Generosity

by Richard Powers

  The audience eats it up. Stone shoots a dazed look at the woman on his right. She’s a kindly forty-year-old pukka elf who reminds him exactly of his sister, if he had a sister. She sneaks him a grin while shaking her head and applauding along with everyone. Stone starts to clap, too. He keeps his eyes on the trainer, afraid even to glance at Candace.

  The personal trainer takes them through a gamut of responses. They get quite good at shared dismay, shock, and pleasure. When the audience is one finely tuned globe of communal good feeling, the trainer tells two more jokes and leaves to an ovation. Music starts up, brassy and buoyant. A voice comes out of nowhere and the audience starts pumping, even before Stone can check the monitors for a cue.

  Oona skips into the glowing living room, warm and confident and a little abashed by the affection flowing from her hundreds of studio friends. Exhilaration courses over the rows of seats. When she steps to the front of the stage and smiles, Stone feels he’s known this woman forever. She’s someone he’d like to have as a friend-girl in an adjoining cubicle at Becoming You. She’s the person his mother was, when his mother was young and still went out in public. He wants to reassure Oona, to thank her for her wry normality. She scares the hell out of him, and she hasn’t even started talking.

  Something pulls at his fingers. He looks down at Candace, who is trying to free her crushed hand from his grip.

  Stop worrying, she mouths, over the applause. It’ll be fine.

  He’s shot through with gratitude for this woman. He couldn’t even sit in this place without her, let alone pretend that anything might be fine.

  Oona waves her hands, helpless with pep. “Thank you, everybody. You’re all simply amazing!”

  The uproar crests again.

  “Today on the show Thank you! Today on the show ”

  The word sends Stone into a fugue. They’re on a show. Show, don’t tell. All for show. If bad things come down while they’re here, they can just return to the unshown.

  “. we’re going to talk with several experts in different fields who’ll tell us-ready for this?-the secret of happiness.”

  The audience erupts again, as if they already possess it.

  “Yep. How about that? That’s got to be worth your price of admission, right there!”

  She makes several more promises, all in the voice of everyone’s favorite high school English teacher. A great surge of appreciation ends in a sudden mood drop. Stone looks around, confused.

  “Commercial break,” Candace whispers.

  Stone struggles with the idea. Out there, in the world, the show never wavers. In here, it ebbs and flows, like any bipolar creature.

  In minutes, the thrill is back. Oona’s first guest arrives with fanfare. He’s a broadcast and Web psychologist whom everyone in the room friended long ago. His message: We’re incapable of predicting what will make us happy. Consequently, it’s best to stay loose and keep revising the plan. Socialize, volunteer, listen to music, and get out of the house. The man’s witty pragmatism makes Russell want to bunker down with the shades pulled. Stone checks Candace. She screws up her mouth and sighs. The audience laughs and claps and resolves to forgive themselves more and live a little freer.

  The broadcast psychologist and Oona debate about whether it’s harder to be happy or to lose weight. They drop into another brief depressive interval, followed by a more manic return. Then Oona gets serious and asks her worldwide audience, “Could it be we’re simply hardwired for happiness? Our next guest, a leading genomic researcher, believes he has the answer. Friends, please welcome Dr. Thomas Kurton.”

  Kurton’s five minutes agitate even Candace. Every time the Donatello man speaks, she tugs at Stone’s sleeve with silent objections. Kurton talks so rationally about dopamine receptors and inherited good cheer that the audience must see he’s dangerous. But the monitors keep their counsel, and each guest is left alone to take her private cues directly from Oona’s face.

  And Oona’s face harbors the wary hope coded into those humans who lie smack in the middle of the normal distribution curve. “So you can look at my DNA and tell me how upbeat I usually am, relative to the rest of humanity?”

  Kurton grins into the studio lights. “We can make a reasonable guess at where, on the spectrum of human buoyancy, a given constellation of genetic variation will probably fall.”

  The broadcast psychologist tumbles forward in his chair and tries to interrupt. But Oona waves him down. “Hold on. And you can do this for how much?”

  Her half-guilty, half-greedy comic timing is perfect. The audience laughs, and Thomas Kurton laughs with them. “Gene sequencing is getting a hundred times cheaper and faster every year. Someday you’ll be able to order behavioral-trait tests for less than you’d pay a psychological testing service. And the answers won’t depend on self-reporting.”

  It hits Stone: the man can say anything at all. Sober measurement or wild prediction-it makes no difference. He’s on the show. And the show, not the lab, is where the race will engineer its future.

  The psychologist can contain himself no longer. “Is knowing my happiness quotient going to make me any happier?”

  His timing is not as good as Oona’s. She blows by him again, fascinated with Kurton. “Here’s what I’m wondering. You see, I’m dating this guy? Yeah Some of you may have read about that?”

  The audience goes wild. Stone sees the future. The race is going to go down. But it will go down laughing. Oona blushes like only the Irish can. Along with 140 million other people, Stone wants to protect this woman from her own heart.

  “So, yeah. I’m dating this guy, and I’m wondering if you can tell me whether he’s really as cheerful, way deep down, as he seems to be right now?”

  Kurton’s smile isn’t afraid to hint. Someday we’ll all know more about one another than anyone knows about herself.

  Oona passes the mic. One of the few men in the audience asks if constant happiness might actually be risky. The audience applauds. The radio psychologist nods and says that people who rate themselves as a ten are less productive than those who call themselves an eight. Kurton asks, “Is that such a bad thing?” The monitors murmur HMM just before the audience does.

  A pretty, terrified brunette not much older than Thassa asks how soon science will be able to turn sad genes into happy ones. Kurton grins and says he’s never been very good at predicting the speed of science.

  Then a slim, tall, poised woman nearing forty stands and addresses Kurton. “My husband and I are trying to have a child through in vitro fertilization.” The audience falls quiet. “Genetic counselors say we can determine which of the fertilized embryos might have incurable monogenetic diseases. Can we now also tell which ones have the best chance of being happy?”

  Oona’s arms are all over the place. “Oh my God! Can you do that?”

  It’s not clear whether she means technically or legally. Kurton demurs, apologizing. And the audience murmurs something the monitors don’t prompt.

  A creature grips Stone’s arm. He turns to Candace. Her face blanches. Her life’s work is slipping away from her in an arms race of bliss. “They’re buying it,” she whispers. The wisdom of crowds has turned on her. All Stone can do is reach across his chest and touch one limp hand to her right shoulder. She grabs it in both of hers.

  “Okay. Hold on!” Oona the sane and suspicious, Oona the levelheaded avenging angel of common sense crosses her hands in a T. And Yes, my two throwback characters hope: she’ll stop the madness now. The most influential woman in the world will buy humanity another twenty years of grace before the species splits into Ordinary and Enhanced. “So what’s the catch? I mean: screening embryos? How much is something like that going to cost?”

  An Ah! escapes the audience, then ripples through millions of people in seven time zones, at the speed of broadcast.

  “Good question,” Kurton says, rubbing his head. “My company is thinking hard about exactly that question.”

  “What do you think?” Oona
asks, peering out into the black abyss of dollying machines. Stone thinks she’s putting the matter up for public auction. But she narrows her gaze to the slender forty-year-old on the verge of in vitro. “How much would you pay to pick your child’s profile?”

  “I don’t know,” the woman says. “Parents already pay hundreds of thousands to give their children advantages.”

  Everyone talks at once. Oona takes forty seconds to reestablish order. She’s dazed, like she doesn’t believe any of this, and then like she does, like we’ve just set out from this world toward something glorious and paradisiacal. At last she falls back into her Everywoman look, still crash-tested but conditioned by a lifetime of biannual breakthroughs to believe that every story will still happen, in time. Through the corner of a mouth that can no longer tell which way to twist, she says, “You heard it here first, friends. The question is whether you’re ready for it! Are we closing in at last on the thing we’ve been looking for from the beginning? More, after this.”

  During the commercial break, a start-up down in New Mexico publishes an association study on predisposition to insomnia. An Illinois university lab secures more funding to study the suicide risks of three leading antidepressants. And a Bay Area biotech company prepares to announce a genetic test that will tell anyone their odds of developing bipolar disorder. “We’re not claiming this is our ticket to Stockholm,” the CEO tells his board. “We do, however, believe it offers people more value than any other diagnostic now on the market.”

  While the cameras rest, Oona lets her guests debate, just to keep everyone happily on edge. Candace leans over to Stone in the dark. Her warm breath swirls in his ear. “Can we move to another planet?” He wants to tell her yes, anywhere. But multibillion-dollar deep-space probes have already laid claim to all the best reachable ones.

  The audience starts to cheer before Stone realizes the real show has returned. “Welcome back,” Oona says, perched on the arm of the emerald sofa. “Today we’re all about the secret of happiness! And right now, I want you to meet a remarkable young woman you may have heard about. Until now, she’s been known only by her pseudonym, Jen. She’s the woman who our guest, Dr. Thomas Kurton, after a four-year study, says may just possess one of the best genetic signatures for personal well-being. How does it feel to be born with what the rest of us can only dream about? Let’s find out. Friends, please welcome the woman with all the right happiness genes, Miss Thassadit Amzwar.”

  Thassa stumbles from the wings, squinting in the klieg lights’ blaze. A gasp comes from the house: she’s foreign. She’s wearing a pair of tight green straight-leg jeans and a puffy white Berber blouse embroidered with rainbow around the collar and wrists. She has on every piece of good-luck silver Russell has ever seen her wear. Those onstage clap along with the audience. Thassa sits on the sofa, leaning forward, legs together, peering out into the blackness. She spots her friends and waves. When the clapping quiets, she says, “Why are you all cheering? I haven’t said anything yet!”

  Stone presses his eyes and Candace starts to cry. Everyone around them breaks out in a new, delighted ovation.

  Nine minutes of television-a broadcast eternity. Watching the scene unfold over the shoulder of her own show’s cameraman, Tonia Schiff couldn’t help feeling, I’ve seen this film before. She could have written the spectacle’s script herself. Thassadit Amzwar came out onstage to a rock anthem, as if some trained seal of elation. The ingenue sat down, surrounded by her examiners, before an audience cranked up on a network high, teetering between the two primal feeding frenzies of hope and doubt. And as in every version of this movie that Schiff had ever seen, some well-meaning but helpless figure lurked on the boundaries of the audience, filled with shameful complicity. At least she was off camera this time.

  The Algerian woman sat in the eye of the churning show, far away in an impenetrable place, pulling an imaginary shawl over her shoulders. Schiff marveled at the self-possession, freakish for a woman of any age, let alone twenty-three. In another era, Thassadit Amzwar might have been celebrated as a mystic. The famous host dangled questions in front of her like twine before a cat.

  O: Would you call yourself one of the happiest people ever born?

  TA: Of course not! Why would I call myself that?

  O: You know what I’m asking.

  TA: I feel very well. Very happy to be alive.

  O: And you feel like that all the time?

  TA: Naturally, no. I’m often sleeping.

  O: How much of your personal happiness is in your genes?

  TA: Ask this man. He knows everything about genes.

  O: We’ve asked him already. What do you think?

  TA: How can I know, Oona? What does it even mean? One hundred percent? Fifty? Zero?

  Confusion gathered in the room behind Schiff, the buzz of a stirred hive. Even the prompting monitors were perplexed. Schiff made Keyes pan around the restive room.

  O: Were you born happy? Were you a happy baby?

  TA: Listen. I was thinking. Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it’s one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don’t even know that we are infected. A virus can even change your genes, can’t it?

  Here the woman appealed to the scientist, who smiled so broadly that anyone just tuning in would have thought that he was the one guilty of inherited pleasure. Keyes caught both faces in close-up at just the right moment. He also managed to catch, in the iconic host’s reaction, the first awareness that she faced a guest rebellion.

  O: Okay, let me ask it this way. Were your parents happy?

  TA: My parents? My parents lived through war their whole lives. They never knew their own language. Everyone was their enemy, and then they died. How happy are most Americans?

  The Americans in this room were less than pleased. Many of them looked ready to demand an emotional refund. Someone had misled the general public. The woman with the perfect genetic temperament wasn’t even amusing. This woman was testy. And the audience had been set up for some elaborate practical joke.

  The famous host made further jabs, increasingly desperate. She shifted to Kurton, asking him to talk about Miss Amzwar’s neurotransmitter levels and her fMRI. Miss Amzwar interrupted. Why are you looking for our spirits in molecules? Very old wine in new bottles!

  Her exasperation turned contagious. The program headed toward precisely the kind of disaster that kept audiences addicted to live broadcasts.

  O: Sister, if you’re telling us that you’re as miserable as the rest of us, why did you come on this show?

  The audience exploded into cheers and catcalls. The despondent Jen bent her neck oddly away from the camera, as if someone had her soul pinched between his thumb and forefinger and was twisting it. Her face clouded, and she sank into a darkness that bordered on bitter. Schiff felt the woman drift to the brink of a public breakdown. Yet even the descent seemed a work of art-repugnance as robustly enjoyed as any mood.

  Keyes’s camera, along with the four Oona Show units, nailed what happened next. With another shoulder twist, the Algerian shook off temptation and passed into a state more solid than anger. She rose up on the couch and surveyed the room. Something large hijacked her irritation, some uncontainable affection for everything that grew from twenty-three chromosomes. Her enzymes aligned, she began to speak, and in one surge her easy tide lifted all the boats.

  Digital clips of her outbreak hit the Web for worldwide consumption as early as that evening. They multiplied for days after the air date. And by the following week, the YouTube imitations began to appear. The otherworldly glow of the soliloquy came less from Thassa Amzwar’s words than from her posture, the quiet knowledge that poured out of the woman, despite her best efforts. And this was the aura that teenage girls everywhere attempted to copy, in an epidemic of two-minute DV viruses that broke out on machines across all the advanced countries.

  Later, Schiff spent hours hunting down the proliferating performances, which had by then become one of the most popular amateu
r theatricals on the Net.

  “Oona, listen,” a pretty Vancouver Eurasian lip-synchs, in her own shot-perfect re-creation of the segment. “I promise you: This is easy. Nothing is more obvious.”

  A stocky blond high school junior wearing a Berber blouse in her Orlando bedroom recites for the lens, “People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful.”

  Atlanta: “Even a minute is more than we deserve.” Spokane, Allentown: “No one should be anything but dead.” San Diego, Concord, Moline: “Instead, we get honey out of rocks. Miracles from nothing.”

  “It’s easy,” all the Thassa Amzwars across the globe swear to anyone who’ll listen. “We don’t need to get better. We’re already us. And everything that is, is ours.”

  Stone and Weld snatch her from the clamoring studio audience and whisk her off to a hidden soft-serve ice cream dive somewhere west of Greek Town. Neither of Thassa’s foster guardians has the courage to ask anything but whether she’s all right.

  Her all-rightness extends to being ravenous. She wolfs down nine hundred calories while wondering out loud, “What exactly is my crime, do you think? I simply enjoy this world. Why do they treat me as some kind of threat to civilization?” She says nothing about her teetering in front of the camera, that brittle moment when she seemed half in love with nihilism. But she confesses to thinking she’d never escape the post-show crush alive.

  When she comes up for air two waffle cones later, she mentions, a little embarrassed, her pre-show meeting with Tonia Schiff. “You remember her? The funny narrator from the genomes program? Of course you do!”

  Stone and Weld nod, red.

  “She wants to make another film. The other side of this so-called destiny story. She thinks there’s much more to tell about my feeling well. She thinks I’m being made into some kind of prophecy. She wants to help, I think.”