By late April, they’ve graduated to the point where he can sit with her in that famous blues club on South State on a Friday afternoon, long enough to eat something. They share fried catfish and okra with honey-mustard sauce and beers that neither of them touch, listening to the Delta twelve-bar keening over the sound system. Kiyoshi has grown so bold as to drum along on the tabletop. Now and then he even rips a little air-guitar lick, although his riffs are so discreet it’s more like air ukulele. He stops when anyone nearby makes a sudden move.
They sit in the shallows of contentment, just about to wrap things up and return to their respective Friday-night film editing, when Sue Weston discovers them. Neither of them has seen Artgrrl for weeks. They share a minireunion, after which a terrified Kiyoshi slips away and barricades himself in the men’s room.
Sue shoots Thassa an I’m-onto-you grin. Thassa braces, preparing an explanation of the Sims-Amzwar special relationship. Surely the art-school ecosystem is broad enough to permit such a symbiosis.
But Artgrrl blindsides her. “It’s you, isn’t it? The woman with the happiness genes. You’re all over the Net. Jen is Miss Generosity.”
Thassa flips a fork across the table, decidedly ungenerous. “Jen is a scientific hallucination.”
Artgrrl steps back, her face crinkling. “Of course it’s you!” She swallowed a little stimulant twenty minutes earlier, a prelude to Friday night, and it’s juked her up a notch. “I can’t believe nobody’s made the connection. I mean, those other stories about you, last winter? The whole hyper thing ”
The Kabyle lowers her head and places her ear on the tabletop. “There is nothing special in my blood.”
Weston sits down in Kiyoshi’s abandoned chair and places a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe not. But what difference does that make? This whole Jen thing is on the verge of being, like, the It deal of the season, and it’s not going to last much longer. You should go for this. Think of the eyeballs. You could post your films and get thousands C’mon, girl. Fame is the new sex!”
Thassa lifts her head, a dry little glint. “Hey! What about the old sex, first?”
“Are you for real?”
“I can’t help. I come from a repressive culture.”
“Oh, my God.” The American covers her gaping mouth. “They didn’t like, cut you or anything, over there?”
“Oh, not that repressive culture! I mean Quebec.”
Sue’s grin tries to steer into the skid.
Thassa touches two fingers to her elbow. “You shouldn’t believe everything you think!”
The suckered American fingers her lips. “You lying little minx!” She steps back from the Algerian, approving. “You’re messing with me.” But before Sue can right herself, Kiyoshi returns, hoping to retrieve his computer bag and make a clean getaway before the human-contact thing gets out of hand. Sue reappraises the shrinking boy and giggles with new admiration.
Thassa follows Kiyoshi in escape. But before she can flee, Sue squeezes her goodbye, gauging her again with that gleam. You can’t hide from me, the look says. Have fun with Invisiboy, if you don’t kill him first.
Later that night, Sue Weston logs in to her blog and posts her new entry: “Bird of Happiness, Tagged.” She spells out the argument with a clarity that would make her onetime writing instructor proud. She links to last November’s StreetSharp transcript, the Reader article, and all the noise of a few months before. Just the facts. Nonfiction, without the creative. Her own kind of science, with first prize for priority.
It’s not like she’s making facts public; the facts were never private to begin with. She’s twenty-one, young enough to know that there is no more public or private. There are only slow facts and fast facts, linked and unlinked, and every two sequences of value will eventually be correlated. Someone will publish the connection in another few days anyway, if she doesn’t. And why should someone else’s blog get all the eyeballs?
Schiff arrives in El Kef with her guts emptied and her brain in a similar state. She stands at the window of her hotel room in the Ville Nouvelle, above the Place de l’Indépendance, too light-headed to make out much more than the massive Byzantine fortress looming up out of a tumble of stone and whitewashed plaster. The streets of the medina twist down from the Casbah’s foot. More town spills down the other slope, a jumble of white-and-tan blocks watched over by minarets and domes. The tip of a cellular radio tower peeks out above the fortress, puncturing Tonia’s Orientalist fantasy. Coming here was mad. She’s like a time traveler from the golden age of pulp science fiction, trying to change a future that has already happened.
Schiff stands motionless, looking, until a heavyset man with a paintbrush mustache comes out on a balcony across the Place and returns her inspection. She turns back into her stale room. The detailed discovery of the town will wait a day, until she can do it right. As Thassa once told her, tomorrow will be there, as soon as you need it.
Schiff sheds her crumpled road clothes and takes a lukewarm shower in the tiny, open stall. Her head still spins from the louage, and she never wants to eat again. She wraps herself in a towel and stretches out on the bed. She finds her ratty pocket spiral notebook and writes: We talk tomorrow. For a moment, the whole expedition seems almost plausible. If I can record ten minutes, I’ll be happy.
All the while, she pretends she isn’t jonesing to discover whether the world as she knows it has continued to exist during her day away. At three minutes to the hour, she casually flips on the television (a broken remote left ceremoniously on the bedside table by the hotel staff) and trawls the channels like the worst of quidnuncs.
This two-star hotel in an outpost of forty thousand people in a remote western province of a little country wedged between the chaos of Algeria and the void of Libya pulls in more cosmopolitan broadcasts than she gets in New York. She pounces on the BBC like a starving person. The world is much as she left it. The day has gone like any other, held hostage by the past and doomed by coming appointments. In that closet hotel, each news story announces either imminent extinction or embryonic breakthrough. Hotel residents everywhere-any passenger in transit this night-must be forgiven for thinking that life will be solved at last, one way or the other, by the time they get home.
She flicks off the set and, in the highland silence of that molding room, opens her carry-on. She pulls out a plastic case packed with disks like makeup mirrors, each one storing hours of video. She’s packed only three days of clothes, but more digital clips than she could watch in three weeks. The secret of happiness is meaningful work.
She flips through her archive, the clips she’ll splice together to make her own real firstborn. In the middle of the stiff bed, surrounded by time capsules, she loads a short feature on the most notorious infant in living memory. The girl with that perfectly archaic middle name: Joy.
Whiplashing to think that the footage is three decades old. But the basic trope goes back millennia: a dangerous, destabilizing baby smuggled clandestinely into an unsuspecting world. The doctors don’t even tell the prospective parents that their little girl will be the first of her kind. Tonia sits on the bed, watching the videotaped birth, a message posted forward to whatever people might inhabit the evolved future. The infant head crowns on Schiff’s screen, and there is Louise Joy Brown, an impossibly slight five and three-quarters pounds, crying her lungs out in that first crisis, air.
The birth cries are nothing, compared to the ones they touch off. Perfectly moderate commentators face the camera and declare the doom of the human race. Almost ridiculous now, this dated hysteria. But almost right.
Schiff sits up in the bed and glances back out the window. A corsage of yellow lights now trace Kef’s edges all the way up the jagged mountain. This town’s basic cure for sterility may often still involve a prayer at the local zaouia. But then, so does New York’s.
Tonia turns back to the warnings posted forward from a previous planet. Later technologies make that first artificial conception look like a Hail Mary pla
y. Intrafallopian transfer, intracytoplasmic sperm injection: a dozen of her friends have shopped from that list. A few hundred thousand IVF babies make their way through this night, as dark swings around the globe. The process is nothing now, and the real show is only getting started. A new industry, following only voluntary guidelines, already screens embryos for hundreds of genetic diseases. And Tonia Schiff will bet her return ticket that some billionaire, somewhere, is already paying to have his offspring screened for good traits. The race will take to selling characteristics on websites, like downloadable songs, the day it becomes possible.
She ejects the disk and flips through the stack, looking for the second half of tonight’s double feature. She has documentaries and biographies, old news clips on engineered bacteria, gene transfer, the world-famous photogenic sheep, xenotransplantation, embryos from skin DNA transplanted into eggs, embryos with two mothers and a father, and, from last week, the application for exclusive ownership of a wholly synthetic organism.
Apocalypse has become too commonplace to feel. Of the scribbling in books, there is no end. And all our writing will in time come alive.
She takes notes until she falls asleep. And falling asleep, she’ll tell herself that she asks for almost nothing: one more documentary, one more interview, one more clandestine infant named Joy. But the rim of cliffs guarding this ancient town mock any theme she might care to film.
Because Donna Washburn, the author of the Reader feature, googles her own name only once every two days, a full twenty-one hours pass before she sees herself mentioned in Sue Weston’s blog. Immediately Washburn leaves a message on Thassa’s voice mail, asking for confirmation. But Thassa doesn’t reply by the time the next week’s Reader is put to bed. So the paper runs an “unconfirmed rumor” squib. By the time the bit runs, it’s redundant. Jen’s secret identity has started to proliferate through the Web. Within a week, she’s pretty much a publicly traded commodity.
Three weeks before final exams, and Thassadit Amzwar is working flat out on Come Spring, trying to get a rough cut done before semester’s end. She hardly even notices the ripples. In this country, where continent-wide cultural transformations root, take over the biosphere, and go extinct several times in every twenty-four-hour news cycle, all she has to do is hunker down, finish the term, and wait until the public attention drifts back to celebrity divorces and custody fights, where it belongs.
The first assault is a simple repeat of last fall. She tries her best to answer the surge of e-mails. A few dozen fanboys and postpartum mothers write to ask, Is Jen really you? How old were you when you first realized that your genes were making you joyous? Does it still work late at night in winter? Could we meet for coffee, for a chat, for just forty-five minutes? I could be there on Thursday. Minneapolis isn’t all that far from Chicago
She’s gentle with these people; it’s not their fault they’ve been misled. After a few days, she reverts to a form letter. It breaks her heart, but she has no choice. She tries to add a personalized sentence at the end of every reply. When she begins to get replies to her replies, she grits her teeth and ignores them.
Then the phone starts ringing. It’s Self magazine. Then People. Then Psychology Today. She gives a couple of phone interviews without even realizing she’s doing so. She gives another one, just by trying to explain that she doesn’t want to talk about what’s not worth talking about. A journalist from the Trib begs her to come down to Rhapsody and just have a sandwich. She can hear in his voice that he’s a fine man with a wife and children who only wants to do his job as best as he can; having a sandwich while explaining the massive misunderstanding can’t do any more harm. When Thassa gets to Rhapsody, there’s a photographer lying in wait alongside the journalist. And this photographer woman-a graduate of Mesquakie-is also just doing her job and living her art.
The interviewers keep asking her to describe exactly how it feels to be exuberant. She asks them, “You have never been?” Yes, they say, but all the time? No, she says. Cheerful often. Exuberant sometimes, perhaps frequently, depending on the tally. Everyone alive should feel richly content, ridiculously ahead of the game, a million times luckier than the unborn. What more can she tell them?
They want to know whether she inherited her bliss, whether it comes from the environment, or whether she’s simply willed herself to be happy. She tells them honestly: she hasn’t a clue. They ask if other people in her family are as happy as she is. She says she’d never presume to say how happy anyone else might be.
After four days of the circus, she stops answering her phone. But it tears her up to hear the messages left on her voice mail. She can’t listen to them and not call them back. At the same time, she’d dearly like to finish the semester without flunking out. The only answer is to cancel her phone service and start a new one.
This doesn’t prevent total strangers who see the Tribune photo from stopping her in the street and greeting her warmly. But then, she used to stop total strangers in the street and greet them the same way. So it’s a wash, and she meets some nice people as a result. Many people she meets tell her how exhilarating it is, just to talk to her. That feels like considerable evidence, to her unscientific mind, that the disease is more contagious than genetic. But no venture capitalists step forward to fund a double-blind controlled study.
Where are Candace and Russell during all of this? They’re slipping off to lunch like international pleasure smugglers. She’s teaching him to cook. He’s sketching her portrait. They’re eating junk food on Navy Pier. They’re listening to Scandinavian reggae at the Aragon. They watch a Chinese gangster film in a hole-in-the-wall Chinatown theater, without benefit of English subtitles. They take Gabe to the Living Toys of the Future exhibit at the Science and Industry.
On nights when Gabe is at his father’s, they lie on Stone’s narrow futon on the oak floor, reading out loud to each other. They do scenes from Shakespeare-Rosalind and Orlando in the Forest of Arden. Jessica and Lorenzo under the floor of heaven. On such a night as this, they might be anywhere.
They carry Thassa around between them, always, blessed by the girl who has brought them together. They see her in every passing curiosity, all the sharp, bright details that now fill their days, feeling a gratitude as obligatory as taxes and death. “We should call her tomorrow,” Candace tells Russell, more than once, as they fall asleep holding each other.
They draft an imaginary book together. The force with which Candace urges the idea on Russell overwhelms him. It doesn’t feel like therapy at all. It feels like remodeling the house. It feels like gardening. It feels like having old friends over for dinner, only without having to clean up.
“Come on,” she cajoles, nudging him with her hip and settling down next to him on his futon. She brandishes his canary-yellow legal pad. “Come on, Mr. Wordsmith. Our one good chance to have things our way. So what do you want to call this thing?”
He can’t stop marveling at her. She’s turned into a goofy twenty-year-old. A grin as infectious as any virus. “Don’t we have to make a few choices first?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Like whether we’re writing a novel, memoir, history, how-to, self-help, or cookbook?”
“Of course! You mean, like, facts or make-believe. Still a difference nowadays?”
For a while, anyway. Soon it will be all one thing or all the other, although Stone isn’t willing yet to predict which.
Time to choose. “Make-believe,” he declares.
“Great. That’s the one where they can’t sue you, right? So where do we start? We need a cast list. Dozens of three-dimensional, unforgettable characters who bleed when you cut them. People so real you can smell their toenails.”
Unit two on his obsolete syllabus: mannerisms, traits, and core inner values.
“Do we really need characters?” he bleats. “I hate characters. It’s such a cliché, characters.”
“Okay, fine. No characters. That’s new. That’s fresh. I like it. So wh
at’s this thing about?”
On the second Sunday after Easter, Mike Burns, one of the inner circle of younger, magnetic ministers at the two-hundred-acre campus of an interdenominational megachurch in South Barrington, preaches a sermon at the third of four mammoth weekend services on the theme: Do we still enjoy God’s most-favored-nation status? The analysis is blunt-blunter than any recent balance sheet from Washington. Pastor Mike lists the symptoms of a national fall from grace. Drugs, promiscuity, and the occasional massacre plague the nation’s schools. Whole communities are drowning in the Internet’s cesspools. The Chinese economy is set to eat our lunch, along with most of our between-meal snacks. The banking industry has vanished into imagination and unemployment is booming. Violent crime and homosexuality are everywhere, and by any objective measure-standard of living, health care, and general quality of life-the whole country is scraping chassis.
At the climax of his daunting catalog, with a storyteller’s timing, Pastor Mike shifts to a checklist of bounties remaining to those who have kept faith. Americans are still God’s elect, the vicious envy of the rest of the world. Just as the lost could not abide Christ’s serene power and had to put Him to death, so, too, do other clans, terrified by the freedom of America, long to harm it.
But who cares what the enemy wants? the preacher chants. God wants your joyful noise. The best thing you can do for Him here on Earth is to parade His elation. And in the closing minutes of his sermon-a commanding moment cut into the highlights reel for inclusion in the church’s weekly videocast-Pastor Mike gives his flock a true-to-life parable:
“Now let me tell you about a young lady you may have heard about in the news, a girl from a persecuted minority family who somehow escaped from the fanatical, Islamo-sectarian hell of Arab Africa, a pilgrim soul who managed to make her way safely to college in one of the luckiest cities in the luckiest country on earth Science gives this survivor’s joy a medical name and tries to pretend that her perpetual bliss is nothing more than a random, chemical accident. My math- my science-works differently. Do you think it’s just an accident that this woman, who has been through horrors that make our own safer souls shudder to imagine, that this recipient of God’s unstoppable love just happens to be Christian? Do ya Huh? Just chance?”
Generosity Page 23
