The Echo Maker

Part Four: So You Might Live

They find their way back down from the arctic. The family of three now fly with scores of others. In mid-morning, with the sun cooking the air into wide, rising columns, the birds lift up a mile or more above the earth. They float in growing flocks, dropping to the next thermal to the south, where they rise again. They reach fifty miles an hour, make five hundred miles a day, with little beating of wings. In the evenings, they glide to the surface and roost in shallow, open waters remembered from previous years. They sail in over harvested fields, feathered dinosaurs bugling, a last great reminder of life before the self.

The fledged crane colt follows his parents back to a home he must learn to come from. He must see the loop once, to memorize its markers. This route is a tradition, a ritual that changes only slightly, passed down through generations. Even small ripples — left down that valley, on past that outcrop — are preserved. Something in their eyes must match symbols. But how it’s done, no person knows and no bird can say.

They wing back down across the western states. Each day graces them with a tailwind. In the first week of October, the family roosts on the eastern prairies of Colorado. After daybreak, as they graze the fields, waiting for the ground to heat and the air to rise, the space around the fledged crane colt explodes. His father is hit. He sees his parent sprayed across the nearby earth. Birds scream into the shattered air, their brain stems pumping panic. This chaos, too, lays down a permanent trace, remembered forever: open season.

When the world sets again from the rush of blood, the young bird locates his mother. He hears her calling, half a mile off, circling traumatized. They wait two more days, searching, sounding some ghost of the unison call. Nothing can tell them; no way they can know. There is only circling and calling, waiting, a kind of religion, for the dead one to show. When he doesn’t, there is only yesterday, last year, the sixty million years before that, the route itself, the blind, self-organizing return.

The sandhills do not gather in Nebraska now. The Platte hosts no great fall staging. The cranes stop only briefly, in small groups. The mother brings her fledgling through, priming him. She leads him within ten yards of the spot where, late last February, she and her mate huddled themselves, yards from where the truck flipped over. She wades in the flat of the autumn river, ready to meet her mate again back here in the river’s loops, in opened, animal time, the standing now, the map whose edges wrap back on themselves.

But her mate is not in this place, either. She grows jittery again, remembering that ancient incident, the trauma of last spring. Something bad once happened here, as loud and deadly as the new, fatal wrong. A kind of forecast, that grainy irritant in the widow crane’s mind is all that remains of what happened that night. All eyewitness accounts have disappeared into the present of animals. No one can say what a bird might have seen, what a bird might remember.

Her edginess rubs off on this year’s colt. Contagious distress lifts him into a leap. He kicks out at the surrounding emptiness. His primaries spread like splayed fingers. His neck curls back and calls, curdling the air. He tosses leaves up over his arcing back, cowling his wings. And for the first of a thousand times in his life, he dances. In the falling dark, other species might mistake it for ecstasy.

He quits the so-called cognitive therapy. He should have quit long ago. Anything that Kopy Karin pushes so hard can’t possibly be in his best interests. It’s just a trick to distract him, get him to think about everything except what’s happening all around him. A kind of brainwashing to trick him into taking all these fakes at face value. He only hopes it hasn’t yet messed him up for good.

Dr. Tower freaks. She practically pleads with him: But we haven’t even gotten out of assessment. Well, he’s ready to give her a full assessment, if she’s interested. But she just rags on. Is he sure he’s ready to leave? Doesn’t he want to feel better about things, before…? All pretty pitiful and self-serving. He tells her to get professional help.

But he needs to talk to someone, someone who can help put all the facts together. Bonnie’s out. Okay: she’s still his Bonnie-baby. Call it love, whatever. But Kopy Karin has gotten to her, turned her, as the federales say. Convinced her there’s something wrong with him. Even when he lays out all the accumulated evidence — his missing sister, the fake Homestar, nobody admitting to the note, the new Karin hooking up with the old Daniel, the disguised Daniel following them around, training animals to watch them — she says she’s not sure.

He could ask Rupp and Cain. He might have, a long time ago, but for that little seed of doubt. Where were they, after all, on the night he rolled the Ram? He’s held back, waiting for an explanation that never quite materializes. But now it occurs to him: Who planted that doubt? Karbon Karin again, trying to do to him what she’s managed to do to Bonnie. Convince him his friends are foes, and vice versa. The whole three-car theory: all the impostor’s idea. He’s crazy to give it a second thought.

He looks for a chance to enlist the guys. He gets it, one chilly afternoon, when they come by to take him on a squirrel dump. One of Ruppie’s specialties: all summer long he picks off gray squirrels in his yard with a pellet gun, then stashes them in his freezer until he has enough to justify a disposal run out of town. Then the three of them take binoculars, a couple of sixes, some brats, and a Hefty Bag full of the thawed rodents and head out to a little strip of uncultivated prairie along the South Loup. Build a little squirrel pyramid in the open field, set up camp a hundred yards away, and wait for the turkey vultures. Rupp loves those things, could watch them all day. Cathartes aura, he calls out when they start circling overhead. Ave, Cathartes aura, like they’re something out of the Bible, and the squirrels are their burnt offering. And it is kind of biblical, in fact: the swarming cloud of them.

Mark and Duane are in jeans and sweats. Rupp is in shorts and a black tee; unfreezable. They set up camp and kick back. Talk turns to desirable women. Want to know who’s hot? Cain says. That Cokie Roberts is hot.

Seven, Rupp says. Seven and a half. Great face, but the super-abundance of ideas lowers the property value. So what’s up with that Christiane Amanpour? I mean, what’s her angle? Is she even American, or what?

Talking in code. The one says: You know what would look good around Britney’s neck? And the other answers: Her ankles? It gets on Mark’s nerves after a while. He watches the squirrel pile. Why do you kill those things, anyway? he asks Rupp.

Because they kill my best and brightest tomatoes.

That’s their job description, Duane-o says. Your basic yard rat is supposed to wreak havoc on your typical tomato. Were you aware that the tomato is a fruit?

I have long had my suspicions, Rupp says. I wouldn’t mind if the rodents actually ate the things. But they like to just pull them off the vine and play polo. No reasoning with them, short of the deep freeze.

Killing is a sin, man.

I am aware. I wrestled with my conscience and beat the bastard, two out of three falls.

The three of them sit, drink, cook up some brats on the little hibachi. The vultures arrive, and it’s two kindred species, fraternizing over a little shared picnic.

Ah, Labor Day, Duane says. You gotta love it.

Rupp agrees. Vita doesn’t get any dolcier than this. Day like this calls for some poetry. Recite some poetry for us, will you, Cain?

I’d rather yank a fart out of a cow’s ass, Cain says.

Rupp shrugs. There’s a herd over that hill. It’s your America. Knock yourself out.

Duane suggests they take some target practice, but Rupp just slaps him upside of the head. You don’t shoot at Cathartes aura. It’s nobility. The finest we have. You wouldn’t take potshots at the president, would you?

Not unless he wings me first. Speaking of which: You hear anything more about your unit? Orders to mobilize, or what have you? Rupp just laughs. But Duane-o is all: It’s gonna be any minute now. You know America is going on a tear before the year’s out, and nobody better get in her way. Afghanistan’s going to look like a training bike with streamers. The big one’s coming. Armor get-on. Direct flight from Fort Riley to Riyadh. You’re going on the hajj, bud. One weekend a month, my ass.

If it be not now, yet it will come, Rupp says. We have to do something. Can’t just sit here, burning. But it’s going to be cruise missiles against camel jockeys, all over again. All I personally have to do is keep the wheels greased. Home by Veterans Day. He shoves Duane’s shoulder: Come on, dipstick. Join up. No knowledge without suffering.

Get shot at? I’d sooner be anally savaged by Hastings escapees.

Hey. Who says you can’t have it all?

Got a letter from the National Guard, Mark says.

What? Rupp shouts. Like he’s upset. What did it say?

Mark waves his hand around his head, swatting gnats. Just a letter; friendly and personal, in a legal sort of way. Not something you can just sit down and read through.

When was this, Rupp wants to know. Like it’s an issue.

Who knows? A while back. No biggie. They’re the damn army, man. It’s not like they’re in any hurry.

But Rupp is all upset, ball-busting him. We’ll get on that puppy instantly, soon as we take you home. Remind me.

Sure, sure. But just chill for a minute. Listen. It’s possible that the government has other plans for us, altogether.

This gets their attention. But Mark has to take it slow. The big picture is a little hard to grasp, and he doesn’t want them to overload. He starts with the stuff they’re already familiar with. The substitutions: sister, dog, house. Then the note, given to him, he now believes, by somebody who was there, in the truck with him.

That’s impossible, both fellow Muskrats say at once.

He gives them a hard look: I know what you’re going to say. There was nobody there. Nobody in the wreck when the medics came. Except me. He walked away. He called in the accident.

Rupp shakes his head, holding a cold beer to it. No, no man. If you had seen…

Duane jumps in. Dude, your truck looked like a big old Angus on the other end of the cutters. Picture in the paper. Nobody was walking away from that. It’s a miracle you…

Mark Schluter gets a little upset. He flips over the hibachi. A rolling coal burns a brown spot in the tops of his Chuck Taylors.

Okay, okay, Rupp says. Let’s assume. For point of argument. What makes you think this guy was…? Who was he? What was he doing in your truck?

Mark holds up his hands. Everybody just relax. Regroup. I know he was there because I remember him.

It’s like the moment in a thriller when the guy reaches underneath his chin and pulls off the latex face.

You remember? Who…? What are you saying?

All right: so Mark doesn’t remember the hitchhiker himself. But he remembers talking to him. As plain as this conversation. Must have picked him up a while earlier, because they were in the middle of some kind of interview guessing game. Questions the hitchhiker wasn’t directly answering, except with hints. Warmer, colder kind of thing. Guess the secret.

Rupp is upset, which doesn’t happen often. He’s all: Hang on. What exactly do you remember?

But the details aren’t worrying Mark right now. He’s after the full jigsaw. Which is exactly what everybody wants to keep him from seeing. Some kind of systematic cover-up, to keep him from finding out too much about what he’s stumbled into. Look at the facts: A few minutes after he picks up this angel hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere and starts in on this whole Twenty Questions thing, he has an accident. Then, in the hospital, something happens to him on the operating table. Something that conveniently erases his memory. And when he does come back to himself, they’ve swapped out his sister, who might help him remember, and replaced her with a fake who keeps him under 24/7 surveillance. That’s a lot to call coincidence. And then they set him up in a parallel Farview. A whole live-in experiment, with Mark as the lab monkey.

What about us? Duane wants to know. How come they didn’t swap us out? He sounds offended. Left out.

Isn’t that obvious? You two don’t know anything.

This pisses Duane off. But Mark doesn’t have time to make every little point. He’s got to get them to see how big this must be, in order for the government to throw around that kind of money, replacing a whole town.

Jesus, Duane says, starting to grasp the scale. What do you think they’re up to?

That’s just the thing. That must have been what the hitchhiker was hinting at. Warmer. Colder. They’re using this place for some project. Either they need some big old empty spot with nobody in it. Or there’s something specific they need — something special about life out here.

Rupp snorts. Something special? About life out here?

Mark pushes them. Think: something so close we don’t even see it anymore. Something we do that nobody else does.

Duane almost chokes on a bratwurst. Wheat. Meatpacking. Migrating birds.

Good Christ, Mark says. The birds. How could we have missed it? Don’t you two remember? When did I have my accident?

Nobody says anything, it’s so obvious. The few weeks of the year when their godforsaken nowhere becomes world famous.

And I haven’t even told you the key: when I was going door to door with the note? There was somebody…Somebody kept popping up, although never exactly…

It’s like Rupp isn’t even listening. Doesn’t even follow the logic. Just asks: How do you know it’s the government?

This is exactly what Mark is trying to tell him. He’s been followed around for weeks by someone who can only be Daniel Riegel. The Bird Man. Plus, the guy has conveniently gotten involved with the fake Karin. And you know exactly who he works for, don’t you?

Daniel? Danny Riegel? He doesn’t work for the government. He works for the damn Crane Refuge.

Which is a government…which gets most of its money from…

You know, I think it might actually be a government operation, Cain says. Come to think.

You are totally whacked. Rupp tries to laugh, but it comes out small-caliber.

Public outfit, anyway, Duane says. Public sanctuary.

It’s not public. It’s a foundation. A privately funded…

It’s definitely got some kind of state affiliation…

Everybody shut up for a second? You’re missing the point. Suppose this guy I picked up was a terrorist. Months after. Trying to strike at something really…American. And suppose the government…

You never picked anyone up, Rupp says. There was no hitchhiker.

How do you know? You told me you weren’t fucking there.

Maybe Mark Schluter yells a bit. Rupp and Cain, too. It’s a little distressing, truth be told. They all chill for a minute, just sit and watch the turkey vultures pick at the squirrel pile. But the picnic is basically over.

We should get back to your place, Rupp says. Check out that Guard letter.

Don’t do me any favors, Mark tells him.

But they pack up and pile into Rupp’s ’88 Chevy 454. Rupp drives, Duane rides shotgun, and Mark takes one of the jumps, like old times. Only he’s beginning to see there are no more old times, if there ever were any. Rupp has the new Cattle Call CD on the player, Hand Rolled. A song called “I’ve Had Amnesia for as Long as I Can Remember.” It sounds like gelded goslings, the same old crap CC has been singing since the band got paroled. But Duane gets all jumpy and Rupp punches the player to skip the track, like it embarrasses him. Which only makes Mark want to go back and listen closer.

They’re coming back Route 40, just before the Odessa turnoff, when a big buck breaks from a copse and leaps across the road in front of them. It’s dead for the truck, a missile aimed at the hood. Not even time to scream. But just as the creature reaches them, Rupp twists into a power skid that takes them over the center line and back twice. The deer stops, on the far shoulder, baffled. It so badly expected to be dead that it doesn’t know what to do with the changed itinerary. Only when the thing shakes itself and runs off into the trees do the three humans revive.

Jesus fuck.

Both friends look at Mark. Rupp grabs his knee, Duane his shoulder. You all right, man? Damn it, we were gone. Finished.

But nothing’s happened, really. The truck isn’t even scratched, and the deer will get over it. He’s not sure why they want him to be so upset.

God damn, Duane keeps jabbering, cranked. We were done. Life insurance payout time. How the hell did you do that? Turning before I even saw the thing.

Rupp is shaking. Duane and Mark try not to look, but there it is. Mr. Natural Guardsman, quivering like a Parkinson’s guy on stilts in an earthquake. Deer tried to kill us, he says. Faking his old self. But they see now, see him. I’m telling you, that maniac tried to jump through our windshield. The fucking video game saved our life. He looks at his hands, which are triggering. If I hadn’t played hundreds of hours of that video game, we’d all be toast.

Rupp restarts the truck and pulls back into the right lane. Cain howls like a coyote. He can’t believe he’s gotten lucky, for once in his life. He punches the air. Jesus, Jesus. What a trip. He punches the glove compartment, which pops open. He pulls out a little black communicator, something Mark’s seen before. Duane presses it up to his face, chewing into it like some kind of cop. Yo, there, Saint Peter, good buddy? Cancel those three reservations you were holding for this evening? Goat-head.

At the word, Mark is up out of the jump seat, grabbing at the communicator. Give me that. But he doesn’t really need to hold it. He’s held it before. Or one just like it.

Put it away, Rupp commands. Cain scrambles with the glove compartment, keeping the communicator from Mark. But there’s no putting it away again.

Mark’s finger swings between the two of them, a waving pistol. You? I was talking to you two? You two were the hitchhiker? I don’t get…how am I supposed to…?

Rupp lays into Cain. You stupid shit-for-brains. He’s driving with one hand, grabbing at the communicator with the other. In the scrimmage, he comes up with it. He chucks it out the driver’s-side window, like that’s the answer to all questions. He glares at Cain, ready to kill him. You pointless gamete. What were you thinking?

What? I was just…what? How was I supposed to know?

You told me you weren’t there, Mark says. You lied to me.

We weren’t there, they say, together. Rupp silences Cain with a look. He turns to Mark, begging. You had one in your truck. We were just…we’d just bought the things.

That was the game? Your little walkie-talkie speak? That was you? Goat-head?

You invented it, man. It made you laugh. We were just doing the CB thing, yakking at each other at a distance, when you…

Mark Schluter is a statue. Pure sandstone. You, too. You’re in on this whole thing. They start talking at once, trying to explain, clouding the facts. Mark puts his hands over his ears. Let me out. Stop this truck. Let me out right here.

Marker. Don’t be crazy, man. We’re two miles from Farview.

They argue, but he’s not listening. I’m walking. I’m out of this thing.

He gets violent, so finally they have to drop him. But for a long time they trail alongside him in the truck, at walking speed, trying to talk him back in. Trying, as always, to further confuse him, before the Chevy pulls off in an angry squeal.

They didn’t touch each other, the night of the restaurant fight. The next day, they talked in kind, obliging monosyllables. They slunk through the house, doing small favors for each other. All the next week, Daniel was self-effacing, patient, devoted, pretending they still inhabited that sunlit upland safe from their old nightmare. He acted as if she were the one who had slipped, and he, selfless, were forgiving her. She let him, encouraged him, even as it enraged her. That’s who she was.

Obviously, he had no idea what was best for him or what he needed. He had only that maddening mask of selflessness. She wanted to scream: Go, sample, taste. Find yourself. I know I’m not good enough; you tell me as much, in every patient acquiescence. Instead, she said nothing. The truth would only have incensed him. She understood him now. Saint Daniel: needing to transcend the rest of the race. Needing to prove that a human could be better than humans, could be as pure as an instinctive animal. But he needed her confirmation. Some part of her was willing to grant that he might be as good a man as she had any chance of meeting in this world. She loved his sad insistence that any bruise might be healed. But his glance of doubt, of vague disappointment, that constant looking for something a little more worthy and shining…Virtuous, sacrificial, long-suffering: and slowly choking her.

Her smallest suggestion that Daniel might be as frail as anyone threw him into a tailspin. Panicked, he worked to please her, labored for the relationship as if it were endangered. He cleaned and cooked, splurged on delicacies — morels and macadamias. He found her articles on Fregoli syndrome and indulged her every fear. At night, he rubbed her back with tiger balm, finally pressing her almost as hard as she asked.

She made love to him, imagining herself the woman whom he was imagining. Afterward, she was seized by frantic tenderness, a last-ditch effort to catch herself and fix them. “Daniel,” she whispered in his ear, in the dark. “Danny? Maybe we need to think about something small. Something new. Something a little of both of us.”

She touched his mouth and saw him smile in a sliver of moonlight. Ready to go almost anywhere she needed him. He spoke no objection aloud, but one, minute muscle in his upper lip was wrong, saying: No babies. No more humans. You see what they do.

She saw, at least, what he thought of her chances as a mother. Saw, at bottom, how he really imagined her.

At week’s end, Mark told her he was quitting therapy. The news blindsided her. She felt as she had at eight, the first time Cappy Schluter went bankrupt and the repossessors came to auction off their living room. Her last hope for rehabilitating Mark vanished. She pleaded with him, so drained from prolonged lack of sleep that she actually wept. Her tears bewildered Mark. But finally, he shook his head. “This is mental health? What we’re shooting for, here? Not for me, brother. Last thing I want is health that good.”

She drove out to Dedham Glen to consult Barbara. Months had passed since Mark’s stay, but Karin half-expected him to come shuffling down the hall, berating her. She sat on the plasticized couch across from the receptionist’s, primping anxiously, waiting for Barbara. When Barbara did walk by, her face clenched at the ambush. She had always told Karin to come to her for anything. Perhaps she’d been lying. But she rallied fast and managed a game smile. “Hey, friend! Is everything okay?”

They sat and talked in the community television room, surrounded by the dazed and incontinent. “I’m no lawyer,” Barbara told her. “I’m crazy even to think about advising you. I’m guessing you could force the issue, if you wanted. You’re his legal guardian now, right? But what good would that do you? Forced therapy isn’t likely to help. It would only convince Mark that you were persecuting him.”

“Maybe I am persecuting him. Just by not being who he thinks. Everything I do just makes him worse.”

Barbara covered Karin’s hand in the shell of hers. Her touch did more for Karin than Daniel’s. Yet even Barbara’s care kept its counsel. “It must feel that way, at times.”

“It feels that way always. How can I know the right thing to do, if I can’t trust how things feel?”

“You’ve written to Gerald Weber? That’s the right thing.”

Karin felt the urge to open completely to her, to tell Barbara the simple and defensible truth that she’d never felt so helpless in her life. But she knew enough about human brains now, damaged or otherwise, not even to think of going there. She needed a woman, someone to confirm her, to remind her of the worth of casual warmth, to save her from endless male dismissal. A girl’s crush. No, more: she loved this woman, for everything Barbara had done for them. But her first word would drive Barbara away. She listened to herself drop into a tone of pure invitation. “Do you have children, Barbara?” Ready, if rebuked, to deny all attempted intimacy.

Barbara’s “No” gave nothing away.

“But you are married?”

This time, no meant not anymore. Something in Karin leapt up at the admission, as if she might yet be able to give this woman something back. But she couldn’t be sure what she was allowed to ask. “You’re alone?”

Impulse broke across the woman’s face before she could suppress it. Someone isn’t? Her face softened. “Not really. I have this.” She shrugged, her upward palms taking in the television room. “I have my work.”

Karin snorted, before she could stop herself. She felt the real question she’d long needed to ask. “What do you get from this place?”

Barbara smiled. The Mona Lisa might have been a bouncing contestant on tell-all television, next to her. “Connection. Solidity. My…friends. New ones all the time.”

Her eyes said Mark. Karin flashed on something illicit, ready to suspect even Christian charity. If Barbara had been a man, the police would have been all over the situation. Mark, her friend? Connection, with these patients, trapped in their own collapsing bodies, people who couldn’t hold a spoon or pick one up off the floor where it fell? One harsh thought opened onto another, and she slipped into resentment. Resentment that this woman wouldn’t give her a tenth of what she happily gave a brain-damaged man fifteen years younger than herself. Resentment that Barbara had Mark and she did not. The thought pinched shut her eyes and twisted her face. Resentment: the family name for need. Couldn’t this woman see how close the two of them were?

“Barbara…How do you do it? How do you stay loyal, when everyone’s so…?” She would lose control, disgust the woman. She looked at the aide, trying not to beg.

But Barbara’s face showed only surprise. Her mouth opened in refusal. “I’m not the one…” Not crushed, not stroked out, no lesion. “It’s not me…”

Could anyone really have so mastered herself? How did she find such maturity? What had she been like, at Karin’s age? The questions piled up, none of them permissible. The conversation stalled. Barbara grew nervous and needed to get back to work. Karin felt that this might be the last time they would talk like this. She grabbed and hugged Barbara before leaving. But whatever connection was, that embrace held none of it.

That evening when Daniel came home, she was sitting on top of her three packed suitcases, five feet down his front walk. She had been sitting there for half an hour. She’d planned to be long gone well before he returned from work. Instead, she was camped out, twenty-five feet away from her parked car, unable to move in either direction. Daniel sprang off his bicycle, thinking she was hurt. But ten feet from where she sat, he figured out everything.

He was relentlessly noble, even in being abandoned. All the questions that he didn’t ask—Why are you doing this? Are you sure this is what you want? What about Mark? What about me? — burned into her as she sat, paralyzed. He didn’t even try to guilt her with talk or stroking. He said nothing at all for a long time, just stood two feet away from her, taking things in, thinking. He hunted for her eyes, trying to determine what she needed of him. She couldn’t meet his gaze. When he did speak, it was almost without accusation. Pure practical concern for her: exactly what she couldn’t bear. “But where will you go? All your stuff is in storage. Your place has just sold.”

She said what she had been rehearsing in her head for weeks. “Daniel, I’m breaking. I can’t do this anymore. For every little thing I do to help, I hurt him in three other ways. The sight of me makes him worse. He wants me gone. I’m sick and broke and in your way, light-headed and I haven’t slept well in six weeks. He makes me think I’m invisible, a virus, a nothing. I’m falling apart, Danny. I’m floating and buzzing. Like little spiders on my skin, all the time. I’m a mess. I’m disgusting. You just don’t, can’t, you have absolutely no…”

He put his hand on her shoulder to slow her. He did not say, I know. Only nodded.

Something like excitement propelled her. “The condo doesn’t close for another ten days. I can camp out on my floor. It’ll be so simple — just the essentials. I can use the money from the sale to line up a rental. I can get my job back, start reimbursing you for everything that you’ve paid for, all these…”

He shushed her. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder at the row of picture windows, through which the neighborhood now watched this piece of September-evening street theater. Now, on top of everything, she was making a scene, embarrassing him. She lunged up and grabbed at one of the suitcases, to drag it to the car. Her sudden speed pitched her over, into him. He grabbed her shoulders and steadied her. He reached down to take the bag. “Here. Let me help you.”

His stupid, brute charity made her lose it. She curled away from him, pressed two fists to her jaw, and began to hyperventilate. He stepped back toward her, to give what comfort he could. She fought him off with both hands. “Leave me alone. Don’t touch me. These aren’t real tears. Don’t you see, yet? I’m not her. I’m just a simulation. Something you invented in your head.” She could not make out her own wet and rubbery words. It crossed her mind, in a seed of bright, spreading fear, that she was having that thing that she and Mark used to speculate about, in the terror of childhood: a breakdown.

But just as suddenly, all her wildness stopped, and she stood on the curb, becalmed. Something in her must have known all along: she could never get farther than going through these motions. Leaving would prove Mark right. Would strip her of every account she might give of herself. A great curiosity came over her, an impatience to learn what she might yet become, in staying here. Who she might still be, if she could no longer be the other. She sat back down on the toppled case. Daniel sat down on the lawn next to her, now indifferent to what any other human being saw or thought of them. “I can’t leave yet,” she announced. “I forgot. The note from Dr. Weber. He’s coming back next week.”

“Yes,” Daniel said. “True.” He made no show of even trying to follow her. And even that, in a way she could not name, was a small relief. They sat together on her packed clothes until the first fat drops of a sparse autumn rain began to plash around them. Then he helped her carry the luggage back inside.

The next day, Karin saw Karsh. She strolled down Central in front of his office, a stretch she’d avoided for months. The morning was glorious, one of those crystalline, dry, blue, fall days when the temperature hovers right at anticipation. She knew she would end up coming here, the moment Daniel had spoken those words during their disastrous dinner. Almost like he was daring her, flushing out all unfinished business into the open. New developer consortium. Local wheelers and dealers. You wouldn’t happen to know…? Well, she didn’t know. Didn’t know the first thing about anyone.

But about herself, there were things she could find out. She looped down the block in front of Platteland Associates, pretending to window-shop those few stores — hospital supplies, Salvation Army, used books — that hadn’t yet been euthanized since the Wal-Mart landed. He would emerge for lunch at ten to twelve and head for the Home Style Cafe. Four years would have changed nothing. Robert Karsh was habit incarnate. A first-rate mind knows what it wants. Everything else was chaos.

He came from the office with two colleagues. Flawless gray coat and burgundy tie, Brooks black slacks: overcompensating businessman, pretending Kearney was the next Denver. She turned to inspect the window of a locksmith shop, a carousel of key blanks. He saw her from two blocks away. She lifted an arm to her hair, then dropped it instantly. He gave his partners a vague meet-you-later wave. Then he was standing in front of her, not touching, but taking her in, consuming her all over again. A tourist back when travel was still hard.

“You,” he said. Voice a little deeper. “It’s you. I can’t believe it’s you.”

For the first time in months, she knew herself. The last half a year took its fingers from her throat. Her shoulders dropped. Her head lifted. “Believe,” she said, her voice like God’s own phone receptionist.

He winced, hands waving. “What did you do to yourself?” Her haircut: the one meant to trick Mark into thinking she was her. “Damn. You look amazing. Like a manufacturer-refurbished virgin. College all over again.”

She scowled, trying not to giggle. “You mean high school.”

“Right. Like I said. You’ve lost weight?” He’d called her a failed anorectic once.

She stood almost posing, savoring the payback. “How’re your kids?” She could almost do this. Capable, no-nonsense. “Your wife?”

He grinned, raking his fingers through his hair. “Good, good! Well…long story.”

Her heart, that stupid holdover, spun like a pigeon in a Skinner box. For this man, she’d once bought a book called How to Elope, even while browsing for wedding dresses. At least she’d confined herself to apricot and peach.

He kept looking at her, shaking his head in disbelief. “How’s…your brother?”

“Mark,” she said. She expected him to flinch apology. She’d been with Daniel that long.

“Right. I read about him in the Hub. Nightmare.”

In remarkably few words, they maneuvered to the bench in front of the war memorial. He sat next to her, in broad day, center of town. Caution to the wind. He kept asking if she wanted something — a sandwich, maybe something fancy. She kept shaking her head. “You eat,” she said. It would be a while before she ate again. He waved off the idea of food, insisting that this was even bigger than nutrition. He asked for details about Mark and sat still for a surprising amount of them, compared to the Robert Karsh of four years ago. He shook his head and said things like Twilight Zone or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Crude, crass, banal. But words like home.

As easy as breathing, she unloaded. She told him everything, making her collapse seem almost comical. “He’s been my entire life for the last six months. But he’s decided I’m never going to be me again. And after half a year? He’s right.”

“Oh, you’re still you, let me tell you. A few new wrinkles, maybe.” Robert’s motto: The asshole of truth. The more brutally truthful, the better. He had ten times the self-knowledge Daniel had. He’d always almost relished admitting all the women he lusted after. I’m a man, Rabbit. We’re programmed to look. Everything worth looking at. Brutal truth was why she was sitting with him now, in the center of town, in front of the war memorial, in plain view of everyone.

His voice chilled her — the sound of time starting up again. His hair had the slightest rime of frost now, over his ears. His shirt stretched over his belt, rather than bunching. Otherwise unchanged: a slightly squashed, forgotten Baldwin brother, just a little too wide-faced to make it into the movies, and so, suppressed by the rest of the clan. Something nagged at her, some small difference. Maybe just a matter of pacing. He’d grown just two clicks slower, more open, peaceful. A touch of the acid, neutralized. Less slick, less aggressive, less self-satisfied. Or maybe he was just on his best behavior. Anyone could be anything, for an hour.

He took her elbow, like she was blind and he was helping her cross the street. She didn’t pull away. “Why did you take so long?”

The catch in his voice shocked her. “What do you mean?”

“To look me up?”

“I didn’t look you up, Robert. I was walking downtown. You found me.”

He grinned, warmed by her transparent lie. “You called me last spring.”

“Me? I don’t think so.” Then she remembered the curse of caller ID.

“Well, it was your brother’s number. But he was still in the hospital.” The smirk, more teasing than sadistic. “Somehow, I just assumed it was you.”

She closed her eyes. “I got your daughter. Ashley? I realized, the second I heard her…I’m sorry. Stupid. Wrong.” She recalled her mother’s words, the day before she died: Even mice don’t spring the same trap twice.

“Well,” he said. “I’ve seen worse crimes against humanity.” He pulled out a small black agenda from his coat pocket, flipping back to spring. He showed her the note, in his icy, clean handwriting: Rabbit, phone. Her brother’s pet name for her, from childhood. The name she never should have told Karsh. The name she thought she’d never hear herself called again. “I wish you’d stayed on the line. I might have helped.”

Not a sentiment the old Robert Karsh could even have faked. Their meeting might end here; she might never see him again and still feel vindicated, a thousand times better about herself than he’d last made her feel. “You’re helping now,” she said.

Robert returned the talk to Mark. The symptoms fascinated him, the prognosis depressed him, and the medical response outraged him. “Let me know when Dr. Author gets back. I’d like to run a few tests on him.”

She did not describe Barbara to Karsh. She didn’t want those two meeting, even in imagination. “Tell me about you,” she asked. “What have you been doing?”

He waved at the surrounding buildings. “All this! When were you through last? The town must look pretty different to you.”

The town looked like Brigadoon. The Land That Time Forgot. She tittered. “I was thinking that nothing has changed since Roosevelt. Teddy.”

He grimaced as if she’d kneed him. “You’re kidding, right?” He looked around, through three compass points, as if he himself might be hallucinating. “The fastest growing non-metro city in Nebraska. Maybe the eastern Plains!”

She swallowed her laughter into hiccups. “I’m sorry. Really…I have noticed a few new…things. Especially out near the interstate.”

“I can’t believe you. This place is undergoing a renaissance. Improvements under way everywhere.”

“Closing in on perfection, Bob-o.” The name slipped out of her. The one she’d sworn never to use again.

He looked ready to inflict full frontal assault, like the old days. Instead, he buffed his skull with his knuckles, a little hangdog. “You know, Rabbit? You were right about me. We built a lot of shit. Nothing substandard, but still. A lot of strip mall and cinder-block apartment complexes I have to atone for, come Judgment. Fortunately, most of it will blow away in the next high wind.” He hummed a high-pitched rendition of the tornado music from The Wizard of Oz. She laughed, despite herself. “But we’re different now. We’ve brought in two new partners, and we’re lots more ambitious.”

“Robert. Ambition was never your problem.”

“No, I mean good ambition. We were involved with the Arch!”

She hiccupped again. But he glowed with an Eagle Scout pride that stunned her. Inconceivable that she’d ever been afraid of this man. She’d simply mistaken him, never understood what he was really after.

“It took me a while to realize, but good conscience actually sells. You just have to teach people how to recognize their own best interests. We pushed through the paper recycling plant. Have you been out to see that? State of the art. I call it Mea Pulpa…”

She asked him about new projects. As soon as was safe, she fished. Something big and new, out near Farview? Bluntness was best with him. He didn’t try to hide; he never had. He stared at her question, his surprise threatening to become desire. “Where on earth did you hear that? You’re talking about a top-secret business deal there, missy!”

“Small town.” Why she’d spent her adult life trying to leave it. Why she’d never be able to.

He wanted to know how much she knew. But he refused to ask. Instead, he just gazed, a look as intimate as an arm around her waist. “Wait a minute. You haven’t been talking to the Druid again? How is the world of sacred ecoterrorism these days?”

“Don’t be spiteful, Bob-o.”

He beamed. “You’re right. Anyway, he and I are practically in the same business now. Building a better future. From each according to his abilities.”

She looked up at him, disgusted, delighted. The four blocks of downtown that she could see did feel somehow revived. Maybe Kearney really was resurrecting, back to its glory days of a hundred years earlier, when buoyant Gilded Age residents actually lobbied to move the capital from Washington to their miracle city at the nation’s center. That bubble had burst so badly it took Kearney a century to recover. But to hear Karsh go on about broadband, the access grid, satellite streams, and digital radio: geography was dead, and imagination was once again the only limit to growth.

Half an hour, and already she was thinking like him. She waved at a renovated bank across the street, big arm movements, like a magician’s assistant or an actress selling appliances on the Home Shopping Network. “Are you responsible for this one?”

“Maybe.” He rubbed his wide Baldwin face in his hand, amused by his own zeal. “But this new…development. It’s something different. This one’s a good thing, Karin.”

“And big,” she said, neutral.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard, but this is a beautiful project. I always wanted to do at least one thing in my life that would make you proud of me.”

She spun to face him. His words came out of nowhere, out of her own head, so wholly unearned that she teared up. She’d always dreamed that a few years of absence might make him like her more. She steadied herself with one arm, sucking air and pressing the other palm into an eye. Too much display: she had to stop. He placed his hand on her neck, and half a year of extinction lifted from her. Broad daylight. Not caring who saw. The old Robert Karsh could never have done that.

They sat still until her tears stopped and he removed his hand. “Miss you, Rabbit. Miss the side by side.” She didn’t reply. He mumbled something about maybe being able to get away for half an hour or something, next Tuesday night. She nodded, twitching like an awn of soft wheat on a windless day.

To make her proud of him. No one on the planet was who you thought he was. She got control of her face, staring down the street to the left. The town must look pretty different to you. She swung back toward him, a solid, sardonic look all prepared. But he was looking off at a clump of four office workers in their twenties, three of them women, heading back into the Municipal Building after their hour away.

“You probably have to get back to work,” she said.

He turned, grinned, and shook his boyish head. Her misguided mammal heart slammed again.

“Go,” she told him. The word sounded light, nonchalant. “Go ahead. You must be starving.”

“Maybe I will just…grab a little something?” She waved him away, dismissal, benediction. He needed something more. “Tuesday?”

She just looked at him, a minute tightening around her eyes: What do you think?

She said nothing to Daniel that evening. Not really deception; telling him — inviting the wrong conclusion — would have been deceptive. Even now, he was keen to prove that he could love her largest anxiety, remain as devoted to her as he was to the blameless birds. And she did love that core of his that didn’t know how to be tainted. Her brother — Mark before—had been right: Daniel was a tree. A decades-long trunk, tilting toward the sun. No victory or defeat, only constant bending. Every time she hurt him, he grew a little. That night, he seemed almost fully grown.

Over dinner — couscous with currants — the claustrophobia of recent days caught up with them. Daniel sat across from her at the old farmhouse table, his elbows on the oak, the steeple of his fingers pressed together against his lips. He threatened to disappear into reflection. He stood and stacked the dirty dishes. His quiet care as he took them to the sink betrayed the fact: she was defeating him. Breaking down his green ideals.

He placed the dishes in the basin and began to scrub them with a cup of lukewarm water. As always, when he did the dishes, he leaned his head on the cabinets protruding above the sink. Over years, the paint on the cabinet had worn away in a small oval, from the oils in his hair. She did love him.

“Daniel?” she asked. Almost like real small talk. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Yes? Tell me.” He still sounded ready to go anywhere. His old pagan Christianity: Do animals hold grudges? He was a good man, the kind of good man that only a truly insecure person could find contemptible.

“I’ve been a leech on you. A parasite, really.”

He spoke to the basin. “Not at all.”

“I have been. I’ve been so preoccupied with Mark. Out with him all the time. Afraid to get a job with real hours, in the event…in case…”

“Of course,” Daniel said.

“I need work. I’m making us both nuts.”

“Not at all.”

“I was thinking…that I could help,” she whispered. “If it were still available…the job that you talked about, at the Refuge?” She would die a fund raiser.

He set down the dish rag and faced her. His eyes bored into her, ready to shine. One offer of help and his wariness fell away. The worst no longer occurred to him, and the best seemed already half-confirmed. How badly he needed to believe in her. “If you just need money…”

“This wouldn’t be just money.” Not just water; not just air. Not, she told herself, just anything.

“Because we couldn’t pay much, right away. Tight times, at the moment.” He was so sure she would rise to what was best in her that she almost backed out. “But, man, do we need you right now.”

And shouldn’t need be enough? Something needed her more than Mark ever would. She studied Daniel for hints of unaffordable charity. Would he cook books, risk his professional standing, just to keep her straight? Could anyone trust anyone who trusted anyone so much? She held his eyes; he didn’t look away. He needed her absolutely, but not for herself. For something larger. Once, that had been all she’d ever wanted. She rose and crossed to where he stood. She kissed him. Sealed, then. What Mark wouldn’t take from her, she would give elsewhere. The Refuge would be amazed at her energies.

The following Tuesday, she met Robert Karsh again.

Four months on, and the place was another country. The shin-high fields of green he’d driven through last June now waved gold and brown. Identical route from the Lincoln airport westward, in an interchangeable rental, yet everything around him had altered. Not just the simple turn of a season: more roll now, more tangled range, drumlins and pitches, rifts and concealed copses disturbing the perfect expanse of agribiz, surprise features where Weber had seen only the peak of emptiness. He’d missed everything, the first time through.

So why, in the final twenty miles before Kearney, did it feel so familiar? Like returning to the sealed summer house to retrieve some article of clothing mistakenly left behind. He needed no map, just drove from the exit ramp to the MotoRest on inner compass. The marquee out front still read “Welcome Crane Peepers,” already ready for next spring’s migration, now only four and a half months away.

He felt he was on a spiritual retreat, recharging his cells, wiping the slate clean. Signs in his room still asked him to spare a towel and save the earth. He did, and went to bed oddly tranquil. He woke refreshed. At the breakfast buffet — healthy midwestern spread, with three kinds of sausage — it struck him that his writing should never have become anything more than private meditation, a daily devotion for himself and a few friends. He could start again, with the extraordinary Mark Schluter. He had come back not so much to document Mark as to help his story forward into the total unknown. Neuroscience might finally be powerless to settle this desperately improvising mind. But he might help Mark improvise.

He followed Karin’s directions out to Farview, River Run Estates, on numbered roads as right-angled as rationality pretended to be. He found the house, in a subdivision cowering in the middle of an enormous harvested field, bounded on one side by the snaking line of cottonwoods and willows that declared the hidden river. He sat in his rental for a moment, gazing at the house: mail-order, springform, something that hadn’t been there yesterday and certainly wouldn’t be there tomorrow. Walking up to the wood-laminated door, he had the passing feeling, not of déjà vu, but of déjà ecrit, of a passage he’d written long before that was only now coming true.

The man who opened the door to Weber was some foreigner. All Mark’s scars had healed and his hair had grown out. He stood like a fledgling god, somewhere between Loki and Bacchus. He seemed only mildly surprised to see Weber.

“Shrinky! Am I glad it’s you. Where the hell have you been? You won’t believe what’s been going on around here.” He scouted the yard behind Weber before ushering him in. He shut the door and leaned against it, excited. “Before I say anything: What have you heard?”

All clinical interviews should take place in the subject’s home. Weber learned more about Mark in five minutes in his living room than in all their previous encounters. Mark sat him in the overstuffed chair and brought him a bottle of Mexican beer with some honey-roasted peanuts. He shushed Weber and went to root around in the bedroom. He returned with a pad of paper and a pen. He gestured to Weber to start his recorder, the two of them old collaborators. “Okay, let’s tackle this thing, once and for all.”

Mark was remarkably animated, spinning a story that smoothed out all the breaks. He raced through the answers before Weber even asked the questions. He traced a single, clean line of thought: all his friends were conspiring to hide what had happened that night. Cain and Rupp knew; they’d been talking to him on the walkie-talkie just as he flipped over. But they’d lied to him about it. His sister knew, so she’d been replaced, to keep her from telling. Like the guardian note-writer, she was probably locked up somewhere. Daniel Riegel was somehow trailing him, for reasons unknown. “Like I’m some creature or something. He’s a big tracker, you know. He can find wild things invisible to the naked eye. Things you and I don’t even know are there.”

Your fake sister’s boyfriend following you around in disguise: Freud might do more than the MRI. Surely the phenomenon had to be something more than a dissociation between ventral and dorsal recognition pathways. But what did psychological mean anymore, except a process that did not yet have a known neurobiological substrate? Weber made no theories about Mark’s new belief. His job now was just to help this new mental state adjust to itself. He would never again leave himself open to charges of failed compassion. He would let Mark write the book.

What did it feel like to be Mark Schluter? To live in this town, work in a slaughterhouse, then have the world fracture from one moment to the next. The raw chaos, the absolute bewilderment of the Capgras state twisted Weber’s gut. To see the person closest to you in this world, and feel nothing. But that was the astonishment: nothing inside Mark felt changed. Improvising consciousness saw to that. Mark still felt familiar; only the world had gone strange. He needed his delusions, in order to close that gap. The self’s whole end was self-continuation.

Mark, at least, was still himself — more than Gerald Weber could claim. Method-acting, Weber tried to inhabit the man who sat in front of him, weaving theories. Weber might more easily have channeled Karin, her frightened research, her desperate, self-effacing e-mails. How could he inhabit Mark Schluter, the oblivious Capgras sufferer, when he couldn’t even inhabit Mark Schluter, the healthy truck customizer and slaughterhouse technician? He could no longer even imagine what it felt like to be Gerald Weber, that confident researcher from last spring…

“Everyone born around here is in on the cover-up. You and Barbie Doll are the last two people I can trust.”

What did Mark suppose was being covered up? Worse: What made him think he could trust Weber? As a rule, Weber never humored patients’ delusions. Yet he humored everyone else, every day of the week. The Pakistani cabbie on the way to LaGuardia, with his theories about Al Qaeda links to the White House. The security agent at the airport, making him remove his belt and shoes. The woman in the plane seat next to him who grabbed his arm at takeoff, sure the cabin would explode at fifteen hundred feet. Humoring Mark was status quo.

“So I was apparently talking to the guys on these communicators. Them in Rupp’s truck, me in mine. We were on to something, chasing. And one of us had to be stopped. Funny thing? This woman playing Karin? She kept hinting those two were there, and I didn’t listen.”

Something had happened to Mark, the night of his accident. And his friends had lied to him. Weber himself couldn’t account for the guardian’s note or interpret the swerving sets of tire tracks. His own explanation for why the world now felt different to Mark wasn’t even partially satisfying. Mark had been thinking about his internal state longer and deeper than anyone. Weber could afford to humor his theories. Maybe humoring was empathy by another name.

Slumping on his couch with his shoulder on the armrest and a throw pillow between his knees, Mark launched his best hypothesis. He leaned toward a secret biological project. “Experimental breakthrough. Like the kind of thing my father was always trying to hit on. But big, on the scale only the government could swing. And it’s got to do with birds. Otherwise, why would Birdman Danny be after me?”

For that, too, Weber had no explanation.

“The whole thing must be pretty hush-hush. Otherwise, we’d have heard about it, right? So here’s what I’m thinking. All this stuff started the minute I came out of the hospital. They did something to me when I was under the knife. Okay, so K2 says I wasn’t ‘under the knife,’ in so many words. But I had a bolt coming out the head, right? A little spigot? They could inject crap, draw it out. I could be dreaming this whole situation, right now. They could have implanted this whole meeting with you, right into my cere-beanie.”

“Then they injected me, too. Because I am convinced that I’m here, too.”

Mark squinted at Weber. “Really? Are you saying…? Wait a minute. Get the hell out of here! It doesn’t mean that at all.”

He scribbled on his notepad. He leaned back on the sofa and put his feet up on the coffee table, staring across the room. He jerked up, raising his arm and pointing his shaking finger. He stood unsteadily and walked over to his computer. He tapped his monitor repeatedly with his index-finger nail. “It never occurred to me. Simply never dawned…You think it’s possible that the last several months of Mark Schluter’s life have been programmed in a government machine?”

Weber could not say that it wasn’t possible.

“That would go a long way toward explaining why I feel like I’ve been living in a video game. One where I can’t beat the level and advance to the next.”

Weber suggested they go outside and stroll down toward the river. A little nervously, Mark agreed. The brisk air worked on Mark. The longer they talked, the more adamant Mark became. It struck Weber that maybe he’d been helping the man create this illness. Iatrogenic. Collaboration between doctor and patient.

“So I’m on the walkie-talkie to my buds. We’re communicating, we’re chasing this thing down. All of a sudden, I see something on the road. I flip the truck. So the question is: What did I see? What was out there in the middle of the road that night? There just aren’t too many choices.”

Weber conceded the point.

“Someone who wasn’t supposed to be out there. I’m not saying terrorists, necessarily. Could be working for either side.”

They walked back along a dusty gravel road through two walls of russet corn days away from harvesting. Autumn, the season that always crippled Weber with anticipation. The cool, dry, alerting breeze got to Weber as it hadn’t for years. His pulse quickened, tricked by the perfect day into thinking something was about to happen. At his side, Mark walked, grim and resigned. His stride no longer showed any injury.

“Sometimes I think it was, you know: Mark Schluter. The other one. The guy who used to work for a living. The sure one, who could pass all your little trick tests without even thinking. That’s who was out there, in the middle of nowhere. I ran that guy over. Killed him.”

He’d begun to double himself. This boy-man might throw no end of light on consciousness. They came back through the fields to River Run, the Homestar. They sat side by side on the concrete front steps, Mark’s legs spread too wide. The dog, Blackie Two, came up on its chain and stuck its muzzle into Mark’s hands. Mark petted and ignored it at random. The dog whimpered, unable to decode human whim. Nor could Weber. He’d sworn off anything that could be accused of exploitation. Yet surely empathy with Mark didn’t preclude a wider care. Perhaps science wasn’t over yet. He said nothing for as long as he could. Then he asked, “Would you like to come to New York for a while?” A full workup at the Medical Center, state-of-the-art equipment, the luxury of time, lots of talented researchers, interpretations less vested than his own.

Mark leaned away from him, astonished. “New York? What, and have some airplane slam me?” Weber told him there would be no danger. Mark just scoffed, well past conning. “You guys are big on anthrax out there, too, right?”

Nothing mattered but trust. “I hear you,” Weber said. “Probably safer to stick around here.”

Mark shook his head. “I’m telling you, Doc. It’s a weird world. They can hit you, wherever you are.” He studied the horizon for the clue that had to appear there, eventually. “But I do appreciate the offer. I might’ve been dead by now without you, Shrinky. You and Barbara are the only ones who have truly cared what happens to me.”

Weber flinched at the words, the most delusional Mark had spoken all afternoon.

Mark’s arms began to shake, as if his body had gone terribly cold. “Doc, I’ve got a really bad feeling about my sister. It’s been like, what? Half a year. Not even a word. Nobody willing to say what happened to her. You have to understand: she’s been checking up on me weekly since I was old enough to wet the bed. God knows why, but she’s always cared for me. She and this guardian both, disappearing without a trace. Even if they have her locked up, she’d have found some way to get a message to me by now. I’m beginning to think I’ve hosed my sister. Gotten her in trouble, maybe even killed, just for being related to me. You don’t suppose…it couldn’t have been her who…? She must be…let’s face it. I think she’s probably…”

“Tell me about her,” Weber said, to keep him from worse speculation.

Mark sucked the air and a sharp syllable of laugh shot from him. “Don’t ever tell her I said this, but there’s nothing at all to her. Simplest person in the world. She just needs petting. Give her, like, three-fifths of a gold star and she’ll go through fire for you. See, we had this mom? Nothing short of Jesus’ starting five was good enough for her. She and my sister had what you might call issues. You miserable thrill-seeking liberal ingrate, yada yada. Nine months of morning sickness followed by the most excruciating pain of my life, just so you can go and seduce your Physical Education teacher, yada yada yada. So Karin? She decides she’s going to be perfect. Find out what everyone expects of her, and serve it up to a T. Even a total stranger’s disappointment just kills her. Simpler than a household pet, though. Just needs two things: Love me, and tell me I’m doing right. Don’t call me a shiftless shit-kicker. Hey; maybe that’s three things. How about you, Doc? You got any of the sibling thing going? Hey: don’t take so long answering. It ain’t a trick question or anything.”

“A brother,” Weber said. “Four years younger. He’s a cook out in Nevada.” If he was still out there. If he was still alive. Weber had last heard from Larry two years before, with too much detail about the Liberty Riders’ annual “Lead, Follow or Get the Hell out of the Way Fest.” Fanatical conservative national motorcycle organization: Lawrence Weber’s whole life. Sylvie nagged Weber every few months to call, make some effort to stay in touch. “A good man,” Weber claimed. “He reminds me a little of you.”

“No shit?” The notion tickled Mark. “Your folks?”

“Gone,” Weber said. More than half true. His father, dead of a stroke when three years younger than Weber was now. His mother with advanced Alzheimer’s, in a Catholic assisted-care facility in Dayton where he visited once a season. He and Sylvie still conversed with her twice a month over the phone, dialogues out of Ionesco.

“Sorry to hear that,” Mark said, and by way of consolation invited Weber in for dinner. The simple kindness stabbed at Weber. How many tiny mental courtesies persisted in their own obscure loops, oblivious to the disasters that hammered them? Dinner was beers out of the bottle and frozen lasagna reheated in a deep aluminum tin. “Something the surrogate sister brought over. Eat at your own risk.”

“Are you okay?” Sylvie asked that night. “You sound different, somehow. Your voice is very…I don’t know. Unfolded. Like a philosopher or something.”

“Philosopher. Now there’s a career future.”

“Makes me nervous, Man.”

In fact, he felt different, even to himself: pooled somewhere outside the realm of public judgment. “Strange, isn’t it? Two round trips, four thousand miles each, just to see a man who really only wants me to be a detective.”

“And they say doctors no longer make house calls.”

“But what a case! Medicine needs to know about this.”

“Medicine should know lots of things. I’m glad you’re doing this. I know you, Man. This one’s been preying on you.”

“Wife? Remind me to call my brother when I get home.”

After the call, he went out and walked into town, block after gingerbread block, under the amber globe of streetlights, as if on his way to some obscure assignation. Autumn thickened the air. The year was drawing into itself, dense with preparation. Massive maples flared up on their way to going dormant. A restless insect swarm blared its band-saw death chorus. He stood at the corner of four white-wood A-frames, one flickering with nineteenth-century glow, two lit blue by television, and the fourth dark. He’d never felt more eager to find out. Find out what, he couldn’t say. What was he doing back? Something that autumn promised to answer.

He was still walking at random when the street went dark. He took four full seconds to think: power failure. The thrill of thunderstorms and ambulances came over him. He looked up; the sky was deep in stars. He’d forgotten how many there could be. Washes of them, spilling in streams. He’d forgotten how rich darkness looked. He could see, but poorly, without color, plunged into achromatopsia. Both of the achromats he’d interviewed had raged against the very words, red, yellow, blue. They lived for the night world, where they were superior to the color-sighted and merely ordinary. Weber fumbled in the dark for blocks, his sense of direction failing. When the lights surged back on, he felt the banality of sight.

The next day, Mark took him fishing. “Nothing fancy, man. Crude stuff. Maybe previous Mark might have taught you how to tie kick-ass midges and sculpins. But we’re talking commercial lures today. Scented rubber worms dragging around their lazy, fake-invertebrate barbed asses through the water until some loser crappie takes a hit. Anybody can handle it. Little kids. Neuroshrinkists. What have you.”

The fishing spot was secret, as all fishing spots are. Weber had to swear a vow of silence before Mark would take him. Shelter Lake, on private land, turned out to be little more than a dew pond with delusions of grandeur.

“Here we are. The hidey-hole. Catch and release,” Mark said. “Man with the most fish by 2:00 p.m. is the superior human being. Ready, set, go. Dude, you look like you’ve never baited a hook.”

“Only in self defense,” Weber said.

His father had taken him, every summer until he turned twelve — bluegill in a small stocked lake just over the Indiana line. His father told him the fish felt nothing, and he’d believed it, on no evidence at all. Nonsense; of course they felt pain. How could he not have seen it? He took Jess once, some nostalgic recreation, surf casting on Long Island’s South Fork, when she was still small. The expedition ended in disaster when she hooked a bass through the eye. He could still picture her, running up and down the beach, shrieking. That was the last time.

“Are you sure this is legal?” he asked Mark.

Mark just laughed. “I’ll take the rap for you, Shrink, if they bust us. I’ll keep your sheet clean.”

They fished from the shore, Mark cursing. “We should have stolen the damn boat from Rupp. It’s part mine, anyway. He’d probably shoot me in the back if I tried to take it now. Can you believe they lied to me? Whoever we were hunting together that night must have gotten to them. Turned them. Now I’ll never learn what went down.”

They fished deliberately, casting and reeling without conviction. Weber caught nothing. Mark enjoyed harassing him. “No wonder you’re wiping out. You cast like some girls’ sixteen-inch softball pitcher.”

Mark caught half a dozen midsized sunfish. Weber inspected the catch each time, before Mark threw it back. “Are you sure those are all different? I think you’re catching the same fish, again and again.”

“You must be shitting me! The first few were full of fight. This one’s completely limp. Nothing to do with one another.” Mark waded ankle deep in the water, shaking his head in amused disgust. “This look like any fish you know? You’ve finally lost it, Doc. Too much direct sunlight. Not good for someone in your line.” He stood like a heron, leaning forward, frozen in the reeds. He fished the way that Weber typed: in a distracted rapture. He’d needed to get Weber away from town, someplace slow enough to think and talk, without any danger of being overheard. “Why do you suppose they’re so worried about me, when I don’t know anything? This whole elaborate fantasy, just to keep me in the dark. Why not just kill me? They could have done that easily, in Intensive Care. Slipped into the room, switched off the machines. Pffft.”

“Maybe you know something that they want to find out.”

The idea stunned Mark. It stunned Weber more, to hear it come out of his mouth.

“That must be it,” Mark said. “Like the note says: kept alive, to bring back someone else. Do something with what I know. But I don’t fucking know what I know.”

“You know a lot,” Weber insisted. “About some things you know more than anyone else alive.”

Mark spun his neck, his eyes a barn owl’s. “I do?”

“You know what it means to be you. Now. Here.”

Mark looked back at the water, so defeated he couldn’t even rouse a rage. “Fuck if I do. I’m not even sure that this is here.”

He changed them both over to bass spinners, not in the hopes of catching anything on them in so small a pond, but for the simple pleasure of pulling them through the water. Weber marveled at his own ineptitude. Not just his failure to catch anything: his complete inability to sit still and enjoy himself. Wasting half a day, holding a stick with a string on it, while his whole career, all his professional duties, unraveled around him. But this was his professional duty now, his own self-selected job description. To sit still and watch, not some syndrome, but some improvising being. Without that, the reviewers were right and the rest of his life a lie.

Mark, meanwhile, had grown as placid as a bottom feeder. He tasted the air in large gulps. “You know, Shrink? I’ve been thinking. I think you and I might be related somehow. Aw, don’t give me that neurological look. You know what I’m saying, Sherlock. I’m just saying: collision paths, and all. Listen.” Mark dropped his voice, so none of the nearby chordates could pick him up. “You believe in guardian angels?”

It distressed Weber to remember: he had been the most devout of children. A kid who liked nothing better than to put on a white cassock and swing something brass and smoky. Even his parents had found him upsettingly spiritual. He’d considered it his personal responsibility, to tip the world toward ancient and reverent. His zeal for purity, some compulsive cleaning mania of the soul, had lasted, only mildly modified, all the way through adolescence, extending even to bouts of shame at failing to refrain from what he and his priest tacitly code-named susceptibility, the pleasure that diminished all grace, simply by being solitary. Even science had not wholly killed off his belief; his Jesuit teachers had kept faith and facts ingeniously harmonized. Then, in college, religion had died, overnight, unmarked and un-mourned, simply in his meeting Sylvie, whose boundless faith in human sufficiency led him to put away childish things. After that, his whole childhood seemed to have belonged to another person. Nothing to do with him. Nothing remained of that boy but the adult’s trust in the scalpel of science.

“No,” he answered. No angels but what selection left standing.

“No,” Mark echoed. “I didn’t figure. Me neither, until I got this note.” His face convulsed with thought. “You don’t think my sister could have written…? No, that’s insane. She’s like you. Realistic to a fault.”

They stood and watched the ripples of their lines race time to a standstill. Weber’s vision tunneled, tranced out on his lure. The air in all directions turned dark as the lake. He looked up into a ceiling of clouds like flour-flecked eggplant. Only then did he feel the drops of rain.

“Yep,” Mark confirmed. “T-storms. Saw it coming on the Weather Channel.”

“You saw this?” Water began to slap down all around them. “Then why on earth did you take us fishing?”

“Aw, come on. Grow up. Three-quarters of what they say on that show is paid for by some sponsor.”

Weber fluttered, but Mark would not be rushed getting the gear back into his tackle box. They made for the car, through pillars of falling water, Mark fatalistic, cackling strangely, and Weber running.

“What’s your hurry?” Mark yelled, above the pounding sluice. Lightning tore a seam in the sky, followed by so violent a crack that Mark fell back onto the ground. He sat there, laughing. “Knocked me on my literal ass!” Weber wavered between helping Mark up and saving his own life. He did neither, but stood in the middle of a grassy field, watching Mark struggle to his feet. Mark looked up, giggling into the torrent. “Try that again! I dare you!” The sky cracked open and he fell back to the ground.

By the time the two of them waded to the car, hail was pelting them. They slipped soaking into the front seat. A sheet of mothball stones blew up, slamming the rental hard enough to pockmark it.

Mark craned his head, gazing straight up through the windshield. “What do we still need, here? Locusts. Frogs. Firstborn.” He fell silent, inside the pounded gray cocoon. “Well, maybe we’ve had that one already.” The hail turned back to electrified rain, light enough to brave. Still, Weber did not start the car. At last Mark said, “So tell me something about yourself. When you were a kid or something. Doesn’t have to be the so-help-me-God or anything. Just a throwaway. Make it up if you want. How else am I supposed to know who you are?”

Weber could think of nothing. He’d worked his entire life to efface his past, no biography except what would fit on the flaps of a book. He looked at Mark, trying to think of some story. “I liked to adore girls from a distance, without telling them.”

Mark curled his lip and shook his head. “Done that. Very little ROI. How’d you ever get married, Romeo?”

“My friends mounted an intervention. They set me up on a blind date. I was supposed to go to a coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon and find a woman who looked exactly like Leslie Caron. I got there, and nobody in the place even remotely fit the description. It turns out the woman got cold feet. But I didn’t know, so I just stood there in a haze, analyzing every female in the place, thinking: Well, could be, maybe…You know: brown hair, bilateral symmetry…A waitress asked if she could help me. I told her I was hoping to find a woman who looked like Leslie Caron. She mistook me for a brash young man with a sense of humor. Three years later we were married.”

“You’re shitting me. You married a total accident? You’re a maniac.”

“I was pretty young.”

“And did she look anything like…Lindsay Whozit?”

“Nothing at all. Maybe a tiny Natalie Wood thing. But more like…the woman I was going to marry.”

Mark looked out through the wraparound waterfall, his glee collapsing. “You’re saying fate? Two inches to the left, and your life is somebody else’s. She’s just standing there, making a living, and bang: your lifelong companion. I’d say somebody was looking out for you.” Weber started the engine. Mark stayed his arm. “Only — we don’t believe in that angel shit, do we? Guys like us?”

Weber now saw how badly he’d failed the man and his sister. He wouldn’t do so again. He made calls, tapping his network of colleagues. To a person, they were discomfited to hear from him, assuming he’d gone off somewhere to die of public disgrace. But Mark’s story fascinated them. None had ever worked with anything like it. And no two of them proposed the same course of action, except the pair who suggested leaving a nonthreatening condition alone. Most sounded grateful when Weber said goodbye.

He worked the broadband connection in his hotel lobby, late into the night. He logged into all the medical indexes, exploring every clinical reference in the literature. He’d done as much before, but cursorily. The patient had been Dr. Hayes’s; Weber was just a visiting interviewer. He’d looked at the literature, enough to conclude that no real literature existed. What few cases he had found bore no direct bearing.

On a second trip through the most current databases, a single abstract jumped out at him. Butler, P. V. Seventeen-year-old man with Capgras delusions following traumatic brain injury. Treatment and outcome: Delusional ideation fully resolved within 14 days of commencement of olanzapine 5 mg daily.

He checked the date: August 2000. Two years old, in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. No excuse for having missed it on first look, not with electronic search. But he hadn’t really been looking, the first time. The sister had begged him for some treatment, but Weber hadn’t wanted Capgras to be treatable with yet one more newly marketed miracle pill. Psychopharmacology: hit or miss, hard to tune, ripe with side effects, symptom-masking, and once begun, difficult to tail off of. Medicine’s next generation would surely remember Weber’s as sadly as Weber remembered his father’s. The general level of barbarism receded, but never as quickly or completely as thought. Or maybe he was the last barbarian. Months of unnecessary suffering, because of Weber’s eyes-averted Puritanism. Because he’d never considered Mark anything but a good story.

Karin came to meet him at the hotel. She even came up to his room, bringing her boyfriend for protection. For no reason, Daniel Riegel, a perfectly decent man, made Weber acutely uncomfortable. Spontaneous unease, hidden in some association: the goatee, the loose-fitting collarless shirt, the aura of calm self-acceptance. Karin was understandably anxious. He’d hurt her with his quick departure the first time, and baffled her by agreeing to a second. Her lips moved as Weber spoke, struggling against the hope that he might still help. How she’d gone on hoping that, Weber could only dimly imagine. How hope itself got selected for, over the eons, Weber had no clue.

He had straightened his room before their arrival, squirreling his possessions away in closets and drawers. He’d missed a pair of socks, a milkshake cup, and his bedside reading—The Seven Pillars of Wisdom—and couldn’t now retrieve them without calling attention. The room gave no real place to sit, and he lost the rhythm of a real office visit. For their part, Karin and her Daniel walked into the meeting as if dragging into court. And Weber hadn’t even presented them with options yet.

He described his follow-up visit with Mark. Mark’s condition definitely had grown more pronounced. Spontaneous improvement no longer seemed likely. Behavioral therapy had failed. “I do still believe that Mark is in no danger of harming anyone,” he pronounced. Karin gasped, which irked him. “I think it’s time to try something more aggressive. I recommend that Mark be started on a low-dosage regimen of olanzapine.”

Karin sat blinking at the word. “Is this something new?” New since June?

Daniel challenged him. “What kind of drug is that, exactly?”

Weber felt like pulling rank. Instead, he just raised his eyebrows.

“I mean…is it a…what category? Is it an antidepressant?”

“It’s an antipsychotic.” Weber found the exact tone of professional assurance. But reflex fear struck both listeners. Karin reddened. “Mark isn’t psychotic. He’s not even…”

Weber was ready with the necessary reassurances. “Mark isn’t schizophrenic, but he’s developed complicated symptoms. This drug is effective in countering those symptoms. It was very successful in a similar case…elsewhere.”

Daniel bridled. “We wouldn’t want to dope him or put him in some kind of chemical straitjacket.” He checked with Karin, who did not back him up.

“He wouldn’t be in a chemical straitjacket.” No more than everyone, always. “A small number of people experience lethargy, and some put on some weight. Olanzapine adjusts levels of various neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine. If it works for Mark, it will reduce his agitation and confusion. With luck, there’s a chance it could leave him more lucid, less susceptible to extraordinary explanations.”

“Luck?” Karin asked.

Weber smiled and spread his hands. “It’s medicine’s great ally.”

“He would recognize me again?” Ready to try anything.

“No guarantees. But there does seem to be a precedent.”

Daniel geared up for moral battle. “Don’t these drugs lead to dependency?”

“Olanzapine is not addictive.” Weber didn’t say how long Mark would have to take it, for the simple reason that he didn’t know.

Daniel persisted. He’d heard stories. Antipsychotics producing social withdrawal, flattened affect. Weber gently pointed out the obvious: Mark was already worse. Daniel began a list of every side effect known to medication. Weber nodded, fighting his irritation. He wanted to see the man in distress, repenting. “This is a newer drug, one of the so-called atypical antipsychotics. It has notably fewer side effects than most.”

Karin sat on the lip of the purple hotel chair, her leg pumping. Postural hypotension and akathisia: two of olanzapine’s side effects. Sympathetic suffering, in advance. “Daniel means…we’re just afraid the medicine might turn Mark into someone else.”

Exactly the result she was asking Weber to produce. Weber wavered, then gave in to saying, “But he’s someone else now.”

The consultation broke up with all three of them ruffled. Weber felt stymied. Daniel Riegel withdrew in dignified dismay. Karin was all over the emotional highway. She badly wanted the magic bullet, but couldn’t move without failing someone. Love me, and tell me I’m doing right. “If you’re sure it will lessen his symptoms,” she fished, but Weber would promise nothing. “I need to think about this. Weigh things.”

“Take all the time you need,” Weber told her. All the time in the world.

He called Sylvie, went out for dinner, showered, read, even wrote a little, although not well. When he checked his e-mail, there was already a letter from Daniel. He’d been frightened by information he found online, a site announcing, “Olanzapine is used to treat schizophrenia. It works by decreasing unusually high levels of brain activity.” The letter overflowed with links to malpractice sites, lists of known and suspected side effects of the drug. The note itself was infuriatingly careful. Did Weber know that olanzapine produced drastic changes in blood-sugar levels? A pending suit even claimed that olanzapine had “turned some people into diabetics.” Daniel disclaimed his own role in the decision-making. “But I’d like to help Karin make the right choice.”

The blessing of endless information: the Internet, democratizing even health care. Suppose we gave all pharmaceuticals an Amazon rating. The wisdom of crowds. Do away with experts altogether. Weber inhaled and began his reply. Here was precisely why the medical profession erected multiple barriers between its practitioners and their clients. A mistake, even to answer this e-mail. But he did, as caringly as possible. A debt to pay off. He was aware of the drug’s possible side effects, and he’d mentioned them at their meeting. His own daughter was a diabetic, and he had no desire to induce the condition in anyone. He didn’t want to suggest any course of action that Karin wasn’t completely comfortable with. Daniel was doing the right thing by informing her in every way possible. The decision was entirely Karin’s to make, but Weber stood ready to assist in any way possible. He copied the message to her.

He fell asleep to questions of his own, for which he had no higher appeal. What had triggered such continuous surprise in him, this sense of awakening from a long sham? Why had this case unsettled him and not the hundreds before it? Not since puberty had he so doubted his impulses. When would he feel discharged, paid up, ready again to trust himself? He had become a matter of intense clinical fascination, the subject of his own open experiment…

The next morning, he walked through town, searching for the diner where he’d breakfasted once, months before. The air was crisp and bracing, readying him for anything. Clear and unbroken, robin’s-egg blue to all four compass points, however far he walked. The buildings, houses, cars, grass, and tree trunks all shone forth, supersaturated. He might have been inside some Kodachrome harvest festival. Dirt and dried cornstalk in his nose: he couldn’t remember the last time he’d smelled anything so baldly. He felt as he had at seventeen, when, as a Dayton Chaminade senior, he’d set himself the task of writing one Persian-style ghazal a day. Back then, he knew he would become a poet. Now he filled with this sense of awful fraudulence, new lyric possibilities.

He’d let his critics convince him. Something had eroded, the core pleasure in his accomplishment. All three books now seemed uniformly shallow, vain, and self-serving. The braver Sylvie had been in the face of his unnerving, the more certain he was that he’d let her down, that she’d lost some basic faith in him and was too scared to admit it. Who knew how Karin Schluter must see him?

After much random turning, he stumbled upon the diner. Inescapable grid: no town for getting lost in. Ready to push through the door and challenge the waitress’s memory, he glanced up through the glass. Karin Schluter sat in a corner booth across from a man distinctly not Daniel Riegel. This man, in a thin teal tie and charcoal suit, looked as if he could buy the conservationist with the loose change that had fallen through his pocket into his jacket lining. The couple held hands across the breakfast-strewn table. Weber backed away from the door, turned, and kept walking. Perhaps she’d seen him. He turned and headed down the street. Over his shoulder, he glanced at the storefronts across the way: trim law offices, a dark, cluttered music shop with a cracked front window, a video store flying a white pennant whose festive letters read “Wednesday is Dollar Day.” Behind the bright aluminum siding and plastic signage poked bits of brick and corbels from the 1890s. The whole town lived in continuous retrograde amnesia.

No one could ask him to do more than he’d now done. He’d spent more time with Mark than any clinician could afford. He’d found the best available treatment. He’d made himself available to Karin, in her decision. He would not profit from the visit in any way. In fact, the whole trip had cost him considerable time and money. But he didn’t yet feel like leaving. He was not yet square with Mark. He walked back to the hotel, grabbed a breakfast-like-object from the buffet, got in the rental, and drove out to Farview.

In a field two miles out of town, he passed a boxy green brontosaur combine that was ravaging the rows of standing corn. The fields gained a stark, minimal beauty in dying. Nothing could ever sneak up on you, here in these blank horizons. The winters would be the hardest, of course. He should like to try a February here. Weeks of snow-crusted, subzero air, the winds pouring down from the Dakotas with nothing to slow them for hundreds of miles. He looked out over a grain-fringed rise at an old farm just one upgrade beyond sod house. He pictured himself in one of these gray-white clapboards, connected to humanity by no medium more advanced than radio. It seemed to him, as he drove, one of the last places left in the country where you would have to face down the contents of your own soul, stripped of all packaging.

A few years before, River Run Estates had been a single field of wheat or soy. And just decades before that, a dozen kinds of grasses for which Weber had no name. Twenty years on, twenty hundred, it would devolve into grasses again, no memory at all of this brief human interlude. Another car sat in Mark’s driveway; he guessed whose. Weber’s pulse shot up, surprised fight-or-flight. He checked his face in his rearview mirror: he looked like a bleached garden gnome. He arrived at the front door with no plausible reason, either professional or personal, but Mark opened as if expecting him. Weber saw her over Mark’s shoulder, seated at the kitchen table. She was smiling at him, sheepish, familiar. He still couldn’t say who she reminded him of. A first hint of awareness broke over him, and he ignored it. She welcomed him, an old confidant. He winced back, the guilty grin you use, clearing customs with contraband in your bag.

Mark shook him by the shoulders in dull delight. “So you’re both here, the last two people I can trust. That’s pretty interesting all by itself. Don’t you think that’s interesting? The only people still with me are the ones I’ve met since the accident. Come on in. Sit down. We were just going over possible plans. Ways to flush the guilty parties out of the underbrush.”

Barbara sucked in her cheeks and raised her eyebrows. “That wasn’t quite what we were talking about, Mark.”

Weber admired her deadpan. It seemed impossible that she’d never had children.

“Give or take,” Mark said. “Don’t bust me on a technicality.”

“So what were you talking about?” Weber asked Barbara. Exposed, off balance, drowning in the shallow end of the pool.

Her smile hinted at private communications. “I was just suggesting to young Mark here…”

“A.k.a. me…”

“…that it’s time for a new approach. If he wants to know what Karin wants…”

“She’s means the Pseudo-Sib—”

“If he wants to ‘get to the bottom of her,’ then the best plan is just to talk to her. Sit down and ask her everything. Who she thinks she is. Who she thinks he is. What she remembers about her past. Listen for any…”

“Kind of a sting operation, see? Draw her out. Really push the alibis and the briefings. Trip her up somewhere. Get something to pop out.”

“Mr. Schluter.”

Mark saluted. “Present and accounted for.”

“That’s hardly the spirit that we…”

“Hang on. All too exciting. I gotta pee. Seems like I have to pee all the time these days. Doc? How old do you need to be before you can reasonably be working on a prostate thing?” He didn’t wait for an answer.

Weber looked at Barbara, admiring. Her plan possessed a simple beauty, out of reach of neurological theory. No one — not the brain-as-computer people, not the Cartesians or neo-Cartesians, not the disguised revived behaviorists, not the pharmacologists or the functionalists or the Lesionnaires — none but some civilian would have suggested it. And it seemed no more destructive or helpless than anything science could come up with. It might accomplish nothing at all, and still be useful.

She avoided his eyes and murmured a question. He answered, “Mostly New York.”

She looked up, smiling in alarm. “I’m sorry! Did I say ‘Where?’ I meant ‘How?’”

“Oh,” he said. “Then the answer is, ‘Mostly shaky.’”

The words seemed to come from someone else. But they surprised him less than their instant comfort. Out from hiding, after months: he might say anything to her, this unlikely caretaker, this unreadable woman.

Barbara took his confession in stride. “Of course you’ve been. If you weren’t shaky, there’d be something wrong with you. Open season on you, right now.” Laying down her hand for him to see. A nurse’s aide, up on the latest New Yorker satire. But the most natural shared feeling imaginable. She looked up, the pupils of her hazel eyes as large as the spots on a masquerading moth. They knew him. “It’s all still about pecking order with humans, isn’t it? Even when the ranking is imaginary.”

“Not a contest I have much interest in.”

She reared back, that same look of amused skepticism she’d just given Mark. “Of course you have interest. This book is you. The hunters are circling. Nothing imaginary there. What are you going to do, roll over and die?”

The gentlest reprimand, a chide based on total loyalty. Utter confidence in him, but on what authority? An hour and a half of shared time, and reading his books. Yet she saw what Sylvie didn’t. The woman unsettled him; why? What was she doing reading book reviews? What was she doing here, at a former patient’s? Could these two be involved? The idea was mad. A private visit, months after Mark’s discharge: even less a part of her job description than of his. Yet here he was, too. She studied him, suspicious of his own hidden motives, and what answer could he give the return question? He stood and said nothing, ready to roll over and die.

Mark came out of the bathroom, still zipping. His head swung, as animated as Weber had ever seen him. “Okay, here’s the plan. Here’s what I’m going to do.”

His words sounded tinny and far away. Weber couldn’t make them out, over the nearer din. Barbara Gillespie’s face, that open oval, still regarded him, the simplest interrogation. His insides, airborne, answered for him.

The two of them ended up at a restaurant back in Kearney, one of those chains drawn up in Minneapolis or Atlanta and faxed around the nation. Historic, vanished America, reincarnated as comforting franchises. This one was supposed to be a silver mine from the 1880s, about four hundred miles out of place. But then, Weber had been to an identical one in Queens.

The ease of their conversation confused him. They spoke in the compressed, comic shorthand of people who’d known each other from childhood. Idioglossia, as shared as any. They picked at a deep-fat-fried onion, chatting without having to explain themselves. Of course they had Mark’s brain to talk about, a topic of inexhaustible interest to them both. “So how do you feel, personally, about his going on this medication?” Barbara’s voice gave away nothing, no hint of her own inclination.

Her interest in Mark nagged at him, indicting his own. Why should she be so intimate with the boy, when she shared even less with Mark than Weber did? He shook his head and combed his hand through the idea of his hair. “Hesitant, at best. I’m ordinarily conservative, when it comes to something so powerful. Every roll of the neurochemical dice is a bit of a crapshoot. Like trying to fix a ship in a bottle by shaking it. I’m not even a fan of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, before exhausting other possibilities.”

“Really? You must not suffer from depression.”

He was no longer sure. “Half the people who respond to them will respond to placebos. I’ve seen studies suggesting that fifteen minutes of exercise and twenty minutes of reading a day can do as much for depression as most popular medications.”

She blinked and tilted her head. “I read for three or four hours a day, and it doesn’t keep me particularly safe.”

A woman who read more than he did, who suffered her own dark bouts: he would have guessed neither fact. Now both seemed self-evident. “Yeah?” He twisted his mouth. “Try cutting back to twenty minutes.”

She grinned and flicked her forehead. “Yes, Doctor.”

“But this may be the right thing for him. The only path with any chance of helping.” Two different things, he knew. But he didn’t point out the difference.

She asked many questions, avid for the topic of Mark. Seamlessly, they drifted to Capgras, then reduplicative paramnesia, then inter-metamorphosis. She couldn’t get enough of anosagnosia: patients unable to see their symptoms, even when shown. “I can’t wrap my head around it. Do you think this man Ramachandran can be right? That there’s a little ‘devil’s advocate’ brain subsystem that goes on the blink?”

She’d read far more than just Weber’s books. And she was far too eager to talk about what she’d read. He listed hard, looking at her, ear almost on his shoulder, a gesture vaguely canine. He wanted to ask, So who are you, when you’re not yourself? He asked, “So how long have you been in nursing?”

She dipped her head. “I’m not really a nurse. You know that. I’m a nurse’s aide. A care attendant.” Furtive, she stole a fried ring from the onion bloom.

“And you never felt like getting licensed? You never thought of training as a therapist?” He began to form a theory: something had left her as panicked by the arena of public judgment as he was fast becoming. Another thing that linked them.

“Well, I haven’t been in the health business for very long.”

“What did you do before?”

Her eyes sparked. “Why do I feel like I’m the next case history?”

“I’m sorry. That was a bit pushy.”

“Oh, don’t apologize. I’m flattered, really. It’s been so long since anyone gave me the full interrogation.”

“I promise to quit prying.”

“No need. To tell the truth, it feels good to talk about…real things. I don’t get much chance…” Her eyes wandered off. He caught a glimpse of her, starved for any scrap of intellectual connection, here in a place where she had chosen exile, a place that distrusted intellect and resented words. Perhaps the only reason she responded to him.

“You’re…by yourself? No friends? You’re not married?”

She laughed. “The proper question these days is: ‘How many times?’”

“I’m sorry! Crass of me.”

“You say ‘sorry’ a lot. One might almost think you meant it. Anyway: twice. The first time was a twenty-something temporary insanity. No-fault. The second one left when I took too long deciding on the kid thing.”

“Hang on. He divorced you for not having children?”

“He needed an heir.”

“What was he, the king of England?”

“A lot of men are.”

He studied her face, needing neuroscience to immunize him against beauty. He saw her as she would look in her late seventies, plagued by Alzheimer’s and sitting vacant at an empty window. “And you didn’t want children?”

“About these neural subsystems,” she said. “Just how many of them are there? I’m getting a ramshackle, electoral-college feel.”

She was using him. And not even him, but just an available, crowded brain, something to bounce herself off of. “Ah! Politics. I should probably go home now.”

He didn’t go home. They sat talking until the waitress cut off their coffee refills. Even in the parking lot, leaning against his car in the leaf-crackling air, they kept talking. They returned to Mark, to retrograde amnesia, to whether the memory of that night was still inside, theoretically retrievable, if not by him.

“He talks about being at a bar,” Weber said. “Some roadside dance house.”

She smiled, the most solitary smile he’d ever seen. “Want to see the place?”

Only then did Weber see he’d been fishing.

“Call your wife first,” she instructed.

“How did you…?”

“Please. You’ve been with me all evening. I told you I’ve been married. I know the drill.”

So Weber stood in the parking lot, checking in with Sylvie for the night, while the unreadable woman walked in loops under a street-light fifty yards away, giving him privacy, hugging herself in her too-thin suede coat.

They took his rental to the Silver Bullet. When he started the engine, the radio roared to life — the classical station he’d found, coming in from Lincoln. He flicked it off. “Wait!” she told him. “Go back.”

He flipped it on again and nosed out of the parking lot, onto the deserted road. High unaccompanied voices wove through each other, borne up by a curtain of brass. Music from another planet, antiphony, a lost way of thought.

“My God,” she said. She sounded ill. He glanced over at her. In the darkness, her face was taut and her eyes wet. She held up an objecting palm and looked away. “Sorry.” Her voice was damp. “Listen to me! ‘Sorry.’ I sound like you. Sorry. It’s nothing. Don’t mind me.”

“Monteverdi,” he guessed. “Something you know?”

She shook her head, hard. “I’ve never heard anything like it.” She listened as if to an old crystal set broadcasting news of a foreign invasion. After half a chorus, she reached and turned off the radio. They drove out of town along dark country roads, in silence, Barbara navigating with only hand gestures. When she spoke again, her voice was casual. “This is the road. This is Mark’s stretch.”

He studied it, but could see nothing. Utterly featureless. They might have been anywhere between South Dakota and Oklahoma. They rode along in the autumn dark, the headlights just bright enough to push them ahead forever through total ignorance.

The dance house was deafening, music so loud it trampolined on his eardrums. “At least it’s not topless night,” Barbara yelled. “That’s the band that was playing the night of the accident. Mark’s favorite.”

He wanted to say that he knew all about the band, that he knew as much about Mark’s musical tastes as she did. It angered him, that her care for Mark was so spontaneous, while his was full of motives.

They found a booth in the corner. She went to the bar and brought back two pale beers in ribbed plastic cups. She leaned across the table and shouted into his ear, “‘You may ask yourself: How did I get here?’ ”

“How’s that?”

She looked at him, checking if he was serious. “Nothing. Talkin’ ’bout my generation.”

He spread his arms out in a fan. “Are these people all regulars?” She shrugged: Most of them. “Some of them were here, the night that Mark and his friends…?” The music swallowed his words.

She leaned into him, elbows on the table. “The police have talked to everyone. Nobody knows anything. Nobody ever does.”

They sat in the confined booth and drank, each periscoping the room. He measured her. Up close, her face was like some child’s, counting the days to its birthday. The woman’s inexplicable isolation disturbed him. Something had happened to seal her inside a pose, some bizarre collapse of confidence that left her eking out a life far beneath her ability. She had lost something of herself, or thrown it away, refusing to compete, declining to take part in that collective enterprise that every day grew more unstoppable. Could damage to the prefrontal cortex have turned her into a hermit? No damage necessary. He recognized her, her withdrawal. Something bound them together. Something more than the unthinkable weirdness of Capgras — the orphan in their shared custody — had estranged them both. She had been through a crisis much like the one that now eroded him.

She caught his eye, probing. She reached across the narrow booth and took his wrist. “So this is what you mean by ‘Mostly shaky’?”

Even as she held it, he could not control the palsied limb. His whole body: tremoring as if he’d just tried to lift something many times his own weight over his head.

She leaned in and lifted his chin. “Listen to me. They’re no one. They have no power over you.”

It took him a moment to identify them: the court of public opinion. “Clearly they do,” he said. More power over him than he had over himself. The human cortex had first evolved by way of navigating intricate social rank. Half of cognition, the chief selection pressure now in play: the herd in the head.

And shaped for it by the power of them, her brain read his. “What do you care about that monkey-troop stuff? Grooming and jockeying. Nothing matters but your own sense of work.”

All sense of his work was gone. Only the summary judgment remained. She tilted her head at him, searching. And at that one helpless gesture, the words flowed out of him. “That’s the problem. Everything the reviewers say is perfectly true. My work is highly suspect.”

Almost elating, to admit as much to this woman. She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “Why are you saying that?”

“I didn’t come out here to help the man. Not originally.” The music battered away; all around him, people were at work making other people. He could bear to look at nothing more complex than the foam on his beer. “Simple narcissism, to think I could help him in the first place. What more can I do but hand him some chemical shotgun—‘Here, take this, and let’s cross our fingers and hope for the best’?”

She stroked his knuckles with the back of her thumb, as if she had been doing it forever.

“What good is all the brain science in the world to him? Arrogance, really. A kind of charlatanism. What am I even doing out here?”

She kept a steady pressure on his fingers and said nothing. Her spine curved forward. Something in her shared his sense of deception, took it into her own body. Only her eyes assured him: empathy meant vertigo. She shook his wrist in the air. It had almost stopped quivering. “Basta. Enough flagellation. Let’s dance.”

He shrank back against the back of the booth, stunned. “I don’t dance.”

“What are you talking about? Everything alive dances.” She laughed at his look of terror. “Just get out there and wiggle. Like you’re catching bugs.”

He was too spent to object. She towed him out to the middle of the dance floor, a tug pulling a wounded freighter. He scrambled along in her wake, looking for instructions, but none were forthcoming. Dancing in a bar with a woman he didn’t know: he felt queasy, the way he felt when going a day without work. But this was just simple, improvised, mutual shelter. The idea of anything illicit felt almost comical—assault with a dead weapon, he always joked with Sylvie. Weber and Barbara stirred and unfolded. All around them, people moved. Salsa and boogie. Box step and rhythmic stumble. Odd writhings to match the house band’s even odder Appalachian fiddling and thrashing guitars. Next to them, a younger couple stared at each other and vigorously kicked shit. Farther away, a Ponca descendant did a variation of the ground-stomp-and-scan, his partner soaring to full flight. Everywhere, knees kicking forward, shoulders flapping. The woman was right: everything alive shook itself under the pull of the moon.

She laughed at him. “You look great!”

He looked like a fool. A clumsy, autumn-honking fledgling. But his body pulsed with the beat of things. The music stopped, stranding them. Weber stood in a pool of shame, needing to fill the emptiness. “Do you suppose that Mark and his friends were dancing that night?”

She squinted at the possibility. “Bonnie said she wasn’t here. Not that there weren’t women involved. There certainly was drinking, as well as other substances. Mark has told me as much.”

The music started up again: heavy bluegrass metal. A wave came over Weber, light, omniscient. Even dancing felt too full to bear. “Come on,” he said. “We should go. Nothing to learn here.”

She felt it, too: he was sure of that. All the thrill of collapse. They might have been anyone, in any life, hiding from discovery. Her face, as unsteady as his, pretended to carelessness. She found the exit and they fell out of the cloud of smoke and noise into a star-filled sky. He felt the most improbable calm, the placidity of helplessness, and knew that she, too, had spilled into that silence with him. The air was dense and dry with harvest. His feet scuffed the gravel as he crossed toward the car. She grabbed his elbow, stopping him. “Shh. Listen!”

He heard it again, in the night’s version. Storms of insects, and the screeches of insect hunters. Now and then owls—Who cooks for you? Who looks for you? — and the antiphonal call of what could only be coyotes. Creatures, all of whom heard humans and knew them as just part of the wider network of sounds. Living things of every gauge for whom the roadside bar was just another mound in the continuous test of the landscape, just another swarming node in the biome to exploit.

She looked up at him, the loneliest woman he’d ever met, desperate for connection, for some proof that she hadn’t created this whole existence out of her own mind. He listened to the night, to the sound of her seclusion. But like Mark’s note-writing secret witness, he held dead still, hoping to be passed over. He broke from her questioning gaze and walked toward the car. By the time they reached the rental, he could no longer defend himself, even to himself, that easiest of audiences. Yes, he’d made himself return to right things with the Schluters, to square things with himself again. But here, in the sounds of the inhabited night, in the light graze of wind on his arm, in the look of this recluse woman, so burrowed outside life, he recognized the vanishing that he, too, was after.

Karin went to Karsh for advice. All of Daniel’s advice was clouded in morality. Medication, Daniel said, would cause more problems than it solved. But Daniel wasn’t Mark’s brother. Working for the cause was one thing. Sacrificing her blood relation to it was another.

She’d seen Karsh twice. Drinks, catch-up. Nothing criminal, nothing she couldn’t handle. She’d been pleasureless for so long that a few quick jolts barely reset the system. She got in touch, through his old secret e-mail alias. He suggested breakfast. “Kind of a switch, no? Post-game show, with no game.”

It used to madden her. All she wanted was to sit together, once, like civilized people, over a breakfast table, instead of slinking off like felons. She met him at Mary Ann’s, just down the street from his office. When she entered the diner, he jumped up and pecked her on the cheek. She flinched at the sudden move.

But just breakfast: she sat and ordered. The man’s mind was just what she needed, as brisk and brutal as an audit. She laid out Dr. Weber’s proposed medication. “Antipsychotic,” she whispered. Robert just nodded. She tried him on Daniel’s most frightening objections. “I’m afraid of leaving my brother doped up on mood-altering substances.”

Karsh shook his head and waved at their breakfast. “A cup of coffee is a mood-altering substance. A Spanish omelet. I seem to remember a little addiction of yours — that Swiss triangular chocolate? Don’t tell me a few tabs of that stuff never buzzed you.”

“This isn’t a chocolate bar, Robert. This is psychoactive.”

He shrugged and flapped his palms. “You’re behind the times, Rabbit. Half the people in the U.S. are on something psychoactive. Look around. See those people over there?” He waved somewhere between a table of four seniors in jogging suits and a family of Mennonites. “Almost even odds. Forty-five percent of America, on something behavior-modifying. Antianxieties. Antidepressants. Name your brew. Couldn’t function otherwise. The world is just too wired. I’m on a couple things myself, in fact.”

She looked at him, reeling. His fresh ease, that newfound comfort and humility: maybe just something he was taking. The softening of his features, the added layer of baby fat. All just chemical. But then, the brain itself was a wash of one mood-altering substance or another. So said every book she’d read since Mark’s accident. It sickened her. She wanted the real Karsh, not this tolerant philosopher, squidding all over the place. “But antipsychotic…”

He did this thing: his right hand perpetually checking his left wrist’s pulse. It used to make her nuts. Now it just scared her. Robert held his index finger in the air, turning preacher. “‘A gram is better than a damn.’”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t remember?” he gloated. “We had to read it in high school. You do remember high school, don’t you? Maybe you need some memory enhancers.”

“I remember taking you to the Sadie Hawkins Dance, and finding you out behind the levee, rooting around in that bitch Cricket Harkness like a truffle hound.”

“I thought we were talking literature here.”

“We were talking about my brother’s future.”

He bowed his head. “I’m sorry. Tell me what worries you. Best and worst cases.”

It felt good, just to be heard, without the perpetual, silent judgment. To smoke in front of a man — no hiding — felt even better. She told him all her fears for Mark: that he might hurt himself. That he might hurt someone else. That some new, uncanny symptom would crop up, leaving him one more step less human. That the medication might make him even less recognizable. “It’s tearing me up, Robert. I was packed and ready to go. And I couldn’t even do that. Mark is exactly right about me. I’m a stand-in. Look at my life. I’m a joke. One of those chameleon people. Nothing, at the core. Everybody’s girl Friday. He says I’m an impostor? He’s right. I’ve never done anything but go through the motions. Never wanted anything but what I thought someone else might want me to…”

“Hey,” Robert scolded. “Easy. Maybe we need to get you some of this stuff.”

She succumbed to bleary laughter. She told Robert about the olanzapine lawsuit Daniel had discovered, pretending she’d found it herself. Karsh made notes in his agenda.

“We keep a stable of lawyers. I’ll have somebody see what they can find out.”

Just talking to Karsh reassured her, more than it should have. Of course, he was every bit as biased as Daniel. None of them knew what was best for Mark. But just hearing his counterarguments was liberating. A wrong decision would no longer come down on her head alone.

Karsh took his pulse. “You know, if you do go this route, there’s still a problem.”

“Namely?”

“Getting Mark to comply.”

“Get Mark to take pills? A problem?” She snorted in pain.

“Getting him to stay on it. Or to tail off properly. He wouldn’t be the most reliable of patients. If he gets it into his head to stop suddenly…”

She nodded, one more thing for her to stress about. Each had reached their coffee limit. It was time to leave. Neither moved.

“I should head to work,” she said.

“So you’re really a volunteer Sandhill Helper now?”

She returned his smile, slash for slash. “Believe it or not, they’re actually paying me.” She still couldn’t quite believe it herself. Over a few weeks, racing to make herself worthy of being hired, she’d read every report the Refuge had issued. And right out of the gate, the Refuge had entrusted her with genuine responsibilities. In some incriminating way, her new duties lifted her from the trough of helplessness she’d lived in since Mark’s accident. Some place that actually needed her energies; some useful definition to her days. Like Daniel, she now worked at least fifty hours a week. Mark couldn’t blame her: impostors owed him no loyalty. She now knew more about the effort to protect the river than any trainee should know. Information Karsh would kill to learn.

“Really?” he said, eyebrows up. “Paying, as in cash, American? That’s great. So what exactly are you doing for them?”

She did everything: stacked boxes. Proofed copy. Made cold calls to local politicians and prospective donors, employing that rich, mezzo, reassuring, consumer-relations voice that was her greatest asset. “Robert. You know? I’m not supposed to say.”

“I see.” Those aqua eyes glinted with hurt innocence. The old Robert. The one who could dismantle her without an owner’s manual. The Karsh she could no more evade than she could escape herself. “Closely held secrets of the wetlands protectors. I understand completely. What’s our personal history, compared to preserving the four-billion-year march of evolution?”

Two years ago that month, she’d lain with this man in the pouring rain, naked in the sloppy riverbanks, licking his armpits like a kitten. “Jesus, Karsh. What can I say? It’s the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. Bigger than myself? How about bigger than anyone. I’m working through some papers…Did you know that we’ve changed that river more in one hundred years than in all the ten thousand years prior…?”

“Sorry…papers? What kind of papers?”

“Photocopies from the County Office, if you must know.” Already too much. But surely he’d guessed. She watched him faking calm. She’d often seen that look, but had never before been able to cause it. The sight was nothing short of mood-altering.

“You’re right, you probably shouldn’t tell me anything.” Pouring on the charm, charm more weirdly boyish now that he was graying. “But you’ll tell me if I guess, right?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“On what you tell me in return.”

Hands spread on the table. “Go ahead. Ask me anything.”

“Anything?” She snickered. “How’s family life?”

He sat back against the booth and surrendered, too quickly. “The kids are…really great. I’m just so glad I got into this whole father thing. Something different every week. Skateboarding, amateur theatrics, industrial-scale software piracy. No, really: they’re fantastic. Wendy and I are another story.”

“Another story than…?”

“Listen. I don’t want to lay this on your doorstep, Rabbit. This has absolutely nothing to do with your coming back home. It’d been in the works for months before I saw you.”

Not, apparently, another story than the one he’d told her for years. But it couldn’t hurt her now. Like one of those pieces of junk mail stamped Urgent: Dated Material. Please Respond. “I’m sure, Robert. My comings and goings would never affect you.”

“You know that’s not what I mean. But I’m going to show great psychological acuity by letting you attack me.” Retaliating, she salted the half strip of bacon left on his plate. He popped it in his mouth, contrition. “This is exactly what I’m saying.” He waved his arms, beaming. “Do you know the last time I felt this free? Wendy and I drag through that disinfected Colonial, appraising each other like insurance-fraud investigators after a fire. We are so over each other. We’re at the point where we have to split up for the sake of the kids.” He gazed out the plate-glass window, onto Central.

“Anything you like out there? Good morning talent?”

He just nodded. “I like everything I see a little bit more. When you are around.”

Most dangerous pitch of all. Someone who made others happier to be who they were: that was all she’d ever dreamed of being. And this man alone knew her fatal weak spot. She listened and indulged him, nodding at his details — the escape apartment he’d lined up, the lawyer who promised reasonable protection. She let him go on about his emerging future. At least he had the decency not to ask whether she was interested in filling it. And all that this brief escape cost her was a peck on the cheek and the surrender of her breakfast tab.

He grabbed her by both elbows as he said goodbye. “I think your brother might be right. You have changed.” Before she could cry out, he added, “You’re better,” and disappeared down Kearney’s recently renovated main drag.

That evening, Dr. Weber called. “How are you holding up?” he asked. He sounded genuinely solicitous. But she would not be analyzed. She did not need his help: only her brother. She scrambled to find her list of new questions about the proposed treatment and began to ask them. He gently cut her off. “I’m going back to New York tomorrow morning.”

The words silenced her. She started two confused objections before she understood. He was signing off again, even faster than last time. She would not see him anymore, whichever option she chose.

“I’ll be in touch with Dr. Hayes at Good Samaritan. He’ll have my full write-up. I’ll give him all the material I’ve found, bring him up to speed on where you are.”

“That’s…I don’t…I still have questions…” Searching through a pile of paperwork for the Refuge, she tipped the stack and knocked it to the floor. She cursed brutally, then covered the receiver.

“Please,” Weber said. “Ask anything. Now, or any time after I get back home.”

“But I thought we were going…I thought we’d have another chance to talk about choices. This is a big decision, and I don’t have…”

“We can talk. And you have Dr. Hayes. The hospital staff.”

She felt her control slip and didn’t care. “So this is doctor-patient compassion,” she said out loud. Things needed letting out, for her own and everyone’s good. The man’s professional composure enraged her. Why bother coming back at all if this was what he planned? Going home to his family, his wife. Suppose he walked in his front door and his wife wouldn’t recognize him? Threatened to call the police if he didn’t leave. Antipsychotic. “You don’t know what this is doing to me.”

“I can imagine,” Weber said.

“No you can’t. You haven’t the slightest idea.” She was sick of people imagining they could imagine. She was ready to tell him exactly what he was. But for Mark’s sake, she calmed herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was inexcusable. I’m not quite together these days.” She reassured him that she understood his choice, and that she’d be fine on her own. Then she thanked him for all his help and said goodbye to him for good.

She all but threw it in his face: You haven’t the slightest idea. Like she deliberately meant to confirm the worst of public accusations. Cold, functionalist opportunist. Not interested in people at all. All that interests you is theories.

The woman’s nerve boggled his mind. He’d handed her a treatment where there was none, an option that had cost him some time and effort to find. Tens of thousands of dollars of care, delivered to her doorstep for free. Two pro bono cross-country trips by a researcher with an international reputation, when she might have been knocking on doors, begging for appointments, dragging her brother around the continent, clinic after unproven clinic, in search of anyone who even knew what he was looking at.

Weber had stayed surprisingly composed, at least in memory. He didn’t, in any case, say what he was feeling. Too much training for that. To the best of his recollection, he’d never lost his temper in a professional capacity. He’d wanted to explain: My leaving is not what you think. But then he would have to tell her what his leaving was.

She was right in one silent accusation: he was no psychologist. Human behavior, so opaque when he’d started his studies, now struck him as worse than religious mystery. He understood no one. He couldn’t begin to grasp her. She’d gone from gratitude to entitlement, on no grounds at all. Vulnerability wheeling to attack, even as she begged for mercy. He’d studied the absurdities of behavior his whole life, and he hadn’t come close to predicting the words she threw at him.

Yes, the damage he’d made a career of studying fell along a spectrum continuous with baseline psychology. But the things he labored to explain in deficits he couldn’t excuse in this healthy person. No medical court would have convicted him had he hung up on her. Instead, he hung on, feeling everything, from far off. He’d seen the same condition in a young woman patient once. Pain asymbolia: damage to the dominant parietal lobe’s supramarginal gyrus. Doctor, I know the pain is there; I feel it. It’s excruciating. But it just doesn’t bother me anymore. Pain everywhere, but just not distressing.

Maybe he’d suffered a lesion and was in full-fledged compensation. But on the phone, he could do nothing but go through the motions: What would Gerald Weber do? He let Karin Schluter abuse him, saying nothing in his own defense. He answered her questions as honestly as possible. He hung up feeling worse than humiliated. But the humiliation did not concern him. The thing dismantling him also exhilarated, lifted him so bodily he hovered above himself. On the brink of sixty, and tomorrow threatened to reveal the mystery his whole life had struggled to unlock. A rush of anticipation flooded through him, worse than something pharmaceutical. He’d fallen in love with a total cipher, a woman he didn’t know from Eve.

He called Christopher Hayes at Good Samaritan, who greeted him warmly. “I’m in the middle of your new book. I haven’t finished it yet, but I just can’t understand the press’s pile-on. It’s no different than anything you’ve ever written.”

Weber had reached the same annihilating conclusion. Everything he’d written now only added to his vague disgrace. He told Hayes that he’d been in town examining Mark. The news silenced Hayes. Weber described Mark’s further deterioration, mentioned the article he found in the ANZJP, and conveyed the case for olanzapine.

Dr. Hayes concurred with everything. “Of course you remember that I thought we should explore this direction, back in June.”

Weber did not remember. Acutely aware of how he appeared to the other man, he nudged the conversation to a close, finally euthanizing it. He drove back to Lincoln that night, waiting on standby until he could get a flight. He called Mark from the airport to say goodbye.

Mark was stoic. “I figured you might be bailing. You tore out of here kinda fast. When you coming back through?”

Weber said he didn’t know.

“Never, huh? Can’t say I blame you. I’d get back to the real deal myself, if I knew how.”

Mark’s not good for squat these days except for failing people’s tests. First, he lets Shrinky down. He’s not sure why — something to do with his less-than-optimal performance in their latest Q and A — but the man tears out of town like he’s taken a fire hose of sweat bees up the ass. No sooner does he drive Shrinky away than the Guard is after him. Some kind of agreement that young Mark signed, and apparently his country is now in desperate need of his services.

You-Know-Who — at least she’s dependable — runs him up to the recruiting office in Kearney. Same place that Rupp and the aforementioned Mark turned up worlds ago, to talk about doing Mark’s bit for Homeland Security. He tries to work it out, on the ride up: the same Specialist Rupp who has finally admitted to communicating with him just after Mark supposedly signs some official papers, and just before somebody runs Mark off the road. As usual, it doesn’t add up, except to implicate the government. But government involvement is generally a no-brainer.

At the Guard office, there’s a heavy conference that he’s not privy to, between the Karin-like person and the Top Guardsman. She’s trying to bust up the deal, whipping out files from the hospital, brother obviously impaired, etc. But the army sees through her, of course. And Mark Schluter is asked to answer a few questions for his country. He does his best; he honestly does. If America is under siege and has to go whip some serious foreign butt to break free again, Mark needs to go, just like everybody else. But he has to laugh out loud at some of the questions. True or false: I believe that meeting people with different backgrounds can improve me as a person. Well, that all depends. Is “people” some Arab waving a gun and trying to crash my airline? I sometimes get angered by repetitive or monotonous situations. You mean, like answering these questions? He asks the recruiting doctor whether we are, in fact, preparing to take the Saddamizer out at last, finish the job, after ten years. But Mr. Ramrod is unbelievably uptight. I couldn’t say, sir. Just answer the questions, sir. Apparently we’re dealing with some heavily classified dope.

Karbon Karin expresses her own opinions on the way home, opinions suspiciously close to his own sister’s. Family is our country kind of noise. Mark forgets about the whole thing until a week later, when he gets a letter from NEARNG, with the little Patriot head logo in the circle of stars on it. Basically: don’t call us, we’ll call you.

Then he whiffs a third time. Pseudo Sib lets slip that the checks he’s been getting from Infernal may dry up after the accident’s anniversary. You can tell she’s sorry as soon as she says it, like he’s not supposed to hear, which of course gets his attention. There’s absolutely no reason why she should be so freaked. So, needless to say, her whole little secretive song and dance freaks him something serious.

He calls the plant. After about a million minutes on hold listening to Surprising Beef Processing Facts while being bounced from one clueless personnel officer to another, they put him through to somebody who seems to know all about his situation. Not a good sign, and it makes him think that Rupp or Cain has gotten to them first and given them the other side of the story, the side that everyone is keeping from Mark. The personnel officer tells him that he’ll need a whole new round of tests — clean bill of health from Good Samaritan — before they’ll consider rehiring him. What the hell do they mean, re-hire? He already works there. The desk man says something rude, and Mark counters with something about: Do you want me to tell the feds about the thirty Hispanic illegals you have working the cutting floors? An idle threat, really, since Mark and the feds aren’t on great terms at the moment. The guy hangs up on him, so there’s nothing to do but take the hospital tests. He’s sure he can do pretty well on these, having had his fair share of practice. But the hospital is pissed at him, apparently, for quitting Thera-Play, and they give him some truly bizarre questions, which he bombs out on again.

So that’s three strikes, and by the rules of the game, he’s out of there. Only, Mark is still in the thick of shit. He’s looking at real unemployment. The whole thing is a life-and-death video game, on a countdown timer to detonation. He’s got until the anniversary of his accident to figure out what they did to him on the operating table. His one hope is to find his finder, the note-writer, his guardian angel, the only one who knows everything.

A plan comes to Mark, something he should have thought of a while ago. Would have, too, if it hadn’t been for all the craziness around these parts. Simple enough, and the beauty of the plan lies in how it forces the hand of the authorities. He’ll go public. He’ll put the note on Crime Solvers. Everybody in four counties will see the plastic-laminated thing pressed up against their TV screens. I am No One, but Tonight on North Line Road…If any real, unbrainwashed people who know what happened that night are left alive, they’ll have to come forward. And if the Powers That Be try to snag and silence them, all of central Nebraska will know.

A year ago, he’d never have considered stooping so low. The show is just too pathetic: the worst kind of local television brain-scrambler. A female reporter and a male policeman run all over the Big Bend region, pretending to be interested in everybody’s so-called unsolved mysteries, while all they really want to do, obviously, is run off into the wheat fields somewhere off camera and drill each other silly. And the tangled, baffling cases they go after? Three-quarters of them are clueless women bleating about how they haven’t seen their husbands for weeks. Lady, have you tried your teenage Mexican housekeeper’s apartment? Once in a blue moon they show some interesting stuff, like the two applicator tanks full of anhydrous ammonia stolen off a siding in Holdrege that turned up in this big old subterranean meth facility in Hartwell. Or the Prairie Bigfoot, this sasquatch thing spotted at night rooting through people’s trash barrels in North Platte, and subsequently reported all over the place from Ogallala to Litchfield, which turned out to be this telco wire guy’s illegal escaped pet sun bear: one very confused creature, whacked out by a few hundred hysterical, hallucinating humans.

But Crime Solvers is his last hope. He does a phone interview with their “story hunter,” also known as unpaid student intern. They’re interested, and they send the famous Tracey Barr over in person, along with a camera guy, to film him. The Homestar, on the idiot box. Or at least the fake Homestar. Tracey Barr herself, in his living room. He wants to call the guys, get them over to gawk, maybe even get them on camera. Then he remembers he can’t really call the guys anymore.

The statuesque Miss Barr is a bit older and not quite as sexual in person. Not as sexual, shall we say, as a certain Bonita Baby, in her homestead garb. Nevertheless, Tracey — she asks him to call her Tracey, believe it or don’t — is impressive, in a kind of black tube skirt and backward ruby blouse kind of way. Fortunately, Mark remembers to dress up, too: his fancy green long-sleeve Izod. Present from Bonnie Before.

Tracey wants the whole story. Of course, Mark Schluter doesn’t have the whole story. That’s the point of dragging in the Grime Patrol in the first place. And he’s learned that when he does tell everything he knows, people go weird on him. He doesn’t want to trip any more mines than he has to. The less the station knows about the big picture, the better. He gives her the basic package: accident, tire tracks, hospital, sealed ICU, and the note on the bedside table, waiting for him when he comes back to himself weeks later. She eats it up. They film all over the yard and house: Mark alone, gazing off into fields. Mark with photo of truck. Mark with Blackie Two, because who’s going to know the difference? Mark holding note, showing note to Tracey. Tracey reading note out loud. And most important: full-screen closeup of note, so everyone at home can see the handwriting and read every word.

Tracey drags him out to North Line, to film him at the scene of the crime. They’re joined by this week’s Cop on the Case, Sergeant Ron Fagan, who, it turns out, knows Karin from high school, perhaps even in the Old Testament sense. He keeps asking Mark about his sister. Like “the police” don’t know about the switch. How’s that sister of yours? She’s real nice. She still in town? She dating anyone? Quite creepy: this big guy in a uniform, probing to see how much Mark suspects. Mark ducks the questions without, he hopes, getting in any deeper than he’s already in.

But Officer Fagan is masterful with Tracey, going on about the accident-scene evidence: the tracks that cut Mark off and the ones that ran off the road behind him. You mean like a squeeze? Tracey asks. And with a straight face, the cop says he doesn’t want to leap to conclusions. Leap, after almost a year. Says they have no match on the treads, no leads on the vehicles…

Unfortunately, he also mentions the speed Mark was going when he flipped. It’s a figure that isn’t going to endear him to any potentially watching guardians. Mark had no idea he’d been going so fast. It dawns on him that the car behind him must have been pursuing. He was evading, and he blasted right into the ambush.

They set up the accident-scene camera at the wrong spot. Right road, wrong stretch. Mark objects, but they blow him off. They claim the backdrop looks better here; more picturesque or something. The cop waves his hands like a conductor, pointing out what happened where, but it’s all wrong. All fake. Mark tells them, maybe a little too loud. Tracey commands him to shut up. He yells back: How the hell is the person who found him going to recognize the place and come forward, if the show doesn’t even show the right spot?

Well, they all look at him like he’s just escaped from Floor Five. But they relocate to the real spot, rather than push it. They film him walking along his little stretch, which is nuts when you think about it, since he wasn’t exactly in walking shape that night. But hey: Hollywood. It’s mild and dry — light jacket weather, with a teasing wind and all the fields taken in. But he’s absolutely freezing, cold at his core, so cold he might as well be lying there, pinned in a ditch, in February, his face pressed through the broken windshield in a slurry of ice.

Another prairie winter, the thing Karin Schluter had fled her whole adult life. She’d been raised on stories of the killer of ’36, with its month of unbroken subzeros, or ’49, with its forty-foot drifts of snow, or the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard of 1888, with its one-day drop of eighty degrees dotting the landscape with frozen statues. This one was nothing. And still, she feared for her survival.

The cardboard browns and gunmetal grays took over. The last of the squashes and pumpkins dried off their vines, and everything sane went south or underground. Longer nights settled in, hooding the town early. Most nights, the wind kept her up; few places on the globe had air so loud. She suffered her traditional November break, that sense that she’d crashed through the world’s guard rail and now lay under the unbroken gauze of Nebraska sky, unable to do anything but wait for spring and someone to discover her.

She’d have diagnosed herself with seasonal affective disorder, but she refused to believe in recently invented diseases. Riegel tried to get her to sit under his plant grow lights. “It’s all about sun. Your number of hours of sunlight per day.”

“You want to trick my body with fluorescent lights? That doesn’t seem very natural to me.” She felt herself sniping at him more as the days shortened, but couldn’t stop herself. He suffered in noble silence, which only made things worse. She rushed to apologize with small kindnesses, telling him again how grateful she was for the work, the most meaningful work she’d ever put her hand to. The next day, she’d snipe again.

She called Barbara for advice. “I don’t know what to do. I can change him with this drug, into God knows what. I can leave him who he is now. It’s too much power.”

She recited Daniel’s problems with pharmaceuticals. The nurse’s aide listened carefully. “I understand your friend’s fears, and I’m speaking to you as someone who has, in her life, given up cigarettes, caffeine, and processed sugar. I know you’re scared of anything that might make things worse. I can’t tell you what to do. But you need to look into this olanzapine as carefully as…”

“I’ve done that,” Karin snapped. “And the man who dumped this in my lap is gone. Barbara! Please?”

“I can’t advise. I’m not qualified. If I could make this choice for you, I would.”

Karin, who’d dreamed once of becoming this woman’s friend, even her confidante, hung up the phone hating her.

She increased her hours at the Refuge. If she’d had this work from the beginning — a river to give herself to — she might have become a different creature. They had her preparing pamphlets. Copy for fund raising and lobbying. Small-arms fire in the increasingly desperate war over water. The pros did the real work, of course. But even her gopher efforts contributed. Daniel, almost afraid to look at her growing wildness, walked her through the research materials, laying out the goals. “We need something to wake sleepwalkers,” he instructed her. “To make the world strange and real again.”

She was seeing Robert, too, every several days, when he could get away. They’d done nothing, at least nothing Wendy could use in court. They squeezed each other’s heads. There were certain lines on the skull Daniel had taught her about, and she showed Robert. Meridians. Powerful stuff, if you could find them. They spent hours outside, at Cottonmill Lake, under the skeletal trees, looking for them: pressure above the eye ridges, a track leading up and back to the crown of the head that, pressed hard, could absolutely pickle your senses. When she tapped into Robert’s lines, he’d lean back, shout “Wasabi!” and take his pulse.

The nights grew too cold to stay out of doors. But they had no place to go. They ended up steaming up her car, pulled over on the shoulders of dark country roads or in the far corners of abandoned box-store parking lots. They couldn’t use his car, because of Wendy’s acute sense of smell. The woman was, by her husband’s account, as olfactorially acute as a badger.

“It’s worse than being a teenager,” Karin groaned. “Damn it, Robert. I’m going to explode.”

Then they’d stop and turn back to touchless talk. They had reached the age when frustration offered more than delivery. It meant something, this holding on to technical fidelity. Cheating came later, when they returned to their respective mates.

It surprised her to discover: if she had to choose between fooling around and talk, she’d choose talk. That’s what she needed most from him, these days. His mind was so brutally other than Daniel’s, or her own. She thought faster around Robert. He was a huge, calculating extension of that PDA he was forever poking at. He could sit behind the steering wheel of the parked Corolla, fiddling with the handheld device like a newborn exploring a Playskool Activity Center. To her anxiety over starting Mark on drugs, he said, “Figure the costs. Count up the benefits. See which is bigger.”

“Listen to you. If only it were that easy.”

“It is that easy. Unless you want to make it harder. Come on! What else is there? The plus column and the minus column. Then the math.”

His clarity maddened her, but it kept her going.

“Really,” he told her. His voice was so calming — Peter Jennings visiting a junior high social studies class. “What’s to keep you from starting him on these antipsychotics and seeing what happens?”

“They’re hard to tail off of, once you start.”

“Hard on you, or hard for him?”

She slugged him, which he enjoyed. “What do I do if they work?”

He twisted in his seat to face her. He didn’t understand. How could he? She wasn’t sure she did. He shook his head. But his eyes were more amused than exasperated. She was his brainteaser, his handheld puzzle box.

She took his palm and stroked it with her thumb, their most dangerous transaction to date. “What would he be like, if he…came back?”

Robert sniffed. “Like he was. Your brother.”

“Right. But which one? Don’t look at me like that. You know what I’m saying. He could be such an aggressive prick. Always riding me.”

Karsh shrugged, the guilt of all mankind. “I’ve been known to, you know, be a bit that way myself.”

“It’s just that I can’t really…When I try to picture him, before? I can’t be sure I…He was really hairy, sometimes. Raging about my going off and saving myself, condemning him to the faith healer and the entrepreneur. Calling me a…Sometimes he really hated me.”

“He didn’t hate you.”

“How would you know?” His palms flew up, a bull’s-eye for her rage. “I’m sorry,” she rushed. “I’m just not sure I can do all that again.” They sat in silence. He checked his watch, then cranked the ignition. She did not have much time to ask it. “Robert? Do you think I ever resented him, back then? You know. Some kind of hidden…?”

Robert drummed the wheel. “Truth? Nothing hidden about it.”

She flared up, then hung her head. “But see? That’s part…I don’t really resent him now, like this. I…don’t really mind, anymore. His being who…”

“Don’t mind?” Karsh downshifted. “You mean you like him better this way?”

“No! Of course not. It’s just…I like his new idea of me, better than his old one. Well, not of me; you know: of ‘the real Karin.’ I like who he thinks I was. He defends the old me now, against everyone. Two years ago, the real Karin was a constant source of disappointment. I was forever letting him down. A tramp, a sell-out, a money-grubber, a pretentious middle-class wannabe, too good for my roots. Now the real Karin is some kind of victim of history. The sister I never quite managed to be.”

Karsh drove in silence. He looked as if he needed to flip open his pocket PC and start a spreadsheet ledger. Karin Schluter upgrade. Costs. Benefits.

“I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. Am I totally disgusting?”

Eyes on the road, he smiled, taunting. “Not totally.”

“I can’t believe that I told anyone. That I even admitted it to myself, out loud.”

They pulled up four blocks from his house, where he always got out and walked. He opened the driver’s-side door. “You told me because you love me,” he said.

She passed a hand over her face. “No,” she said. “Not totally.”

He called her at times, when his office was empty. They talked in stolen installments, whispering about nothing. Once they got past the essentials — what did he have for lunch? what was she wearing? — everything else devolved into current events. Was the Washington sniper a terrorist or just a self-made, rugged individual? Why weren’t the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq turning up anything? Should the Enron and ImClone executives be given their own reality television network? As good as outright phone sex to both of them.

She held out for fairness, and he for freedom. Each thought they might convert the other: that had always been their fatal attraction. Both agreed that the government was out of control. Only, she wanted to put it to decent use at last, while he wanted to put it down once and for all. A chance encounter with The Fountainhead had turned a sunny, self-effacing high school swimming champion into a Libertarian, although Karsh found even that name way too restricting. “Every competent person on earth is a kind of god, babe. Together, we’re unstoppable. Human ingenuity might accomplish anything. Name a material constraint, and we’re halfway to transcending it. Get out of our way and watch the miracles roll in.”

“Oh my God, Robert. I can’t believe you’re saying that. Look around! We’ve trashed the place.”

“What are you talking about? The ordinary rez teenager lives better than royalty used to. I’d rather live now than at any other moment. Except the future.”

“That’s because you’re an animal. I mean: that’s because you’re not an animal.”

“Since when did you get such convictions?”

Since she realized how little she could do to change Mark. She had to put her energies elsewhere, or die. This river might need her, more than her brother ever had.

They’d get onto thin ice within minutes, then stay out there, spinning arm in arm, a whole pairs freedance routine. Each needed to rout the other: pointless yet irresistible. She preferred screaming in horror at Karsh’s outrages to murmuring in agreement at Riegel’s pieties. Robert knew the truth that would forever elude Daniel, all the way to the grave: we love only what we can see ourselves in.

Invariably, Karsh would pump her. “How are things at the Save-a-Bird store? Tell me about this shiny new fund drive. You folks planning on buying up some wetlands?”

“First tell me about your consortium’s new shopping center.”

“Not a shopping center!”

“What the hell is it, then?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“While I’m supposed to shout my little secrets from the rooftops?”

“So you do have a secret? You people are up to something?”

Heady, his begging. She had some power over him. The taste of it made up for no end of past humiliations. “There aren’t that many contestable spots of value along the river left, you know.” Something Daniel had said at breakfast, a couple of mornings earlier. She repeated it as if she’d just thought of it herself.

“We only want to stay out of your way,” Karsh claimed. “We wouldn’t want to develop in any areas that the Refuge sees as essential to preserve.”

“Then you ought to sit down with the trustees and work this out, acre by acre.”

He chuckled. “Have I told you that you are really adorable?”

“Not in this lifetime.”

“Well, if you and I were in charge, that’s what we’d be doing. Seriously. All this corporate cloak-and-dagger stuff gets on my nerves. Let’s talk once this thing is public. You’ll be a whole lot prouder of me then.”

The word proud went right through her. Something in her did admire him. He could point to things and claim paternity. Mostly horrible things, granted, but solid and finished. At least Karsh had left a scar on the landscape. She could point to nothing except a series of service jobs, all lost, and a condo, now sold. She hadn’t even procreated, something all her old high school acquaintances did more easily than Karin cleaned house. Even her own brother said she was nothing. At thirty-one, she had stumbled at last into work of consequence. She ached to tell him how worthwhile. “Proud?” she asked, ready to be lost. “How proud?”

“You’ll see, if we get our Development Council approval. If we don’t, the whole thing is moot. Come to the public hearing and find out.”

“I have to,” she said, a sultry tease. “For my job.”

She went to the hearing with Daniel. He drove, and she judged mercilessly the whole way. “If you get to the stop sign first, you’re supposed to go through it first. Don’t sit there and wave other people through.”

“It’s basic politeness,” he said. “If everyone…”

“It’s not politeness,” she shouted. “It just screws people up.”

He shrunk back. “Evidently.” All the cruelty he could muster, and it mortified her. By the time they got to the hearing, she was contrite. She took his arm as they walked through the Municipal Building parking lot.

She dropped it in the foyer, seeing Karsh and his Platteland colleagues. She kept her eyes down on the peach-colored marble as Daniel led her to the hearing room. They hunted for seats in the filling chamber. Daniel scoped the room. She followed his eyes, over the mostly geriatric crowd. Two kids from the university community cable channel manned a video camera halfway down the right-hand aisle. Other than them, most of the room was drawing Social Security. Why did people wait until they had one foot in the grave before caring about their future?

“Not a bad house,” she told Daniel.

“You think? How many, would you say?”

“I don’t know. You know me and numbers. Fifty? Sixty?”

“So…roughly one-tenth of one percent of people directly impacted?”

They joined the Refuge contingent. Daniel came alive and Karin dragged behind him, a cowbird in the nest. The group fell into plan and counterplan, Karin serving up her prepared research. She watched Daniel at work, energized by the forces deployed against them. Long odds made him more attractive than he’d been in weeks.

Just behind the student cable crew, on a chair pulled deliberately off-camera, sat Barbara Gillespie. The sight of her rattled Karin: incompatible worlds. “That’s Barbara,” she told Daniel. “Mark’s Barbara. What do you think?”

“Ah!” Daniel flinched.

“Doesn’t she have something? Some kind of aura? It’s okay; just the truth.”

“She looks very…self-possessed.” Afraid to look, confirming her.

The Platteland contingent chose that moment for their entrance, striding as a group up to the other developers in the front row, just in front of the council tables. She and Daniel both looked away. After a minute, she sneaked another look. If Karsh had acknowledged her, the moment had passed. He was waist deep in presentation materials, the art of consequence. Dizzy, Karin glanced back at Barbara, who lifted one palm in a covert wave. Danger, the flicker of greeting said. Humans everywhere.

The hearing came to order. The mayor addressed the council and established the procedures. A spokeswoman from the development group took the podium, darkened the room, and fired up an LCD projector. The screen behind the council tables flashed a title slide, the ubiquitous Nature template. The slide, in Mistral font, read: New Migrants on Our Ancient Waterway.

Karin twisted around to Daniel, incredulous. But he and the Refuge braced for the show, jaws clenched. The slides flipped through their paces, meandering like the river in question. The pitch aimed at the last target Karin had expected: what the Development Council called the “Hospitality Sector.”

A bar graph showed the number of visitors to the spring migration over the last ten years. Numbers were an eternal mystery to her, but she could gauge lengths. The bars were doubling every three years. By the time she died, much of the country would be traipsing through every March.

The speaker metamorphosed into Joanne Woodward before Karin’s eyes. “The concentrated staging of almost every migratory sandhill crane on earth has become one of the most breathtaking wildlife spectacles available on earth.”

“Available?” she whispered. But deep in mental battle, Daniel couldn’t hear. A panoramic photo followed — a stretch of the Platte not far from Mark’s. An overlay faded in, an artist’s rendition of a rustic settlement complete with old homesteads and sod houses. The speaker christened it the Central Platte Scenic Natural Outpost, and was deep into listing its environmental principles of construction — low-impact setting, passive solar, simulated split-rail fences made from millions of recycled milk cartons — when Karin saw: the consortium wanted to build a sprawling tourist village for crane peepers.

The battle unfolded in glacial pantomime, with developers and conservationists charging and countercharging. Daniel waded into the fray, landing a couple of stinging blows. The birds were spectacular, he pointed out, precisely because the river had drained away beneath them, concentrating them in a few remaining havens. Drawing even one more cup of water out of an already breaking biome was unconscionable. Karin had been over the facts, facts she’d helped research. Every word Daniel spoke was gospel. But he preached with such messianic passion that she felt the room discount him as yet another finger-pointing Jeremiah.

Robert, smiling like an innocent bystander, rose to defend. The Outpost wasn’t in a roosting area, but only nearby. The visitors would come, one way or another. Didn’t it make sense to absorb them as ecologically as possible, in buildings that preserved an historical awareness, integrated into the natural landscape? Visitors would leave more aware of the need to conserve wildness. Wasn’t the whole point of conservation to protect nature for our appreciation? Or did the Refuge believe that only a select few should enjoy the birds?

This last point was met by room-wide approval. Student council all over again. The Karshes of this world always crush the Riegels, in any open poll. The Karshes had humor, style, unlimited budgets, sophistication, subliminal seduction, neuromarketing…The Riegels had only guilt and facts.

Robert sat back in his seat. He glanced at Karin, a look that lingered like a stalker. How was that? For a weird, fleeting fugue moment, she felt privately responsible for the whole contest.

The Refuge countered: the developers were requesting ten times more water shares than their Natural Outpost would consume. The developers explained their own cautious projections and promised that the Outpost would sell all unused water shares back into the public kitty at cost.

Democracy flailed on, the most cumbersome form of deciding known to man. Breath-powered sailboat. Every village eccentric and homeless aluminum-can collector had his say. How could so blind a process ever reach a right decision? A developer in a pale-green suit and a Refugee in stringy denim, what little hair remaining to him pulled in a ponytail, sparred, their arms ceremonial swords, their voices rising and falling in spectral Kabuki wails. A gauzy filter settled over the gathering, as if Karin had stood up too quickly. The whole room shimmered, like a bean field in an August wind. These people had been gathering here since before development was even an issue. For as long as there were prairies open enough to blind and madden, men had met here to argue, just to prove to themselves that they weren’t alone.

The public was as conflicted as her brother. Worse: as her. The debaters circled, doubling each other, doubling themselves, squaring off against phantom combatants…She sat in the middle of the fray, a double agent, selling herself to both sides. She took the combat inside herself, all possible positions banging around the loose democracy in her skull. How many brain parts had Weber’s books described? A riot of free agents; five dozen specialties in the prefrontal bit itself. All those Latin-named life-forms: the olive, the lentil, the almond. Seahorse and shell, spiderweb, snail, and worm. Enough spare body parts to make another creature: breasts, buttocks, knees, teeth, tails. Too many parts for her brain to remember. Even a part named the unnamed substance. And they all had a mind of their own, each haggling to be heard above the others. Of course she was a frenzied mess; everyone was.

A wave moved through her, a thought on a scale she’d never felt. No one had a clue what our brains were after, or how they meant to get it. If we could detach for a moment, break free of all doubling, look upon water itself and not some brain-made mirror…For an instant, as the hearing turned into instinctive ritual, it hit her: the whole race suffered from Capgras. Those birds danced like our next of kin, looked like our next of kin, called and willed and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: impostors. At most, a strange spectacle to gaze at from a blind. Long after everyone in this room was dead, this camp meeting would rage on, debating the decline in life’s quality, hammering out the urgent details of a vast new development. The river would dry up, go elsewhere. Three or four surviving decimated species would drag here annually, not knowing why they returned to this arid wasteland. And still we’d be trapped in delusion. But before Karin could fix the thought taking shape in her, it turned unrecognizable.

The hearing ended without a resolution. She clutched Daniel, confused. “Don’t they have to come to some decision?”

He gauged her with pity. “No. They’ll sit on the proposal for a few months, then slip out a ruling when no one is looking. Well, at least we know what we’re up against now.”

“I thought it was going to be a lot worse. Some kind of factory outlet megaplex. Thank God it’s just this. You know. Something that doesn’t spew poison. Something that’s at least pro-bird.”

She might as well have stabbed him. He’d been drifting to the exits at the back of the room. He stopped in the middle of the milling pack and grasped her upper arm. “Pro-bird? This? Have you lost your fucking mind?”

Heads turned. Robert Karsh, deep in numbers with two Development Council members, looked up from across the room. Daniel reddened. He leaned in to Karin and apologized in a hot whisper. “I’m sorry. Unforgivable. It’s been a sick few hours.”

She stepped forward to hush him. A hand petted her shoulder. She wheeled to see Barbara Gillespie. “You! What are you doing here?”

That single, arch Gillespie eyebrow. “Being a good citizen. I do live here!”

Caught, Karin made introductions. “I want you to meet my friend Daniel. Daniel, this is Barbara, the…woman I told you about.”

Riegel turned toward her, a stiff, grinning Pinocchio. He couldn’t even stammer. Karin caught sight of Karsh as he left the room, leering at Barbara.

“I liked what you said,” Barbara told Daniel. “But tell me something. What do you suppose these people plan to do with this facility during the five-sixths of the year when there isn’t a crane to be seen?”

Daniel stood gaping at the environmentalists’ combined failure to raise the question during the hearing. “Maybe a conference facility?”

Barbara considered. “That’s possible. Why not?” Then, so briskly it spun Karin, she added, “Well, great to see you, my dear! And good to meet you, Daniel.” Daniel nodded, limp. “Fingers crossed on this one!” Barbara backed away with a crooked smile and a paralyzed prom-queen wave, then stumbled out of the room through the thinning crowd. A part of Karin cursed her exit.

Daniel was suffering. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have lost my temper if things hadn’t gone so…I don’t know where that came from. You know I’m not…”

“Drop it. It doesn’t matter.” Nothing mattered but getting free, reaching the real water. “So I’ve lost my fucking mind. We both knew that already.”

But Daniel couldn’t drop it. On the car ride home, he came up with three more theories explaining his verbal assault. And he wanted her to ratify all of them. She did, in the interests of peace. This wasn’t good enough for him. “Don’t say you believe me if you don’t.”

“I agree with you, Daniel. Really.”

It got them home, at least, and into bed. But the postmortem went on, in the dark. He spoke to the plaster cracks in the ceiling. “The whole hearing was a total disaster, wasn’t it?” She couldn’t tell if she was supposed to agree or object. “We didn’t know what hit us. We went into the hedgehog defense right away. Fighting it like it was the usual commercial-strip land grab. We failed to discredit this thing. The Council probably left that room thinking what you did: that this Nature-rama is somehow beneficial.”

She still thought so. Done right, it could even be a populist equivalent of the Refuge, managing the impact of tourists, whose numbers would just keep swelling, anyway.

“They’re obviously up to something. This is just stage one. Look at the water they’re asking for. And your friend is right. They can’t possibly make money if the place is only filled two months out of the year.”

She rubbed his back, big gentle circles. Weber’s book said that made endorphins. It worked for a minute or two, before he flipped over.

“We blew it. We should have exposed them, and instead…”

“Shh. You did the best you could. I’m sorry; I don’t mean that. I mean, you did the best that anyone could have, under the circumstances.”

Daniel was up all night. Sometime after one, he started tossing so badly she came out of her own fitful sleep enough to rest a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it,” she mumbled, still half dreaming. “It was only a word.”

Around three, she woke to an empty bed. She heard him out in the kitchen, pacing like a zoo creature. When he at last crawled back into bed, she pretended to be asleep. He lay still, an all-hearing ear, out in a field, tracking something big. Bring your sphere of sound inside your sphere of sight. Fully motionless, even his lungs. By five-thirty, neither could pretend any longer. “You okay?” she asked.

“Thoughtful,” he whispered.

“I gathered.”

They should have just risen and had breakfast, pioneer style, in the dark. But neither moved. At last, he said, “Your friend seems very sharp. She’s right. These birder houses are just the tip of something.”

She crushed the pillow. “I knew you were thinking about her. Is that why you—?”

He ignored her. “Did you already introduce me to her somewhere?”

“Look at me. Do I look like I’ve lost my fucking mind?”

He blinked at her, his head dipping. “I told you I was sorry. It was unforgivable. I don’t know what else to say.”

She had: she had lost it. Ground down by failed caretaking. “Forget it. It’s nothing. I’m insane. What are you saying about Barbara?”

“I have the weirdest sense that I know her voice.” He stood and crossed naked to the window. He pulled back the curtain and stared into the dark yard. “She sounds like someone I know.”

Winter on Long Island: Why did they persist in staying? Surely not for the few breathtaking postcard moments: rime on the water mill, the duck pond frozen over, Conscience Bay whited out, with nothing but the invader mute swans and a single confused heron holding tight before the snow turned sooty and the real season of lifelessness settled in. Not for their health, certainly: pelted for days at a shot by tiny, sleet hypodermics. Not out of any economic necessity. Only some fathomless expiation, clinging to the former fresh, green breast of the new world.

“Dug in, in that vast obscurity beyond the city,” he told Sylvie, over a ruthlessly administered breakfast regimen of muesli and soy milk. “Where the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night.”

“Yes, dear. Whatever you say. How ’bout them Rangers?”

“I could be teaching in Arizona. Or guest-lecturing in California, just down the street from Jess. Better yet, we could both be retired. Living in some ramshackle farmhouse in Umbria.”

She knew her job. “Or we could both be completely dead. Then we’d have everything handled and out of the way already.” She rinsed their breakfast bowls, for the ten thousand nine hundredth time in their shared life. “Lecturing at the Medical Center in seventeen minutes.”

He watched her walk into the bedroom to dress. What did she look like to strangers? Still slim for her age, hips and waist still echoing the past, her body still waving the advertisement of vigor, long after it had any right. She’d become almost unendurably dear to him in recent weeks, the result of his Nebraskan near-derailment.

The night he’d returned, he told her why he’d rushed home. Say everything: their marriage contract from the beginning, and to salvage anything real with this realest of women, he could not hide now. He’d always believed in Blake’s “Poison Tree”: bury a fantasy if you want to nurture it. Kill it by exposure to the open air.

The dank Long Island air did not kill his fantasy. Rather, describing his awful discovery to his wife the night of his homecoming killed something else. Lying in bed alongside her, he laid it out. He felt some sick frisson of collapse, just gearing up to speak. “Sylvie? I need to tell you something.”

“Uh-oh. Real first name. Big trouble.” She grinned, turned on her side, head on an elbowed arm. “Let me guess. You’ve fallen in love.”

He squeezed shut his eyes, and she sucked air. “I wouldn’t say…,” he started. “It seems I may have gone back to Kearney, at least in part, for another look at a woman around whom, without any awareness, I’ve fabricated an entire hypothetical life.”

She lay there, the grin still poised, as if he’d just said, So this neuroscientist walks into a bar…“Syntax getting all fancy, Ger.”

“Please. This is ruining me.”

Her grin stiffened. She rolled onto her belly, regarding him as if he’d just confessed a love for donning women’s underthings. Second by second, she grew more professional. Sylvie Weber, Wayfinder. Supportive; always, horribly supportive. “Did you sleep with her?”

“It isn’t that. I don’t think I even touched her.”

“Ah. Then I’m really in trouble, aren’t I?”

He deserved the slap, even wanted it. But he shrank and said nothing.

“I know you, Man. The Weber Nobility. I know that idealist’s mind of yours.”

“This is not something…I want. That’s why I came back so fast.”

She lashed out. “Fleeing?” Then soft again, ashamed. “You didn’t know, when we talked about your making another trip out there?”

“I…still don’t know. This is not…” He meant to say lust, but that seemed evasive. As shifty as something Famous Gerald might write. More desperate scramble to make a continuous story out of chaos. “In retrospect, perhaps some part of me was looking forward to another look.”

“You weren’t aware of being attracted to her, on your first visit?”

He thought before answering. When he spoke, it was from up near their bedroom ceiling. “I’m not sure that what I felt yesterday is best called attraction.”

She drew her hands in and shaded her eyes. “How serious is this?”

How serious could it be? Three days versus thirty years. A total cipher versus a woman he knew like breathing. “I don’t want it to mean anything at all.”

Underneath her cupped hands, Sylvie cried. Her crying, so rare over the years, had always puzzled him. Detached, almost abstract. Too civil to count as real weeping. Maybe calm grief was genuine maturity, the thing that mental health demanded. But only now did Weber realize how much her vague dispassion in distress had always bothered him. The crisis that their bedrock certainty always mocked — all their binding kindnesses and silly games, Man and Woman—the estrangement they’d never understood in others was now theirs. And she was crying, without sound. “Then why the hell are you telling me this?”

“Because I can’t let it mean anything.”

She pressed her temples. “You aren’t just throwing this in my face? My punishment for…?” For what? For finding herself, finding steady fulfillment in mid-life, while his abandoned him. Something animal flared in her face, ready to hurt back. And he felt how cruelly he loved her.

He tried to say. “I’m giving you…I’m trying…”

Then she was up and out of her crouch, game again, too quickly. She sat up and exhaled, as if she’d just been exercising. She patted the bed with a palm. “Okay. So tell me what you like about this babe.” Improvement project. Life’s next step to self-mastery.

“How can I…like anything about her? I don’t know anything about her.”

“Unknown commodity. Mystery? Lock and key thing? How old is she?”

He wanted to stop talking for good. But talking was his penance. “Pushing fifty,” he said, lying by a decade. A pointless lie — forty hardly qualified as a younger woman — after the harder truth. Barbara was younger. But youth was irrelevant.

“She remind you of someone?”

And it came to him. “Yes.” That aura of having evaded life. One step outside and above it. The same angelic pretense as the author of those three books. And yet, that private frenzy, just beneath the surface of her flawless act. “Yes. I seem to be linked to her. She reminds me of me.”

He might as well have slapped Sylvie. “I don’t understand.”

The two of us. He pressed his palms into his eye sockets until his lids splashed green and red. “There’s something to her that connects. That I need to understand.”

“You’re saying it’s not physical? That it’s more…?”

And then, what he’d tried to tell Karin Schluter, a thing he could not entirely bring himself to believe: “Everything’s physical.” Chemical, electrical. Synapses. Fire or not.

She fell back on the bed, next to him. “Come on,” she grinned, grappling the sheets for safety. “What does this floozy have that I don’t?”

He covered his bald spot with both hands. “Nothing. Except for being a totally unreadable story.”

“I see.” Between brave and bitter. Either one would kill him. “No real chance of competing with that, is there?”

At last he roused himself and encircled her, drew her shaking head into his chest. “Competition’s over. No contest. You have…all my knowledge. All my history.”

“But not all your mystery.”

“I don’t need mystery,” he claimed. Mystery and love could not survive each other. “I just need to get a hold of myself.”

“Gerald. Gerald. Is this the best midlife crisis you can manage?” Her spine collapsed and she burst into tears. She let him hold her. After some time, she surfaced, wiping her damp, red face. “Do I have to buy complicated underwear from the Internet, or something?”

They broke out in choked laughs, scalded with compassion.

The encounter shook them, worse than Weber imagined. Sylvie was still heartbreakingly herself, and he kicked himself for his idiocy every time she smiled gamely at him. After thirty years, she should have taken the news with wry fatigue, realized that he was hers by default, buried under the fossil record of experience. Should have patted him on the head and said, Dream on, my little man; the world is still your proving ground. Should have known he was going nowhere, except in symbols.

But a life of neuroscience had proved that symbols were real. No place else to live. They passed each other in the den and embraced. They touched each other’s forearms in the laundry room. They sat alongside each other on their stools at meals as they had always done, both of them brightened by danger, trading casual theories about UN weapons inspectors or harbor seal sightings in the Sound. Sylvie’s face was clear and bright, but far away, like a color-enhanced nebula beamed back from the Hubble. She refused to ask how he was, the only question that mattered to her. It bruised his chest to look at her. All that unbearable care would crush him.

A few years back, Giacomo Rizzolati’s group in Parma had been testing motor-control neurons in a macaque’s premotor cortex. Every time the monkey moved its arm, the neurons fired. One day, between measurements, the monkey’s arm-muscle neurons began firing like crazy, even though the monkey was perfectly still. More testing produced the mind-boggling conclusion: the motor neurons fired when one of the lab experimenters moved his arm. Neurons used to move a limb fired away simply because the monkey saw another creature moving, and moved its own imaginary arm in symbol-space sympathy.

A part of the brain that did physical things was being cannibalized for making imaginary representations. Science had at last laid bare the neurological basis of empathy: brain maps, mapping other mapping brains. One human wit quickly labeled the find the monkey-see monkey-do neurons, and all others followed suit. Imaging and EEG soon revealed that humans, too, were crawling with mirror neurons. Images of moving muscles made symbolic muscles move, and muscles in symbol moved muscle tissue.

Researchers rushed to flesh out the staggering find. The mirror-neuron system extended beyond the surveillance and performance of movement. It grew tendrils, snaking into all sorts of higher cognitive processes. It played roles in speech and learning, facial decoding, threat analysis, the understanding of intention, the perception of and response to emotions, social intelligence, and theory of mind.

Weber watched his wife moving about the house, going about her days. But his own mirror neurons failed to fire. Mark Schluter had gradually dismantled his most basic sense of acquaintance, and nothing would ever seem familiar or linked again.

Jess came home for three days at Christmas. She brought the mate. Sheena. Shawna. Jess noticed nothing wrong. In fact, her parents’ closeness—the lovebirds in winter—became the running joke between Jess and her cultural studies scholar. “I warned you: disgusting displays of hetero-bourgeois devotion like you witness only in the bowels of Red America.” The three women soon condensed into a trio, running out to vineyard tastings on the North Fork or over to Fire Island for frigid beachcombing, leaving him to solitary “testosterone musings.” When the girls left, Sylvie settled into a post-holiday empty-nest funk. Only long hours of social-service referral at Wayfinders seemed to help.

He fantasized about treating his own holiday descent with piracetam, a nootropic with no known toxicity or addictive properties. For years, he’d read amazing claims about the drug’s ability to enhance cognition by stimulating the flow of signals between the hemispheres. Several researchers he knew took it with small dosages of choline, a synergistic combination said to produce greater increases in memory and creativity than either drug taken alone. But he was too cowardly to experiment with a mind already so altered.

The Country of Surprise showed up on no end-of-year lists except the ones for dubious achievement. Its rapid disappearance almost relieved Weber — no lasting evidence. Sylvie ministered to him with studied indifference, which only made him sad. They were sitting in front of a fire on Sunday evening after New Year’s when he made some crack about Famous Gerald forgetting to come down the chimney this year. She laughed. “You know what? To hell with Famous Gerald. I could kiss Famous Gerald goodbye right now and never miss him. A postcard once a year from Club Med Maldives would do.”

“That strikes me as unnecessarily cruel,” he said.

“Cruel?” She smacked the brick mantel with real force. Her hands stabbed out at the pent-up weeks when she’d said nothing. “Jesus, Man. Can you tell me when this is going to be over?”

Her eyes burned, and he saw the size of her fear. Of course: having to sit by and watch his private deterioration, unsure where or whether it would ever end. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ve not been…”

She took a series of deep breaths, willing herself down. She came to the couch where he sat and pressed her hand into his chest. “What are you doing to yourself? What’s this about? Reputation? Public judgment is nothing but shared schizophrenia.”

He shook his head, pressed two fingers into his neck. “No. Not reputation. You’re right: reputation is…beside the point.”

“What then, Gerald? What is the point?”

No one saw his own symptoms. No one knew who others knew him to be.

Sylvie twisted his shirt, wincing at his silence. “Listen to me. I would gladly trade every recognition you have ever managed to have my husband back and working for himself again.”

But her husband, stripped of recognitions, was no one Sylvie would recognize. He was a breath from telling her what he now felt certain of: the basic immorality of his books. Two words that would have finished them faster than any infidelity, imagined or real.

Lecturing at the Medical Center in seventeen minutes. All she wanted, finally, was for him to master his own life again, as he had for decades, ever since they’d met as Columbus undergrads. Her Man. The man who threw himself into every activity, not because of where it might lead, but for the innate strangeness of raw engagement. The man who had taught her that any life one came across was infinitely nuanced and irreproducible. Go teach. Go learn. How much more flavor do you want? How much bigger could you hope to make yourself?

As he toyed with his grapefruit, something struck the window of the breakfast nook with a sickening thump. He knew before he turned around. When he did turn, he saw the bird struggling away, broken: a large male cardinal who, for the last two weeks, had been attacking his reflection in the nook window, thinking himself an intruder on his own territory.

He stood in front of the quarter-bowl of students, fiddling with his wireless mic and fighting that sense of deceit that hit him before every lecture now. The students were the same as any year: upper-middle white kids from Ronkonkoma and Comack, trying on every identity from Prison Yard Tattoo to LaCoste alligator. But their manner had changed this semester, turned sardonic. They had passed around the public indictments of him by e-mail and instant messenger. They still wrote down every word he said, but more now to catch him out, to root out charlatanism, their pens angled in challenge. They wanted science, not stories. Weber could no longer tell the difference.

He tested the mic and focused the projector. He looked up into the Greek theater filled with college seniors. Feral facial hair was making a comeback. And the piercings, of course, the heavy hardware: he would never adjust to that. The grandchildren of Levittown, with rods through their eyebrows and noses. As a plump tattooed girl in the fourth row made her last legal cell call before the bell—Hey, I’m in my neuro lecture—he watched her tongue stud glisten in the sheen of saliva, a surprising little freshwater pearl.

Looking into this bowl of world-weary twenty-one-year-olds, he couldn’t help assigning them case histories. Since his last curtailed visit to see Mark Schluter, the world had broken out in Dickens and Dostoyevsky. The feverish anarchist, Bhloitov, stretched out sideways on a bank of three chairs in the back row. The high-strung stickler, Miss Nurfraddle, in the aisle seat two rows from the podium, fussed over her perfectly aligned texts. From the center of the auditorium, a slim man with slick black hair, Slavic or Greek, glared at Weber when the lecture failed to begin at the stroke of the hour. What was there in life worth such anger?

Every soul in this room would look upon itself in time with amused disgust. I never dressed like that. Never scribbled notes so earnestly. I couldn’t have thought such things. Who was that pathetic creature? The self was a mob, a drifting, improvised posse. That was the subject of today’s lecture, all the lectures he had given, since meeting his ruined Nebraska meatpacker. No self without self-delusion.

Two seats down from the slick-haired Greek sat the woman in this semester’s class that he avoided looking at. They came and went every year, growing eternally younger. They were not all beautiful. But each played at being older than her age, eyebrows raised a nanometer too high. This one, eight rows up, right in his fovea, in a clinging peach turtleneck, smiled at him, her round face flushed, eager for anything he might say.

The sister, Karin, had said something, the first time they met for lunch. An accusation. I can’t believe it. You do it, too. I just thought that someone with your accomplishments… He thought he hadn’t known what she was talking about. But he had. And he did — did do it, too.

He cast a last look at his notes: organized ignorance. Next to the brain, all human knowledge was like a lemon drop next to the sun. “Today I want to tell you the stories of two very different people.” His disembodied voice came out of speakers high up on the walls, full of amplified authority. The last fragments of nattering conversation fell away. The word stories drew a suppressed snicker. Bhloitov stared at Weber’s first slide, a coronal cross section, with open skepticism. Miss Nurfraddle pleaded with a digital voice recorder. The turtlenecked woman gazed at Weber with pliant curiosity. The others betrayed no emotion beyond mild boredom.

“The first is the account of H.M., the most famous patient in the literature of neurology. One summer day half a century ago, just across the Sound from here, an ignorant and overzealous surgeon, trying to cure H.M.’s worsening epilepsy, inserted a narrow silver pipette into H.M.’s hippocampus — this gray-pink area right here — and sucked it out, along with most of his parahippocampal gyrus, amygdala, and entorhinal and perirhinal cortexes — here, here, and here. The young man, roughly your age, was awake through the entire procedure.”

So, suddenly, was this entire room.

“Those of you with functioning hippocampi who attended last week’s lecture will not be surprised to learn that, along with all the tissue evacuated through the pipette, came H.M.’s ability to form new memories…”

Weber heard his florid showmanship, and it made him ill. But he’d told the story so many times over the years, in lectures as well as in his own neurological novelistic books, that he could tell it no other way. He clicked through the slides, recounting the outcome by heart: H.M. returning halfway to the land of the living, his personality intact, but unable to tag new experience.

“You’ve read Dr. Cohen’s account of H.M. Four days of tests, and each time the examiner left the room and came back, he had to introduce himself all over again. Decades had passed since his surgery.H.M. felt them as if they were days.”

A doctor’s first duty is to ask forgiveness. Where did that come from? A film he and Sylvie had seen together, in grad school. Film and line had shaken them as only couples in their early twenties can be shaken. Not long after that night, he committed to his future career. And around the same time, Sylvie must have committed to him for life. A doctor’s first duty is to ask forgiveness. He should have spent a moment every evening, begging forgiveness from everyone he’d inadvertently harmed that day.

“H.M.’s memory of the past was intact, even impressive. When shown a picture of Muhammad Ali, he said, ‘That’s Joe Louis.’ Asked again, two hours later, he responded identically, as if for the first time. He was trapped in a vault, frozen at the moment just before his operation. He couldn’t even learn that he was locked in an eternal present. He had no idea what had happened to him. Or rather: the part of him that knew couldn’t convey the fact to his conscious recollection. Several times an hour he would repeat, ‘I’m having a little argument with myself.’ He was plagued by a perpetual fear that he’d done something wrong and was being punished for it.”

Weber looked up past a row of horror-thrilled faces and saw her. He stopped speaking, disoriented. She had slipped into the hall, a secret auditor. Sylvie. Sylvie at twenty-one, in Ohio. She sat a quarter of the way up the slope, just inside the left-hand aisle, gazing at the slides, a spiral notebook on her crossed legs, her pen touching her top lip. On her folding desktop sat all the course’s texts. Here they were, at term’s end, and he’d never noticed her.

“Over the decades, H.M. became one of the most studied subjects in medical history. Through massive daily repetition, he managed to learn that he was under observation. His constant testing became a source of painful pride. A hundred times a day, he would repeat, ‘At least I can help someone. At least I can help people understand.’ But he still had to be constantly reminded where he was and told, after decades, that he wouldn’t be going home to his mother and father that day.”

He watched the waterfall of curly hair overwhelm the woman’s earnest face. She looked very little like Sylvie, in fact. She just was her. The gentle, inward intensity. The game curiosity, ready for anything that study might throw her way. Weber snapped back to his restive audience, the seconds ticking. He elaborated the case’s details without having to think them. His students scribbled away. This is what they wanted: just the facts, solid and repeatable.

“Now, alongside H.M., I would like you to consider the story of David, a thirty-eight-year-old Illinois insurance agent, married with two young children, in perfect health, who displayed no unusual neurological conditions aside from the persistent belief that the Chicago Cubs were just a season away from a pennant.”

Polite laughter rippled through the auditorium, more diffident than last year. He looked up. Young Sylvie bit her lip, eyes on her notebook. Perhaps she pitied him.

“The first sign that something was amiss came when David, ordinarily an R.E.M. man, developed a passion for Pete Seeger.”

No response from the audience. Nor had there been the year before. These names had passed into cultural amnesia. Seeger had never existed. R.E.M. was now not even a fever dream.

“His wife found this odd, but wasn’t alarmed until a month later, when David started badmouthing his favorite author, J. D. Salinger, denouncing him as a public menace. He began to collect, although never to read, what he called ‘real books,’ which were limited to western and naval adventures. David’s style of dress began to change—regress, his wife called it. He wore a pair of bib overalls to the office. His wife tried to get him to see a doctor, but he insisted that he was fine. He was so lucid his wife doubted her own distress. He spoke often about recovering the person he had once been. Over and over again, he told his wife, ‘This is the way we all used to live.’

“He began to suffer from headaches and vomiting, lethargy and reduced alertness. One evening, David came home three hours later than usual. His wife was beside herself. He’d walked back from his office, twelve miles away, having sold the car to a colleague. His wife, frightened silly, shouted at him. He explained that cars were bad for the environment. He could bike to work, saving huge amounts of money that they could put away for the children’s college. His wife suspected some stress-induced personality disorder, a thing that used to be called an acute identity crisis…”

Young Sylvie scribbled a note into the tablet balanced on her thigh. Something about the way the elbows flared, the dip of the neck, both tough and vulnerable. Sensations bombarded Weber, all their old keys, those million moments that had disappeared, one chord after the other: studying together in the library until closing; Tuesday-night European art films at the Cineclub; long debates about Sartre and Buber; more or less continuous sex. Blindfolding her and running various swatches of cloth over her bare belly, to test her claim that she could feel colors. Sylvie always guessed right.

Traces, still intact. Everything he’d been was still on file, archived somewhere. But he’d misplaced the sensations of recall until this living ghost sat down in front of him in the scooped amphitheater, scribbling all the wrong notes into her own accreting record.

“David’s wife insisted that he call the person he sold the car to and buy it back the next day. He did. But a few weeks later, he failed to come home at all. Crossing the parking lot at his office, he grew so entranced by the changes of sky above him that he spent the night there, sitting on the asphalt, staring up into space. When the police found him the next morning, he was disoriented. His wife brought him to the hospital, where he was admitted to psychiatry, who quickly passed him to neurology. Without modern scanning technology, who knows how he might have been treated? But with a scan: look here at the caudal orbitofrontal cortex, where you will see a large, circumscribed neoplasm — a meningioma — growing for years, pressing into his frontal lobes and gradually incorporating itself into his personality…”

It struck Weber as he advanced the slide: his Nebraska waver was not the first blot on an otherwise perfect record. He’d never betrayed Sylvie, technically. But every so many years, Faithful Gerald nosed up to the brink. The year he turned fifty, he’d met a sculptress who lived in the Bay Area. They corresponded for a long time, maybe a year and a half, before she forced him to admit that she was nothing but his pure invention. Ten years ago, there had been a Japanese graduate research assistant, eager and expectant, just past thirty. A near-miss thing, by any measurement. She’d gone away when he turned cold. She, who could barely lift her eyes to his when speaking, left a note for him after her departure: In Japan, researchers at least have a day of mourning for all the test animals they’ve sacrificed…Each of these theoretical love affairs had been an exception: half a dozen exceptions, all told. He seemed to be a hit-and-run repeat offender. He told Sylvie each time, but after the fact, always downplaying the near disaster. Nothing went into the permanent record.

As the next slide clicked, he saw the truth: he wanted Barbara Gillespie. But why? The act she performed did not add up. Something in her life had gone as wrong as his. She already lived in the void he was entering. A huge thing, in hiding. She knew something he needed. Something in her could recall him.

But there was a more parsimonious explanation. How would these students diagnose it, given the facts? Banal midlife crisis? Pure biology, classic self-deception, or something more striking? Some deficit that would show up on a scan, some tumor, relentlessly pressing on his frontal lobes, imperceptibly recasting him…

He cleared his throat; the sound ruptured through the speakers above him. “David couldn’t see how badly he was altered, and not just because the change had been so gradual. Remember my lecture on anosagnosia, two weeks ago. The job of consciousness is to make sure that all of the distributed modules of the brain seem integrated. That we always seem familiar to ourselves. David didn’t want to be fixed. He thought he’d found his way back to something true, something that everyone else had abandoned.”

Young Sylvie raised her head and studied him. He filled with self-loathing. He could forgive the man with the list of pathetic, halfway infidelities. But the man whose unblemished self-image had so completely erased that list: What could such a person deserve beyond a slow and agonizing public exposure? He bent his shoulders and hung on to the podium. He felt anemic, and countered with more structural analysis, more functional anatomy. He lost himself in lobes and lesions. A soft beep from his watch declared time to wrap things up.

“So we have the stories of two very different deficits, two very different men, one who could not become his next consecutive self and another who plunged into it without control. One who was locked out of new memories and the other who manufactured them too easily. We think we access our own states; everything in neurology tells us we do not. We think of ourselves as a unified, sovereign nation. Neurology suggests that we are a blind head of state, barricaded in the presidential suite, listening only to handpicked advisors as the country reels through ad hoc mobilizations…”

He looked out into the blunted audience. No good. Bhloitov was furious. The clinging turtleneck woman’s eyes wandered. Miss Nurfraddle seemed ready to call the attorney general on her BlackBerry and arrest Weber for violations of the Patriot Act. He could not bear to look at young Sylvie. He saw himself reflected in their faces, a neurological freak show, a case.

How could he tell them? Energy fell on an ancient cell; the cell registered. Some prodding set off a chemical cascade that incised the cell and changed its structure, forming a cast of the signals that fell on it. Eons later, two cells clasped, signaling each other, squaring the number of states they might inscribe. The link between them altered. The cells fired easier with each fire, their changing connections remembering a trace of the outside. A few dozen such cells slung together in a lowly slug: already an infinitely reshaping machine, halfway to knowing. Matter that mapped other matter, a plastic record of light and sound, place and motion, change and resistance. Some billions of years and hundreds of billions of neurons later, and these webbed cells wired up a grammar — a notion of nouns and verbs and even prepositions. Those recording synapses, bent back onto themselves — brain piggy-backing and reading itself as it read the world — exploded into hopes and dreams, memories more elaborate than the experience that chiseled them, theories of other minds, invented places as real and detailed as anything material, themselves matter, microscopic electro-etched worlds within the world, a shape for every shape out there, with infinite shapes left over: all dimensions springing from this thing the universe floats in. But never hot or cold, solid or soft, left or right, high or low, but only the image, the store. Only the play of likeness cut by chemical cascades, always undoing the state that did the storing. Semaphores at night, cobbling up even the cliff they signaled from. As he once wrote: Unsponsored, impossible, near-omnipotent, and infinitely fragile…

No hope of showing them that. He could at best reveal the countless ways the signals got lost. Shattered at any joint: space without dimension, effect before cause, words cut loose from their reference. Show how anyone might vanish into spatial neglect, might swap up with down and before with after. Sight without knowing, recall without reason, tea parties of personalities fighting it out for control over the bewildered body, yet always continuous, whole to themselves. As consistent and complete as these bright and skeptical students now felt.

“One last case, in our few seconds left. Here is a lateral cross section, showing damage to the anterior cingulate gyrus. Remember that this area takes input from many higher sensory regions and connects to areas controlling higher-level motor functions. Crick writes about a woman with just such damage, who lost her ability to act upon or even form intentions. Akinetic mutism: all desire to talk, think, act, or choose was gone. With forgivably human excitement, Crick declared that we had located the seat of the will.”

The bell rang, saving and damning him. Students began evacuating, even as he scrambled to conclude. “So much for an introductory look at the enormously complex question of mental integration. We know a little about the parts. We know considerably less about how they cohere into a whole. For our last session, we’ll look at the strongest candidates for an integrated model of consciousness. If you don’t have the article on the binding problem, get one from your discussion leader before you leave.”

With a bang of desks and slam of books, the students rose to go. What would he say the following week, to sum up a discipline drifting away from him? Long after his science delivered a comprehensive theory of self, no one would be a single step closer to knowing what it meant to be another. Neurology would never grasp from without a thing that existed only deep in the impenetrable inside.

Students emptied the hall, smoldering up the aisles in clumps of mutiny. A feeling came over Weber, a desire to supplement genuine neuroscience with half-baked literature, fiction that at least acknowledged its own blindness. He would make them read Freud, the prince of storytellers: Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences. He would give them Proust and Carroll. He would assign Borges’s “Funes,” the man paralyzed by perfect memory, destroyed by the fact that a dog seen in profile at three-fifteen had the same name as that dog seen from the front a minute later. The present, almost intolerable, it was so rich and bright. He would tell them the story of Mark Schluter. Describe what meeting the boy-man had done to him. Make some motion that their mirror neurons would be forced to mimic. Lose them in the maze of empathy.

The usual stragglers clustered around the podium. He tried to listen to each question, to give each observation his full attention. Four students, suffering end-of-semester anxieties. Just behind the first wave, four more waited. He scanned the hall, not knowing what he looked for. Then he saw her, hovering, halfway up the left-hand aisle. Young Sylvie, looking back at him. She stood, debating with herself. She had a message for him, for the boy he’d once been, but she couldn’t wait. She had some future place to get to.

He tried to rush the questioners, each with a reassuring smile. The crowd began to thin, and he looked up, surprised, into the face of Bhloitov. This close, Weber saw that the anarchist’s black hair was dyed. He had on a studded leather arm bracelet and, peeking below his left sleeve, a bright red and cyan Virgin of Guadalupe. His downy mustache was split by a faint scar — imperfectly repaired cleft lip. Weber glanced up into the hall. Young Sylvie, hesitant, started to drift away. He looked back at the anarchist, trying to master himself. “Sir. How can I help you?”

Bhloitov flinched, blinked, and backed away a little. “Your account of that, that meningioma. David?” His voice apologized. Weber nodded him on. “I’m wondering…I think that maybe my father…”

Weber looked up, desperate reflex. Sylvie had on her backpack and was marching upstairs to the auditorium exit. He watched her all the way up, as Bhloitov murmured and effaced himself. She never turned to look back. Where are you going? Weber called in symbol space. Come back. It’s me. Still here.

It was time to retire. He could no longer trust himself in the classroom, let alone the lab. He could find some volunteer work, adult literacy or science tutoring. In the twenty years he had left, he could learn another foreign language or write a neurological novel. He had stories enough, anyway. He would never have to publish it.

He stayed on campus until early evening, submerged in invented labor, the steady swapping of letters of recommendation that comprised academic existence. It felt like atonement, scutwork. For a dose of phenylethylamine, he prescribed himself a dozen ounces of chocolate. Recently, it had helped lift the cloak of winter evenings.

The strange thing was, he felt almost no desire for Barbara Gillespie. Perhaps he found her attractive, in the abstract. But even now, his imagined transactions never involved anything more than harmless clasping. She was like — what? Neither family nor friend; certainly not mere lover. Some relation that hadn’t yet been invented. He didn’t want to possess her. He wanted only to investigate, with the usual battery of questionnaires, what had collapsed her, and why it felt so acquitting to be with her. He wanted to break her down, to draw her out. Get her history and vita. She’d said almost nothing in the few minutes they’d actually spent in each other’s presence. Yet she knew something about Mark that he was blundering to find.

He saw her in green dungarees and white cotton shirt, climbing a wooden stepladder. The ladder was up against a white Cape Cod house, near the ocean. She was reaching up to the eaves. What did he know about her? Nothing at all. Nothing but what his prefrontal cortex might spin out of thin air and flotsam from the hippocampus. He saw her as a little girl with a black veil pulled down over her face, lighting a fifty-cent candle and placing it on an altar in an incense-choked church. What did he know about anyone? He saw her and Mark Schluter, in gray jumpsuits and yellow hardhats, inspecting a bouquet of gauges on a gleaming stainless-steel cylinder as tall as a house. He saw her hanging out of the passenger window of a trolling blue coupe driven by Karin Schluter, holding out a stuffed teddy bear to the winds. He saw himself, standing shoulder to shoulder with Barbara in a crowded courtroom somewhere like Kabul, trying to get legal custody of the Schluter brother and sister, but unable to make their request understood in any useful language.

It struck him that he’d invented Nebraska. The whole story: some foray into a mixed, experimental genre, a morality play masquerading as journalism. He had no reliable memory of anything that had happened there. He could accurately reconstruct exactly none of Barbara Gillespie’s traits, let alone her features. Yet he could not stop summoning up recovered memories of her, all of them so detailed that he might have sworn they were documented data.

What did he know about his own wife’s life? Who she was when she wasn’t his wife. He drove home, through the snow-covered commons. The two colonial churches never failed to settle him. He made the long bend onto Strong’s Neck, the brown-green harbor at low tide. He turned up Bob’s Lane, that passage impossible for visitors to find unless they’d already been on it. The winter rains still swamped the front yard. A family of green-winged teal had, all fall, made a home alongside the temporary lake. But now that lake was frozen over, and the ducks had flown.

Sylvie had beaten him home. She tried to return from Wayfinders early these days, ever since he’d dropped his bombshell. He hadn’t asked her to. But neither did he have the courage to tell her it wasn’t necessary. She was feeding something into the oven, eggplant casserole. Twenty years ago, he’d told her that he would gladly eat it every night, and now she remembered that buried zeal. Her anxious smile when she looked up went right through him. “Good day?”

“Golden.” Something they used to say.

“How did the lecture go?”

“If you’re asking me, I believe there’s a distinct possibility that I was brilliant.” He took her in his arms too quickly, while she struggled to remove her oven mitt. “Have I told you that I’m absolutely mad about you?”

She giggled doubtfully and looked behind him. Who did she imagine might be coming? Who could he possibly be bringing home? “You have indeed. Yesterday, I believe.”

The TV show airs. But it’s strange. They’ve done something digital to Mark — run him through some kind of high-tech video filter. People who don’t know him would never suspect. But his friends, what few friends Mark Schluter has left, will think he’s some kind of stunt man stand-in.

The show gets the story mostly right, at least. They talk about the crash, the vehicle that cut in front of him, the one that ran off the road behind. And there’s a great moment when the handwritten note comes up and fills the screen, and they even have subtitles, in case you can’t read or something. I am no one. I am no one. Man, that could be anybody, these days. But there’s a cash award, like five hundred bucks. With the economy down the toilet again and the whole state on the dole, somebody’s bound to come forward and collect.

He’d like to sit around and wait for the phone to ring with anonymous tips, but there’s too much to do. The Kopy Karin comes by, all cranked because she heard about the show but missed it. When did you do this? Why didn’t you tell me? It’s a good performance; he pretty much believes she had no idea.

He’s got a plan to test her, something he’s been thinking about forever. He asks if she’d like to take a drive, out to Brome Road, the old abandoned farm his father once tried to run. The place he lived in from eight until almost fourteen. The place his sister always talked about like it was some kind of paradise lost. Her replacement seems to have been drilled on the routine. She’s bouncing like a girl as soon as the invitation is out of his mouth. You’d think he was asking her to the prom or something.

They drive out together, in her little Jap car. It’s weirdly warm, for two weeks before Christmas. He’s in his light-blue jacket, October gear. Greenhouse ecological catastrophe, probably. Well, enjoy the short-term bennies. She’s all stoked, like she hasn’t seen the place forever. Funny thing is, she probably hasn’t. They head up the long farmhouse driveway, and it’s like somebody dropped a neutron bomb on the front porch. All the windows, black and curtainless. The yard, a sea of tall grass and weeds, like some kind of prairie restoration project. There’s a black and orange NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to the porch, which is a joke. Nobody’s lived in the place for years. Truth be told, the Schluter family kind of ran the place into the ground, and no subsequent resident has been able to bring it back. Abandoned since ’99, but he’s never come prowling until now.

The barn is leaning hard to the right, like it’ll ditch if it gets hit by a little microwave radiation. But before they can pull up to it, Karin Two slams on the brakes. She’s all: Where’s the tree? The sycamore is gone. The one that you and Dad planted for my twelfth birthday. Well, it shakes him up, at first. She knows what they planted, when. But then, there’s the stump sitting right there. And anybody in town could’ve told her. Those fool Schluter men, planting a big water-sucking tree, when they don’t even have water table enough to keep their beans from getting singed.

He says: I heard they were taking it down, a while ago.

She turns on him, her eyes all hurt. Why didn’t you tell me?

Tell you? I didn’t even know you then.

She pulls over on the gravel and gets out. He follows her. She walks up to the stump and just stands there, in her baggy jeans, her hands in the pockets of her little brown leather jacket just like the one Karin One used to wear. She’s not a bad human being. She’s just gotten mixed up in bad business.

When did it go? she asks. Before or after Mom?

The question knocks him back a little. And not just her asking it. He’s not sure.

She looks at him, going: I know. It’s like she’s still around, isn’t it? Like she’s going to come out that side door with a plateful of pigs-in-blankets and threaten us with a belt whipping if we don’t say grace and eat.

Well, the words really creep him. But this is exactly why he’s brought her out here. To probe the limits. What else do you remember about her? he asks. And she starts unloading all kinds of stuff. Stuff only his sister knows. Things from when they were young, when Joan Schluter still looked like the original Betty Crocker. She goes: You remember how proud she was, about that award her family won when she was little?

He can’t help answering: Fitter Family Contest, Nebraska State Fair, 1951.

Run by some kind of national eugenics society, she says. Judging them on their teeth and hair, like they did the cows and pigs. And they got a gold medal!

Bronze, he corrects her.

Whatever. The point is, she spent the rest of her life pissed off at Cappy for polluting the gene pool and producing us.

She keeps reciting these amazing things, things that Mark himself has forgotten. Things from late childhood, before Joan was on a first-name basis with Mr. Omnipotent. Things from the bad years, when you couldn’t say boo to her without her falling to her knees and belching minor spirits. You remember that book, Mark? The one she used to carry around that always made you hysterical? Jesus Fills Your Hole? And the day she finally figured out what you were laughing at?

The two of them stand there by the sycamore stump, giggling like teen stoners. A wind blows up, and it gets cold, fast. He wants to go up to the house, but her words now are like a snowmelt river. Things from the end, when his mother became a premature saint. You wouldn’t have recognized her, she says, like Mark wasn’t even there. You wouldn’t have believed her, so agreeable and sweet. We were talking one afternoon, after she went on the drip, and out of the blue, she started telling me that the afterlife was probably a delusion. And yet, she’d sit there, more Christian than Christ, sucking down the cheddar cheese hospital soup that I was spooning into her mouth, and saying, Oh, that’s good! That’s good!

She’s jumbled the facts a bit, but Mark’s not going to argue. He’s freezing out here, all of a sudden. He takes her arm and pulls her toward the house. She won’t quit talking.

You know, I’m still getting her mail? I guess they don’t forward beyond the grave. Mostly charities and credit-card apps. Catalogs from the store where she used to order those frumpy cardigans.

They reach the front door. He tries it: locked, even though there’s nothing inside but mouse shit and paint chips. He looks at her, not volunteering anything.

You don’t remember? she says. And she goes right to the loose slat just to the left of the front picture window, jiggles it a little bit, rusty. Finally pops it open, and there’s the spare key. The one they didn’t even mention to the family who moved in after them. It’s distinctly possible she’s reading his brain waves. Wireless scans, some kind of new digital thing. He should have asked Shrinky, when he had the chance. She unlocks the door and they step into something right out of a horror film. The old living room is stripped, with a layer of gray dust and cobweb over everything. The sitting room has had the stuffing beat out of it. There’s signs of infestation, mammals a lot larger than mice. Karin Two pulls her cheeks back with her palms.

Don’t do that. It makes you look like one of those bank robbers with the nylon-stocking faces.

But she doesn’t hear him. She just wanders from room to room in a coma, pointing at invisible things. The puke sofa, the TV with the rabbit ears, the parakeet cage. She knows everything, and she brings it all back with such hypnotic pain that she’s either the greatest actress who ever lived, or there’s truly something of his sister’s brain transplanted in her. He’s got to figure it out, before it drives him certifiable. She’s walking around stunned, like one of those bomb victims on cable news. Here’s where we ate. Here was the shoe pile. She’s really upset. Meanwhile, he’s wondering whether it’s the original house or some scale model. She turns on him. You remember when Dad caught us playing doctor and locked us in the pantry?

That wasn’t what we…But why start with her? She wasn’t there.

Prisoners. For days, it seemed. And you started this whole Great Escape thing. Using a piece of uncooked spaghetti to push the skeleton key through the keyhole onto a square of wax paper that you pulled in under the crack of the door. What were you, six? Where did you learn that kind of stuff?

The movies, of course. Where else does anybody learn anything?

She stands at the kitchen window, looking out on the back forty. What do you remember about…your father?

And that’s kind of funny, actually. Because that’s what he and Karin One used to call the man. Your father. Blaming him on each other. Well, he tells her. The man was no farmer. That’s for damn sure. Always a minimum of three weeks late or early. Beat the system. Defy conventional knowledge. Year he harvested anything at all was a golden era. We were lucky he got out, and into all those can’t-miss bankruptcies.

She just shrugs, sticks her fists into the dry and dusty sink. You’re right, she says; we were lucky. The Farm Crisis would have gotten him anyway. It got everybody else.

Ah, but rainmaking, Mark says. Nobody ever lost a buck rainmaking.

She snorts bitterly. Who knows why? It’s only a job for her. But she’s great at it. She shakes her head. I mean, can you remember his voice? The way he walked? Who was that guy? I mean, I’m now about as old as he was, when he locked us in the cellar. And I just can’t…I remember he had a big scar on the lower inside of his right shin from some kind of accident he had when he was young.

Railroad tie, he tells her. It doesn’t matter if she knows: they can’t hurt him with ancient history. Dropped a railroad tie on himself, working for the Union Pacific.

That can’t be right, Mark. How can you drop a railroad tie on your shin?

You don’t know my father.

She starts to laugh, but then it freaks her. You’re right, she says. She starts to cry. You’re right. And he’s got to hug her a little to get her to quit. She drags him out back, to the utility room, a little overhang above the tool rack. She says: When we moved out, to the Farview house? Mom and I, we found these videos…

What, you mean those self-employment things? Cream Your Competitors? The Big Score?

She shakes her head, shuddering. Horrible, she says. I can’t even. I can’t.

Oh, Mark says. The fisting stuff. Yeah, I knew about those.

And when Mom, in shock, brings them to him and starts screaming, he just stands there and says he’s never seen them in his life. He doesn’t know how they got there. Maybe the previous owners left them. Videos! Videos weren’t even invented when we moved into this house. He just took them out back and poured gasoline on them. Bonfire.

Tell me about it, Mark says.

And Mom just took it all in. Points toward martyrdom. Believed he was well on the way to repentance.

Well, Mark says. Maybe not.

No. Okay. Maybe not.

They go upstairs, where the bedrooms were. He’s getting used to it, to the devastation. Little scraps of crap line the hall: an old telephone bill, an empty cigarette lighter. Piece of a tarp and a couple of beer bottles. Thin carpet of plaster dust coating the floors. But a person could live here. No big deal. You get used to anything.

She stands in his old room, pointing with her finger, going, Bed, dresser, shelves, toy chest. Her eyes check with him, seeing if she gets everything right. She does. They couldn’t possibly have trained her in all this. There has to be some kind of direct synapse transfer. Which means that something of his sister is actually downloaded inside this woman. Something essential. Some part of her brain, her soul. A little bit of Karin, here. She points out the niche in the windowsill, the tiny house where Mr. Thurman lived, year after year. Mark’s only reliable childhood friend. He winces, but nods.

That challenge look of hers, again. Mark? Can I ask you one thing?

I didn’t go anywhere near those damn Seventeen magazines.

She laughs a little, like she’s not sure if he’s trying to be funny. But she presses on. Did Cappy…did he ever touch you?

What do you mean? Used to almost break my legs. I still have the bruises.

That’s not…Never mind. Forget about it. Come do me. My bedroom.

Hang on, he says. Do you? You’re not trying to seduce me, are you?

She slugs him in the shoulder. He follows her obediently, snickering. Always worth a laugh. They stand in the rotting gray room, playing more quiz. Bed. Wrong. Bed? Wrong! Dresser? Not quite.

Well, how the hell should I know? She was always changing it around.

Karin Two puts a hand on his wrist, stops his arms. She tries to look him in the eye. What was she like? Tell me what…she was like.

Who? You mean my sister? You’re really interested in my sister?

Gone so long that she can’t ever be coming back. And something must be wrong with Mark Schluter, something from the accident that not even the hospital knows about, because he stands there bawling like a goddamned child.

They stood alone together in the abandoned Brome house, reconstructing the past they no longer shared. There came a moment, amid the trashed rooms and shaky memories, when it struck Karin that they’d have that day, at least, that one sunlit afternoon of confusion in common, if nothing else. And when her brother started to cry and she moved to console him, he let her. A thing they’d never had, before.

They went outside, into the warm December. They walked the length of their father’s old field, not knowing who farmed it now. In the crush of stubble under their feet, she felt those summer mornings, waking before daylight, going out to walk beans while the dew was still on them, hacking weeds with a hoe so sharp she once almost sliced off her big toe, right through the leather of her work boot.

Mark tagged alongside, head down. She felt him struggling and was afraid to say a word, afraid to be anyone, least of all Karin Schluter. Oddest of all, she was okay with holding back. She’d gotten used to the doubling, to being this woman. It let her start from scratch with him, even while the other Karin improved so drastically in his memory. A chance to rewrite the record: in fact, two chances at once.

They rolled over the stubbly black rise. She felt all over again, as she had as a child, the vicious treelessness of this place. Not a scrap of cover in sight. Do anything at all, and God would spy you out. Off on a slight crest in the middle distance, cars and trucks whipped back and forth on the interstate like scythes. She turned to look at the house. This time next year, it would be gone, collapsed or bulldozed, never to have existed. The open-book roof, the slanting cellar door propped up against the brick foundation, the square-shouldered white stump of a box, jutting up from the bare horizon. Protection from nothing.

“You remember when you and Dad tried to clean out that backed-up cistern?”

He pounded his head, as if the disaster had just happened. “Don’t remind me about shit you can’t know.”

She didn’t know how hard to push. “Remember when your sister ran away?”

He folded his hands over the crown of his head, to keep it from flying off. He started walking again, studying the rill in the soil that his feet followed. “She was a godsend, all those years growing up. She kept me out of a heap of death. Oh, she had her little quirks. Don’t we all? But she just wanted to be loved.”

“Don’t we all?” Karin echoed.

“You two really are a lot alike. She used to sleep around a bit, too.” She swung toward him, violent. He gaped back, mocking. “Hey, chill. I’m just bashing you. Man, you are even easier to get a rise out of than she was.” She slapped him in the chest with the back of her hand. He just laughed that mirthless laugh. “But, hey, I have to ask you — that guy you’re currently doing?”

She dropped her eyes and studied the plow cut. Which one?

“Why are you with him, anyway? Is he entirely sexually normal?”

She couldn’t help snickering. “What’s normal, Mark?”

“Normal? Man, woman, front door. Nothing that’s going to get you arrested.”

“He’s…pretty normal.”

Mark stopped and knelt down on the ground, over a dried carcass. He prodded it with his toe. “Pocket gopher,” he declared. “Poor thing.”

She pulled him away. “What do you have against Daniel, anyway? You were such deep friends, all those years. What happened?”

“What ‘happened’?” Mark traced the quotes in the air. “I’ll tell you what ‘happened.’ He tried to queer me. Out of the blue. Sexual harassment.”

“Mark! Come on. I don’t believe you. When did this happen?”

He spun around and raised his hands. “How am I supposed to know? Like, November 20, 1988, five o’clock in the afternoon?”

“Oh, Markie. What were you? Fourteen, fifteen?”

“You should have heard him. ‘Something we could have, together. Just touch each other, there. Just you and me…’ One sick puppy.”

She lifted her hands and knelt to the dried mud. “You’ve got to be kidding. This is the big fight that neither of you would talk about, all these years?” He squatted next to her and combed the dirt with his fingers, avoiding her eye. “All growing boys do that kind of thing with each other, at least once.”

“Huh. Not this growing boy.”

“You threw away a friendship on that?” But she’d exiled best girlfriends for less.

Mark toyed with a root mass, his mouth twisted. “He went his bent way; I went mine.”

She touched his shoulder. He didn’t pull away. “Why didn’t you tell me? I mean, why never mention it to your sister?”

“Why? You’re both college-educated women. If you want to experiment with diddling a bisexual, what’s it to me?” He squinted in resentment across the swollen, rolling field. “What do you think he’d say, if he saw the two of us out here, like this?”

She lay back against a furrow ridge, wanting to laugh. Horrible. Worst of all, this was their most honest, intimate conversation since they’d lived in this house.

“It wasn’t just, you know. Petting my pecker. The guy really loved me or something.”

His eyes caught the scudding clouds, and a sick feeling started in her. The scrape of explanations. The guy really…But it couldn’t be true. Not in the way Mark meant it.

“I also think he may have had sex with animals.”

“Jesus, Mark! Will you quit? Who told you that? Your friends? Biggest barnyard abusers there are.”

He hung his hands around his neck, miserable with thought. “You know, you were right about Rupp and Cain. You were right and I was wrong. I didn’t listen to you. I should listen to you more.”

“I know,” she told the dirt. “Same here.” She listened now, Daniel changing as she heard. She pushed off the harvested earth with her scuffed palms and stood. “Come on. Let’s head back, before we get arrested for trespassing.”

“What do the two of you do together, anyway? For pleasure.” He twisted his head to the side and screened it with his hands. She blinked at him, feeling ill. “Don’t give me any messy details. I mean, you go to the opera? Hang out at the public library until they throw you out?”

What did they do together? Pleasure was not something they’d perfected. “We walk, sometimes. We work together. For the Refuge.”

“Doing what?”

“Well, at the moment, trying to save the cranes from their admirers.” She sketched out the details of her working day, surprising herself while she talked. She had been with the Refuge for a little more than a month, and she had all the fervor of a convert. She couldn’t imagine herself now without the work. Sitting for hours at a table strewn with buttes of government pamphlets, trying to put them into language that would make an indifferent person come awake and see all the things that drank from the river. The work had populated some emptiness in her, taken up the slack Capgras had left. She’d been on hold for so long. She wanted to tell Mark her data. Humans consuming twenty percent more energy than the world can produce. Extinction at a thousand times the normal background rate. Instead, she settled for telling him about the fight for water rights, the land war unfolding outside Farview.

“Wait a minute. You’re saying this Nature Outpost is bad for the birds?”

“That’s what the numbers say. That’s what Daniel thinks.”

The name plunged Mark back into a funk. “So-called Daniel. He’s the missing link, you know. Everything keeps pointing back to him.”

Missing link. Coupler with animals. Champion of all creatures that could not compete with consciousness. They were almost back to the house. Mark had his hands in his back pockets, kicking a field stone down the furrow. He stopped short and bore around on her. “Where’s this nature village supposed to go?”

She got her bearings and pointed southeast. “They want to put it in over there somewhere. Down on the river.”

He snapped his head back, and his body jerked to attention. “Fuck. Look where you’re pointing! What in God’s name is going on?” A cry of pain came out of him. “You don’t see it? Right where I had my accident.” He fell back against the inclined cellar door. “Figure this out for me.” For a second he seemed on the verge of a seizure. “Save the birds? Save the river? What about saving me? Where the hell is Shrinky? There’s so much shit I have to ask him. The man bailed out of here so fast, you’d think I had tried to queer him.”

His desperate chestnut eyes widened at her, and she had to say something. “It wasn’t your fault, Mark. The man has problems of his own.”

He leaned forward on the incline, ready to lunge. “What do you mean ‘of his own’?”

She stepped backward. Checked the distance to the car. He was capable of anything. Something basic was in him, clawing to get out.

But he leaned back again and held up his palms. “Okay, bag it. Just listen. I asked you out here for a reason. Sorry about tricking you, but this is wartime. There’s something I need to settle, once and for all. I’m not sure who you answer to, or whose side you’re really on. But I do know you helped me out while I was down. I’m still not sure why, but I’ll never forget it.” He craned his neck and looked up at the eggshell sky. “Well, let’s put it this way. So long as I remember anything, I’ll remember that. I don’t know how you know what you know, but it’s clear you’ve got my sister’s entire database, give or take. They downloaded her, imprinted you, or something. You know more crap about me than I know about myself. You’re the only one who can answer me this. I have no choice but to trust you. So don’t screw me on this, all right?” He stood and walked ten feet from the house, angle enough to point up at his old bedroom window. “You remember that guy?”

She managed to get her skull to bob.

“Something in your memory banks. Who he was, how he grew up, what became of him? What he became?”

She willed her head to nod again, but it would not. Mark didn’t notice. He was staring up at his childhood window, waiting for the evidence to come crawling down on a long pillowcase-and-sheet rope.

He turned and took her by the shoulders like she was God’s own messenger. “You have a strong memory of Mark Schluter, this time last year? Say, ten or twelve days before the accident? I need to know whether you think, given your sense of that guy they primed you with…whether you think he could have done it…on purpose.”

Her brain made a muffled buzz. “What do you mean, Markie?”

“Don’t call me that. You know what I’m asking. Was I trying to off myself?”

Her gut folded. She shook her head so hard her hair whipped her face.

He studied her for betrayal. “You’re sure? You’re absolutely sure? I didn’t say anything beforehand? Wasn’t depressed? Because here’s what I’m thinking. Something was in the road in front of me. I’m remembering something in the road. White. Maybe that oncoming car, cutting me off. Then again, maybe it was, you know, my finder, that note-writer, changing the course of my life. Because maybe I was out there, you know: trying to roll it. Finish up the story. And somebody stopped me.”

Objections appeared before she could think them. He’d shown no sign of depression. He had his job, his friends, and his new home. If he’d wanted to do something like that, she would have known…But she’d suspected the possibility herself. As early as the hospital, and as late as that morning.

“You’re sure?” Mark said. “Nothing in the sisterly memories they fed you to suggest anything suicidal? All right. I have to believe you wouldn’t lie to me about this. Let’s go. Take me home.” They walked back to the car. He got in the passenger side. She started the engine. “Just a minute,” he said. He got out again, ran up to the rotting porch, and tore off the NO TRESPASSING sign. He ran back to the car and piled in, jerking his head toward the road.

She drove him home, a distance that expanded as they rode. She wavered again over the olanzapine decision. Mark liked her now, at least a little. Better, he liked what she’d been. She knew what a cure might return him to. Maybe Mark was better off like this. Maybe well-being meant more than official sanity. He — the old Mark — might have said as much himself. But succumbing to reason, she told him that they needed to go see Dr. Hayes again. “They’ve found something, Mark. Something they can give you that might help clear things up. Make you feel a little more…together.”

“Together would be very helpful, right around now.” But he wasn’t really listening. He was peering off to his right, toward the river, the future Nature Outpost, his past accident. “Save the birds, you say?” He nodded stoically at the utter insanity of the race. “Save the birds and kill the people.”

He flipped on the car radio. It was tuned to the frenzied conservative talk station that she listened to, for the pleasure of confirming her own worst fears. The president had ordered half a million servicemen vaccinated against smallpox. Now the home audience was calling in with advice about protecting yourself from the coming outbreak.

“Biological warfare,” he chanted. He turned, his face plastered with absolute incomprehension. “I wish I’d been born sixty years earlier.”

The words blindsided her. “What do you mean, Mark? Why?”

“Because if I’d been born sixty years earlier, I’d be dead by now.”

She turned into River Run and crawled up in front of his house. “I’ll make an appointment with Dr. Hayes, okay, Mark? Mark? Are you with me?”

He shook off his fog, hesitating, his right foot dangling out of the car door. “Whatever. Just do me one small favor. If my real sister ever does show up again?” He drummed his forehead with his first two fingers. “You think you could still save a little feeling for me?”

“The self presents itself as whole, willful, embodied, continuous, and aware.” Or so Weber wrote once, in The Three-Pound Infinity. But even back then, before he knew anything, he knew how each of those prerequisites could fail.

Whole: Sperry and Gazzaniga’s work with commissurotomy patients split that fiction down the middle. Epileptics who’d had their corpus callosum cut as a last-ditch method to treat their disease ended up inhabiting two separate brain hemispheres with no connection. Two severed minds in the same skull, intuitive right and patterning left, each hemisphere using its own percepts, ideas, and associations. Weber had watched the personalities of a subject’s two half brains tested independently. The left claimed to believe in God; the right reported itself an atheist.

Willful: Libet laid that one to rest in 1983, even for the baseline brain. He asked subjects to watch a microsecond clock and note when they decided to lift a finger. Meanwhile, electrodes watched for a readiness potential, indicating muscle-initiating activity. The signal began a full third of a second before any decision to move the finger. The we that does the willing is not the we that we think we are. Our will was one of those classic comedy bit parts: the errand boy who thinks he’s the CEO.

Embodied: consider autoscopy and out-of-body experience. Neuroscientists in Geneva concluded that the events resulted from paroxysmal cerebral dysfunctions of the temporoparietal junction. A little electrical current to the proper spot in the right parietal cortex, and anyone could be made to float up to the ceiling and gaze back down on their abandoned body.

Continuous: that thread was ready to snap at the lightest pull. De-realization and depersonalization. Anxiety attacks and religious conversions. Misidentification — the whole continuum of Capgras-like phenomena, phenomena that Weber had witnessed his whole life without quite noticing. Eternal love retracted. Entire life philosophies abandoned in disgust. The concert pianist he’d interviewed who woke one morning after prolonged illness, no discernible pathology, still able to play, but unable to feel the music, or care about it…

Aware: here was his wife, asleep on the pillow next to him.

This thought formed in him as he lay awake at dawn, listening to a mockingbird roll through its round of pilfered calls: of selves as the self describes itself, no one had one. Lying, denying, repressing, confabulating: these weren’t pathologies. They were the signature of awareness, trying to stay intact. What was truth, compared to survival? Floating or broken or split or a third of a second behind, something still insisted: Me. Always the water changed, but the river stood still.

The self was a painting, traced on that liquid surface. Some thought sent an action potential down an axon. A little glutamate jumped the gap, found a receptor on the target dendrite, and triggered an action potential in the second cell. But then came the real fire: the action potential in the receiver cell kicked out a magnesium block from another kind of receptor, calcium flowed in, and all chemical hell broke loose. Genes activated, producing new proteins, which flowed back to the synapse and remodeled it. And that made a new memory, the canyon down which thought flowed. Spirit from matter. Every burst of light, every sound, every coincidence, every random path through space changed the brain, altering synapses, even adding them, while others weakened or fell away from lack of activity. The brain was a set of changes for mirroring change. Use or lose. Use and lose. You chose, and the choice unmade you.

As with synapse, so went science. When long-term potentiation was discovered in the 1970s, perhaps a dozen articles appeared in half a decade. In the half-decade after that, almost one hundred. Fire together, wire together. In the early nineties, a thousand papers or more. Now more than twice that, and redoubling every five years. More articles than any researcher could hope to integrate. Science was loose, with the exposed synapse. The synapse was already science. Smallest imaginable machine for comparing and conjoining. Classical and operant conditioning, written in chemicals, able to learn the entire world, and float a you on top of it.

The mockingbird peeled off its bursts: fives, sevens, threes. Each burst mutated like the spins of a cycling car alarm. Listen to the mockingbird. Listen to the mockingbird. He’d sung that song with this same wife once, when they still sang. A mockingbird is singing over her grave.

This was the bird’s hymn to plasticity, every glance of rising sunlight off the rippled bay changing the shape of its brain. The brain that retrieved a memory was not the brain that had formed it. Even retrieving a memory mangled what was formerly there. Every thought, damaging and redamming. Even this mockingbird accompaniment, this one, changing Weber beyond recall.

The tangle thickened as he traced it: groups of wired neurons that modeled and memorized the changing light were themselves modeled, in other neuron groups. Whole chunks of circuitry reserved for sandboxing other circuits, the mind’s eye cannibalizing the brain’s eye, social intelligence stealing the circuitry of spatial orientation. What-if mimicking what-is; simulations simulating simulations. When his little Jess was not yet a month old, he could get her to stick out her tongue just by sticking out his tongue at her. No counting the miracles involved. She had to locate his tongue relative to his body, then somehow map his parts onto the feel of hers, find and order a tongue she could not even see, could not even know about. And she did all this at the mere sight of him, this infant who had been taught nothing. Where was the end of his self, the start of hers?

The self bled out, the work of mirror neurons, empathy circuits, selected for and preserved through many species for their obscure survival value. Baby Jess’s supramarginal gyrus conjured up a fiction, an imaginary model of what her body would be like if it did what his was doing. Weber had seen people with damage to the area — ideomotor apraxia. Asked to hang a picture, they could. But asked to pretend to hang a picture, they slapped helplessly at the wall, no clasped hammer, no mimed nail.

When his girl, at four, looked through her picture books, her face would match the expressions painted there. A smile made her smile, inducing girlish happiness. A grimace gave her real pain. Weber, too, to witness: emotions moved the muscles, but merely moving the muscles made emotions. Those with damage to the insula could no longer do the imitative, integrated mapping of body-states necessary to read or adopt someone else’s muscles. Then the community of self collapsed into one.

The bird mocked on from a branch up close to their bedroom window, bits of riff stolen from other species and stuffed into the growing melody. On the backs of his eyelids, using the same brain regions as real sight, Weber watched a little boy he did not recognize — it might have been Mark, or someone much like him — out in a frosty field watching birds taller than he. And seeing them arch and leap and curl their necks and beat their wings, the boy beat his.

To be awake and know: already awful. To be awake, know, and remember: unbearable. Against the triple curse, Weber could make out only one consolation. Some part of us could model some other modeler. And out of that simple loop came all love and culture, the ridiculous overflow of gifts, each one a frantic proof that I was not it…We had no home, no whole to come back to. The self spread thin on everything it looked at, changed by every ray of the changing light. But if nothing inside was ever fully us, at least some part of us was loose, in the run of others, trading in all else. Someone else’s circuits circled through ours.

This was the dawn thought that formed in Weber’s brain, his shifting synapses, all the insight that he ought ever to have needed. But it scattered at the arrival of new bursts, as Sylvie moaned and twisted awake, opened her eyes and smiled at him. “Did you?” she asked, fuzzily. Old code between them: Sleep well?

And, yes, he nodded his head, smiling back at her. All his life long, he had slept well.

Christmas came and went, and still no angel. Dozens of people called in after the broadcast, all of them with theories but none with useful information. When even Crime Solvers let him down, Mark hinted broadly to Karin that he now had a pretty good idea of what had really happened that night. Any ambitious business project for transforming the region would first require transforming the region’s inhabitants. When she tried to get him to elaborate, he told her to use her head and figure it out herself.

Early in the evening of New Year’s Day, Specialist Thomas Rupp, 167th Cavalry Regiment — the Prairie Soldiers — appeared on the doorstep of the Homestar. He was coatless in his three-color desert camouflage fatigues, having just returned to town after unit exercises. Mark looked out his dirty front window into the dark yard, thinking that paramilitary forces had arrived with the purpose of commandeering his house in conjunction with this new Nature Outpost development.

Specialist Rupp stood on Mark’s doorstep, rapping triplets on the front door’s simulated wood. The soundtrack from a public television antiques show seeped through the windows. “Gus. Wassup. Open up, Gus. You can’t stay mad at us forever.”

Mark stood on the other side of the door, brandishing a thirty-six-inch Rigid pipe wrench. Realizing who it was, he called through the flimsy panel. “Go away. You’re not welcome around these parts.”

“Schluter, man. Open the door. It’s getting ugly out here.”

It was twenty degrees, with a visibility of ten feet. The wind whipped a fine-grained dry snow into a white sandstorm. Rupp was shivering, which only convinced Mark of a trap. Nothing ever froze Rupp.

“Stuff to clear up, buddy. Let me in and we’ll talk.”

By now, the dog was hysterical, snarling like a wolf and leaping three feet into the air, ready to plunge through the window and attack anything to protect its master. Mark couldn’t hear himself think. “What stuff? Like the fact that you lied to me? Like the fact that you ran me off the road?”

“Let me in and we’ll talk. Clear this crap up, once and for all.”

Mark hit the front door with the wrench, hoping to scare off the intruder. The dog began to howl. Rupp screamed profanity, to shock Mark into stopping. The next-door neighbor, a retired data processor who served homeless people lunches at Kearney Catholic, threw open her window and threatened to firebomb them. Both men continued to yell at each other, Mark demanding explanations and Rupp demanding to be let in out of the cold. “Open the fuck up, Gus. I’ve got no time for this. I’ve been called up. Active duty. I’m going to Fort Riley the day after tomorrow, man. Then on to Saudi, soon as they pull my chain.”

Mark stopped yelling and hushed the dog long enough to ask, “Saudi? What for?”

“The Crusades. Armageddon. George versus Saddam.”

“You’re so full of it. I knew you were full of it. What good is that going to do anyone?”

“Round two,” Rupp said. “The real thing this time. Going after the bastards who brought down the Towers.”

“They’re dead,” Mark said, more to the dog than to Rupp. “Died on impact in a flaming fireball.”

“Speaking of death.” Rupp stamped the ground and yelped with cold. “Dressed for a hundred and ten degrees, and it’s Scott of the Antarctic out here, Gus. Are you going to let me in or do you want to kill me?”

Trick question. Mark said nothing.

“All right, man. I give up. You win. Talk to Duane about it. Or wait for me to get back. This showdown thing is going to be over fast. We’re giving these goons a week at the outside. One-shot Rupp’ll be back here slaughtering again, by Flag Day. Take you fishing for your birthday.” Silence issued from the house. Rupp backed away, into the icy sandstorm. “Talk to Duane. He’ll explain what happened. What do you want from Iraq, Gus? One of those little white skull caps? Some prayer beads? Miniature oil well? What can I bring you back? Just name it.”

Rupp had vanished in his truck by the time Mark shouted, “What do I want? I want my friend back.”

On Groundhog Day, a Sunday, Daniel Riegel called his boyhood friend. They’d had no contact for fifteen years, aside from deniable sightings at a distance and a supermarket run-in where they’d passed each other without a word. Daniel’s hands shook as he dialed the number. He hung up once, then forced himself to start again.

Karin had told him all about that afternoon at the abandoned Schluter house, a house Daniel remembered as well as he remembered his own. She confronted him with Mark’s disclosure, something broken in her. You loved my brother, didn’t you? Of course he had. I mean, you really loved him. She had stood there rethinking everything, appraising Daniel as she would an alien.

He had no idea what he’d say if Mark Schluter picked up. It no longer mattered what he said, so long as he said something. A voice at the other end shouted, “Yeah?” and Daniel said, “Mark? It’s Danny.” His voice slid like some pubescent’s between soprano and bass. Mark said nothing, so Daniel filled, insanely matter-of-fact. “Your old friend. How are things going? What have you been up to? It’s been a while.”

At last Mark spoke. “You’ve been talking to her, haven’t you? Of course you have. She’s your wife. Lover. Whatever.” Mark’s voice wavered between bafflement and awe. Why should people discuss him behind his back? What difference in the world did he make to them? His words were swimming in mysteries, and ready to give up paddling and drown.

Daniel started in, faltering, about old misunderstandings, crossed wires, experiments gone wrong. Not what you think; should have said; should never have suggested. A long silence came from Mark. Fifteen years’ worth. Then: “Look. I don’t care if you’re gay. It’s a big trend these days. I don’t even care that you like animals better than people. I would, too, if I weren’t a human. Just watch your back. I know this is a college town, but get out into the surrounding areas and you’d be surprised.”

“You’re right about that,” Daniel said. “But wrong about me.”

“Fine. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Forget it. Burial. Little Danny; young Markie. You remember those guys?”

It took Daniel some moments to decide. “I think so,” he answered.

“I sure as hell don’t. No idea who those guys ever were. Two different worlds. Who cares?”

“You don’t understand. I never meant for you to think…”

“Hey. Have sex with whatever you want. You only live once, for the most part.”

And then, on nothing at all, they were back in the trivial now.

“But can I just ask you? Why her? Don’t get me wrong. She’s all right. At least, she hasn’t hurt me yet. But…this doesn’t have anything to do with me, does it?”

Daniel tried to say. Say why her. Because with her he didn’t have to be anyone but who he’d always been. Because being with her made him feel familiar. Like coming home.

Mark crashed the explanation. “I thought so. You’re using her for my sister! Sleeping with her because she reminds you of Karin. Old times. Man! Memory. It’ll screw you up royal every time, huh?”

“It will,” Daniel agreed. “It does.”

“Well, okay. There you have it. Whatever gets you through the night. Just remember: this love thing comes and goes. You wake up one day, and wonder. I guess I don’t have to tell you that. So what have you been doing with your life?” He chuckled like a belt-driven tool sharpener. “In the last fifteen years. In two hundred words or less.”

Daniel recited the short résumé, marveling at how little had changed since childhood, and how little he’d really accomplished in so long a time. He could barely hear himself talk, over the noise of the past.

Mark wanted to hear about the Refuge. “Some kind of Dedham Glen for birds?”

“Yes, I suppose. Something like that.”

“Well, can’t hurt me with that. Karin Two says you’re fighting this sandhill Disney World thing? Camp Crane Peeper?”

“Fighting, and losing. What did she tell you about it?”

“I’ve seen their real estate operatives out this way, sniffing around. Seems to me they have their eye on the Homestar. Going to requisition my house.”

“Are you sure? How can you tell they’re from…?”

“Team of guys with one of those surveyor thingies? Guys out there, dynamiting fish?”

The idea coursed through Daniel, with a surge of sick thrill. The developers were running an environmental impact survey. The real capital outlay had started. “Listen,” he said. “Can we meet? Can I swing by your place?”

“Whoa. Hang on, big fella. I told you a long time ago. I’m not like that.”

“Neither am I,” Daniel said.

“Hey. It’s fine. It’s a free country.” Mark fell silent, but calm. “But tell me something. You know all that avian crap. Can you train one of those birds to spy on someone?”

Daniel weighed his words. “Birds will surprise you. Blue jays can lie. Ravens punish social cheaters. Crows fashion hooks out of straight wire and use them to lift cups out of holes. Not even chimps can do that.”

“So following people would be no problem.”

“Well, I’m not sure how you’d get them to report back to you.”

“Dude. That’s the easy part. Technology. Little wireless cameras and such.”

“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “Not my strong suit. I’ve never been good at telling the possible from the impossible. That’s why I ended up in preservation.”

“The point is, they’re not just — you know — bird brains?”

Daniel held still at the sound, the ten-year-old Mark, the love of his boyhood who’d always deferred to Daniel’s bookish authority. They’d fallen back by instinct into the forgotten cadence. “It turns out that their brains are much more powerful than people ever thought. Much more cortex, just shaped differently from ours, so we couldn’t see it. They can think, no question about it. See patterns. People have trained pigeons to tell Seurats from Monets.”

“Gortex? Tell who from what?”

“The details aren’t important. Why do you ask?”

“I had this idea, a few months back. I thought…you might be following me around. You and your birds. But that’s crazy, isn’t it?”

“Well,” Daniel said. “I’ve heard crazier.”

“Now I realize that if anyone’s following me, it’s the other side. These Nature Outpost people. And it’s not really me they’re after. Nobody gives a flying fart whether I live or die. They probably just want my real estate.”

“I’d love to talk to you about this,” Daniel said. Using a delusion to chase a delusion.

“Ah, man. Maybe I’m just scrambled. You have no idea what I’ve been through. A fuck of an accident, one year ago this month. It all started then.”

“I know,” Daniel told him.

“You saw the show?”

“Show? No. I saw you.”

“Saw me? When was this? Don’t jerk me around, Danny. I’m warning you.”

Daniel explained: in the hospital. Early on. While Mark was still coming back.

“You came to see me? Why?”

“I was worried about you.” All true.

“You saw me? And I didn’t see you?”

“You were still in pretty bad shape. You saw me, but…I scared you. You thought I was…I don’t know what you thought.”

Mark took off, fragments of words scattering like pheasants from a gunshot. He knew who he’d thought Daniel was. Someone else had come to see him in the hospital. Someone who left a note. Someone who’d been out there that night, on North Line. “You didn’t see the TV show? Television, man. You had to see it.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t have a set.”

“Jesus. I forgot. You live in the freaking animal kingdom. Never mind; it doesn’t matter. If I could just get a look at what you look like now. Maybe it would come back to me. Who I thought you were. What this finder looks like.”

“I’d love that. I’d…like that. Maybe if I came by sometime…?”

“Now,” Mark said. “You know where I live? What am I saying? The Crane Refuge probably wants to liberate my house, too.”

Daniel knocked, and the prefab door opened on someone he might have passed on the street without identifying. Mark’s hair was flowing and tangled, as he’d never worn it. He’d put on twenty pounds in the last few months, and the weight surprised Mark’s small frame as much as it surprised Daniel. Strangest of all was his face, manned by some pilot baffled by the controls. Foreign thoughts now moved those muscles. The face stared out at Daniel on the icy February threshold. “Nature Boy,” Mark said, a little skeptical. Trying to put his finger on a vast difference. At last, he figured it. “You got old.”

He dragged Daniel inside and stood him in the center of the living room, inspecting. Brine spilled out of the corners of his eyes. Yet his face remained studious, like a shopper examining the ingredients on a strange brand’s label. Daniel stood still, shaking. After a long time, Mark shook his head. “Nothing. I’m not getting anything.”

Daniel’s face curdled, until he realized. Mark didn’t mean fifteen years ago; he meant ten months.

“It never comes back, does it?” Mark said. “Shit’s never what it was. Probably wasn’t what it was, even back when it was it.” He laughed, cotton wrapped in barbed wire. “Doesn’t matter. You were Nature Boy once, and that’s good enough for me. Pleasure to meet you, Nature Man.” He threw his arms around Daniel, like tying a horse’s reins to a hitching post. The hug was over before Daniel could return it. “Sorry about the historical bullcrap, dude. A lot of wasted time and anxiety, and now I can’t even remember what the big deal was. So I didn’t want your hand working my front privates. That doesn’t mean I had to beat you to a bloody pulp.”

“No,” Daniel said. “It was me. All me.”

“Man, getting old is nothing but accumulating stupid shit we have to apologize for. What are we going to be like when we’re seventy?” Daniel tried to reply, but Mark didn’t really want an answer. He reached into the pocket of his corduroy overshirt and pulled out a piece of laminated paper full of chicken scratch. “Here’s the deal. Does this mean anything to you?”

“Your…Karin Two told me about it.”

Mark grabbed his wrist. “She doesn’t know you’re here, does she?”

Daniel shook his head.

“Maybe she’s okay. You never know. So you’re saying you’re not my guardian angel? No idea who? Well, whatever happened back in the hospital, you aren’t reminding me of anybody, now. Except a big, crusty, old version of Nature Boy. So what can I get you to drink? Some kind of wetlands whole-grain tea?”

“You have any beer?”

“Whoa. Little Danny R. comes of age.”

They sat at the round vinyl dinette table, jittery with reunion. They did not know, yet, how to be anything but boys together. Daniel asked Mark to describe the surveyors. They sounded only slightly more solid than his guardian angel. Mark asked about the development, which, in Daniel’s recounting, sounded like paranoid invention.

“I don’t get it. You’re saying this fight is all about water?”

“Nothing else is more worth fighting over.”

The idea dazed Mark. “Water wars?”

“Water wars here, oil wars overseas.”

“Oil? This new one? Man, what about revenge? Security? Religious showdown, and such?”

“Beliefs chase resources.”

They talked and drank, Riegel exceeding his last two years’ consumption. He was prepared to pass into unconsciousness, if need be, to stay with Mark.

Mark was flush with ideas. “You want to know how to steal this land right out from underneath these jokers? Danny, Danny. Let me show you something.” With the closest thing to energy he’d shown, Mark stood and clomped into his bedroom. Daniel heard him moving things around, sounding like a backhoe in a trash dump. He returned triumphant, waving a book above his head. He held it up to Daniel: Flat Water. “Local history textbook from my first year in college. My last year in college, I should say.” Mark flipped through the pages in a state almost like excitement. “Hold your horses. It’s here, somewhere. Mr. Andy Jackson, if I’m not mistaken. Weird about the ancient past: how it keeps coming up. Here. Indian Removal Act, 1830. The Intercourse Act, 1834. Don’t get excited; it’s not as interesting as it sounds. All the lands west of the Mississippi that aren’t already Missouri, Louisiana, or Arkansas. May I quote? ‘Forever secure and guarantee.’ ‘Heirs or successors.’ ‘In perpetuity.’ That means forever. We’re talking a long time, buster. The fucking law of the land. And they say I’m delusional? This whole country’s delusional! There’s not a white person out here who’s a legal property owner, including me. That’s how you should handle this. Get your lawyers, get a few natives down from the rez on your side: you should be able to clear out the whole state. Get it back how it was.”

“I’ll…look into that.”

“Give it back to the migratories. The birds can’t mess it up any worse than we have.”

Daniel smiled, despite himself. “You’re right, there. To really finish things off, you need human-sized brains.”

The word woke Mark up again. “Danny. Danny Boy. Speaking of brains and cranes? How come all their heads are red? You don’t find that weird? It’s like they’ve all been operated on. You should have seen me, man, with my bloody skull in a sling. Oh, wait: you did see me. I’m the one who didn’t see me.” He held that same battered head in his hands, split all over again. Riegel said nothing; he moved less than his little finger. The life-long expert tracker, reverting to form. Join yourself to where you are, and the creature will come to you, of its own accord.

Mark gathered himself for a leap of faith. “That woman you’re doing? She wants me to take these pills. Dope me up, I guess. Well, not exactly dope. If only it were that interesting. No, this stuff’s called Olestra. Ovaltine. Something like that. It’s supposed to give me ‘clarity.’ Make me feel more like myself. I don’t know who I’ve been feeling like, lately, but, man, it would be good to be off this ride.” He looked up at Daniel, a flicker of false hope begging to be confirmed. “Thing is, this could be Stage Three of whatever they’re trying to do to me. First, run me off the road. Second, take something out of my head while I’m on the operating table. Third, feed me some chemical ‘cure’ that changes me forever. Danny, you’re from the early days. The earliest. Okay, so we fucked up the friendship. Killed the past and wrecked fifteen years. But you never lied to me. I could always trust you — well, except for your impulses, which you couldn’t really help. I need advice on this. It’s tearing me apart. What would you do, man? Take this shit? See what happens? What would you do, if you were you?”

Daniel stared into his beer, drunk as a junior high schooler. Some other dizziness kicked in: What would he do, in Mark’s place? He’d sat in Gerald Weber’s hotel room with Karin, taking his predictable high moral stand. He might have changed tunes, had his own brother, just out of half a year of cocaine detox in Austin, suddenly refused to recognize him. Daniel Riegel: absurd with certainty. He might take this olanzapine, if the world turned strange on him, if he woke up, one day, sick of the river, blind to the birds, out of love with everything that had once been life. “It’s possible,” he mumbled. “You might want…”

A knock on the door saved him. Playful, familiar rhythm: Shave and a haircut, two bits. Daniel jumped, vaguely criminal.

“Now what?” Mark groaned, then shouted, “Come on in. It’s always open. Rob me blind. Who gives a damn?”

A shivering figure pushed inside: the woman that Karin had introduced to Daniel at the public hearing. Daniel sprang up, knocking the table and spilling his beer down his pants. A facial tic proclaimed his innocence. Mark, too, was on his feet, rushing the woman. He grappled her in a bear hug, which she, to Daniel’s amazement, returned.

“Barbie Doll! Where have you been? I was starting to panic about you.”

“Mr. Schluter! I was just here four days ago.”

“Oh, yeah. I guess. But that’s a long time ago. And only a short visit.”

“Stop whining. I could move in, and you’d still complain I was never around.”

Mark shot a look at Daniel, licking the canary feathers off his lips. “Well, we could give it a try. Purely for health-research purposes.”

She blew past him into the kitchen, struggling to remove her coat while holding out her hand to Daniel. “Hello, again.”

“Ho, ho-hold on a minute. You’re telling me the two of you know each other?”

She drew her chin back and frowned. “That’s the usual sense of ‘Hello, again.’”

“What in God’s name is going on? Everybody knows everybody. When worlds collide!”

“Now just cool your little heart. There’s an explanation for everything in this life, don’t you know.” She described the public hearing, how impressed she’d been with Daniel’s performance. The explanation quieted Mark. Daniel alone was unconvinced.

“I should go,” he said, flustered. “I didn’t realize you were expecting company.”

“Barbie? Barbie’s not company.”

“Don’t run,” Barbara said. “It’s just a social call.”

But something in Daniel was already running. On his way out the door, he told Mark, “Ask her. She’s a health professional.”

“Ask her what?” Mark said.

“Yeah,” Barbara echoed. “Ask me what?”

“Olanzapine.”

Mark grimaced. “She seems to think the decision is all mine.” As Daniel slipped through the door, Mark called after him, “Hey! Don’t be a stranger!”

Not until he got back to his apartment and checked his answering machine did Daniel Riegel, lifelong tracker, remember where he’d first heard Barbara Gillespie.

In the middle of February, the birds came back. Sylvie and Gerald Weber saw a late-night news feature on the cranes, lying in bed together in their snow-covered Setauket house on Chickadee Way. As the camera panned over the sandy banks of the Platte, husband and wife looked on in embarrassment. “That’s your place?” Sylvie asked. She couldn’t very well say nothing.

Weber grunted. His brain was wrestling with some blocked memory, some problem in identification that had been bothering him for eight months. But his thoughts pushed the near-solution farther away, the more he chased it. His wife misunderstood his preoccupation. She raised her knuckles to his upper arm and stroked. It’s all right. We two are past simplicity. Everyone’s messy. We can be, too.

The woman in front of the camera, a clumsily urbane New Yorker who seemed unnerved by so much emptiness, related the story as if it were news. “It’s been called one of the most spectacular shows of nature anywhere, and it stars half a million sandhill cranes. They start to arrive on Valentine’s Day, and most will be gone by St. Patrick’s…”

“Smart birds,” Sylvie said. “And great holiday observers.” Her husband nodded, peering at the screen. “Everybody’s Irish, huh?” Her husband said nothing. She clenched her jaw and rubbed his shoulder a little harder.

By Presidents’ Day, saluting everyone goodbye, Mark began the medication. Dr. Hayes doubled the dosage of the Australian case: a still-conservative 10 mg every night.

“So we should see some improvement in two weeks?” Karin suggested, as if any doctor’s agreement would be legally binding.

Dr. Hayes told her, in Latin, that they’d see what they would see. “Remember what we talked about. There may be some chance of social withdrawal.”

You can’t withdraw, she told the doctor, in American, if you’re not there to start with.

Four days later, at two in the morning, the phone tore Daniel and Karin out of a deep sleep. Naked, Daniel stumbled to the phone. He mumbled incoherently into the receiver. Or the incoherence was Karin’s, listening from the bed. Daniel stumbled back to her, bewildered. “It’s your brother. He wants to talk to you.”

Karin squeezed her eyes and shook herself. “He called here? He talked to you?”

Daniel scrambled back under the covers. He turned the heat off at night, and now his naked body was going hypothermic. “I…we saw each other. We talked to each other, a little while ago.”

Karin grappled with the lucid nightmare. “When?”

“It doesn’t matter. A few days back.” He flicked his fingers: the ticking clock, the waiting phone, the story too long. “He wants to talk to you.”

“Doesn’t matter?” She tore the gray army-surplus blanket off the bed. “It’s true, isn’t it? You loved him. I mean, love. He was the only reason you…I was never anything more than…” She wrapped the wool blanket around her shoulders and turned her back on him, fumbling for the phone in the dark. “Mark? Are you all right?”

“I know what happened to me during the operation.”

“Tell me.” Still drugged with sleep.

“I died. I passed away on the operating table, and none of the doctors noticed.”

Her voice came out of her, thin, pleading. “Mark?”

“It clarifies a bunch of stuff that made no sense. Why everything has seemed so…far. I resisted the idea because, well, obviously, someone would realize, right? If you weren’t alive? Then it hit me: How would they know? I mean, if nobody saw it happen…I mean, it just now occurred to me, and I’m the one who’s in the middle of it!”

She talked with him for a long time, first reasoning, then irrational, just trying to comfort him. He was panicked; he didn’t know how to “get properly dead.” He spoke of messing up the transition—“I scattered the deck”—and now there seemed no way to get things back into the right sequence.

“I’m coming over right now, Mark. We can figure this out, together.”

He laughed, as only the dead can laugh. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep overnight. Haven’t started rotting yet.”

“Are you sure?” she kept asking. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

“You can’t get worse than dead.”

She was afraid to hang up. “How do you feel?”

“Okay, actually. Better than I felt when I thought I was still alive.”

Back in the bedroom, Daniel held one of the neuroscience books that Karin had perpetually renewed from the library. “I’ve found it,” he said. “Cotard’s syndrome.”

She threw the gray wool blanket back on the bed and crawled under it. She’d read all about it, had spent a year exploring every horror the brain allowed. Another misidentification delusion, perhaps an extreme form of Capgras. Unrecognized death: the only possible explanation for feeling so cut off from everyone. “How can he get it now? After a year? Just when he’s started the treatment.”

Daniel killed the light and crawled in next to her. He put his hand on her side. She flinched. “Maybe it’s the medication,” he suggested. “Maybe he’s having some kind of reaction.”

She spun around to face him in the blackness. “Oh my God. Is that possible? We need to get him back under observation. First thing tomorrow.”

Daniel agreed.

She froze in thought. “Shit. Jesus. How could I forget?”

“What? What is it?” He tried to rub her shoulders, but she pulled away.

“His wreck. One year ago today. It completely slipped my mind.”

She lay down and pretended stillness for something like an hour. At last she got up. “I’m going to take something,” she whispered.

“Not this late,” he said.

She went into the bathroom and closed the door. She didn’t come out for so long that he finally followed her. He knocked on the bathroom door, but there was no answer. He opened it. She sat on the closed toilet lid, glaring at him, even before he entered. “You saw him? You talked with him? And you never told me. It’s him for you, isn’t it? I’m nothing but his sister, am I?”

Dr. Hayes examined Mark, baffled, but fascinated. He listened as Mark announced, “I’m not saying it’s a cover-up. I’m just saying that nobody noticed. You can see how it might happen. But I’m telling you, Doc, I never felt like this when alive.”

He scheduled Mark for another scan, for the first week in March. Mark, weirdly compliant, left to see the lab techs. “It can’t be the medication,” Hayes told Karin. “There’s nothing like this in the literature.”

“Literature,” she repeated, everything fictional. She could feel the neurologist, already writing up this new wrinkle for publication.

The Cotard’s diagnosis changed nothing substantial. Now that Mark had started the olanzapine, Dr. Hayes insisted that he continue without missing any doses. Could Karin vouch that he’d kept with the medication schedule, exactly as given? She could not, but did. Did she feel able to continue supervising her brother, or would she like to put Mark back into Dedham Glen? Continue supervising, Karin said. She had no choice. The insurance coverage would not pay for re-admission.

She couldn’t afford to increase her hours out at Farview. Already, there weren’t enough hours in the week for the Refuge. What had begun as an invented job, the charity of a man who wanted to keep her nearby, had turned real. It was no longer even a question of meaningful work, of self-fulfillment. As absolutely delusional as it would have sounded to say aloud to anyone, she now knew: water wanted something from her.

Desperate, she called Barbara and asked for help in covering. “It’s only for a few days, until the medication kicks in and he pulls out of this.” The goals of care had changed. She no longer needed Mark to recognize her. She only needed him to believe he was alive.

“Of course,” Barbara said. “Anything. For however long he might need it.”

The woman’s willingness stung her. “It’s a crazy time at the Refuge,” Karin explained. “Things are heating up with…”

“Of course,” Barbara said. “Someone should probably be there at night. Nights are probably bad for him, right now.” Her voice hinted willingness, even that far. But that much Karin refused to ask of her. If the night shift couldn’t be Karin, it wouldn’t be Barbara, either.

Karin called Bonnie, the only real choice. She got the infectious answering machine—I wish I was here to talk to you for real—in that cheerful treble that sounded like the horn of a Ford Focus on mood elevators. Karin tried twice more, but couldn’t bring herself to leave a message. Would you mind spending nights at my brother’s for a little while? He thinks he’s a dead man. Even by Kearney standards, something you’d want to ask in person. At last, Karin went out to the Arch, on Bonnie’s shift. Karin hadn’t yet bothered to take a look. Sixty-five million dollars to turn her great-grandparents into the Cartoon Channel and to trick people on their way to California in their Navigators into thinking there was something here worth stopping for.

She paid her $8.25, pushed past the life-size pioneer figures, and rode up the escalator through the covered wagon, surrounded by giant murals. She spotted Bonnie near the sod house exhibit, in her calico dress and poke bonnet, talking to a group of schoolchildren in a bizarre, old-fashiony voice — an MTV version of Ma Kettle. Seeing Karin, Bonnie broke into a big wave and, in the same fake-archaic voice, called out, “Hiya!” She picked clinging first-graders off her skirt and joined Karin in the Pawnee exhibit, calico alongside Tencel.

“He’s convinced he died and no one noticed,” Karin told her.

Thought soured Bonnie’s nose. “You know? I felt that way myself, once.”

“Bon? Do you think you could stay with him for a bit? At the Homestar? Just for the next few nights?”

The girl’s eyes went wide as a lemur’s. “With Marker? ’Course!” She answered as if the question were itself deranged. And last of anyone again, Karin saw how things were.

Arrangements firmed; the women each took a shift, with Mark indifferent to the measures all around him. “Whatever,” Mark told Karin, when she described the arrangements. “Knock yourself out. Can’t hurt me. I’m already gone.”

But he assembled Karin and Bonnie in the Homestar living room on the first Monday evening in March, to see the latest edition of Crime Solvers. “Got a heads-up call today,” he explained, refusing to say more. He moved methodically, forcing hot drinks and bags of corn nuts on them, making sure everyone used the facilities before the show started. Karin watched him, feeling the folly of all hope.

Then, as if on command, Tracey, the show’s hostess, announced, “There’s been a break in the story we brought to you some weeks ago about the Farview man who…”

On screen, a farmer out by Elm Creek pointed to a hole in the border of his front lawn. Five days before, his wife had discovered some bloodroot growing up inside the planter he’d fashioned for her out of an old tire he’d fished out of the river back in August, when the water was low. “Now, my wife and I are a couple old fans of your show, and as I stood there, looking at that tire, your television story came back to me, and it crossed my mind to ask myself…”

Police Sergeant Ron Fagan explained how the tires had been impounded and checked by forensics against the crime-scene evidence on file. “We believe we have a match,” he told the world, a bit crestfallen to be describing computer database searches instead of high-speed chases. But he reported that the tire had been traced to a local man who had been brought in for questioning. The man worked at the Lexington packing plant and was named Duane Cain.

Karin shouted at the tube. “I knew it. That pond scum.”

Bonnie, on the other side of Mark, shook her head. “That can’t be right. They swore to me it was someone else.”

Mark sat rigid, already a corpse. “They ran me off the road. Chicken goat-head. They left me for dead. At least I finally know I am.”

Karin threw on her coat, slamming around in her bag for her keys. “I’ll give him questioning.” She fumbled for the door. In her haste, she sprang it open on her face and smashed her lip.

Mark lifted off the sofa. “I’m coming with you.”

“No!” She wheeled, furious, scaring even herself. “No. You let me talk to him!” Blackie Two growled. Mark stepped back, hands raised. Then she was out in the dark, blundering toward her car.

She checked at the police station. Duane Cain had been released. Sergeant Fagan was not on duty, and no one would give her details. The night was as cold and the world as airless as any meteor. Her breath came frozen out of her nostrils and bathed her hands in flinty smoke. She beat her elbows against her sides to keep her lungs pumping. She got back into her Corolla and headed across town, making it to Cain’s apartment in minutes. He opened the door to her assault in a purple sweatshirt reading: What Would Beelzebub Do? He was expecting someone else, and he shrank at the sight of her. “I take it you saw that show?”

She pushed into the room and slammed him into the wall. He didn’t fight back, only reached up and pinned her wrists.

“They let me go. I didn’t do anything.”

“Your fucking skid marks cut right in front of him.” She struggled to land a punch while he blunted her in a clumsy embrace.

“Do you want me to tell you what happened, or don’t you?”

He refused to say anything until she stopped struggling. He sat her on a beanbag chair and tried to give her something to drink. He balanced on a bar stool at a safe distance, brandishing the phone book like a shield.

“We didn’t really lie, per se. Technically speaking…”

She threatened to kill him, or worse. He started again.

“You were right about the games. We were racing. But it wasn’t what you think. We were at the Bullet. Tommy had recently acquired a set of communicators. We went out and started goofing with them. Me and Rupp in Tommy’s truck, Mark in his. Just tag. Driving around like we always did, testing the range, chasing each other. You know: hotter, colder, losing the signal, picking it up again. We were a ways away, coming east on North Line, from town. We thought we had him. Mark was giggling into the communicator, something about taking evasive action. Then his signal went dead. Took his finger off the transmit button and never came back. We didn’t know what he was up to. Tommy kicked his truck, figuring we had to be close. It was pretty dark out there.”

He hooded his eyes with one hand, from the glare of memory.

“Then we saw him. He was upside down in the ditch, right-hand side, just south of the road. Tommy swore and slammed the brakes. We fishtailed and swerved across the center line. That’s what you saw: our tracks in his lane. Only, we got there after him.”

She sat stiff, her spine a spike. “What did you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s lying in that ditch. You and your friend are right there.”

“Are you kidding? He had three tons of metal on top of him. Every second counted. We did what we had to do. Spun around, ran back to town, and called it in.”

“Neither of you has a cell phone? Jacking around with those ridiculous walkie-talkie toys, and no cell phone?”

“We called it in,” he said. “Within minutes.”

“Anonymously? And you never came forward, after. Never told the story. Changed your tires and pitched the guilty ones in the river.”

“Listen to me. You don’t know anything.” His voice rose. “Those police types bust you first and ask questions later. They go after guys like me and Tommy. We threaten them.”

“You, threaten? And he went along with it. Your friend Rupp. The Specialist.”

“Look. You don’t believe me, even now. You think the police were going to believe us, the night of the accident?”

“Why didn’t they lock you up?”

“They questioned Tommy down at Riley, and he gave exactly the same story. The point is, we got the paramedics there as fast as possible. We didn’t have anything to add to the facts. We have no clue what happened to him. It wouldn’t have made any difference, our coming forward.”

“It might have made a difference to Mark.”

He screwed up his face. “It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

Her need to believe him appalled her. She rose to her feet, rearranging things: the tracks, their order, her memory. Time threaded and rethreaded, slowed, buckled, and slammed into reverse. “The third car,” she said.

“I don’t know,” Cain said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a year.”

“The third car,” she repeated. “The one that ran off the road, from behind him.” She crossed to him, ready to slam him again. “Were any cars coming toward you as you reached the spot? Any westbound cars, heading back toward town? Answer me!”

“Yeah. We were watching, as we got close. We kept expecting him to blast past us. But then came this white Ford Taurus with out-of-state plates.”

“What state?”

“Rupp says Texas. I couldn’t tell. We were going a little fast, I told you.”

“How fast was this Ford going?”

“Funny you should ask. We both had the impression that it was crawling.” The thought sat him up. “Jesus. You’re right. This other car…this Ford came up just before we did, just after he…and they…You’re saying that they…What exactly are you saying?”

She didn’t know what she was saying. Then or ever. “They didn’t stop either.”

Cain shut his eyes, clamped his neck in one palm, and threw back his head. “It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

“It might have,” she said. God led me to you.

She got home crazy late. Daniel was waiting up for her, beside himself. “I thought something had happened to you. I thought…You might have been anywhere. You might have been hurt.”

Might have been with the other man. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have called.” To placate him, she told him everything.

He listened, but was no help. “Who called the accident in? Rupp and Cain? Not the other car? I thought it was this guardian…?”

“Maybe they both called in.”

“But I thought the police said…”

“I don’t know, Daniel.”

“But if the other car didn’t stop, why the note? Taking credit, for leaving the scene…?”

“I have to sleep,” she explained. It was too late to call Mark and Bonnie. She didn’t know what she would say, anyway. What her brother could handle.

She woke the next morning to the raging phone. The room was ablaze with light and Daniel had already left for the Refuge. She dragged herself up, out of animal dreams. “I’m coming. Hold on a minute, please. You checking up on me or something?”

But when she lifted the receiver, the voice at the other end was thin and spectral. “Karin? It’s Bonnie. He’s having some kind of seizure, and I can’t get him out.”

It had to be the hospital, again. A year’s long loop back to where he was, this time last March. Some migrating thing that can’t know any better. Mark Schluter back in Good Samaritan, not the same ward, but close enough. Restrained in bed, post-toxic, 450 mg of olanzapine flushed from his body.

A dead man has tried to kill himself: the only way to fit things back together. Dystonic by the time the paramedics reached him. Intubation and gastric lavage, rushed to the hospital for intravenous fluids and cardiovascular monitoring, watched over by a staff who will ensure that he won’t try leaving again.

He comes out of his second coma, a mere figment of the first. Conscious again, he refuses all attempts to communicate except to say, “I want to talk to Shrinky. I’ll only talk to Shrinky.”

Dr. Hayes calls Weber with the news. Weber receives the report like a verdict, the fruit of his long, self-serving ambition. He calls Mark at once, but Mark refuses to talk. “No phones,” Mark tells the shift nurse. Every phone line is tapped. Every cable and satellite. “He’s got to come here, in person.”

Weber makes several more efforts at contact, all without result. Mark is out of danger, at least for now. Weber has already entered into the case beyond the bounds of professional correctness. His last trip almost finished him. Any more involvement, and he’ll be done.

But something in the neuroscientist now sees: responsibility has no limits. The case histories you appropriate are yours. If he does nothing, if he refuses the boy’s one request, if he abandons now what he has bungled so badly, then he surely is what his darkest voices already declare him. Tried to kill himself, because of me. No choice but return. Some long loop, back again. Tour Director makes him.

No way to tell his wife. Tell Sylvie. After what he has already told her, any given reason will seem the worst of self-deceptions. She, who would not stretch out a hand now if Gerald Weber, celebrity author, tainted saint of neural insight, were burnt in effigy for bogus empathy: no possible way to explain to her.

He braces for her response, but nothing prepares him for how badly his announcement shakes the woman. She takes it like some numb Cassandra who already guesses everything he hasn’t yet admitted. “What can you do for him? Anything the doctors out there can’t?”

She asked him that question, a year ago. He should have listened to her then. He should listen now. He shakes his head, his mouth a mail slot. “Nothing I can think of.”

“Haven’t you done enough, already?”

“That’s the problem. The olanzapine was my idea.”

She sits down hard in the breakfast nook. But still she masters herself, horribly true to form. “It wasn’t your idea that he take two weeks’ dosage at once.”

“No. You’re right. That one wasn’t mine.”

“Don’t do this to me, Gerald. What are you proving? You’re a good man. As good as your words. Why won’t you believe that? Why can’t you just…?”

She stands and circles. She waits for him to raise the issue. She extends him that grim respect, wholly unearned. She will assume the woman is nothing, irrelevant, until he tells her otherwise. Will believe in him, even without trust. He must say something. But he can’t grace the fact, even by dismissing it.

All things come down to belief. Belief in a gossamer too ephemeral to fool anyone. That will be the holy grail of brain studies: to see how tens of billions of chemical logic gates all sparking and damping each other can somehow create faith in their own phantom loops. “He’s in agony. He wants to talk to me. He needs something from me.”

“And you? What do you need?” Her eyes probe him, bitterly. She looks palsied and pale, suffering from her own overdose.

He answers, almost. “It costs me nothing. Some frequent flyer miles, a couple of days, and a few hundred out of the research account.” She shakes her head at him, the closest she can come to derision. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I need to do this. I’m not an exploiter. Not an opportunist.”

She has stood by, supportive, kept a hard-won poise these last few months, throughout his steady dissolving act. Every drop in his self-confidence has hammered her. “No,” she says, fighting for composure. She crosses to him; her hands scrabble at his shirt. “I don’t like this, Man. This is wrong. This is messed up.”

“Don’t worry,” he says. As soon as the words leave his mouth, he feels the ridiculousness. The self is a burning house; get out while you can. He sees his wife, really sees her, for the first time since he stopped believing in his work. Sees the pea-green amphibian puckers under her eyes, the withering of her upper lip — when did she grow old? He sees in her flinching gaze how he frightens her. She can’t make him out. She’s lost him. “Don’t worry.”

She shrinks from his words in disgust. “What the hell do you need? You need Famous Gerald? Famous Gerald can go hang himself. Do you need people to say that you…?” She bites into her lower lip and looks away. When she speaks again, it’s like a newscaster. “Will you be doing any sightseeing while you’re there?” Her face is bloodless, but her voice is casual. “Any old friends?”

“I don’t know. It’s a small town.” And then — the debt of thirty years — he corrects himself. “I’m not sure. It’s likely.”

She pushes away and crosses to the refrigerator. Her businesslike movement destroys him. She opens the freezer and removes two pieces of tilapia, to thaw for dinner. She takes the fish to the sink and runs cold water over them. “Gerald?” Idly curious, trying for acceptance, and missing by a cold mile. “Can you just tell me why?”

He deserves her fury, even desires it. But not this calm acceptance. Gerald: just tell me why. So you will think well of me again. “I’m not sure,” he tells her. Repeating that in his mind, until he makes it true.

Mark left no note before swallowing his antipsychotics. How could he, already dead? But even that lack of message accuses Karin. All this year he has called for her help, and all along she has failed him. Failed him in every way: failed to confirm his past, failed to permit his present, failed to recover his future.

The old Schluter craziness settles on her, the inheritance she’s never been able to shed. Her first identity: guilty and deficient, whatever else she manages. She visits Mark in the hospital. She even brings Daniel, Mark’s oldest nonimaginary friend. But Mark refuses to talk to either of them. “Can you two just respectfully leave me to rot here in peace?” It’s Shrinky or no one.

She surrenders him again to the health professionals, to the chemical correctives now dripping into his limp arms. She slips down her own Glasgow Scale. She can focus on nothing. Her concentration strays for hours at a stretch. At last she sees why her brother stopped recognizing her. Nothing to recognize. She has twisted herself past recognition. One small deceit laid on another, until even she can’t say where she stands or who she’s working for. Things she’s waffled on, denied, and lied about, things she’s hidden even from herself. All things to all people. Doing a conservationist and a developer at the same time. Making herself over, personality du jour. Imagination, even memory, all too ready to accommodate her, whoever her is. Anything for a scratch behind the ears. Scratch from anyone.

She is nothing. No one. Worse than no one. Blank at the core.

She must change her life. From the mess of her fouled nest, salvage something. Anything. The slightest, drab, creeping thing: it makes no difference, so long as it’s uncompromised and wild. She may be too late to get her brother back. But she might still rescue her brother’s sister.

She buries herself in legwork for the Refuge, researching her pamphlets. Something to wake sleepwalkers and make the world strange again. The least dose of life science, a few figures in a table, and she begins to see: people, desperate for solidity, must kill anything that exceeds them. Anything bigger or more linked, or, in its bleak enduring, a little more free. No one can bear how large the outside is, even as we decimate it. She has only to look, and the facts pour out. She reads, and still can’t believe: twelve million or more species, less than a tenth of them counted. And half will snuff out in her lifetime.

Crushed by data, her senses come weirdly alive. The air smells like lavender, and even the drab, late-winter browns feel more vivid than they have since sixteen. She’s hungry all the time, and the futility of her work doubles her energy. Her connections race. She’s like that case in Dr. Weber’s last book, the woman with fronto-temporal dementia who suddenly started producing the most sumptuous paintings. A kind of compensation: when one brain part is overwhelmed, another takes over.

The web she glimpses is so intricate, so wide, that humans should long ago have shriveled up and died of shame. The only thing proper to want is what Mark wanted: to not be, to crawl down the deepest well and fossilize into a rock that only water can dissolve. Only water, as solvent against all toxic run-off, only water to dilute the poison of personality. All she can do is work, try to return the river to those we’ve stolen it from. Everything human and personal horrifies her now, everything except this doomed pamphleteering.

Water wants something from her. Something only consciousness can deliver. She is nothing, as toxic as anything with an ego. A sham; a pretense. Nothing worth recognizing. But still, this river needs her, its liquid mind, its way of surviving…

The world fills with luxuries she can’t afford. Sleep is one of them. When she does succumb, she and Daniel still share a bed. But touching has stopped, except by accident. He meditates more now, sometimes an hour at a shot, just to escape all the damage she has done him. She has battered him with betrayals; he absorbs the battering, as he absorbs all the race’s insults. He seems to her now a man who might absorb anything, someone who, alone of everyone she knows, has put away vanity and looked past himself. And this is what she has so resented in him. Of all the men she has ever been with, he now seems the only one fluid enough to be a decent father, to teach a child about everything outside us that must be recognized. But he would sooner die than bring another estranged human into this world. Another like her.

He should have thrown her out months ago. No reason why he hasn’t. Maybe only residual love for her brother. Or just the care he extends to any creature. She must seem hideous to him, clutching, a brittle little shell of need. He can’t want her, and never really did. Yet he remains stubbornly if silently decent to her in all things. Her brother has almost died, and this man alone knows what that means. This man alone might help her cope. She lies in bed, her spine eight inches from his, aching just to reach back with one blind palm and touch the warm of him. Prove that he’s still there.

The third day after Mark’s attempt, the Development Council indicates its willingness in principle to grant the Central Platte Scenic Natural Outpost the right to purchase water shares. She has dreaded the decision for weeks, but never really believed it would come. The combined Platte preservation groups respond in numb disarray. They’ve lost their footrace with the developers’ consortium, and in a series of hasty meetings, the alliance begins to crumble.

If the decision demoralizes her, it crushes Daniel. He says nothing about the judgment but curt, stoic maxims. He finds the council beneath condemning. Something withers in him, some basic willingness to go on fighting a species that won’t be rehabilitated and can’t be beaten. He won’t talk to her about it, and she has lost her right to press him.

She needs to square things by him. To fix one thing, for one real person, in all the debacle of recent days. Redeem his ill-placed trust and return something to the one man who loves her brother as much as she does.

She has one thing she can give him, one thing only. The thing water wants. She almost talks herself into believing that she has worked toward this, all these months, just to be able to give it to him now. She knows what the gift will cost her; he will learn who she is, and wash his hands of her. The other man, too. She will lose them both, everything that she has perjured herself to get. But she can give Daniel something worth far more than herself.

She spends the day preparing him a vegan feast: broccoli almond seitan, skordalia, and coriander chutney. Even tahini rice pudding, for the man who considers dessert a sin. She flies around the kitchen, mixing and assembling, feeling almost steady. Blessed distraction, and the most effort she has expended on him since moving in. She’s done nothing for him, while he has tended to her every crisis. She has let their life be overgrown by the weed of her personality. Is it so impossible to be someone else, to make him a grateful meal for once? Even if it is their last.

Daniel blows in on a cloud of distraction. He struggles to make sense of the feast. “What is all this? Some occasion?”

It stings, but she needs it to. “There’s always occasion.”

“True. Well.” His smile is crucified. He sits and spreads his hands, stunned at all the food. He hasn’t even taken off his coat. “My separation party, then.”

She stops licking rice pudding off her finger. “What do you mean?”

He’s placid, head bowed. “Quit the job.”

She holds the counter, her head shaking. She drops onto the stool across from him. “What do you mean? What are you saying?” He can’t stop his work. Impossible: like a hummingbird on a hunger strike.

He’s expansive, almost amused. “Split with the Refuge. An ideological parting of the ways. They seem to have decided that this whole crane theme park isn’t so bad after all. Something they can work with. Compromise is the better part of valor, you know. They’re circulating a memo saying that, properly run, the Outpost might even be beneficial for the birds!”

A thing she herself believed in, well past the public hearing. “Oh, Daniel. No. You can’t let this happen.”

He tilts an eyebrow at her. “Don’t worry. I’ve covered for you. Already talked it out with them. You can go on working there. They won’t hold it against you that you’re my…that you and I…”

“Daniel.” She can’t take him in. They’ve lost. That’s what he’s saying. The fight is over. The river will be developed; more staging ground will vanish. He’s saying…but it’s impossible, what he’s saying. Quitting the Refuge. Leaping off into nothing. Death by disengagement.

“You can’t quit. You can’t let them give in to this.”

“What I can and can’t let happen does not seem to be the issue.”

She can make it the issue. Can get him back into the battle. One word from her and the Refuge will rescind whatever deal they have chosen to cut. But that one word kills any love he’s ever felt for her. He will see her in full light, at her most hideous. Stay silent, and she might even keep him, broken like this, needing her. He’d have nothing else but her care.

She thinks, for an instant, that she does this for the birds. For the river. Then she tells herself it’s to save this upright man. But she will save no one, no living thing. She will barely slow the humans, who can’t be stopped. She chooses from pure selfishness, as selfish as every human choice. He will hate her now, forever. But finally, he will know what she can give.

“It’s worse than you think,” she says. “The Outpost people, they’re planning a Phase Two. I know how the consortium will make money on the crane cabins, out of season. It’s…going to be called the Living Prairies Museum.”

She describes it to him in all its banality. “A zoo?” he asks. He can’t figure it. “They want to build a zoo?”

“Indoor-outdoor. And it gets worse. I’ve found out why they need the extra river allocation shares. There’s also a Phase Three. A water park. Slides. Hydraulic fountains and sculptures, all with nature themes. A giant wave pool.”

“A water park?” He rubs his scalp, forehead to crown. He tugs at his ear, his mouth twisted. He giggles. “A water park, in the Great American Desert.”

“You have to let the Refuge know. They have to stop this.”

He doesn’t answer, only sits on one heel, the Virasan position, and stares at all the elaborate dishes she’s prepared. Now it will come out. Now she will pay, for all this saving. “How do you know about all this?”

“I saw the blueprints.”

His chin rises and falls and rises again. A kind of pungent nodding. “And you were going to tell me…when?”

“I just told you,” she says, palms up, pointing at the food, her proof. She’s ready to give him all the brutal details. But he doesn’t need them. He sees everything. He knows now what she’s been doing, all these weeks, better than she has known. She sits looking on herself, through his eyes. Almost a relief, his fatigue. He must have known for a long time. She braces for his recrimination, disgust — anything to feel clean again. His words blow her bracing away.

“You’ve been spying on us. You and your friend? Trading secrets. Some kind of double…”

“He’s not…Okay. I’m a whore. Say what you want. You’re right about me. A lying, devious bitch. But you have to believe one thing: Robert Karsh isn’t what I want in my life, Daniel. Robert Karsh can go…”

He looks at her as if she’s dropped on all fours and started barking. What she and other men have done is meaningless. Only the river matters. He looks at her, appalled. He can’t make out, let alone count, all the ways that she has betrayed the river. “I don’t give a fuck about Robert Karsh. You can do whatever you want with him.”

She reaches out with her palms, backing him up. “Wait. Who are you talking about?” If not Karsh. “Who did you mean, ‘your friend?’”

“You know who I mean.” He has lost all patience. “Their private investigator. Their hired researcher. Your friend Barbara.”

Her head snaps back. He has some lesion, some sickness worse than Mark’s. Cold little hands stroke at her. “Daniel?” She will run from the house and call for help.

“Pumping me at the hearing, to see how much I might have guessed.”

“What investigator? She’s Mark’s old aide. She works at the rehab…”

“For what? Three dollars an hour? A woman who talks like that? A woman who acts like that? You make me sick,” he says, human at last.

A fork of panics. What is Barbara to him? She imagines some longstanding, secret explanation, something that locks her out. But the other fear is greater. Her face a snarl, she backs toward the apartment door.

He sees her confusion, and wavers. “Don’t tell me you don’t know…How much do you think you can hide?”

“I’m not hiding…”

“She called me, Karin. Her voice sounded familiar, the first time we ran into her. I talked to her on the phone, fourteen months ago. She called me, right around the time the developers started planning this thing. She pretended to be working on some news story. She asked me all about the Refuge, the Platte, the restoration work. And like an idiot I told her everything. When people want to talk about those birds, I trust them. More fool, me.” He stares past her, stilled, like some small thing dying in a blizzard.

“Wait. Daniel. That’s crazy. You’re saying she’s, what? An industrial spy? That she works at Dedham Glen as some kind of cover?”

“Spy? You would know, wouldn’t you? I’m saying I spoke to her. I answered her questions. I remember her voice.”

Birding by ear. “Well, you’re remembering wrong. Trust me on this one.”

“Yes? Trust you? On this one?” His head comes about, luffing. “And what else should I trust you on? You’ve been ratting me, laughing at me with your old sweet fuck for months…”

She swings away from him and presses her ears. His right cheek twitches. He squints and shakes his head.

“You’re going to sit there and deny this, after everything? Her name never came up, in all the secret conversations you were having with him? When you were meeting with him, telling them about us? About the Refuge?”

She moans and starts to break. He stands and crosses to the far side of the room, as far from her as possible, holding his elbow and pinching his mouth, waiting for her to be done. She breathes in, mouthful by mouthful, grappling for calm, pretending she is him. “I think I should go.”

“You’re probably right,” he says, and leaves the house.

She wanders about the apartment for a long time. Eventually she drifts to the bedroom and stuffs her clothes into a bag. He will come back and stop her, listen to her explanation. But he is as gone now as her brother. She goes to the kitchen, packs the meal in old bean sprout containers and sticks them in the refrigerator. She sits on the toilet lid in a daze, trying to read one of his meditation books, a crash course in transcendence. She sits at the front door, on the bags she has stuffed with her things. He’s outside somewhere, tracking, watching the building, waiting for her to go.

At twenty minutes to midnight she at last calls her brother’s friend. “Bonnie? I’m sorry to wake you. Can I crash at your place? Just a night or two. I’m nowhere. Nothing.”

Gerald Weber pulls alongside a cash machine in his third Nebraska rental. His hands shake, withdrawing far more money than he intends. From the airport, he heads on instinct back to that hotel where he is now a regular. Welcome Crane Peepers. Only now, the lobby is crawling with heavy, aging people in knit clothes carrying field guides and light binoculars. He himself has way overpacked, three times what he would ordinarily bring on a professional trip. He even carries the cell phone and digital recorder, a professional habit that should have died months ago, along with his professional pretenses. In his Dopp kit, alongside the Band-Aids and fold-up sewing sampler, he has packed ten different ingestibles, from ginkgo to DMAE.

Once, he’d studied an otherwise healthy man who thought that stories turned real. People spoke the world into being. Even a single sentence launched events as solid as experience. Journey, complication, crisis, and redemption: just say the words and they took shape.

For decades, that case haunted everything Weber wrote about. That one delusion—stories came true—seemed like the germ of healing. We told ourselves backward into diagnosis and forward into treatment. Story was the storm at the cortex’s core. And there was no better way to get at that fictional truth than through the haunted neurological parables of Broca or Luria — stories of how even shattered brains might narrate disaster back into livable sense.

Then the story changed. Somewhere, real clinical tools rendered case histories merely colorful. Medicine grew up. Instruments, images, tests, metrics, surgery, pharmaceuticals: no room left for Weber’s anecdotes. And all his literary cures turned to circus acts and Gothic freak shows.

Once, he knew a man who thought that telling other people’s stories might make them real again. Then others’ stories remade him. Illusion, loss, humiliation, disgrace: just say the words and they happened. The man himself had arisen from doctored accounts; Weber had invented him out of whole cloth. The complete history and physical: fabricated. Now the text unravels. Even the case’s name—GeraldW. — sounds like the feeblest of pseudonyms.

He finds himself standing beside Mark’s bed, looking for redemption. The boy pleads with him. “Doc. What kept you? I thought you were dead. Deader than I was.” His speech is slow and fumbling. “You heard what happened?” Weber doesn’t answer. “Tried to off myself. And as far as anybody can tell, maybe not for the first time.”

The words pull Weber down onto the bedside chair. “How are you feeling now?”

Mark opens his elbows, displaying the IV tube running into his left arm. “Well, I’m going to start feeling better real soon, whether I want to or not. Yep, they’re going to bring me back to myself. Mark Three. You know there’s talk of electroshock?”

“I…” Weber starts. “I think you must have gotten that wrong. Misunderstood.”

“Yep, EST. ‘Very mild,’ they tell me. I’ll walk out of this place happy as a clam. Good as new. And I won’t remember the first thing of what I know now. What I’ve figured out.” He flails and grabs Weber by the wrist. “Which is why I have to talk to you. Now. While I still can.”

Weber takes the heel of Mark’s hand in his, and Mark suffers it. The boy is that desperate. When Mark speaks, his voice is pleading.

“You saw me, not long after the accident. You ran tests on me and such. We talked all about your theory, the whole lesion idea, the right posterior thing getting split off from the almond thing. The Miggy?”

Weber sits back, shocked at Mark’s recall. He himself had forgotten their conversation. “Amygdala.”

“You know?” Mark pulls his hand from Weber’s and fakes a feeble grin. “I was sure, back then, when you told me that, that you’d lost your fucking mind.” He squeezes his eyes and shakes his head. Time’s running out. He’s losing his insight to a chemical cocktail seeping into his arms. He can’t quite name the thing he needs to say. The struggle runs the length of his body. He wrestles to grasp the thing that stands just three feet out of reach. “My brain, all those split parts, trying to convince each other. Dozens of lost Scouts waving crappy flashlights in the woods at night. Where’s me?”

Weber could tell stories. The sufferers of automatism, their bodies moving without consciousness. The metamorphopsias, plagued by oranges the size of beach balls and pencils the size of matchsticks. The amnesiacs. The owners of vivid, detailed memories that never happened. Me is a rushed draft, pasted up by committee, trying to trick some junior editor into publishing it. “I don’t know,” Weber says.

“Now you tell me…” Mark’s face crumples again, twisted by thought. No question he might come up with could be worth so much distress. But this is what Weber has flown thirteen hundred miles to hear. Mark’s voice drops, concealed. “Do you think it’s possible…? Could somebody be completely messed up and not have the slightest notion…? And still feel just like they’ve always…?”

It isn’t possible, Weber wants to say. It’s certain. Obligatory. “You’ll feel better,” he says. “More whole than you do now.” Reckless promise. He’d be on the drug himself if that were true.

“I’m not talking about me,” Mark hisses. “I’m talking about everybody else. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands: cases where, unlike mine, the operation actually worked. Everybody walking around without the foggiest idea.”

Weber’s hairs stiffen. Piloerection, old evolutionary holdover—goose flesh. “What operation?”

Mark is wild now. “I need you, Shrinky. There’s no one else can tell me. All the little brain parts, chattering to each other? Those packs of Cub Scouts?”

Weber nods.

“Can you cut one out? One? Without killing the troop?”

“Yes.”

The relief is immediate. Mark slips down on his pillow. “Can you put one in? You know. Kidnap a Scout, stick another in his place? Same basic crappy flashlight, waving around in the dark?”

More goose flesh. “Tell me what you mean.”

Mark drapes his palms over his eyes. “‘Tell me what you mean.’ The man wants to know what I mean.” He twists his head bitterly. The voice drops again. “I mean transplants. Cross-species mix and match.”

Xenotransplantation. An article on the subject in JAMA, last month. The growing body of experiments — bits of cortex from one animal transplanted into another, taking on the properties of the host area. Mark must have heard about these, in the bastardized, garbled way that science reaches everyone.

“They put ape parts into people, right? Why not birds? Their little almond thing for our little almond thing.”

Weber needs only say no, as gently and fully as possible. But something in him wants to say: no need to swap. Already there, inherited. Ancient structures, still in ours.

He owes it to Mark, at least to ask. “Why would they want to do this?”

Mark’s all over the question. “It’s part of a bigger deal. A whole development thing, on the drawing boards for a long time. Bird City. Capitalize on the animals. The next big business, you see? Figure out how to move bits back and forth. Cranes to humans. Vice versa. Like you say: a Cub Scout more or less and you’re still the same troop. Still feel like yourself. It would have worked on me, too, but something went wrong.”

Something communicates through Mark. Something primeval that Weber must hear before the dripping chemicals seal this boy-man back up into the human. There’s only this minute. Only now. “But…what is the operation trying to accomplish?”

“They’re trying to save the species.”

“Which species?”

The question surprises Mark. “Which species?” Shock gives way to that booming, hollowed-out laugh. “That’s a good one. Which species?” He falls silent, deciding.

In Bonnie Travis’s turn-of-the-century hip-flask of a bungalow, the two women barely have room to slide past each other. Karin apologizes at every chance, washes dishes that aren’t even dirty. Bonnie chides her. “Come on! It’s like camping. Our little soddie.”

In truth, the girl has been a blessing, mindlessly cheerful and distracting. Bonnie keeps them entertained with reading tarot cards or roasting s’mores over the gas stove. “Comfort food,” she calls it. At night, Karin fights the urge to curl up in bed with her.

On the second evening, she comes back inside from smoking half a pack out on Bonnie’s deck, to find the girl distraught. She won’t say why at first, just keeps repeating, “It’s nothing. No problem.” But she can’t stay on task and ends up carbonizing the potpies. Karen finds the culprit on Bonnie’s coffee table: Weber’s new book, which the girl has been dutifully plowing through at the rate of half a page a day over the last several months.

“This is what’s upset you?” Karen asks. “Something in here?”

One more denying shake of the head, then the girl breaks down. “There’s a God part of the brain? Religious visions from some kind of epilepsy storm?”

Karin is all over herself, comforting the girl. And the girl takes some comforting.

“You can turn God on and off with electric…? It’s just some built-in structure? Did you already know this? Does everybody? Everybody smart?”

Karin shushes her, strokes her shoulders. “Nobody knows. He doesn’t know.”

“Of course he knows! He wouldn’t put it in a book, if he didn’t. He’s the smartest man I’ve ever met. Religion is just a temporal lobe…? He’s saying belief is just an evolved chemical thing you could gain or lose…? Like what Mark decided about you. How it’s not him anymore, how he can’t even see that he…Oh shit. Shit. I’m too stupid to get this!”

And Karin, too stupid to help. Some part of her — some temporal storm — wants to say: What we sum to is still real. The phantom wants our shaping. Even a God module would have been selected for its survival value. Water is up to something. She says none of this; she has no words. Bonnie’s doubt must have been long in coming, a slow-growing tumor. She’s shaken enough to entertain any wider belief system Karin might suggest. For a long time, they look at each other, caught in some shameful secret. Then, on nothing but grim smiles, they make a pact, joined in the trick of belief, novitiates in a new faith, until damage changes them.

Karin hasn’t stepped out of the toy house except for one more unsuccessful attempt to talk to her brother in the hospital. She hasn’t been to the Refuge since leaving Daniel’s. All her life, she has secretly suspected that everything you learn to want, everything you really make your own, gets taken from you. Now she knows why: nothing is your own. Last night she dreamt herself aloft, high above the oxbows of the Platte. Crusts of ice studded the flats, and stubble filled the fields. No large life of any sort, anywhere. All large creatures were gone. But life was everywhere — microscopic, vegetative, humming in the hive. Voices without language, voices she recognized, calling on her to see. She woke refreshed and filled with baffling confidence.

Now she preps for a venture outside, borrowing Bonnie’s best non-pioneer dress, a sage-green fitted silk that could cause whiplash on Chicago’s Gold Coast. She even gets Bonnie to theme her makeup. An older, grimmer Bonnie holds color chips up to Karin’s face, studying them through squinted eyes.

Touching the girl’s elbow, Karin asks, “You remember painting Mark’s toes when he was still in Trauma?”

“Frostbite,” Bonnie remembers.

“Frostbite,” Karen agrees. “Do me.”

They work together, like technicians. Bonnie steps back to admire her handiwork. “Killer,” she says, which must be good. “Armed and dangerous. You could eat men like a frog eats flies. He won’t know what hit him. Killer, I’m telling you.”

Karin sits still and cries. She takes the crestfallen makeup artist and hugs her. Bonnie hugs back, clutching, an accomplice before the fact.

Then Karin is downtown, the same spot where she first flushed out Robert Karsh. Early evening, and his office empties onto the street. He’s among the last. When he glides out the door and sees her, he stops in surprise. She turns and closes the distance to him, trying not to think, humming the word killer to herself, a protecting spell. He comes up to meet her. His chin is out, and his eyes are everywhere.

“Jesus,” he says. “Look at you.” He wants her, even now, even after what she’s done. Maybe more, because of it. He wants to take her off behind the burning bushes and do it right there, like lower vertebrates. “Well,” he says. “Your friend Daniel seems to have gotten the Development Council’s attention.” He doesn’t need to add: mine, too. He smiles, his scary, wholesale smile. The smile is so Karsh she can’t help smiling back. “You gave away the whole show. Spilled pretty much everything I told you in confidence. Okay: maybe not everything. But all the business stuff.” He’s still smiling, as if at his little Ashley, the girl Karin has never been allowed to meet. “Maybe this was all about business, huh? From the beginning?”

“Robert?” Her voice flies a little, until she rides it down. “I wish I could take credit for that. I wish I’d been that smart.”

“Well, you’ve certainly set us back. Complicated the game. Major personal embarrassment, for me. A scramble to keep my ass out of the fire. Hey: keeps things interesting. The price of learning what I mean to you.”

She shakes her head. “You always knew that. Better than I did.”

“But, hey. If this project doesn’t happen right in Farview, we’ll do it somewhere downstream. You think you’re going to stop us from building? You think growth is just going to go away? Who are you? You aren’t even…”

“I’m not even anyone,” she says.

“I didn’t say that. I’m just saying that whatever the community needs is going to get built. Eventually. If not next year…”

Too self-evident even to counter. Even now, his eyes say, Let’s go somewhere. Get a room. Twenty minutes. Silk dress, doing its job. And she feels nothing, a nothing that fills and lifts her. She stands dead still, unable to stop shaking her head. “I erased myself for you.” Bewildered that she did; bewildered that she still might. She looks at him, scavenging for her past. “You think you knew me. You think you know me!” Years of effort, and she might pass him on the street and not feel a peep. Karsh, too: mimetic Capgras, a smile that fails to acknowledge anything, standing there grinning like he’s just bribed the grade school teacher with an infected apple.

And still, they are connected. She turns and slices a straight line back through town, this town she hates and will never be rid of. And all down the block, at her back, she hears him calling, half amused, “Babe? Come on, Rabbit. Hey! Let’s talk this out.” Easy, understanding, sure she will be back, if not now, then this time next year.

They talk for longer than Weber can say. And with every answer Mark needs, Weber grows less certain. That pack of Scouts, waving faulty flashlights in the woods at night, is scattered. All his life, he has known himself to be just this makeshift troop. Only now, something undams in him, and knowing goes real.

They talk until Mark’s theories start to sound plausible, until Mark believes that Weber has grasped the size of the facts. They talk until the chemicals in the IV drip dampen the activity of his synapses, calming him.

But something in him still struggles. One palm on his temples, the other on his nape. “You know, they can do anything that they want to me. Drugs. Electroshock. Even surgery, if that’s what it takes. I’ll happily let them inside again, if they just get it right this time. I can’t live with this halfway bullshit anymore.” He closes his eyes and growls like a cornered wolf. “Hate this feeling that I’ve made everything up. That I’m some totally invented asshole. But there’s one thing I know I did not invent.” He contorts his body, reaches to his bedside drawer, and pulls out the note. It refuses to decay; the lamination has turned it permanent. He throws it down on the sill. “I wish to God I did invent it. I wish there were no guardian. But there it is. And what in God’s name are we supposed to do about it?”

Weber does nothing except wait until the chemicals take Mark, and he sleeps. Then Weber totters down the hospital hall. He sits for a moment in a glass terrarium of a waiting room, filled with individuals all promised a high-tech miracle. A girl, twenty at the outside, sits in a cushioned orange chair, reading aloud from an oversized, garish picture book to a four-year-old on her lap. “Did you ever wonder how the miracle of you began?” She reads sweetly, reassuringly. “You didn’t come from monkeys. Not from some jellyfish in the sea. No! You began when God decided…”

He looks up, and it’s as if he has willed her into being, there in front of him. The sister, in green silk. “Did you see him?” he asks. His voice sounds strange to him.

Karin shakes her head. “He’s sleeping. Unconscious.”

Weber nods. Un-conscious. Wrong, that the negation should stand for something so many billions of years older than the negated.

“Will he be all right?”

There’s something in the question he can’t penetrate. Will anyone? “He’s safe. For now.” They stand near each other, saying nothing. He sees the hundred small muscles around her eyes reading his, even as his fit to hers. “He’s under the impression that he might be part bird.”

She smiles in slow pain. “I know the feeling.”

“He feels that the emergency room surgeons swapped…”

Her brusque nod cuts him off. “Old story,” she says. “Not surprising, given the look of them.”

She has gone demented — something in the water supply. “The surgeons?”

Her face creases like a child’s, a girl who has just discovered the total hoax of words. “No, the birds.”

“Ah. I’ve never seen them.”

She looks at him, like he’s just said he has never felt pleasure. She checks her watch. “Let’s go,” she says. “We’ve just time.”

They hide in an abandoned pit blind as dusk comes down. They sit on an old trysting tarp she had in her trunk, she still in Bonnie’s green silk dress, he in coat and tie. She’s taken him to a roost that only natives know — a private farm, a secret uninhabited trespass. The pit is chilly, the field around them littered with last year’s brown corn stalk stubs and waste grain. Just beyond the field, the sandy banks of the river serpentine. A few birds already gather. She folds her hands in front of her face, like a kid learning to pray. He looks at the thicket of birds a hundred yards from them, then back at her. This is it? The mythic spectacle?

She grins and shakes her head at his doubt. She brushes his shoulder: wait. Life is long out here. Longer than you think. Longer than you can think.

For a moment in the chill dusk, he lifts. The sky slips from peach to garnet to blood. A thread ripples across the light: a kettle of cranes home in from nowhere. They make a sound, prehistoric, too loud and carrying for their body size. A sound he remembers from before he hears it.

He and the woman crouch on the ground. His spine hums with cold. Another thread floats down on the still air. Then another. The fibers of bird catch and join, an unraveled cloth coming back together. Threads appear from all compass points, the sky crimson, shot through with veins of black. The wings bank and yaw, slip or skate up again, before winding back in a slow cyclone. Soon the sky fills with tributaries, a river of birds, a mirror Platte meandering through heaven. And every part of it, calling.

The birds are huge, much bigger than he imagined. Their wings pump slow and full, the long primaries arcing high above the body, then drooping well below, a shawl perpetually resettled over forgetting shoulders. Necks stretch out while legs dangle behind, and in the middle, the slight bulge of body, like a child’s toy suspended between strings. A bird lands twenty feet from the blind. It shakes out its wings, a span longer than Weber. Behind this one, hundreds more fall in. And the roosting in this private field is just a sideshow, nothing compared to the climaxes in the larger sanctuaries. The calls collect and echo, a single splintering, tone-deaf chorus stretching miles in every direction, back into the Pleistocene.

He thinks: Sylvie should see this. The most natural thought in the world. Sylvie and Jess. Not Jess, but Jessie, at eight or nine, when a city of birds would have astounded her. Did he ever come close to that child? Did that self-shaping little girl deserve some more feeling father?

In threaded clumps, the birds coast back to earth. They collapse from grace into earthbound stumbling. The diminishment would be comic if it weren’t so painful. A thousand floating cranes succumb to gravity. They spot the humans and carry on, deep in the constantly meandering present. For as long as there have been prairies and sandy banks and the idea of safety here, birds have gathered in these braids. This century, they graze on field corn. Next century: whatever scraps this place might still supply.

The icy ground numbs him. He jumps at the sound of her voice, from a distant planet. “Look! That one, there.” He lifts his head to see. It’s him, in the roadside dance house, alongside Barbara Gillespie, wrestling his body into joy. The crane dances, weirdly deliberate. It tosses twigs into the air. It cowls its fingers and kinks itself like a rapper. Then the bird and its mate rise to the alert, necks extended, eyes on something invisibly far off, their beaks parallel, signing the air. They alternate, then synchronize, looping their calls into unison.

He locates something in the pirouetting pair. Some clue to his own dissolve. And then, in trivial telepathy, something even science could explain, she reads his thoughts: “Why did you come back? Was it for Mark? Or for her?”

He can’t even play dumb.

Her grin twists into a sneer. “Everybody saw. Obvious.”

“Saw what?” They can have seen nothing. He’s only just seen, himself. But even his slow science converges on the obvious: the first person is always the last to know.

She talks to someone out in the field. “Daniel says she called him. A year ago, before Mark’s accident. Asking him all sorts of questions about the Refuge. He says she’s a spy. A researcher, working for the developers. Does that sound crazy to you? Like one of Mark’s theories?”

He would say something if he could. He’d have a thought, and even give it, but he is slipping back down, underneath words.

She examines him, the two of them reversed, she the doctor and he the subject. “Something’s happened to you.”

“Yes,” he says. He sees that something, thousands of it, combing the fields, a whisper away.

She closes her eyes and lies down on the frosty ground. He eases back beside her, on his side, his head in his crooked arm. He looks at her, at the open country of her, as the last amber flecks of light die, searching for the woman of a year ago. Now she looks back. “I don’t know what I needed from you. Writing you about Mark. I don’t know what I needed from him. From anyone.” She flicks her palm out at the damning evidence, the bird-crammed field. What is there possibly to need?

She looks away, self-conscious. She sits up, points at a nearby pair: two large and agitated birds, walking with their wings out, jabbering. One bugles a melody, four notes of spontaneous surprise. The other picks up the motive and shadows it. The sound stabs him: creation chattering to itself, locking him out. True speech, beyond any but a crane’s ability to decode. The speaking pair fall silent, scouring the ground for evidence. They could be detectives, or scientists. Life incommunicable, even to life.

He looks at the woman, her face lined with the same thought, as clearly as if he has put it there: What does it feel like, to be a bird?

“There,” she declares, nodding at the walking pair. “That’s what Mark’s talking about.” Her nose flares, red and raw. Her head shakes in disbelief. “They used to just unzip, and be us. Or we’d peel off our skin and go with them. Oldest story in the book.” She takes his profile, but when he turns back toward her, she swings away. “The sad thing is, though, they can’t love. They mate for life. Follow their partners every year for thousands of miles. Raise their young together. Fake a broken wing to lure a predator away from their chicks. Even sacrifice themselves to save their young. But no. Ask any scientist. Birds can’t love. Birds don’t even have a self! Nothing like us. No relation.”

He can only begin to see all the things she holds against him. He would apologize, if he could speak.

The larger of the walking pair turns and fixes him. Something looks out from the prehistoric bird, a secret about him, but not his. A look of pure wildness, all the hard intelligence of simply being that Weber has forgotten.

But the woman is talking. She is saying things, faraway things, with great urgency. She tells him about the water wars. How the preservers have won for a moment. How they will lose, forever afterward. She has seen all the numbers, and no power exists large enough to stop them. Her face sets into an ugly mask. She shakes her arm at the staring bird, who takes fright and skims away. “How can we not want this? Just this, exactly as it is. If people only knew…”

But if people knew, this field would be buried in crane peepers.

“How long do you suppose we have?” she asks. “God, what is wrong with us? You’re the expert. What is it in our brains that won’t…?”

The sky is dark now, and he can’t see what she points at. Each of them sits sealed off in their own private pit blind, looking out on an unthinkably long night.

She speaks out loud, as if already there were only memory. “I remember the first time my father took us out here. We were little. Me, Mark, and my father, sitting in this field. This one. Early morning, before the sun was up. You have to see these creatures in the morning. The evening show is pure theater. But the morning is religion. The three of us at dawn, still happy. And my father, still the wisest man alive. I can hear him. He told us how they navigated. He was a small-plane pilot, and he loved how they followed landmarks to find this exact spot, year after year. How they recognized individual fields. ‘Damn straight, cranes remember. Hang on to things like a bat hangs to a barn rafter.’ And the first time I saw those birds circle up into the air and disappear, I kept looking at the sky, thinking, Hey, me too. Take me with. Awful feeling. Empty. Like: Where’d I go bad?”

Her fingers brush her eyebrows. He knows her now, the thing in her that had once so repelled him. Her weakness. Her need to do right by the world.

“Some kind of lesson for us. His idea of fatherhood. Going on and on about blood, family, how even the birds take care of their own. Scared the crap out of both of us. He squeezed us both until it hurt, made us swear. ‘If anything ever happens — and it will — you two never, never give up on each other.’”

These last words are so swallowed, Weber must supply them. Then she looks away, strong again, more composed than he can even fake, gazing across the wetlands, past the progress that will destroy them.

“He was wild, my father. Totally lost touch with the rest of the race. He always told me I would come to nothing. Pretty much ensured it.” She turns and grabs Weber’s arm in the dark. She needs him to contradict. Needs him to say it’s not too late to change her life. Not too late for real work at last, the only work that matters. “If you had raised me…If you had raised Mark and me? Someone who knew what you know?” She might have come to this calling sooner, while there was still time.

Weber stays silent, too scared to confirm or deny. But she’s already taken what she needs from him. She shakes her head at him and says, “Unsponsored, impossible, near-omnipotent, and infinitely fragile…”

He struggles to place the words, written by someone who once was him. Her face, flush with the idea, begs him to remember. If all forged, then all free. Free to play ourselves, free to impersonate, to improvise, free to image anything. Free to weave our minds through what we love. What lots we all might learn about this river. What places water might still get out and see.

He spends the night awake in his rented cubicle, his brain on fire. His cell phone rings twice, but he doesn’t take it. He stares at the hell-red LED of the bedside alarm, watching the minutes hang. He will go to Dedham Glen, ask to see her file. No: they would deny him access. He isn’t authorized. He could ask her supervisor: When did she come to this facility? What job did she do before this one? But the supervisor would just stonewall him, or worse.

He’s out in front of her bungalow at 4:00 a.m. He sits in the rental in total darkness, all the time in the world to decide not to torch his life. But then, it’s burned already — Chickadee, Conscience Bay, Sylvie, the lab, his writing, Famous Gerald — all consumed, months ago. He cannot even fake the role now. Not even his wife would believe the act. He wills himself downward, falling. There is a need to be no one, one that will forever hide its precise location from neuroscience’s probes. He steps from the car and wanders to her stoop, into the chaos he has made.

Barbara comes puffed and bleary to the door, the first hint of awareness on her. She tilts her head and smiles, almost expecting him. And the last, solid part of him dissolves in air. “You okay?” she asks, inviting and uncertain. “I didn’t know you were back.”

His head rocks, as easy as breathing.

Wordless, she lets him in. Only when she flicks on the dim overhead light in a bare foyer — an abandoned vacation cottage on the shores of a northern lake, circa 1950—does she ask, “Have you seen Mark?”

“Yes. Have you?”

She drops her head. “I’ve been afraid to.”

But that can’t be. The boy-man’s most devoted caregiver, who has seen him in far worse shape. He catches her eye. Her look is renegade, running out over her left shoulder. She’s wearing a green-and-red plaid flannel men’s bathrobe out of which her legs and arms protrude like fresh mistakes. She puts a hand to her puffy face. “Am I awful?”

She is beautiful, the beaten kind of beauty that guts him.

She leads him into a tiny cupboard kitchen where, wobbly, she puts a kettle of water on the gas ring. He hovers next to her. “There isn’t much time,” he says. “I’ve something to show you. Before the sun rises.”

Her hands snake up and push his chest, first gently, then hard. She nods. “I’ll just get dressed. Please…” Her palms extend, offering the three small rooms to him.

There’s nothing to take possession of. The kitchen has service for one, a ragged collection of dented pans and jelly jars. The table and chairs in the front room could only have come from an auction. Oval rag rug and crocheted curtains. A heavy, old oak farmstead hutch and matching writing desk. Above the desk, taped to the wall, is a well-thumbed index card, written in pen: But I do nothing upon myself, and yet I am mine own Executioner.

On the desk sits a paperback: Eiseley’s The Immense Journey. The evening reading of this nurse’s aide. The back cover identifies the author as a local boy, born and raised in the bend of the Platte. Scores of adhesive colored arrows stick to the pages. He flips to the last: The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.

Next to the book sits a portable disc player and ear buds. Alongside the player, a short stack of discs. He picks up the top one: Monteverdi. She chooses this moment to come too quickly out of the bedroom, rushing to button her cobalt cotton blouse. She sees him fingering the disc. She’s caught; her eyebrows pinch, guilty. “The Vespers of 1610. But for you, 1595.”

He holds it out to her, accusing. “You misled me.”

“No! I bought that…since our evening. A keepsake. Believe me, I can’t make heads or tales of it.”

He places it back on top of the stack without looking. He doesn’t want to see the other discs. His belief can’t bear more tests.

She crosses the room and circles him. Inside her arms, he comes apart. A fist at the base of his brain stem opens into a palm. He surges on the dopamine, the spikes of endorphins, his chest jerking. The wildest research in the most reckless journal…He has wrecked himself, and it’s good beyond saying. No writer, no researcher, no lecturer, no husband, no father. He has precipitated out. Nothing left but sensation, the warm, light pressure against his ribs.

The room is cold and every inch of her burns. He slips down into limbic back alleys, corners that survived when the massive neocortex came through like a superhighway. He feels his skin against her hands, skin too white and papery, his bare arms a blotchy mess of veins, his flanks rude humps. One heartbeat, and he’s strange to his body, all those nested ghosts invisible to this woman who has never seen him any way but this.

Then stranger still: he does not care how she sees him. Does not want her to see him as anything but what he well and truly is: hollow and graceless, stripped of authority. Borderless, same as anyone.

“Wait,” he says. “There’s something you need to see.” Something not his. The evening show is pure theater. But the morning is religion.

They drive back out to Karin’s field in the first hint of dawn. He finds the way there, lefts and rights stored in his body. The night before has scattered. But the flock is still there, wading. He and this woman take their place in the blind, not ten feet from the nearest clump of birds. They strain for silence, but their movements alert those cranes left on guard. Awareness spreads through the flock. The cranes stir, singly and together, then settle when the danger passes. In the growing light, they begin the ordinary stutters of morning, flaring up here and there in tentative bursts of ballet.

“I told you,” she whispers. “Everything dances.”

One by one, the birds test the air, first in short hops, like scraps in the breeze. Then thousands of them lift up in flood. The beating surface of the world rises, a spiral calling upward on invisible thermals. Sounds carry them all the way skyward, clacks and wooden rattles, rolling, booming, bugling, clouds of living sound. Slowly, the mass unfurls in ribbons and disperses into thin blue.

What joy there is in this life. Lifting past us always. What pointless joy.

He hears his own voice coming out of him, broken counterpoint to this honking morning chorus. “Not to be separated, not by the thinnest curtain shut out from the measure of the stars.”

“What is that?” she asks.

He struggles to call it back. “Innerness — what is it if not amplified sky, shot through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming?”

A book of Rilke he bought for Sylvie, lifetimes ago, right out of school, when they still made time for pointless elegies.

“The scientist is a poet,” this woman says.

But he is neither. He’s no profession he can recognize. Nothing he ever thought he might become. And this woman: What is this nurse’s aide? A woman so alone she wants even him.

She puts her hand down inside the collar of his coat. He touches her back. They trace the skin, the trap between them. His hands shake against her breasts, and she would let him, would lead him forward into everything, right here in this bird-filled field. Her rib cage presses against his palm. They blunder into something startling to them both. Their mouths are on each other and thinking goes. Everything goes except this first need.

Something huge and white streaks across the field. He jerks up, and she with him. He spots it first, but she identifies. “My God. A whooper.” Ghosts in that flash of light, some private terror. She squeezes his arm, a tourniquet. “We can’t be seeing this. One hundred and sixty of them left. Jesus, that’s one!”

The ghost glides shining across the fields. Neither can breathe. He grasps at a last hope. “That was it. What was in the road. He said he saw a column of white…” He studies her face, science wanting so badly to be confirmed.

She follows the bird, afraid to look at Weber. She has the chance now, to clear everything. Instead, she says, “You think?”

They watch the phantom bird until it vanishes through a line of trees. They crouch and watch, long after the field empties.

Both are frozen and caked in mud. She pulls him back to her, mindless again. They flood each other, waves of oxytocin and a savage bonding. Release — vanishing in mid-prairie, lifted free of everything — hovers just out of his reach.

A broken laugh comes from too nearby, something not belonging to the Platte’s dawn chorus. A cricket chirr, months too early. It chirps again, from inside his shed jacket at his feet. He glances at her, bewildered. Her look tells him: your phone. He fumbles to find the pocket that hides the device. He looks at the number on the caller ID, the first time ever. He shuts the ringer off and folds back into her. Everything will be panic, from now on. Strange as birth. He would write it up — first case ever of contagious Capgras — if he could still write. He seems to be nearing, and she is taking him. Thoughts flow through him like a brook over pebbles, none of them his. There comes the emptiness of arrival. Then there is just holding, and bracing for endless vertigo.

Wordless, they head back to her car.

“Which way?” she asks.

No choice, really. “West.”

No other compass for the two of them. She drives at random. They cross some dry stream. “Oregon Trail,” she says. Scars in the land confirm her, despite the century and a half of erosion.

They drive for miles in silence. He waits for her to say what at any moment he could make her say. But he is perjured now, too, and deserves nothing. When they get light-headed, they stop for something to eat in a town called Broken Bow. “Another ghost town,” she says. “Most of the towns out here peaked a hundred years ago. The place is emptying out. Heading back to frontier.”

“How do you know these things?” He knows already, how she knows.

She dodges. “Around here? Only the dying stick around.”

They buy water and fruit and bread and carry it into the sandhills. They picnic on a dune that drifts downwind even as they sit on it. Some part of them is always touching. The land is abandoned, a worldwide contagion. In the middle distance, the pitch-bending minor chords of an endless freight.

She touches his ear in surprise. “I just remembered last night’s dream. How beautiful! I dreamt we were making music. You and me, Mark and Karin, I think. I was playing the cello. I’ve never touched a cello. But the music coming out…unbelievable! How can the brain do that? I mean, pretending to play an instrument: fine. But who was composing that music? In real time? I can’t even read music. The most gorgeous harmonies I’ve ever heard. And I must have written it.”

He has no answer, and he gives her as much. All he can do is touch her ear back. His dream last night was one he hasn’t had for months: a man, plunging headlong, frozen in the air in front of a smoking column of white.

They sit in the middle of a drifting nowhere. His phone vibrates in his pocket. If the thing rings here, it could ring in outer space. He knows who it is before he answers. The ID confirms him: Jess. His daughter, who only calls in extremity and on holidays. He has to answer. Before he can even ask what’s wrong, Jess howls at him. “I just talked to Mom. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

He can’t attach himself. He feels every mile between here and any coast. He says, “I don’t know,” perhaps several times. It only makes his daughter crazier. Grow up, she screams. Perhaps she is having an insulin attack. The signal starts to die. “Jess? Jess. I can’t hear you. Listen to me. I’ll call you back. I will call you…”

When he hangs up, Barbara is still there. She cradles his cheek, tentatively, and he lets her. The first of his punishments. Her hand says: Whatever you need. Closer or farther. Yours to keep inventing or to send away.

He is a case he has forgotten until this moment: the woman with the shattered insula, lost in asomatognosia. Now and then, for brief periods, all sense of her body disappeared. Skeleton and muscles, limbs and torso would fade to nothing. And still, without a body, she kept to the lie, believing that kapo in the temporo-parieto-occipital junction, that lackey of the system always ready to take charge.

They drive some more, the only thing for it. Another dozen miles down the road, she says, “There’s a place up ahead I’ve always wanted to see.”

“How far?”

Her lips pucker as she calculates. “A hundred miles?”

There’s nothing left of him to object. He points through the windshield, some invisible target.

She grows careless behind the wheel, even giddy. They have no future, and even less past. For two hours, they say nothing about themselves. Nor do they talk much about Mark. The closest they come is when she asks him to tell her ten essential things that neuroscience knows for certain. He should be able to list dozens. But something has happened to his list. Those that are essential no longer feel certain. And those that are certain can’t possibly be essential.

He sees their destination from a distance, rising up out of a field of winter wheat. Salisbury Plain. Megalithic monument. A wrong turn somewhere, but here they are. She laughs as he makes it out. “This is it. Carhenge.”

The huge gray stones turn into automobiles. Three dozen spray-painted junkers stood on end or draped as lintels across one another. A perfect replica. They are out of the car, walking around the standing circle. He manages a pained imitation of mirth. Here it is: the ideal memorial for the blinding skyrocket of humans, natural selection’s brief experiment with awareness. And everywhere, thousands of sparrows nest in the rusted axles.

They dine in nearby Alliance, at a place called the Longhorn Smokehouse. A television suspended above their corner booth breaks the news. Operation Iraqi Freedom has begun. War has been so long in coming that Weber feels only mild déjà vu. They watch the cycling, impenetrable footage, the president, looping over and over: May God bless our country and all who defend her. He watches her stony face as she watches the screen. She watches as only a reporter can. He has known for some time. Only now he sees her, unmistakable. Her voice catches a little when she talks. “Mark is right, you know. The whole place, a substitute. I mean: Is this country anyplace you recognize?”

They sit too long, watching too many frenzied reports packed to exploding with no content. When they get back into the car, the light is already fading.

“Should we find some place to stay?” She doesn’t look at him. She means shelter, but shelter is long gone.

He wants nothing but the blank slate. Erased from what he has done, from what he is doing. Nothing waits for him anywhere. Find some place to stay: yes, night by night, foraging, the two of them, even with the worst confirmed, even knowing about her what he now knows. No more reporting from a distance. No more case histories: only make himself as culpable as she. Yet the words out of his mouth kill even this possibility. “We need to go back.”

She can’t mask the half-second of fear. Her shoulders flinch in the snare. “Oh, Heart!” she says. Whose name is that? Someone else’s endearment. Some earlier escape that she mistakes him for. She does not want him; she only wants to avoid detection. She starts to object. “My house is so small…”

And the earth so large. “We need to,” he repeats. Yes, life is a fiction. But whatever it might mean, the fiction is steerable.

She knows what is happening. Still, she pretends. She starts up the car and points it southeast. After a few miles, her voice pure invitation, she asks, “What are you thinking?”

He shakes his head. He can’t do this in words. His silence unnerves her. She grips the wheel, her face braced for the worst.

He grazes her upper arm with his knuckles. “I was thinking, I feel I’ve known you my whole life.”

Her face turns to his and breaks. She doesn’t believe him, but she will take it. Some part of her knows, already, where he’s bringing them. Some part already suffers the sentence, before he levels it.

He chooses that moment to ask, “What story were you covering? When you first came here.”

They ride an awful mile in silence. Something in him hopes she’ll say nothing. Something in him doesn’t want the facts. He feels what he first knew in her, the dread just beneath her fake composure. Out of the corner of his eye, she is someone else. Like that woman he examined once, call her Hermia, whose only symptom was seeing children in her left visual field, even hearing their laughter, only to see them disappear when she turned to look at them…

“What do you mean?” she asks at last. Her voice is bright enamel on ashes.

He has no right to force her. He is not justice; he is duplicity itself. “Who were you working for?” No real need to know. But a proven neurological phenomenon: activity in the verbal center has a suppressing effect on pain.

She grips the wheel and steers the ruler-straight road. “Dedham Glen,” she says. “I worked for them every day for a year. I cleared twelve hundred dollars a month.”

At last the anomalies on Mark’s chart make sense to him. He knows what happened. “Karin’s friend,” he says. “The conservationist. You interviewed him over the phone, a year ago.”

Her eyes are a mess and her red nostrils quiver like a rabbit’s. Something still tenacious in her frees that last little part of him that did not yet love her. “Water,” she says. Matter of fact. Journalistic. “The story was about water.” They roll another quarter mile in the dropping dark. She speaks into a machine. “Most stories will be, soon.” She rallies, shakes her hair, turns the full force of her emptiness on him. She shoots for a fashion-magazine insouciance. It would repel him, but for that thing he recognizes in her, and shares. That desperate hope of evading discovery. “I’ll tell you everything. How much do you want to know?”

He wants to know nothing. Even now, he would disappear with her, someplace words can’t reach.

“A journalist,” she tells the windshield. Another three-street town flashes by. “Producer for Cablenation News. You know: find a colorful topic, work it up, conduct the groundwork, screen the interviews, cull the research. I always tried to…be as big as the story. I always tried to dig, to immerse in the material. That’s what killed me, I think. I’d been an editor for seven years, producer for three and a half. I could have moved up to a major desk, coasted until they turned me out to pasture.”

He stares at the age marks in her neck that he has never noticed. The tendons flare under her clenched jaw. Her face will crack open and a grown thing emerge.

“I was in trouble. Flameout, they called it. It should never have started. I was superwoman. I mean, Jesus: I’d been at Waco, with those rows and rows of lawn chairs, all the good American citizens turning out to watch the human barbecue. I produced a series on the crèche babies at Oklahoma City. I did Heaven’s Gate — three successive days of collaborative suicide. Nothing bothered me. I could tell it all. Walked around lower Manhattan, sticking a video camera in people’s faces after the towers. A week after that, I started to lose it. We’re out of control, aren’t we? And we’re pulling everything down on top of us.”

She still needs him to contradict. What she has always needed from him. And even here, he fails her.

“My boss made me see a pill peddler, who put me on the same stuff the rest of the nation is already taking. It smoothed me out a little. But I lost my edge. Got dull and sloppy. I couldn’t get the job done anymore. They took me off news and put me on human interest. Harmless pieces. Pathetic. The pauper custodian who dies and leaves a million dollars to the local community college. Twins reunited after forty years, and still behaving identically. That’s what the trip to Nebraska was supposed to be. A little rest and recuperation. A can’t-miss, please-everyone story, one that even I could handle.”

“The cranes,” Weber says. The only story out here. Endless return.

On a flat, featureless stretch three miles out of town, she turns to look at him. Her face searches his, bargaining. “They wanted Disney. I tried to make it bigger. So I dug a little. It didn’t take much to find the water. I dug a little more. I learned that we were going to waste that river, no matter what I wrote. I could tell a story that broke people down and made them ache to change their lives, and it would make no difference. That water is already gone.”

Kearney appears, an orange dome of light on the horizon. He waits for her to finish. Only when she glances over her right shoulder, a wild, fugitive, pleading look, does he realize she’s done. “So you quit,” he says. “And became a nurse’s aide?”

Her shoulders jerk. But recovery comes fast enough. “They took me as a volunteer, at first. I had some experience…years ago. In high school. I got the nurse’s aide license within three months. It’s not…you know, brain science.”

Even now, she will not tell him. Not by herself. So he tells her. “You knew they would be sending him there?”

Her eyes steel. She grows brutally calm. “Is this some kind of theory? What do you think I am?”

I is just a diversion. His science has known that for some time. He has suspected her, long before Daniel’s positive ID. Maybe since the day he saw her. He sensed her deception at once, as she sensed his: the lie that joined them, that drew him to her. But here is the part he still can’t understand. “I think I must have seen you once before. Some years ago. When your network interviewed…”

“Yes,” she says, controlled, making the right onto Highway 10, just outside town. She speaks like a producer again. A journalist who might report any story. “So why did you keep coming back? To test your memory? You thought you’d use me. A little thrill, a little mystery. Public hostility was breaking you down. Take a quick escape trip; rewrite your life. Out-of-body experience. Expose a crime. Entrapment. Then pass judgment on me.”

He shakes his head, for both of them. Something bigger than judgment brought him back. The winds of homecoming. Now, worse than ever, even as she turns cold and horrible, he knows her. Her face flares and she slams the wheel with her palms, her eyes everywhere, flushed into the open. With a flick of his head, he will force her to turn, not toward her bungalow, not toward an anonymous motel room. Back to where the story started. When he finally speaks, his voice isn’t his. “I don’t know what you ever could have felt…what I might have been to you. But I know how you feel for that boy.”

At the second-to-last traffic light before Good Samaritan, she sees where he is forcing her. She reaches out her right hand and grabs him. One last preemptive seduction: we could still escape, the two of us. Disappear somewhere on that long river.

He thinks of what she has already lost: her career, her community, such friends as she had, a year of her life, and as many more as the boy might want to take. It’s not enough. “Tell him,” he says. “You know you need to.”

She turns her head, strewing explanations. “I tried,” she claims. “I would have. But he didn’t recognize…”

“Which time?”

All pretense between them dies. Stripped bare, they know each other. She spits venom. “Why are you doing this? Am I another case? What do you want from me? You smug, self-righteous, self-protecting little…”

He nods in recognition. But he has grown light, empty, a committee of millions. “You can do this.” He looks down into the fact, the one thing left that he knows for certain. “You can do this. I’ll go with you.”

A cold February night on a dark Nebraska road. She is alone in the car, driving at random. Hours ago, she filmed the evening spectacle. But the cameras failed to capture the full force of the otherwordly gathering. Tonight’s birds have shaken her so badly she can’t return to her hotel. The crew has long ago disbursed, and she is alone, at loose ends, as brittle and flimsy as she felt in New York last fall. Maybe she has gone off the medication too quickly. Or maybe it’s the cranes, those threads floating in, massing and trumpeting, misled by millions of years of memory. The end will be instant. They’ll never know what hit them.

She herself would never have known, except in following this story. The silent, invisible new war on wetlands: she has hunted down the details, background for this report. Her species is running amok, and now more than ever, it’s every life for itself. Her nerves are jagged, the rental is suffocating, and this straight slash of road unnerves her. She has tried for hours to calm herself, sitting in a restaurant, then a movie theater, walking through the dead downtown, driving these deserted country roads, and still she’s in no state to sleep. If she can make it just a few more hours, just until dawn, and the birds again…

Even the ancient polyphony coming out of the car speakers shreds her. She shuts it off, her fingers frenzied. But silence on this black and freezing February night is worse. She can take only thirty seconds of it before she flips the radio back on. She trembles up and down the dial, trying to land on something solid. She finds a station and fixes on it, no matter the content. It’s talk, and only talk might help her now.

Some woman’s satin voice crawls up intimate into her ear. For a moment, it sounds like Christian revival — no believer left behind. But these words are worse than religion. Facts. The woman’s voice recites a litany, somewhere between a shopping list and a poem. It took the human race two and a half million years to reach a billion people. It took 123 years to add a second billion. We hit three billion, thirty-three years later. Then in fourteen years, then thirteen, then twelve…

Shaking, she pulls over onto the shoulder. Alone in this nowhere with these numbers. A storm breaks somewhere in her head. Signals surge, triggering one another. Nothing in evolution prepares her for this. Sheets of electricity cascade through her, fact-induced seizures, and when the headlights appear in her rearview mirror, the most rational thing in the world is to open the door and step out into them.

Now she enters the hospital again. The year before, they stopped her outside the sealed ward. You’re his sister? One unthinking nod of the head was enough to get her through. This time no one challenges her. Anyone at all is free to go see him. Even the person who first put him there.

He is sitting up in bed, struggling with an old, familiar book. She can tell by his posture that the fog is lifting. His face lights up at the sight of her, that mix of ideal and instinctual gratitude. But it fades as fast, with a look at her face.

What’s happened? he asks. Who died?

She stands at the foot of his bed. Her stance alone might trigger his memory. That trace is still in there, in the weights of his synapses. But still, she must tell him. Her tracks were first. The car that was behind him was in front of him. She was in the road. He rolled his truck to keep from killing her.

How? he asks. Why? The pieces won’t fit together.

She is alive because of him. He is brain-damaged because of her.

You are my guardian? You wrote the note?

No, she tells him. Not me.

She stands in front of him again in memory, only hours after the first time, out in the empty road. He is still intact, still responsive. Strung with tubes, but not comatose yet. That will come later, with the excitotoxicity. The shock of this visit will bring it on. Now, as she stands by his bed in the trauma unit, he recognizes. He looks on her, terrified. She has come back, the white pillar he swerved to avoid. She’s some supernatural creature, rising up from death. But her face is molten, and choked sounds stream out of her. He recoils before he realizes: she’s begging for forgiveness.

He tries to tell her. Nothing comes out his throat but a dry hiss. She leans down to his mouth, and still nothing. His right hand scratches in the air, gesturing for paper and pen. She fishes these out of her purse and hands them to him. Already half-paralyzed by pressure rising in his skull, his bruised lobes swelling against the fixed bone, in a damaged hand that isn’t his, he draws the words:

I am No One

but Tonight on North Line Road

GOD led me to you

so You could Live

and bring back someone else.

He fumbles the note into her fingers. As she reads it, a blinding spike hits his right hemisphere. He falls back onto the bed, his cry cut short. Then he is still.

She has destroyed him twice. In reptile panic, she drops the note on the bedside table and vanishes.

His anguish comes on, too stunned to stop itself. Even as she pleads with him, his eyes deny her. In his stare, the saint disintegrates and she turns back into herself.

You let me hunt for a year, and never said shit. How could you? You were my…You would have done anything…

She stands in front of him, erased. She has lost even the right to defend herself. He tears the note out of his bedside drawer and waves it in the air, slapping the stricken handwriting.

If that’s what happened…what the fuck am I doing with this? Get it away from me.

He throws the scrap of laminated paper at her. It falls to the floor. She bends down and clutches it to her.

This is yours. Your curse, not mine.

Her mouth works, asking, How? Who? But no sound emerges.

His rage bursts. You’re the one who’s supposed to go do this. Go bring back someone.

Someone stands mute in the doorway, brought back by a note that will forever circulate. So you might live. And now that curse is his.