Exuberance carries us places we would not otherwise go-across the savannah, to the moon, into the imagination-and if we ourselves are not so exuberant we will, caught up by the contagious joy of those who are, be inclined collectively to go yonder.
– Kay Redfield Jamison, Exuberance
A man rides backward in a packed subway car. This must be almost fall, the season of revision. I picture him in the thick of bequest, tunneling beneath the I Will City, the world’s twenty-fifth biggest urban sprawl, one wedged in the population charts between Tianjin and Lima. He hums some calming mantra to himself, a song with the name Chicago in it, but the train drowns out the tune.
He’s just thirty-two, I know, although he seems much older. I can’t see him well, at first. But that’s my fault, not his. I’m years away, in another country, and the El car is so full tonight that everyone’s near invisible.
Look again: the whole point of heading out anywhere tonight. The blank page is patient, and meaning can wait. I watch until he solidifies. He cowers in the scoop seat, knees tight and elbows hauled in. He’s dressed for being overlooked, in rust jeans, maroon work shirt, and blue windbreaker with broken zipper: the camouflage of the non-aligned, circa last year. He’s as white as anyone on this subway gets. His own height surprises him. His partless hair waits for a reprimand and his eyes halt midway between hazel and brown. His face is about six centuries out of date. He would make a great Franciscan novice in one of those mysteries set in a medieval monastery.
He cups a bag of ratty books on his lap. No; look harder: a ruggedized plastic sack inscribed with bright harvest cornucopia that issues the trademarked slogan, Total Satisfaction plus so much more!
His spine curls in subway contrition, and his shoulders apologize for taking up any public space at all. His chin tests the air for the inevitable attack that might come from any direction. I’d say he’s headed to his next last chance. He tries to give his seat to a young Latina in a nurse’s uniform. She just smirks and waves him back down.
Early evening, four dozen feet below the City on the Make: every minute, the train tunnels underneath more humans than would fit in a fundamentalist’s heaven. Aboveground, it must be rainy and already dark. The train stops and more homebound workers press in, trickling September drizzle. This is the fifth year since the number of people living in cities outstripped those who don’t.
I watch him balance a yellow legal pad on his toppling book sack. He checks through the pages, curling each back over the top of the pad. The sheets fill with blocks of trim handwriting. Red and green arrows, nervous maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, swarm over the text.
A forest of straphangers hems him in. Many are wired for sound. A damp man next to him drips on his shoes. Humanity engulfs him: phone receptionists for Big Four accounting firms. Board of Trade pit bulls, burned out by twenty-eight. Market researchers who’ve spent days polling focus groups on the next generation of portable deionizers. Purveyors and contractors, drug dealers, number crunchers, busboys, grant writers. Just brushing against them in memory makes me panic.
Advertisements crown the car’s walls: Outpsych your tyke. Want to know what makes the planet tick? Make your life just a little perfecter. Every few minutes, a voice calls over the speakers: “If you observe any suspicious behavior or unattended packages ”
I force my eyes back down over the scribbler’s left shoulder, spying on his notes. The secret of all imagination: theft. I stare at his yellow legal pages until they resolve. They’re full of lesson plans.
I know this man. He’s been fished from the city’s adjunct-teacher pool, an eleventh-hour hire, still working on his first night’s class even as the train barrels toward his South Loop station. The evidence is as clear as his all-caps printing: ethics has wrecked his life, and this fluke part-time night job is his last hope for rehabilitation. He never expected to land such a plum again. Death and resurrection: I know this story, like I wrote it myself.
The train wags, he pitches in his seat, and I don’t know anything. I stop deciding and return to looking. A heading on the top of his pad’s first page reads: Creative Nonfiction 14, Sect. RS: Journal and Journey.
A heavy teen in a flak jacket bumps him. He squeezes out a retreating smile. Then he resumes drawing red arrows, even now, two subway stops from his first night’s class. As I always say: It’s never too late to overprepare. His pen freezes in midair; he looks up. I glance away, caught spying. But his hand just hovers. When I look back, he’s the one who’s spying on someone else.
He’s watching a dark-haired boy across the aisle, a boy with a secret quickening in his hands. Something yellow floats on the back of the boy’s curled fist. His two knuckles pin a goldfinch by the ankles. The boy quiets the bird, caressing in a foreign tongue.
My adjunct’s hand holds still, afraid that his smallest motion will scatter this scene. The boy sees him looking, and he hurries the bird back into a bamboo cylinder. My spy flushes crimson and returns to his notes.
I watch him shuffle pages, searching for a passage in green highlighter that reads First Assignment. The words have been well worked over. He strikes them out once more and writes: Find one thing in the last day worth telling a total stranger.
Clearly he’s terrified there may be no such thing. I see it in his spine: he’ll bother no one with his day’s prize, least of all a total stranger.
It’s up to me to write his assignment for him. To describe the thing that this day will bring, the one that will turn life stranger than total.
He gets out at Roosevelt, the Wabash side. He struggles up the stairs against the evening human waterfall. Remnants of the day shift still pour underground, keen on getting home tonight at a reasonable hour. Home before the early autumn rains wash away their subdivision. Home before Nikkei derivatives trigger a Frankfurt DAX panic. Before a rogue state sails a quick-breeding bioweapon through the St. Lawrence Seaway into Lake Michigan.
At street level, my adjunct is hit by the downtown’s stagecraft. The granite gorges, the glass towers with their semaphores of light he’s too close to read. To the northeast, the skyline mounts up in stunning ziggurats. His heart pumps at the blazing panorama, as it did when he was a boy gazing at World’s Fair futures he would inhabit, any year now. Someone in the crowd clips his back, and he moves on.
Down a canyon to the east, he glimpses a sliver of lakefront: the strip of perfected coast that passes for Chicago. He has stood on the steps of the fabulous nineteenth-century Palace of Taxidermy and gazed north up the sheer city face-the boats in the marina, the emerald park, the epic cliff of skyscrapers curling into the two blues-and felt, despite everything, this place pushing toward something sublime.
Off to his left, dumpsters the size of sperm whales swarm a block-long abyss, each overflowing with last century’s smashed masonry. One more angel giant rises from the pit, its girders taking on a sapphire skin. Luxury skybox living: late throes of a South Loop renaissance. Last year’s homeless are all hidden away in shelters on the city’s perimeter. Chicago hasn’t looked better since the fire. The place is after something, a finish line beyond any inhabitant’s ability to see, let alone afford.
He wants to fetch his legal pad from his sack and make some notes. Rule one: Get it down before it goes. He’d like to get this down-something about the furnace of renewal, the fall and rise of any given block on the way to this city’s obscure goal. But he keeps to the stream of rush-hour foot traffic, afraid of getting arrested for suspicious activity. He pulls up at the entrance of Mesquakie College of Art, a steel-framed limestone temple from back in the age when skyscrapers topped out at a dozen stories.
No, you’re right: those streets don’t really run that way. That neighborhood is a little off. The college isn’t quite there; it’s not that college.
This place is some other Second City. This Chicago is Chicago’s in vitro daughter, genetically modified for more flexibility. And these words are not journalism. Only journey.
His name is Russell Stone, or so he tells the security guard in the Mesquakie lobby. The guard asks to see a college ID; Russell Stone has none. He tries to explain his last-minute hiring. The guard can’t find Russell on a printout. He makes several calls, repeating the name with increasing suspicion until Russell Stone is ready to apologize for believing that the job might ever have been his.
At last the guard hangs up. He explains with simple scorn that Stone missed the cutoff date. Against his better judgment, he issues Stone a security badge, shaking his head all the while.
By the time Russell finds his room, his eight students are already encamped around its oval table, deep in a dozen discussions. He grasps at once how badly he has mis-prepped. He fingers his carefully selected textbook through the thick plastic sack-Frederick P. Harmon’s Make Your Writing Come Alive. Too late, he sees: the book’s a ridiculous blunder. This group will mock it into the hereafter.
I should feel sorry for the man. But what in the name of second chances was he thinking?
In the doorway, he tries a feeble smile; no one looks up. He makes his way, head bobbing, to the gap in the student oval. To hide his shaking hands and call the group to attention, he dumps the sack out on the table. He lifts up Harmon, cocks an eyebrow at the group. The copy in his hands flaps open to a highlighted page:
Convincing characters perform differently for different audiences, in different flavors of crisis. We know them by their changing strategies, often better than they know themselves.
“Everyone find a copy?”
No one says anything.
“Right. Ahhh ” He flips through his legal pad. “Let’s see Don’t tell me!” One or two students chuckle deniably. “Oh, yeah. Roll call. How about a name, biographical tidbit, and life philosophy? I’ll start. Russell Stone. By day, mild-mannered editor with a local magazine. Life philosophy ”
For convenience, I give him mine.
“When you’re sure of what you’re looking at, look harder.”
He glances at the woman to his left, all purple and steel. “So who are you, when you’re not at home?”
I wish I could make out Stone’s students better. I can see how they disturb him. But I just can’t see them in any detail. They’re hiding in the sullen, shiny performance of youth.
The circle starts with Sue Weston, a small, hard woman who must run with both wolves and scissors. She has recently been pierced in all her few soft spots. She looks at the world slant, from underneath a lopsided pageboy she cuts herself. Public judgment excites her so much it’s scary. She gives her life philosophy: “The shittiest five-second advertising jingle is superior to any symphony, if more people hum it.”
A big, bleached, omnivorous woman to Sue’s right barrels her way through the ritual intro. Charlotte Hullinger has lived at thirteen addresses in twenty-two years. Dozens of sketches on rag paper tumble out of her overstuffed backpack. The left side of her mouth pulls back in permanent skepticism. She scares me, shrugging off her credo: “I’ll try anything once. Twice, if it’s nice.”
Cowboys crawl across Adam Tovar’s shirt and zoo animals parade around his baggy trousers. It’s his universal outfit, from rooftop croquet games to his forebears’ funerals. He says, “My great-grandfather was a miner so that my grandfather could be an engineer so that my father could be a poet so that I could be a goofball.” The others give him the laugh that’s all he really wants in life. He tells of being on a cruise ship last summer that was taken over by Somali pirates, one of whom he’s still in e-mail touch with. “The only thing I know for sure is you can never be too misinformed.”
Roberto Muñoz-long, gaunt, head shaved, and haunted-never stops checking the exit. He should see a doctor about those skin lesions. I picture his parents walking into the country across the Chihuahuan desert, at night, though that’s my own clichéd noise. For the last four years, painting has kept him off crystal meth. “Play the hand you’re dealt,” he insists. “Everybody’s got to play their own deal.”
The cowering figure next to Roberto whispers, “Kiyoshi Sims.” He disappears behind the bridge of his black glasses, as if the group will forget him if he holds still long enough. Machines are his people; among them, he’s widely and well loved. He could make $100 million by accident on a world-changing digital patent and not be able to figure out how to buy a condo with it. “I’m not sure about life philosophy,” he stammers. “I haven’t given it much thought.”
“Mason Mason,” Mason Mason announces. Worked briefly loading luggage at O’Hare, until they discovered he’d lied on his application. Worked briefly as a youth counselor, until someone heard what he was counseling the youth. He scratches his ear and announces, “More people probably want you dead than want you alive.”
Next to last comes John Thornell, a massive, impassive monolith. People bother him less than snow bothers a mountain. He tells the class about his current project, a series of 365 pen-and-ink drawings, each one meticulously re-creating a different product logo he uses in daily life. His philosophy comes out robotic: “The supreme human emotion has to be boredom.”
Stone’s students perform themselves, each a work in progress. Their eyes fill with the designs they’ll draw, the clips they’ll shoot, the hypermedia they’ll conjure. Russell Stone remembers them all from ten years ago, when he was one of them. He already pities their descent into noncreative nonfiction.
Introductions come full circle, to the slight, short, ethnically ambiguous woman to his left. She’s clothed in bleach-streaked jeans and a canary tunic, silver bracelets up both auburn forearms, and a scarf in bright Mediterranean spirals over her shoulders. Her curly, dark hair is pulled back in a profuse ponytail. She waits her turn in a blush of listening.
She, I can see in detail.
“Let me guess,” Russell Stone says. “Amzwar?” The last name remaining on his list.
She smiles at his foolishness. “Yes! Amzwar. Thassadit Amzwar.” Her accent is unplaceable. She says she’s a Berber Algerian, from Kabylie, via Algiers, via Paris, via Montreal. Her eyes are claret. She sits inside her nimbus, chatting with ease. He thinks he hears her say she fled from the Algerian civil war. He wants to ask her to repeat herself. Instead he panics and prompts her for her life philosophy.
“Life is too good for philosophies,” she tells them. “I try my best to decide no more than God.”
My eyes adjust: dark, cracked linoleum and broken-sashed windows. Fluorescent lights humming like a prop plane hang low over a circle of students filled with that first-day mix of nerves and thrill, as if anything might still happen, even this late in history, even in Chicago.
The first class goes so well it scares Russell Stone. The students pretty much hijack the syllabus. Each of them is starved for fresh. Even the older ones still believe in a destiny sure to reveal itself, any semester now. Three of them admit they’re here because Journal and Journey is the easiest way for visual majors to complete the writing requirement. Words are not the shape their desperation takes; sentences can’t hope to survive the flood of images. But who knows? Even a journal entry might someday become a short video.
Mason Mason asks the obvious. “Why don’t we write online? Aren’t journals just dead blogs?”
Russell has prepped three days for this question. He defends private writing against writing for any stranger with a search engine. “I want you to think and feel, not sell. Your writing should be an intimate meal, not dinner theater.”
They shrug at his nostalgia. They’ll take a spin in the Wayback Machine, just for the sheer novelty.
Sue Weston details her current artwork. “It’s called ‘Magpie.’ I stand in Daley Plaza, jotting down the things people say into their cells. Then I post it on a tumblelog. Amazing, what people will tell a street full of strangers.”
Roberto Muñoz whispers, “I’m amazed you think that’s ethical.” A hoot comes from the group, and soon it’s an art-student free-for-all. Russell Stone watches his lesson plan vanish.
Adam Tovar describes his automatic spirit writing. “I just let it come.” After a roll-call vote, the class decides that ghosts do indeed exist and are the soul’s upload to virtual storage.
“Writing always comes from beyond the grave, anyway,” John Thornell says. “I mean, either the author or audience is already dead, or will be soon.”
The Algerian watches fascinated, like a child fresh from months in the sick bay, at a tennis match under a spotless sky. The others ignore her, with pretend nonchalance. But when Thassadit does raise her finger, the room freezes. “In my country? During the Time of Horrors?”
Russell loses her words. Something about her father being shot for writing a letter, but she speaks so serenely it must be a metaphor. Stone knows nothing about Algeria except that it’s a former French colony with an astronomically impossible flag. Their civil war is news to him. The whole world is news to him.
The Berber’s ready grin unnerves the Americans, who return to the ethics of eavesdropping. She resumes watching them, hands peaceful on the table, centered in herself, smiling through the discussion as if it’s the most entertaining feature film.
This first night’s class runs overtime before Russell can get through a quarter of his notes. He assigns them twenty pages from Make Your Writing Come Alive, half apologizing for the text, as if someone else chose it. He gives them their first journal assignment, the one about rescuing one fragment from their last day worth telling a perfect stranger. They’ll read their entries out loud together, two nights from now. “Have fun,” he tells them, avoiding the eyes of the Algerian. “Surprise me.”
Then he stumbles back out through Building Security into the September night. The Loop has quieted. Its 3-D lattice of light now looks like the twitch-grid computer games his brother is addicted to. Nine million lives from here out to the horizon, and God only knows how many art schools calling it quits for the night. Night classes in Lima will follow in an hour. Day classes in Tianjin are already under way.
It strikes me that my adjunct has never heard of Tianjin. He boards the northbound Red Line at Roosevelt, avoiding the sparsely populated cars. The train emerges from its grotto into a canyon flanked by the backsides of brick apartments scaffolded in wooden fire escapes. Tonight’s glow turns tenements into upscale condos. He’s elated by how well his first class has gone. He spends the subway ride scribbling an account of the last two hours into his own journal. He describes his students’ willful naïveté and fearless self-invention. What would life be like, he writes, if art students finally had their revolution?
Russell Stone doesn’t answer his own question. I watch him trying to decide no more than God.
In his studio apartment in Logan Square, he makes himself a one-hand sandwich of wilted veg and cheese, from which he scrapes a thin skin of mold. Then he sits down to find Kabylie. He wants to see it on a printed page, not online. He finds it in the atlas. In the Atlas Mountains. The place is a rugged hideaway, a separatist hot spot full of goats and olive trees, a land graced by all accounts with the most aromatic and beautiful spring known on earth.
He lies in his dark bed, replaying the night’s conversation. Creative nonfiction runs through his head. He needs to be up in four hours, for the long ride back to his daytime editing shift. After forty minutes of mimicking sleep, he rolls over and turns on the light. His journal still waits on the nightstand. Beneath his keyed-up subway entry, he adds: She must be the world’s most blissful refugee.
I give myself a first assignment: Russell Stone in one hundred and fifty words.
Start with this: His earliest crime involved a book about a boy whose marvelous scribbling comes alive. He wrecked every page with crayon, aping the trick. His mother never really forgave him.
He hates books with teacher protagonists. He avoids stories set in any school. He can’t think of a single bildungsroman that seems useful anymore, or beautiful, or even merely true.
Taped to the inside of the desk he inherited from his grandfather, he keeps the Schiller quote found in Melville’s desk after his death: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.” His forgotten note awaits the discovery of death’s garage sale.
He dreads the question What music do you listen to?
He’d be pleased to know that in my mind, he’s still mostly white space.
Once, out of character, he scrawled on the bathroom stall at the magazine where he edits, “Manuscripts don’t burn.”
Stone hasn’t kept a journal for years. He shed the personal memoir right around the time that the MyBits Age took off. Self-examination leaves him seasick.
Once he kept florid diaries. From sixteen to twenty-four, he couldn’t see, hear, smell, or taste anything without polishing it into a perfect paragraph. He hoarded great descriptions to spend later, as needed. Before his private wipeout, he filled a whole shelf with spiral notebooks. He has tried to destroy them, but is too cowardly. They’re in his mother’s crawl space, awaiting discovery by a future stranger.
But even as he shrinks from it, the world graduates to runaway first person. Blogs, mashups, reality programming, court TV, chat shows, chat rooms, chat cafés, capital campaigns, catalog copy, even war-zone journalism all turn confessional. Feelings are the new facts. Memoir is the new history. Tell-alls are the new news.
He looks up his students online. All but two have flourishing personal pages. They reel off more intimate specifics than Stone has the courage to read: favorite music, favored drugs, preferred sexual practices, hated movies, crimes they’ve committed, appetites they’ve fed, celebrities they would kill or do or be if they weren’t themselves
Why this is happening Russell Stone can’t say. He himself gave up journals when he realized his life story held no interest even for himself. No: I’m deciding too much, again. He gave them up overnight, shortly after tasting his first public success, in his fourth year in Tucson, just after completing his master of fine arts.
In the course of a dozen dizzy weeks, three leading magazines took his pieces for publication. His work was that contradiction in terms: creative nonfiction. Back then, people still called them personal essays. Russell Stone wrote them to amuse Grace Cozma, the rising star of the Arizona writing program, winner of the coveted Avignon residency, and-still bewildering-ten-time visitor of Russell Stone’s own bed. Grace had told him, with an electrifying squeeze of the ribs on her way out the door to France, that letters during her year abroad would not be unwelcome, providing they amused her. So he wrote her long rambles, as if they were life itself.
He described his run-ins with Southwestern drifters. He told her about the old desert rat who ran a collapsing gem-and-mineral shop not far from Saguaro West. The man claimed to have once done some “groundbreaking work in geology,” swearing to Stone that he was just $10 million short of producing a working prototype of a lightning farm that would “shoehorn the Wahhabis out of the West Wing once and for all.”
Russell polished up the mordant letter to Grace and mailed it to a famous glossy, on a long-shot lark. When-craziest of fantasies-the magazine took the story, Stone went back to his letters to Grace and polished up another.
In his second piece, he recounted his fast-food-lunch conversation with a Tohono O’odham former EMT who’d just received a two-year suspended sentence for being up on the roof of a clinic with four buddies, a couple of pairs of defibrillator paddles, and a box of 200-gram tubes of paddle gel. “We weren’t doing anything, really.” The second reputable magazine Stone sent it to jumped on it.
The third essay transcribed Stone’s meeting with a narrow-eyed vagrant outside El Con Mall who wanted Stone’s opinion on nerve regeneration, water-powered cars, and the Pseudo-Baldwin. The man warned Russell not to cross him: “I can put the word out to a continent-wide street-person network that’ll make your life hell from Miami to Vancouver We’ve even got contacts in the European Union.” At Grace’s urging, Russell submitted the piece to the Valhalla of New York literary weeklies. The day the impossible acceptance letter arrived, he called Grace in France. They giggled at each other for half an hour.
The secret of these pieces lay in the hapless narrator: bewildered victim of the world’s wackiness. “I seem to be the kind of flavorless, neutral guy whom the truly hard-core outsiders in this life claim for one of their undiscovered own.” The reporter was exactly that goggle-eyed Midwestern rube ripe for conversion whom Grace always found so unwittingly hilarious.
Overnight, these three pieces changed Russell Stone’s life. The magazine payments let him quit his desperate community newspaper job and write essays full-time. Agents called, wanting to represent him. An editor at a major New York house wrote to ask if he had enough pieces for a book.
Public radio commissioned him to write a piece for an omnibus program broadcast on 350 local stations. He wrote and performed a brief burlesque about trying to understand the musings of his Hindu dermatologist, whose sentences began in the Physicians’ Desk Reference and ended in The Ramayana. The producer declared him as droll a voice actor as he was a writer, and offered another ten-minute spot whenever Stone wanted.
“Bravo,” Grace wrote. “How much did they pay you? Enough for a transatlantic ticket and a week of B and B’s?”
Then a letter came, nestled in a batch of reader mail:
Dear Mr. Russell Stone,
The Tohono O’odham Nation faces many challenges. You have just added to them. Charlie Melendez is a decent young man who got in trouble. You’ve profited by mocking both him and our people.
I hope your writing will be less destructive in the future.
Sincerely,
Phyllis Manuel, San Xavier District
Stone agonized for several days over an apology, which he mailed out just before the fan-mail bag delivered a new land mine:
Mr. Stone,
I’m not sure why anyone would laugh at a man who is mentally ill. But I’m willing to forgive you, if you can help me find my father, Stan Newstetter, the man you call “Stan Newton” in your story, “Ear to the Network ”
Stone had to confess to Mr. Newstetter’s daughter that he hadn’t really met the man outside El Con, but in a strip mall somewhere in the vast retail wastelands along Speedway, the precise coordinates of which he’d failed to write down. When Julie Newstetter wrote back and asked why he’d said El Con, he had no answer except the name’s comical sound.
A month later, Charlie Melendez tried unsuccessfully to take his own life.
So you know this story: Lord Jim, or a plot to that effect. Not that Stone collapsed all at once. I see him shriveling gradually, over many years. He never told anyone about the letters-not his mother, not his brother, not Grace. He wrote another radio piece, this one about his Jack Russell terrier’s misadventures in obedience school. The producer found it less biting than the first. Stone set to work on a fantasia on his phobia of Adam’s apples-about his recurring fear that they were subcutaneous creatures trying to escape. Grace loved it; pure Stone, she decided. But he couldn’t bring himself to publish the essay. It just seemed so pointlessly, weirdly personal.
He started a wry, detailed description of his mother’s obsession with food supplements. He lingered over her enthusiasm for DHEA, with which she pared herself down to four hours of sleep a night. He described how kavalactones got her elected to the school board. But four thousand words into the portrait, he realized he couldn’t possibly publish it, let alone mail it to Grace. He couldn’t imagine what he’d been thinking, ridiculing his own flesh and blood for anyone to read.
He wrote an account of Pima County estate auctions. Every magazine he sent it to rejected it as polite and lifeless. He composed several short nature features involving no people at all. When even the nature magazines asked him to liven up his accounts with a little quirky presence, he lost heart.
Grace, back from France, called him from New York. She was having trouble finishing her novel. Come out, she begged. Just for an escapade. Or at least send something fresh to read. “Something to unfreeze me. You know: the stuff you do. The wicked stuff. The grotesques. Everybody I’m reading is a patronizing bore.”
He closed his eyes, gripped the phone, and laid out his sins for her, like a literary prize. He told her about Stan Newstetter. She laughed at him, harder than she’d ever laughed at his stories. Book-club moms were podcasting their teenage daughters’ first sexual forays, and he was beating himself up for misrepresenting street people? He was crazy. Worse: he was threatening to become tedious.
He told her about Charlie Melendez. She couldn’t understand. “You didn’t make that man hurt himself. He volunteered everything.”
He confessed that he hadn’t run the piece past Charlie before publication.
They argued. She hung up on him. He vowed he wouldn’t pick up for her the next couple of times she called. She never gave him the chance. Eighteen months later, her novel was published. It included a hilarious portrait of a small-town reporter terrified that his human interest stories were returning to haunt him.
He went back to his community newspaper job. But his interview subjects no longer opened up to him. After half a year, he lost all ability to put together a basic lifestyle feature. He considered returning to grad school, to train as a political correspondent or economics reporter.
He could no longer read anything even vaguely confessional. Intimate revelations or domestic disclosures creeped him out. He dosed himself with popular science and commodity histories-how the spice trade or the cultivation of the bee set mankind on an unforeseen destiny.
Best of all, he liked the white space, the virgin territory bordering a page. All his life he used to ink up that space, fill it with passionate editorial: Couldn’t have said it better myself or Stop this argument before it kills again! Now he no longer wrote in books. In fact, he started making the rounds of Bookman’s stores, buying up the best impersonal books faster than he could read them, just to save them from scribblers.
He left Tucson. He returned to Aurora, to live with his mother in his boyhood home in the Fox Valley. His brother was still there, working for a satellite-dish company. Russell got a job in construction. The clean, repetitive tasks were best. He loved to staple insulation, to cut and nail large square pieces of Sheetrock to freshly plumbed studs. When he was in the flow, even his boss’s hate-mongering talk radio didn’t bother him.
He installed things for his mother: new kitchen cabinets, which she loved; oak bookshelves, which she couldn’t fill. He dated sometimes-kind women who were after exactly nothing. Many nights, he and his brother played long matches of deferential Ping-Pong in the basement on the warped table of their childhood. He read himself to sleep on Silkworms and Civilization and A Small Guide to the Big Bang.
He went to his ten-year high-school reunion. The prospect held no more dread than any working day. He didn’t mind listening to his successful classmates’ achievements. He almost enjoyed telling his own riches-to-rags story. Confession was his only penance.
A former buddy from the sophomore year 4 × 100 relay was intrigued. “You’re a published writer?”
Was, Russell corrected.
The buddy-accomplished deadbeat throughout his youth-had hit on a publishing scheme that threatened to turn him into a philanthropist. He’d founded a self-improvement magazine called Becoming You. Foods, workouts, lifestyles, finance: one of thousands, yes. But Becoming You had a twist: all the copy was subscriber-generated. And all subscriber-contributors were paid in quantities of advertisers’ goods. Write a feature on how micronutrients reversed your declining memory, and you won a year’s supply of Pom-a-Grenade antioxidant cocktail. Advertising exposure, underwritten costs, deeply involved subscribers, and the wisdom of crowds combined to leverage the zeitgeist.
Come to Chicago, the buddy told Russell Stone. Become a part of Becoming You.
Russell demurred: he no longer wrote for publication. But the buddy didn’t need Stone’s writing. He needed Stone to turn scores of semiliterate, fervent testimonials into something readable.
The offer felt oddly appealing. True, the pieces would be personal in the worst way. But the person in question wouldn’t be Russell Stone. Ghosting for amateurs was the perfect contrition.
Russell worked the job as if volunteering for a humanitarian NGO. With his new income, he found a Logan Square studio and decorated it with dozens of pastel scenes that he drew, now that Ping-Pong no longer filled his evenings. The ten-by-ten-inch pictures showed bright, fluid human figures caught in the process of becoming lakes, clouds, or trees.
Say he eventually fell in with Marie White, a giving soul who loved to come over and read in bed next to Russell while he edited. They never chafed over anything, except his paintings. Marie thought he had a gift, and people with gifts were morally obligated to develop them. Russell just laughed at her, which stung Marie into silence.
After fourteen months, Marie wrote him a full-page note on Matisse stationery saying she was afraid that Russell might be melancholic, which kind of made her love him, but she couldn’t afford to sacrifice her life to his disease. She had to get on with making her own future, and she hoped that Russell would do the same. She was thinking of starting to see someone-a kind gallery owner, in fact. And if Russell ever finally realized how nice his paintings were, she could put him in touch
Becoming You took up the slack. Editing gave the same pleasure as hanging Sheetrock. He fixed predications, aligned parallel structures, undangled participles, unmixed metaphors, and collared runaway modifiers. He ran a comb through the tangled thickets of prose until they almost shone. He went into the River North office three days a week, and he worked three more out of his apartment. Consummate tedium became his art. For two years, he kept to his verbal trade, hoping to sink without a ripple beneath the earth’s crust. He could edit Becoming You for the rest of his life, provided he died in early middle age.
He edited a piece written by an administrative secretary at Mesquakie College about how to fight depression by feeding squirrels. The grateful woman alerted him to an emergency hiring in the Writing Department. A memoirist who taught the Journal and Journey course had taken unpaid leave after a bad episode with mood enhancers that made him travel to San Francisco and assault a blogger who’d insulted one of his published reminiscences about his father.
To Russell Stone’s astonishment, he met the job’s prerequisites. He had the degree and prestigious publications, albeit none for eight years. With just a month to staff the course, the college was ready to take anyone. The interview felt weirdly furtive, as if Russell were defrauding a credit union.
He got the job and crammed for three weeks, prep that the opening night’s class scattered to the winds. But that night goes so well that now, for the first time in years, he imagines himself, with something like shock, becoming someone quite different again, by this time next semester.
From where I sit, the whole human race did something stupid when young-pulled some playful stunt that damaged someone. The secret of survival is forgetting. If evolution favored conscience, everything with a backbone would have hanged itself from the ceiling fan eons ago, and invertebrates would once again be running the place.
“The Genie and the Genome”-final cut-opens with that relentless, digital techno-throb that stands for coming soon. Out of the pulsing blackness emerges a face Donatello might have cast, successfully refuting middle age. The eyebrows arch. The mouth twitches shyly and confides:
Enhancement. Why shouldn’t we make ourselves better than we are now? We’re incomplete. Why leave something as fabulous as life up to chance?
The impish face turns golden and explodes. Each shiny shard tumbles away into more throbbing blackness.
Another face fades in from the void, a big, gruff, empirical Friar Tuck.
Insane? No, I wouldn’t say Thomas Kurton is insane. I might say profoundly nutty. But Darwin was nuts too, right?
Tuck shrugs, and his shoulder ripple starts a whirlpool that washes him away. The smiling Donatello rises from the flood.
A lot of people think this is all science fiction. But then, we live in a country where 68 percent of folks don’t believe in evolution
His face tears in two and rolls up into a double helix. Out of that spiral appears a woman with straight brown hair and eyes as sad as a bloodhound’s. In a clipped Midlands accent, she declares:
One-fifth of human genes have already been patented. You have to pay a license fee just to look at them. People like Thomas Kurton buy and sell genetic material like it’s movie rights
She turns into a sand painting that the wind scatters. Next comes a quick, cross-fade cavalcade of talking heads:
He plays at life like it’s a German board game
The man made two fortunes by the age of thirty-five
It’s not really about profit, for Thomas. It’s about ingenuity
This is not your grandfather’s scientific method
The British bloodhound returns to declare:
He’s driven by a massively dangerous altruism.
Kurton fades back, his face morphing into other instances of itself:
Superdrugs, smart drugs. Healthier people. Stronger people. Smarter people
He turns into a watercolor, whose brushstrokes reassemble into Friar Tuck:
You do know that Thomas is going to live forever?
Thomas Kurton swims up again from the abyss:
The first person to live to one hundred and fifty has already been born.
The British bloodhound pushes back a limp hank of hair from her weary face.
I don’t want to live in his world. I do not look forward to the day when people will have to pay a royalty to have a child.
Her pall gives way again to Donatello’s daybreak.
We’re heading toward something glorious. Something better than anyone alive can imagine.
The close-ups relax into expansive midrange. A tall, bright woman in surgical scrubs strolls through a clean room at a biotech facility. She turns, removes her sterile cap, and shakes out a mass of flaxen hair.
Is Thomas Kurton the villain in a morality fable gone terribly wrong? Or is he the hero of a noble experiment that’s just about to pay off? No matter how the future judges him, he’s already helping the present to spin Over the Limit.
As the host’s Mid-Atlantic accent shapes these three last words, they animate, strobing in dozens of languages, spinning off mathematical proofs, chemical symbols, and physical equations until the entire laboratory is buried in bits of self-replicating information.
Establishing shot: a crazy-cantilevered, glass-skinned building near Kendall Square, Cambridge, one of those prestige-designer palaces that look like the solution to a logic puzzle.
Interior: the big-windowed corner office reserved for high-volume grant winners. Ambient sounds of wind and trickling water fill the room. On a five-foot-wide LCD panel across one wall, wild landscapes cross-fade into one another.
Close-up: Thomas Kurton seated behind a swept-wing desk that looks invisible to radar. A complex pneumatic chair props up his spine. His hands work with the detachment of someone throwing the I Ching. More screens dot the glass desktop. He speaks into one, brushes two fingers across another, dragging data in changing formation across the parade ground.
Voice-over, the cool voice of Tonia Schiff, the video journalist who hosts this world:
Thomas Kurton made his first splash at twenty-eight, when his PhD research helped lead to the creation of transgenic cows that produced disease-curing proteins in their milk. He formed his first biotech company soon after he got his first academic job. At Harvard, he plowed his pharmaceutical farming profits back into the search for a bacterial catalyst for fermenting bio-butanol from sugar beets. He spun off this search, too, into a successful venture
The ginger-headed figure dispatches brisk communiqués. Between commands, he leans over to his desk’s long glass return, and from a stash of hundreds of capsules and tablets, he selects two dozen rust-colored supplements, washing them down with a large bottle of Swiss spring water.
At the Wyde Institute, Kurton helped to develop a technique called rapid gene signature reading. Using it, he has produced three landmark association studies, isolating complexes of genes correlated with susceptibility to anxiety, childhood hyperactivity, and depression
The ginger man waves a matchbook-sized device in the air. The room dims into a hushed dusk. He spins to face the picture window behind him, gazing out on a cluster of glass buildings oozing venture capital. He tips up in the chair, closes his eyes, and starts to meditate.
He has founded seven companies and advises fifteen more. He serves on the editorial board of six scientific journals while holding positions with three different universities. He races in triathlons and breeds exhibition-quality zebra finches. In his spare time, he writes ecstatic pieces about the coming transhuman age that electrify hundreds of thousands of readers
Close-up of his right wrist: a red medical-alert bracelet instructs the finders of his dead body to act quickly, administer calcium blockers and blood thinner, pack his corpse in ice water, balance its pH, and call the 800 number of a firm that will helicopter in paramedics to begin cryonic suspension.
The view out the window darkens and the sound of electronic surf starts up again. He swings back around to the circle of screens and resumes conducting a symphony of scientific management. In a sound bridge, his cheerful voice says:
I don’t see why, given enough time and creativity, we humans can’t make ourselves over into anything we want.
A jump cut, and Tonia Schiff, the amused show host, is sitting in a rocker in a flagstone-and-cedar cabin. Her clothes are a little young for her-a gypsy shirt and knit gilet with pleated floaty skirt. She’s a parody of genetic fitness as it approaches forty. Her lips curl as the scientist finishes his thought.
Now when you say “anything ”
A reverse shot reveals Kurton-in moth-eaten flannel-grinning and tipping his chin up and down.
Well, look: we’ve been remaking ourselves for ten thousand years. Every moment of our lives, we do something that some previous incarnation of humanity would consider godly. We simply can’t know our upper limits. All we can do is keep exploring them.
He reaches into the vest pocket of his ratty jacket and pulls out a Moleskine. He opens the soft notebook and hands it to her.
I carry this around with me. My mantra.
The shot reverses are clean and crisp. Tonia Schiff takes the notebook and reads:
“Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation. Teilhard de Chardin.” Wasn’t he a Christian mystic?
Kurton grins.
Nothing mystical about deep genomic understanding! It’s just good science.
Stone is more solid to me the second night of class. A breeze off the lake slows him as he walks from the Roosevelt stop to Mesquakie. He waits at a vendor window for a veggie wrap and green tea. Someone presses a flyer into his hand: Did We Cause Darfur? He mumbles a thank-you and pretends to read. Walking while sipping, he passes a clothing boutique-turbaned women in paramilitary jumpsuits. Two stores down is Prosthetechs: 1,000+ mobile, wearable, portable, and sportable electronic devices! He lifts his head: three miles of this, from here through the Gold Coast. The city wants to burn him for fuel, and he’s fine with that. Anything to be useful.
Surly art students fill the college lobby in nervous knots, planning the world’s next essential, interactive, networked-art trend, one that will change the way the race sees itself. They remind him how it feels, to imagine you have the right to excite another human. He skirts past them tonight, careful to make no more than accidental eye contact.
Up on floor seven, in the dingy, fluorescent-humming nest, he comes on Mason, Charlotte, and Adam debating the merits of garage bands he’s never heard of. He was an avid fan once, but these names sound like complex synthetic chemicals or villages scattered across Kyrgyzstan. “Are they running out of available garage band names?” he asks. The students laugh, at least. “Aren’t they running out of garages, by now?”
The Kabyle woman isn’t there. Russell Stone wilts, sure that he said something last time to make her drop the course. She has disappeared, like a nighttime life-changing insight he has forgotten to jot down. Confidence failing, Stone asks for volunteers to read their first entry. One thing worth telling a total stranger. Adam Tovar demurs. “Mine isn’t ready yet. The story part is done; I just have to go back and put in the symbols.” John Thornell launches into a clinical account of two policemen chasing a screaming teenager into the courtyard of John’s apartment building. The tasers are just coming out when Thassa Amzwar appears in the doorway.
She’s shorter than Stone thought. She’s wearing a kind of needlework, coral-colored shift. She could be from southern Italy. But her round face shines with precisely the light he remembers, the flushed look announcing that the most remarkable thing has happened to her, just now, down this hall, outside this building, on the streets of this improbable city. A thing that redeems everyone, for years to come. No apology in her eyes for being late; just a rash smile for her assembled, long-lost friends. She takes a seat, her silver-bangled wrist grazing Sue’s shoulder, her lilac fingernails curling around Charlotte’s elbow in greeting.
All eight of them grow an inch more alert. John stumbles through another half a sentence then backs off, claiming the rest of the entry is too rough to share. “Roughness is the only thing worth sharing,” Russell claims. The others flip through their pages, eyes down, stripped of their art-student élan.
No volunteers. Maybe it’s suburban diffidence, the Islands of the Blessed deferring to the edge of the scorched Sahara. Or maybe they’re just soaking in the glow of this woman, her eerie contentment. They shuffle their journals, glancing sidelong, checking to see if they’ve made her up.
“We’re reading out loud?” Thassa asks. Her glee confers with everyone. “May I go next?”
Before Stone can wonder how she learned her modal verbs better than the native speakers, she starts her entry. Her voice is one of those mountain flutes, somehow able to weave a second melody around the one it plays. Russell misses the gist of the words, he’s so wrapped up in the cadence of the sentences. It’s something out of the dawn of myth, set in a Chicago all but animist. One thing worth telling a total stranger, and the thing is this: an ancient woman, hoisting her aluminum walker up the Grand Staircase of the Cultural Center at the rate of one step a minute.
The ascent is glacial, the staircase infinite, the climber a Wednesday-afternoon Sisyphus mounting toward the world’s largest Tiffany dome. The worn marble steps droop like cloth under the feet of a century of ghosts. But every word of Thassa’s description lifts the climber toward the light. By the third step, Russell realizes he’s never looked hard at anyone. By the top of the stairs, a sharp blue filament of need makes him want to see what will happen to the species, long after he’s dead.
“Shit,” Sue Weston says, when Thassa is done. “Girlfriend? You expect me to read mine, after that?”
They all laugh, and laughing, Russell remembers to breathe. Roberto Muñoz shudders in his loose flak jacket, rubs his shaved, plum-colored head with one cupped palm. “Thank you for that,” he murmurs. “Serious thanks. Makes me look forward to getting decrepit.” He shoots Thassa a look. “How old are you, anyway?”
She’s twenty-three, it turns out, give or take an era.
The others read, while the air is still jazzed with the colors of that ascent. They compete for approval, each of them fueled by Thassa’s encouraging nods. Affection threatens to replace all other texts. Algeria is nowhere, and Chicago a place just now become visible.
The night ends before they get a chance to take a look at the assignment from Make Your Writing Come Alive. Russell scrambles to summarize Frederick P. Harmon’s thesis:
Unless you care for the people in your story the way you want your reader to, all the description in the world will arrive stillborn.
Nobody cares. They’re all too busy grooming and teasing one another. As the group packs up, Mason assigns them all nicknames. Kiyoshi becomes Invisiboy. There’s Artgrrl Weston and Princess Heavy Hullinger. John Thornell makes a born Spock. Adam becomes the Joker and Roberto, the Thief. Mason christens himself Counterstrike and declares that Russell Stone will hereafter be known as Teacherman. Only Thassadit gives him pause. He studies her, timid in her amused return gaze. “Hello, Dalai!” Then he corrects himself: “No, no. I know who you are. Miss Generosity.”
Teacherman has to wave the grade book to get their attention. “Remember to e-mail your new pieces by midnight tomorrow.” The Joker and Artgrrl moan like cartoon characters caught in an ambush. Russell assigns the next topic as if he hasn’t been thinking about it for the last twenty-four hours, arranging and rearranging the words like a carpet of forest leaves hiding a pit trap. Convince someone that they wouldn’t want to grow up in your hometown.
Des Plaines, Terre Haute, Buffalo Grove: the perils of home are many, and the rewards slim. Stone reads all about the top hazards, tedium chief among them. “If Wheaton were a reality show,” says Mason’s piece, “the sponsors would have crashed it halfway through the pilot.” Close behind come isolation, bigotry, aimlessness, crushing homogeny, commercial blight, crimes against every known aesthetic, and the terminal malaise of abundance. Charlotte Hullinger writes, “I spent my childhood simmering in a satellite dish.” You know the place. A hometown now opening in a development near you.
Now come by train, a five-year-old from Sétif, into the swarming Agha Station, Algiers. Grow up in a sprawling suburban maze uphill from the port, in the sun-disintegrating, low-bid, postwar high-rises of that repeatedly despoiled recumbent odalisque, Alger la blanche. Postwar? Prewar. Midwar, now and always. Holy war. La sale guerre. Half a century of war that has emptied the country of a third of its people. The zeal of recent independence has turned on itself, and the state manufactures new enemies everywhere. The Islamic backlash against kleptocrat tyrants escalates into a mass movement. The separatist Berber Spring comes and goes, not so much suppressed as deferred into a simmering Berber Summer. Reculer pour mieux sauter
The world’s most promising new state has gone stillborn. The girl knows the problem. Her parents map it out, every night, in hushed voices over dinner. A century and a half of the colonized mind has spewed out tribalism with a vengeance, but without any noble cause this time. Dress, words, facial hair: every trait declares allegiance, intended or not. A generation into the country’s third major linguectomy, words are again a capital offense. When her father slips into French while lecturing to his university engineering students-et donc, voilà-he’s publicly censured. Her mother, a document translator for the national oil company Sonatrach, gets hissed at one afternoon by a small chorus on a Bab el-Oued bus for her neckline and bare hair, and when she complains to a patrolling policeman, he fines her for rabble-rousing.
Yes, the girl has her music lessons, her family seaside picnics, even her horse riding on holidays with cousins in Little Kabylia. Some days, the city still rises up like a dream of jumbled white from the azure Mediterranean. But destiny runs mostly backward, in Algiers. Birth rates soar and housing collapses. Corruption outpaces every industry; just walking down the street requires a payoff. Education starts to gutter, and as the girl enters second grade, the entire cobbledup system reaches the brink. The Islamic Salvation Front threatens to sweep into power. Then the Pouvoir cancels all elections.
Real darkness settles in, a decade of it. Her mother instructs the girl and her brother never to sit next to each other on the bus or walk through the market together. Many of the nightly massacres occur in mountain villages, remote and unregistered. But murder-nameless, ecumenical-makes itself at home even in the capital, strolling downhill from the Casbah, spreading through the French quarter, wandering impudently all the way up to the grim joke of the Martyrs Monument.
The killers are many and generous. They massacre for any reason, even on one another’s behalf. The Islamic Salvation Front, the Islamic Salvation Army, the Armed Islamic Group, the Islamic Armed Movement, the National Democratic Rally, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat: new charters by the week. Devout versus secular, traditionalist versus Western, Arab versus Kabyle Whole villages disappear under cover of dark. Neighbors kill neighbors over old scores, then trick out the corpse to make it look political. A corpse can be ordered for a handful of dinars.
The elites flee the country for Casablanca, Tunis, or Marseilles. Thassa’s mother’s brother escapes to the vast minimum-security wastelands of the Parisian banlieue, where he finds a job with Public Assistance. He phones his Algiers kin with magical accounts of buying bread in a boulangerie without fear of retribution. The girl’s father’s sister gives up her prosperous dental clinic to become a groundskeeper in the Montreal botanical gardens. The girl’s own parents-the last cosmopolitan Algerians not on a boat somewhere-resolve to leave when the death toll reaches eighty thousand. Then they say ninety. Then one hundred. They’re still there when the deaths hit one thousand a week. They are the victims of congenital hope. They can’t break themselves of that old habit, faith. Not religious faith, which they long ago consigned to the realm of vicious myth. Faith in their friends and neighbors. Belief in the average human.
The girl enters secondary school. Her world shrinks down to her classroom and her home. But the world of books opens to her, without borders. She, her brother, and her mother travel together to Dib’s Tlemcen, Yacine’s Bône, even Duras’s Saigon. The three of them perform amateur re-creations for her father’s entertainment. The crudest imaginary venue is a respite from Algiers.
Her engineer father waits for humanity’s return to reason. He makes guarded, deniable appeals to his lecture classes, slipped in between load calculations and stress analysis. He cheers the amnesty programs and the gradual surrender of the guerrillas. He quietly champions the new elections. His innate optimism begins to pay off. He pictures the end of the endless war.
Then the Kabyle singer Lounès Matoub is killed. The country spirals into new violence, and Thassa’s father suffers a conversion.
He writes a letter to the editor of El Watan: real democracy demands official status for Berber. Tamazight must be taught in public schools. All the deaths of the last decade will mean nothing without a return of that first tongue.
His stand is moderate enough, given recent years. But two weeks after the letter appears in print, students find Thassa’s father at his university desk, facedown on a pile of fluid dynamics exams, two holes the size of finches’ eyes high up in the back of his skull.
Thassa’s mother collapses. She’s two months recovering. When she can function again, Zamra Amzwar packs and takes her two teenage children to her brother’s in Paris. She finds work in a community health clinic: light clerical. Just until. She’s still working there over a year later, when the gendarmes near Tizi Ouzou, back home, kill a nineteen-year-old named Guermouh Massinissa. During the ten days of riots that follow, mother and children tune in nightly to accounts relayed from Radio Algerienne as scores of protesting Kabyle teens are gunned down.
Four months later, a doctor at the clinic notices Zamra Amzwar’s jaundice and discovers her distended gallbladder. A six-centimeter pancreatic tumor has already spread cells through every system in Thassa’s mother’s body. Seventeen weeks later she dies, listening to her daughter read aloud the news from Algiers.
The Berber student fits all this into three pages of eerily idiomatic English. Her second journal assignment: why you might not want to grow up in my hometown. But still, she writes, it is so beautiful there. I wish you could see it, up close, from the harbor. It would fill your heart. So crazy with life, chez nous.
True, then: both of Thassa Amzwar’s parents are dead. Dead of identity and too much hope. And the daughter is either on newly discovered antidepressants or so permanently traumatized she’s giddy. Her writing has that open confidence of a child who might still become an astronaut when she grows up. All her sounds ring, all colors shine. Crippling colonial inheritance, religious psychosis, nighttime raids: she’s swept along by the stream, marveling. Her words are naked. Her clauses sprout whatever comes just before wings.
Stone’s hands shake as he inks up her assignment. He uses a green marker to highlight great phrases. (Never red, the pedagogical texts insist.) By the end, her paper is streaked over in ghostly emerald. Even my photocopy looks like a kelp farm.
When he finishes, he tries to return to his delinquent work on Becoming You. These last two years he’s become an editing machine-tea in, grammar out. But now he can’t concentrate for more than a paragraph, he’s so keyed up about that evening’s class. After his fourth evasive visit in forty minutes to the Algerian Crisis Explained website, he decides that a walk might do him a world of good.
The walk from Logan Square to the South Loop takes hours. He’s healthy, and the hike should be effortless. But he’s winded by Bucktown. On foot, Milwaukee Avenue is another country. He knows nothing about the place where he lives. By Wicker Park, he’s overheard six languages. And all the more recent ethnic groups supposedly live on the other side of town.
Frederick P. Harmon devotes a whole chapter of Make Your Writing Come Alive to place. Stone has the topic on his syllabus, for mid-October. Place, Harmon says, is as much a protagonist as any character. But place is in danger, Harmon claims. Our sense of here is rapidly disappearing in the globalizing, virtual onslaught.
By Greek Town, Russell decides that Frederick P. needs to get out more often.
Stone has a mental map of the city’s neighborhoods, color-coded: do not enter unaccompanied, or after dark, or ever. He’s never come close to those spots of true underbelly, the pockets of no-man’s-land that even the police refuse to visit. He’s seen the projects from the expressway, high-rise concentrations of pain on par with any of the earth’s doomed places. But Chicago’s grimmest threats seem laughable, after Algiers.
He’s never once feared for his life here. He’s always felt safe, that lazy delusion. Now, walking down Milwaukee, he sees armed youths waving their Scorpios from town-house windows. FIS and GIA spotters signal from the street corners. A rebel pipe bomb blows out the picture window of a used-record shop. The street fills with oily smoke. Black-hooded paramilitary ninjas on motorcycles sweep up and down Division Street, commandos working for God knows whom, pulling random people out of cars and beating them senseless in hidden warehouse interrogation chambers on the edge of Oak Park.
By the time Russell reaches the Mesquakie lobby, he’s quivering. All the bitchy, nail-biting, tattooed, fashionably depressive art students that so terrified him last week now seem like guardian angels. He wants to hug these harmless ingenues, gods of health and childlike benevolence. Meeting his group again is like the summer’s last poolside party.
The Americans read their entries aloud. In a voice so self-effacing it’s almost mute, Invisiboy Kiyoshi Sims describes getting paid to stay up all night on Provigil and exercise online wizard and warrior characters for busy professionals in his Geneva neighborhood. The Joker Tovar inducts them all into the perils of Wilmette: “My mother was once busted on Christmas Eve for letting more than half of her sidewalk luminaria candles blow out.”
Then Thassa. She reads her words like she’s just discovered them. Her voice brings Algiers-dry, white, and merciless-into the fluorescent classroom. She reads about herself as a young girl, pausing her game of kickball under the back-alley clotheslines to watch three men put a fourth into the trunk of a beige Peugeot. She recounts her father’s death, almost poetry. When she gets to her mother’s “wistful sickness,” she stops for a long time. Her face is flushed and her eyes run, but she lifts her head and looks around the room gamely. No American can meet her gaze.
She returns to her words and finishes, back in that sunlit upland where she started. Algiers is once again a stack of sugar cubes rising from the Mediterranean. Maybe it’s distance or time, American sanctuary, or a refugee’s anesthesia, but she’s good, everything that happened to her family is good, as are all things still to come. She radiates awe at ever having survived adolescence. Her brows relax and her eyes spark, ready for any scenario life might bring.
“What do you think?” she asks her peers. She shakes her head at the standing brutality of her birthright. “Can you imagine such a mad place?”
Princess Heavy Hullinger breaks the silence. “Could I see that for one second?” She snatches the pages out of the smiling woman’s hands. Studying Thassa’s sentences, Charlotte shakes her head and chants, “Damn, damn, damn.”
The others melt into questions. Thassa answers with more stories. She tells them about the Islamists’ futile attempts to save the faithful from exposure to Southern European reality television. She describes her family running the finger of her father’s corpse over the fingerprint reader of his computer, to unlock the machine again after his death. She tells about her brother Mohand’s ill-fated turn as Cheb Tony in a Raï adaptation of West Side Story.
She laughs as she talks, as if she hadn’t just treated them all to a misery that would have broken saints. A few more anecdotes and she hooks even Spock Thornell. They all chatter at once, competing for Miss Generosity’s nod. Before Teacherman can pay lip service to the evening’s reading assignment from Make Your Writing Come Alive, their two shared hours end.
But no one quite wants to leave. They’re addicted to the woman’s elation. Charlotte-Princess Heavy-takes charge. “Okay, people: we’re going to the Beanery right now and continue this.” She points a threatening finger at Russell: “All of us.”
And so Russell Stone rolls down Roosevelt with a pack of art students on their way to a coffee shop on a warm September night. He takes up the rear with an embarrassed Kiyoshi Sims, toward whom Thassa, from her circle of admirers, keeps turning and shooting warm looks. It thrills Russell: she could have any one of them, and she likes the geek.
The front ranks luxuriate down the vacated street, as thick and slow as the moment’s pleasure, hanging on each other’s shoulders, pulling at each other’s arms, loud and here and full of eyes, under the best of the city’s light shows, laughing and strolling, tuned to one another, embracing the spectacle of night all around them and feeding on the Algerian girl’s standing enchantment. Rising together on a heart-how can I say it?-too soon made glad.
Years ago, on a night much warmer, Stone walked with his own glad pack, equally free. I picture his band wandering with this same slow sweep, through the streets of Tucson’s vanished Presidio, under a desert sky that between them, they owned. They sauntered together, the week before thesis deposit, on their way to their shared inheritance, planning the history of their unstoppable literary gang. Theirs was one of those great movie plots, where a handful of specialists come together to pull off an impossible caper: the classicist, the prince of the streets, the brainy one, the buckshot comic, the lyric queen of dialogue. They would change the way that writing worked, break the tyranny of convention, and reenchant the tired reading public with a runaway playfulness that not even the dead could resist.
Six months later, their movement collapsed. Ground down by realism, the gang scattered. Two of them bailed into office jobs. One became a dedicated drunk. One of them builds houses up in the Pacific Northwest and claims to be writing a three-hundred-thousand-word novel, one hundred words a week. Only one of them-Russell’s Grace-proved merciless and mean enough for real creativity.
And one of that once invulnerable group can no longer even imagine his byline on any printed piece without succumbing to a profound death wish. That one tags along tonight on the streets of Chicago, ten steps behind another invincible pack, this one in orbit around a woman who might have walked out of a story he once dreamed of writing.
Has he ever fallen in love with a fictional character? I might as well ask: Is the man alive? He’s just a few genes away from those famous rhesus monkeys, clinging to their terry-cloth mothers as if life depended on it. The trait has all kinds of value: the ability to get warm from the mere symbol of smoke.
But which fictional loves? Okay: an early, inchoate lust for Jo March. He burned with the need to befriend Emma Woodhouse, to pass her funny notes in the mind’s eternal freshman biology class. With Dorothea Brooke, he took long rambles through the countryside, camping out with her under the stars and never touching anything but her lips. Much later, Odette was great fun, until she wasn’t. He tried to protect Daisy Miller, and failed miserably. He tried to desire Daisy Buchanan, but failed to do much more than shake her till she whimpered.
Emma Bovary scared the crap out of him, and he blanched in the corner with illicit craving every time they were in the same room. His time with Anna Arkadyevna was full of insane letters and rash, stolen meetings; she came to him in full sun, standing up, to excess, and right at the perfect moment in his own too-prosaic life. Lily Bart appalled him on two continents, but by the end, he would have done anything for her, had she but asked. Like the authors of the world canon, Russell Stone had a disproportionate fondness for pretty suicides.
There were scores of others: blind dates, admirations from afar, one-night stands, happy domesticities ending in no-fault divorces. He fell madly, licentiously, guiltily, and often, always without sense or purpose. And each time out, the woman on the page reduced all actual women to pale, insufficient reminders of the full-throated real.
But here’s the thing about this man: a few months after he read any book, its plot twists faded into fuzzy sepia and he could deny, bald-faced, even to himself, that any leading woman had ever had his whole soul under her pretty thumb. That, too, seems to be an endlessly useful and preserved trait: the ability to revise at will.
“All writing is rewriting,” he tells the class, three times in the next two sessions.
They stare at him as if he’s speaking Russian.
Russell Stone used to watch three hours of tube a night, all he was good for after a day of repairing other people’s words. He’d lie in bed marveling at the perfection of nightly network fiction, the best writing by committee since the King James Bible. He expected to hate the shows, all the proliferating private traumas and tiny triumphs. But they sucker punched him every time. Five minutes to the hour, his throat would seize and his chest heave, and by the denouement, he’d be wrung out yet again by one more perfectly timed self-acceptance or reconciliation, one more flawed human managing to be, for a few seconds, something better than he was. And in between episodes, Russell found himself yearning to be with all his old fictional friends again.
These nights he has no time for any fiction. He has a project, his first since collecting every mention of Grace Cozma in print. Whatever hours remain, after his two jobs, he invests in a crash course on the Maghreb. He searches through online Berber manifestos: twenty-five million people scattered over a dozen countries, and until this month, he’s never heard of them.
“Careful saying Berber,” Thassa teases him, the sixth night of class. “Berber means barbarian. Say Amazigh. That means free people.”
With a single-volume French-English dictionary near his keyboard, he puzzles his way through Le Matin and El Watan-old newspaper accounts of the escalating violence that drags Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s illicit government down into places too dark for primetime fiction.
Late into the nights when he doesn’t teach, Russell descends that spiral. He takes strange comfort, sitting at his maple writing desk under the knockoff Milton Avery seashore, in confirming the worst about Thassa Amzwar’s country. He jots down notes, as if to quiz the girl on Algeria’s grimmest particulars. Ten years of organized bloodbath have reduced a country the size of western Europe to a walking corpse. And Thassa has emerged from that land glowing like a blissed-out mystic.
He writes in his journal: She takes intense pleasure in autumn. Simply writing that makes him feel like Homeland Security.
When the weather turns foul, her pleasure just swells. She comes to class in a chill downpour, her smock and slacks soaked, her chocolate hair hanging in strings on her shoulders. She stands in the doorway, he writes, laughing like she’s just been to Disneyland. “It’s ridiculous out there! Fantastic!”
She tells the class about last night’s party-three hours of tea and cookies with five strangers including her UPS man and a Ukrainian woman who camps out at Thassa’s bus stop and speaks no English. “Nice people, Chicago people. So friendly.”
She sits dripping contentment as Artgrrl reads a journal entry about how America’s real divide is not conservative versus liberal, rich versus poor, or rationalists versus Christians, but people with passports versus people without. At every third turn of phrase, Thassa smacks both cheeks and says, “Yes, yes-perfect!” And the object of her praise starts to levitate.
Their ninth night together, she brings a Tupperware wheel of pastry to class: honey-soaked clouds of semolina with a name-timchepoucht-the others can’t even repeat after her. “What you can’t find in life,” she tells them, “you have to make yourself!” The rest of them eat freely, hoping that whatever chronic, viral euphoria infects her has also contaminated her kitchen.
That night, the group-so protective of one another when reading aloud their raw journal entries-has its first fight. It starts with the evening’s assignment from Make Your Writing Come Alive: Frederick P. Harmon’s smug insistence that everything ever written derives from one of only twenty-four possible plots.
“I have a little theory about that theory,” Counterstrike Mason announces. “I’m thinking that’s what you might call a fucking brain fart.”
Russell says nothing. He has preached freedom for weeks; he can’t police them now.
Spock Thornell does the calculus. “Disagree. If anything, the man’s being generous. I’d put it at half that number. A dozen story lines, tops.”
“You’re shitting me!” Counterstrike bangs the oval table. “It’s billions. As many stories as there are-”
“Everyone’s a major motion picture,” Princess Heavy sneers. “Every life, based on a true story.”
“Listen ” Counterstrike sounds desperate. “I’m not saying everybody is interesting. I’m just saying that no two This whole mathematical permutation thing is bullshit.”
Artgrrl raises her fist. “Exactly! How many times have you seen this story? Nine people argue about how many plots there are. One of them gets up and throws herself out the window, just to prove-”
“That’s Harmon number twelve.” Spock holds up the page. “Personal Sacrifice for Moral Belief.”
“Or, or, or ” Roberto stresses his way down the list of possibilities. “Or number seventeen: Passion Disrupts Judgment.”
Princess Heavy oozes mock approval. “Or number twenty: Audacious Experiment. Choose your own adventure!”
Lumpers and splitters square off, as if victory here will decide things out in the unplotted world. They nibble at Thassa’s timchepoucht, which tastes of ancient oases.
Kiyoshi, the Invisiboy, sets down his pen and looks up. He’s the last person Russell expects to wander into the crossfire. “There’s something I don’t get about this class. I mean, are we supposed to be making up stories, with a plot and everything? Or are we just supposed to put down what actually happens?”
The others go on arguing, as if Invisiboy’s confusion is just one more available story line.
“When you really stop and think about it,” the Joker concludes, “there have to be something like three? I mean: happy ending, miserable ending, and ‘Watch me get all arty.’ ”
It’s two, Russell thinks, though no one bothers to ask him. It’s the old, elemental two, the only two that anyone will read: the future arrives to smack around the past, or the past reaches out to strangle the future. Hero goes on journey; stranger comes to town.
Here in front of him, at any event, is one plot no one will ever bother writing down: A happy girl passes through the world’s wretchedness and stays happy. The hung jury turns to Miss Generosity, who hugs herself against their combined outrage. By tacit agreement, Thassa’s vote is now worth any three of theirs.
“Yo, Genie!” Charlotte corners her. “What do you think? Lots of stories, or not?”
Her radiant face insists, This one is easy. “No hurry!” she tells them. “The time to choose that is after we’re dead.”
I search for Russell Stone all over. I read the almanac for that year. I read his class textbook, of course. I read back issues of his magazine. I even loot those hall-of-mirrors avant-garde novels whose characters try to escape their authors, the kind he once loved, the kind he thought he’d write one day, before he gave up fiction.
He’s nowhere, except in his work. On the day shift, in between classes, he puts in his stints on Becoming You. He sits motionless in his shared cubicle in the refurbished River North warehouse, pruning effusion back to the root.
According to many of the two thousand new self-help titles that appear every year, once a person rises above poverty, income influences well-being only slightly, and social class affects it just a little more. Marriage counts for a bit, and volunteering works wonders. But nothing short of pharmaceuticals can help sustain contentment as much as a satisfying job.
What pleasure does he get from his selfless editing? Stone strikes me as the kind of guy who might not know what his pleasures are. He’s not alone. No one does: the happiness books are adamant on this. We’re shaped to think the things we want will make us happy. But shaped to take only the briefest thrill in getting. Wanting is what having wants to recover.
Russell phones his brother-the first call he’s made from work since the half-minute dinner negotiations he used to make with Marie. He reaches Robert’s cell; it still amazes Stone that his own flesh and blood even has a cell. All the remaining hunter-gatherers on Papua New Guinea will be packing loaded smartphones before Russell goes mobile. Mobile is the last thing in existence he wants to be. His every original thought is already being interrupted by real time.
His brother is camped on some stranger’s pitched roof in Oak Brook. It’s what he does-crawl around on strangers’ roofs, installing satellite receivers. He tells people he’s in the throughput business. It troubles Robert that a lot of the general public is still getting only a few dozen stories an hour. His company can get anyone up to a couple hundred plus. And then there’s retrieval and on-demand and downloading. As he often tries explaining to Russell, it’s all about shifting. Time shifting and place shifting. Taste shifting and mood shifting. And if you get the throughput up high enough, it’s like nobody’s even telling you stories anymore; it’s like you’re making them up yourself.
“You busy?” Russell asks. “Got a minute?”
“No problem,” his brother tells him. “Parallel is more efficient than serial.”
For some reason, Robert always has time for Stone. He still thinks that Russell is going to be famous someday: a famous writer, whose hilarious stories will pour through the pipes of all the need-shifting, narrative-addicted strangers in the country.
“Bro?” Robert prompts, when Russell says nothing. “’Sup?”
When white guys walking on strangers’ roofs in Oak Brook start using any given street argot, it’s time to seal the word up in the dictionary mausoleum.
“You know that stuff you’re taking?” Russell asks.
“What, the fulvic acid?”
“No. The emotion stuff.”
“The selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor? Not to worry. I got the kinks out. It’s working fine now.”
“Can it make you I don’t know euphoric?”
Robert makes the sound of a laugh. “I told you. All it does is let me talk to strangers without wigging. Makes me feel a little bigger than I am. Like I’ve got something to give other people.”
A shudder crests across Russell’s skull. The drug makes his brother more generous.
“Pretty subtle effect,” Robert insists. “Really: once you get over the slight depersonalization, it’s no biggie.”
“Sure, but do you think that other people who take it might get more-”
“Little brother wants euphoria? Huh. I’d have to shop around.”
“It’s not I’m not looking for, for myself It’s about that class I’m teaching.”
“I got ya,” Robert says, not convinced that Russell is teaching anything.
Russell pictures his brother micropositioning a dish with one hand, C-clamping the cell to his face with the other. It doesn’t matter. You never have anyone’s full attention anymore, anyway. Focus has gone the way of other flightless birds. “There’s a girl in the class a woman, and I just wanted to know if-”
“You want Rohypnol? Date rape? Don’t do it, man; you can go to prison. Like for ever.”
Russell says nothing. Prison would simplify many things.
“Look,” Robert says, concerned. “Little bro. I’ve known you, like, always, right? Euphoria is not for you. You used to sit in front of the Saturday-morning cartoons like you were studying for a final exam. You’re the kind of guy who needs his pleasures in very modest dosages. Have you thought about maybe a multivitamin?”
“I’ll try that,” Russell tells his brother.
Robert chuckles at whatever truculent antenna he is trying to hogtie. “Roscoe, let’s face facts. We’re depressives. It’s in the Stone gene pool. Embrace it. It wouldn’t have hung around for so many generations if it wasn’t essential.”
Thomas Kurton has never doubted that happiness is chemical. Meaningless to call it anything else. Like a third of the country, he’s tried mood brighteners. They did indeed brighten him, a little. But they also smeared him. They took away a little of that fighter-pilot clarity. So he ditched the brighteners; if he had to choose, he’d rather be keen than bright.
But he has never accepted that people should have to choose.
He talks often about the massive structural flaw in the way the brain processes delight. The machinery of gladness that Homo sapiens evolved over millions of years in the bush is an evolutionary hangover in the world that Homo sapiens has built. Back on the savannah, stress kept us alive. Natural selection shaped us for productive discontent, with glimmers of heavenly mirage to keep us going. As Kurton puts it in his article “Stairway to Paradise”:
A mix of nasty neurochemical pathways, built, doubtless, by a small set of legacy genes, now plagues us with negative feedback loops and illusory come-ons. What passes for everyday consciousness feels to me increasingly like borderline psychosis. Depression had its uses once, when mankind was on the run. But now that we’re somewhat safe, it’s time to free the subjugated populace and show what the race can do, armed with sustainable satisfaction at last.
His sister had a chemistry set: Kurton’s life follows from that. He was eight, Patty ten. Up until then, he had been the better magician. He could make a coin look like he was bending it over his thumb. Now, overnight, Patty could combine two perfectly clear liquids and turn them a shocking pink. There was no contest. Her magic blew his out of the water, and consumed him with jealousy.
He took to theft: no other choice. He tinkered in the darkness of her closet while Patty was out of the house. he worked with tiny bits of chemical, so she would never know that anything was missing. Somehow, she always knew, and she’d explode with all the violence that the chemical safety manual warned about.
The fourth time his sister caught him sneaking experiments behind her back, she gave him the set. Truth was, she couldn’t stand the smells. Patty had been born with the wrong alleles. Even ammonium chloride turned her stomach, and after her first few excursions, she couldn’t bring herself to open the vials.
Three months into his sole proprietorship of the chemicals, young Tom completed all 150 experiments in the printed booklet and began inventing his own. His alarmed parents bought him a grandiose expansion for Christmas, although such gear was beyond the budget of a Detroit assembly lineman with five children. Armed with “forty-nine solvents, catalysts, and reagents one thousand hours of pure chemistry!” the boy never really broke stride in his life again.
Even without that proximal cause, he might have landed someplace nearby. From early childhood, he showed all the signs: the model rocketry, the ham radios, the long afternoons gazing into tidal pools, the complete Herbert S. Zim Golden Guides, and later, the expanding universe of cheap science-fiction paperbacks, those lyric hymns to alien life-forms with the surreal cover art where you couldn’t tell buildings from geographical features from living things.
Eighth-grade frog dissection revealed how nearby species were already more alien than any fiction. His first microscope opened his eyes to life’s true measurements. Diatoms everywhere, whose biomass dwarfed those mutant giants too large to see the real scale of living. In high school, he discovered the Haldane quote about God’s inordinate fondness for beetles. The year Kurton came through puberty, God disappeared altogether, replaced by deeper wonder.
In senior year, he read Microbe Hunters. He turned his bedroom into a shrine to de Kruif’s heroic microbiologists. He painted the names Pasteur, Koch, Reed, and Ehrlich on his ceiling, the last thing he saw at night and the first thing he opened his eyes on in the morning. His mother couldn’t object; he was heading to Cornell on full scholarship in the fall.
In short: Kurton’s genes might have led him to genomics, no matter what environment threw at him. But environment pulled all the right triggers, at just the right times. All the right teachers, the right toys, the right texts in the right order. In the first month of college, he came across the most beautiful concluding sentence in world lit, words that gave him far more epiphany than any novel. The book itself was a long, hard slog, but oh, that arrival!
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
By sophomore year, he was spending long hours in the lab, in his private chapel with its very own fume hood. Do not put your nose over the unknown; waft the air of the unknown to your nose. In his third year, he earned a key to the storeroom, where all the supplies were lined up in orderly glorious ranges on the shelves. Sometimes he would simply stand among them, as if on the podium in front of an orchestra, listening.
In graduate school at Stanford he made his first real discovery-a gene-promoter mechanism that no one on earth knew about. The find infused him with terrible urgency, a hurry to discover something else, now, before all the discoveries were made. And when, in his late twenties, his research team assayed the milk of their transgenic cows and confirmed the presence of a protein they themselves had placed there alongside all of nature’s own tangled enzymes, he felt for two months that he could die satisfied.
Then the two months ended, two months during which he had done absolutely nothing new for the world. Frantic again, he returned to the lab, to learn something about real work.
He and his girlfriend-a sociologist who studied the power of crowds-got married. They had two children, one of each. He and his wife raised the kids somehow, between them. It crushed Thomas to discover his daughter could not abide the smell of life science. It hurt him worse to discover that his son preferred making money to making discoveries. He released the children into the laboratories of their own lives. He got divorced. He wished his ex-wife all the world’s fresh horizons. Later, he had affairs, when there was time. But the love he really lived for was knowing.
That thrill of first discovery returned a handful of times over the next twenty years, in diminished forms. He pushed himself forward on the pleasure of first: first place, first to lay eyes on, first in the hearts of his peer reviewers. But he wanted more than simple primacy. First was just a sporting bagatelle. To look on a thing that had been true since the start of creation but never grasped until you made it so: no euphoria available to the human brain could match it. Cleaner than drugs, broader and more powerful than sex-Huxley’s “divine dipsomania.” Anyone who tasted it once would spend the rest of his life trying for more.
Science fit the very folds of Tom Kurton’s brain. Its exuberance tempered the tedium of daily lab work, kept him alert, overrode fatigue, and rendered risks trivial. And the goal of scientific exuberance, like the goal of life, which it helped to propel, was to replicate itself.
And so his life, from the simplest of beginnings, has spun out endless living forms, not all of them viable, not all of them pretty, not all of them sane or even wise, but each a turbulent attempt to lay bare the order in things, and all of them variations most wonderful.
Russell Stone lies in bed at night, reading about Algeria and its victims until he can’t breathe. He reads about a “vast national passion for reticence.” He reads about a culture struggling to emerge from feudal female sequestering and subservience. He can’t connect these accounts to his student’s existence. Even her years in Canada don’t explain such a leap.
When the Algeria books threaten to suck him under, he switches to a layperson’s handbook on happiness that he’s checked out from the public library. He flips around in it, buffet style, hoping that some paragraph somewhere might explain something, or at least lull him to sleep.
Sleep is not an option. He reads on, squinting at the clinical studies. One study claims that the most satisfied people are also those who can list the most peak experiences in sixty seconds. He sits up in bed with his yellow legal tablet and tries to write down the happiest moments in his life. The first one he remembers stops him cold.
He’s tried to kill it, over the years: the three-day escape with Grace Cozma to Flagstaff that frosty March, in their last spring in the writing program. Her idea: Come up with me to see the canyon. I have to see the damn Grand Canyon before I escape this place. Until then, the farthest they’d gone was her ordering him to lick Mexican beer off her fingers one crazed happy hour after workshop.
They rented a car-midsized luxury sedan, when they couldn’t afford economy-and drove up. But until they were standing at the reception desk in the ponderosa-pine lodge in Flagstaff, he had no idea whether Grace would ask for one room or two.
She asked for one. One of everything, for the next three days. Come up with me. Come hike with me, eat with me, bathe with me. Come learn how to want something more than you want to write. Their first night, after burritos in a dusty dive, they holed up in their chilly room. He looked to her to set the pace. Her pace was geological. She wanted him naked under the covers with her, knees up, reading, as if their thirtieth anniversary came before their honeymoon. He was reading The Varieties of Religious Experience. She was deep into Far Tortuga. He loved when she wore her glasses, which she hated to put on. She curled over her book like in prayer, the back of her hand distractedly grazing his thigh. He did not know a body could pound like that. Reading lasted maybe forty minutes, until she turned to him, slipped one leg over his, and asked, “How’s the book?” They read no more that night.
In the morning, after gorging on complimentary breakfast, they stood on the South Rim giggling like maniacs at the bizarre optical effects: near, middle, and distant cross sections of the earth sliding decoupled against one another like bad back projection in a forties movie. He could not accept the colors, the rose irons and coppery greens. They climbed down Bright Angel into the chasm on foot, she singing Ferde Grofé’s clumping mule theme, he wanting to take her into the thickets of tamarisk and do her like deer. She was insane, insisting that they descend to the Inner Gorge, all the way down to the Vishnu Schist. They made it as far as Plateau Point and barely dragged themselves back up to the rim by nightfall. That night, as if they weren’t dead with fatigue, they skipped the studying and went right to the exam.
He never imagined that Grace might feel any less than he did. Just hearing her hum contentedly under her breath as she drove home was like returning to a country he didn’t even know he’d been banished from. But back in Tucson, they didn’t move in together, didn’t join futures, didn’t even change their old routine except for sleeping together eight increasingly tense times before her departure to France that May.
As she left the country, she goosed his ribs and said she expected great things from him. To date, his greatest achievement has been his appearance as a most convincing character in Grace’s deeply convincing first novel.
He writes down Grand Canyon w/ G, and in that instant, the one-minute timer starts beeping.
Other things his happiness encyclopedia says:
Well-being is not one thing. It surprises Stone to read that optimism, satisfaction, capacity for happiness, and capacity for unhappiness are all independent. He puts his average across the four at about.235, or just shy of respectable for the North American league. Nor is he much of a long-ball hitter.
Happy people have stronger social relationships, more friends, better jobs, higher salaries, and stronger marriages. They are more creative, more altruistic, calmer, healthier, and longer lived. Russell skips the self-scoring checklist.
Happy people know that they’re happy and don’t need to read happiness books to determine how happy they are. Russell’s book doesn’t actually say this. It’s what psychologists call inferred knowledge.
People in positive moods are more biased, less logical, and less reliable than people in negative moods. Score one for what the book calls “depressive realism.”
The prefrontal cortex of happy people lights up more on the left, while the brains of the congenitally dour favor the right. This seems to Russell either profound or meaningless.
Happiness is probably the most highly heritable component of personality. From 50 to 80 percent of the variation in people’s average happiness may be accounted for by genes. People display an affective set point in infancy that doesn’t change much over a lifetime. For true contentment, the trick is to choose your parents wisely. No argument at the Stone household.
Yet the conflicted book insists on a role for nurture. Joyousness, it says, is like perfect pitch: a little early training in elation can bring out a trait that might otherwise wither.
Stone assumes that Algeria’s Time of Horrors is not exactly the early training of choice.
Late one class, as Thassa is leaving, he works up the courage to ask her how she’s surviving the local Arabophobia. She just grins. “But I’m not an Arab! I’m Kabyle. You might be more Arab than I am. Stone: that’s Hajar . That’s a good Arab name. Hey! Are you planning any terror, Mister?”
His terror is all unplanned.
He’s like a man who has just seen some mythic creature fly past the window-teal and ruby against the concrete neighboring high-rise, a species blown a continent off course, not listed in any of the books he now spreads along the windowsill in the hopes of making an ID. A thing of complete unlikelihood. Game for anything. And anything’s game.
Stone shares an office with two other adjuncts-a converted smoking lounge on the sixth floor. There he holds his first student conferences. The half-hour sessions feel more like counseling jags than writing tutorials.
Joker Tovar drums on his thigh with a chewed-up uni-ball, his knee pounding like a woodpecker spattering a concrete phone pole. “Digital media is over,” he tells Russell. “Played out. Nobody’s done anything fresh for three months. The whole scene is Night of the Living Dead. And no one has a clue what to do next.”
Roberto the Thief sits forward on the hot seat, his soul stretched as taut as shrink-wrap. In a soft voice, he announces, “I go to the edge of the abyss every other night. Sometimes I look over.”
Russell asks, “Would it help you to talk to someone?”
Roberto just cocks his head. “I’m sorry Help what?”
Charlotte, intrepid Princess Heavy, shows Russell her portfolio-charcoal vortices of human bodies that look like the Venus of Willendorf, which is to say, a little like Princess Heavy. She works snippets of journal entry around each image. One sketch, more sinewy than the rest, jumps out at Russell. He doesn’t even need the hand-scrawled accompanying passage: It’s like she’s glowing. Like she knows something. Makes me want to be a refugee.
Maybe it’s just a fragment of indie-song lyric. He flips to the next image, but not fast enough to evade Charlotte. “So what do you make of her?”
He flips back, holds up the sketch, lifts an eyebrow. He’s remarkably good at being the one thing his father taught him never to be: a fake.
Charlotte tsks. “I don’t mean the sketch. Is there something broken with her? Or something really fixed?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “I’ve never met an Algerian before. I probably shouldn’t be discussing-”
“No, of course not.” Charlotte retrieves her drawings and slips them into her portfolio. “Wouldn’t be caught dead discussing real life.”
When Thassa is five minutes late for her appointment, Russell unravels. The Islamic Salvation Front has sent a death squad after her. Or the America First people. Her total lack of depressive realism leaves her a walking target.
At eight minutes after the hour, she sticks her face around the doorjamb, puckered with sweet shame. He’s so relieved to see her that he stands up. He’s shocked all over again at just how short she is: the crown of her curly hair reaches no higher than his collarbone.
“I’m sorry to be so tardy,” she says. “I was talking to the security guard downstairs.”
Just the sound of her voice is like a governor’s pardon. Her accent has drifted: too much time in North America. He wants to stop the sound from drifting any further.
“He has a fascinating story,” she says, touching Stone’s wrist and making him sit. She sits just next to him. “He’s a Bosnian Muslim. Imagine: he taught himself English when he moved here, and now he’s writing a book!”
Russell treads water. “Do you know him?”
“I do now! He’s a beautiful man.”
The adjective stabs him. He’ll never be able to protect her from her own promiscuous warmth. “A Muslim,” he says, brain-dead. “Like you?”
“Me?” She laughs. “I’m no believer. I’m some kind of half-Christian atheist. My mother’s family have been Catholic for generations. Hey!” She shakes his arm. “Don’t look so surprised! You know that Saint Augustine was Berbère?”
Russell didn’t know. His ignorance is more or less complete.
“From Annaba. A Kabyle even more famous than Zidane. But my father was so disgusted with religion that he wouldn’t let it in our house. I don’t know, myself. If there is God, he is just laughing at every religion we invent!”
He’s stunned silent: faith is not the author of her bliss. Blessed are those who do not believe, and yet see.
She carries on amusing herself. “You know, maybe those jihad suicide people will really get their seventy-two virgins in heaven-except they will be seventy-two American Christian virgins, saving themselves for their Baptist husbands!”
Her glee is a dance. Stone seizes up even worse than he does in front of the class. He stutters his way through a few gibberish clauses. He’s stunted by this thing she owns, the thing that beautiful people seem to possess but never really do. If only she were merely beautiful
Her face is small but ursine. Her nose veers hard to the right, and her eyes are slightly askew. She shouldn’t even be pretty, except for the conspiracy of delight rounding her cheeks. A rill of melted skin runs up the outside of her left arm from elbow to shoulder. How could he have missed it until now? She must think the scar too banal to mention in her journal.
He says some generic pedantries about her entries for class. She nods and scribbles into her notebook, which she safeguards up near her narrow chest. He tries to say things that won’t look ludicrous, copied down. A few more of his clumsy maxims stolen from Harmon, a little more of her laughter and scribbling, and she turns the page to show him: not notes, but a felt-tip cartoon caricature of him, perfect down to his squint of bewilderment. She draws like she breathes-a gull enjoying a gust.
Happy people must know something that no one else does. Some key to being alive, obscure and hard-won, almost out of reach. Otherwise, he would have met a truly happy person or two, long before her.
“What made you apply to this place?” he asks. “How did you choose Chicago?”
She declares Mesquakie a great college for her major: film arts, the documentary concentration. “I fell in love with films, in high school, in Montreal. I was making little movies for my brother, to make him feel less, um country sick? Homesick. Come on, Thassa! Homesick. I made him funny clips, to get him to laugh. Then, I started splicing? I love film; I just love it. I love putting the shots together. I love dubbing the sounds. Anything! I could play with the editing softwares all day long.”
He’s so nonplussed he can’t even nod.
“What I would really love-more than anything?-is to get very skilled, then to go home and make beautiful films, chez nous.”
“Of course!” At last it clicks: witness and voice, in the world’s most powerful medium. “Like Pontecorvo Has anyone done something like that for the civil war?”
She smiles confidentially and touches his wrist. Her skin shocks him. “Not politics! Politics and film?” She tsks and waves her index finger like a windshield wiper. “That’s not my glass of tea. No, I just want to shoot-you know! Kabylie. The mountains. The coast. Those peoples. That sky.”
“Nature?” He can’t keep the bafflement out of his voice. A child of death who’s thrilled about the future. An Algerian who shuns politics. A film lover who chooses the banality of mountains.
She shakes her head again and pulls a tiny media player out of her rainbow bag. Before he can decode, she shows him her work in progress. A Thassa the size of his fingernail grins at him from inside the matchbox screen. She’s in front of a large fish tank at what must be the Shedd Aquarium. Spots of bioluminescence in the fish blink on and off. Then the glowing spots animate, spelling out the words: Secret Chicagos. A Film by Generosity.
Then they’re in Grant Park, at the foot of Buckingham Fountain, the spouting green sea horses. It’s a sunny day; people of all stripes stroll around the basin. A mixed-race couple goes by arm in arm. A woman in full hijab tries to rein in two little girls, both in their own white headscarves. A sizable Japanese tour group makes a collective, rising glissando of appreciation at the words of their guide. But the camera settles on an ancient bald man sitting on the edge of the fountain. He’s talking to himself, except that the camera hears.
I can’t really say I miss it. Italy? God! That’s over sixty years ago. But I like to come down here anyway, because it feels like something back then. You know what I’m saying?
A voice from behind the camera says, “I know.”
Maybe I’m finally getting senile. But you know what would be great? If all this water just-if it all just kept flowing Venice!
With the sweep of his illustrating hand, the water spills over the fountain rim and streams its way up Congress. It doesn’t look like real computer graphics. It looks like a living watercolor, splashes of primaries better than life, and much more generous.
Russell jerks up, searching her face for clues.
She giggles. “Compositing,” she explains, freehanding in the air. He nods like an idiot and looks back.
Boats appear on the watery Congress Parkway. Gondolas paddle upstream, underneath the old post office. San Marco’s materializes alongside the old Illinois Central tracks. The camera swings back, cutting up State Street at high speed. It ducks down into the subway, settles on a dark, middle-aged man standing on the platform waiting for his train.
I’m from Eastern Turkey, Cappadocia. Every time I come down here, I think of the caves. They should have cities down here, right? They stick all those people up in the air; they can put some underground. Am I right?
The tube of tunnel stone behind him begins to seethe with hand-drawn passageways. Doorways and windows open in the walls. The camera pops into one of them, then pops out again on a tree-lined street of brick bungalows somewhere in Bronzeville. A young man in leather jacket and felt porkpie studies the lens:
My kinda town? Sister, you could take a weekend out of the war budget and turn this whole neighborhood into Heaven South. Homes for the homeless. Music falling out of the sky!
He has only to speak it, and a third-story paradise of visible melody springs up all around him, at tree level.
So it goes for a handful more shots: Kraków spilling out of a cathedral in West Town, Cinco de Mayo flowing down the Back of the Yards, the Bahai Temple turning into Isfahan, the Devon corridor releasing a desi incense procession.
“Who made all this?” Russell croaks.
She dives into her bag and retrieves a Handycam the size of a newborn schnauzer. She’s seen more of this city in a year and a half than he has in his life. He looks at that face, its invincible grin. She’s fearless, ready to travel into any neighborhood. All he can think is: It’s not safe out there. Happiness is a death sentence.
She squeezes the camera trigger and starts filming him. He grimaces, trying to smile. “But this isn’t really a documentary, is it?”
She stops filming. Even her frown is delighted. “It isn’t? What is it, then? It’s all perfectly true. Maybe this is your creative nonfiction!”
“But is there any market for that kind of film?” He can’t help himself. The orphan girl’s self-appointed uncle. “Can you make a living, after school?”
She waves her hand and scowls. “Pff. Livings are easy. My father was an engineer. He always liked the English expression: There’s no free lunch. That’s crazy! There is only free lunch. We should all be nothing but clouds of frozen dust. This is what science says. All lunch is free. My father was a scientist, but he never understood this one simple scientific fact, poor man.” She shakes her head at the man’s perversity.
So she didn’t get the bliss from her father, either.
They talk beyond the allotted half hour. She’s in no hurry to go. Russell realizes that he has saved her appointment for last, just in case it runs overtime. Finally, he can keep her no longer. She stands up to go, scooping her possessions back into the rainbow bag. She turns to him, her brightness challenging.
“You know, Mister? You are a very unfair teacher. You make us all read from our journals. But you never read to us from yours!”
His details are coming to me now, more easily than I care to admit.
He watches for a long time at the plate-glass window after she leaves, gazing six stories straight down onto the building’s entrance. She takes forever. She’s talking to the Bosnian security-guard novelist again, or to some new newly met, soon-to-be bosom buddy. His chest clutches when she does appear. She takes a few steps south, then slows, distracted by something across the street. She starts up again, then greets a woman walking toward her. She spins around as the woman passes, turns like a planet in an orrery, and calls out. When the woman looks back, Thassa taps her own bare head and laughs something: I like your hat. The stranger’s delight is visible from six floors up.
Thassa walks down the street as if through a spice bazaar. She takes all of five minutes to go a block. From high up in his spy’s nest, Russell imagines the composited, hand-drawn documentary she’s seeing at all times, while everyone else drags their way through the depressing, psychological realist version: Wabash, blooming into a Casbah watercolor.
He lifts his eyes to the building across the street-an astonishing, ceramic-clad, honeycomb lattice far beyond anything the present could afford to build. He’s never noticed it before. He glances back down just in time to see the Kabyle girl duck into a building two blocks south: one of the college’s two dormitories. He knows where she lives.
He grabs his valise, skips down six flights of stairs, bursts out to the street, and follows her south. The air is weirdly ionized; the lake smells like ocean. He’s never noticed, but each shoulder-rubbing façade in this police lineup of buildings is a different color. Marble, sandstone, granite: Paris on the Prairie.
He stands across the street from her dormitory, scouring the window grid. He can’t see anything, and he’s just about to skulk away when she appears in a fourth-story window on the right, looking down on the Wabash pageant. She’s smiling at the possibilities beneath her, sizing up the adventure. She sees him; she doesn’t see him. She lifts one hand. The hand holds a leather-bound book. She cradles the small volume from beneath and spreads it face-open against the window. The alien gesture freezes him.
He ducks into the doorway behind him, heart pounding. A musical-instrument store. He pretends to shop for acoustic guitars. He might, in fact, be interested in guitars. He hasn’t touched one since moving back from Tucson.
He leaves the shop ten minutes later, empty-handed. He walks from campus up to the river, just to clear his head. He feels vaguely criminal. He is vaguely criminal.
Home again, he sits on his back deck next to the fire escape, trying to capture in his journal what happened that afternoon. He writes under the yellow deck light as darkness falls, unable to shake her image.
He writes: She pressed the pages to the glass, as if for someone with a powerful telescope on another planet.
He looks up. The night is clear and the wind comes off the moon and literature has just been invented.