Gabe bounds up and presses the intercom. A homunculus voice comes through the tiny speaker, “Jibreel, Jibreel. As-Salaamu ’Alaykum.”
The boy practically shouts back “Wa ’Alaykum As-Salaam,” and buzzes her in, in triumph. He’s scolding the woman by the time she reaches the top of the stairs. “I thought you decided we were scum or something.”
Her hands run through the boy’s hair, and he abides them. Her limbs move through a thicker liquid than air. “Jibreel, life has been teaching me.”
Stone holds back in the dining room, trying not to look relieved. He stands between the two women, hands in pockets, facing neither.
“Are you all right?” It must be all right to ask. An awful freedom infuses him, like that day at sixteen when he came home and told both parents he was agnostic. His father went to his grave neither forgiving nor believing him.
Thassa’s eyes close and her chin rises and falls. Her face is primal acquiescence. “I am,” she says, with a peace bordering on irony. She opens her eyes and fixes Candace, timidly. “I’m so sorry to stop in. I am living without a plan these days. My friends are moving me around the city.”
She steps forward and kisses both adults, four face-sides in all. Candace is hospitality itself. She gestures for Thassa to sit, which the Algerian does, as if the tiny dining room is sanctuary.
“Tea?” Candace offers. “Something herbal?” It scares Stone, how easy she is. “Gabe, if you want to put in ten minutes on the machine, you can.”
Pleasure ambushes the boy from all sides. “Can she come?”
“Maybe in a little bit, bird.”
Thassa nods, and he speeds off in a rapture. As soon as he disappears, the Kabyle announces, “I think I must sell these eggs of mine.”
She takes the couple’s shock for disapproval.
“Don’t hate me. The top offering is now $32,000, American. I know: this is insanity. But I could give half to my brother. Five times what he earns in one year! He could quit his killing job and find a good one. And half for my uncle and aunt, to pay on my student loans.”
“You can’t,” Stone says. He recoils at his own voice.
“Apparently you can, in this country. Our friend Sue Weston has done it twice, up in Evanston.”
“No,” Stone says. “I mean, you can’t do it to yourself.”
The woman turns to him, pleading. She claps the table with one palm. “Russell, what is the difference? You told me yourself you don’t believe my genes are the key to anything. So if some crazy person wants to pay for hallucinations, is it my job to stop them? The more they pay for this, the happier it will make them. And that is the product they want to buy, anyway!”
The argument repels him. He can’t believe she’s making it. “You can’t sell your own offspring.”
Her face crumples in pure bewilderment. “My what? You say these eggs So you do think these genes are the secret real me!”
Thassa turns to Candace. Stone is mortified to see his girlfriend stand motionless between the table and wall, clutching her elbows. Then Weld comes out of her clinical coma and sits down across from Thassa. A dozen years of classes, research, and professional training have all prepared the counselor for this moment. Candace speaks, and for a moment, her voice drives all the madness from the room.
She explains her compromised position, the protocols of her profession, and the decision her superiors have taken on her behalf. It stuns Stone: the woman is a model of maturity, matter-of-fact, even-keeled. For a moment he thinks: Yes, this is what they should have done months ago. Just the sound of Candace’s voice shows the way back to port.
She stands, goes into her study, and returns with a glossy pamphlet. “This explains everything you need to know about the consultation facilities available to you. Here are the numbers of people you can call. This woman is very good; she can refer you to a reproductive medical counselor.”
“But I want to talk to you, Candace.”
Candace nods, in complete agreement. “I can’t help you anymore, sweetie.”
The Algerian sits blinking as at the news of some FIS attack. “Candace? You’re sending me away?”
Weld touches her arm, rubs it. Open and honest. “You know how I will always feel about you.”
The words explain everything. The words are gibberish. Thassa looks to Stone to interpret. Stone stares at the pamphlet in her hands, unable to remember even what he’s doing there.
Thassa looks back and forth between them, insight blossoming. “If this is what you’ve chosen, Candace, I’m sure it’s the right thing. I’m sure it’s best. But I think I should go now.”
She backs toward the door. Candace steps forward to embrace her, but Thassa holds up one palm. She’s down the stairs at a trot before either adult can say anything.
Candace sits, passing her quaking fingers over her eyes. Stone takes awhile to realize that she’s crying, those blank tears that might as easily have been made by biking into a cold wind. He wants to step forward and place his arm on her frozen shoulders. He wants to chase down the stairs and find Thassa, tell her that nothing is as it seems. Candace rises and begins putting away dinner dishes. Stone is still standing on his tiny, germ-free island when Gabe comes back into the room.
The boy is crushed. “She left? Where’d she go? She said she was going to play. She lied!”
Stone looks to Candace, who pauses in her chores. Her voice comes out more trebly than her child’s: “I think it went pretty well. How about you?”
PART FIVE
NO MORE THAN GOD
No hay extensión como la que vivimos.
(No place is bigger than where we live.)
– Pablo Neruda, “Soneto XCII,” Cien sonetos de amor
She’ll rise early, before the sun, and for a moment won’t know where she is. She won’t even be sure of who. Then the hotel room, her notebook, her computer, the view of a mountain town from a window in western Tunisia, and Tonia Schiff will rematerialize.
The hotel breakfast: a coffee the consistency of clay slip, a baguette, and jam made from a biblical-tasting fruit she can’t identify. After breakfast, Schiff wanders out into a day that’s like a thousand-watt bulb mounted inside an inverted cobalt bowl. She carries a tiny digital video camera. It’s not her first instrument of choice, but it’s light, practical, and sharp enough to give an authentic vérité edge to the pilgrimage. She films everything she sees. She remembers Thassa’s pronouncement: all existence becomes a prize again, through a viewfinder.
She climbs and plunges down the steep streets, through a suq that has seen better centuries, the best of the morning’s produce already gone, the knickknacks tawdry, the vendors calling to her to free up her purse a little for once in her life. She navigates by guidebook up to the Casbah, just to shoot the town’s panorama. There she prowls around La Basilique, documenting the building’s changes in ownership: fourth-century grain storage turned Byzantine church turned mosque, recently returned to a Roman ruin. History is just fluctuations in appetite. Technology changes nothing. Someone, somewhere, sometime will auction off every inclination. When we tire of happiness, someone will make a market in useful despair.
She films the tiny courtyard, lingering on the Latin tablets and tomb inscriptions. She tries to decipher the inflections and conjugations, the ordered grammar of a dead language she learned in a Brussels high school, forgot all up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and revives now in this flyspeck town on the edge of the old empire, as vendors in the nearby streets call out fruit and vegetable names in Arabic. No place like home. Glued to one pillar is a worn poster for a local band, Rien à Dyr.
Tonia will spend an hour in the church, until an attendant asks her to stop filming. When she rolls out again, the comic-book sky will have tilted toward turquoise. She tracks through the half-excavated Roman baths alongside the spring that has kept the town alive for millennia. She strolls back to the esplanade-pristine, wide, and beautiful-through the heart of the old town that Bourguiba bu
lldozed in the sixties, in a ruthless improvement to touristic spec. Even this, she preserves in digital video.
On toward noon, she turns down a side alley and is stunned to find herself back near her hotel. She has gotten so twisted around in the maze of streets that for a minute, she can’t shake the feeling that there are two hotels, twin squares absolutely identical, parallel universes occupying identical colonial quartiers on opposite ends of the same hillside town.
She runs back up to her room and gets the two books that she has toted with her all the way from the States. She slips them into her shoulder bag. Her cheap attempt at emotional blackmail: gifts from the irrecoverable past. Secrets of the personal genome.
She debates whether to risk bringing the video camera. She has promised no film, no recording of any kind-absolute concessions required to get the interview at all. But she has banked this whole visit on a change of heart, a softening, once they begin to talk. She has come all this way, at greater expense than the project’s budget allows, in the hopes that she can elicit what no one in two years has been able to obtain. But any chance she has will vanish, if she angers her subject. Fortunately, the camera is no bigger than a family Bible. She drops it into her bag alongside the two books, where it discreetly disappears. She locks her room and trots down two flights of stairs, back into the blazing day.
She wanted to meet in Algiers, of course. Better yet, Bône, Sétif-anyplace in Kabylia. But two months ago, an unnamed terrorist group attached a bomb to the undercarriage of a personnel carrier near the Hassi Messaoud oil field in east-central Algeria, killing nineteen people and wounding twelve. The attack would have been routine, in a country that suffers such strikes as often as North America suffers sports championships. But among the dead this time were three U.S. “advisers,” all of them in uniform.
Schiff didn’t even know her country had military personnel in Algeria. Nor did most of the world, gauging from the fallout on six continents. The State Department immediately issued a travel ban, and the chance of a visa vanished into fiction. A town just over the Tunisian border is as close as she will get-a compromise solution with narrative possibilities all its own.
Schiff will find herself sitting in the designated café, forty-five minutes early. She has no trouble finding the place. The Café de la Liberté, just behind the Association de Sauvegarde de la Médina. She has checked it on maps for a week. She made sure it was truly there, earlier that morning. You’re a Western woman; no one will trouble you.
She has been denied further phone contact on the thinnest of fatalisms. “I will be there, Ms. Schiff. And if I’m not, a phone won’t help. We both just have to trust.” Schiff sits nursing what is surely the worst tea she has ever encountered anywhere in the world, served in a beautiful enameled glass. The liquid has been repeatedly boiled down to something the consistency and sweetness of a hot Popsicle, served with a jaunty sprig of mint on top. She wants to film it, but she’s afraid to take the DV camera out of the bag. Every ten minutes a waiter turns up to scowl at her for being a single woman sitting in a café, for thinking taboo thoughts, and for not making any more headway on the innocuous beverage. But Tonia has bought her right to sit in silence, and no one shoos her away.
She sits and does what she’s done now for three days: reads Thassa’s beaten-up copy of Make Your Writing Come Alive. At 12:48 local time, she opens it and points to a passage at random, divining by scripture. Harmon says:
Everywhere in the world, for almost all of human history, most people would have mocked the thought that a person might beat fate.
Several lifetimes later, at 12:53, she goes to the well again:
Some characters seem to be born with a blazing red X on their forehead.
The author seems to be getting shrewder, the longer that Schiff spends away from home. At 12:57, Harmon decides:
The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.
She can’t decide whether this is profound or portentous commonplace. All she knows is that the author isn’t helping her nerves. She periscopes the streets, jerking in recognition at every moving figure of approximately the right size and age. She goes on checking her watch every forty seconds until five minutes after the appointed hour. The whole idea is absurd: two people on opposite sides of the planet arranging to meet at a café on the edge of nowhere, at exactly 1:00 p.m. local time on a Thursday afternoon at the end of the age of chance.
The midday muezzins sing longingly to her, promises scattered evenly around the horizon. Long after all the root causes of such needs have been found and addressed, people will still answer the nomadic call to prayer. For centuries after the transgenics have pulled up stakes and gone elsewhere, many will still seek the cure this world cannot give.
At exactly 1:20, Schiff comes to the conclusion that she’s been stood up. She has blown a week out of her life, spent $3,000, and journeyed 5,000 miles just to sit in a café and sip the most cloying tea known to mankind. Her film will never get made. No chance to redeem herself. The race will blunder into the age of choice without so much as a proxy vote from her.
She’ll flip open Harmon again, but she won’t like the passage she lands on. She’ll try again, and once more after that-as many times as I say-until she hits upon a divination destined for her:
A great amount of ink has been spilled in the belief that when every other peace fails us, we still have words.
She’ll look up from the page, trying to decide if the words give her any consolation to write home about. And there, working toward her down the sloping street, still two hundred meters away, will be the leisurely, reconciled, unmistakable silhouette of the figure she has come halfway around the world to learn from.
Kurton descends from his coastal cabin and returns to work. His first public act is an injunction against the Houston clinic that wins the bidding for a dozen of Thassa’s sex cells. News of a deal has spread like a contagion from biotech newsletters to tacky bio sites: the happiness woman has signed away her eggs for $32,000.
Kurton files to stop the deal. His argument is simple, and similar to those upheld for decades in America’s courts. Whatever they mean to use the eggs for, this clinic is buying a genome whose increased bio-value results directly from the association studies performed by Truecyte. Truecyte’s intellectual efforts have established a correlation, and the company has filed for the appropriate patents. So if this fertility clinic means to profit from the probability of increased emotional health inherent in Thassadit Amzwar’s genome, then they owe Truecyte a licensing fee.
Journalists of every stripe converge on Kurton, and he talks to all of them. “We’ve done the research,” he tells a prominent op-ed commentator, for a wire-syndicated piece called “Fixing the Price of Delight”: “And we’ve determined $800 million to be a fair pro rata evaluation of the accumulated future benefits of our finding, as enjoyed by all its direct descendants into the indefinite future ”
In short, a nuisance suit, but one whose motives baffle all commentators. Thomas Kurton, who has long taken a beating for hustling humanity into the consumer-genomics era, is now hammered in scores of blogs for gratuitously impeding a free-market transaction and asserting ownership over a woman’s genes.
Several posses of self-deputizing reporters descend on the Houston clinic for comment. Dr. Sidney Green, the facility’s director, declares that his staff will carry on with their collection of the woman’s gametes unless restrained by a court of law.
As the public furor spins out, the wheels of justice fail to find traction. Legal analysts split between those who see this case as no different from a routine egg donation and those who feel that denying Truecyte compensation would reverse three decades of intellectual-property rulings. Uphold the claim, and everyone might soon be paying licensing fees to procreate. Throw it out, and billions of dollars of bio-economic property rights will go up in pollen dust.
An Episcopalian priest tu
rned bioethicist who teaches at Illinois Institute of Technology goes on Chicago talk radio to try to slow down “this terrible and dehumanizing drift toward the trade in human traits.” He points out that successful donation can happen fairly efficiently these days, and if the extracted things get fertilized and turned into embryos soon after collection, no amount of law short of slaughter of the innocents will be able to reverse that step. But the judge in the Truecyte filing refuses to be hurried.
The alarmed congressman from Illinois’s Seventh Congressional District makes a speech on Capitol Hill. It’s really just a long-planned attack on the use of paid studies in the pharmaceutical industry. But the congressman works in a reference to the “joy genome” controversy in his home district, playing to his constituency while insisting on the need to rein in the bio-economy.
In all the noise, Jen falls badly in the eyes of those millions who so recently took her to their hearts. As far as the vocal majority is concerned, she’s become something sinister. Sure, lots of people take money for their potential offspring, but few agree to take so much. How could this shining woman, the standard-bearer of bodily happiness, put such a price tag on her gift? She should place it in the public domain.
Thassa’s egg contract makes her fair game for every kind of Web-disinhibited public attack. She turns pariah in several demographic sectors, especially among the adoring teenage girls who aped her Oona appearance just a few news cycles ago. A West Coast techno band writes her into a biting song, which ultimately goes on to make ten times more money than Houston wants to pay Thassa for her eggs.
Pastor Mike Burns, from the South Barrington megachurch, preaches a much e-mailed sermon in which he distances himself from his earlier proclamations about Thassadit Amzwar. “God may send us many messages, but we make our own errors in translation. Thank God He’s always ready to forgive!”
Generosity Page 28
