Traumatic Brain Injury in Post-9/11 Fiction

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Both novels also suggest that what seems real is actually characterized by virtuality and performance and the reverse. A number of Mark's theories—including several that Weber claims sound "like paranoid invention"1—turn out to be accurate. In contrast, Remy's attempt to identify the members of a secret terrorist cell culminates in his realization that no one in the supposed cell "happens not to be a government informant."2 Yet even after this revelation, the performance continues: government agents impel the fake terrorists to make extremist declarations, as one character notes, "just like on TV,"3 after which, as part of a propaganda campaign, nearly all of them are killed. But then Jaguar, the survivor, ends up detonating a bomb provided by government agents to make their raid seem more real. The problem, according to both novels, is that reality itself has been so suffused with virtuality that old-fashioned realism has become unrealistic.

This confusion of the real and the virtual is in some ways consistent with features associated (by Seltzer and others) with both TBI and trauma more generally. But it also enables both novels to comment, at least obliquely, on their status as novels. Both plots focus on Remy and Mark's attempts to construct coherent narratives from the fragments to which they have access. The Echo Maker, especially in its last third, reads like a mystery; in The Zero, Remy's revelations help readers, who participate throughout in his mid-scene blackouts, decipher its highly fractured plot. Yet both protagonists' interpretations are also inaccurate. Remy fails to anticipate the actual bomb explosion that impels him to recall the events of "that day," while Mark's theory that his sister and house have been replaced by simulations is, as several characters note, internally consistent but untrue.

In this context, it is significant that both novels depict frustrated attempts at reading and interpretation. Not only does Remy discover a cryptic possible suicide note reading "Etc. . . ."4 when he first awakens, but his only memory of 9/11 for much of the novel is of paper: "He remembered smoke and he remembered standing alone while a billion sheets of paper fluttered to the ground."5 His subsequent research requires that he interpret some of these "partials"—torn or partly burned bits of paper collected and carefully sorted by the novel's bureaucrats.6 In The Echo Maker, a mysterious note Mark discovers by his hospital bedside catalyzes his quest to understand the cause of his accident, a search often indistinguishable from his search for the note's author. Yet Remy's investigation fails to prevent a future attack, and the provenance of Mark's note can only be explained by Barbara.

Similar acts of frustrated and inconclusive reading are a staple of postmodern fiction, but these novels offer (or in the case of The Echo Maker imply) extratextual, real-life explanations for their preoccupation with interpretation. The Zero includes two framing statements. A prefatory notes reads, in its entirety, "This happened,"7  but the final acknowledgments assert that "this book is fiction" and express the author's "wish" that "those people whose real pain I witnessed [. . . find] real peace"8 (italics added). The novel unfolds between these contradictory claims about veracity. Walter's acknowledgment elsewhere that many of the novel's details derive from his observations of Ground Zero while he was working as a ghostwriter for the real New York mayor9 further complicates the distinction between truth and fiction.

Perhaps the most explicit comment on a similar confusion occurs late in The Echo Maker when Weber reflects on the truth of "stories," that is, the case histories on which his reputation was built: