Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers

  Then, in a wash of time-lapse shots backed by looping, stacked ghetto-house tracks, there comes a collage of courtroom dramas and judicial mind-benders, divorced couples suing each other over frozen embryos, companies making fortunes on cancer screens derived from the genetic material of uncompensated subjects, companies suppressing patented genetic tests that reveal the effectiveness of their patented medications.

  Over the Limit: That the show has avoided extinction for four years is already freakish. That each episode passes for compelling television is a miracle of protective coloration. The fight for eyeballs is as merciless as any in nature.

  “The Genie” returns to archaic talk. Schiff steers Kurton away from his enhancement fantasies toward practical business, but he keeps sailing out into waters that teem with more astonishing life. And every time, like a lithe pilot fish, Schiff follows him.

  She can’t help herself. Her heart, too, beats to something transhuman. You can see it in her face: she’s already working on whole new segments to follow this one. You can see it in the way she tilts in her chair. She’s ready to enhance herself. So are 78 percent of the show’s demographic. Her job is to erase all trace of the thousands of staff hours of research and make every twist of this script sound freshly improvised. Fresh: the core engine of the information economy. Every idea spontaneous, every argument off the cuff. Every word to be consumed before expiration date.

  SCHIFF:

  I understand you recently became a technology consultant for a start-up venture that specializes in pet cloning.

  KURTON:

  Regenovia creates delayed identical twins of animals who played important roles in their owners’ lives. For some people, it’s a chance to reexperience all the qualities they loved in their companions.

  SCHIFF:

  Is it true that a California woman has mortgaged her house to raise the $50,000 needed to bring her dog back from the dead?

  KURTON:

  A lot of us might be willing to pay as much, for meaningful connection with another living thing.

  Kurton’s smart house in Maine does not quite read poetry to him, but it does almost everything else. It darkens and lightens windows, detects motion and shuts off extraneous appliances. The cottage is a monster hybrid, a family summer cabin from the twenties where, just behind the cedar wainscoting, just inside the retrofitted beaded ceiling, cables course and signals seethe in all flavors and protocols. Despite the tangled network of digital devices, Post-it notes cover every surface, like mating butterflies massing in a hidden glade. Thomas sits among them in his rocking chair, with the spray of the Atlantic surf visible outside his smart window, chatting about drugs tailored to fit the individual genome.

  Jump to that haunted Cassandra, Anne Harter, in her Oxford warren, her eyes darting everywhere but into the lens:

  These people want royalties for tests that used to be free.

  They’re prosecuting others for mentioning patented scientific discoveries in public. They own entire organisms.

  They own natural fact. What about a few billion years of prior art?

  Back on the shores of Boothbay, Thomas Kurton watches the same clip of Harter on a seven-inch screen in his lap while he rocks in his wooden rocker. He nods in sympathy.

  I agree; no patent should be allowed to prevent progress. The only thing profit is good for is reinvesting in research. I want a world where the one source of real wealth—genetic possibility—is common knowledge and accessible to everyone.

  He talks about the companies he has formed: one synthesizing bio-fuels, one dedicated to rapid sequencing, one set up to perform genetic screens . . . Bayh-Dole has given public science a way to turn itself to the quickest practical use. And so he creates private ventures, releases them into the world like new experiments, creatures compelled to live or die by the same rules of fitness that govern all creation.

  What we want is a rich ecosystem: lots of ways of doing business. Lots of ways of doing science. The point is to find out where collective wisdom wants to go . . .

  I want the story to stay there, to develop this conflicted, tragically flawed character: collective wisdom. Instead, “The Genie and the Genome” squids off into a wholly unnecessary subplot concerning a healthy middle-class Chicago suburban couple who used preimplantation genetic diagnosis to keep their daughter from inheriting the colon cancer that has ravaged her father’s family. The couple simply had their embryos screened, then implanted one that didn’t contain the lethal mutation. All the others were tucked away in deep freeze, joining the burgeoning population of embryos that float in dreamless suspended animation complete with legal status.

  And no group wisdom can possibly condemn these parents for plotting their daughter’s lucky escape.

  Tonia Schiff will scour these clips years later on the flight down to Tunis, studying the sardonic show host for signs of herself as the Airbus glides over the black Mediterranean. She’ll freeze-frame through Over the Limit segments, examining the interviews for any hint of what she herself felt about the future of life, before it caught up with her present. Eventually, the battery on her notebook will give out, somewhere over southernmost Sicily. The future Schiff will study the past one for answers, but telegenic to the last, America’s most irreverent science journalist stays hidden in questions.

  The group wants to see what the Bliss Chick is like when she’s tipsy. They take Miss Generosity to an Irish bar on North Wells where the bouncers don’t throw you out until you mess all over the floor. Someone should throw them out, just for ordering appletinis. They feed Thassa the first two mixed drinks she’s ever had and won’t let her eat anything. “In the interest of science,” the Joker says.

  Everyone’s there except Kiyoshi, who mastered his agoraphobia as far as the bus stop before beelining home. Even Roberto sits in, trying not to spoil the fun. The result of the experiment is that the appletinis leave Thassa exactly like she is when sober, only less steady on her pins.

  “You know what she’s like?” Adam says. “Every day, 24-7. She’s like being on a perpetual hit of E.”

  “She’s nothing like that,” Roberto hisses. The two battle over the precise effects of 120 milligrams of 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine. The girls look on as all four boys thrash out the matter, which is halfway to a shoving match when Thassa chides them. She channels them back into a group sing-along. She gets them all clapping a backbeat and singing a Berber folk song, like a circle of Kabyle women at a wedding. Strangers at other tables graduate from glaring to joining in.

  They play pool. She shows them how much more fun the game is if you’re allowed to nurse the balls a little bit by hand, after hitting them with the stick. She helps everyone get the hang.

  They talk about their teacher. Spock declares him as monumentally, magnificently tedious as a John Cage piece. Charlotte and Sue settle on the word hapless. Thassa asks for a definition, then fiercely disagrees. “I think he knows something big. I love him.”

  “Umm . . .” Sue giggles. “Define your terms?”

  “I simply love him!”

  They settle back into their corner booth, their heads on each other’s shoulders—even brittle Sue Weston—reciting poetry. Thassa has them beat in every language. They don’t even care that they can’t understand four-fifths of her recitation.

  “Do you know this Irish man Heaney? ‘Walk on air against your better judgment.’ He deserves immortality, just for that line!”

  This line, they understand. The ceiling of the bar vanishes onto the open night, and all parties finally see that there’s no reason on earth why people can’t be one another’s eternal comfort.

  But poems end and the night goes on. The group breaks up, scattering to three compass points. John, Charlotte, and Mason follow Thassa south. They want to take the train, but she refuses. “You can walk anywhere in this city. Nothing is so far as you think.” They stroll down glittering Wells, linking arms and harmonizing early Beatles songs, accusing each other of stealing o
ne another’s parts. Thassa is ravenous and stops for kebab, which she makes all three of them taste.

  Charlotte and Mason peel off at the Metra station. Mountainous Spock Thornell walks Thassa as far as her dorm. Then Maghreb hospitality, appletinis, American freedom, or hyperthymic naïveté kicks in. She asks him up to her tiny efficiency to see the volume of Tamazight poetry she quoted from tonight, the only possession that has accompanied her everywhere in her long upheaval from Algiers to Paris to Montreal to the world’s erstwhile hog butcher.

  Her room is a tiny tent in the desert. Spock barely feels her sit him down, hand him hot hibiscus tea, place the book in his lap, and turn the pages. Deep inside his tangled passageways, he’s already breaking free. Art is whatever you make. Walk on air. No one gets hurt by any true invention. She’s showing him the foreign pages, and the words are all in a Martian alphabet no human being could possibly read. The writing is chaos, the coldest thrill, the best drug of all.

  He is slow in all things, monosyllabic, a great believer in the irrelevance of any emotion. But even for Thornell, the night is still magical. He has never been so close to a foreign country. He has never been outside the Midwest, except for the wild expanses of the Web. He’s waking up, after years of the grid system, to a life beyond containing.

  What does he want? He wants what anyone wants. He wants this thing he can never have, this effortless glow, the one that’s so exhilarating just to sit this close to. He wants a release from his relentless his-ness—just for a minute, a little of her spark, her art of pulling a story out of annihilation. He wants to eat her flame.

  Or he wants to pinch the wick. To snuff her into nothing. To leave her as terrified as anyone.

  “Strip,” he says, and pulls at her blouse.

  She clasps both hands to her breasts and laughs. “John! Quit. You’re mad!”

  Her fear thrills him. “Off. Come on. Let’s go.”

  “No! You’re nuts! You’ve lost your mind.”

  And he’s loose in total liberty. Walking in the vacuum of outer space. He stands and starts tearing. He’s burned alive, refined inside the thing he needs.

  She falls backward, but there’s no place to land. She grabs his wrists, but that’s worse than pointless. He’s twice her size, a crushing dimorphism. It thrills him to see the happiness vanish at last. She can do nothing, and that is more moving than any art.

  All impediments tear loose. They are together, skin to skin. He looks down at the helpless brown thing between his legs. It hasn’t gone feral. It’s speaking, still her. She’s saying, “John, not this.” She’s terrified, but not for herself. She says, “John, this kills you.”

  He slows to figure what she can possibly mean.

  And slams back into the trap of thought. He rears up, rolls off her like she’s burning. She calls out, “Spock?” and the word scalds him. He curls up into a fetus on her carpet, moaning like a thing trying to be unborn.

  Mid-November, the semester’s home stretch, and the city drops into real chill. The sky molds over, and even the two-block walk from the El to the college cracks Russell Stone’s skin. Now the lake effect begins to work against this place, and the vanished autumn is just a tease that he should have known better than to trust.

  The security guard stops him in the lobby, flanked by two policemen. Someone has invented the scene just to create rising action. Harmon: story starts when a character’s core value no longer suffices to stabilize his world.

  Stone is ready to confess, even before he hears the charges. They take him into a first-floor conference room to talk about two of his students. There’s been an incident. The officers are vague, cagey. Law and procedure everywhere. It seems that John Thornell—Mr. Spock, the icy conceptual artist whose most emotional journal entries read like commuter-train schedules—has attempted to force himself on . . .

  Stone already knows the victim. He’s known since before he heard the crime. It’s Generosity, who escaped the maiming of Algeria in order to be raped in the States. The moment he laid eyes on the Kabyle woman he knew someone would need to violate her.

  Russell sits still and listens to the officers. Thornell has turned himself in. Wandered in a daze into the station on South State and demanded to be put away. By his own account, the American got the Algerian to let him up to her room on false pretenses, then sexually assaulted her. But when the police talked to the alleged victim . . .

  Stone knows this already, too, without hearing. When the police went to question Thassadit Amzwar, she denied that anything like rape took place. Yes, she invited Thornell up to her room after an evening out with the other students from their Journal and Journey class. Yes, he did become inappropriately excited. He did tear her skirt and blouse. But that’s where things ended. By her account, she talked the man down without much effort at all. Thornell was crying by the time he left. She was afraid to let him go, afraid he might hurt himself. She was relieved to hear that he’d arrived safely at the police station.

  The lead cop can’t figure it. “She knows this case had no bearing on her student visa. She knows she’ll have the full protection of the law if she takes action. But she refuses to file charges.”

  The second cop is as mystified as the first. “She actually apologized for giving us unnecessary trouble.”

  The police ask Stone if there’s anything important they should know before they release Thornell over his own protests. They grill him about sexual tension, aggressive statements, any part of the classroom dynamic worth reporting. Do the man’s journal entries suggest anything unusual?

  They are filled with art at its most inexplicable. Plans for mailing Christmas cards to total strangers, to see how many baffled receivers reciprocate. Plans for selling tickets to the next rain shower, with a stiff surcharge for the good seats. Hand-drawn re-creations of bar codes. Long poems composed of song lines sampled at random intervals off Internet radio. Powerless art in a confidential medium offered up in complete trust to a supportive community. By a would-be rapist.

  An image of the man’s cock between Thassa’s thighs cuts through Russell, and he shudders. The man should rot in prison, raped by others. “No,” he whispers. “I wouldn’t say anything unusual.”

  And the woman: Any anxious behavior? Any reason why she might be afraid of pressing charges?

  They’ve met her. They’ve talked to her. Surely they must have seen. “No,” he tells them. “No reason.”

  “We’re afraid this may be some kind of Muslim cultural thing. Many Muslim families will disown a rape victim.”

  Christian families, too. “She’s not Muslim,” Russell tells them.

  “Arab, then. You know: where the woman gets punished if—”

  “She’s not . . .”

  The cops perk up. “Not what?”

  “Nothing,” Russell says. She wants her assailant free.

  Now the police are all attention. They ask if there’s anything about the woman—any health conditions, behavioral quirks—anything that he should mention.

  Well, there’s a set of careful notes sitting in a psychologist’s office just a few floors up. There’s a telephone call—perhaps recorded by conscientious antiterrorist agents listening for references to students of Algerian origin—where a psychologist says that the woman should be studied in a lab.

  Stone doesn’t know what is confidential anymore and what the state owns. He hasn’t a clue what he owes to professional discretion, what to justice, what to Candace Weld, what to Thassa Amzwar, and what to basic truth. But it’s pointless to hide from the Informational Oversoul. Everything in the full digital record will be discovered. An hour of digging in the likeliest place and they will find him out.

  “It’s possible she might be hyperthymic.” And to their inevitable, blank stares, he explains: “Excessively happy.”

  He only answers what the law asks. The policeman with the notebook asks him how to spell the word.

  Then he’s supposed to teach the class. He’s known from the
start that he’d never get through the semester without disaster. He climbs the seven flights, buying time. He’s buried deep in the Vishnu Schist, forcing his way back up to the present, and every ten steps is a mass extinction.

  He hears the group pleasure, from down the hall. Thassa’s voice weaves some goofy solo, and the rest of them laugh in adoring chorus. He rounds the doorway, his anemic frame coiled for pain. They’re all there, huddled in the dingy room, listening to her read from her journal. All except the animal, still in police custody. She’s told no one.

  Thassa breaks off in midsentence. The group looks up, caught red-handed in enjoyment. Stone’s eyes search the Berber’s. For an instant, she’s ready to minister to whatever tragedy has hit him. Then she remembers: she’s the injured party. Their faces rewrite each other twice before anyone else in the room realizes anything’s wrong.

  And just as quickly, Thassa returns to the clause where she broke off. Russell Stone stumbles toward the mocking oval, book bag to his chest. Soon everyone is chuckling again at her story, about an Algerian and an Indonesian in a Chicago Mexican grocery, neither able to understand two consecutive words of the other’s English. And all the while that her pliant face encourages her audience’s laughs, she’s coaxing the mute teacher, begging him to be okay, as okay as she is. In the sparkle of her glance, she reassures him: John couldn’t help himself, you know. The problem was inside him. The man just couldn’t help.