Traumatic Brain Injury in Post-9/11 Fiction

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In The Echo Maker, mostly set in Kearney, Nebraska, beginning in early 2002, the attacks are even more remote. The novel refers to the WTC site only once, and indirectly: Dr. Gerald Weber, the Oliver Sacks-like neurologist who comes to Kearney to examine protagonist Mark Schluter, recalls that during a 2002 Manhattan visit he saw "a patch of sky where there should be none."1 Yet 9/11 is also central enough to the novel's background that Colson Whitehead has called it a "post-9/11 novel"; Powers himself has associated it with an "estrangement" that he calls "the baseline condition for life in [21^st-century] terrorized America."2 As Charles Harris has observed, the attacks also indirectly cause Mark's accident: 3 Barbara, the aide who helps care for Mark, was a journalist working in New York City at the time of "the towers," she tells Weber late in the novel, but the act of repeatedly "sticking a video camera in people's faces" makes her "[start] to lose it."4 This PTSD-like reaction leads her to reassignment to Kearney, where her attempted suicide on a dark road causes Mark to swerve and crash his truck.

Certainly physical debilitation—including Remy's recurrent "floaters and flashes" and Mark's slow process of learning to speak—and memory problems are central to both novels even as other characters repeatedly interpret their protagonists' conditions as emblematic of early 21^st-century American culture. While both novels repeatedly describe such metaphoric explanations, neither novel fully commits to them. Instead, both espouse a more fractured mode of connection that recalls the "metonymic displacing [ . . . ] of the already-available world and its language"5 associated by Rosemary Winslow with "trauma writing."

In The Zero, the recurrent scenes in which others identify with Remy's "gaps" are partly comic, partly tragic: we are meant to identify with these claims but also to note their redundancy. Certainly the single scene in which Remy visits a psychiatrist seems deeply satirical. The psychiatrist glibly diagnoses Remy with "textbook PTSD"6 and reassures him that the "secret agents" and "mysterious Arab men" with whom he has been interacting are "delusions, persecution, paranoia. Delirium."7 Remy subsequently informs several characters that they and their predicaments are not "even real."8 But a later scene seems to echo the psychiatrist's association of Remy's symptoms with the trauma of 9/11: Remy confides to Jaguar, one of the men he is following, that the Zero ("nothing left here but a hole, a yawning emptiness fifty feet deep") resembles his own mind, which is "maybe [ . . . ] a hole like this—the evidence and reason scraped away."9

While Remy's condition seems to localize something already pervasive in the culture, a similar confusion of what Seltzer calls the "individual" with "the public spectacle" is evident in The Echo Maker through Powers's implication that Mark's condition has expanded beyond its bodily confines. Just as Mark is troubled by his failure to recall the events leading up to his accident, Weber, who plans to describe Mark's case in a new book about memory, acknowledges "worry" about his own memory problems.10 The Capgras Syndrome Mark develops shortly after his accident—defined by his local doctor as "one of a family of misidentification delusions"11 in which the patient fails to identify "his loved ones"12—is similarly linked by all the novel's central characters to early-21st-century experience. Weber, for example, calls Capgras "contagious,"13 and Mark's sister and caregiver Karin at one point notes that "the whole race suffer[s] from Capgras."14 And while Mark's sense that he is the victim of a massive conspiracy is partly an effect of his Capgras, Powers locates these delusions in the context of "newspapers [ . . . ] full of conspiracy theories"15 and "crackpot talk-radio show[s]" ranting about terrorist prevention.16 Mark's Capgras is thus depicted variously as a physiological effect of his neurological condition, a metaphor for contemporary culture, an effect of this culture, and an ironic subversion of it.