Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers

  They wander through the Caribbean and Amazon. They peer into the past of cichlid-mad Victoria, a lake on the brink of death. He understands: the aquarium is this woman’s own test. She screens him first, before she’ll let him draw a drop of blood. Two Hispanic school-girls tumble past them in front of the lungfish, each holding a sheet filled with furious check marks. The taller shouts at her rumpled sidekick, “Are you getting your theory yet?”

  The meeting has already lasted longer than Kurton planned. They haven’t even glanced at the consent paperwork. He should be anxious, but he’s not. He has seen five previous cases of reputed hyperthymia without mania. This one is the first that might be real. Just being around her is a mild euphoric.

  Half an hour in the woman’s presence and Kurton makes a decision. Science is half hunch, and his funding is ample, anyway. This one needs more than DNA genotyping. She merits the full workup. He asks her, “How would you like to fly out to Boston for a weekend?” He lays it out: a full suite of psychological tests. Comprehensive biochemical analysis. Functional brain imaging. Salivary cortisol levels. Protein counts. Finally, genetic sequencing, beginning with three chromosomal areas of special interest . . .

  “What are you looking for?” she asks.

  He tells her about the hot sites already located: the dopamine receptor D4 gene on chromosome 11, whose longer form correlates with extroversion and novelty-seeking. He describes the serotonin transporter gene on the long arm of chromosome 17, whose short allele associates with negative emotions.

  “You want to see how long my genes are?”

  “We’re studying a genomic network that’s involved in assembling the brain’s emotional centers. A few variations seem to make a lot of difference. We’d like to see what varieties you have.”

  “Boston is by the ocean,” she says.

  “If you like this city,” he promises, “you’ll love Boston.”

  “Can I see where they made the tea party?”

  He knows nothing at all about Algeria’s war of independence. He has never even heard about the massacre at Sétif. “How do you know about that?”

  “I did my homework! It’s true, I would like to see this city of yours. But I don’t like to miss classes.”

  Kurton says the visit can be as short as she likes.

  She takes him down to the leafy sea dragons. The scientist has somehow missed these creatures’ existence. He pushes his face up to the glass, boggled. They are, by any measure, beyond fiction, madder than anything out of Tolkien. A sea horse cousin, but gone Daliesque, the deformed things have flowing banners pasted all over them, from dappled branches down to frilly spines. The drapery looks like clunky high school theatrical costumes. Taxonomy’s late-night brainstorming, gone unhinged.

  The dragons float, propelled by tiny fins in their necks and tails. He stares into pure possibility, feeling how feeble imagination is, alongside evolution. He remembers Life in a Coral Reef, a book he wolfed down at age nine and came away from with a hunger he has yet to satisfy.

  Thassa, on the far side of the tank, peeps through the creature foliage into Kurton’s face. “What are those? Feet? Horns? Look: it’s growing a tree out of the back of its head. Okay, Science. Please explain.”

  He starts with the standard model. The one you can find anywhere, aside from a quarter of American high schools. Start with a genetic template for making enzymes. Let chance make small errors copying the templates . . .

  She waves her palm in the air. “That’s no explanation.”

  He starts again, from the other end of the beautiful synthesis. Some slightly more seaweedy-looking sea horse has a slightly better chance . . .

  “Yes. Le camouflage. That’s always the reason. Hiding, and also advertising. Can nature say only two things? But look at the cost to these poor creatures. They struggle just to swim!”

  “Whatever survives a little better”—Kurton drops into his media voice—“is a little more likely to—”

  “Certainly,” she replies. “Survival is always handy! But what are they surviving better than?”

  Slightly better than something that’s not quite a leafy sea dragon.

  “You are the man who got cows to make medicines. If I come to Boston, can you give me one of those branches, growing out of the back of my head?”

  “It might take a few tries.”

  She crouches down again, examining the implausible monster. “Farhana? Hnnn? Tu es heureuse là-dedans, ma belle? What do you think, Mr. Kurton? Can fish be happy the way we are happy?”

  “No one knows—yet. But ask me again, in a few years.”

  An announcement comes over the building’s speakers: a behavior display in the oceanarium will start in fifteen minutes. She shoots him a hopeful look. He checks his watch and decides that she’s worth missing a plane for. Minneapolis can wait. For the first time in months, he’s enjoying being in a place more than he’ll enjoy leaving it.

  The water-theater design is pure genius. The glass curtain arcing behind the huge tank vanishes, and the pool merges seamlessly with the endless lake beyond. The day is azure, and they could be sitting in a Carthaginian amphitheater on the shores of the Mediterranean. A creature breaks the surface, then another. Three sleek gray missiles clear the water and plunge in synchrony back in. The crowd gasps, music starts up, a human with a wireless headset and a fish bucket appears, and it’s showtime.

  Soon, pods of marine mammals are spinning, leaping, tail-dancing, squirting, and chattering—everything that the woman with the wireless headset asks them to do. It looks like mutually alien species breaking through into shared play.

  No one is more pleased than this show’s regular. She asks the scientist, “Do you think they truly understand her?”

  “She’s making little hand signals.”

  “Obviously! But this signal communicates, no?”

  That’s when he tells her. Only a handful of genes separate speaking primates from mute ones. When humans are born with one of these genes knocked out, they can’t learn language. “Soon, we’ll be able to fix or replace those genes. So . . . I don’t know. If belugas are a kind of disabled intelligence, maybe we have a moral obligation to give them language genes, someday.”

  She grabs his elbow, thrilled. “Serious? Serious?”

  And he knows, then, that she’s coming to Boston.

  They say goodbye where they met, out on the sun-coated steps. She stands peering at the rainbow skyline, enraptured again, as if she forgot these buildings existed while she was away, underwater. She promises to go over all the paperwork and call his secretary to make travel arrangements.

  He offers a hand, which she squeezes. “Houta alik,” he says.

  The words start her giggling.

  “What? Did I say it wrong?”

  She shakes her head, still laughing. “How do you know this?”

  “I did my homework on you. At least I thought I did.”

  “No; I’m sorry. It’s good. But do you know what it means?”

  “I was told it meant good luck.”

  “Yes, sure. But really . . . ?” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder, backed toward the Doric temple. Her eyes light up with more pointless pleasure. Every novel is allowed one major coincidence and one minor one. “It means: A fish on you.”

  Stone succumbs and calls Candace. This must be three days before Thassa heads east. He should call Thassa herself, but that would involve courage. Instead, he abuses Weld. It’s her job to calm neurotics. Everyone must suffer the penance of their abilities.

  “You can’t just let her go out there,” he tells the psychologist.

  “It’s not my decision.”

  “One word from you and she’d return the tickets.”

  “Or one word from you,” she counters.

  “Me? What do I know about science? You’re the authority.”

  “Authority?”

  “This whole thing is bogus. Nothing as complicated as feeling can possibly reduce to genetics. Yo
u have to tell her that.” Her silence rattles him. “Come on. You know this isn’t good science. They can’t possibly think they’ll find anything.”

  “Are you worried they might?”

  He reads to her from a ten-month-old article in US News & World Report calling Thomas Kurton the “Sergei Diaghilev of genomics.”

  She says something about science being self-correcting. If the man is bogus, he’ll disappear. If not, others will validate his work. The discoverer doesn’t matter; only the discovery does.

  “You can’t possibly believe that.”

  She asks, “Why does this upset you so much?”

  He wants to say: Please don’t therapy me. Instead, he manages, “It’s exploitation. We’re complicit. We’ve been given this amazing gift, and somebody wants to take it apart and look inside without voiding the warranty. She’s not an object.”

  “No, you’re right. She’s a college kid who gets an all-expenses-paid vacation to Beantown. She can say no if she wants.”

  “All right. Fine. Just remind her she can refuse any test she doesn’t want to take.”

  Candace says they’ve been over all the human subject protection guidelines. “Russell. She’s fine. Anyone who survived a childhood in Algiers can survive a weekend in Boston.”

  You know the story in Boston. You know what the lab will have to discover.

  Thassa flies out. She lands on that Logan runway jutting out into Boston Harbor, thinking until the last second that the plane is going into the drink. She’s prepared to die, but she’s delighted when she doesn’t.

  Even as the plane touches down, it’s snowing. The northern world is dark by early afternoon, and she finds the harborside dusk unbearably beautiful. They put her up in a hotel ten minutes from the lab. She’s never stayed in a hotel before. She cries out at the spread of the Charles and laughs at the view of Beacon Hill climbing the far shore. She loves the town center, the jumbled harbor, the genteel circus of Downtown Crossing, the Freedom Trail’s inscrutable red thread, the colonial churches with their thin white steeples fingering God. The whole city plays itself, as if a movie of the real place.

  She gives all her money to street people. She listens to the buskers in the subway, staying for three full songs and applauding, solo, after each. She’s a shameless tourist, keen for everything. She especially loves the graveyards—King’s Chapel, the Granary, Copp’s Hill. She gets no frisson from the names of the famous dead. Not even natives get that anymore. She just loves the slate tombstones, with their winged skulls and their quatrains of eternity, the patches of holy ground surrounded by amnesiac skyscrapers.

  In Cambridge, near the lab, the streetlights carry banners celebrating the twenty-three human chromosomes. She succumbs fatalistically to the lab tests. If something interesting truly does coil up in her cells, someone will find it. If not Truecyte, then some other research group, private or public, will pinpoint whatever part of the secret of happiness lies hidden in the body. This decade or the next. The species will learn to read whatever is there to be read.

  Her job, meanwhile, is to see the sights as best she can. Hit the Freedom Trail, before history catches up with it.

  Stone calls Candace on Thassa’s second night out east. They compare the short e-mails each has received. Stone pillories her with questions. “What does she mean when she says, ‘They took my DNA’?”

  “That’s nothing, Russell. Painless and noninvasive.”

  “But . . . they can do whatever they want with it?”

  “Well, I can’t think what they might do aside from study it.”

  “And when she writes, ‘Everything is much more interesting than I thought . . .’?”

  “I think it’s safe to conclude that that’s a good thing. Russell? Can I call you back in an hour, after Gabe goes down?”

  She does. And whether it’s the lateness of the hour, his Zen cupboard bedroom, the blackness cut by the single megaphone beam of streetlamp out his window, the shoehorn of phone pressed against his ear, the chill of his arms above the down comforter, or the sound of the woman’s restorative voice, Stone feels it might be safe to conclude that Candace Weld is, herself, another good thing.

  A Truecyte geneticist named Dr. Julia Thorn takes Thassa’s family history. Thassa gives what she can, although her knowledge of medical details is spotty at best. Dr. Thorn asks if they might test and take samples from her near kin. Thassa phones her aunt in Montreal, who declines on grounds of privacy. Her uncle in Paris refuses out of a deep-seated suspicion of all things biotechnological. Her brother, Mohand, is currently under house arrest in Algiers for participating in a march for Kabyle autonomy back in November.

  Dr. Thorn can’t help asking. The question isn’t scientific; the answer nothing but anecdotal. “Are any of your relatives . . . like you?”

  “They say I’m just like my mother’s sister. Everyone always calls her the Sufi.”

  “Could we test her?”

  “Oh, heaven no! She died in the Relizane massacres. With many others.”

  Candace calls Russell at that same late hour each night Thassa is in Boston. Weld’s field has known about the need for ritual almost as long as Stone’s. And when the two of them go on talking three nights a week, even after Thassa returns to Chicago, this ritual becomes theirs:

  The phone rings at 11:00 p.m., an hour after the cutoff set by every civilized rule for the day’s last call. He picks up on the second ring and says “Hello?” as if it might be anyone from prank radio to Homeland Security. She tries for silly—I was afraid you might say that or How does “hello” make you feel?—and he’ll smile in his street-lit room and say, “Hey.” Then they’ll be off and running, comparing notes about all old things under the sun.

  Sometimes they talk for only ten minutes. Sometimes they go an hour. Thassa is no longer the sole focus of their investigation. Mostly they talk about humans, their infinite gullibility, and how you almost have to love them, just for the endless ways they’re capable of being duped.

  They become an ancient couple, and all their previous incarnations—Candace and her ex, Marty; Russell and his abortive Grace—become just experiments each tried once, failed hypotheses that now, at worst, provide good punch lines. They’ve both required some trial and error to hit on the obvious: talk beats passion, two out of three falls.

  Russell can’t imagine Weld’s motives, but he’s deeply grateful for the distance. It helps him enormously, not to have to look at her. So long as her face doesn’t set him off, he doesn’t have to time-travel. All the real-world stresses that Stone can never handle in real time he can cope with like this—in words, revised together, stories at night that last only a few minutes and give him a day to prep for, in between.

  He hears her doing chores as she talks. Picking up toys. Pulling dishes from the dishwasher. They are the sounds of the life he always thought might be his someday. The pleasures he has long found only in books.

  She asks him about the work in progress, the book that Thassa mentioned in Hyde Park. She’s wanted to ask for weeks. Her waiting so long to raise the topic moves him.

  “I lied,” he says. “To keep Thassa from worrying about me. It’s all in my head. There is no book. There’s not even a nonbook.”

  “Do you wish there were?”

  It no longer bothers him, the echo therapy. He knows now that it’s just Candace, doing what she’s trained to do. If she stopped doing it, she’d be someone else.

  “I don’t know. I’ve lost some basic human sympathy. I can see fantastic characters. Hear them perfectly. My head hurts sometimes, they’re so close. I can see exactly what they’re doing to themselves. But I get ill the minute I try to describe them.”

  “Use someone else,” she whispers, as sexy as the dark. “Find a teller.”

  At the sound of her, his soul breaks out and tours. She’s right. The city at this hour is packed with potential narrators. On a back street in Wrigleyville, two of his former students are smoking salvia and filmi
ng each other traveling through the universe, for posting on YouTube. On Oak Street Beach, an old Polish civil servant with one and a quarter legs makes her annual February midnight plunge into the freezing lake, with her husband as lifeguard. In an invisible squat on the roof of the Aon Center, an illegal Tanzanian immigrant protects the whole town from destruction through the sheer force of his will. Any one of them could rescue Stone’s fiction from crib death.

  He does not tell her the real problem: fiction is obsolete. Engineering has lapped it.

  What would his book be about, if it dared set foot in this world? She doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t say. It might be about the odds against ever feeling at home in the world again. About huge movements of capital that render self-realization quaint at best. About the catastrophe of collective wisdom getting what we want, at last.

  He gives up his secret to her: the three stories he published once, in another life. He tells her how badly he wishes he could unpublish them all.

  She tells him that even God was appalled by His first draft. Candace’s encouragement sounds exactly like the kind he once offered his students.

  She says, “Are you in your bedroom?”

  The question quickens him.

  “Are you lying down? Do me a favor. Close your eyes and write a sentence in the air. Use your left hand. Just one sentence. A simple one.”

  He writes: They sit and watch the Atlas go dark.

  “How does that feel?”

  It feels strange. Almost alive.

  “Does it make you want to know what happens next?”

  “I’m afraid that was the next.”

  “Then write what happens just before.”

  He has no trouble writing, he tells her. It’s the permanent public archive that terrifies him.

  She says: Go to one of the free blog giveaway sites. Create an anonymous log-in, an altered ego. Just start watching, out loud, in words. Just say what has happened to you, in this life.