The Echo Maker

Part Five: And Bring Back Someone Else

What does a bird remember? Nothing that anything else might say. Its body is a map of where it has been, in this life and before. Arriving at these shallows once, the crane colt knows how to return. This time next year it will come back through, pairing off for life. The year after next: here again, feeding the map to its own new colt. Then one more bird will recall just what birds remember.

The yearling crane’s past flows into the now of all living things. Something in its brain learns this river, a word sixty million years older than speech, older even than this flat water. This word will carry when the river is gone. When the surface of the earth is parched and spoiled, when life is pressed down to near-nothing, this word will start its slow return. Extinction is short; migration is long. Nature and its maps will use the worst that man can throw at it. The outcome of owls will orchestrate the night, millions of years after people work their own end. Nothing will miss us. Hawks’ offspring will circle above the overgrown fields. Skimmers and plovers and sandpipers will nest in the thousand girdered islands of Manhattan. Cranes or something like them will trace rivers again. When all else goes, birds will find water.

When Karin Schluter enters her brother’s room, the man who has been denying her is gone. In his place, a Mark she has never seen sits in a chair in striped pajamas, reading a paperback with a picture of a prairie on the cover. He looks up as if she’s late for a longstanding appointment.

“It’s you,” he tells her. “You’re here.” His tongue cups the roof of his mouth, the first half of a K. But a shudder passes through him, and he turns away.

The muscles of her face revolt. A wave breaks over her. He is back again; he all but knows her. The thing she has needed all these months, worse than anything. The reunion she has dreamed about for more than a year. But this is nothing like she has imagined. The return is too seamless, too gradual in coming.

He looks up at her, changed in a way she can’t identify. He grimaces. “What took you so long?” She crumples on him, pulls his neck up into her face. Rapids course between them. “Don’t wet me,” he says. “I’ve bathed already today.” He pulls her head off him and holds it between his hands. “Jesus. Look at you. Some things never change.”

She has to stare back for a second before the difference hits her. “God, Mark. You’re wearing glasses.”

He takes them off to inspect them. “Yeah. They’re not mine. Just borrowed them from the guy next door.” He replaces them and lays the book down on the windowsill on top of another. A Sand County Almanac. “Been boning up.”

She knows the copy. It shouldn’t be here. “Where did you get that? Who gave that to you?” More bite than she intends. Despite herself: brother and sister again, too soon.

He looks at the book, as if for the first time. “Who do you think gave it to me? Your boyfriend.” He turns to her, expanding. “Complicated guy. But he’s got a lot of intriguing theories.”

“Theories? About what?”

“He thinks we are all hosed. That we’ve all gone schiz or something. Kind of out there, wouldn’t you say?”

The medication is working, the mild shocks, but so gradually there is almost no threshold. The same spin-doctor subsystem that cut him out without his knowing now blinds him to his own return. She watches him turn back into Mark, old Mark, before her appalled eyes.

“We’ve screwed up down here, so your man Danny is looking into Alaska.”

She sits down in a chair next to him, arms across her chest to still them. “Yes. I’ve heard.”

“Getting himself a new job. Be with the cranes all summer long, on their breeding grounds.” He shakes his head at the riddle of everything living. “He’s had it with us all, hasn’t he?”

She starts to explain, then leaves it at “Yes.”

“Doesn’t want to be around, when we finally wreck the place.”

Her throat closes and her eyes bitter up. She just nods.

He rolls on his side, his fist up to his ear. Afraid to ask. “You going with him?”

She should have long ago habituated to this pain. “No,” she tells him. “I don’t think so.”

“Where you going, then? Home, I suppose?”

Her brain is loose and feral. She can say nothing.

“Sure,” he says. “Back to Siouxland. Sioux City Sue. So sue me already.”

“I’m staying, Mark. The Refuge says they can still use me. They’re a little shorthanded, now.” Water is not done with her.

He looks off, as if reading his words printed on the sealed window. “Makes sense, I guess. With Danny gone. Hey — somebody has to be him, if he won’t.”

So this is how it ends. So gradually that neither of them can feel the gears catch. She wants him to shake free all at once, to rise from his fever dream and see where they’ve been. But he’ll crush her again, this time from the other direction. Claim he knew who she was, all along. No firmness floods back into her. If anything, the whole structure seems even flimsier, with no injury to blame.

He stretches out his legs and crosses them, the imitation of repose. “So is Cain going to the slammer, or something? No, I forgot. Totally innocent. Know what they should do with that guy? They should send him to the next Iraq. Use him as a hostage.” He looks up, uncomprehending. “It was Barbara. Barbara out there, all along.”

He is six again, terrified. And she is everywhere, trying to comfort him. For once, he lets her, so fully broken. He squeezes his forehead, then shakes it. He covers his eyes with his hands.

“You know about all this?” She nods. “You know it was her?” He grasps his skull, the source of all confusion. She nods again. “But you didn’t know…before?”

She shakes her head hard. “No one knew.”

He tries to figure this. “And you were here…all along?”

He collapses into himself, not wanting an answer. When he pulls himself together again enough to talk, his words stun her.

“She says she’s finished. Says she’s nothing, now.”

She flares up, insulted that her brother should still care. Disgusted that the woman should give up on them, having come this far. More fraudulence. More wasted godliness. “Jesus Christ,” she spits. “A woman with her skills! Just because she fucked up, does she think the world can’t use her? We’re down to gallons here. Hours and ounces. And she’s going to roll over and die?”

Mark looks at her, bewildered. Some possibility lifts him up. His own loss means nothing. The accident gives him this. “Ask her,” he begs. Afraid to suggest even this little.

“Not me. I’ll never ask that woman for anything again.”

He sits up, clenched in the terror of animals. “You gotta ask her to work for you. I’m not just saying. This is my life we’re talking about.” He slows himself and breathes. He squeezes his eyes again. He points apologetically at the IV drip. “Man! I need to get back in the driver’s seat, here. What are they doing to me? Mr. Emotion all of a sudden. With the shit they’ve got figured out now? They could probably turn anyone into anyone else.”

It no longer seems to her like a delusion. Tomorrow will be worse.

He looks at her, forgetting everything but the immediate need. He circles her forearm with his fingers, measuring. “You haven’t been eating.”

“I have.”

“Food?” he asks, skeptically. “She’s not that thin.”

“Who?”

“Come on! Don’t give me who. My sister.” And at her flash of panic, he laughs clear and deep. “Would you look at you! Relax. Just busting your chops.”

Mark leans back in the chair, stretches out his black cross-trainers, weaves his hands behind his head. It’s like he’s sixty-five, retired. In three months, her brother will be gone again, or his sister will, someplace the other won’t be able to follow. But for a little while, now, they know each other, because of their time away.

“At least somebody else is sticking around. That’s what I’m doing. Hang where you know. Where else can you go, with all hell breaking loose?”

Her nostrils quiver and her eyes burn. She tries to say nowhere, but she can’t.

“I mean, how many homes does one person get?” He waves his hand toward the gray window. “It’s not such a bad place to come back to.”

“Best place on earth,” she says. “Six weeks, every year.”

They sit for a while, not exactly talking. She can have him for her own, recuperating, for one minute more. But he grows agitated again. “This is what scares me: if I could go so long, thinking…? Then how can we be sure, even now…?”

He looks up anxiously, to see her crying. Frightened, he draws back. But when she doesn’t stop, he reaches over and shakes her arm. He tries to rock it, at a loss for anything that might calm her. He keeps talking, sing-song, meaningless, as to a little girl. “Hey. I know how you’re feeling. Rough days, for us two. But look!” He twists her around to the plate-glass window — a flat, overcast, Platte afternoon. “It’s not all so bad, huh? Just as good, in fact. In some ways, even better.”

She fights to retrieve her voice. “What do you mean, Mark? As good as what?”

“I mean, us. You. Me. Here.” He points out the window, approvingly: the Great American Desert. The inch-deep river. Their next of kin, those circling birds. “Whatever you call all this. Just as good as the real thing.”

There is an animal perpendicular to all the others. One that flies at right angles to the seasons. He makes the check-in, getting through security on instinct. Navigates on muscle memory. Only the drone of automatic reminders focuses him: Passengers are required to accompany their baggage at all times. Government regulations prohibit…

The airports are thick with war. In the waiting area in Lincoln, television monitors assault him. The twenty-four-hour news program forever loops its twenty-four seconds of news, and he can’t look away. Day Three, the deep bass keeps intoning, over synthesized brass, at every segment break. Magic drawing boards, tellustrators, computerized maps with movable battalions, and retired generals doing the play-by-play. Embedded journalists, prevented from reporting facts, pour out meandering speculation. All other world news stops.

In Chicago, more of the same: A taxi drives up to a checkpoint north of a city that may or may not be under occupation control. The driver waves for help. Four soldiers make the mistake of approaching. Even on his sixth time through the story, Weber sits transfixed, for the seventh time might end differently.

Airborne again, dragging back east in the skewed flyway, he grows transparent, thinner than film. A voice says, Please do not move about the cabin or congregate in the aisles. He grasps at the words, a life jacket. Something in his species is cut loose. The boy-man was right: Capgras truer than this constant smoothing-out of consciousness. He had a patient once — Warren, in The Country of Surprise—a thirty-two-year-old day-trader and weekend rock climber who rolled down the face of a steep ravine and landed on his forehead. Coming from his coma, Warren emerged into a world peopled by monks, soldiers, fashion models, movie villains, and creatures half human and half animal, all of whom spoke to him in the most natural way. Weber would destroy every copy of every word that bears his name for a chance to tell Warren’s story again, now that he knows what he’s talking about.

He is surrounded. Even the sealed cabin around him has grown septic with life. Everything is animate, green and encroaching. Dozens of millions of species seethe around him, few of them visible, even fewer named, ready to try anything once, every possible cheat and exploitation, just to keep being. He stares at his shaking hands, whole rain forests of bacteria. Insects burrow deep inside this plane’s wiring. Seeds abide in the cargo hold. Fungus under the cabin’s vinyl lining. Outside his little window flap, frozen in the airless air, archaea, super-bugs, and extremophiles live on nothing, in darkness, below zero, simply copying. Every code that has stayed alive until now is more brilliant than his subtlest thought. And when his thoughts die, more brilliant still.

The man in the seat next to him, debating all the way to eastern Ohio, at last summons up the courage to ask, “Don’t I recognize you?”

Weber flinches, a lopsided, phantom grin stolen from one of his patients. “I don’t think so.”

“Sure. The brain guy.”

“No,” Weber says.

The stranger examines him, suspiciously. “Sure. The Man Who Mistook His Life for a…”

“Not me,” Weber insists. “I’m in reclamation.”

Stewardesses skitter up and down the aisle. A passenger across from him scoops mashed animal into her giant mouth. Weber’s body crumples inside his stain-wrecked suit. His thoughts skim like water striders. Nothing is left of him except these new eyes.

Inside his own teeming head, the last day’s images come home to roost. In his seat behind the wing, Weber plays the last scene repeatedly — reframing, rethreading, returning. Mark in his room at Good Samaritan, watching the same vacant, embedded broadcasts of war as the rest of the clueless world. Watching relentlessly, as if, should he watch these armies long enough, he might recognize an old friend. The cognitive neuroscientist stands at bedside, flinching under the wall-mounted television, forgetting why he’s there until the patient reminds him. “Leaving already? What’s your hurry? You just got here.”

He is spread as thin as life. He holds his hands up to apologize. Light passes clean through them.

Mark gives him a used paperback, My Antonia. “For the trip. I read it in a little book club I was in. Kind of a chick-flick thing. Needs a good helicopter chase to become a classic. Naked scuba scene, or something. But real Nebraskaland. I kind of bought into it, finally.”

Weber reaches to take the cast-off story. A hand snakes out and grabs his.

“Doc? There’s something I can’t get. I saved her. I’m…that woman’s guardian. Can you believe that? Me.” The words are thick and foreign in his mouth, a curse worse than the misread note. “What am I supposed to do with that?”

Weber stands still, frozen in the glare. His question, too. She will be with him, unshakable, wherever he heads. Accidental turned resident. Nothing anyone can do for anyone, except to recall: We are every second being born.

Mark begs Weber, his eyes flashing with the dread that only consciousness allows. “They need her at the Refuge. Ask my sister. They need a researcher. A journalist. Whatever the hell she is, they need her.” His voice would deny all personal involvement. “Man, she can’t just walk. It’s not like she’s some free agent. Some separate…She’s hip-deep in this place now, like it or not. Do you think I could…? What do you think she’d…?”

Powerless to know what anyone else might do. To know what it feels like to be anybody.

“My sister won’t ask her. And I don’t dare. The way we left it? After the things I said to her? She’ll hate me forever. She’ll never want to talk to me again.”

“You might try her,” Weber says. Pretending again, on no authority. On no evidence but a lifetime of case histories. “I think you might try.”

He himself tries only to prolong. If Tour Director even remembers Weber, he is taking no calls. But something else is messaging, too soft to hear. Through the plane’s plastic window, the lights of unknown cities blink beneath him, hundreds of millions of glowing cells linked together, swapping signals. Even here, the creature spreads countless species deep. Flying, burrowing, creeping things, every path sculpting all the others. A flashing electrical loom, street-sized synapses forming a brain with miles-wide thoughts too large to read. A web of signals spelling out a theory of living things. Cells by sun and rain and endless selection assembling into a mind the size of continents now, impossibly aware, omnipotent, but fragile as mist, cells with a few more years to discover how they connect and where they might go, before they gutter out and return to water.

He fingers Mark’s book throughout the flight, flips through at random as if this buried record might still predict what’s coming. The words are more obscure than the most intricate brain research. Whiffs of prairie, a thousand varieties of tallgrass come off the pages. He reads and rereads, retaining nothing. He scans Mark’s margin notes, the desperate scribbles next to any passage that might lead forward out of permanent confusion. Toward the end, the swathes of shaky highlighter grow wild and wider:

This had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

He looks up from the page and fractures. No whole left to protect, nothing more solid than braided, sparking cells. What the scans suggest he has seen up close, in the field: older kin still perching on his brain stem, circling back always, down along the bending water. He blunders toward that fact, the only one large enough to bring him home, falling backward toward the incommunicable, the unrecognized, the past he has irreparably damaged, just by being. Destroyed and remade with every thought. A thought he needs to tell someone before it, too, goes.

A voice calls to disembark. In the rising crush, he stands and grapples for his carry-on, shedding himself on everything he touches. He stumbles down the jet bridge into another world, swapped out by impostors at every step. He needs her to be there, on the other side of the baggage claim, though he has lost all right to hope it. There, holding his name on a little card, printed cleanly so he can read it. Man, the card must say. No: Weber. She will be the one holding it, and that is how he must find her.