face. What had she ever let him resent? He shook his head, decency outweighing memory. “If you won’t hold it against me.”

“It won’t be long,” she promised him. “There’s not much more I can do. Either he gets better soon or…” She stopped, seeing Daniel’s face. She’d meant to reassure that she would not invade his territory. Only as she spoke the words did she hear them as a slap.

She leaned into him again, limbs tangling, fragile, the first time in years that they lingered with each other in broad daylight. She felt it in the pallet of his chest, tasted it in his mouth’s pinched bliss. In the interests of getting wrong right, he might forgive her everything. Everything but safety and hiding.

She evacuated the Homestar, erasing her tracks. Daniel, the expert tracker who could hold still and disappear into thin air, helped. She restored Mark’s chaos to the state she remembered. She scattered the CDs. She bought another girlie poster to replace the one she’d destroyed: a blond in a slightly torn gingham dress holding a large monkey wrench in greasy hands, poised over a blood-red pickup. She had no idea what to do about Blackie. She considered bringing the dog to Daniel’s too, at least until they saw how Mark would be, once home. In his present state, Mark might attack the thing, lock it out of the house, feed it bulk laxatives. Daniel would have been fine with another creature sharing his sanctuary. But Karin couldn’t do it to the dog.

Dr. Hayes signed off on the discharge, and Dedham Glen released Mark Schluter to the care of the only kin who recognized him, even if he failed to return the favor. Barbara asked if she could help.

“Bless you,” Karin said. “I think I have Moving Day handled. It’s next week I’m worried about. And the week after that. Barbara, what am I supposed to do? The insurance won’t cover extended nursing, and I’m going to have to start working.”

“I’ll still be here. He’ll have his regular appointments with the cognitive therapist. And I can come check in on him, if that would help.”

“How? You’ve given us too much already. I can’t even think about repaying…”

The aide radiated eerie calm. Her hand on Karin’s shoulder carried absolute certainty. “Things work out. Everybody gets repaid, one way or another. Let’s see how things go.”

Karin asked Bonnie Travis to help her get Mark home. Mark made the rounds at the facility, saying goodbye to his fellow inmates. “See?” he told them. “It’s not a death sentence. They let you go, eventually. If they don’t, call me and I’ll come bust you out.”

But when Karin pulled up in her car, he refused to get in. He stood on the curb, surrounded by his bags. He was capless now, his hair a thin pelt. His face clouded, remembering. “You want to roll this little Jap thing off the road somewhere, with me inside. That’s the plan? You want to finish what was supposed to happen the first time?”

“Mark, get in the car. If I wanted to hurt you, would I risk my own life doing it?”

“You hear that, everybody? You heard what the woman said?”

“Mark, please. You’ll be fine. Just get in the car.”

“Let me drive. I’ll get in if you let me drive. See? She won’t give me the keys. I always drive my sister everywhere. She never drives when we’re together.”

“Ride with me,” Bonnie said.

He considered the suggestion. “That might work,” he said. “But this woman has to wait here for ten minutes after we leave. I don’t want her trying anything funny.”

The air was ripe with manure and pesticide. The fields — matted soybeans, shin-high corn, pastures flecked with cows resigned to their fate — unrolled in all directions. When Karin reached the Homestar, Mark was on the front stoop, his head in Bonnie’s lap, crying. Bonnie stroked the fuzz on his skull, doing her best to console him. Seeing Karin approach, Mark sat up and howled. “Just tell me what’s going on. First my truck, then my sister. Now they’ve got my house.”

His elbows flung upward, while his whole body cowered. His neck craned in three directions, as if the next attack might come from anywhere. She looked behind her, and through his eyes, saw the winking, familiar neighborhood go strange. She turned back to where he sat clawing his concrete front steps. He was staring at her, searching for someone, the one she had been once but wasn’t any longer. The only one who might help him. His need for her tore her up, worse than her own helplessness.

The women consoled him for a long time. They pointed out the streets, the houses, the lone sugar maple he’d planted in the desert of lawn, the gouge in the left-hand garage edge that he’d made eight months before. Karin prayed for one of the neighbors to come out and say hello. But all living things hid themselves in the face of this epidemic.

Karin considered bundling him back into Bonnie’s car and returning him to Dedham Glen. But his moaning gradually gave way to dazed chuckles. “They did an incredible job. They got almost everything right. Jesus! How much did this cost? It’s like some billion-dollar film of my life. The Harry Truman Story.”

At last he went inside. He stood next to Bonnie in the front room, head swiveling in amazement, his tongue clucking. “My father used to tell me they did the moon landing on a sound stage in Southern California. I always thought he was nuts.”

Karin snorted. “He was nuts, Mark. You remember how he thought the navy could quantum-rearrange the molecules in a battleship to make it invisible?”

Mark studied her. “How do you know they can’t?” He checked with Bonnie, who shrugged. He looked back at the life-sized image of his home, shaking his head in disbelief. Karin sat on the fake sofa, large parts of her dying. This fog would never blow over. Soon her brother would be right: their whole life, a copy of itself. While Bonnie unloaded Mark’s things from the car, Karin tried to rally. She took Mark on a tour of the house. She showed him the crack in the corner of the medicine-chest mirror. She raked through his clothes closet, all his summer cutoffs and legible T-shirts waiting for him. She opened the drawer full of loose photos, including dozens of the two of them together. She pointed out the magazine rack, with its three new back issues of Truckin’ Magazine.

In all this sprawl, his eyes landed on her replacement poster. His face darkened. “That’s not the picture I had up here.”

Karin groaned. “Okay. Let me explain.”

“That’s not mine. I’d never touch a thing that looked like that. That’s the crappiest body molding I’ve ever seen.”

Karin blinked before realizing he meant the truck. “Mark, that’s my fault. I tore yours. Accidentally. That’s a replacement I put up.”

He stopped and squinted at her. “Exactly the kind of shit my sister used to do.”

For a moment, she could breathe. Her arms went out to him, tentative but desperate. “Oh, Mark! Mark…? I’m sorry if anything I ever said or did…”

“But my sister would have known better than to replace a classic 1957 Chevy Cameo Carrier with some 1990 Mazda piece of crap.”

She broke down. Her silent, curdled tears perplexed him enough that he touched one hand to her forearm. The gesture thrilled her more than anything since his return to speech. She composed herself, laughed off her sniffles, and dismissed the moment with a wave. “Listen, Mark. I have to confess something. I never knew as much about the whole truck thing as I probably led you to believe.”

“Exactly what I’m saying. But thanks for admitting it. Simplifies life a little.”

He took over the tour, pointing out every beer coaster that had been moved since the night of his accident. He tsked as they walked, shaking his head and repeating, “No, no, no. This house is no Homestar.”

Bonnie brought in his duffel bags. She started following him around. “We’ll fix things, Marker. Get everything just the way you want.”

Karin sat on the bed, head in hands, listening to Mark repudiate his beloved mail-order home. But the strength of his memory for the smallest particulars gave her forbidden hope. She herself could no longer recognize her own condo, on those quick trips to South Sioux City to ready it for sale.

“Wait,” he said. “I know how to tell once and for all whether this house is real or not. You two stay here. Don’t look! Don’t let me catch either of you spying.”

He headed toward the kitchen. Bonnie quizzed Karin with a look. Karin slumped, knowing what Mark was after. She heard him drop to his knees and root around in the cabinet underneath the sink. Some old, inherited shame stopped her from calling out, old family secrets that sealed them off from each other.

He came back triumphant. “I told you this place is a fake. Something of mine is missing. Something they wouldn’t duplicate.” He looked at Bonnie, significantly. Bonnie, leaning against a bar stool, glanced at Karin. Karin needed only say: Mark, I flushed your stash down the toilet. But she couldn’t. Couldn’t say she knew he was doing shit, maybe even on the night of the accident. It would make no difference, anyway. He’d just come up with another theory, untroubled by anything so slight as the facts.

Mark came and sat next to her on the sofa. He seemed about to put his arm around her. “I know you have to pretend ignorance. That’s your job. I accept that. But just tell me whether I’m in danger. We’ve gotten to know each other well enough over the last couple of months for you to give me that much. You’d tell me if they were going to hurt me again, wouldn’t you?”

Karin waved her hands, a chimp struggling with sign language. Bonnie answered for her. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you, Mark. Not while we’re around.”

“I mean, Christ! They wouldn’t go through all this expense if they just meant to finish the job that they bungled back on 2/20/02. Am I right? C’mon. Let’s have a look outside.”

He left the house and walked up Carson Street. The women followed. All twelve houses on his block were variations on the Homestar. The recently air-dropped subdivision contained the first new structures to be added to the backwater town of Farview since the farm crisis. Drapes fluttered up and down the street, but no one came outdoors to make small talk with a brain-damaged slaughterhouse machinist.

Mark strolled up the street, staggered. “This must have cost a fortune. I must be under massive observation. I only wish I knew why I’ve become so important.”

Bonnie took his arm. Karin expected her to say something religious, about how God kept even the sparrows under massive observation. But she surprised Karin with her intelligence by saying nothing.

Mark spun a full circle. “I’d like to know where exactly we are.”

Karin held her temples. “You saw how we came from town.”

“Well, I was kind of keeping an eye on the rear window.” He smiled, a little sheepish.

“South on County, and a straight shot west, eight miles down Greyser. Same as always. You saw everybody’s farms.”

He grabbed at her, stiffening. “Time out. Are you telling me that the whole town…?”

Karin tittered. She felt herself losing it. The stress of daily life in her brother’s newfound land was pulling her under. Kearney, Nebraska: a colossal fake, a life-sized, hollow replica. She’d thought as much herself, all the while growing up. And again, each time she returned during their mother’s final illness. Prairie World. Her giggles came harder. She wheeled and looked at Bonnie, a paralyzed, shiteating grin plastered on her face. The girl looked back, spooked, and not by Mark. “Help me,” Karin managed, before breaking into more little laughs.

Something in the other woman rose to the challenge. Bonnie guided Mark back to the Homestar, leaning into him and tracing large ovals in his back as if practicing her cursive. “That’s not what she’s saying, Marker. She’s saying this is it. Right here. Where you really live. And I’m telling you I will personally see to it that we get your nest exactly the way you want it.”

“Serious? Would that include you moving in? Oh yeah, a woman’s touch. The finer things in life. But I forget: you probably still want to hold out for the paperwork. Fully legal, and all that noise? No playing house?”

Bonnie blushed and steered him homeward. All back down the street, Mark pointed out little anomalies: a missing tree, the wrong car in a driveway. Every desperate feat of memory fed him a little. A neighbor’s tool shed fifteen feet too far west left him exultant. His visual recall floored Karin. Damage had somehow unblocked him, removing the mental categories that interfered with truly seeing. Assumption no longer smoothed out observation. Every glance now produced its own new landscape.

Back at the house, Blackie had broken free from her backyard tether and was pacing the front steps, panting wildly. She held back, yipping, remembering her abuse at her master’s hands at their last meeting. But longer memories got the better of her. As the humans approached, she bounded across the lawn, joyous and suffering, leaping forward but feinting sideways, ready to flee at the first confusion. Mark stood still, which emboldened the beast until she was all over him, throwing her paws against his torso, almost knocking him over. The lower the brain, the slower the fade. Love, in an earthworm, might never extinguish at all.

Mark took his pet’s paws and danced her, a waltz with little conviction. “Look at this pathetic thing! It doesn’t even know who it isn’t. Somebody trained it to be my dog, and now it doesn’t even know what else to be. I guess I’m going to have to take care of you, aren’t I, girl? Who else will, if I don’t?”

By the time the four of them got back inside, Mark was issuing a stream of authoritative commands to the ecstatic dog.

“So what the hell am I supposed to call you? Huh? What am I gonna call you? How about Blackie Two?”

The brute thing barked in ecstasy.

They’re after Mark Schluter’s ass: this much is obvious. A man would have to be a vegetable to miss that much. Setting him up in some kind of experiment, some of it so hokey that even a child still stuck on Santa would snicker. But some of it so complex he can’t even start figuring it.

Okay: something happened in the hospital, that night they operated. Some mistake they had to cover up. Or, no: the weirdness must have started hours before that. With the accident. Which clearly couldn’t have been an accident. Great driver flips a fantastic-handling vehicle on a razor-straight road in the middle of nowhere? Sure; you might believe that, if you’re brain dead.

But that’s when it started, the switchings and impostors, all the medical crap to get Mark Schluter to think that he isn’t who he thinks. He needs a witness, but nobody was there. Rupp, Cain: they swear they were nowhere. And the doctors surgically removed his memory of that night while he was on the operating table. The secret is out there, in the empty fields. But the fields are growing over, this summer’s crop covering up the evidence. He needs a witness, but nobody saw what happened that night except the birds. Catch himself one of those cranes, one that was there, alongside the river. Find him a sandhill, and swear it in. Scan its brain.

Because it all started with the accident. Now everyone’s all Mark, Mark, he’s different, he’s losing his grip. As if that’s the issue. As if he’s the one who’s changed. The real deal is hidden behind doubles. He has only one clue. One solid thing beyond doubt: the note. The words from the person who found him, the one spectator to that night’s events, before the weirdness set in. The note they tried to keep from him.

His only clue, so he’s got to be careful. Can’t act too eager. Take the days as they come. Rupp and Cain promise to take him truck shopping. Work is sending him checks for doing nothing. But that won’t last forever; he’s got to get back, eventually. For now, though, he sits tight and works his plan. He asks Bonnie Travis to take him to church. The girl belongs to one of those renegade Protestant splinter cells called The Waiters in the Upper Room, a so-called religion that, in one of the screwed-uppedest things he’s ever heard, actually has not-for-profit status. They meet early Sunday for marathon two-hour services in a converted real-estate office above the Second Life hobby shop. Bonnie has begged him for years to come to a service, to compensate for the assorted commandments they smashed together on Saturday nights.

He himself swore off religion the minute he turned sixteen and his father pronounced him fit for the damnation of his own choosing. Nobody’s going to be comfortable with the whole Left Behind thing after growing up with a mother on a first-name basis with the Big Smiter Himself. It bugs the crap out of Bonnie when Mark busts Jesus’ chops, so over the years they’ve gotten pretty good at ignoring the topic. It could be raining frogs and blood, and they’d be, like: You bring your umbrella? That’s why, when Mark asks her to take him to the Upper Room, the woman acts like all the seven seals have just started barking.

Of course, Mark! Just say the word.

Like, what word do I need to say? Methuselah? Vouchsafe?

She laughs, at least. Sure; we can go anytime. This Sunday! And all the while, her face is going, Is this a joke? I’ve been praying for this for years.

She comes to get him in her car on Sunday morning. She’s looking quite deluxe, in a short, sky-blue dress with white collar, like a chrome woman singer in an MTV video fantasy about a 1950 corn-husker girl’s first communion. Really: he could pop himself off just looking at her, although that might not be entirely appropriate, given the circumstances. By the look she shoots him, he’s made some miscalculation. Can’t be his clothes: his fancy khakis — his wedding pants, Rupp calls them — a pretty clean denim shirt, and his best bolo tie. It’s something else that he can’t figure. Bonnie drives them to the Upper Room, all quiet. And she stays that way during the whole two-hour show, twitching her head side to side, just looking at him, like he’s got a spider crawling out of his nose. Afterward, back in the car, tugging at the hem of her dress like she suddenly doesn’t want it to be all that short, she’s pissed.

You didn’t hardly listen to one single word that Reverend Billy had to say.

I did. The whole bit about the repopulation of Palestine and the fulfillment of prophecy and whatnot.

And you wouldn’t break bread with us.

Well, you can’t be sure where that stuff has been.

Why did you bother coming? You spent the whole time just eyeing the congregation and waving that little note around like some kind of summons.

How can he tell her? If there’s really some Guardian Angel hiding out, refusing to identify himself, claiming God led me to you, he’s probably hanging somewhere like the Upper Room.

Bonnie comes back later that afternoon with his wannabe sister, while he’s going through churches in the Kearney yellow pages. It hurts his head to look at the list, and maybe he’s bitching a bit.

Jesus H. Crimmeny! Look at them all. They’re breeding like bugs. What’s a town this size need with so many churches? We’ve got more of these denomination things than we have people.

Bonnie slips behind him and rubs his back. This could become comforting. But counterfeit Karin sits down next to him and gets up in his face.

What is it, Mark? What do you want? We can help you.

He makes himself a stone. He tells them: I can do a couple every Sunday.

I can go with you, says Bonnie, pressing his shoulders.

But…how? These aren’t your churches.

She jerks back and laughs, like he’s being funny. They aren’t yours, either, Mark!

He runs his hand down the yellow-page list. You know what I’m saying. These things are all — whatever. Baptist. Methodist, and such. You’re an Upstairs Roommate.

So? They’re not going to stop me at the door.

They might. Homo sapiens can be very territorial.

If they stop me, why wouldn’t they stop you?

Because I’m nothing. Nobody stops a nothing from slipping in anywhere. They can still get to a nobody; convert him.

Pseudo-Sister reaches out to touch him, but stops. Mark. Honey. You want to know who wrote that note?

Like she’s graduating to mind reading.

Maybe we can take an ad out in the newspaper or something.

No ads! He probably yells a bit. Freaks even himself out, a little. But it’s just that whoever wrote the note might also know what happened to his sister. And if the people who got to his sister get to the note-writer first…

This upsets the sister stand-in. For some reason, it’s more than an act. Pulling her hair, like Karin always does. Bugs the hell out of him.

What can I do, Mark? Okay, so whoever left you the note believes in God. In guardian angels. Everyone in Nebraska believes in guardian angels! I’d believe in them myself, if…

She stops, like she almost gives the game away. If what? he says. If what?

She won’t answer, so he gets a scrap of paper and starts copying down addresses: Alpha and Omega Church of Jesus Christ. Antioch Bible…

Mark, I’m telling you. This is crazy. It’s a total crapshoot.

Not as big a crapshoot as this guardian finding me out there in the dark, clear off the road. In the middle of winter. The middle of nowhere. What are the odds of that?

Bonnie, at least, is as good as her word. She thinks she’s going to save Mark’s soul. Maybe she is. They dress up every Sunday and go churchgoing, like a courting couple out of some pioneer schoolbook. Sex afterward and he’d be in heaven. But the best he can hope for after the service is a good buffet. They go to Phil’s or the Hearth Stone, places with high old-folk turnover. It must be an old person, given the spidery scrawl. At both the churches and the restaurants, he keeps the note out in plain view. Even walks around with it, waving it under strangers’ noses. But nobody even nibbles. And they’re not faking ignorance. He’d know faking, blindfolded.

He overhears the Special Sister Agent talking to Bonnie, when they come back. She wants all the details. What’s in it for B-Baby, to be filing reports on him? Distinctly possible that she’s his leash, that she’s helping set up the whole charade. But he can’t confront her. Not just yet.

The Woman Who Would Be Karin keeps coming by, pretty much every day. She brings him groceries, and doesn’t want cash for them. All very suspicious, but the food is mostly sealed, and by and large it tastes pretty great. Sometimes she cooks for him. Go figure. But it seems like a sweet deal, at least until he learns what it’s going to cost him.

She corners him one afternoon when he’s home alone, digging a new post hole for his mailbox. He’s gotten nothing but junk since leaving Dead Man’s Glands. They put the mailbox in the wrong place. Throws the mailman off. His sister might have been writing him this whole time, and no one would know.

It’s not where it was, before, he tells her.

She pretends to be horrified. Where was it before?

Hard to say, exactly. You can’t measure against anything. What can you use as a baseline? Everything’s a few feet off.

He looks out toward the few scattered trees fringing River Run Estates. Beyond the stand of houses, a single, green cornfield ripples out to the horizon. For a minute, the ground liquefies, like he and his real sister used to make it do when they were kids, spinning like tops, then slamming to a standstill. He looks at Karin’s substitute; she, too, looks wobbly.

Mark, we need to talk. About the note.

His whole body surges up out of the post hole. You know something?

I…wish I did. Now, Mark. Mark! Stop it. Listen to me. If whoever wrote this note hasn’t gotten in touch by now, it’s because they want to be…selfless. Nameless. They don’t want to be a hero or take credit. They don’t want you to know who they are. They just want you to live your life.

He spreads the post hole digger and drives it into the parched dirt. Then what fucking good is leaving a note? Why bother leaving one at all?

They wanted you to feel protected. Connected.

Connected? Connected to what? He slams the shovel to the ground and kicks it, his arms twisting like bull snakes. Mr. Invisible Nameless Angel? That’s supposed to make me feel safe? Connected?

Why do you need to—?

He almost jabs her. Whoever wrote this note saved my life. If I could find him, then I might find out what…

It gets to him: stupid, stupid. But he doesn’t even care if she sees him kind of cry. She joins in. Whatever. Monkey see.

I know. I know what you’re feeling, she says. And it’s almost like she does. She says: Do you really need to put a face to this note? Would it matter if you found out that they…? Mark, stop. No! Just tell me what you’re thinking. Do you just want to thank them? Do you want…I don’t know. Are you thinking you might get to know them? Make friends?

It’s like she’s just materialized out of nowhere. Suddenly trying to be the person she was just imitating.

I don’t give a good flying leap who the guy really is. He could be a ninety-year-old Lithuanian girl-groper.

So why are you trying so hard to find him?

Mark Schluter grabs his head in both hands and rattles it. Guardian devils, everywhere. His muddy work boots kick at the earth, trying to destroy the fresh hole.

Read the note. Just read the goddamn note. He squeezes two fingers into the pocket of his overalls and pulls out the folded-up scrap. It’s always with him now, next to his body. She doesn’t take the paper. She won’t touch it.

So you could live, he recites, holding the sheet up in her face. And bring back someone else.

She sits down in the dirt next to him, an inch away. Weird calm comes over the both of them.

Bring back someone? she asks. Like she might want to, herself.

He yanks forward, out of the hole. She falls back, her arms up to block him. But all he wants is to take her face between his hands.

You have to help me. I’m begging you. I’ll do anything you want. I have to find this person.

But why, Mark? What can he give you that I…?

This guy knows. Knows why I’m still alive. Something I’d like to learn.

Karin wrote Gerald Weber. He’d told her to write if Mark’s status changed. She didn’t mention seeing him on television. She said nothing about buying his new book or finding it cold and tired, filled with recycled pronouncements about the human brain and empty of the human soul. She wrote: “Mark is clearly getting worse.”

She described the new symptoms: Mark’s obsessive theories about the note. His doubling places now, along with people. His rejecting the house, the subdivision, maybe even the whole town. His drifting into territory so weird it left her shaky. She asked Dr. Weber if the accident could have given Mark false memories. Could something have happened to his inner, generalizing map? Every small change was making Mark split each now into a unique world.

She mentioned a case in Weber’s first book, an elderly woman called Adele who’d assured Dr. Weber that she wasn’t lying in a hospital in Stony Brook but was in fact in her cozy saltbox home in Old Field. When Dr. Weber pointed out all the expensive medical devices in the room, Adele had laughed. “Oh, those are just props, to make me feel better. I could never afford the real things.”

Reduplicative paramnesia. She copied the words from his book into her e-mail. Could Mark actually be suffering from that? Could he be seeing details he’d never seen before? Did brain damage ever help memory? She cited Dr. Weber’s second book, page 287: the man he referred to as Nathan. Damage to the man’s frontal lobes somehow destroyed his internal censor and freed up long-suppressed recollections. Nathan, at fifty-six, suddenly realized that at nineteen he had killed another man. Could Mark be remembering old things about himself — or even about her — that he could not accept?

She knew her theories were crazy, even as she suggested them. But no crazier than Capgras. Weber’s own books claimed that the human brain was not only wilder than thought, but wilder than thought could think. She quoted from The Country of Surprise: “Even baseline normality has about it something hallucinatory.” Nothing in Dr. Weber’s examination of Mark had anticipated these new symptoms. Either Mark needed a whole new diagnosis, or she was hallucinating.

She got back a cheerful reply from Weber’s secretary. Dr. Weber’s new book required him to travel to seventeen cities in four countries over the next three months. He’d be largely out of e-mail contact, except for emergencies, until the fall. The secretary promised to alert Dr. Weber to Karin’s note at the earliest opportunity. And she encouraged Karin to be in touch if things with her brother became more serious.

The response enraged Karin. “The man’s ducking me,” she told Daniel. “He’s taken what he wants, and now he’s blowing us off.”

Daniel tried to hide his embarrassment. “I doubt he even has time to duck you. Things must be nuts for him right now. Television, radio, and newspapers every day.”

“I knew, all the time he was out here. He thinks I’m a problem patient. A problem relative. He read my e-mail and told his staff to cover for him. Maybe it wasn’t even his secretary. Maybe it was him, just pretending…”

“Karin? K.?” Daniel had grown older than the neuroscientist. “We don’t know…”

“Don’t patronize me! I don’t care about what we know or don’t.”

“Shh. It’s okay. You’re angry. You should be. With all the professionals. At this whole business. Maybe even angry with Mark.”

“Are you analyzing me?”

“I’m not analyzing. I just see that…”

“Who the fuck…?” Do you think you are?

The words, even stifled, knocked them both silent. Her hands started shaking and she sat down, numb.

“My God, Daniel. What’s happening? Listen to me. I’m him. Worse than him.”

He crossed to her and rubbed the life back into her upper arm. “Anger is natural,” he said. “Everything gets angry.”

Everything except the saint she lived with.

She made an appointment to see Dr. Hayes. Pulling into the garage at Good Samaritan for the appointment, she reverted to the night of the accident. She had to sit in the parked vehicle for ten minutes before her legs would support her weight.

She greeted Dr. Hayes professionally. The appointment meter was ticking. She listed Mark’s new symptoms, which the neurologist copied into Mark’s chart.

“Why don’t you bring him in? I’d better have another look at him.”

“He won’t come,” Karin said. “He won’t listen to me, now that he’s back living by himself.”

“Have you considered taking steps to assume legal guardianship?”

“How…what does that involve? Would I have to declare him mentally unfit?”

Hayes gave her a contact. Karin jotted it down, the ugly hope washing over her. Use the law against your brother. Protect him against himself.

“How sure is your brother that his home is a fake?” Hayes asked, fascinated.

“Out of ten? I’d say he’s a seven.”

“How does he explain the switch?”

“He thinks he’s been under observation since the accident.”

“Well, he’s right, isn’t he? It’s too bad our author isn’t here to see this. This one could have come straight out of his cases.”

“But it didn’t,” she said, brittle.

“No. I’m sorry. It didn’t.” He set down his pen and fingered a thick, green-bound medical text on the shelf behind him. But he didn’t remove it. “Studies show a high incidence of overlap for the various misidentification syndromes. In fact, they may not be entirely distinct disorders. A quarter or more of Capgras patients go on to develop other delusional symptoms. When you consider the different causes of Capgras…”

“You’re saying he could get worse? He might start thinking anything? Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?”

He shot her a maddeningly composed look. “It hadn’t happened before.”

Dr. Hayes wanted more observation. Mark was scheduled for his first outpatient CBT session in a week. The therapist, Dr. Jill Tower, had already gone over the file. Dr. Hayes would do his own follow-up assessment. Meanwhile, neither the diagnosis nor the indicated treatment would change.

They’d reached minute seventeen; she was already overdrawn. “I also wanted to get your opinion,” she started. “I understand that Dr. Weber is an acknowledged expert. But I’ve been reading about this kind of therapy. It just sounds to me like, I don’t know. Like glorified conditioning. They try to weaken the delusion just by training and…modification. Do you think that such therapy is appropriate in Mark’s situation? The scan shows damage. What good is mental habit-changing going to do against a physical injury?”

She hit a sore spot: clear by the way the neurologist started hedging. “We need to explore a variety of approaches. Cognitive behavioral therapy will certainly not hurt your brother as he learns to adjust to his new self. Confusion, anger, anxiety…”

She grimaced. “Does it have any chance of helping his Capgras?”

He swung back around to his shelf of books, but again removed none. “A small body of literature shows some melioration of misidentification delusions in psychiatric disorders. Whether CBT can do anything for Capgras caused by closed-head trauma, we’ll have to wait and see.”

“We’re the guinea pigs?”

“Medicine often involves some degree of experimentation.”

“Every time I show Mark how crazy he’s being, he comes up with another more elaborate theory to explain himself. How can a therapist reason him out of this?”

“Cognitive behavioral therapy is not about reasoning. It’s about emotional adjustment. Training patients to explore their belief systems. Helping them work on their sense of self. Giving them exercises to change…”

“Help Mark explore why he thinks I’m not who I am?” Whoever that was.

“We need to determine the strength of his delusion. It may be no more resistant to modification than any belief. Some people change political parties. People fall in and out of love. Religious persecutors get converted. We don’t know what goes on in a misidentification syndrome. We can’t cause it and we can’t make it go away. But we might be able to make it easier to live with.”

“Easier for…?” She modified. “So ‘easier’ is the best we can hope for?”

“That might be a lot.”

“Does Dr. Weber prescribe cognitive therapy for all his untreatable cases?”

His eyes flickered, a little glint that almost forgot its code of ethics. A glint that admitted: Well, you know, physicians often prescribe antibiotics for colds. “We wouldn’t recommend this referral if it had no chance of helping.”

The professional, closing ranks. But she might flush him out. “Would you have made this referral if Dr. Weber hadn’t visited?”

His smile darkened. “I have no trouble backing his recommendation.”

“But behavioral therapy for a lesion? That’s like talking somebody out of going blind.”

“A newly blind person could use help adjusting to blindness.”

“So this is just help adjusting? There’s nothing, then? Nothing medical? Even when he’s clearly getting worse?”

Dr. Hayes folded his index fingers to his lips. “Nothing else advisable. Remember, this isn’t for us. It’s for your brother.”

She stood and shook the neurologist’s hand, thinking, Whose brother? She confirmed Mark’s schedule with Dr. Tower’s scheduling nurse on her way out.

She reached a truce with Rupp and Cain. Whatever their sins against her brother, she couldn’t afford to go to war. She had no one else to draw on. Someone had to help watch Mark, especially at night, when things got rough. She’d lost the right to come and go. One bad evening, she volunteered to stay in his spare bedroom. He’d studied her so wildly it scared her back to Daniel’s. The next day, Karin called Tommy Rupp, the brains, for want of a better term, of the Muskrateers. She could deal with Rupp over the phone. Anything, so long as she didn’t have to look at him.

He was surprisingly decent, improvising a rotation that would keep constant tabs on Mark. The prospect of caretaking pleased him. “Just like the old days,” he told her. “He won’t think twice about us staying over.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Please don’t make him do any drugs. Not when he’s like this.”

Tommy chuckled. “Make? What do you take us for? We’re not monsters.”

“According to current neurological theory, everybody’s a monster.”

Humiliating memory lay between them, untouched. Years ago, Karin and Rupp had done each other, just for grins, late one September night on the front porch of her family’s house, while Mark, Joan, and Cappy Schluter were upstairs sleeping. Her senior year of college, with Rupp just out of high school. Almost like corrupting a minor. And she did corrupt him that night, drawing muffled squeals of disbelief from the boy that threatened to wake the whole house and get them both killed. She never knew why she’d initiated the one-shot entertainment. Curiosity. Simple thrill: the worst possible transgression. Maybe it gave her some leverage, dragging her brother’s friend behind the porch swing on a dry, brisk, pitch-black September night and doing the animal deed. Tom Rupp exercised an unnatural influence over Mark. Even at eighteen: too cool to show the slightest desire. Just along for the ride. Well, she gave him one. Not until afterward did Karin realize how much leverage she’d given the boy.

But he never told Mark. She would have known; Mark would have disowned her, nine years sooner. Rupp never mentioned the occasion again. He’d gladly have taken second helpings anytime, but he was way above asking. She could feel his question in the way he skulked around her, the same nagging question banging around the back of her own head every time she crossed Tom Rupp’s path: That girl still in there?

She’d had a thing for danger back then. And in the danger department, Tom Rupp was the Kearney High Bearcats’ Great White Hope. At the age of thirteen, he hitchhiked the 130 miles to Lincoln and smuggled himself into Farm Aid III, bringing back to his dumb-founded friends John Mellencamp’s fingerprints on a bottle of Myers’s Rum. At fifteen, he stole the four flags that flew outside the Twenty-second Street Municipal Building — city, state, nation, and POWMIA — and used them to decorate his room. Everyone in town knew who’d taken them except the police. He’d been a wrestler, placing fifth in state in the 152-pound class his sophomore year before dropping out of organized sports, proclaiming them “a training camp for prospective gays.” Mark, who’d struggled for years to make a name as a hustling but flatfooted guard with a mediocre outside jumper, gratefully dropped out with him.

Rupp trained Mark, quoting ominously from the classics he fed himself in strict, autodidact regimen. “Be on your guard against the good and the just! They would fain crucify those who devise their own virtue. They hate the lonesome ones.” Mark couldn’t always follow the man, but the diction always pumped him.

They picked up Duane Cain as their all-purpose sidekick in senior year. Cain had already succeeded in earning an eighteen-month suspended sentence for believing himself to be the first person ever to come up with an insurance fraud scheme. The three of them grew inseparable. They spent weeks rebuilding any internal-combustion engine that stood still long enough for them to strip it. They were at perpetual war with every other clique in school. Duane led them on nighttime raids involving that old Native American gesture of contempt, leaving a warm, coiled calling card on prominent display in the enemy’s front yard.

They enrolled together at U of N Kearney, Rupp finishing in four years, Mark and Duane managing a total of four between them. Rupp took a “telecommunications opening” in Omaha, abandoning Duane and Mark to lives of moving furniture and reading gas meters. Eight months later, Rupp was back in town, without explanations, but with a long-term plan to advance all three of their professional fates. He talked his way into a start at the Lexington packing plant, where he migrated from postprocessing over to the slaughter side, which paid three dollars more per hour. As soon as he amassed some seniority, he got jobs for his two friends. Duane joined One-shot Rupp on the zapping side, but Mark hadn’t the stomach for it, let alone the nose. Mark gladly stayed behind in machine maintenance and repair, saving enough money over three years for a down payment on the Homestar.

Alone of the trio, Tommy Rupp was ambitious. The Nebraska National Guard offered him a supplemental paycheck and even promised three-quarters of his tuition if he went back to school. All that, for only one weekend a month. It was a no-brainer. He tried to get the other Muskrateers to join up together. Free money, and gender-integrated patriotic service: the best legal deal anyone was going to hand the likes of them. But Duane and Mark chose to wait and see.

Rupp enlisted in July 2001 as an MOS 63B: Light-Wheel Vehicle Mechanic, the same stuff he loved to do all weekend, anyway. The 167th Cavalry. They tried to poison him in basic, and he had the souvenir commemorative videotape to prove it: stumbling from the qualification gas chamber, crawling out of the sealed room full of chlorobenzalmalononitrile where he and twenty-five other recruits had been ordered to remove their gas masks. Duane Cain took one look at the tape — Rupp the Ironman, falling to his knees in the dirt, choking and puking — and decided that national service was not in his foreseeable future. The video freaked Mark, too. He’d never been especially big on inhaling poisons.

September came, and then the attacks. Alongside the rest of the world, the trio hung on the endlessly looping, slow-motion, cinematic insanity. From the Central Plains, New York was a black plume on the farthest horizon. Troops were securing the Golden Gate Bridge. Anthrax started turning up in the nation’s sugar bowls. Then the bombs began to fall in Afghanistan. A broadcaster in Omaha declared, It’s payback time, and all along the river came stony, unanimous assent.

Rupp called it simple self-defense. Early and often, he explained that America couldn’t afford to sit and wait for some new fanatical operative dreaming of seventy-two virgins to smallpox the country in its sleep. The terrorists weren’t going to stop until everyone looked just like them. Duane fretted over Tommy’s future. But Rupp was philosophical. Freedom wasn’t free. Besides, the army had no targets to send the Guard after.

By winter, America rose up striking at targets everywhere. Rupp’s duty time increased, and a few guys he served with were dragged off to Fort Riley, Kansas. On the third of February, just after the president delivered his hunt-them-down State of the Union address and Washington lost track of bin Laden, Mark came to Rupp and said he’d changed his mind. He wanted to serve, despite the chlorobenzalmalononitrile. Rupp welcomed the news like an Amway distributor entitled to a cut. They hit the recruitment center together, and Mark went shopping. MOS 63G: Fuel and Electrical Systems Repairer. He wasn’t sure he could pass the qualifying test, but figured it couldn’t be much harder than what he did for IBP. He signed a letter of intent, and he and Rupp celebrated by going out and shooting.22s at pop cans out on country fence posts for a couple of hours. He called Karin late that night, his words slurred and swirling. He told her the whole story. He sounded different, his voice prouder, more serene then she’d heard him in a while. Like he was already a soldier. A credit to the country.

She told him not to go through with it. He laughed at her fears. “Who’s going to protect your way of life, if not me? I just wish I’d gone with it sooner. So obvious. I can do this. Remember Dad and Mom?” She said she did. “They both passed, convinced I was a slacker. You don’t think I’m a slacker, do you?”

He’d enlisted for her. Karin told him to quit, to invoke the forty-eight-hour escape clause. But hearing herself destroying her brother’s one bid for self-esteem, she backed down. And maybe he was right. Maybe she, too, needed to pay for privilege. Two weeks later, he was lying upside down in a frozen roadside ditch, his tour of patriotic duty over.

Karin dealt with the Guard’s recruiting officers while Mark was still in Good Samaritan. She tried to exempt Mark from the agreement altogether. But the best she could manage was a temporary medical waiver, subject to review. One more dangling uncertainty to live under. After a while, the whole idea of security felt like a sucker punch. The Guard would claim Mark, if they deemed him fit to serve. Meanwhile, Rupp drilled for all of them. Duane lent his moral support by sporting a T-shirt that read, The Marines Are Looking for a Few Good Women, complete with appropriate field-guide illustration.

But Duane did help Rupp and Bonnie guard the Homestar. Karin watched, from as close as Mark would allow. Mark basked in the company, never wondering why his homecoming festivities went on for weeks. So long as the guests hung around and the refrigerator kept replenishing itself, he seemed ready to live for the moment.

Karin hovered on the sidelines, appealing to Rupp’s peculiar sense of duty. “Will you watch him when he smokes? He hasn’t smoked for months. I’m terrified he’s going to forget what he’s doing and burn the house down.”

“Hey. Lighten up. Except for a few bizarre theories, the man is basically back to normal.”

She couldn’t argue. She no longer knew what normal meant. “Can you at least go easy on the beer?”

“This? This piss can’t hurt anybody. It’s low-carb.”

When she drove by the Homestar at night, the lights were always on. That meant raunchy martial-arts film festivals followed by all-night video-game binges. She abided them now. Even the insane NASCAR game couldn’t be any worse than cognitive therapy, for bringing him back to life. The screen was the only place he could be happy now, racing without thinking, free from the suspicion that things didn’t add up. But the game made him crazy, too. Before his spinout, his thumbs had been faster than his eyes. Now, he remembered all that he once could do, but not how to do it. That enraged him. Then she was glad for Rupp and Cain. No one else could protect her from his outbursts. Now that his body had healed, he might maim her before he even knew it. She was a government agent, a robot. He might take her head off in a minute, to find the wires. One bout of confused fury and she’d be no one.

Cain and Rupp contained his rage. They learned how to handle him: let him blow up, then stick the game controller back in his hands. The routine became part of the general festivities.

On Independence Day, everyone gathered to watch the fireworks. The boys got an early start, filling an oil drum with iced beer and grilling a quarter of a calf from the plant over an open pit. When Karin showed up, they were listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing patriotic lyrics grafted onto Sousa marches. The sound waves battered her as she pulled into the subdivision. Duane was working to tame an ice-cream maker, reasoning with the unruly gear. Mark laughed at him, more naturally than he’d laughed since the accident. “Your machine has diarrhea.”

“I’ll beat this bastard. And I’ll fix the tape deck afterward. Show me a machine I can’t whup. I think it’s a polarity problem. You familiar with those?”

The whole show amused Mark so much he didn’t even challenge Karin’s arrival. “Look who’s here! It’s okay — you’re a citizen, too. Nice little touch, anyway. The Fourth of July is my sister’s all-time favorite. Let’s dedicate this one to her, wherever she is. Her, and all the missing Americans.”

She hadn’t had a good thing to say about the holiday since she was ten. But maybe he meant that ten-year-old Karin. Those two small children, their eyes gold sparklers, sick with fear and thrill when their father detonated an artillery barrage of illegal Class B fireworks in the north forty.

“She’s gotta be abroad,” Mark said, a cloud passing over him. “Abroad or in prison. I’d have heard from her if she was in the States. Today of all days. I’m telling you: maybe there’s things to her life that I just didn’t know about.”

Bonnie showed up straight from work at the River Road Archway, still in her pioneer’s bonnet and ankle-length cotton dress. She was about to duck into Mark’s bathroom and change into her civvies when Mark stopped her. “Hey! Why don’t you stay this way? I like you this way.” He waved at her calico-printed bodice. “Nobody does that stuff anymore. I miss all that shit.”

She stood, a giggling museum diorama. “What do you mean, ‘miss’?”

“You know: olden days. Americana. Sort of sexy. It relaxes me.”

Despite the salacious abuse she took from Rupp and Cain, she stayed in costume, fussing in the kitchen to prepare the impromptu feast alongside Karin in her cutoffs and bare midriff. Denim, duck-hunting camouflage, legible tees, and a fake calico bonnet: America at two and a quarter centuries.

“Where’s your friend?” Bonnie asked Karin.

“What friend?” Mark called from the patio.

Karin considered snapping that frilly, calico neck. “He’s at home. He’s…” She waved her hand vaguely at the stereo system, the massed choral Sousa marches. “He hates military displays. He can’t take the explosions.”

“Invite him anyway,” Bonnie suggested. “He can leave when the fun starts.”

“What friend?” Mark, outside the kitchen window, pressed his nose to the screen. “Who are you talking about?”

“You banging somebody?” Rupp asked, with polite interest.

Duane savored his rare informational advantage. “Old news, Gus. She’s shacking up with Riegel. What country have you dudes been living in?”

“Danny Riegel? Bird Boy? Again?” Rupp toasted Karin with a beer can wrapped in a foam Koozie. “That’s priceless. Why didn’t I see that coming? I mean, coming back? The annual migration.”

Duane snickered. “That dude is going to save the planet someday.”

“More than you’ll ever do,” Bonnie chided.

Karin scoped Mark through the kitchen screen. He sat back down on his patio chair, holding a piece of ice to his forehead. He wrestled with the name, fitting the long past into the five seconds of fleeting present where he now lived. Someone pretending to be his sister, shacking up with a boy who, in another life, had once been his inseparable companion. Who’d once shacked up with his actual sister. Impossible to assemble. How many lives was one person supposed to dope out in this life?

Over the cookout, the boys decided where America would strike next. Duane and Mark proposed various countries, and Tommy rated how hard each one would be to take out. Bonnie — a tinted daguerreotype with half a pound of steak on a paper plate balancing on her knee — listened, as if to a speech she had to memorize for her job at the Archway. “Don’t you just feel sorry for them sometimes? Foreigners?”

“Well,” Rupp said, doubtfully. “It’s not like they’re just being naïve.”

“Reverend Billy says this thing with Iraq is actually predicted in the Bible,” Bonnie contributed. “Something that has to happen, before the end.”

Karin suggested that every dropped bomb might be creating more terrorists.

“Jesus.” Mark shook his head. “You’re a bigger traitor than my sister. I’m beginning to think you’re not affiliated with the government at all!”

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir collapsed in exhaustion and was replaced by deeply affirmative Christian country rock. Groups of neighbors, camped over their own scattered cookouts, called out holiday greetings. The sun set and the bugs came out and the first tentative sprigs of fireworks tested the dark. The first Independence Day celebrations since the attacks, and the indolently exploding colored missiles felt both helpless and defiant. Tommy Rupp shot off a dozen “Exploding Terror Heads” he’d picked up at a roadside tent near Plattsmouth: colorful figures of Hussein and bin Laden that whistled skyward and burst into streamers.

Karin watched her brother in the shooting light. His eyes swung toward heaven, flinched at each explosion, then cackled at the flinching. His face, now green, now blue, now red, mouthed the same astonishment as all of Farview at this barrage of light they could no longer afford but couldn’t do without. She saw him look around, trying to catch the attention of his friends, searching for confirmation none of them could give. Under the fall of a massive chrysanthemum, he turned and caught her staring at him. And brief as that flash, his eyes finding hers, the slightest sign of kinship issued from him: You’re lost here, too, aren’t you?

Weber’s life began veering in late July. When plaintive chirps issued from a pile of his clothes, he thought it an animal. First Sylvie’s struggles to evict the raccoon family from the attic, now a plague of locusts in the living quarters. Only the chirps’ regularity made him recall the cell phone. He dug up the burrowing thing and stuck it to his face. “Weber.”

“Big Daddy. Calling to wish you your day in the sun.”

“Hey, Jess. It’s you!”

His daughter, in her astronomical aerie in Southern California, wishing him a happy fifty-sixth. Whatever the awkwardness between them, Jessica always observed the forms. She flew back east for three or four days every Christmas. She sent them trinkets on Mother’s and Father’s Days — films and music, vain attempts to educate her parents in popular culture. She even remembered their anniversary, a thing no self-respecting child ever did. And she called them without fail on their birthdays, however halting the calls.

“You sound surprised. You know there’s caller ID on the screen of your phone.”

“Get thee behind me. Besides, how do you know which phone I’m on?”

“Daddy? Brain fart.”

“Oh. Right. Forget that. How come you’re calling on this cell thing, anyway?” Wrong foot, as usual, out of the gate.

“I thought you might enjoy birthday greetings from your daughter.”

“I guess I’m not used to this ring-tone yet.”

“You’re not using it? You’re sorry I got it for you?”

“I’m using it. I use it to call your mother, when I’m on the road.”

“If you don’t like it, Father, you can bring it back.”

“Who said I don’t like it?”

“Get Mom to return it for you. She knows how to move about freely in the retail world.”

“I like it. It’s handy.”

“Fine. Listen, I’m telling you this now so you won’t spin out when it happens. I’m thinking about getting you a DVD player for Christmas.”

“What’s wrong with tapes?”

His daughter snickered. “So, what birthday is this, anyway?”

“Sorry. We’ve stopped counting.” The mere sound of each other’s voices returned him to his thirties and her to thirteen.

Jess had never been big with words. She preferred figures. But she liked the phone, an unimpeachably clean technology. As a teen, she went through the obligatory phone stage — long, near-silent sessions with her friend Gayle while she played Tetris and Gayle watched cable, a medium the Webers managed to duck. The girls would breathe at each other for hours at a shot, punctuated only by Jess’s occasional reports of high scores or interrogations of Gayle’s plot synopses: “He’s kissing her? Where? Why?” Sylvie would sweep through every half-hour, insisting, “You girls start talking or give it up.”

Her phone behavior was much the same now, only Tetris had given way to Hubble scans. Weber could hear her computing on the other end; the furtive clacking of keys. Applying for grants or querying enormous online astronomical databases. She said nothing for some seconds. At last, he asked, “How’s the planet hunting?”

“Fine,” she clicked. “I’ve got Keck time in August. We’re looking to supplement the radial-velocity method with…You aren’t really interested, are you?”

“Of course I am. You found anything small, warm, and water-bearing yet?”

“No. But I promise your choice of half a dozen before I come up for tenure.”

“You’re filling in all the required promotion forms?”

She sighed. “Yes, Parental Unit.” One of the rising stars among young cosmologists, and he was fretting about her paperwork.

“How’s the new insulin pump working?”

“Oh my God. Best two months’ salary I’ve ever spent. Absolutely life-changing. I feel like a new person.”

“Really? That’s fantastic. So it’s keeping you from crashing?”

“Not entirely. Zuul still inhabits me from time to time. Capricious little fiend. Came and took me over in the middle of the night last week. First time in a long time. Scared the crap out of both of us.”

Say her name, Weber willed Jess. But she didn’t. “So how is…Cleo?”

“Father!” She sounded almost amused. He blessed the screens of distracting data on her end. “Don’t you think it’s strange that you would ask about my dog before you asked about my mate?”

“Well,” he said. “How is…your mate?”

Deep silence from California. “You’ve forgotten her name, haven’t you?”

“Not ‘forgotten.’ I’ve just mislaid it, for the moment. Ask me anything about her. Brookline, Massachusetts. Holy Cross, Stanford, dissertation on the French colonial adventure in sub-Saharan…”

“It’s called ‘blocking,’ Father. It happens when you’re anxious or uncomfortable. You’ve never really gotten used to it, have you?”

“Gotten used to what?” Stupid time-buying.

Jessica stopped clicking. She was enjoying this. “You know. Never gotten used to your daughter sleeping with someone from the humanities.”

“Some of my best friends are humanists.”

“Name one.”

“Your mother is a humanist.”

“My mother is the last of the pagan saints. How soul-strengthening you’ve been for her, all these years.”

“You know, Jess. It’s really starting to worry me. It’s not just common names anymore. I’m surprised by entries in my agenda, in my own handwriting.”

“Daddy, remember what you said in one of your own books. ‘If you forget where you put your car keys, don’t sweat. If you forget what car keys are, see a physician.’”

“Did I say that?”

Jess laughed, the same goofy, distracted, bucktoothed laugh she’d laughed at eight years old. It cut right through him. “Besides, if it gets really bad, you can get your hands on the latest and greatest drugs. You guys have all sorts of things you’re not telling us public about yet, don’t you? Memory, concentration, speed, intelligence: a pill for everything, I bet. Irks the crap out of me that you won’t cut your own flesh and blood into any of this stuff.”

“Treat me nice,” he said. “You never know.”

“Speaking of your book, Shawna showed me the Harper’s review.” Shawna. No wonder he could never remember. “I say to hell with him,” his daughter said. “Obviously jealous, pure and simple. I wouldn’t think twice about it.”

A flash of disconnect. Harper’s? They’d jumped pub date. His publishers must have known about the review days ago. No one had mentioned anything to him. “I won’t,” he said.

“And have yourself a happy little birthday? Can you do that much for me?”

“I will.”

“Which I suppose means writing four thousand words and discovering a couple of heretofore unknown states of altered consciousness. I mean, in other people.”

He said goodbye, folded and pocketed the cricket, then hopped on the bike and pedaled up to Setauket Common and the Clark Library. He ran the gauntlet of news-magazine headlines: U.S. bombs obliterate Afghan wedding. Cabinet-level Security Department rushed through. Where had he been while this was happening? Handling the new Harper’s in its hardened red plastic folder, he felt vaguely criminal. Obscene, looking up a review of his work. Like Googling his own name. Scanning down the table of contents, he felt ridiculous. He’d been writing for years, with more success than he’d ever dared imagine. He wrote for the insight of the phrase, to locate, in some strange chain, its surprise truth. The way a reader received his stories said as much about the reader’s story as about the story itself. In fact, his books explored that very fact: there was no story itself. No final judgment. Anything this reviewer might say was just part of the distributed network, signals cascading through the fragile ecosystem. What could a pan or praise matter to him? He cared only what his daughter thought. His daughter’s mate. Shawna. Shawna. They’d read this piece, but not yet seen the book. If Jess got around to The Country of Surprise—and he imagined she would, someday — she’d be reading, inescapably, the book this review created, in her mind. Best to know what other volumes were now floating around, spun from the one he wrote.

The title of the review jumped off the page with a sickening thrill: “Neurologist in a Vat.” The reviewer’s name meant nothing to him. The article started out respectfully enough. But within a paragraph, it turned brittle. He began to scan, lingering on evaluative dismissals. The thesis, at the end of the second paragraph, was more damning than Jess had let on:

Driven by medical imaging and new molecular-level experimental technologies, brain research has surged ahead phenomenally in the last few years; Gerald Weber’s increasingly slender, anecdotal approach has not. He returns here with his familiar and slightly cartoonish tales, hiding behind an entirely predictable if irrefutable plea for tolerance of diverse mental conditions, even as his stories border on privacy violations and sideshow exploitation…Seeing such a respected figure capitalize on unacknowledged research and unfelt suffering borders on the embarrassing.

Weber read on, from out-of-context quotes to gross generalizations, from factual errors to ad hominem attacks. How could Jess have been so matter-of-fact about this? The piece made his book out to be both inaccurate science and irresponsible journalism, the pseudoempirical equivalent of reality television, profiting from fad and pain. He dealt in generalities with no particulars, facts with no understanding, cases with no individual feeling.

He did not read the review through to the end. He held the magazine open in front of him, a score to sight-sing. Around him in the bright, snug library sat four or five retirees and as many schoolchildren. None of them looked at him. The looks would start tomorrow, when he showed up on campus: the nonchalant gaze of colleagues, the pretense of business as usual, behind masked excitement.

He thought to research the reviewer, get a character sketch of the character assassin. Pointless. As Jess said: to hell with him. Any explanation Weber might construct for the attack would be just a story against this story. Jealousy, ideological conflict, personal advancement: explanations were endless. In the field of public reviewing, one scored zero for appreciating an already appreciated figure. With a target as large as Gerald Weber, one earned points only for a kill.

Even as he rehearsed these rationalizations, they sickened him. Nothing in the review was out of bounds. His book was fair game. Some other public writer found him exploitative: fair enough. He had often worried about that very possibility himself. Weber stared out the picture window, across the Common at the two Colonial churches, their harsh, believing beauty. Reading the worst left him almost relieved. No such thing as bad press, he heard Bob Cavanaugh whisper.

The book was what it was; no further evaluation would change its contents. A dozen people in shattered worlds, putting themselves back together — what was there in such a project that merited public attack? If he hadn’t authored the book, Harper’s wouldn’t have reviewed it at all. The review gave itself away: it didn’t aim to destroy the book. It aimed at him. Anyone who read the review would see this. And yet, if Weber had learned anything about the species, after a lifetime of study, it was that people flocked. Already, the core of the intelligentsia, wet forefingers in the air, were gauging the change in the prevailing winds. The science of consciousness now needed protection from Gerald Weber’s slender, anecdotal, exploitative approach. And oddly, as Weber slipped the plastic-bound issue back onto the shelf, he felt vindicated. Something in him had half-expected this moment, for as long as he’d been celebrated.

He strolled past the circulation desk, hung a left out the main doors, and followed the familiar stone path a hundred paces down the slope before freezing. He stood at the path’s end, the intersection of Bates, Main, and Dyke. He would telephone Cavanaugh, on the cell phone in his pocket, even at home, on Sunday, to ask how the man could think to hide this attack from Weber. He pulled out the shiny silver device. It looked like a remote detonator in a thriller film.

He was overreacting. The first sign of reasoned objection and he wanted to circle the wagons. He’d enjoyed public respect for so long — twelve years — that he assumed it; he no longer knew how to expect anything else. The book could stand on its own, in the face of any charges. Still: he did the math. For every twenty people who read the review, one, with luck, might read the book, while the others would describe it to friends in dismissive terms, without the inconvenience of having to look at it.

He slipped the phone into its pocket and doubled back up the path toward the bike rack. He would tell Sylvie, when he got home. She would be impervious, mildly amused. Smile and ask him: What would Famous Gerald do?

The bike ride back to Strong’s Neck was all downhill. The tide was out and July tasted brackish in his lungs. He’d wanted to get back to pure science, away from the fuzzy, mass-marketed world of science popularization. Here was a further motive. The hard left whip of Dyke Road brought him along the reedy estuary. Gravity slung him along the rill where George Washington’s Setauket spy ring had hung their lanterns at night, signaling over the sound to Connecticut, back when the terrorists were the heroes. The bike sped dangerously down the tidal embankment. In what world could the book he’d written be as evil as the book he’d just read about?

He looked back across his right shoulder. Setauket Harbor gleamed, brilliant in the midday sun. Across the blue-jade inlet, the spread wings of small sailboats skimmed. On such a day as this, anything might happen. The Bridgeport — Port Jefferson ferry lowed in the distance, a great migratory thing calling its way back to harbor. He loved his life here. A happy little birthday. He could still do that much.

Tour Director got them as far as Italy. Weber stood on the Ponte Vecchio, scanning the boutiques that had lined the bridge for centuries. A brief history of capitalism: butcher shops giving way to blacksmiths and tanners, giving way to silversmiths and goldsmiths, giving way to coral jewelry and neckties that would set you back weeks of salary. In the middle of a plume of people chattering scores of languages, he watched Sylvie, giddy with new euros and Florentine sun, nose around a window full of Nardin watches, just for play. Just pretending, happy to be away, someplace fully imaginary.

They had been all over the Duomo the day before. Already, Weber failed to form a detailed picture of the church’s interior in his mind. That morning, she had picked out the night’s entertainment, a performance of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria.

“Serious?” he’d asked her.

“You kidding? I love Renaissance opera. You know that.”

He didn’t ask how long she’d loved it. He couldn’t afford the answer. He studied her now, in the flowing crowd. When the light was right, at a distance, she could pass for a Japanese tourist. A holiday in this country, her favorite spot on earth, took decades off her. She looked as she had before they married, the girl for whom, a million years ago, he’d once performed a campy Schubert chorale, words by that rhymester Willie the Shake, sung to her with his friends over the phone as a Valentine, as if it were a collegiate glee number from 1928:

Who is Sylvia? What is she,

That all our swains commend her?

Holy, fair, and wise is she,

The heaven such grace did lend her,

That she might admired be.

Young Sylvie, when she stopped laughing at the rendition, scolded them all for singing without her. “Hey! Start again. Give me a part.”

Still her, still his traveling companion, despite the years. But how they’d gotten from that year to this, Weber couldn’t say. He could still name most of the cities they’d vacationed in, if not when, or what they’d seen. Now Florence in high summer: madness, he knew, even when they’d planned the trip. But July was the only time they both could get away, and the hot, dry press of crowds just made Sylvie happier. She turned and smiled at him, a little embarrassed at her window shopping. He smiled back as best he could, unable to take a step toward her through the stream of sightseers on the old bridge. Love doth to her eyes repair, to help him of his blindness.

The Times review had appeared just before they left the States. He’d read it at the breakfast table, as Sylvie tried to pull him out of the house to the airport. “Take it with,” she said. “It doesn’t weigh anything.”

He didn’t want to bring it. They were going to Italy. Reviews not welcome. By the time they got to LaGuardia, he’d rewritten it in his head. He could no longer tell what he actually remembered from the evaluation and what he was fabricating. He did know that whole phrases in the Times were lifted from the Harper’s piece. Surely any reader who read both would see the duplication.

He called Cavanaugh from the airport. “I wouldn’t let it worry you, Ger,” his editor said. “Strange days in America. We’re looking for something to lash out at. The book is selling fine. And you know we’re there for you with the new contract, whatever happens to this one.”

By arrival in Rome, Weber was ready to expatriate. Resentment had given way to doubt: perhaps the Times review wasn’t cribbed, but was merely independent corroboration. The idea ruined him for sightseeing. Their second night, in Siena, he and Sylvie argued. Not argued; struggled. Sylvie was being way too supportive. She refused to credit any of his qualms. “They might have one point,” Weber had suggested. “Looked at the wrong way, these books could indeed be seen as milking others’ disabilities for personal gain.”

“Piffle. You’ve been telling the story of people whose stories don’t get told. Letting the normals know that the tent is much bigger than they thought.”

Just what he’d told her he was doing, all these years.

“You’re tired. Jet-lagged. Bouncing around in a foreign country. Of course this whole thing makes you feel a little shaky. Hey! It could be worse. You could have some Medici hit man knifing you in the back for your art. C’mon. Abbastanza. What do you want to do tomorrow?”

Exactly the question that worried him. What to do tomorrow, and the day after. Another popular book was out of the question. Even lab work felt shaky. His research team already treated him differently — a new impatience with his low-tech, folksy anecdotal style, a hunger for more penetrating research — the sexy stuff with Big Imaging that was cracking the brain wide open. He was just a popularizer. An exploitative popularizer, at that.

After a week of anhedonia, he discovered a surprise weakness for Italian liqueurs with exotic nineteenth-century labels, as if he were some second-generation nostalgic lush returning to the fatherland. He couldn’t concentrate on the old buildings, even his beloved Romanesque. Sylvie felt him soldiering through the ancient towns, but she never scolded him. Siena, Florence, San Gimignano: he took more than five hundred pictures, mostly of Sylvie in front of world-famous landmarks, dozens of them from the same angle, as if both woman and monuments were in danger of disappearing. He was cramping her holiday, and he worked to lighten up. But finally his militant gaiety made her sit him down in a dusty trattoria across from the Palazzo Pretorio in Prato and lecture him.

“I know you’re gearing up for an ordeal when we get back. But there’s no ordeal. No one to fight. Nothing’s changed. This book is as good as anything you’ve ever written.” Exactly his worst fear. “People will read it and do what they can with it, and you’ll write something else. My God! Most writers would kill for the kind of attention you’re getting.”

“I’m not a writer,” he answered. But perhaps he’d inadvertently given up the day job, as well.

Back in Rome on their last evening, he lost control. They were sitting at a café on the Via Cavour. She reminded him that they were having drinks that night with a Flemish couple she had met.

“When did you tell me this?”

“Which time?” She sighed. “Male pattern deafness.” What other wives might have called self-absorption. “Come on, Man. Where are you?”

Against his better judgment, he told her. He hadn’t mentioned the reviews for days. “I’m wondering if they might actually be right.”

She threw her hands into the air like a ninja cheerleader. “Oh, stop! They’re not right. They’re just professional climbers.” Her composure maddened him. He found himself saying absurd things in increasingly incomprehensible fragments. Finally he got up and left. Idiot, fool: he wandered at random through the Roman web, as the sun sank and the twisting streets disoriented him. He got back to the hotel after eleven. The Flemish couple had long since left. Even then, she did not rebuke him as he deserved. He’d married a woman who simply didn’t understand drama. That night and on the plane the next day, she extended the same professional cool she gave her most erratic Wayfinder clients.

They made it back home intact. Sylvie was right: no ordeal awaited. Cavanaugh called with a few reassuring reviews, figures, and translation offers. But Weber still had book promotion to get through before summer’s end. Readings, print interviews, radio: more proof, if his research team needed any, that a man couldn’t serve two masters.

At a reading at Cody’s in Berkeley, a member of the otherwise respectful audience asked how he responded to the press’s suggestion that his personalized case histories violated professional ethics. The audience hissed at the question, but with a disguised thrill. He stumbled through an answer that had once been automatic: The brain was not a machine, not a car engine, not a computer. Purely functional descriptions hid as much as they revealed. You couldn’t grasp any individual brain without addressing private history, circumstance, personality — the whole person, beyond the sum of mechanical modules and localized deficits.

A second listener wanted to know if all his patients always gave full approval. He said of course. Yes, but with their deficits, did they always fully understand that approval? Brain research, Weber said, suggested that no one could ever second-guess another’s understanding. Even as he spoke it, it sounded incriminating. Even he could hear the blatant contradiction.

Weber looked out into the standing-room-only crowd. One attractive middle-aged woman in a madras dress held a miniature video camera. Others had audio recorders. “This is starting to feel a little like a feeding frenzy,” he laughed. Something off with the timing. The audience hushed, nonplussed. He caught a rhythm at last, limiting the damage. But fewer people waited in line for signed copies than the last time he’d come through town.

The ordinary colors of his day took on a new cast: all too much like a case he’d once detailed. He knew Edward only from the literature, but in Wider Than the Sky, Weber made Edward his own, describing him, perhaps, as if he’d discovered him. Edward was born partly color-blind, like ten percent of all men, many of whom never discover their condition. A lack of color receptors in Edward’s eyes left him unable to distinguish reds and greens. Color blindness was itself uncanny: the unsettling suggestion that any two people might disagree about exactly what hue a given object actually had.

But Edward’s color vision was stranger still. Like far fewer people — one in tens of thousands — Edward was also synesthetic. Edward’s inherited synesthesia was consistent and stable throughout his lifetime. His took a standard form: seeing numbers as colors. For Edward, numbers and hues actually fused, the way that smoothness usually fuses with comfort and sharpness with pain. He complained as a child that the colors on his number blocks were all wrong. His mother understood; she had the same fused wiring, too.

Those with the condition often tasted shapes or felt, in their skin, the texture of spoken words. These were no simple associations, no flights of poetic fancy. Weber had come to see synesthesia as something as durable as the smell of strawberries or the chill of ice: a left-hemisphere function, somehow buried beneath the cortex, a signal-crossing that every brain produced but that only a select few brains presented to consciousness, something not quite shed in evolution, or perhaps the advance scouts of mutation’s next reel.

Edward, both color-blind and synesthetic, was his own story. The look, sound, or thought of the numeral one caused him to see white. Twos were bathed in fields of blue. Every number was a color, the way that honey was sweet or the interval of a minor second was dissonant. The problem came with fives, and nines. Edward called them “Martian colors,” hues unlike any that he’d ever seen.

It puzzled the doctors at first. After some testing, the truth came out: those numbers were red and green. Not the “red” and “green” that his eyes saw and his mind had learned to translate. But red and green as they registered in the brains of the color-sighted — pure mental hues for which Edward had no visual equivalents. Colors that his eyes could not detect still registered in his undamaged visual cortex, triggered by numbers. He could perceive the shades by synesthesia; he just couldn’t see them.

Weber had told the story years ago, concluding with a few thoughts about the locked room of personal experience. The senses were a metaphor at best. Neuroscience had revived Democritus: we speak of bitter and sweet, of hot and cold, but we come no closer to actual qualities than a rough thumbnail. All we could exchange were pointers—purple, sharp, acrid—to our private sensations.

But years ago, these ideas had been for Weber just writing, without aroma or tone. Now the words came back, rasping and clanging, springing up everywhere he looked: Martian colors, hues his eyes could not see, flooding his brain…

In August, he flew to Sydney, an invited speaker at an international conference on “The Origins of Human Consciousness.” He had his problems with the evolutionary psychology crowd. The discipline was too fond of explaining everything in terms of Pleistocene modules, identifying gross, falsely universal characteristics of human behavior, then explaining, with ex post facto tautology, why they were inevitable adaptations. Why were males polygamous and females monogamous? It all came down to the relative economics of sperm versus egg. Not exactly science; but then, neither was his writing.

To Weber, much conscious behavior was less adaptation than exaptation. Pleiotropy — one gene giving rise to several unrelated effects — complicated attempts to explain characteristics in terms of independent selection. He had serious doubts about walking into a room full of evolutionary psychologists. But the meeting gave him a chance to try out a talk that he didn’t dare present anywhere else: a theory about why patients who suffered from finger agnosia — the inability to name which finger was being touched or pointed to — often also suffered from dyscalculia — mathematical disability. He wasn’t expected to break new ground with his speech. He was simply supposed to play himself, tell some good stories, and shake lots of hands.

The flight from New York to Los Angeles began badly, when his shoes triggered the security detectors and they found a nail-care kit he’d stupidly packed in his carry-on. It took a while to prove to the guards that he was who he claimed to be. In L.A., he transferred to the Sydney plane, which sat at the gate for an hour before being canceled. The pilot blamed a hairline crack in the windshield. Forty people on the plane: doubtless the crack would have looked smaller had there been four hundred.

He disembarked and sat in LAX for eight hours, waiting for his rebooked flight. By the time he boarded, he’d lost all sense of time. Somewhere out over the middle of the Pacific, he developed mild gaze tinnitus. When he looked to the left, he heard ringing in his ears. When he looked straight, the ringing went away. He thought about canceling his speech and returning to New York. The problem worsened throughout the in-flight dinner and movie. But after the forgettable film, the symptoms vanished.

He was so late clearing passport control in Sydney that he had to head straight to his first interviews, even before checking into his hotel. The first interview turned into a banal personality profile. The second was one of those disasters where the uninformed interviewer wanted Weber to comment on everything except his work. Could classical music actually make your baby smarter? How close were we to cognition-enhancing drugs? Weber was so jet-lagged he practically hallucinated. He heard his sentences growing longer and less grammatical. By the time the Australian journalist asked whether America could really hope to win the war on terrorism, he was saying injudicious things.

He was too tired to sleep that night. The next day was the conference. He walked about the cavernous convention center, bumping into chairs and office tables. Everyone recognized him, but most attendees looked away when he caught their eyes. For his part, he fought the urge to assign a five-digit Diagnostic and Statistical Manual code to everyone who came up to shake his hand. The crowd flowed through the conference rooms, whispering and laughing, displaying, preening, praising and faulting, flocking, forming factions, picking fights, plotting overthrows. He watched a middle-aged man and woman shriek upon seeing each other, embrace, and chatter in tandem. He waited to see them comb bugs out of each other’s scalps and eat them. The evolutionary psychologists had that much right, at least. Older creatures still inhabited us, and would never vacate.

A morning of panels confirmed his impression that the field was paying undue respect to a handful of skilled showmen, some no older than his daughter. This, too, was science: fashions came and went; theories rose and vanished for all sorts of reasons, not all of them scientific. He had no more appetite for following the latest craze than he had for sitting through an entire baseball game. For one, few of the new theories could be tested. But the field was fundable and in a hurry, and they asked only that he give an entertaining keynote. A cartoonish tale-teller could do that much.

By mid-afternoon, he was seeing double. He sat through a baggy discussion of the phenomenology of synesthesia. He listened to a sensorimotor account of the origin of reading. He heard a fierce debate between cognitivists and new behaviorists on orbitofrontal damage and emotional processes. The one lecture of use to him examined the neurochemistry of the trait that truly separated humans from other creatures: boredom.

There followed an excruciating mass dinner during which his table mates — three American researchers he knew by reputation — baited him about the shaky reviews. Was it a statistical fluke, or some more significant shift in popular taste? Even the word popular sounded pointed. Pushed, he replied, “I suppose I have enjoyed the kind of attention that inevitably produces a backlash.” He heard how self-serving the words were, even as they left his mouth, words these three researchers would now broadcast. The whole conference would hear them, by the time he gave his speech.

One of the conference organizers, a “holistic psychotherapist” from Washington, gave him an introduction so luminous it sounded mocking. Only when Weber stood behind the podium, at a moment that Sydney insisted was 8:00 p.m., did he realize the whole invitation might have been a setup. He looked out across a grassland peppered with the smiling, expectant faces of a species that hunted in packs.

He hated to read talks. Usually, he spoke from an outline, delivering freewheeling, campfire performances. But when he wandered from the script that night, vertigo hit him. He stood high on a towering cliff, water pounding over it. What was acrophobia anyway, if not the half-acknowledged desire to jump? He stayed close to the printed word, but with the stage lights on him and his eyes playing tricks, he kept losing his place. As he read aloud, he realized he’d pitched the talk too low. These were scientists, researchers. He was feeding them armchair descriptions, waiting-room stuff. He scrambled to add technical detail that got away from him even as he added it.

The speech wasn’t a total disaster. He’d sat through worse. But it was no keynote, not worth the honorarium they paid. He took questions, mostly slow, fat lobs over the plate. The group felt sorry for him, seeing that the kill had already been made. Someone asked if he thought that the narrative impulse might actually have preceded language. The question had nothing to do with the talk he’d just delivered. It seemed to refer, if anything, to the Harper’s accusation that he’d missed his true calling, that Gerald Weber was, deep down, a fabulist.

He made it through the reception without further humiliation. The ordeal left him ravenous, just hours after dinner, but the reception offered nothing but Shiraz and greasy herring squares on crackers. The entire room developed Klüver-Bucy: popping things in their mouths like babies, carrying on a little too manically, mewling nonsense syllables to each other, propositioning anything that moved.

He didn’t get back to the hotel until after midnight. He wasn’t sure if he could call Sylvie. He couldn’t even calculate the time difference. He lay awake, thinking of the answers he should have given, seeing the cracks in his ceiling as frozen synapses. Sometime after 3:00 a.m., it occurred to him that he himself might be an extremely detailed case history, a description of personality so minutely realized that it only thought it was autonomous…

At night, the brain grows strange to itself. He knew the precise biochemistry behind “sundowner syndrome”—the intense exaggeration of medical symptoms, during hours of darkness. But knowing the biochemistry didn’t reverse it. Eventually, he must have fallen asleep, because he woke up from a dream in which people were plunging like missiles into a large body of water and emerging in molten proto-forms. Dreaming: that compromise solution for accommodating the vestigial brain stem. He woke to the phone, a wakeup call he’d forgotten asking for. It was still dark. He had thirty minutes to shower, eat, and cross town to the television studios for a live appearance on a morning news show. Five minutes on breakfast television, something he’d done half a dozen times before. He arrived at the studios with his mind still back at the hotel. They took him into Makeup and powdered him. He removed his glasses. Not vanity, really. Glasses under television lights became mirrors. He met with the show editor, who briefed him from photocopied notes and Internet printouts. The Harper’s review peeked out of the stack. The editor seemed to be discussing a book written by someone else.

Weber sat in the cramped green room, watching a tiny monitor as the guest before him struggled to look natural. Then his turn came. They led him onto a tech-encircled set filled with glowing living room furniture. Around the couch, a small artillery unit of cameras dollied in and out. Without his glasses, the world was a Monet. They sat him next to the commentator, who looked down into what seemed to be a coffee table but was in fact a prompter. Next to this man, a woman: symbolic wife. The woman introduced him, garbling several facts. The first question came from nowhere.

“Gerald Weber. You’ve written about so many people suffering from so many extraordinary conditions. People who think that hot is cold and black is white. People who think they can see when they can’t. People for whom time has stopped. People who think their body parts belong to someone else. Can you tell us the strangest case you’ve ever witnessed?”

A freak show, unrolling live in front of millions of breakfasters. Just like the reviews accused. He wanted to ask her to start again. The seconds clicked off, each as large, white, and frozen as Greenland. He opened his mouth to answer and discovered that his tongue was super-glued to the back of his front teeth. He could not salivate or moisten the freeze-dried hollow of his throat. Every Australian on earth would think he was sucking on a lug nut.

Words came out, but in chunks, as if he’d just suffered a stroke. He mumbled something about his books countering the idea of “suffering.” Every mental state was simply a new and different way of being, different from ours only in degree.

“A person who has amnesia or experiences hallucinations isn’t suffering?” the man asked in a journalistic voice, ready for instruction. Yet his tone bore just a tinge of sarcasm about to flower.

“Well, let’s take hallucinations,” Weber said. The take came out closer to taste. He described Charles Bonnet syndrome, patients with damage to the visual pathway that left them at least partially blind. Bonnet patients often experienced vivid hallucinations. “I know a woman who often finds herself surrounded by animated cartoons. But Bonnet’s is common. Millions of people experience it. Yes, suffering is involved. Yet everyday, baseline consciousness involves suffering. We need to start seeing all these ways of being as continuous rather than discontinuous. Quantitatively rather than qualitatively different from us. They are us. Aspects of the same apparatus.”

The woman commentator tilted her head at him and smiled, a megadose of gorgeous skepticism. “You’re saying we’re all a little out there?” Her companion laughed antiseptically. Television.

He said he was saying delusional thinking was similar to ordinary thinking. Brains of any flavor produced reasonable explanations for unusual perceptions.

“That’s what lets you enter into mental states so different from your own?”

Like the worst traps, this one felt innocent. They steered toward the accusations about his work they’d found on the Internet. Do you really care about your patients, or are you just using them for scientific ends? Good controversy; better television. He felt the ambush develop. But he couldn’t see, his mouth was dry, and he hadn’t slept in days. He started to speak, sentences that sounded peculiar even before he formed them. He meant to say, simply, that everyone experienced passing moments of delusion, like when you look at the sunset and wonder, for an instant, where the sun goes. Such moments gave everyone the ability to understand others’ mental deficits. The words came out sounding as if he were confessing to intermittent insanity. Both hosts smiled and thanked him for coming on the show that morning. They segued seamlessly into a teaser about a Brisbane man who had a piece of coral the size of a cricket-ball crash through his bedroom roof. Then a commercial break, and assistants hustled him off the set, his debacle taped forever and soon replayable on the Web, at any time, by anyone, from anywhere on earth.

He called Bob Cavanaugh from the hotel. “I thought you’d want to know, before you heard from other quarters. Not good. There may be some fallout.”

After the maddening satellite uplink delay, Cavanaugh sounded only bemused. “It’s Australia, Gerald. Who’s going to know?”

How much had Mark changed? The question dogged Karin, in that hot summer, a third of a year on. She measured him constantly, comparing him against an image of him before the accident that changed with each day she spent with the new Mark. Her sense of him was just a running average, weighted in favor of the latest person who stood in front of her. She no longer trusted her memory.

He was certainly slower. Before the accident, even deciding how to handle their mother’s estate had taken him only twenty minutes. Now choosing whether to draw the blinds was like resolving the Middle East. A day became just long enough to sit down and figure out what he absolutely needed to do tomorrow, followed by a little necessary down time.

He was more forgetful. He could pour a bowl of cereal right next to the one he had left half-eaten. She told him several times a week that he was on disability, but he refused to believe it. His word blurs seemed almost playful to her. “Got to get back to work,” he declared. “Bring home the bankin’.” Seeing the president on the news, he groaned, “Not him again — Mr. Taxes of Evil.” He complained about his clock radio readout. “I can’t tell if it’s 10:00 a.m. or 10:00 FM.” Maybe this was still what all the books called aphasia. Or maybe Mark was goofing on purpose. She couldn’t remember if he’d ever been funny, before.

He was often childlike now; she could no longer deny it. Yet she’d spent years before the accident badgering him to grow up. The whole country was juvenile. The age was childlike. And when she watched him alongside Rupp and Cain, Mark did not always suffer by comparison.

The slightest trigger set him raging. But anger, too, was an old familiar. Back in first grade, when Mark’s teacher affectionately called him “an oddball” in front of the class, for bringing his lunch in a paper sack and not a metal lunch box, he’d cursed her in furious tears. Years later, when his father mocked him in a Christmas-dinner argument, the boy of fourteen sprang up from the table, ran up the stairs shrieking Happy damn Holidays, and put his fist through the maple-paneled bedroom door, winding up in the emergency room with three broken bones in his hand. And then there was the time a hysterical Joan Schluter tried to take shears to her son’s locks after Mark and Cappy fought over his bangs. The seventeen-year-old had exploded, kicking in the oven and threatening to sue both parents for abuse.

In fact, even the Capgras had some precedent. For three years before puberty, Mark had refined Mr. Thurman, his imaginary friend. Mr. Thurman confided to Mark, in top secret, that Mark had been adopted. Mr. Thurman knew Mark’s real family, and promised to introduce Mark when he was older. Sometimes Mr. Thurman made allowance for Karin, saying they were both foundlings, but related. Other times, they were drawn from different orphan lots. At those times, Mark consoled her, insisting they’d be better friends when they didn’t have to carry on in that sham family anymore. Karin had hated Mr. Thurman with a passion, often threatening to gas him while Mark slept.

The Capgras was changing her, too. She fought against her habituation. For a little while longer, she still saw it: his laughter, eerily mechanical. His bouts of sadness, just statements of fact. Even his anger, mere colorful ritual. He’d burst out with some seven-year-old’s declaration of love for Barbara, apropos of nothing. He’d go fishing with his buddies, mimic all the patter, sit in the boat casting and cursing his luck like the robot host of some television fishing show, going through the motions with fearful, flattened intensity, desperate to prove that he was still intact, inside the wrappings. For a little while longer, she knew the accident had blown them both away, and all the selfless attention from her in the world would never get them back. There was no back to get them to. For each new day, her own integrating memory increasingly proved that my brother was always like that.

Visiting the Homestar one early July afternoon, Karin found Mark watching a travel documentary featuring a gentle, anemic priest stumbling around Tuscany. Mark sat entranced, as if he’d just chanced upon the most extraordinary reality TV. He greeted Karin, excited. “Hey, guy. Look at this place! Unbelievable. People living there for millions of years. And stones even older than that.”

Karin watched with him. He abided her now, a habit as upsetting as earlier hostilities. The travelogue ended, and Mark surfed the other channels. He buzzed his old favorites — motor and contact sports, music videos, manic comedies. But he flinched at the noise and speed. He could no longer open up the pipe that connected him to the outside world without overflowing. After five minutes of a rerun of his favorite syndicated farce, he asked, “Could that accident have made me psychic?”

She faked calm. “What do you mean?”

“It’s like I can tell every joke before they even crack it.”

He settled on a nature show about the three species of primitive egg-laying mammals, something he would not have been caught dead watching before the accident. “Jesus. What are those things? Somebody really screwed up on the design specs. Birds with hair!”

This was the Mark she remembered from childhood. Curious and tender, with no sudden moves. He’d grown baffled enough to want her there, sitting next to him on the narrow sofa. She had him just as she wanted. She could make tea for him, might even extend her arm across the sofa and touch his shoulder, and he’d bear it. The thought traumatized her. She stood and paced the room. Unthinkable: Tuscany, echidnas, and her brother. She stared at him where he sat on the couch, knitting his brows at the backward mammals, a charade of excitement. “Just look at that thing! Abandoned by evolution. Left behind. That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.” He looked up and saw her pacing. “Hey. Would you sit down a minute? You’re making me nervous.”

She sat back on the couch next to him. He leaned toward her, turning on his idea of charm. He rested a hand on her thigh and launched into his daily litany. “How about driving me over to Thompson Motors? I can get a used F-150 for nothing. Trick it out. You gotta help me, though, because they stole my checkbook. Left me my address thingie, but the names and numbers are messed up.”

“I don’t know, Mark. That’s probably not such a great idea yet.”

“No?” He scowled and raised his helpless hands. “Whatever.” He picked up a week-old copy of the Kearney Hub left on the coffee table as a place mat and flipped through the used-truck listings that he’d already penned up. She reached forward and pressed the power on the remote. He whirled on her. “Would you mind? I’m watching that. You don’t really care about the egg mammals, do you? You don’t care much about any species except yourself.”

“Mark, the egg mammals are over.”

“The hell they are. Living fossils. Greatest survival story in vertebrate history. Over? No way. Look! What is…that’s…some kind of a sea unicorn or something.”

“That’s a new show, Mark.”

“What the fuck do you know? It’s all the same show.” By way of proof, he flipped the clicker back around the channels. “Hey. Look at this one. Based on a true story. Doesn’t anyone make movies based on fake stories, anymore?” He clicked some more, landing on Court TV. “All right? Satisfied? Jeez. Not from around here, are you?”

While Mark read his newspaper, she watched two neighbors sue each other over a garden plot they’d purchased together. After a while, she asked, “Would you like to go for a walk?”

He jerked up, alarmed. “Walk where?”

“I don’t know. Down to Scudder’s meadow? We could shoot for the river. Get out of the subdivision, anyway.”

He looked at her with pity, that she’d think this possible. “I don’t think so. Maybe tomorrow.”

They sat for a long time, reading to a background of televised litigation. She fixed him a tuna melt for dinner. He walked her to the door when she left. “Damn it! Look at that. Night again. I don’t know how I had time to work all day, when I was working. That reminds me: Infernal Beef. I should call the plant, shouldn’t I? Gotta get back to the workaday, know what I’m saying? Can’t live on free money forever.”

He started cognitive behavioral therapy with Dr. Tower. Karin drove him to Kearney, in what Mark called “the little Jap car.” He’d given up the idea that she might try to crash and kill him. Or perhaps he’d just reconciled himself to fate.

The treatment called for six weekly assessments followed by twelve “adjustment sessions,” with as many follow-ups as necessary, through the next year. Karin drove him to Good Samaritan for the appointments, then walked around town for the hour. The hospital staff asked her not to talk with Mark about the therapy until they had her join the later sessions. She swore she wouldn’t. After the second session, the question slipped out before she heard herself asking. “So how is it, talking to Dr. Tower?”

He turned clinical. “Okay, I guess. Doesn’t hurt to look at her. Little slow on the uptake, though. Man, you have to tell the woman everything a hundred times. She thinks you might be real. Maddening.”

Barbara came by, three times a week. She would drop in unannounced, always an event. Out of her hospital clothes, in gray shorts and burgundy tee, she was summer personified. Karin admired her bare arms and legs, wondering again about the woman’s age. Barbara turned Mark into a water-drinking duck toy, constantly bobbing, game for anything she asked. And all the things she asked for felt like games. She took him to the grocery store and made him shop for himself. That course had never occurred to Karin, who stocked Mark’s kitchen each week, keeping him both fed and dependent. Barbara, though, was merciless. She’d make no decisions for him, however much he appealed to her. “Hey, Barbie. Which of these do I really like better? You remember, from all those years in our little health hotel? Am I a sausage guy or a bacon guy?”

“I’ll tell you how you can find out. Just watch yourself, and see which one you pick.” She turned him loose, condemned to freedom in all the terror of American abundance, mounting interventions only in the matter of sprayable cheese and chocolate marshmallow cereal.

Barbara played video games with him, even the racing program. Mark loved it: a fish on wheels he could beat every time, even with one thumb tied behind his back. She got him on cribbage. Mark loved the epic contests, which often left him begging for mercy. “Is this how you get your kicks? A grown woman, beating up on beginners?”

Karin overheard. “Beginner? You don’t remember playing this forever, with your mother, as a child?”

He scoffed at the idiocy. “Playing forever? My mother as a child?”

“You know what I’m saying. Using sheets of worthless Green Stamps as stakes.”

Mark lifted his head from the cards, to sneer. “My mother did not play cribbage. Playing cards were the increments of the Devil.”

“That was later, Mark. When we were little, she was still a card addict. Don’t you remember? Hey. Don’t ignore me.”

“Playing cards. With my mother. My mother as a child.”

Three months — no; thirty years — of frustration thickened the air around her. “Oh, for God’s sake! Don’t be such a gnat-skull.” She listened to the echo, horrified at herself. Her eyes sought Barbara’s, pleading temporary insanity. Barbara checked Mark. But Mark just tipped his head back and snorted.

“Gnat-skull. Where’d you learn that? My sister used to call me that, too.”

Nothing rattled him, so long as Barbara was there. In small steps, she got him reading again. She tricked him into picking up a book he’d refused to crack when required back in high school. My Antonia. “Very sexy story,” she assured him. “About a young Nebraska country boy who has the hots for an older woman.”

He got fifty pages in, although it took him two weeks. He confronted Barbara with the evidence, betrayed. “It’s not about what you said at all. It’s about immigrants and farming and drought and shit.”

“That, too,” she admitted.

He stuck with the story, to protect his investment, throwing good hours after bad. The book’s ending confused him. “You mean he goes back, after they’re both married and she has all those fucking kids, just to hang out? Just to, like, be her friend, or something? Just because of what happened when they were little?”

Barbara nodded, her eyes filmy. Mark put out his hand to comfort her.

“Best obsolete book I ever read. Not that I got it all, exactly.”

She took him on long walks under the summer sun. They wandered, parched yet sticky, July threatening to rasp on without end, with nothing they could do but endure and keep walking. They spent hours touring the ignited wheat fields, like local farm agents responsible for monitoring the region’s harvest. They took the dog, Blackie Two. “This cur is almost as good as mine,” Mark declared. “Just a little less obedient.” Now and then he let Karin tag along, if she kept quiet.

Barbara could listen to Mark go on about modding vehicles long after Karin numbed. “I can never leave a car stock,” Mark declared. He launched an extended anatomy of the vehicle he was building in his head: Rams, Bigfoots, and Broncos all spliced together into a monster hybrid. Ignored and invisible, tagging along fifty yards back, Karin studied the older woman’s technique. Barbara absorbed and deflected him, drawing him out. She listened, rapt, to Mark’s recited parts lists, then lifted her finger, as if in passing. “Did you hear that? What was that sound?” Without his realizing, she’d have Mark listening to the cicada choruses that he hadn’t heard since fifteen. Barbara Gillespie had the lightest touch known to man, a self-possession that Karin could dissect and even imitate for short stretches, but could never hope to embody. It saddened her to see, in Barbara, what she finally wanted to be when she grew up. But she had no more chance of becoming Barbara than a lightning bug had, through diligence, of becoming a lighthouse. The other woman now belonged here more than she did.

Mark would do anything for his Barbie Doll. Karin came on them late one afternoon at his kitchen table, heads bowed over an art book, looking for all the world like Joan Schluter and her final pastor poring over Scripture. The book was called A Guide to Unseeing: 100 Artists Who Gave Us New Eyes. Some volume from Barbara’s secret, surprise shelf. Karin drew behind them where they sat, afraid Mark might flare up and banish her. But he didn’t even notice her. He was hypnotized by Cezanne’s House and Trees. Barbara’s fingers draped across the image, twining with the tree trunks. Mark had his face up to the page, following the scrape of the palette knife. He struggled with the picture, something forcing up from inside him. Karin saw at once what he wrestled with: their old farmhouse, the lean-to against the precarious years of their childhood, the house whose mortgage their father tried to pay by dusting crops in an ancient Grumman AgCat. She couldn’t stop herself. “You know where that is, don’t you?”

Mark turned on her, like a bear surprised while foraging. “It’s nowhere.” He pointed wildly at his own skull. “It’s fucking fantasy, is where it is.” She shrank back. He might have stood and struck her, except for the graze of Barbara’s fingers on his arm. The touch threw a circuit breaker, and he turned back to the print, rage dissolving. He grabbed the pages and thumbed them, flip-book style, five hundred years of painted masterpieces in five seconds. “Who’s been making all this stuff? I mean, look at this! How long has this been going on? Where have I been all my life?”

Minutes passed before Karin stopped shaking. Once, eight years ago, he’d split her lip with a backhand when she’d called him an unreliable asshole. Now he might truly hurt her, without even knowing. He’d be stuck like this for good, even farther gone than their father was, unable to hold down jobs, watching nature shows and browsing art books, reacting to the smallest impediment with cloudbursts of fury. Then turning away, puzzled, as if not quite believing what he’d just done.

It wrecked her: he’d be dependent on her forever. And still she would fail him, as she had failed to protect her parents from their own worst instincts. Her ministrations were making Mark even worse. She needed him to be a way he would never be again, a way that she was no longer sure that he had ever been. She hadn’t the strength to cope with his crushing new innocence. She lowered herself into a folding chair. The arc of her own life no longer led anywhere. The years ahead collapsed, burying her under their dead weight. Then the graze of fingertips on her forearm took her out of herself.

She looked up into Barbara, a face whose gaze seemed equal to any behavior. Barbara retrieved her hand from Karin’s arm and continued to walk Mark through the calming book. She seemed to know all the painters’ names, without even looking at the captions. Did she extend this care to all her discharged patients? Why the Schluters? Karin didn’t dare ask. The visits couldn’t last much longer. But there Barbara was at Mark’s kitchen table, keeping him company in his unseeing.

The two women left together that evening. Karin walked Barbara to her car. “Listen. I don’t know how to say this. I am in your debt. I’ll never be able to thank you for this. Never.”

Barbara wrinkled her nose. “Pff. Hardly. Thanks for letting me drop in.”

“Serious. He’d be lost without you. I’d be…worse.”

Too much: the woman cringed, ready to flee. “It’s nothing. It’s completely for me.”

“If there’s ever anything — anything at all — please, please…”

Barbara held her eye: There might be, one day. To Karin’s surprise, she rushed out, “Who knows when we’ll need someone looking out for us?”

Not even the Muskrateers rattled Barbara. When their visits overlapped, Rupp and Cain enlisted Barbara in rounds of five-card stud or two-hand touch. Whatever game the boys were playing, Barbara joined. Mark came out of his maze for as long as she was nearby. Cain couldn’t resist drawing her into running debates — the war on terror, the necessary curtailment of civil liberties, the invulnerable yet somehow infinitely threatened American way of life. He was one of those stubby, apoplectic debaters who jabbed out statistics, richly detailed and constantly mutating. Barbara pummeled him. Unsportsmanlike, even letting Duane into the same ring with her. Once, he cited some newly upholstered article from the Bill of Rights, and she countered with the entire document, memorized. He fled the room at peak decibel, shouting, “Maybe in your Constitution!”

Rupp hit on the woman conscientiously, duty-bound, resorting to increasingly desperate supplications: help with his pet ferret. A model rocketry excursion. Licking envelopes for a mass fund-raiser. Her job was the cheerful slam. Muzzle it. Try a solo lift-off. Get stuffed. Everyone waited for the next escalation. Everyone except Mark, who begged them, eyes wet, to quit.

Karin gave what he let her give. She loved to run the taxi service to the hour-long cognitive therapy sessions that Mark increasingly resisted. Taking him home after the third appointment, so casually she wasn’t really breaking the hospital’s orders, she sounded him out again. “How are things going with you and Dr. Tower?”

“Pretty good,” Mark said, eyes, as always, glued to the road. “I think all this therapy is starting to make her feel a little better.”

Before the fourth session, Mark demanded to visit Intensive Care. He picked a floor nurse at random, told her the story and showed the note. The startled woman promised to pass along anything she heard.

“See that?” he asked, as Karin steered him toward Dr. Tower’s floor. “She was stonewalling. Claiming they didn’t let anyone in to see me that first night except my next of kin. But you told me they let you in. It doesn’t add up, does it?”

She shook her head, surrendering to the laws of his world. “No, Mark. It really doesn’t.”

She spent the hour of his session sitting in the hospital cafeteria, calculating the degree of her self-delusion. Therapy was doing nothing for him. She was clinging to medical science the same way her mother clung to Revelation. Weber’s scientific assurances had seemed so rational. But then, Mark seemed rational to himself. And increasingly clearer-eyed than she.

When he came out of the session, Karin suggested dinner. “How about Grand Island, the Farmer’s Daughter Café?”

“Holy crap!” Pleasure and fear struggled over his face. “That’s my favorite place to eat in this whole forsaken life. How did you know that? You talk to the guys?”

She felt ashamed for everything human. “I know you. I know what you like.”

He shrugged. “Hey! Maybe you have weird powers you don’t know about. We should run some tests.”

Mark and his friends loved to drive forty-five miles for the same bloody beef they could get anywhere in half a dozen places in Kearney. Karin had never understood the Farmer’s Daughter’s appeal, but she was glad now for the ride. Mark, hostage, sat next to her, thoughtful, for most of an hour. Riding shotgun—the death seat, he called it — he scanned the fields of wheat, beans, and corn, scouring the landscape for the slightest thing that didn’t fit. He read the road signs out loud: “Adopt-a-highway. Adopt a highway! Who would’ve thought so many of our nation’s roads were orphaned?”

She waited until the sleepy stretch between Shelton and Wood River to question him. Medicine had betrayed her; she could betray medicine. “So what’s the worst thing about Dr. Tower?”

His head was nearly on the dash, peering up at a raptor circling above them. “She’s getting on my nerves. She wants to know all this crap that happened twenty million years ago. What’s different, what’s the same. I tell her: You want ancient history? Go buy an ancient history book.” The hawk fell away behind them. Mark straightened and leaned over toward her. “‘What did you do when you were little and your sister made you angry?’ What’s the point? I mean, it’s weird, don’t you think? Trying to find out so much about me. Change the way I look at things.”

Her pulse quickened at his conspiratorial tone. She remembered their covert adolescent resistance, surviving their parents’ worst certainties. Now he offered a new alliance. She could join him, however crazy. They’d both have what they needed. She sucked air, dizzy to toady to him. “First of all, Mark. No one is making you do anything.”

“Whew. That’s a relief.”

“Dr. Tower just wants to understand what’s on your mind now.”

“Why don’t they just stick me back inside one of those scanners? Damn, they’ve got to work the kinks out of those things. You ever been inside one of those tubes? Damn racket. Like having your skull worked on in a body shop. And you can’t move. Chin all strapped in. Mess you up good, if you’re not messed up already. Computerized mind reading.”

She let it drop until Grand Island. Summer along the Platte: the shimmering mirage, the burnt-green wall of flattening heat that made the Plains everyone else’s model of godforsaken barrenness released Karin. The surging, Lego grid of Chicago had oppressed her. The Rockies left her edgy. L.A.’s wraparound glitz felt like hysterical blindness. This place, at least, she knew. This place alone was open and empty enough to disappear in.

The Farmer’s Daughter occupied an old 1880s storefront with cherry wood wainscoting and bits of rusting farm implements hanging on the walls. Nebraska playing itself. The grandmotherly hostess greeted them as long-lost friends, and Karin replied with like effusion. “They’ve changed this place around,” Mark insisted, in their booth. “I don’t know. Rehabbed. It used to be newer.” And when they ordered: “The menu’s the same, but the food’s relapsed.” He ate with resolve, but little joy.

“Dr. Tower just wants to get a sense of your thoughts,” Karin insisted. “That way, she can, you know, kind of put things back together.”

“I see. I see. You think I’m coming apart?”

“Well.” She knew she was. “How do you feel?”

“That’s what that damn doctor keeps asking. I never felt better. Felt a whole lot worse, I’ll tell you that much.”

“No question. You’re worlds better than you were, this time five months ago.”

He laughed at her. “How can you have ‘this time’ five months ago?”

She waved her hands, flustered. Every word her mind fingered melted into meaningless figures of speech. “Mark, for days after they cut you out of that truck, you couldn’t see, you couldn’t move, you couldn’t talk. You were barely human. You’ve worked a miracle since then. That’s the word the doctors use: miracle.”

“Yep. Me and Jesus.”

“So now, with all the ground you’ve gained, Dr. Tower can help you even more. She might find some things that could make you feel better.”

“Not having had that accident would make me feel better. You going to finish those potatoes?”

“Mark, this is for real. You want to feel more like yourself again, don’t you?”

“What are you talking about?” He giggled again, approximately. “I feel exactly like myself. Who else am I supposed to feel like?”

More than she could claim. She let the matter fall. When the modest meal check came, she reached to take it. He snatched her hand. “What are you doing? You can’t pay for this. You’re the woman.”

“It was my idea.”

“True.” Mark toyed with the pepper shaker, figuring. “You want to pay for my dinner? I don’t get it.” His voice searched for a teasing tone. “Is this some kind of date? Oh, no. Wait. I forgot. Incest.”

The waitress came and took Karin’s credit card. Soon it would be maxed out and she’d have to start another. In another five months, her mother’s life insurance, the sum that Karin hadn’t wanted to dip into, the money she was supposed to use to do good things, would be wiped out, too.

“This absolutely proves you can’t be my sister. My sister is the cheapest person I’ve ever met. Except for maybe my father.”

She jerked back, wounded. But his blank face stopped her. He was probably right. Her whole life she’d clutched, panicked, at anything buoyant enough to float her free from the maelstrom of Cappy and Joan. And all her hoarding had depleted her. So it went, with safety: the more you guarded, the less you had. She would make up for it, now. Mark would cost her no less than everything. She would spend what life she’d had, to pay for the life he couldn’t even see he’d lost. Did it count as generosity, if you had no choice?

“Next one’s on you,” she said. “Come on, let’s go home.”

By the time they left Grand Island, night was falling. Ten miles out of town, Mark took off his seat belt. It shouldn’t have unnerved her. Just the opposite: the old Mark never wore his belt. Here he was, coming back to normal, trusting her again. But she panicked. “Mark,” she shouted. “Buckle up.” She reached to help, and he slapped her hand. Shaking, Karin pulled over onto Highway 30’s dark shoulder. She refused to continue until he fastened. He seemed perfectly happy to sit there in the dark, enjoying their Mexican standoff.

At last he said, “I’ll put the belt on. But you have to take me.”

“Where?” she said, knowing.

“I want to see where it happened.”

“Mark. You don’t, really.”

He stared straight ahead, into his own universe. He spun his hand around his head, the sign for gone. “I might as well never have been there.”

“We can’t. Not tonight. It’ll be pitch-black. You won’t be able to see a thing.”

“I can’t even see that much, now.”

“Let me take you home. I promise you, we’ll go first thing in the morning.”

He turned on her. “That would be convenient, wouldn’t it? Take me back ‘home,’ call your people, and then go and smooth out everything, while I’m sleeping. And I wouldn’t ever know the difference.”

Solid shapes, artfully altered in the night, data manipulated while their backs were turned. Everything certain, carried away downstream.

“Tampering with the scene of the crime,” he said. He flipped the glove compartment of her Corolla up and down.

“Crime? What do you mean? What crime?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Going through the ditch and removing the evidence. Laying down false tracks.”

“Mark, anybody who wanted to tamper with the evidence has had almost half a year. There’s no evidence left. Why would they wait until now?”

“Because I didn’t want a look, until now.”

His jiggling accelerated, and she reached out and stopped his hand. “There’s nothing left to see. It’s all been washed away or grown over.”

He sat up, excited. “You agree with me, then? Somebody’s altering every clue I might have to crack this thing?”

This thing. His life. “Nature, Mark.” Overgrowing all that ever happened. “Put your seat belt back on. Let’s go.”

He did as instructed, but on the condition that she stay the night in the Homestar where he could keep an eye on her. “I have this hide-a-backache thing in my front room you can sleep on.” They rode back to Farview in silence. Mark wouldn’t let her play the radio, not even KQKY, which he claimed no longer played the kind of music it used to. At his house, Mark asked for her car keys, to put under his pillow. “I’ve been sleeping kind of hard. I probably wouldn’t hear you if you snuck off during the night.”

While her brother showered, Karin called Daniel. She tore him out of deep meditation. She told him about the evening and said she was staying at Mark’s. “See you tomorrow?” she said, wanting off the phone. For just an instant, he failed to respond. He didn’t believe her. She closed her eyes and teetered. History under the floorboards, waiting to flame up.

Daniel grew solicitous. “Is everything all right? Would you like me to come over?”

“Who’s that?” Mark demanded, materializing in the living room doorway, dangling a towel in front of him and dripping on the gold pile carpeting. “I told you not to contact anyone.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Karin said into her cell, then powered off.

“Who was that? Damn it. I can’t turn my back on you for a second.”

“That was Daniel Riegel.” Mark cocked a forearm in front of him, warding off the name. “We’ve been seeing each other for, for a little while. I guess I’m living with him, you could say. It’s good with him, Mark. After all the crap we dumped on each other. Finally good between us.” She didn’t add: because of you.

“Danny Riegel? Mother Naked boy?” He sat, still damp, on the arm of his Naugahyde recliner, abstractedly toweling his chest. A little late, Karin looked away. “So you two really are an item?”

“He came to see you in the hospital.” Stupid, forced, irrelevant.

“He did? Danny Riegel. Well, he can’t hurt me. He wouldn’t hurt an amoeba. He can’t be in on any big doings. Not Danny Riegel. But, shit. How did you know to get involved with him? That’s really eerie. My sister and him were, like, some tape loop. They must have programmed you in advance, put it in your DNA, or something.”

She turned back to him, past fatigue, slipping back into what she would have to do every day for the rest of her life, if she stayed on nursing him. “Mark, go for the easy solution, for once. The obvious.”

“Ha! In this life? You’ve lost it.”

He wrapped the towel around his waist and helped her open the sofa bed. Later, after midnight, she lay on that mat of shifting ball bearings and razor springs, listening in the dark for movement. Everything was alive: air conditioning cutting on and shuddering off, lightweight creatures scuffling in the walls, warm-blooded branches tapping the window, something the size of a subcompact reconnoitering the azaleas, insects excavating her ear, their beating wings like dentist’s drills drawing near her eardrum. And every creak sounded like her brother, whoever he was, slipping into the living room.

After a habitual, puffed-sugar breakfast, Karin brought him out to North Line Road. The early-morning air was already asbestos, ready to break one hundred humid degrees before noon. Yet Mark wore his long black jeans. He couldn’t get used to the scars on his legs and didn’t want anyone thinking that was how he looked. The stretch of shimmering road seemed almost featureless: sedge-lined pasture and grassy fields, the rare road sign and scrub tree, and crossroads named only with numbers. But Karin pulled over within thirty feet of the accident.

“This is it? You sure this is where I rolled it?”

Wordless, she left the car. He followed. They combed the deserted road in opposite directions. They might have been a vacationing couple, stopping to search for a map that had blown out of their car window. The scene offered even less than when she’d come with Daniel, nothing except the brute business of nature, the base of the whole pyramid, too small and sprawling to bother with: a green, ground-hugging cover running all the way to the horizon, with a trickle of melting asphalt burned through it.

Mark drifted across the road, as baffled as the herd of Simmental on the hillock three hundred yards to his right. Only, the drifting cows didn’t shake their heads.

“Which way was I going?” She pointed west, back toward town. Whatever evidence he sought had long ago been whisked away by forces intent on erasing his life. “See? Nothing here. Told you. It’s all been moved out.” He squatted and brushed the asphalt with one palm. At length, he dropped to the ground and sat on the drooping road edge, his arms around his knees. She came over to him, to beg him to move off onto the shoulder. Instead, she dropped down beside him, both of them targets for any passing vehicle faster than a combine. He didn’t look up. He held his arms in the air, lifting the emptiness. “We were at the Bullet. I remember that.”

“Who?” she whispered, trying to sound as blank as he.

“Me, Tommy, Duane. Couple guys from the plant. Music, the band, I think. It was cold. I was arm-wrestling somebody. And that’s it. Total blank. I don’t even remember getting in the truck. Nothing, until I’m sitting up in a hospital bed drooling on myself. How long was that? Weeks? Months? Like I’m locked away somewhere and somebody else is living my life.” The monotone came out of him, in poor computer speech.

She rested her arm on his shoulder and he didn’t pull away. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Just try to…”

He tapped her arm and pointed. An ancient Pontiac wagon lumbered in from the east. They rose to their feet and moved a yard off the road. The car slowed to a stop in front of them, its windows open. The seats were piled high with gear — boxes full of clothing, stacks of dishes, books, tools, even a corsage of plastic flowers. In the back, an air mattress lay covered with a ratty cotton blanket. A thick-featured, crimson-faced man of seventy, unmistakably Winnebago, leaned across the front seat. “Car trouble?”

“Kind of,” Mark said.

“You need a lift?”

“I need something.”

The Winnebago man opened his passenger door. Karin pushed forward. “We’re okay. We’re good.” The man looked through them both and stared a long time before closing the door and driving away, slower than a riding mower.

“That reminds me,” Mark said, no faster than the vehicle.

She waited, but patience produced nothing. “Of what?”

“It just reminds me.” He strayed from the roadside to the center line. She tagged behind. He held out his hands, re-creating the imagined path. “I know I rolled the truck. I know they operated on me.”

“They didn’t really operate on you, Mark.”

“I had a damn metal spigot coming out of my skull.”

“That wasn’t exactly brain surgery.”

He flashed a palm to silence her. “I’ll tell you what else. That car reminded me. There was someone else out here. I wasn’t alone.”

Insects burrowed in her skin. “What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean? In the damn truck. I wasn’t the only one in there.”

“I think you were, Mark. You know, if you can’t remember being in the truck yourself…”

“Well, you were not fucking there, either! I’m telling you what I know. Somebody was sitting there talking to me. I remember talking. I distinctly remember another voice. Maybe I picked up a hitchhiker somewhere.”

“There was no one else anywhere near your truck.”

“Then whoever it was just picked up their death bed and walked away!”

“If the investigators found any prints, they would have—”

“Judas Christ! Do you want to know what I remember or not? I’m telling you what this thing’s about. People appearing and disappearing, like that!” He snapped his finger, a vicious crack. “First they’re right there, then they’re not. In the truck, out on the road, gone. Maybe I dropped them off somewhere. Anybody can disappear on you, at any point. One day, they’re your blood relations, the next day, they’re plants.” He scrambled into his pocket and pulled out the crushed scrap of paper, his sole anchor. The gift that kept on taking. His eyes welled up, blinding him. “First they’re angels, then they’re not even animals. Guardians that won’t even admit they exist.” He threw the scrap of paper on the pavement. The crosswind raked it over the road into the ditch, where it snagged on a stand of switchgrass.

Karin cried out and tore after it as if chasing a straying baby. She ran headlong into the ditch, scraping her bare legs on a patch of prickleweed. She leaned down and snatched the scrap, sniffling. She turned to face him, triumphant. Mark stood frozen in the road, looking east. She called him, but he didn’t hear. He didn’t break his gaze, even as she came back to him.

“Something was right there.” He swung around in a half-circle. “I was coming this way, just over the rise.” He turned back east again, nodding. “Something in the road. Just here.”

Her spine ignited. “Yes,” she whispered. “That’s right. Another car? Swerving over the center line. Coming at you, in your lane.”

He shook his head. “No. Not that. Like a column of white.”

“Yes. Headlights—”

“No car, damn it! A ghost, or something. Just floating up, things flying. Then gone.” His neck caved forward and his eyes widened, pulling himself from the wreck.

She guided him back to the car and got him into the passenger side. He ran the same continuous calculation, all the way back to Farview. A mile before town, he demanded the note. She almost had to stand up behind the wheel to extract it from her too-tight shorts. He read it again, nodding.

“I’m a killer,” he said, as she pulled into the Homestar’s empty driveway. “Some kind of guiding spirit in the road, and I tried to kill it.”

So the note writer’s not a churchgoer. Fine. He’s proved that much, at least. Visited all the non-illegal churches, shown the note to every believer in town, and nobody’s claimed it. Time to head out among the heathens. People don’t generally know this about Nebraska, but it’s filled with heathens. He takes Bonnie-baby with him. Old missionary trick: send out the youngest, sexiest girl you’ve got. The core cults are all over this. People are nicer to foxes. Send a fox to somebody’s front door, and a woman will assume that you can’t possibly be a serial killer, while a man will stand there melting, emptying his pockets for the charity of your choice. Even read the Book of Mormon, if she smiles at him right.

The two of them set out together, the fox and the grapes. Like they’re married or husband and wife or something, which he personally would have no problem with, if it meant getting your claws painted and your ashes hauled on a regular basis. Sometimes they even take the dog — one big happy family. Bonnie’s not crazy about the idea at first, but she gets into it. They go on a door-to-door campaign, note in hand. House-to-house fighting, to flush out the messenger hiding behind the message.

A lot of people are familiar with Mark Schluter, or say they are. He recognizes some of them, but you never can tell, with people. Maybe he went to school with them, or worked with them out at IBP or at his prior not-so-gainful employment. Small-town life: worse than having your picture up at the post office. A lot of people say they know him, although they don’t really mean know. They just mean: Oh, the dumbass we read about in the Hub who flipped his truck and had to work his way back from a vegetative condition. It’s pretty easy to read their real thoughts, just by how nice they are to him when he and Bonnie ring the bell. At least, when they sit him and Bonnie down and serve them the fizzy drinks, he can check their handwriting. Maybe they’ve left some letters out to be mailed. Maybe a shopping list stuck on the refrigerator with the little Star Wars magnet. Or they’ll make some pathetic suggestion — some number to call or book to read — and he can go, Hey, great idea. Can you write that down?

But nobody writes like the note. That handwriting died out a hundred years ago, in the Old Country. Everyone he shows it to gets all quiet, like they know that those twisting letters could only have come from beyond the grave.

The note is disintegrating, turning back to dust. He gets Duane-o to laminate it, up at the plant. Make it perpetual, for however long he needs to haul it around. But in early August, something strange starts happening. They’ve been knocking on doors for weeks. No one in Farview will admit to anything. Farview’s pretty much eliminated, checked off his list. He wants to tackle Kearney. They could stand out at the Speedway station pumps, or alongside the Sino-Mart greeter. At worst, they get thrown out of the store. But Bonnie gets weird about the whole thing. Then he picks up on it.

Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary? he asks her.

Ordinary how, Marker?

She’s in a white sleeveless blouse and cut-off jeans, like way cut off, and that straight black hair of hers and that navel that just won’t quit. She really is maximally adorable, and it’s kind of a mystery that Mark was never onto that fact in any systematic way before this whole accident.

Unordinary. Extraordinary. Notice any peculiar…well, let’s just say, patterns?

She shakes her pretty head. He wants to trust her. She’s a little too close to the Pseudo-Sister for comfort’s sake, but that woman has everyone fooled, even Barbara.

You’re saying that nobody we’ve talked to…seems at all odd to you?

The little laugh, like a music box. Odd, how?

He has to make it sound like something that won’t scare her. Nobody’s going to believe something that endangers their whole world-view. Okay, he tells her. A lot of those people who’ve been answering the doors when we knock? I’m not saying all of them. I’m just saying…some, some of them are like the same person.

The same…? The same person as what?

What do you mean, same as what? Same as each other.

You’re saying…you’re saying they’re…the same as themselves?

Well, it’s not rocket science; not even brain surgery. Kind of a simple concept, actually: somebody’s been following them around. They shouldn’t have been going up and down the streets so obviously. They should have mixed things up, randomized. They’ve been suckers, predictable. Walked right into this.

Listen. I know this is going to sound a little out there. But there’s…one guy who keeps coming back.

Coming back? Back where?

You know what I’m saying. Following us. One house to the other. And I think I know who this person is.

This prompts her to say a number of fairly dopey things. Understandable: she’s freaked. Him, too, but he’s had a little more time to think about it. Bonnie is still back in beginner’s denial: How can anybody be following us? How could they get into the next house, put on a disguise, etcetera, all before we get there?

Pretty lame objections, that dissolve the minute you examine them. But Bonnie’s upset; she doesn’t want to make the rounds anymore. He should have guessed this would happen. She probably thinks her life is in danger. He tries to explain: the disguise artist is interested in one person and one person only: Mark Schluter. But Mark can’t convince her to stay with the search. Maybe that’s best, after all. The hunt has produced nothing, and who can say when this little cat-and-mouse game might turn violent? After all, there’s been violence already. Last February 20, to be precise.

He carries on alone. He works the Public Library and Moraine Assisted Living. But interestingly, few people are willing to give him handwriting samples, and every third person who does pretends they’re someone they aren’t. The disguise artist keeps trailing him. Someone he hasn’t seen in many years. There’s a sad droop about the eyes that gives it away every time. Like we’re all hosed and this lone, wise face is the only one to fully understand the fact. Danny boy. Riegel, the birdman of Kearney.

It occurs to Mark: his accident happened right at the very start of bird season. Sure, that could be just coincidence. But now that Mr. Migration has taken to following him around, it lends more than a little weight to a larger theory. What’s more: Riegel and his fake sister are rubbing genitals. It’s all too much. Mark doesn’t know exactly what to make of it, but he’s got to make something soon, or it’s going to make him.

He confronts the artificial Karin. Nothing to lose. He’s in the crosshairs already. He waits until she shows up at the would-be Homestar with her latest bag of unrequested groceries. Then he asks her point-blank, before she can confuse him: Just tell me, honestly. What is your friend the nature man up to? Don’t lie to me; we’ve known each other a while now, right? Been through some rough times.

She gets all shy, holds her elbows and studies her shoes like they just jumped onto her feet. I don’t know, exactly, she claims. Strange, isn’t it? How he keeps coming back into my life at different crises? First when Cappy died, then Mom, and now—

Kind of strange how he keeps coming back into my life. Every time I try to talk to anyone about my little message from heaven?

She stares at him, like at a firing squad. Guilty, as charged. But then she goes into a major stall routine. Following you around? What are you talking about? She starts to cry, one step away from an admission of guilt. But then she turns worse than worthless. She gets on her cell phone and calls Bonnie, trying to synchronize their stories. Ten minutes later, it’s two against one, with both of the women carrying on about the most irrelevant shit, handing him the phone and telling him it’s Daniel on the other end, just say a few words to Daniel…

He’s got to get out of this place, someplace he can think. He’s got a little spot down by the river where he can just sit in the flats and let those hundreds of muddy, liquid miles wash over him. He starts south, on foot. He hasn’t been on the Platte since last fall. He’s been afraid to discover that somebody’s jacking with the river as well. He leaves the house without his hat, and the sun scalds him. Birds track him from tree to tree. A pack of grackles, animal spies. They make an entirely uncalled-for racket, like they’ve got a problem with him. Their so-called songs echo in his head, going gaw, gaw, go, goat-head, goat-head, goathead…

And then the words are already there: the words he was saying, just before his truck took to the air. Goat-head may be the Ram, like he was saying the truck’s name. But no. Goat-head: something more, if his life means anything. He gets to the edge of River Run Estates, slips through the fringe of sycamores. He reaches the long cut, a mile and a half of headland thick with black flies and pollen, nothing to protect him from the elements. The river recedes as he walks toward it. The grackles get on his case. Goat-head, goat-head.

Go ahead.

The force of it sits him down smack in a patch of prickleweed. He was saying, Go ahead. Or someone was saying it to him, in the cab of the truck. He’d picked up some angel hitchhiker, someone who survived the flipped truck, walked away from the wreck back to town, to call in the disaster. And afterward, followed him to the hospital, to leave the note, instructions for Mark Schluter’s future. An angel hitchhiker, telling him, Go ahead. Go where? Toward the wreck; through the wreck. Here.

He stands up, shaky with insight. In the singed green of this field, black spots rise and his vision tunnels. His body wants to go down, but he fights upright. He turns back toward Farview, jogging. His brain spurts like a hot coal stabbed with a poker. He reaches the fake Homestar, doubled over by a stitch in his side. How did he get so out of shape? He bursts in the front door, eager to tell anyone, even people he probably shouldn’t tell. A manic Blackie Two almost knocks him down, already knowing, with animal telepathy, about this breakthrough. The woman is still there, sitting at his desk, at his computer, like she owns the place. She swings around, guilty, caught by his return. Even redder than usual, pushing the hair back, like: Oh, nothing. Trying to hack his credit card cookies or such. She logs off quickly and turns toward him. Mark? Mark, are you okay?

Unbelievable question. Who in the whole godforsaken world is okay? It may be death, to tell her what he’s discovered. She might be anyone. He still has no idea whose side she’s on. But they’ve grown close over these months, in adversity. She feels something for him, he’s sure of that. Sympathy or pity, seeing what he’s up against. Maybe enough to make her break ranks and join him. Or maybe not. Telling her may be the stupidest thing he’s ever done, since whatever he did to lose his real sister. But finally, he wants to tell her. He needs to tell her. Logic’s got nothing to do with it. It’s about survival.

Listen, he says, excited. Your fiancé? Boyfriend, whatever. See if you can find out what he was doing the night of my accident. Ask him if the words go ahead mean anything to him.

For a moment, Weber couldn’t find his left arm or shoulder. No sense of whether his hand was underneath him or above him, palm up or down, flung out or drawn in. He panicked, and the alarm congealed him, bringing him almost alert enough to identify the mechanism: awareness before the full return of the somatosensory cortex from sleep. But only when he forced his paralyzed side to move could he locate all his parts again.

An anonymous hotel, in another country. Another hemisphere. Singapore. Bangkok. A slightly more spacious version of those Tokyo morgue hotels, with businessmen filed away in drawers, rented by the night. Even when he remembered where he was, he couldn’t credit it. Why he was there lay beyond answer. He read the clock: an arbitrary number that might have meant either day or night. He flipped on the diffident bedside light and headed to the bathroom. A hot shower would help to disperse his lingering displacement. But his body came back only tentatively. None of the bizarre neurological insights acquired over the course of his professional life unsettled him more than this simplest one: baseline experience was simply wrong. Our sense of physical embodiment did not come from the body itself. Several layers of brain stood in between, cobbling up from raw signals the reassuring illusion of solidity.

Scalding water streamed over his neck and down his chest. He felt his shoulders relax, but he did not place too much faith in the feeling. The cortex’s body maps were fluid at best, and easily dismantled. He could alarm any undergraduate by having her slide her arms into two boxes with a window in the end of the right one. The student’s hand appeared in the window. Only: the hand in the window wasn’t her right one, but a cleverly superimposed reflection of her left. Asked to flex her right hand, the student saw, through the window, a hand that wouldn’t move. Instead of reaching the only logical conclusion — a trick of mirrors — the student would almost always feel a surge of terror, believing her hand to be somehow paralyzed.

Worse still: a subject who watched a rubber hand being stroked in synchrony with his own hidden hand would continue to feel the strokes, even when the stroking of his real hand stopped. The dummy hand didn’t even have to be lifelike, or even a hand. It could be a cardboard box or the corner of a table, and still the brain would absorb it as part of its body. A subject with a dowel strapped to the tip of one finger would gradually incorporate the dowel into his body image, extending his sense of finger inches too far.

The smallest warping could distort the map. Each fall, Weber asked his lecture full of undergrads to roll their tongue tips upside down, then run a pencil from the right to the left across their tongue’s bottom, now uppermost in their mouths. Every subject felt the pencil as if from underneath, running from left to right. He made other students don prismatic glasses until they normalized the image of an inverted world. When they removed the glasses and looked out again with their unaided eyes, the real, unfiltered landscape now presented itself, upside down.

Soapy rivulets ran over the apron of his belly and down his knobby legs. They reminded him of Jeffrey L., a man whose spine was crushed in a motorcycle accident. The wreck had sprawled Jeffrey upside down on an embankment, with his legs in the air, at the moment that his spinal cord was severed. He lost all use of his body below his neck, and should have lost all feeling as well. But Jeffrey still felt his inverted body, his feet hovering forever above his head. Another of Weber’s patients, Rita V., had been sitting with her wrists crossed when thrown from a horse. Ever afterward she lived in agony, wanting only to straighten her arms, which, in fact, lay perpetually extended at her sides. Still other quadriplegics reported no bodily sensation at all, simply the sense of existing as a floating head.

More disconcerting still were the phantom limbs. Nothing worse than excruciating pain in a limb that no longer existed, pain dismissed by the rest of the world as purely imaginary—all in your head—as if there were another kind. A person could suffer persistent tenderness in any removed part — lips, nose, ears, and especially breasts. One man continued to experience erections in his amputated penis. Another told Weber that he now enjoyed vastly intensified orgasms that reverberated through his missing foot.

Then there were the border wars, the brain maps of the amputated part invaded by nearby maps. Somewhere — God only knew in which book — Weber described discovering a largely intact and responsive hand blossoming across the face of an amputee, Lionel D. Touched high up on the cheekbone, Lionel felt it in his missing thumb. Grazed on the chin, he felt it in his pinkie. Splashing his face with water, he felt liquid trickle down his vanished hand.

Weber shut off the shower and closed his eyes. For a few more seconds, warm tributaries continued to stream down his back. Even the intact body was itself a phantom, rigged up by neurons as a ready scaffold. The body was the only home we had, and even it was more a postcard than a place. We did not live in muscles and joints and sinews; we lived in the thought and image and memory of them. No direct sensation, only rumors and unreliable reports. Weber’s tinnitus — just an auditory map, rearranged to produce phantom sounds in an undamaged ear. He would end up like one of his stroke patients, an extra left arm, three necks, a candelabrum full of fingers, each discreetly sensed, hiding under a hospital blanket.

And yet the ghost was real. People with lost feet, asked to tap their toes, lit up that part of their motor cortex responsible for walking. Even the motor cortex of intact people flashed, when they simply imagined walking. Seeing himself running from something, Weber felt his pulse shoot up, even as he stood immobile in the tub. Sensing and moving, imagining and doing: phantoms bleeding, one into the other. He could not, for a moment, decide which was worse: to be sealed in a solid room, thinking yourself outside; or to be freed to pass through the porous walls, into the protean blue…

Without reaching for a towel, he flipped off the bathroom light and moved back toward the dimly lit bed. He sat dripping on an upholstered chair. He had humiliated himself abroad. Back home, hundreds of subjects awaited him, real people he’d used as mere thought experiments. Every one of them throbbed in him and could not be cut out. The world had no place left, real or imagined, where he might put down.

She found a description online, at Mark’s house, in something called The People’s Free Encyclopedia. The site looked reputable, with footnotes and citations, but assembled in public, by community vote, leaving her as uncertain as ever.

FREGOLI SYNDROME: one of a rare group of delusional misidentification syndromes in which the sufferer is convinced that several different people are in fact all a single person of changing appearance. The syndrome takes its name from Leopoldo Fregoli (1867–1936), an Italian stage magician and mimic whose lightning ability to change his face and voice into any character astonished audiences…

Like Capgras Syndrome, Fregoli involves some disruption of the ability to categorize faces. Some researchers suggest that all misidentification delusions may exist along a spectrum of familiar anomalies shared by ordinary, nonpathological consciousness…

She told Daniel, over Chinese dinner. She’d pushed him into a night out, needing to escape his monk’s cell and talk in public. She’d dressed up, even used scent. But she’d forgotten about the logistical problems, which started as soon as Daniel got the menu. Daniel dining out: like a Calvinist minister at a rave. He wagged his head, whistling. “Eight dollars for a plate of beef and broccoli? Can you imagine, K.?”

The entrée was the restaurant’s loss leader. She battened down and waited.

“Eight dollars is a lot of money to the Crane Refuge.”

With matching grants and good management, they could buy and retire a square inch of marginal farmland. The waitress came to tell them the specials. The list of slaughtered fish, flesh, and fowl crucified Daniel.

“This ‘Chinese eggplant,’” he asked the blameless woman. “Would you know, offhand, how that’s prepared?”

“Vegetarian,” the waitress assured him, like the menu said.

“But is the eggplant fried in butter? Do they use milk fat in the preparation?”

“I could find out?” the waitress bleated.

“Would it be possible just to get a plateful of sliced vegetables? Raw carrots, cucumbers? That sort of thing?”

Karin had been crazy to suggest the outing, and he’d been crazy to agree. The beef and broccoli sounded like a dream, a cure to her growing whole-foods anemia. Weeks of living with Daniel had left her wasted. She peeked at him, the waitress hovering. His face was placid, like something being led up a ramp to the waiting stun gun. She ordered the tofu and bean threads.

She’d forgotten what he was like in these places, places the rest of the civilized world depended on. When the waitress brought his sliced cucumbers, he just slid them around the plate with his fork, quibbling with them.

“It doesn’t seem possible for him to suffer both conditions at once,” she said. “I mean, Capgras is about underidentifying. Fregoli sounds like the exact opposite.”

“K.? We probably want to be careful with the self-diagnosis.”

“Self…? What do you mean, ‘self…’?”

“Lay person’s. You and I aren’t qualified to diagnose him. We need to go back to Good Samaritan.”

“To Hayes? He practically insulted me, the last time. Daniel, I have to say, I’m a little surprised. Since when have you defended organized medicine? I thought they were all faith healers. ‘Native Americans have forgotten more medicine than Western technology has yet discovered.’”

“Well, that’s basically true. But they didn’t have many car accidents, back when the First Nations discovered their medicine. If I knew a Native American with experience in closed-head trauma, I’d recommend him above anyone you’ve talked to.”

He didn’t mention Gerald Weber by name. He didn’t have to. Daniel had taken an irrational dislike to the man without having met him.

“I have to tell Dr. Weber,” Karin said. She meant she’d already written him.

“Do you?” Daniel grew blissfully calm. Like he was meditating.

“Well, he is one of the leading…” But then, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was just famous. Not quite the same thing. “I promised I’d let him know if Mark changed.” Daniel had changed; so had Mark’s friends. She herself had altered, more than any of them.

Daniel studied his fingertips. “Is there any downside to contacting him?”

“Aside from more humiliation and disappointment?”

The waitress came to ask how everything was. “Wonderful,” Daniel said, smiling.

After she left, Karin asked, “Did we go to school with her?”

Daniel grinned out the side of his mouth. “She’s a decade younger than us.”

“No way! You think?” They ate in silence. At last she said, “Daniel, I’m making him worse.”

He objected nobly; that was his job. But all the evidence was against him.

“Really. I think the strain of seeing me every day, of not being able to recognize — it’s breaking him apart. I haven’t been able to do much of anything for him. And now he’s getting new symptoms. It’s me. The sight of me is messing him up. I’m making him…”

Daniel trained his full calm on her, but his alpha state was wavering. “We don’t know what he would’ve been like, if you hadn’t been here all this time.”

“Your life certainly would have been simpler, wouldn’t it?”

He grinned again, as if she’d just cracked a joke. “Emptier.”

Empty as she felt. Empty as all her gestures turned out to be. She ran her fork through her bean curds, like a scythe. “You know the strangest part? He doesn’t think I’m her; and he’s never going to think I’m her. So if I just took off — stopped torturing him, got a job, started to work my way back out of debt — it wouldn’t be like she was abandoning him at all. His sister. He’d never hold it against me. He’d celebrate!”

She saw the flash in his eye before he could suppress it. She was spooking him. She would pull him down, too. She was doing to Daniel what Mark was doing to her. Soon she would be a stranger to him. Then to herself. Better for Daniel, too, her exit.

He shook his head, marvelously certain. “He wouldn’t be the casualty.”

“What? Stay for myself?” The worst imaginable reason. The words pushed her a million miles away from him, off on an airless planet. “You’re preoccupied,” she said.

He shook his head, a little sadly.

“Y’are,” she accused, trying to clown. “I read in one of my brain books that women are ten times more sensitive at detecting another’s internal states than men.”

Daniel stopped badgering a split bell pepper and set down his fork. “But we’re talking about you,” he said. “About Mark…”

“I’d love to discuss something else for a while.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking…Strange days at the Crane Refuge. But I feel funny talking about anything so…while we’re facing…”

“Talk,” she said. And to her vague sense of betrayal, he did.

The Refuge, he told her, was heading for a shootout. For years, combined environmental groups had kept the river’s management honest by threatening to invoke the Endangered Species Act if demands on the Central Platte dropped the flow below levels needed to sustain wildlife. They’d surrendered that threat after the establishment of environmental accounts — guaranteed levels of flow set aside for wildlife by the three states that lived off the river.

But now the precarious scheme of water-rights trading was teetering. The system of winter recharge basins no longer accommodated all the groups that wanted to drink from the stream. In the most recent round of negotiations, the Refuge had alienated everybody but the cranes. “They’re coming after us from all sides. I was down by the river yesterday, just west of the old wagon bridge, cutting across the rise. I’ve been walking those fields since I was six. All of a sudden, this farmer comes down a row toward me. Jeans, big mud boots, work shirt, and a shotgun draped over his forearm like a tennis racket. He just rolls up to me, all smiles, and says, ‘You’re with the people trying to save those damn birds, aren’t you? You have any idea how much damage those birds do?’ I walk faster, to avoid trouble, and he starts shouting: ‘It took Americans hundreds of years to turn this swampland into beautiful farms. And you people want to turn it back into swamps again. Better get yourself some protection. Watch your back. It’s in your own best interests.’ Can you believe it? He actually threatened me!”

“I believe it,” she said. “I’ve been warning you for years.”

He giggled, the clicks of a squirrel. “Watch my back?”

“Not everyone here believes in putting birds ahead of people.”

“Those birds are the best thing this place has going. You’d think people would realize that. But no: all the local agreements that took us a decade to hammer out are breaking down. Kingsley Dam, relicensed for forty years. Insane! You should come work for us, K. We need a fighter. We need everyone we can get.”

“Yes,” she said, and almost meant it now.

“I’m telling you, greed has run amok. The Development Council, whoring itself for this new consortium of builders. They promised there wouldn’t be any new building. That’s what we’d fought for, and won. A freeze on large-scale development for ten years. They’re selling us out, like we’re the new Pawnee.”

“Consortium?” She stacked her tofu into pyramids on her plate. She knew who he meant, without his saying. And he knew her question, before she asked.

“A wolf pack of local wheelers and dealers. You wouldn’t happen to know…? You haven’t heard anything about this, have you?” He scanned her, his face uncertain.

“Nothing.” Karsh. “Should I have?”

He shrugged and shook his head, apologetic. “We know which developers are involved, but we don’t know what they’re after. They have their eye on some parcels of land for a new project. Some open tract, near the river. We blocked them two years ago. Snatched four dozen acres out from underneath them. They’re gearing up for war again, now that they know we’re broke. They’re convening the Development Council after the November elections.”

“What are they after?” She brushed at the tablecloth.

“They’re holding their cards pretty tight. They’ll need to address the water use first before they tip their hand on the properties they want.”

“What do you know about them?” Almost offhand, but the question caught him in the face. “I mean, how many are there? How deep are their pockets?”

“It seems to be three different outfits. Two from Kearney and one from Grand Island. Whatever they’re up to, it’s on a big scale.”

“Big enough to be a problem?”

“They’re looking at riverfront. And whatever they build will increase usage. Every cup that comes out of that river reduces flow and encourages vegetative encroachment. The birds—”

“Yes,” she preempted. She couldn’t bear the whole story again, just then. “So how will the Refuge counter?”

“We have to prepare a strategy, more or less in the dark.” He gauged her, and for an awful moment, she felt him calculate her trustworthiness. As close to an accusation as he could make, without accusing. “We’re forming a loose consortium of our own: the Environmental Defense Fund, the Refuge, and the Sanctuary. If we can build up a shared war chest, we can grab strategic bits of land and try to block any large acquisitions by the other side. We’d never beat them in any open auction, of course. But if we secure a couple of keystones, a little strip in the most probable areas, before the bidding wars begin. It has to be Farview. Somewhere around Farview. The best undeveloped land outside of Kearney.”

The name of Mark’s town jerked her back from her reverie.

“As usual, it’s the birds who suffer,” Daniel declared. “In myths, gods are always screwing birds. Why stop now?”

The waitress came by, too soon. “How’s everything here?”

“Everything’s just fine,” Karin intoned.

“How are your vegetables?” the waitress quizzed Daniel.

“Terrific,” he answered. “Fresh.”

“Are you sure I can’t get you anything else? Something a little more…?”

Daniel smiled. “Thanks. I’m good.”

His eyes followed the waitress as she left. When the server came to refill their waters, Daniel said sorry for thank you.

A great dam of humiliation broke, and waves of old current washed over Karin. Her spine became a willow. Her fists sat in her lap like stones. “Which do you like better?” she asked.

“Which who?”

“You know. The server or the waitress?”

He smiled at her and shook his head, the model of evasive innocence.

She stared off in the middle distance, her face a copper to match her hair. “Would you rather be somewhere else?”

He tried to keep smiling, even now. “What do you mean?”

She admired his nerve, however transparent the denial. She smiled back, full wattage. “You can do better out there, can’t you?”

The words crushed him. He looked down at his plate, the strewn slices. “Karin. Please, let’s not…I thought we weren’t going to do this anymore.”

“I thought so, too.” Until he’d doubted.

“K. I don’t know what…what you think you saw…”

“Think? Think I saw?”

“I swear to you, the thought never crossed my mind.”

“What thought?”

He bowed his head again, like one of those fairy creatures who gathered more life force from simply cowering and taking the hits. “Any thought.”

She might still do anything: laugh it off, grow up. Get over herself. Or plunge them back into their worst nightmare. A dizzy thrill coursed through her. “She’s a cute little cucumber herself. ‘Fresh.’ And the water-pourer, too. Both delicious. Your lucky night. Two-for-one sale.”

“I wasn’t shopping.” He tried to hold her eye, but the sick spark of it got to him, too. All their history.

She matched his calm. “Just window gazing?”

He raised his palms in the air. “I wasn’t looking. What did I do? Did I do something wrong? Say something to hurt you? If so, I am sincerely—”

“It’s okay, Danny. I can accept the fact that males are genetically programmed for variety. Every man has to inspect the wares, out in the marketplace. That doesn’t bother me. I just wish — don’t! please, just don’t! — wish you would come to terms with it.”

He pushed his plate forward and folded his hands in front of his face, a guidance counselor or a priest. He rested his forehead on the steeple of his fingers. “Listen. I’m sorry. Whatever I did to upset you just now, I’m sorry for it.”

“Just now? You can’t say it, can you? You can’t say that you were simply enjoying her. Both of them. I don’t even want you to be sorry about it. It would just be nice if you could admit for once that you were simply imagining…”

His head snapped back. Old words came out of him, as old as the ones she struck him with. “I would say that, if that’s what I was doing. I didn’t even see her. I can’t even tell you what she looks like.”

Pointlessness flooded her, the futility of all exchange. Nobody really cared how the world looked to anyone else. She felt a deep need to break everything that pretended to connection. To live in this hollowness, where loyalty always led. Love was not the antidote to Capgras. Love was a form of it, making and denying others, at random. “Forgotten already? Have another look!”

His words came through his teeth. “I am not that kind of man. I told you as much eight years ago. I told you that five years ago. You didn’t believe me then. But I was waiting for you when you came back. I’m with you. I’ve always been, and I always will be. With you, and no one else. Not looking. Found already.”

He reached out across the table to take her hand. She flinched, flipping her fork and scattering tofu. “With me? With your eyes still everywhere? Which ‘me’ do you mean?” She looked around, embarrassed by herself. The whole restaurant was avoiding looking at them. She turned back to him and chirped, “It’s okay, Daniel. I’m not judging you. You are who you are. If you would just agree to tell me…”

He withdrew his hand. “We should never have come out to eat. We should have remembered what always…” She arched her eyebrows at the admission. He inhaled, trying to regain his scattered possession. “Someday you’ll know what I’m looking at. Always. Trust me, K….”

He sounded so scared it stung her. At that moment she felt the deep appeal of Robert Karsh, a man without a tenth of Daniel’s idealism. Karsh, of all the men she’d ever been with, at least had the decency to say which women he was looking at. No illusions. At least Karsh never once deceived himself about being all hers. Karsh, always on the lookout. Karsh, the relentless developer.

They sat and stirred their plates, hot with shame. More words would only clarify. People at nearby tables wolfed their food, paid, and left. She ached to change the subject, to pretend she’d said nothing. Doubt formed a little scab over the wound, which she picked at. She wanted only to tear down everything, clear the landscape, escape somewhere empty and true. But no true place existed; only brief mirage, followed by long, humiliating self-justification. She would return with this man to his monk’s cell tonight. He was her lover, her mate. This year’s current, eternal promise. She had no other bed, no other place to go back to, and still be near her brother, the brother she probably shouldn’t be near. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I’m losing it.”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Everything mattered. The waitress came back around, still smiling, but wary. Everyone knew them, now. “Can I get this out of your way, or are you still working…?”

Daniel held up his half-empty plate, eyes averted from the Medusa. The contortion only confirmed her, made things sadder. When the girl left, he turned the full force of his will on Karin, desperate to show a decency even she would have to affirm.

“We need to tell Weber about Mark. We’re in new territory here.”

Karin nodded, but could not look at him. Everything old, new again.

Back at last in his corner of the globe, his aerie on the shores of Conscience Bay, Weber touched ground. Sylvie was stalwart, of course, truly indifferent to what anyone aside from their daughter thought of them. Public judgment meant no more to her than spam. As far as Sylvie was concerned, consensus was the delusion. “We can’t think clearly alone, let alone in groups of two or three. And you want me to trust the marketplace? Let’s see what they say about you in twenty years.”

The fate of Famous Gerald concerned her less than the epidemic of corporate scandals: Enron, WorldCom — the mega-billion-dollar fraud of the month. She read him the latest outrages over breakfast.

“Leaping lizards, Man. Can you believe what’s happening? We’re living in the age of mass hypnotism. As long as we keep clapping our hands and believing, the captains of industry will take care of us.”

He was grateful for the distraction, her righteous anger at corporate deception. She was right not to humor his private jitters. And yet a part of him resented her indifference, resented being upstaged by corporate crooks. Resented that she temperamentally could not be shaken by the sudden, summary judgment against him.

He began to check his Amazon ratings, each time he logged online. Cavanaugh had shown him the feature, back in the good times. He wanted a reality check. Public reviewers had a vested professional interest; the private reader did not. But the private ratings were all over the map. One star: Who Does This Guy Think He Is? Five stars: Ignore the Naysayers; Gerald Weber Does It Again. The praise was worse than the poison. Responses multiplied, like the snakes writhing in his family’s basement in the one recurring nightmare of his childhood. Scores more, each time he looked. Somehow, when he wasn’t looking, private thought gave way to perpetual group ratings. The age of personal reflection was over. From now on, everything would be haggled out in public feedback brawls. Call-in radio, focus groups every time anyone moved. Leo Tolstoy: 4.1. Charles Darwin: 3.0.

And yet, every time he logged off, nauseated by the relentless assessments, he found himself immediately wanting to check again, to see if the next response might erase the last mindless dismissal. He compared his numbers to those of other writers he was lumped with. Was he alone in this backlash? Who was the moment’s darling? Which of his colleagues had also fallen? How did the public manage to bank and wheel in such perfect synchrony, as if on signal?

He’d done nothing this time that he hadn’t done at least twice before. Perhaps that was the problem: he’d failed the endless collective appetite for novelty. No one wanted to be reminded of bygone enthusiasms. He’d become an icon of a former decade. Now he’d have to pay for all his previous acclaim.

And that was the ugly irony. When he’d started out, back in his thirties, his evening writing had been for no one. Pure reflection, a letter to Sylvie. Words to little Jess, for when she grew up. Just a way to understand his field a little more humanely, with a few more connections, those soft speculations forbidden by empiricism, the stuff science was really after but didn’t dare admit. Just something to refresh his sensibilities each evening. The human brain musing on itself.

Only the enthusiasm of a few close friends to whom he’d shown excerpts convinced him there might be an audience for such essays. Public approval meant nothing, until he had it. Now the thought of losing his audience shamed him. What started as a sideline had grown defining, a definition that vanished the moment he accredited it. He was only fifty-five. Fifty-six. How would he fill the next twenty years? There was the lab, of course. But he’d been little more than an administrator there for a long time. The curse of successful science: senior researchers inevitably became chief fund-raisers. He could not spend the next two decades raising funds.

Most of neuroscience had been discovered since Weber began research. The knowledge base was doubling every decade. One might reasonably guess that everything knowable about brain function would be known by the time his current graduate students retired. Cognition was heading toward its prime collective achievement: grasping itself. What self-image would be left to us, in light of the full facts? The mind might not endure its self-discovery. Might never be ready to know. What would the race do, with full knowledge? What new creature would the human brain build, to take its place? Some new, more efficient structure, stripped of its ancient ballast…

He went for long walks around the mill pond, until he began running into pleasant neighbors. He took the boat out onto Conscience Bay. The dinghy had lain upside down in the yard for so long that an opossum was nesting under it. Befuddled by daylight, the creature hissed at him as he uncovered it. Out along the Neck, drifting with the tide, he felt the wind twist the boat at will. He had embarrassed his wife and daughter in public. He’d become a matter of easy mockery.

He’d done nothing wrong, committed no conscious deception or serious error. He could still point to thirty years of reputable research, a tiny corner of the species’ crowning enterprise. Only his attempt to popularize that science had somehow gone wrong. To his surprise, he realized how he felt: seedy, caught in some infidelity.

September came, that bleak, first anniversary. What did private setback matter in the shadow of that shared trauma? He tried to recall the public dread of the year before, turning on the radio to find the world blown away. The force was intact, though the details were gone. His memory was surely worsening. Even simple stuff: the names of graduate students. A tune he’d known since childhood. The opening words of the Declaration of Independence. He obsessed over retrieval, proving to himself there was nothing wrong, which only made the blocking worse. He didn’t tell Sylvie. She would have just scoffed. Nor did he mention the bouts of depression. She would only have made excuses for him. Perhaps something was wrong with his HPA system, something that might account for all this emotional oversteering. He thought of self-prescribing a low dosage of deprenyl, but principle and pride prevented him.

In the last days of the month, when even Bob Cavanaugh had given up on the book and stopped calling, a short story came out in The New Yorker, where Weber had sometimes published his own meditations. The author was a woman still in her mid-twenties, apparently well-known, and well beyond whatever came after hip. A two-page humorous vignette, “From the Files of Dr. Frontalobe” took the form of a series of first-person case histories as told by their examining neuroscientist. The woman who used her husband as a tea cozy. The man who awakened from a forty-year coma with the urge to believe his elected officials. The man who turned multiple-personality in order to use the HOV lane. Sylvie laughed at the piece. “It’s affectionate. And anyway, it’s not about you, Man.”

“Who is it about?”

She flared her nostrils. “It’s about people. Infinitely peculiar packages of walking symptoms. The whole lot of us.”

“It’s laughing at people with cognitive deficits?” He sounded ludicrous, even to himself. He would have suggested they take a vacation, except that they just had.

“You know what it’s laughing at. What comedy always laughs at. Whistling past the graveyard. Nobody wants to believe that we’re what you people are saying we are.”

“Us people?”

“You know who I mean. You brain guys.”

“And what exactly are we saying that no one wants to hear? We brain guys?”

“Oh, the works. Objects may be closer than they appear. Equipment may give unexpected results. No warranty written or implied. Everything you know is wrong.”

That night, he got another e-mail from Nebraska. It came in alongside messages from friends and colleagues who wanted, with all the deniable aggression of good humor, to rub his nose in the New Yorker piece. He skipped to Karin Schluter’s note, again remembering not yet having responded to her notes earlier that summer. The critics were right. Mark Schluter had stopped existing once he could do nothing more for Weber.

Karin’s news electrified him. Her brother believed that someone was following him, in a variety of disguises. Mark was assembling a list of documented details proving that his entire town of Farview had been replaced between the night of his accident and the day he came out of his coma, for the express purpose of misleading him.

Weber had just come across a case in the clinical literature, from Greece of all mythic places, describing coexistence of Capgras and Fregoli in a single patient. Something truly remarkable was happening to Mark Schluter. A new, systematic workup might shed light on mental processes that weren’t even poorly understood, processes that only this devastating deficit could reveal. All the things nobody wants to hear.

But even as this thought took form, he had another. Gerald Weber, neurological opportunist. Violator of privacy and sideshow exploiter. He could not decide which would be worse: to follow up these new complications or to let this repeat appeal drop. These people had asked for help, and he had entered their story. Then he had forgotten them. They were still in distress, still looking to him. His one prescription — cognitive behavioral therapy — seemed to be making things worse. Even if Weber could do nothing more, he was obliged at least to listen and attend.

Karin Schluter’s note made no overt requests. “I don’t mean to push again, especially after hearing nothing back since July. But I heard your Public Radio interview, and given what you said about the brain’s plasticity, I somehow thought you would at least want to know what’s happening to Mark.” He looked up from his screen, out his window, onto the ancient maple that — when? — had broken out in the color of a May goldfinch. Nebraska at harvest: the last place on earth he wanted to go. What was the word again, for unreasonable fear of rolling, empty spaces?

Only more writing could save him. One concentrated report, published or not. One that might redeem whatever he’d botched with the last one. Not a case history: a life. He could secure, in advance, the goodwill of everyone involved. He could re-create Mark Schluter, no composites, no pseudonyms, no glossed-over detail, no hiding behind the clinical. Just the story of invented shelter, the scared struggle to build a theory big enough for wetware to live in.

He told Sylvie, after dinner the next night, while he was washing dishes. The whole transaction thickened with déjà vu. But he never imagined the announcement would upset her. “Back to Nebraska! Are you serious? You couldn’t get home fast enough the last time.”

“Just for a couple of weeks or so.”

“Two weeks! I don’t understand this. It’s sounds like…a complete reversal.”

“I think Tour Director wants me to do this.”

She was hefting the clean glasses out of the strainer, wiping them slowly, and putting them away in all the wrong places. “You’d tell me if anything was happening to you, wouldn’t you?”

He killed the spray of hot water. “Happening? What do you mean?” What could still happen, in his life?

“Anything…Any big rearrangements. If anything was, you know, truly messing with you? Or with Famous Gerald. You’d tell me?”

Weeks now. He put down the sponge, took the dish towel from her hands, folded it neatly in half, and hung it lengthwise on the handle of the stove. “Of course. Always. Everything. You know that.” He crossed back to her, placed three fingers on her temporal lobe. A mind scan; a scout’s kiss. “It’s only when I tell you things that I understand them myself.”