Generosity

by Richard Powers

  That was years ago, when he was Thassa’s age. Since then, he’s felt no need to read the man’s six other books. And he’s never again cracked the cover of the novel that so badly wrecked him, afraid of what he might discover. Last year, hearing that the novelist had taken a visiting position at Mr. Rockefeller’s university, he stopped going to his favorite South Side bookstore, just to avoid an accidental sighting. He has avoided two previous, much-publicized public talks. Now he’s condemned to sit in this overflowing auditorium and watch the man whose words transcended the human condition display all the tics of the weakest human. Stone cups his elbows to his ribs and swallows down a small, vague taste of complicit shame.

  “Tell me about your book,” Thassa whispers, as the crowd settles.

  Candace leans forward. “You’re writing a book?”

  “It’s a fiction,” Stone says, and is rescued by a roomful of applause.

  They come onstage together, the Nobel laureate, the genomicist, and the evening’s moderator. Thassa, seated between her escorts, asks Candace, “Which one?” Weld indicates Kurton, who-as the pale laureate studies his shoes-shades his eyes from the stage lights and gazes out, searching the audience for something, perhaps even for Thassa herself.

  The “debate” unnerves Russell, right out of the gate. The novelist reads stiffly from a prepared speech, voice shaking. Stone’s man is the most painfully shy person who has ever been forced into a public spectacle. The writer’s thought is so dense that every clause tries to circle back for another try before plunging on. For every point Russell grasps, three break away into the undergrowth. He wants to get down on hands and knees and crawl from the auditorium.

  The novelist’s argument is clear enough: genetic enhancement represents the end of human nature. Take control of fate, and you destroy everything that joins us to one another and dignifies life. A story with no end or impediment is no story at all. Replace limits with unbounded appetite, and everything meaningful turns into nightmare.

  The quaking man sits down to damningly respectful applause. Stone steals a glance at Thassa; her hands fold in front of her mouth, like she’s praying. She’s off in a land he can’t visit. The country of pure observation.

  The geneticist follows. Even walking to the podium, Thomas Kurton is charming. His shoulders bob like a boy on his first day of summer camp. He opens with a quip. “Every divide between the Two Cultures is bridgeable, except this one: humanists write out their talks and scientists extemporize.” Stone peeks at Weld; her knowing profile smile twists his stomach.

  Kurton praises the long, mysterious journey of literature. “Imaginative writing has always been the engine of future fact.” He thanks his opponent. “You’ve made a lot of good points that I’ll have to think about.” He concedes that genetic enhancement does force major reconsiderations, starting with the boundaries between justice and fate, the natural and the inevitable. “But so did the capture of fire and the invention of agriculture.”

  He invites a thought experiment. Suppose you want to have a baby, but you’re at high risk for conveying cystic fibrosis. You go to the clinic, where the doctors, by screening your eggs, guarantee that your child will be born free of a hideous and fatal disease. “Not too many prospective parents will have a problem with that.”

  As the scientist speaks, the novelist stares down at the table in front of him, his head in his hands. Russell Stone wants to mercy-kill him.

  Thomas Kurton sees only the audience. “Now suppose you come to the clinic already pregnant, and tests show cystic fibrosis in your fetus. Assuming that the doctors can bring a treatment risk down to acceptable levels ”

  Russell glances at Candace, who winces back. He looks at Thassa. She holds up a tiny digital movie camera and pans it around the auditorium. At his glance, she grabs his arm and pulls his ear near her mouth. “Many beautiful faces in here tonight. I’m so glad we came!”

  Her casual touch pumps his neck full of blood. Minutes pass before he can concentrate on Kurton again. The geneticist progresses to removing the disease gene from the germ line before the malicious message has a chance to get copied again.

  Russell comes alert when Kurton invokes the uses of literature. “For most of human history, when existence was too short and bleak to mean anything, we needed stories to compensate. But now that we’re on the verge of living the long, pain-reduced, and satisfying life that our brains deserve, it’s time for art to lead us beyond noble stoicism.”

  In short: if it’s getting too rich for you, get off the ride. The Nobel novelist looks like he wants to do just that. Kurton concedes that change is always upheaval. “But upheaval is opportunity’s maiden name.” He concludes by mentioning a construction sign he saw on the torn-up expressway coming in from O’Hare: Inconvenience is temporary; improvement is permanent. The hall laughs appreciatively, pretty much ready to play.

  When the applause ends, the novelist begins the rebuttal. “I’ve used that same expressway myself, and it’s true: improvement has been more or less permanent.” It must be his timing, because only a few people in the hall chuckle. But the laureate now talks with a freedom that gives up on persuading anyone.

  The novelist’s metamorphosis baffles Kurton. He replies that anyone who prefers nasty, brutish, and short to glorious and paradisiacal may be suffering from depression. We’ve cured smallpox; we’ve done away with polio. “Of course we want to eliminate the toxic molecular sequences that predispose us to suffering, whether cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s, or heart disease. And if we can prevent the harmful, why not promote the helpful?”

  Bunkering down into his seat, Russell can’t even begin to list the objections. He looks to Candace, but she stares straight ahead.

  Right at the finish line, the novelist stumbles badly. Instead of pinning Pollyanna to the dissecting table, he capitulates. Enhance away, he says. Enhancement will mean nothing, in the long run. The remodeling of human nature will be as slapdash and flawed as its remodelers. We’ll never feel enhanced. We’ll always be banned from some further Eden. The misery business will remain a growth industry. When fiction goes real, reality will need a more resistant strain of fiction.

  Uncertainty ripples through the house. The moderator, on orders from the co-sponsoring booksellers and café, chooses the unsettled moment to wrap things up. Democracy is thwarted; there is no Q and A.

  Thassa is on her feet before her friends, camera in front of her, filming as the crowd drifts past. To those few who are old enough to resent someone recording them without asking, she just smiles and waves.

  Russell is left alone with LPC Weld. “Well?” he asks. He doesn’t have the heart to volunteer what he thinks.

  “Well what? It’s not a professional boxing match, you know.”

  He cocks an eyebrow. “And you’re not a public relations manager.”

  She flares a little, then nods, embarrassed. “Right. Well. I’m afraid it was Optimism, by a technical knockout.”

  He wants to tally differently, but can’t.

  “Should we try to say hello?” she asks.

  He points at the crowd mobbing Thomas Kurton and lifts his palms.

  “You’re right,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They find Thassa conversing with a couple who recognize her from the Reader story. The man asks, “Do your relatives in Canada have your same hypothermia?” The woman asks, “What kind of exercise do you do?”

  Candace apologizes to the couple and leads a puzzled Thassa away by the arm. The woman calls after them. “What are your favorite dietary minerals?”

  They press through the crowded foyer. Safely outside in the bone-crunching cold, Candace tests Thassa. “You still want to talk to him?”

  Thassa stops on the salted sidewalk, clouds of breath condensing around her. “He’s a funny man. We say: he knows how to make the donkey think it’s choosing the rope.”

  Russell and Candace trade bewilderment.

  Thassa takes their arms and starts
forward again. “Yes, I’ll meet him tomorrow, like he wants.”

  “He seems harmless enough.” Candace checks with Russell, who is helpless even to nod.

  “But the author!” Thassa exclaims. “He’s the one I’d really like to meet. Did you read him ever, Russell?”

  High up on the building’s corner, a tiny white coffin of a security camera tracks them with its red cyclopean eye. The last five years of Russell’s life could be reconstructed from archived videotape all over this city. He looks at the Algerian, his face a blank. “I don’t think so.”

  “So many thoughts. I wonder if he might be ill? His sadness is so steady. I would love to experiment emotionally on him.”

  Candace jerks to a stop. The arm-linked chain breaks. “You what?”

  Thassa doesn’t even blush. “Just once! Just for science.”

  He has her with the belugas.

  On the phone the next morning, Thomas Kurton tells Thassa Amzwar to pick a meeting spot anywhere in the city. She laughs at the blank check. This city has forests in the northwest big enough to get lost in. To the south, black neighborhoods the size of Constantine that white people never enter. Convention centers with the look of fifties science-fiction space colonies. Warehouse districts full of resale contraband peppered with refrigerated corpses. Cemeteries a hundred times the length of a soccer pitch, with gravestones in forty-one languages. There’s Chinatown, Greek Town, Bucktown, Boystown, Little Italy, Little Seoul, little Mexico, little Palestine, little Assyria Two Arab neighborhoods-the southwest Muslims and the northwest Christians-where people from a dozen countries congregate to eat, recite Arabic poetry, and mock one another’s dialects.

  She has my problem: too much possibility. A thousand parks, four hundred theaters, three dozen beaches, fifty colleges, fifteen bird sanctuaries, seven botanical gardens, two different zoos, and a glass-encased tropical jungle. Meet anywhere? The scientist doesn’t realize the scale of the place.

  She says to meet her in front of the fish temple.

  So they meet at the Shedd Aquarium in the depths of winter, on a day pretending to June. For a week the earth has been so warm that even the bulbs in Grant Park are fooled into surfacing. All along the lakefront people stumble, light and jacketless, joking about the boon of planetary climate disaster. It’s exactly the day on which to start the future’s next blank page.

  Kurton allots twenty minutes. He has read everything on the Net about Thassa Amzwar. He’s gone through the Reader piece with a highlighter. If she’s half what the accounts make her out to be, he’s ready with a full invitation.

  He spots her from a distance as his cab pulls up. She’s standing at the foot of the aquarium steps, in full sun. She looks like a girl whose parents told her to stay put and wait for them, just before they were rounded up by the authorities.

  He pays the cab and walks the final hundred yards, watching her chat up a ring of multiracial third graders. In a few sentences, she has the whole volatile class rapt, hypnotized as if by the best interactive television. Their faces are like Prize Day. Their teacher stands behind them, transfixed as well. Thassa Amzwar flips a hand back toward the Chicago cliffs: red and emerald, white and obsidian. The children look on, astonished by the city that springs up behind them.

  She sweeps her hand across the panorama out beyond the matchstick marina, pointing to where an entire mirror city plunges into the surface of the lake. Her hands cup into a small open boat, which she floats out to the horizon, into the seaway, past Montreal, and over the swirling Atlantic. The third-grade field trip winds up on the shores of another country.

  She catches sight of Kurton where he stands spying. She grins and waves. He crosses to her and takes her hand in his. She laughs and introduces him to the circle of kids, who glare at this party crasher. Their teacher leads them toward the buses and they drag themselves away, calling Thassa’s name in singsong goodbye.

  “What were you telling them?” he asks.

  “We were just traveling.” She looks back out over the curve of the lake, shaking her head. She’s channeling Kateb Yacine: If the sea were free, Algeria would be rich.

  He thanks her again for meeting. She shrugs. “Of course!” She says he looks kinder when he’s not onstage.

  “I think your debate partner was very upset, by the end. Maybe you should write him a letter.”

  He laughs. “Maybe I should!” He steals a look at his cell; he needs to be at O’Hare by one, for a flight to Minneapolis. And her tempo is clearly Sahara time. He waves toward a nearby bench. “Would you like to sit?”

  She frowns. “I thought we could ” She glances at the octagonal Doric temple.

  It takes him a moment. “Oh, of course. Have you ever been?”

  Her face is like someone texting a lover. “Not today!”

  As they stand in line for tickets, she confesses to coming almost every week. The simplest pleasure-watching fish glide by on the other side of murky-green glass-never goes stale and needs no escalation. She’s jumped off the hedonic treadmill and doesn’t habituate. Goose bumps run up Kurton’s neck-piloerection, puffing up against danger-archaic reflex pirated by that spin-off of no known survival value: awe.

  They circle the great central tank, Thassa studying the blue-spotted stingray and Kurton studying her. She holds the gaze of a leatherback; the creature is as transfixed by her as any scientist. Even her walk is eerie; she springs like she’s on a smaller planet with weaker gravity.

  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 go
ne 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-”