Generosity

by Richard Powers

  The laughter of the congregation plays loud and long, on desktop and handheld devices everywhere.

  Candace and Russell lie flank to cold flank, facing heaven, effigies on the lid of some Renaissance marble tomb.

  “National novel-writing month coming up,” she whispers. “Fifty thousand words in thirty days. Last year they had 95,000 entrants and 19,000 finishers. What do you think?”

  “Excuse me for a moment,” he tells her. “I have to go take my own life.”

  Shortly after the megachurch posts Pastor Mike’s sermon to their site, a member of its sprawling congregation shares the results of her research in the church’s online forum: the street address of the pilgrim soul herself, should anyone wish to share with her their appreciation of God’s blessing.

  Response is swift and enthusiastic. Even faith enjoys economies of scale.

  Stone is sanguine enough these days to pick up the phone, even when he doesn’t recognize a new number on his caller ID.

  “Mister Stone! You have to help. They’re after me!”

  Her. The ground goes soft around him. “Who?”

  “Very Christian people with too much free time. They’re mailing me gifts. Bringing me things. They want to meet with me for prayer!”

  She tells him about the sermon and its aftermath. Even now, she’s more amused than panicked.

  “You are the native,” she says. “Tell me what am I to do with this.”

  He starts filing furious lawsuits, taking out restraining orders, threatening to prosecute everyone who mentions her name in public. “Are you all right?” he asks, mimicking Candace’s competence. “Is anyone harassing-”

  “I’m perfectly fine. It’s just embarrassing. They’re sending me stickers and pins, pretty guitar-music discs, and crazy little Jesus trophies. One lady brought a whole nest of leftover chocolate Easter eggs in a little green-and-pink basket for my dorm room. I told her that chocolate eggs are a fertility ritual. At least that one didn’t stay too long!”

  “Wait.” He feels as if a nearby gunshot has just dragged him up from the dead of sleep. “They’re coming by your place?”

  “Tell me how I’m supposed to stop them. Help me! I’m running out of tea and cakes. And you know, I have finals coming up. I need one hundred more hours to finish, and I have only sixty left.”

  “They’re What do they want from you?”

  “Simple. They haunt me for being born a Christian. They want me to be their team what do you call the funny little things ”

  “Mascot.”

  “Exactly. I’m some kind of Jesus mascot. Or I’m going to cure their lives. Mister, it’s pitiful. Some of them think I’m a messenger angel, sent down to earth with a secret message about the future. Tell them, Russell. I’m no fucking angel!”

  The word stops him dead on the line. She doesn’t swear. She must not know what she’s saying. The French or Arab equivalents are just costume jewelry, and Tamazight can’t even have a word that taboo. But, come to think of it, neither does English anymore: the word is fucking everywhere.

  She breaks his silence. “Hey. You’re not a Christian, are you? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt.”

  He has dreamed of mailing her things himself-old folk mix tapes, guides for surviving America, essays that her essays reminded him of, dizzy little books of Hopkins and Blake. “No. I was born My parents brought me up It doesn’t matter. I’m not really anything, really.”

  “Good. I’m nothing, either. I’m a Maghreb Algerian Kabyle Catholic Atheist French Canadian on a student visa. I can’t help these people.”

  “We should ask Candace.”

  “I don’t know, Russell. I love Candace. That’s not the point. But Candace always tells me to do just what I think is right. She’s a big one for self-discovery, that Candace. I’ll simply pretend I already asked.”

  He could suggest other solutions. But he doesn’t. He’s weakened by his recent bout with joy. Joy does little to increase one’s judgment. Happiness is not the condition you want to be in when you need to be at your most competent.

  He asks if she has someplace in the city to hide out until finals. She can think of no place, and he doesn’t offer any. He tells her to protect herself, to be gentle but firm about her time. The main thing is to get over the semester finish line and get back home.

  “Home,” she agrees. “That would be a beautiful place to get back to. One small problem, Mister. No trips home anytime soon. I’m enrolled in Summer One courses!”

  They share an awkward pause. He thinks about offering her his place. But that’s crazy. They both hold still. For a moment, it’s so quiet I’m afraid they’ll hear me listening in. Then she asks him how his book is going, and we’re all safe again.

  “Great.” He laughs. “I have a coauthor. Friend of yours.”

  “Candace? Are you serious?” He can’t read her, her nonnative register. But he can hear her doing the math. “You and Candace are together?”

  As together as anything, he supposes. “Yes. Yes, we are.” His answer surprises him more than her question.

  “That’s wonderful, Russell. I’m happy for you. I’m happy for Candace. You are great with Jibreel. And I’m happy for this book you’re working on together. Now could you please tell me what it’s about?”

  He smiles at her petulance. Sunniest petulance ever. “It’s an adventure story. It’s about someone breaking out of prison.”

  “Really? You should talk to me. I have a cousin who broke out of prison. I can tell you stories.”

  Imagination dies of shame in the face of its blood relation.

  “I miss you, Mister Stone. Miss how you are. We should go somewhere together, sometime. See some sights.”

  He has to remind himself. It doesn’t mean anything. She would take even the Christians out sightseeing, if there weren’t so many of them.

  A buzzer rasps on her end. “Oh my God. More visitors. Wait a moment.” She’s off to the intercom and a short chat. She comes back laughing. “It’s two sweet old women. I can see three more spinning around, down in the street. They want me to autograph some magazine clippings and talk about blessings.”

  “Tell them you’re studying for exams.”

  “I give them ten minutes. Then I ask if they would like to sacrifice some goats together, out on the balcony. That sometimes speeds them up.” She makes a kissing sound into the phone. “Thank you for everything, Russell. Love you. Bye!”

  This mutant Second City is home to a talk show. Lots of world cities and even some non-world ones have talk shows to call their own. The genre dates back to the book of Job, and it has spawned more variants than wolves have spawned dogs. But the world has seen no talk show like the one that has evolved in this particular Chicago.

  It’s less a show than a sovereign multinational charter. And its host is, by any measure, the most influential woman in the world. Her own story is a remarkable mix of motifs from American creative fiction, from Alger to Zelazny. Say only that she has grown from an impoverished, abused child into an adult who gives away more money than most industrialized nations. She has the power to create instant celebrities, sell hundreds of millions of books, make or break entire consumer industries, expose frauds, marshal mammoth relief efforts, and change the spoken language. All this by being tough, warm, vulnerable, and empathetic enough to get almost any other human being to disclose the most personal secrets on international television. If she didn’t exist, allegory would have to invent her. Her name is O’Donough and she is the richest Irish American woman in history, but she, her show, her publishing house, and her chain of personal-overhaul boutiques are known the world over simply as Oona.

  The guiding principle of her program-the one that has made Oona the most-watched human of the last two decades-is the belief that fortune lies not in our stars but in our changing selves. She has told several thousand guests that blaming any destiny-whether biological or environmental-just isn’t going to cut it. Even in her own much-publicized b
attles with moods, mother, and metabolism, Oona has always insisted that anyone can escape any fate by a daily application of near-religious will. Every person has at least enough will on tap to overcome any statistically reasonable adversity and to become if not intercontinentally successful, then at least solvent.

  So when the national media circulates the discovery of congenital happiness, it catches the attention of Oona’s extensive stable of program developers. A predisposition to disposition: it’s exactly the kind of fatalism the boss is determined not to be determined by. And nothing boosts the viewership like a good fight. When Oona’s staff learn that the Happy Gene Woman lives in a dorm room in the South Loop not sixteen blocks from The Oona Show’s studio, it reads like fate.

  Thassa’s name appeared in Weld’s appointments calendar: a half-hour walk-in slot on the Thursday afternoon of finals week. The tidal bore of pre-finals desperation that surged annually through the counseling center had tapered off, and most of Candace’s clients were crawling back home to piece themselves together over summer break. Weld hadn’t spoken with Thassa for longer than she could count. She’d seen the swell of public nonsense, of course. But a student could face worse crises than a momentary deluge of anonymous love.

  Yet there Thassa was, her 3:00 p.m. counseling appointment. Weld wondered how she could have let so many days pass without contact. In the seven years that Candace had worked at Mesquakie, she’d made three major miscalculations, one of them resulting in an attempted, thankfully inept suicide. Weld went into therapy herself after that, and Dennis Winfield and other colleagues helped restore her professional confidence. She learned a great deal from these slips, and she battled back from each one to become stronger at what she did and better at who she was. But every so many months a note or news or a surprise name on the appointments calendar grazed her, and she returned to that eroding state where everything was incomprehensible mistake and cascading consequence. The state in which many of her clients permanently resided.

  Candace knew what she had to do: Listen carefully for any immediate danger. Sympathize with the disorienting stress Thassa must be under. Then suggest that Thassa make an appointment as soon as possible with one of the other counselors. Friendship and professionalism both demanded the switch.

  The knock came promptly at three o’clock. Candace opened the door on the first student ever to enter her office and hug her. Thassa shook Weld’s shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks. “So-you are still alive!”

  “I’m sorry,” Candace said. “Things have been so crazy lately, haven’t they?”

  “Total folie.” Thassa’s eyes could not stop moving. She glided around the office in her white muslin dress, inspecting the bookshelves, the Hopper print, and the photographs, as if this were the first she’d seen them. She settled into the leather chair, home at last.

  Candace sat in the adjacent armchair, trying to place what was different about Thassa. Her aura had changed. She wasn’t nervous: just the reverse. She radiated some intense urge toward stillness. Every conversational starter Candace could think of felt foolish.

  “A colleague of mine showed me the People magazine piece.”

  Thassa shook her head to an inner rhythm and closed her eyes. “I can’t even think of it, Candace. C’est fou. C’est absolument fou.”

  “Are you Is it wearing you down?”

  The Kabyle looked off into a year’s distance, at the distinct possibility that this might be the case. “These days have been so strange. A kind of funny hell. I never realized this before. I can make total strangers miserable, just by being well. I never thought this could happen, and I don’t know what I am supposed to do with this.”

  “Is that what you came to talk about?”

  Thassa’s head jerked back, slapped. Candace heard the stupidity of her words. The two women blinked at each other for a raw instant. Thassa rallied first, covering for them both.

  “Of course not! Do you think I would be that tedious, Candace? I made an appointment because you are too busy to see me anymore!”

  They stumbled into a laugh. Then a little vanilla gossip. There was no other word for it, and although it felt mildly criminal to indulge, especially in her office, Candace proceeded to give the only other woman who would care a brief account of just what it felt like to be with Mr. Russell Stone.

  The session timer chimed softly, much sooner than it should have. Thassa rose to go, Miss Generosity again, a perfect clone of the young woman whom Stone had introduced to Weld, as recently as last fall. The small damage from Weld’s stupidity had healed. Candace would call her next week. They would do something together. Maybe a gallery opening. Maybe theater.

  “By the way,” the Kabyle said, her accent thickening, “I need to tell you. I’m going on The Oona Show.”

  Candace froze halfway to the door. Her face did a time-lapse Lon Chaney before settling on professional curiosity.

  Thassa dropped her eyes and toyed with the inlaid Japanese pencil box on Candace’s desk. “I know. You must think I’ve lost my mind. I was going to ask your opinion.”

  Seven years of psychological training, and Candace Weld had no reply. “Do you know that show?”

  “My God, Candace. What do you think? South Sea island people have Oona fan clubs.”

  “Have you thought about this? Do you really think ”

  The younger woman reached out and touched two fingers to Candace’s wrist, helping the patient through denial. “This is the right thing. The fastest way to make everything end. I made them ask Thomas Kurton, too. This way, I talk to that man face-to-face, in front of everyone. I only want my life back, Candace. This can clear up everything, once and forever.”

  Thassa left, but not before embracing Candace with such resigned encouragement that it scared the counselor. Thassa on the most-watched television show in history: Weld felt as if a Greek chorus had predicted that development all the way back at the start of Act 1.

  A knock came five minutes too early to be the next student client. Before Weld could collect herself to answer, Christa Kreuz poked her head through the door. Her colleague’s eyebrows struggled with the empirical evidence. “Excuse me. Was that who I think it was?”

  Complimentary tickets admit Stone and Weld to the most coveted studio-audience seats in the country. The gift is wasted on them-like a 1993 Petrus Bordeaux at a frat party. They aren’t aware of the four-year waiting period. They know nothing about that famous pancreatic-cancer support group who banded together to request emergency tickets-the one thing the group all wanted to do while still together. They’ve never heard about the episode where Oona gave every person in the audience a fifty-inch television. They’re just here to watch Thassa prove she’s not a freak.

  Russell is a mess. He’s wrapped around Candace’s upper arm like a blood-pressure cuff. He’s way out behind hostile lines, in the core of an empire that would turn on him in an eyeblink if it knew his insurgent heart. He’s clammy and numb, as if Colonel Mathieu has captured him in The Battle of Algiers and is about to hook him up to wet electrodes.

  “She’ll be fine,” Candace says, peeling his claw off of her arm and taking it in her hand.

  Of course, she will. He’s never doubted that Thassa would be anything less.

  The soundstage is a low-ceilinged box packed with raked theater seats. It’s filled with dolly-mounted cameras, floodlights, boom mics, flat-screen monitors, and skeins of cabling as thick as anacondas. In a glass-encased mezzanine, Stone can see banks of mixing boards-a private space program or an underground command bunker. The whole show is operated by tattooed, headset-wearing kids who look like his former students. They probably are Mesquakie students, from a few years ago at most.

  The audience sits in a dark oubliette. In the center of the LED-speckled blackness, bathed in grow lights so bright it hurts Stone’s eyes to look, sits a cozy living room ripped out of someone’s mission-style home: a flower show in the middle of an airplane hangar.

  Five camera crews
dolly around like crack artillery emplacements. One of the squads is smaller, their gear more mobile. Russell knows the woman standing next to the cameraman before he recognizes her. He looks away, somehow guilty.

  Candace notices. “Is that who I think it is?”

  “Who?” he says. But she’s impossible to mistake: Thomas Kurton’s television interviewer. Popular science’s most striking public face. The woman who presided over their first moments of sexual exploration.

  “What are they doing here?” Candace asks. “Didn’t they film their show already?”

  Her question is lost in an audience swell. Someone walks out onstage, but it’s not Oona. It turns out to be the audience’s personal trainer. He starts with a few jokes that soon have the audience in the aisles. Stone gets only half of them. He turns to Candace for explanation. She’s pinching the bridge of her nose and smiling stoically. At what, Stone can’t say.

  The trainer talks the audience through the next forty minutes. He explains how important it is that everyone be themselves and respond honestly to any meltdowns that Oona and her guests get into. Monitors spread throughout the room will give simple cues to help indicate where laughter or surprise might be appropriate. “So let’s try out a couple of responses, all right? I said, ‘All right?’ I can’t hear you ”