Generosity

by Richard Powers

  But now he’s okay with her dodge. Okay with everything; not even her growing yogic retreat bothers him. These last three nights, his appetite for her has been embarrassing. He’s taken her above, behind, in front, below. And she lets him. She’s been painfully beautiful, in the wake of Oona. She has been his keel, since even before they were lovers. She helps him see himself, helps him have a say over who he wants to be. Whatever the world insists on dragging them into, he is with her, and her bubble of self-possession is big enough for three.

  He, Candace, and Gabe sit at her kitchen playing Yahtzee. She’s given the boy unlimited gaming time, so long as the game has physical bits and he’s playing with real, present humans. Russell is on a literal roll, pushing his luck far beyond what the dice should allow and getting away with it. He hits number after number, as if controlling the pips telekinetically. His odds-defying streak sends the boy into thrilled fits. “You’re cheating! Mom, tell him to stop!” When the game ends, they leave Gabe sitting at the kitchen table, still rolling the dice, trying to crack the secret of Stone’s spectacular run.

  In her bed, Candace is sapphire, something he does not know in her. She runs her hands all over him, hunting from a distance for a key she has misplaced. After much searching, her need is answered. They lie together, emptied out. She curls away from him, tucks her backside into his belly, but holds on tight to his encircling arm. In the still room, she says, I love you. It’s simple discovery, all surprise forbearance, like she’s just been assigned a difficult but necessary journey.

  Her head nods a minute confirmation on the pillow next to him. He fills with a certainty such as he has only felt twice in his life. The thought rushes him. Whatever this brings, he wants it. “That sounds very good to me,” he whispers to her spine. “Can we put that in our book?”

  She clasps his arm tighter: a given. The scene has already been written. He watches her fall from confirmation into sleep, by intervals too small to change anything. There is no fear; there is no elation. Only the fact of this shared day.

  He watches her asleep. What could he say about her face, emptied of look, that would make it live for someone a hundred years from now? Or a hundred hundred. A sleeping face forgets every waking technology; sleep at 2020 should be intelligible to the Neolithic. Her eyes start to twitch a little, and then her lips. He could make her say anything at all, in her sleep, in their growing, coauthored volume.

  She starts to snore. Small, seersucker, Laura Ashley snores. If he was fighting his love for her at all up until this moment, he now loses. The snores crescendo, and although he holds perfectly still in his joy, her own sound rouses her. She wakes confused, defensive. “I wasn’t!” she says, still asleep. She opens her eyes, turns to look at him. “Was I?”

  “Hey,” he tells her, nuzzling her downy neck. “Let’s get engaged, or something.”

  She sits up and inspects the room, puzzled. Someone has rearranged all its furniture in her sleep. “Russell? I have to tell you something. We can’t see Thassa anymore.”

  The footage of Thassa on The Oona Show made an eerie art film in its own right: her far-focusing eyes, the ecstatic fear, the angelic irritation shaking free of all human markets. Schiff couldn’t get enough. She studied the shots of the genetically blessed woman, already splicing them into a much larger script: a single forty-two-minute hour about how the eons-long pursuit of happiness was at last cutting to the chase.

  She and the Over the Limit crew worked from a rough outline: nine minutes on the chemical bases of moods; eight on neurogenetics; eleven on hyperthymia and its now famous mascot, Thassa Amzwar; and ten on the coming ability to manipulate genetic disposition. That left four minutes for transitions and Schiff’s interludes. She’d already done two interviews with key researchers in the biology of contentment. The show interns were busy raiding the archive for usable footage, while the art team set to work on fantastic animation.

  The day after The Oona Show, Schiff and Garrett arrived to film Thassa in her dorm. The building had thinned out for the summer break, but a cluster of Jen-spotters loitered in the entrance. They clamored around Garrett’s tripods and lights, bugging him for information. A sallow ectomorph asked Schiff to sign his iPod with a Sharpie. One woman of about thirty, puffy and near tears, tried to force her way into the building alongside them, saying it was absolutely essential that she talk to the happiness girl right away. The lobby security guard turned her away, not for the first time.

  Upstairs, in Thassa’s narrow, film-filled efficiency, they found a woman far from ecstatic. She sat holding her elbows on a small, three-colored kilim that stretched across the room. Garrett barely had space to mount the camera and lights, unfurl the reflectors, and still get both women into the shot. As he started filming, Thassa wrapped herself in stoicism. Schiff, stripped of sass, transformed into some kind of acolyte. She asked Thassa about her upbringing. Garrett, nonplussed, kept shooting. But when the two women began to talk about Kabylia, Thassa relaxed and showed the first sparks of a spirit that might be worth filming, let alone engineering.

  Schiff asked, “Do Algerians trust happiness?” Garrett almost knocked the tripod over. But Thassa fielded the question on the fly. “We say, Ki nchouf ham el nass nansa hami: ‘When I see someone else’s desolation, I forget mine.’ Every Algerian knows that every other Algerian has seen great miseries. And that is consolation? Do any of my countrymen hope that science will discover a solution to the sorrow of history? Please! How can even Americans believe this?”

  Instead of volleying, as she usually would have, Schiff gave one of the lamest follow-ups Garrett ever heard her deliver. “What makes you happy?”

  Before Garrett could stop shooting, the Algerian woman smiled for the first time all interview. She lifted one thin, brown finger, and pointed at him. “That. Oh my God! If I could do what this man does, all day long? That would be a life. I love to look at the world through a viewfinder. I just love it. The worst things about life are beautiful on film.”

  Garrett killed the camera and asked to talk to Schiff out in the hall. He started in before she could defend. “You aren’t exactly advancing the frontiers of science here.”

  Schiff leveled him with her unnerving hazel eyes. “Not my job, Nick.”

  “No? What exactly is your job? I thought it was to give me something engrossing to-”

  “We’re telling this woman’s story.”

  The words slowed him. But only a little. “You’re supposed to interview hyperthymia, not befriend it. This woman is not exactly a bottomless wellspring of cheer.”

  “We’re supposed to film whatever is really there.”

  “Oh, shit. Don’t get righteous on me. Not the time for philosophy, Ton. We’re on a deadline here.”

  “This girl is not what Kurton says she is. I just think our viewers want to see-”

  “Our viewers want science. It’s a science show.”

  A voice called from inside the apartment. “Everything okay out there?”

  When they slunk back into the room, they found Thassa filming Garrett’s camcorder and lighting gear with her own MiniDV. “Someone wants to pay for my eggs,” she told them. She lifted up her camera coolly and filmed their faces as understanding spread across them: Her eggs. Her eggs.

  Garrett asked her to repeat the fact on film. Thassa laughed him off. “Interviews must be spontaneous. You can’t tell your subjects what to say. That’s what they teach in film school, en tout cas.”

  Russell Stone lies in his beloved’s bed, stilled by her bombshell. I step through his possible choices. Every combination of heritage and upbringing dooms him to keep pulling at the sheets and smiling. “What do you mean?”

  Candace tells him, in mature phrases, the law as laid down to her. She explains what her job dictates. She lays it out the way she might tell a client that he needs to undergo certain stringent therapies. She goes down the list of Russell’s possible objections, addressing each one sensitively.

  “You can’t be
saying this,” he says. “She’s a friend, isn’t she?”

  She nods her head, helpful. “I suppose that’s the point. By any responsible standard of behavior, I should never have become Thassa’s friend in the first place.”

  He isn’t getting this. “Are you just worried about your job? Because, Jesus: the whole country’s a nut case. It’s a buyer’s market for what you do. You could work anywhere.”

  She explains about personnel files, letters of reference, and all the realities of adult life for which he’s never had much innate aptitude.

  “I see,” he says. He sees nothing, except the accusation that he doesn’t make.

  She trembles and tears up. But her shoulders and torso remain strangely marble. He puts his arm around her and pulls her flush to him. He murmurs up near her ear. “Don’t worry,” he tells her. “It’s all right. Sleep. You need to work tomorrow. We’ll talk about it in daylight.”

  In daylight, they say nothing. She gets Gabe off to school while Stone is still clearing his head and trying to decide if she really said, in the middle of the night, what she really said. His best response is the billion-year-old, time-tested method of freezing up. If he does nothing, the whole thing may pass overhead without incident. So he keeps still and waits, like the rodent in a raptor’s shadow with whom he shares so many genes.

  He doesn’t have the luxury of waiting long. Three days later, he gets an e-mail from Princess Heavy Hullinger. Half a year ago, he shared a weird intimacy with this woman three nights a week. Now her name in his Inbox seems like a fable. The note is a cruel slash at all the writing conventions he once urged on the woman:

  hi there, u know there bidding on her genes now? the bid is up to 19K; no u dont and maybe dont care since u havent been in touch but shes getting a bit sick of everything coming down on her at the moment. dont worry were taking care of her, someone has to. I know shed like to hear something so if u have any teachery advice (;)) just e me, im sure shell appreciate.

  The note wraps him in a gray cocoon. All of Charlotte’s pieces for him were just exercises in deceit. This is how the woman really writes. Writing has become some mutant thing that will eat him alive and shit him into fertilizer.

  He calls Thassa. There’s no answer and no voice mail. He hops on the Red Line and rides down to Roosevelt. It takes a fiscal quarter. He jogs to her dorm building, the pedestrian streams cursing as he wades through them. He turns the corner at Eighth Street and stops.

  A knot of people flock the entrance to her building. It’s some kind of ad-hoc Flag Day. A woman with her hands and face painted cerulean sports a hand-lettered poster mounted on her head: No Jenetic Jimmying. A younger female, perhaps her daughter, painted to match, wears a sandwich board that reads Sad and Proud. A man struggles to remove the helmet of his cartoony hazmat suit. Three college kids in matching Gee, I’m a GMO T-shirts exchange raucous laughter. Policemen make two others take down a first-story banner with the two-foot-high words Bio-Value-Add Me. A short, hoary black woman-eighty years old if she’s a day-jabs her finger at a white gnome a decade her senior, who holds a limp megaphone at his thigh. Even as the police try to break up the geriatric scuffle, the woman keeps shouting, “Where the hell is the law in all of this?”

  Around the edges, the parade trickles out. But the core of the spectacle holds steady, and other bystanders stop to watch. A woman Stone’s age toting a stack of pamphlets mistakes his expression for disappointment. “You just missed the StreetSharp News. They sent two vans. They pulled out about fifteen minutes ago.” She hands him a pamphlet; it’s about how virtually anyone can atomize their egos, dissolve the boundary between their cells and the rest of creation, and tap into the nirvana that spiritual leaders have known about for millennia, all with little medical intervention to speak of. She smiles, like she wants to be his friend.

  “Is she here?” Stone asks, his voice veering.

  “Who?”

  Helpless, he points upward, toward the plate glass of Thassa’s apartment.

  “You mean her?” The pamphlet woman laughs, like he’s making a joke she doesn’t quite understand yet. “Nobody has seen her for days. That guy says she was at the window on Thursday night. But he’s probably lying.”

  Russell Stone clamps both sides of his forehead. “How long have you been here?”

  The pamphlet woman seems ready to help, if only she could follow him. “Me? Here? You mean, all together?”

  He pauses in the doorway of the music shop where he once hid out from Thassa’s gaze. For the first time in his life, he wishes he had a cell phone. He jogs to the Roosevelt stop, waits for a train, and rides it back up to Logan Square. He calls her latest number, which he’s surprised to find he has memorized. No one answers, of course, and there is no voice mail.

  Schiff called Thomas Kurton from the concourse at O’Hare. Garrett sat in the scoop chair next to her, eavesdropping.

  “I figured I’d hear from you,” Kurton said, before she could identify herself. “Did you call to gloat?”

  “Is it true?” she asked.

  “I’m wondering if I’m really your best go-to person for that question.”

  “Someone is trying to auction her gametes? I thought it was illegal to bid on body parts.”

  He chuckled without mirth. “Thousands of coeds are paying their way through school by ‘donating.’ It’s a bazaar, online. One hundred and fifty ads a day on Craigslist. The question is: What’s a fair market price, for someone with her genetic profile?”

  “What’s the going rate?”

  “Up to $10,000, if you’re 1300 or higher on the SAT.”

  Lots more, apparently, for off-the-chart scores in well-being.

  “But are these bids coming from commercial scientists, or just ”

  “Just rich, infertile couples running their own experiments?”

  She could hear the water kneading the rocks and the wind slipping through the evergreens.

  “I can think of no use of her sex cells that is both scientifically legitimate and legal. This year, that is. But put them in the freezer for a while-”

  “Where are you?” she asked. If he were within shooting distance of LaGuardia, they could get him in front of a camera that evening, while this wistful, penitent mood still ran him. Science. Real science.

  “Front porch. I’ve been holing up here all week. I answered when I saw it was you. Tell me, Tonia. Should I have predicted this?”

  She was merciful and did not quote back any of a dozen incriminating things he’d said to her on camera. She only wished she had a recorder running now.

  He said, “You know, I’m sorry if this complicates the woman’s life. But choices are coming that we all simply have to hammer out.”

  Paradise, his voice maintained, was still just down the road. And to bring it about, even suffering was a civic duty.

  Then Thomas Kurton’s tone turned, tilted by some small change in the quality of light. “I heard from a colleague at MIT who has been looking over her fMRIs. He thinks there might be something distinctive about the way her hemispheres are communicating. It might help explain ”

  Tonia Schiff gestured madly in the air to Garrett-a computer, a pad of paper, a wiretap, anything. “I don’t understand. Something structural, or just something she’s learned to ”

  Kurton started to come alive again. “That’s not entirely clear. A good team needs to take a closer look.”

  Say that the six thousand years of writing are a six-hundred-page novel, suitable for getting you through the longest captive flight. Romance, mystery, thriller: a little something for everyone. At a decade a page, it’s a slow starter. Only belatedly does the opening hook-secret marks that hurl meaning magically through time and space-reveal itself to be a Trojan horse. By page 200, memory is embalmed beyond recognition, lamented only when anyone still notices it’s gone. If a thing isn’t written down, you can forget about it. The rest is history.

  The plot starts to pick up on page 350. After a ridicul
ously long exposition, the development section starts at last. Characters emerge, cities clashing in the freshness of youth, driven by the varied needs of their patron gods. Wars spread and trade expands. The characters harden and age. They join together into sprawling clans. Freed from the present, papyrus starts to spawn new subplots. By page 400, the basic conflict becomes clear: preservers against revisers, sufficers against maximizers, those who think the book is coming apart versus those who think it’s coming together.

  There are a few longueurs for some readers in the middle two-thirds. But this is when the story is at its most desperate: when techne and sophia are still kin, when the distant climax is still ambiguous, the outcome a dead heat between salvation and ruin.

  Page 575 starts a series of quick reveals (although each one foreshadowed, early on). Every discovery triggers two more. The cast of characters explodes, as do the sudden reverses. The book makes one of those massive finish-line sprints-twenty-five pages to wrap up all the lingering plot points and force a denouement. The last chapter is filled with deus ex machinas, and on the very final page, the very last paragraph, the characters throw off the limits of the Story So Far and complete their revolt. The ultimate sentence is a direct quote-“Author, we’re outta here”-the happy ending of the race’s own making.

  Russell and Candace are clearing the table for Gabe’s choice of evening off-line methadone-Monsters and Mutants: Personal Edition-when she arrives. They all know it’s her, just from the rhythm of the buzzer. Candace implores Russell with a look, as if they might pretend that no one’s home. But all the lights are on, jazz piano trickles out through the windows, and where else would they be, on a work night, after dinner?