True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out-you must stay out; and to stay out, you must have some absorbing errand.
– Henry James, Roderick Hudson
The British ethicist with the bloodhound eyes returns to the screen. She’s seated in the library of Magdalen College, Oxford. Her face is lined by a lifetime spent gate-guarding science’s worst excesses. An Over the Limit caption identifies her: Anne Harter, Author, Designs on Humanity. She says:
More expensive, high-tech antiaging breakthroughs will just produce even more horrendous differences between the haves and have-nots. If we really want to extend the average human life span, then let’s supply clean drinking water to the majority of the planet that doesn’t have it.
Cutaway, and the caption reads: University of Tokyo conference, “The Future of Aging.” Thomas Kurton stands behind a podium, covered in hazelnut curls, fifty-seven going on thirty-two, a Sarastro of the cult of antioxidants. He speaks from the hip:
The script that has kept us in gloom and dread is about to be rewritten. Labs across the globe are closing in on those ridiculous genetic errors that cause life to suicide. Aging is not just a disease; it’s the mother of all maladies. And humankind may finally have a shot at curing it.
Cut back to Oxford: Professor Harter questions the scientific basis to Kurton’s optimism. Back in Todai, Kurton cites the discovery of a single gene mutation that more than doubles the life span of Caenorhabditis elegans.
Oxford:
Aging is not the enemy; the enemy is despair.
Tokyo:
Cure age, and you beat a dozen ailments at once. You might even help depression.
The camera turns the scientist and ethicist into a bickering couple, airing their grievances in front of friends.
A quick jump to Maine, where keen Tonia Schiff asks Kurton:
What about those people who say society can’t survive more old people than it already has?
He can’t ratchet down that boyish smile.
Naysayers have always been around to challenge any human dream. And that’s good! But that objection just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m talking about a future where the aged aren’t old.
Back to Anne Harter, in Oxford:
Dr. Kurton might want to fund an association study for the wishful-thinking gene.
The match is as unfair as genetics. The scientist is brighter, more informed, and more relaxed. All Harter can do is sink her teeth into his ankle and hang on.
Kurton, back in the Maine cabin:
People want to live longer and better. When they can do both, they will. Ethics is just going to have to catch up.
Tonia Schiff sits, her knee to his, enjoying the ride:
How do you think the market will price the fountain of youth?
He does this funny little head-bow of concentration, like he’s never been asked this question and he wants to think about it, for the sheer pleasure of thought.
Well, the market seems to price food and water fairly effectively. It could use a little help pricing medications, I suppose.
Schiff, in something like awe at the man’s ingenuousness:
Do you really mean to live forever?
He rocks good-naturedly and squeezes the back of his neck.
We’ll see how far I get. I’m on calorie restriction, daily workout, and a few supplements, especially megadoses of resveratrol. If I can keep myself healthy for another twenty years, at our present rate of discovery
The techno beat starts up again. Cross-fade to a slowly focusing midrange shot, and the genomicist floats twenty stories in the air over the apocalyptic dreamscape of Hachik Crossing, Shibuya, Tokyo. Below him spreads Times Square squared-spectral neon blazes fringing a bank of LCD screens each several stories high, towering over seven major thoroughfares that converge in the world’s largest pedestrian scramble, which, from twenty stories up, looks like mitosis under the microscope. Multilevel train station, bass-thumping department stores, costume outlets, twisting warrens of mirror-lined game arcades The streetlights stop all traffic, and the accumulated mounds of crowd disgorge into one another, massing into the intersection from all sides in an orderly, omnidirectional tsunami.
Thomas Kurton gazes down on this orgy of the urban dispossessed. The camera follows his gaze: kids as bowerbirds; kids as noble savages; kids as Kogal Californians; kids from the outer reaches of galaxies far, far away; kids as baggy, knee-socked, schoolgirl-sailor prostitutes; kids as mutants-cosplay, Catgirl, GothLoli, maid-nurse-bunny-all in a gentle, frenzied, nightly theatrical performance of rebellion that will wander home at four in the morning to broom-closet apartments and wake up two hours later to head to classes or clerical jobs.
The scientist looks down into the costumed mass and smiles.
We’re trapped in a faulty design, stuck in a bad plot. We want to become something else. It’s what we’ve wanted since the story started. And now we can have it.
The camera follows him into a glass elevator and plunges down into the maelstrom. The transparent capsule opens, and Thomas Kurton disappears into the carnival of midnight Shibuya.
Tonia Schiff appears briefly out of character at the seven-minute mark in “The Genie and the Genome.” She’s seated near the front of that University of Tokyo auditorium, looking nothing like the show host who scampers through the interview segments. Her alert amusement disappears. For two seconds, her aura teeters, scared by the show onstage. Then the camera dives back into the sea of eager faces behind her in the auditorium.
She surfaces again ten seconds later, in the milling crowd. Even the way she stands and chats feels somehow experimental. Something in her hand movements hints at her childhood in New York and Washington, her adolescence in Brussels and Bonn. She speaks to one scientist in flowing German, but stops for a moment to greet a passing acquaintance with a few snippets of Japanese.
She turns to a couple next to her and says something that makes them bloom. She learned the trick from her father, a career diplomat: how to make everyone she meets feel like a conversational genius. From her mother, a medical policy adviser for international relief agencies, she’s learned how to turn a person’s worst impulses to good use. That is the secret of her edutainment fame: assure us all that we might still become the authors of our own lives. She’ll use the skill again, later, on a New York soundstage, filming the lead-in to this show’s segment. A flash of cosmopolitan charm undercut by a sardonic grin: “My kind of future would probably ask, ‘If I let you have your way with me tonight, will you still respect me in the morning?’ ”
From childhood through the age of twenty, Tonia Schiff nurtured the belief (acquired in a series of elite international schools) that the deepest satisfaction available to anyone lay in those cultural works that survive the test of Long Time. But a collision with postcolonialism in her second semester studying art history at Brown shook her faith in masterpieces. A course in the Marxist interpretation of the Italian Renaissance left her furious. For a little while longer she soldiered on, fighting the good fight for artistic transcendence, until she realized that all the commanding officers had already negotiated safe passage away from the rout.
In her junior year, vulnerable now to the world’s corruption, she belatedly discovered (blindingly obvious to everyone else alive) the lock on human consciousness enjoyed by the medium that her parents always treated as a lethal pandemic that would one day be successfully eradicated. At the age of twenty, Tonia Schiff, fair-haired, blue-eyed heir of dying high culture, at last got roughed up by television, and loved every minute of it.
In short order, she discovered:
Broadcast was what Grimm’s fairy tales wanted to be when they grew up
Broadcast was an eight-lane autobahn into the amygdala
Broadcast was the only addiction that left you more socially functional
Broadcast was what Homo ergaster daydreamed about, on the shores of Lake Turkana, between meals
One semester of Modern Visual Media Studies taught her that she didn’t want to analyze the stuff; she wanted to make it. After graduation, she talked her way into a Manhattan production studio, reassuring them that the Ivy liberal-arts degree could be overcome. She served time as a fact-checker for local news, where she learned, to her astonishment, what her country really looked like. From there, she worked her way onto a team specializing in archival footage for the Hitler Channel.
She realized, early on, how fast broadcast was becoming narrowcast, and she signed on with a boutique production outfit to work for a consumer-electronics tech showcase that the whole crew called Geek of the Week. She graduated to assistant producer and executed her responsibilities meticulously until someone had the brilliant idea to let her try hosting. The camera loved her, and so did the week’s geeks. In front of the lens, her old Brahmin insouciance combined with a sexy bewilderment to turn her into everybody’s favorite new toy with a new toy. Her arched-eyebrow amusement at the constant torrents of techno-novelty made Over the Limit, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, “science like you wished it had been, back in high school.”
Each week, the show delivers another round of Scientific American meets Götterdämmerung. In the months just before “The Genie and the Genome,” they do:
off-the-shelf electronic surveillance
drugs that eliminate the need for sleep
geisha bots
thought-reading fMRI
Augmented Cognition weapons systems
runaway nano-replicators
radio frequency skimming
untraceable performance enhancers
remotely implantable human ID chips
viral terrorism
Frankenfoods
neural marketing
smart, networked commodities
The show taps into the oldest campfire secret: in terror begins possibility. A sizable slice of the viewing public has unlimited appetite for all the latest ways that godly gadgets will destroy their lives. Schiff measures the success of each segment by the number of illegal clips floating around the Internet the next day. Even the occasional Photoshopped nude of her seems a testimonial.
It’s beyond lucky, getting to spend all her hours in the company of ingenious people. Her interviews have led to a few intense adventures with amusingly driven men. But even the ones who know how to entertain themselves need far more approval than she can deliver without irony. The best of these intervals are bittersweet, like Mahler by candlelight. In between, she’s content with her circuit through the exercise rooms of three-star hotels, listening to podcasts of technology-show competitors while on the elliptical cross-trainer. Lately, she has begun to bid in online auction houses on the letters of famous inventors. She imagines giving the whole collection to the smartest of her nieces, when she graduates from high school.
Meanwhile, Tonia enjoys the admiration of everyone she knows except her humanitarian mother. Sigrid Schiff-Bordet watches the program now and then, when she’s not in Afghanistan or Mali. Tonia’s mother long ago adjusted to the world’s basic schizophrenia. She thinks nothing about passing from climate-controlled concourses studded with free drinking fountains into armed outposts where mortars battle over a few potable liters. But she can’t adjust to Over the Limit.
“I’m too old for your stories,” Sigrid tells Tonia. “I’ve voided my citizenship in that kind of future. You have to let me die a functional illiterate.”
Once, in the closest thing to a compliment she could muster, Dr. Schiff-Bordet told her daughter, “Your show is probably good for me. It sickens me to watch, but it’s powerful medicine. Like chemotherapy for the naïve soul.”
As for Tonia’s father, Gilbert Schiff died three years before “The Genie and the Genome,” at age sixty-nine, of a massive heart attack in the consulate in Tyumen. Two weeks before his death, in one of their biweekly phone calls, his daughter had the gall-or call it the enduring filial pride-to ask him when he was going to write his long-postponed diplomatic memoirs. The former young cultural attaché under Camelot had managed to survive in the State Department all the way through Bush the Second, battered up to the rank of vice-consul, still trying to convince the six billion neighbors that America had gentle, nuanced, humble, and diverse insights to offer the world conversation. Tonia had grown up on his increasingly embattled accounts, a foreign policy hiding inside the official foreign policy, a beautiful losing proposition that only a handful of lifers kept alive.
Her father answered her challenge in his best stentorian white-tie voice. “No one wants to read my autobiography. Story of my life.” She foolishly pressed him, hinting at the ticking clock, until he released his last, jagged barb. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll write my memoirs as soon as you give up the technology ringmaster act and write that history of interwar regionalist realism you once promised me.”
The rebuke stung; she knew how deeply she’d failed the man. Both Vice-consul Schiff and his beloved doctor wife felt something hopelessly magnificent about the human adventure, its ability to channel the brute instinct of a few hard-pressed hunter-gatherers into creating Athens, Byzantium, Florence, Isfahan. But in Gilbert Schiff’s considered opinion, the project had been running in reverse for more than a century; the beasts of unlimited appetite were loose and weren’t going back into the kennel anytime soon. Every individual being with any skill had to fight the fatuous, disposable present with everything of worth. Instead, his daughter-his polyglot, caryatid, harpist daughter, National Merit Finalist, queen of the debating society, captain of the chess club, choral society soloist-was partying with the barbarians.
She knew how much she’d once pleased him. On the morning of her first communion, he told her she was closer to perfection than any father could have asked. In her first year of college, during their long Christmas-vacation discussions of late Reginald Marsh and early Stuart Davis, she even detected a little hangdog adoration in his glance, a self-policing cringe ready to punish himself for imagining the full range of her lucky gifts.
The summer that she told him she’d switched to media studies, he was stationed in Oslo. She called him from Providence; the announcement merited more than a letter. He laughed from the gut at the send-up, until he realized it wasn’t one. He regrouped gracefully and told her that he and her mother would back her in anything she chose to study. When she got her first television job, he resigned himself to noble stoicism over her late-onset disease. But he’d have given anything for her cure, if any medicine offered one.
In time, he shifted his hopes from his daughter to her genes. Throughout her twenties, he treated every man she introduced to him with polite reserve. Fun, maybe, for a weekend or Settling a little quickly, aren’t you? In her thirties, he began praising even the bottom-dwellers. So he has a record; half the justices on the D.C. circuit have a criminal sheet. The question is, where does he come down on the Pampers Size Six controversy? Once, he even pronounced the abomination “speed dating.” Both he and Tonia’s mother were too well-bred to come out and tell her, Breed, damn you! But that was all she could do for them, finally.
Tonia never confessed to her parents a genetic defect even more lethal than susceptibility to broadcast. But by thirty-three, the syndrome was undeniable: she possessed no maternal desire whatsoever. One glance at the only available planetary future made having children at best benighted and at worst depraved. Nulliparity-human build-down-was a moral imperative.
But Tonia never made that point to Gilbert Schiff. Even when she was still single at thirty-six, her father held out the same forsaken hope for her as he did for making the case for America abroad under Bush II. “I wouldn’t even insist on a monograph,” he told her, during that wretched phone call just before his death. “I’d be happy with a modest little coauthored study ”
“Someday,” she teased him. “When someone as good as Daddy comes along.” But she was already a member of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, even if she could not quite bring herself to qualify for their Golden Snip Award.
The old diplomat went to his grave nineteen days after that phone call, as defeated by his daughter’s choices as he was by his innocent, beginner country’s embrace of extraordinary rendition. After her father’s death and her mother’s subsequent expatriation, Tonia threw herself into a brief period of purposeful mate-seeking. But the thing about ghosts is that they outlast their own hopes. A dead father is forever beyond placating.
Now she concentrates on appeasing one million total strangers. Each forty-two-minute segment is an exercise in insouciance, taking her sixty hours to perfect. The goal is to compile an accurate map of the present at the scale of one to one, a massive mosaic of thumbnails of the blinding future.
For four decades, Tonia Schiff’s parents kept a pact. However busy they were, whatever remote outpost each of them found themselves in, they always managed to meet every two months for a private dinner. And at that dinner, one of them would argue a fiercely prepared debating motion. Resolved: the human race would have been better off if the agricultural revolution had never happened. Resolved: the government should cap the salaries of professional athletes. Resolved: Bach’s Passions should be banned from concert halls for anti-Semitism. And the other delivered the fiercest possible rebuttal. In this way Gilbert and Sigrid preserved the fires of argument that had supplied such heat to their love.
Now, a decade past the age her parents were when they birthed her, Tonia revives the ritual, with the only difference being that she meets for a new topic twenty times a year with no fixed opponent. Resolved: the human race will not survive its own ingenuity. Resolved: the cure for our chronic despair is just around the corner. And no matter whom she spars with on any given occasion, Tonia Schiff can make the most cataclysmic debate almost as entertaining as reality itself.
Stone sits at his desk with tea and a slice of Dutch rusk, ignoring his stack of delinquent manuscripts. Instead, he reads yet another happiness book checked out from the library. This book stands apart from all the others-the bad seed. The book says happiness is a moving target, a trick of evolution, a bait and switch to keep us running. The doses must keep increasing, just to break even. True contentment demands that we wean ourselves from all desire. The pursuit of happiness will make us miserable. Our only hope is to break the habit.
He lifts his eyes from the page to wonder whether the Algerian woman might be experiencing massive anesthesia from post-traumatic stress disorder. Maybe her free-floating ecstasy might signal a coming collapse. But in all the hours he’s spent in her presence over recent weeks, the lowest she’s ever descended to is mild amusement. She will sit in class from beginning to end, whatever the tempers erupting around her, basking in light and loving her flailing peers. Russell has watched her all class long out of the corner of his eye, levitating in the middle of the fray, shining like some giant horse chestnut in full sun.
Does the woman feel real elation, or does she just imagine it? He runs the meaningless question into the ground.
He launches his slow Internet connection, then stares at the search-engine box, wondering how to initiate a search for unreasonable delight.
He taps in euphoria, and erases it. He taps in manic depression, and deletes that, too. He taps in extreme well-being. And right away, he’s swamped. In the world of free information, the journey of a single step begins in a thousand microcommunities. Inconceivable hours of global manpower have already trampled all over every thought he might have and run it to earth with boundless ingenuity. Even that thought, a digitally proliferating cliché
In less time than it would take to comb through the global auction houses for a favorite childhood toy, he discovers the positive-psychology movement. One more massive development he’s never heard of. An empirical science of happiness-why not? And an international phenomenon-but what isn’t, these days? After centuries of studying all the ways the mind goes wrong, psychology has finally gotten around to studying how it might go right.
The whole field seems to have kick-started around the year 2000, just as the world began to descend into a new round of collective misery. And already the discipline is overflowing with enough articles, books, and conferences to make a casual lurker like Russell Stone overdose.
Results 1 through 10 of about 9,300,000. He feels that vertigo he gets from going out to the end of Navy Pier and glancing back at the hundred-story, steel-and-glass towers spinning out their million innovations per cubic meter per minute. He scrolls through the matches, this network of seething bits at last made visible to anyone with a browser. The vision is almost bracing, the feeling Russell had as a boy of ten, when he and his brother, Robert, stood in the mist at Table Rock, Niagara Falls, shouting in the murderous cascade. The sheer scale absolves him. The world falls at too many buckets per second for him to rescue anyone.
He clicks on link after link, diving down into the maelstrom of discovery, not sure what he is looking for, but finding no end of things he isn’t.
Russell finds what he’s after at last, not online but in archaic print. He sees it in a sidebar in his latest bedside happiness manual, a tinted box with the heading “The Better Without the Bitter?”
Have you ever come across someone with an oversized appetite for life? Someone who seems to feel nothing but major keys, resiliently joyous, impervious to distress? Some people are simply the big winners in genetics’ happiness roulette. They live every day bathed in renewable elation, enjoying a constant mania without the depression, ecstasy without the cyclic despair. These people (and they are very rare) may possess a trait called hyperthymia
He hasn’t made it up. It’s biological. Researchers study it. It has a Greek name.
But don’t be fooled: people who are exhilarated, inspired, and full of vibrant life may actually suffer from hypomania, a condition associated with full-fledged bipolar disorder. Hyperthymia is a durable trait; hypomania is a cyclical state. The first can be life-enhancing, the second, deadly. As usual, it’s best to leave a full diagnosis to the professionals.
The thought creeps up on him, as unreal as that euphoric refugee. The woman has something that should be looked at. He, Russell Stone, in deeply over his head, needs to consult a real professional about Thassa Amzwar.
He tries the Mesquakie home portal. The college must have shrinks, or whatever the latest euphemism calls them. With little effort, he finds it: Psychological Services Center. On the screen, it looks just like a brokerage. The counselors each have their own page for potential student clients to scan.
He searches their images, feeling no more than a twinge of shame. He has used website photographs to pick a dentist. He has checked out the Facebook mugs of the amateur authors he edits. It doesn’t feel creepy anymore. It feels like self-defense. If his grandchildren ever read the journal entry where he considers the ethics of “face peeping,” they’ll just laugh. If he doesn’t burn his journals first. If he ever has grandchildren. Maybe his grandchildren will post his journals on whatever replaces the Internet, alongside every embarrassing photo of him ever taken. It won’t even be posting anymore. Shared will be the default condition.
Face peeping does for Russell what selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors do for his brother. It allows him to cope with a torrent of strangers, without wigging.
The first psychologist looks like a ridiculously benign Realtor. The second looks like somebody’s fervently maiden aunt. The third would eat him for breakfast with just a squirt of no-cholesterol spread. The fourth stops him dead.
She’s Grace’s clone.
Only older, he thinks. Then he remembers: Grace is older now, too. Candace Weld, Licensed Clinical Psychologist, looks so much like Grace Cozma that Russell goes tachycardic. He sees the differences, but none is big enough for his gut to give a damn. It’s Grace, give or take; the spray of fight-or-flight hormones cascading through his limbs proves it.
He folds his shaking hands behind his neck. He feels himself plummeting into paranormal genre fiction. Know this story? He wrote it. He should close his browser, flush his history, delete all his cookies, and run.
The words on the profile page swim into focus:
Candace Weld works with students who are coping with stress, anxiety, low self-esteem, burnout, and difficult relationships. She also specializes in eating disorders and questions of body image. Candace helps students understand that feeling good about themselves is more important than being “perfect ”
He rereads, reeling, wondering how Grace could have come to this. He stares at the picture of the counselor; the resemblance weakens, but not the recognition. All his pictures of Grace went long ago to the flame, so he has nothing to compare this woman to. After another few minutes of paralyzed staring, what’s left of Grace Cozma’s face blends into this one.
Someone else dials the center, gives his Mesquakie ID number, and asks for an appointment. He hears that someone say No, not urgent and Nothing really wrong with me. An appointments secretary who has heard that particular danger signal once too often slips him in for early next week.
I bring him back his old obsession-at least her face. It isn’t my idea. This twist has been lying in wait for him. For years now, Russell Stone has bunkered down against the memory of a woman he doesn’t even like. He’s written his own ghost story, in advance.
I never seek out uncanny plots. I find them way too cheaply gratifying. I stay away from books with inexplicable coincidences, prophetic events, or eerie parallels. But they seem to find me anyway. And when I do read them, however conventional, they rip me open and turn me into someone else.
This is what the Algerian tells me: live first, decide later. Love the genre that you most suspect. Good judgment will spare you nothing, least of all your life. Flow, words: there’s only one story, and it’s filled with doubles. The time for deciding how much you like it is after you’re dead.
Candace Weld’s picture, vita, and life philosophy sit online in the Mesquakie directory for any spammer or sicko to find. Any nut with a keyboard could stalk her. Russell could probably get her credit history without too much trouble. In fact, the lightest digging reveals that she’s got a ten-year-old boy with a photo-filled page on a kids’ social networking site. It took the species millions of years to climb down out of the trees, and only ten years more to jump into the fishbowl.
Five afternoons later he’s up in the counseling center, trying to keep his limbs from shaking free of his body. The reception area is cheerful and fabric-oriented. Two female students sit nearby, each texting into their laps. In the stack of magazines spread around for waiting clients, he finds, to his horror, a copy of Becoming You with his fingerprints all over the text.
They call him in by anonymous number. He’s a wreck by the time he reaches the office. Candace Weld, LPC, rises from an L-shaped desk in the corner to shake his hand. She introduces herself, but he knows her already. She holds herself nothing like Grace: a cardinal in place of a scarlet tanager. She regards him, her face tipped in a tentative smile. She’s maybe thirty-eight, six years older than she should be. But the puzzled eyes, the brave cheeks, and the childish pug nose combine to slam his chest.
“Please sit,” she says, and waves at a stuffed chair. She sits in another, angled toward him. A shaded reading lamp stands between them. A half-height bookshelf hugs the wall behind her, filled with books on healthy living. He recognizes one of the happiness encyclopedias he’s been poring over these last weeks. On the wall above the bookshelf hangs the azure dream of Hopper’s Lee Shore. The room is an aggressively cozy corner of a furniture showroom. They sit together, home again after a long day, trying to decide on pizza versus sushi. Grace, wild Grace, domestically tranquil at last.
“How can I help you?” she asks, her face a cheerful blank. It’s no one he’s ever met.
He tilts his head and grimaces as warmly as he can. “I’m not here for myself, really. I’m concerned about one of my students.”
She recoils an inch. For just an instant, he’s unreadable. Like he’s grabbed her by the elbow and started cackling. Then she smiles and says, “That’s fine. Tell me.”
Weld thought: This man has recently been shocked to discover that he still has a future. He sat in her stuffed chair, his eyes panning like a security camera, his chest so cupped that she twitched a little when he claimed to have come about someone else.
Four weeks earlier, yet another besieged student had erupted and shot up yet another school, this one in Wisconsin, only three hundred miles away. It happened every other semester, like some natural cycle, and every time, in the wake of the tragedy, a wave of concerned Mesquakie instructors flooded the counseling center. When those waves hit, the counselors were cautioned to work doubly hard at treating each case as if it were unique.
Candace Weld started the consultation with all the set protocols: Has the student made any direct or implied threats? Does the student display violent, erratic, or aggressive behavior? The questions just baffled the visiting instructor. Does the student display behavior that might require immediate medical attention? His each no was increasingly agitated.
Early on in every consultation, Weld liked to give her clients vivid shorthand names. She often tagged her art students after artists-Munch, a photography MFA candidate badly in need of lorazepam. Botero, a pale girl who planned to eat her way into her mother’s heart. Morandi, a sandy glass-bottle freshman reconciled to his gray still life. But Russell Stone was a writer, or, as he explained, “At least I play one in the classroom.” Fyodor, she decided, penning the name at the upper right of her fresh spiral pad: Fyodor, feverish with beliefs.
In what way did he find the student’s behavior troubling?
He laid out the whole story, which Candace Weld noted in detail. Document everything. The stranger the tale, the more important the paper trail. She leaned forward into his accounts, as if some scrap might otherwise fall between them. As he launched into his exposition-Algeria, murder, exile-she had to remind herself to stop listening and keep writing.
He wandered deep into backstory. She tried to guide him, but he seemed trapped inside a thick volume, and all the pace and cadence of her profession were powerless to extract him.
She asked: Are you worried Ms. Amzwar might be suffering some kind of breakdown?
Her transcript has him answering: “I’m worried that she is excessively happy, in a way that can’t possibly be right.”
Why not?
“Because she’s an Algerian civil war orphan refugee.”
Why couldn’t an Algerian refugee be happy?
But at that question, Fyodor just slumped and shrugged.
She asked if he’d consulted with anyone at the college-any of Ms. Amzwar’s other teachers.
“One or two of the other students ”
Seeking another opinion had clearly never occurred to him.
Had Ms. Amzwar ever approached him in distress?
Fyodor: “I’m not sure she’s capable of distress.”
Then why, exactly, was he so concerned?
“From what I understand, if she’s truly hyperthymic, then she doesn’t need anything from anyone. But if she has hypomania, she’s in trouble. All that elation is just waiting to crash.”
She breathed in and transcribed his words, not for the first time in her counseling career silently cursing Wikipedia. Out loud, she said, “She’d have to make an appointment for me to do a complete assessment.”
He shut his eyes, then opened them. “Of course. I just don’t know how I can ask her to do that without ”
“Without asking her to see a psychological counselor?”
He nodded, defeated.
“I understand,” she said. “Tough to tell someone, ‘Get help. You’re too happy.’ ”
He nodded again, his lip half curling. Fyodor smiled.
“You should consult with her other instructors. See if any of them are also concerned.”
“Okay,” he said, not even pretending that he might.
Obeying the protocols, Candace Weld bit down and started again. Would he say that Thassadit Amzwar was sociable?
The question amused him. “Every single person she meets is a long-lost friend.”
Did Thassadit race or free-associate when she talked?
“Just the opposite. She brings everyone back down to a reasonable pace.”
Did she fidget or jiggle or bite her nails?
“She sits beaming for the whole class period.”
Did she ever seem cryptic or allusive or grandiose?
“My God, no.”
Was she ever edgy or aggressive?
He twisted his lips and shook his head, the question too ludicrous to humor.
What did she eat? How much did she sleep? He answered the best he could. Something heartbreakingly amateur clung to him. But he wasn’t the subject of the consultation.
The psychologist set down her pen. She steepled her fingers to her lips. “Maybe someone should get a urine sample from this woman?”
He took his time answering. She admired that.
“If I knew a drug that produced sustained, intense, level, loving well-being without any trace of stupor or edge, I’d take it myself.”
She cocked her head and twisted her lips. “You’d have to. Everyone else would already be on it.”
He laughed then, a sharp little bark of alarm. She caught her hand smoothing her cheek and dropped it into her lap. “You’ve never seen her get irritable?”
He waited a beat, but only out of respect. “I’ve watched her for almost two months, and I’ve never seen her even grimace.”
She flipped through her notes for a hidden explanation. “Obviously, I can’t say anything without seeing her in person. This isn’t a diagnosis. I’d never say you have no cause for concern. But you aren’t really describing mania, from what I can tell.”
He couldn’t even pretend composure. She liked that in him. “What am I describing?”
“We can talk more, if you’d like. About why she disturbs you. You could make another appointment.”
For a moment, Fyodor fumbled. Then all the visiting instructor wanted was to get away.
For her doctoral thesis, Candace Weld had studied 480 cases and analyzed the various ways that clients ended their treatments. Some reached a satisfying stopping place. Some terminated prematurely, when they were almost home. Others spent years going nowhere before finally throwing in the towel. This one, she knew from the moment he walked into her office, was destined to terminate before therapy even began.
But waiting was her art, and her medium, the blind confusion of others. “Come talk whenever you like,” she told him. “I’m here, if anything changes.”
She sits in the chair next to him, Grace poised on the South Rim. He fights to keep from lapsing into old, private patois. He answers her professional questions, hearing himself stutter as if on tape delay. She gives him nothing but her guarded opinion that Thassa is probably not about to hurt herself. He’s come to the wrong place. This woman is a licensed counselor. He needs a positive psychologist. He wants to apologize for wasting her time. He’s long ago written off his own.
They stand and shake hands. She starts to speak, but something stops her. He has the weirdest sense that she recognizes him. She almost remembers that they, in another life, were lovers.
“Wait a moment,” Candace Weld tells him. She crosses to her desk. She walks the way Grace would have, if Grace had been the person he thought she was. She riffles through a drawer and retrieves a small white rectangle. She writes something on it, then holds it out to Russell at arm’s length.
The gesture freezes him. The outthrust arm, the cradling grasp: it’s Thassa, pressing her book against the plate-glass window. He shrinks from the offering. But she holds it steady, reeling him back in.
It’s only her business card. He takes it like it’s an archaeological artifact. The college logo, a counseling center address, her name and title, phone and e-mail, and another phone number scribbled in ink. “That’s my direct line.”
In tiny italic font, centered beneath the words “Licensed Clinical Psychologist,” he reads:
You have cause-so have we all-of joy.
He’s sixteen, and seated in a metal lawn chair in the backyard of his childhood home, struggling through a mildewed Shakespeare, with the dictionary and encyclopedia on a drinks table beside him. July of his junior year in high school, and for months, he’s felt an overwhelming premonition that he’ll be a playwright when he grows up.
The premonition was a lie. He never quite grasped drama, never got the hang of how people really talk, never mastered human psychology. The best he managed was a scene or two of clumsy imitation vérité.
He lifts his head, again fighting the sense of being scripted. He searches for any hint that she’s running him through an elaborate psychological experiment. But her face is frank and open in a way Grace’s never was.
“For our escape is much beyond our loss.” He doesn’t mean to speak out loud.
She stares at him. “Oh! The quote. I do like that one. The students usually do, too.”
“Is this the only card you use?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
No reason. Less than no reason.
Back outside, on the street below, whiplash settles in. The appointment has done nothing but fill him with shame. Who is he to police someone else’s well-being? A cold wind slices down from Milwaukee. A week ago, the city was a blast kiln. The temperature has dropped from ninety to sixty in four days. Seasonal affective disorder: the entire spinning planet must be bipolar.
Seven things worth journaling about Candace Weld:
Boston accent, not yet obliterated by the Midwest.
She used to be religious; now she’s empirical.
She’s never been without some calling. For the last twelve years, it has been reminding people that they’re free.
Her office walls have three pictures of sisters and two of girlfriends. Five of her little boy. None of the boy’s father.
She has twice taken herself off cases after developing compromising emotional attachments.
Most of her clients love her. The few that hate her need her love.
She wakes up every morning feeling almost criminal that she can make a living doing exactly what she was born to do.
Three things Russell Stone actually writes about her in his journal that evening:
She’s a middle child, a helper. She doesn’t know how obvious this is.
She’d be the best kind of person to have in your court.
The gaps between her keyboard keys are filled with cookie crumbs.
The class grows closer, reluctant to let the holidays split them. They open up their unedited notebooks to one another. Journal and Journey turns into group therapy by another name. They swap all their hidden hostages now, when they trade their nightly writing. They travel together, down into one another’s darkest places and up to their wind-whipped peaks. For one last moment, the eight of them share something better than a story.
They take on Roberto’s nineteen months of annihilation by meth, the weekend-long punding sprees, taking apart and reassembling an old pendulum clock six times in a row. They join Charlotte’s permanent guerrilla campaign against her father after the baffled automotive executive punches daddy’s little girl in the mouth, then spends the next three years begging for forgiveness. They cheer Kiyoshi’s provisional victory over agoraphobia the day he summons up the courage to order a fish sandwich in a McDonald’s.
And they share Thassa’s bewildered glimpses of the United States-waiting to get a license at the DMV, trying to recycle batteries at a behemoth box store, witnessing her first televised megachurch evangelical service. Her journal knocks them back down into immigrant senses. Their country goes wilderness again, through her eyes. Her words make it okay to find pleasure in nothing at all-trading folk songs with the mailman or mapping the trees of the near South Side. Joker Tovar cuts his ADD engines and listens, one hand cupped over his eyes. Even Artgrrl Weston drops the groomed irony and nods, like she, too, wants to be Thassa when she grows up.
Suppose that panic or even pointlessness can’t touch us. Say that nothing can touch us, but what we say.
There’s the scene where Stone asks Thassa to stay after class. As if he wants to talk to her about her course writing. The others, on their way to their traditional post-class jamboree, beg him not to monopolize their ringleader for too long.
He’s practiced this speech for so long that he almost gets the question out without bobbling. “There’s something I’d like to talk about. Would you have a minute? We could grab something downstairs ”
“Hey!” the Algerian asks. “Are you trying to date me?”
He steps back, slapped. “No! I just thought we could sit for a minute and discuss-”
Thassa laughs and shakes his elbow. “Yes, Mister Stone. It’s fine. I’m joking!”
They descend to the makeshift café, off the main-floor lobby. They hit the self-serve tea station and take their paper cups to a tiny steel-mesh table. Stone chatters nervously about the recently discovered miraculous benefits of tea polyphenols. Thassa waves him off. “Kabyle grannies knew about that, long before chemicals!”
Stone asks about Thassa’s surviving family. Thassa pulls pictures from her shoulder bag. She shows off her brother, Mohand, who has dropped out of community college and returned to Algiers, where he makes a living hiring himself out to stand endlessly in line for people mired in the bureaucratic state services. She passes him a shot of her aunt Ruza, the former dentist, tending the water lilies surrounding the chinoiserie pavilion in the Montreal botanical gardens. “A funny city,” the Kabyle says, shaking her head. “But it’s home now.”
Seeing his chance, Stone blurts out, “Do you miss it?”
“Sure! I miss every place I’ve ever lived.”
“Do you ever find yourself a little low? A little gray, down here, in this place?”
She tips her head, trying to figure out what kind of scene they’re writing. “Of course! I think you can imagine. How else to feel, so far from everything?”
“And does that ever frighten you?”
She sighs and looks skyward. Anyone who didn’t know her might say she’s exasperated. “You think I’m too happy, don’t you? The whole world thinks I’m too happy! Isn’t this America? No such thing as too much?”
His pulse spikes, and he looks around to flee. “I’m sorry. I don’t think that. I was just concerned that sometimes-”
She reaches across the table and flicks the back of his hand with her fingernails. “What do you think? I’m not strange. I feel everything you do. Can’t you tell that from my journals?”
He catches her eye; she must be joking again. At worst, her journal entries admit to tiny flecks of brown-small craft scattered across an open, golden sea. Everything that he feels? Maybe, if you invert all the doses.
“The problem is really my name.” She’s frowning, or at least it looks like a frown.
Stone shakes his head.
“Thassadit. This name means liver. I’m stuck with this prophecy. I can’t help it!”
Stone just looks at her, worse than worthless.
“Well, liver is the Tamazight for heart. You know! Joie. Expansion. Big feeling?”
She won’t say the word. “Generosity?”
“You see? I was doomed from birth.” She looks down, embarrassed. “Russell? The others are waiting at the bistro. Why don’t you join us?”
His heart tries to kickbox its way through his sternum. “I don’t think so.”
“Just ten minutes? You like these people. They like you.”
“I still have some work tonight.” Manuscripts to mark up; enthusiasm to edit back down into harmlessness.
“Please don’t worry about me,” she says. She stands and hugs him.
She’s halfway through the emptied lobby before he can say, “No, of course not.”
He goes home and binges all weekend on nineteenth-century Russian short stories. Just this once, fiction.
I need a genealogy for the word. It comes through the loins of that giant Latin gens, the one that so liberally shares its family name, family property, family ties, and family plot. The original root of the thing has spread its genes into an absurd number of offspring: genial, genital, genre, gentle, general, generic, germane, germinate, engine, generate, ginger, genius, jaunty, gendarme, genocide, and indigenous, while scattering cousins as far afield as cognate, connate, nascent, native, nation, children, kind. Generous to a fault. Too many progeny for any paternity test.
A heterogeneous word, but how benign? Does generous include all those who are by nature genuine, generative, anyone pregnant with connections, keen to make more kin?
Or is generosity a question of having the right blood, the innate germ of the genteel gentry?
It strikes me that genomicists will soon be able to trace a full lineage for any person with more journalistic precision than the dying race of philologists have ever been able to trace a given word’s more recent journey.
Forgive one more massive jump cut. This next frame doesn’t start until two years on. It’s the simplest of predictions to make. Tonia Schiff will find herself on a warehouse-sized plane flying east above the Arctic Circle, unsure what she is hoping to come across at the end of the ride.
She’ll be on a flight to Paris, economy this time, where she will catch a connecting flight to North Africa. A packed plane, 550 passengers: elder hostel groups, college kids with Eurail plans and Rough Guides, middle-class French couples-instant aristocrats of the plunging dollar on their way back from overnight shopping in New York-commuter businessmen with their spreadsheets full of pharmaceutical sales or financial services. And on this flight, she will try several times to watch the episode again, “The Genie and the Genome,” that segment of Over the Limit she filmed two years ago. Armed with a notebook computer, several disks from the archives, and dozens of hours of raw clips, she intends to weave a sequel that might somehow redeem her.
The third time through the episode, she’ll get as far as the bit where Kurton starts in on our being “collaborators in creation” when she’ll have to shut off the computer and put it back in her carry-on. She’ll look up through the rows of her fellow passengers, smothered by the coming world. And she’ll think how the species almost completed one magnificent act of self-understanding before it snuffed itself out.
I have her flip up her window slide and look out the plastic portal. Far below, at a distance she won’t be able to calculate, something the size of a continent will slip away west. The endless surface, a sheet of unbroken white just a few years ago, will be speckled all over and shot through with blue.
Tonia Schiff will sit for seven hours in the melee of the concourse at Orly Sud waiting for her connection to Tunis. Say it has happened already, just the way it will. Her flight is delayed and reposted half a dozen times. Reading becomes impossible, in the seething free-for-all of the gate. Continuous PA announcements shred all thought, and the age of talking to strangers in transit ended long ago.
To pass the time, she scans the crowd for cognitive biases. It’s a nasty little hobby, one that has driven away several boyfriends, including a trophy congressman whom she almost considered marrying. But the habit is too consoling to break.
All the flavors of bad science are out in force. Several twitchy passengers bandwagon around a sealed jet bridge for no good reason except that others are standing there. A red-faced Russian, sick with information bias, accosts a beleaguered ticket agent, who indulges a little skilled déformation professionnelle of her own. A pretty young couple hold hands and together influence the departure monitor by staring at it. And a loud compatriot of Schiff’s complains to no one about the loss of an upgraded seat that was never really his.
Here in the portal to the northernmost South, the glottal cadences of Arabic already immerse Schiff. The sounds of the crowd broaden and deepen into rhythms she no longer recognizes. A three-generation clan sits next to her, decked out in holiday-finest tunics and scarves among ziggurats of cardboard boxes lashed up with string-presents from France for an entire village, once they get home.
The father of this family in transit could almost be that mythic fair-haired, blue-eyed, Afro-Eurasian Kabyle that so obsessed nineteenth-century Europeans. Then again, they could all be Schiff’s own distant cousins, differing from her by only a handful of alleles.
She thinks: Look at me-as Islamophobic as anyone. Phobic of contemporary Muslims, anyway. For Golden Age Muslims, she feels the respect most people save for dead patriots. Alhazen, Avicenna, Averroës: advancing science when Europe was still waist-deep in angels and devils. Then something happened. Exploration stopped, replaced by received wisdom. Observation, washed away by certainty.
Much the same is happening again, this time on Schiff’s branch of the family tree. Her own government has long crusaded against all kinds of science, secure in the revealed knowledge they needed. Now Schiff herself wades into the middle of a fray that might just turn the moderate American citizen against any more discovery.
Once she assumed that it was just a matter of time before humanity mastered its own destiny. Now she knows that only the past is inevitable. Reason could break down at any moment. Look at Orly Sud.
Enough philosophy; she has sworn off it. Philosophy never consoled anyone. Tonia Schiff finds an outlet and flips on her notebook again. She cues up her rough clips and searches for a way to splice their cataclysms into a future worth birthing.
Then comes the next classroom scene. From Friday to Monday, ten suicides have succeeded in metropolitan Chicago, six of them the result of mood disorders, the second-leading medical killer of people Stone’s age. From the time he says goodbye to Thassa in the college cafeteria until he sees her again in next week’s classroom, 287 people nationwide take their own lives. It’s number three in Harmon’s list of most frequently used plots.
Stone holds forth to the class, clunking his way through Harmon’s chapter on focalization:
The world has seconds and minutes and hours and years and centuries, but only the mind has long and short. The world has inches and yards and miles, but only the mind can turn near into far
“Grandpa Fred has finally lost it,” Princess Heavy says. “He’s starting to drool.”
“Totally,” Spock agrees. “The man is whack. Fascinating.”
The rest of the class piles on, and pretty soon, Frederick Harmon is left in a quivering, bloody pulp in the center of their encounter group. Russell loses his losers and abandons the lecture in favor of more journal read-alouds.
He conducts the group feedback the same way he always does. But Thassa, who grazed his shoulder on her way in, just sits in the oval in a bubble of contentment. He tries to draw her into the discussion, but she hovers alongside it, soaking the words in. To receive may now be more generous than to give.
Invisiboy apologizes to everyone. “I’m sorry you all have to listen to my lameness. Twenty-five new blog posts every second, and every one of them is more entertaining than my entry.”
Charlotte berates him. “You shouldn’t worry about entertaining anyone.” Before Russell has a chance to shout Yes! she adds, “Nothing really matters except entertaining yourself.”
Russell moves the group on to John Thornell’s excerpt. Spock reads a piece about playing paintball up in Wisconsin with a dozen strangers for thirty-six hours without sleeping. When he’s done, Russell can do nothing but sit, his face yipping, unable to sink the putt of appropriate response.
He tries, ever so gently, to suggest room for improvement. He cloaks the suggestion in a general observation. “As I always say, all the best writing is rewriting.” The circle just blinks at him. No way they’re buying perpetual revision. Half of them don’t even believe in the Shift key.
Counterstrike dismisses Teacherman. It’s his God-given constitutional right. He gives Spock’s entry his highest praise: “Perfect the way it is, boo. Don’t change a word. The thing flows like manga.”
They have to explain to Russell what manga is.
“Comic books?” Teacherman pleads. “Do we really have to go there?” His eyes latch onto Roberto, usually reliable in bringing the group back to sense.
But even Muñoz turns on him. “Well,” the Thief whispers, his hands like balls of bailing wire, “the best comics must be better than any print-only book. It kind of follows: pictures plus words gives you more to work with than just words alone.”
“What about interiority?” Russell challenges. “Complex levels of concealed thought? Things that aren’t material or visible. What about getting deep inside people’s heads?”
“I hate books that tell me what people think,” Princess Heavy says.
“Exactly,” Counterstrike agrees. “That Henry James guy? He is right at the top of my bitch-slap list.”
Russell snaps. “Fine. Let’s all just drown in shiny consumer shit.” He hears the word too late, garbling himself only at syllable’s end, like a television censor asleep at the bleep switch.
Even Thassa is stunned. They all sit frozen, until the Joker says, “Only the mind can turn shit into shiny.”
Stone apologizes to everyone, twice. He’s so ashamed he can’t even restart the conversation. He lets them go early. He’s ready to resign. Mesquakie was crazy to hire him.
The Berber woman stays after class. It’s all he can do to meet her eye. “Are you ill?” she asks.
Of course he’s ill; he’s alive, isn’t he?
She puts the back of her hand to his forehead. “Mmm. Yes. Warm. You need poly-pheelys, I think.”
They take the elevator down together. She studies him, shyly, but shows no need to ask about his meltdown. She just wants him to be well. Same as she wants from any stranger she passes on the street. She just needs him to delight in the world’s obvious inconsequence. It’s all she’s ever needed from anyone, in any country.
The elevator opens into the main lobby. Three night students straggle in, grinning knowingly as they exit. Thassa stops. Her olive skin blushes russet. “Maybe your problem is that you believe too much in words.”
He can’t even reply maybe. All he can do is stand wincing at everything in this life that ever made him happy. She takes his elbow and steers him toward the corner café. He follows her to the tea canteen, then freezes, dead. Seated at one of the tiny mesh tables is Grace’s double, the psychologist, Candace Weld.
Weeks later, Candace Weld would try to decide if she’d deliberately ambushed them. She’d been working late, catching up on session annotation. Between a sick soul and the healthy law, nothing mattered more than a good document trail. She was adding a closing appraisal to Russell Stone’s interview when she noticed in her notes that his evening class was just about to let out. Gabe was at his father’s; nothing waited back at her apartment except dirty dishes. She still had a good three hours of work. She put in one more, then went downstairs and sat for a moment on the edge of the café. She wasn’t even sure she could pick out an Algerian from the mix of evening students. But a potentially hypomanic one she might just notice.
They came from the elevators arm in arm. Candace couldn’t control her face, and Fyodor certainly saw her fail to. He shook his arm free fast enough to startle the girl. That’s when Candace Weld wondered what exactly she’d come for, sitting idly in the college lobby, when she should have been heading home.
Weld told her clients that if she ever saw them in public, she would never acknowledge them unless they initiated. She got so practiced at that professionalism that she sometimes failed to acknowledge simple friends. Russell Stone was not a client, of course; he had come to her in consultation only. Had he come out of the elevators alone, she probably would have said hello. But not like this.
She didn’t have to. Fast enough to surprise all three of them, the adjunct steered the girl toward the counselor’s table and made introductions. He didn’t say friend. He didn’t say psychologist. He didn’t say student. He just gave names and let the roles fend for themselves. She did admire that.
The girl was no girl. Twenty-three, but the radiance made her seem younger. People, like paintings, usually darkened with age.
“You know this man?” the Algerian asked. “That’s perfect! May we join ”
Without Stone’s prior account, Weld might have thought she had just come from a concert or film, some exhilarating work of art that made life, for a moment, seem kind and solvable.
“I was just leaving,” Weld said.
“Five minutes?” The student grabbed her instructor’s wrist and shook it. “You know this man. You have to explain him to me.”
As Candace Weld did whenever she was lost, she grinned broadly. And in that moment of her confusion, the pair sat down. The younger woman could not stop beaming at Weld, her eyes all speculation. As soon as she hit the chair, she rose again. “I’ll make the tea. What do you take? I know already what this man drinks.”
As soon as the student wandered away to the self-serve station, the teacher started up, in that male shorthand that needs each word to do twelve things. “I’m sorry.”
Weld donned her counselor’s mask. “For what?”
“She’s trying to cheer me up.”
“Why is that?”
“I lost my temper in class.”
The man was artless, whatever else he was. But before Candace Weld could press deeper, Thassadit Amzwar returned with three hot drinks. She handed them out, saying, “Saha, saha.” Weld put hers to her lips and set it down, just to be doing something.
Thassadit asked, “So did you know this man when he was young?”
“No,” Weld said, stupidly adding, “not really.”
“This is a shame, because I need to know-”
“Ms. Weld is a college counselor,” Stone blurted. “I just met her recently.”
Weld’s face went hot at the man’s scrupulousness. But the news electrified the younger woman. “Serious? Une psychologue? Then I really must ask you some things!”
Counselor and teacher both froze.
“Do you think it’s possible for people to change their own story?”
Candace Weld had planned to down half the tea and bolt. But that question was her drug, her hottest hot button, her hobby and her calling. She could no more refrain from weighing in on it than a gambling addict could keep from testing out a new pair of dice. Before she could stop herself, Candace was holding forth about the untapped ability of any human temperament to recompose itself. Everyone could be redeemed, given the right combination of behavioral adjustment, medical intervention, and talk. And of these three, the foremost was talk.
And as they talked, the counselor’s words turned playful, to match the immigrant’s. Something contagious about the Algerian. Her delight was irresistible: like being seven, and ten hours away from turning eight. Like being eighteen, out on the highway when a tune with a hook like resurrection came on the radio for the first time. Like being twenty-nine, and having the doctor tell you that company was coming.
Candace Weld could count on her two elbows the number of people in life who always made her feel lighter than she was. She’d met both of those people before she’d turned this woman’s age. And yet here was this knocked-about refugee putting her, within twenty minutes, high up on a thermal, reluctant to do anything but circle and enjoy the view.
They followed a bread-crumb trail of topics: How long therapy takes and when you know it’s done. Whether some cultures were healthier than others. Why America was terrified of every country that the Ottomans had ever ruled. Weld trotted out the twelve words left from her two years of college French; her pronunciation paralyzed Thassa with mirth. A week or two would turn them into big and little sister.
The secret of happiness suddenly seemed absurdly simple: surround yourself with someone who was already happy. Weld caught Stone’s eye and screwed up her face: You’re right; she’s unnerving. Fyodor barely acknowledged her, as if his job in this scene- the three principals meet for tea-was to sit stock-still and regret the development he’d set in motion.
Thassa, finally, broke things up. “Hey! Some people have homework to do, if they want to succeed in life.”
The three of them rose and stepped outside into a late-October night still warm enough to walk without hunching forward. The wind came in crisp off the lake, and in twos and threes, the leaves of the caged city trees made their apricot escape. Thassa walked backward for a few steps, looking at the couple through a director’s shot box she made with her thumbs and index fingers, pleased by whatever she saw inside the frame. Then she smiled at the future, waved goodbye, turned, and vanished.
Candace Weld felt a twinge she couldn’t quite identify. She turned to face Russell Stone, warming to all the bewilderment that the man had nowhere to put. He looked back, but couldn’t quite hold her eye. He wanted to insist that he’d initiated nothing. She dismissed his apologies with one raised eyebrow.
“That isn’t mania,” she told him, even as doubt spread across his face. It was, in fact, something much weirder. “That’s what we in the mental health business call peak experience. And you’re saying she’s like that all the time?”
She offers him her hand good night. The hand is polished driftwood. He takes it and feels something awful and instant. One of them squeezes, then the other, and they tumble too quickly into mutual knowledge.
He knows this story. You know this story: Thassa will be taken away from him. Other interests will lay claim. His charge will become public property. He might have kept quiet and learned from her, captured her in his journal, shared a few words at the end of his allotted four months, then returned to real life, slightly changed. A vaguely midlist literary story. But he’s doomed himself by calling in the expert. It’s his own fault, for thinking that Thassa’s joy must mean something, for imagining that such a plot has to go somewhere, that something has to happen.
I know exactly how he feels.
The “Genome” caption reads: Geoffrey Tomkin, Author, Tomorrow’s Child: The Science and Fiction Behind Germline Engineering. The image says: dead of coronary heart disease in two years.
TOMKIN:
If you want to issue a blanket pardon for every social crime we commit against one another, you just have to convince the public that destiny is in our genes.
SCHIFF:
You’re saying that it would be bad for social justice if Thomas Kurton is right?
TOMKIN:
I’m saying, the minute you claim, “My genes made me do it,” accountability disappears. And the minute you tell prospective parents, “We’ll give your child the traits you want and get rid of the ones you don’t,” you turn humanity into a fast-food franchise.
S CHIFF:
It would be bad if he’s right, but the evidence doesn’t necessarily prove he’s wrong?
TOMKIN:
Genomics says there are no genetic contributions without countless environmental ones.
SCHIFF:
Is it too late for me to get taller and prettier?
TOMKIN [glaring]:
These transhumanists are really big on making people taller. But taller than what? When Kurton’s company starts selling parents the genes for a seven-foot son, someone else is going to bring out an eight-foot model.
SCHIFF:
Is it too late for me to become an eight-foot model?
Weld calls Stone three days later, to postmortem the meeting. He’s in his other life, at Becoming You. She’s the first person from the college to use this listed contact number. It’s Halloween, and he’s dressed up as himself.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Thassadit,” the counselor says.
Russell suppresses a grunt. The lamb has crossed the lion’s mind. But there’s something in her voice, some professional reticence that worries him. “You think there’s reason for concern?”
“No. I wouldn’t say concern. But I’d like to talk to you about some possibilities.”
He says, “What kind of possibilities?”
She’s silent one beat too long. “I think someone should work her up. Take a good look. She seems immune to anxiety. Her positive energy is amazing. She maintains a continuous state of flow. Maybe she’s benefited from some kind of post-traumatic growth.”
A sick feeling comes over him. “It sounds like you’ve already worked her up.”
“Well, she did stick her head in the counseling center over lunch. Just to say hello.”
“And stayed for a chat?”
“We talked a little.”
“And now you’re her new best friend.”
“Russell, I think she should be explored.”
He catches himself gouging the margins of the manuscript in front of him with red pen. “You’ve seen her. You said she’s okay.”
“I mean really looked at, under controlled conditions. There’s a research group over at Northwestern ”
She trails off when he says nothing.
“Russell?”
He no longer thinks anyone needs to test anything but Thassa’s journal entries. “You said this isn’t hypomania.”
“It isn’t. I would bet my career.”
“Do you think it’s hyperthymia?” The better without the bitter.
Her silence oozes dislike for the term. “I think a professional researcher should look at her.”
“She likes you,” he says.
“I like her. Anyone would.”
This woman is not Grace. Grace always thought he was attacking when he was making nice. Constance Weld thinks he’s making nice when he’s attacking.
“Why are you asking my permission?”
“Well, I’m not, really. But I am asking your feeling.”
Testing is an excuse. The psychologist just wants to spend more time around the Berber woman, like everyone else.
“You asked her already? About Northwestern?”
“I mentioned the possibility.”
“And she said that sounded like more fun than a roadside explosive.”
“You don’t have to be like this,” the counselor says.
He watches himself regress. “No? What do I have to be like?”
“All right. Let’s not talk about this right now.”
He’s pathetic. Worse than a prepubescent. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m out of line.”
“No,” the psychologist replies. “I understand entirely.”
Cold, wet leeches attach to his brain, the way they did when his first writing successes turned into nightmare. “Look,” he tries. “I don’t mean to Maybe you and I could talk about this sometime. Coffee or lunch, or something.”
He means fake lunch. Purely symbolic hostage swap. Nothing she might take him up on.
Luckily, her acceptance is as hypothetical as his offer. “Sure,” she says, her voice weird. “I think I’m Are you free Saturday?”
For want of anything more appropriate, he says, “Saturday’s good.”
“Good,” she says, meaning nothing. They make plans, plans the Kabyle might just as well have written for them. Candace Weld names a place dangerously close to Water Tower, a nice Moroccan restaurant. “That’s next to Algeria, right?”
“Streeterville, I think.”
She waits just a beat, her silence wicked. “Am I supposed to laugh at that?”
Candace ran her own experiment once, three years earlier. The packet sat for at least a day, in plain sight, in her mail slot at the counseling center. The creamy envelope with the coneflower painted on the bottom right corner must have been handled by at least two of the center’s clerical staff. The nub was small and folded into thick paper, but still it amazed Candace that the bulge had alarmed no one.
The letter was unsigned and handwritten, its fat, loopy script with balloon i-dots the graphological equivalent of that coneflower stationery. It read:
Don’t judge the ride till you tried!!!
And nestling happily in the top crease of the unfolded page was a flat, bright-yellow pill stamped, absurdly, with the universal smiley-face icon.
Weld knew at once who had mailed the pill. It came from a free-spirit painting major Weld called Frankenthaler, who had all sorts of complications, including ritual praying to the spirit of anorexia: O goddess Ana, in your depravity She had told Weld all about an amazing series of expeditions on threshold doses of so-called X: Everything just perks up, and you wonder who killed the big bad wolf.
Weld had given Frankenthaler the usual literature, with its well-researched warnings. And Frankenthaler, feeling judged, had sent her this tiny yellow sun. The pill could not be cheap, on a student budget, and for any twenty-year-old to care about the empathic education of any adult was almost touching. Weld should have turned it in immediately to the center for analysis. Instead, she slipped it into her purse until she had a chance to think.
Carrying around a Schedule I drug as she walked through the university building to the street altered her awareness all by itself. She’d read about the substance over the years, and three of her friends had described it in detail. She knew of at least one psychologist who’d used MDMA in his practice, before it was banned. Her husband, Martin, had tried it before their marriage, and he called it one of the most meaningful experiences of his life.
Now, just having the stuff in her purse gave Candace sympathetic symptoms. She felt the unbearable dearness of the faces coming downstream in the rush-hour foot torrent along Adams. She could talk to them without talking. She could see with ridiculous clarity all of the needs lining their faces. She felt the full, desperate desires of a populace 58 percent of whom needed some kind of chemical intervention just to manage. All this from a little pill sitting in the bottom of her purse.
This was in her last few months together with Marty. She thought: Just go home, put it on your tongue, talk with the man like a little child for the next four hours, rediscover the world with him as if it were freshly invented. Save your relationship. Bend a little. Put your family back together. Just try it, in the interest of science.
She stood in line at the car park, clutching her magnetic-strip card as if it were her lottery ticket out of Purgatory. Even the man in the cashier cage seemed Shakespearean. On Lake Shore Drive North, she remembered Frankenthaler’s awed description of how she’d sat in her kitchen, looking at a box of Mister Salty pretzels, feeling gratitude and wonder for everything in the solar system: I was afraid to look out of the window on the park across the way. Scared it would be more than I could take. But I looked, and I was astounded. Peace just overpowered me. I’d spent my whole life coming here, and now I was home. Everyone alive deserves to feel that way once.
For a day after her mistake Weld felt depressed, a depression as strong as the residual effect of any phenethylamine. Hers was an intense sadness at the thought that some brain-chemical look-alike could simulate for an hour any human emotional state in the spectrum. Not just simulate: duplicate. Produce for real.
In their next session together, Frankenthaler asked if Weld had gotten any recent presents in the mail. Candace said she had. An excited Frankenthaler asked, “And?”
Weld just smiled wistfully. “I flushed it down the sink, I’m afraid.”
So there’s a scene where adjunct and counselor meet for another consultation, this time over bisteeya. Weld shows up looking like another person: flannel slacks and a funky hand-knit sweater. She catches him eyeing it. “Knitting is supposed to be the best relaxation. You can see the rows where it worked and the rows where not so much.”
“You made this?” He tries to gauge how much surprise is flattering.
She nods, beaming. “I started taking knitting lessons right around the time that I began studying how to read Mayan glyphs. Now I can kind of do both!”
He’s braced for an ordeal, so he’s off balance all lunch long when talk is nothing but pleasant. She’s not without her own anxieties about handing Thassa over to the positive-psychology labs. She’s exploratory and knowledgeable and open to negotiation. She genuinely wants to know what Stone thinks.
He thinks science can turn up nothing that he didn’t already intuit, the first night of class.
She nods at his objections. She has no idea she’s attractive, and probably doesn’t care. The anti-Grace. It strikes him that she may not even like the way she looks. A wave of lust courses through him, which he rides out.
They talk about work histories, life at Mesquakie, near north neighborhoods, the industrial fear state. Over date pudding, she tells him about negativity bias. I’m not really sure if she tells him this over date pudding, of course, or even if she tells him at this lunch at all. But she tells him, at some point, early on. That much is nonfiction: no creation necessary.
She tells him to imagine he’s in a deserted parking lot and a twenty-dollar bill blows right in front of him. There’s no one in sight he can return it to.
“How do you feel?”
“Good,” he admits.
“Right. A nice meal or a CD just dropped out of the sky.”
A book, he thinks. Nedjma, by Kateb Yacine. The book Thassa described in her latest journal entry. A dream of escape from the colonized mind.
“Now imagine you’re in a store. You approach the cash register with a purchase, reach inside your pocket for the twenty, and find it’s missing. You accidentally threw it away when disposing of a crumpled tissue.”
He feels the difference, before she has to explain. The freebie was fun; the loss panics him, like he has just let terrorists into his apartment. The bad is crazily out of proportion to the good, and it’s the same twenty bucks.
“I see. I’m a nut job.”
She smiles with disturbing gusto, reaches across the table, and shakes his fingers. “So’s everyone! I’m right there with you, and I’ve studied this stuff. We remember a compliment for about three and a half days, but we hold on to a criticism for months. We think unpleasant events last about sixty percent longer than same-length pleasant ones. Threatening images get our attention faster, and we have to fight harder to look away. We need about five positive events to compensate for one comparable negative one. If you hurt a friend, you have to do five nice things to offset the damage.”
“We’re broken,” he intones.
“Not at all.”
“Five to one! We’re completely incapable of balanced judgment.”
She pulls her hair into a ponytail. She’s warm and clinical, at once. “Actually, if anything, the bias is accurate. There’s a solid reason for it. Think back to the Serengeti.”
“Ah, yes. I remember it well.”
She sticks her tongue out at him, then pretends she didn’t. “If you’re scouting and find food, that’s dandy. But if a pride of lions discovers your hidey-hole while you’re sleeping: Game Over. The bad can hurt you much more than the good can help. So nature selects for pessimists.”
He catches himself twirling his spoon between his fingers. He’s been doing it for minutes. He drops his hands into his lap, like stones. “So how did she slip through?”
The counselor’s face is novice bewilderment. It’s like they’re discussing their daughter’s just-discovered eating disorder. “That’s why I thought someone might want ”
But Candace doesn’t push it. She doesn’t push anything. It’s almost relaxing, and Russell Stone wonders just where this woman’s clinical interests start and stop.
They split the check down the middle. Then they walk back out into the outrageously gorgeous day. The sky is a Chagall deep cobalt, and the buildings are etched against it with a fine ink liner. Even the surly pedestrians pressing past them seem like friends. The psychologist sighs. “Just look at this beautiful place!” Grace’s good twin twists her face up at him, and he has to look away.
He closes his eyes and inhales. He’s deeply depressed by the thought: true happiness may depend on the weather. And in the next breath, he’s depressed that it might not. One of his happiness manuals claims that weather and mood strongly correlate, but only until people are cued to notice it
“So why should autumn make people feel so good?”
She smiles secretly. “I don’t know the precise chemistry. I’m sure it’s been studied.”
It’s the perfect day to play the tourist in one’s own life. They walk three blocks, into the shopping crowds surging up and down the Magnificent Mile, hunting for a cure to their misery that has not yet hit the market. She cranes her neck up at the Hancock. “When was the last time you went up?”
He squints at the calculation. “Sixteen years ago?”
Her eyes are aghast, delighted. “Come on. You can see four states from up there. And a good seventy-five percent of them aren’t ours!”
In my country, a new work of fiction is published every thirty minutes. That’s 17,530 new volumes annually, not including Web publication. Even assuming a tenth of the U.S. rate in other parts of the world, the total figure may be something like 50,000 invented worlds in this year alone.
Say the infant novel was born four centuries ago and grew at the rate of 100 titles a year for its first several decades. Say the curve shoots up sometime in the last century. I don’t know: a million total novels seems a plausible worldwide guess. You know what the next decade will bring. Beyond that, imagining is beyond imagining.
I try to calculate how many of those million-and-growing volumes are saddled with a romance-bright or doomed, healthy or diseased. I can’t do the math. Surely it must be most of them.
Sexual selection, the surest and most venerable form of eugenics, has molded us into the fiction-needing readers we are today. Part of me would love to belong to a species free, now and then, to read about something other than its own imprisonment. The rest of me knows that the novel will always be a kind of Stockholm syndrome-love letters to the urge that has abducted us.
They stand at the glass wall, elbow to elbow, watching crowds flow through the gorges below them. The city turns into a techno-opera, a glorious nanotechnological enterprise beyond the power of any coordinated forces to engineer. They find their neighborhoods, the college, six universities, a dozen museums and monuments, the dead stockyards and living stadiums, churches and commodities exchanges, the river-reversing channel, the four-mile-wide particle accelerator off in the distance. Their city is a staging ground too huge and hungry to dope out, lying like a scale maquette at their feet.
“Gabe loves it up here,” Candace says. She keeps her eyes earthward. “My son. Anything complicated and blinking, from high up. Ten years old, and he already has a résumé on file with NASA.”
“High up or deep down.” Stone talks to the glass, remembering. “Or far away, in some parallel universe. A thousand years before or after, anywhere but now.”
“That’s right!” She smiles at him, surprised. “How do you know my little guy?”
He shrugs: met him way back. “So tell me where that comes from. Infinite hunger for the unreal. Why should that be useful, in little boys?”
She gazes back down at the microbe races. He watches her trying to take in the panorama. Puzzled, vulnerable, hand-knit: she will not look like this again, the next time he sees her.
“I wish I knew.”
Numbing to the aerial view, they return to ground. The elevator drops so fast his ears hurt. This scene ends with Candace Weld studying him in return, in the tower lobby.
“So. Mr. Stone. I’m sorry to say, but I’ve enjoyed this. We should do it again somewhere else, sometime.”
He wonders if she means the Sears Skydeck.
Though he stays silent, she doesn’t wither. “I’m all about gathering more data. We in the social sciences like to avoid the small-N problem.”
“I sure. That sounds like fun.”
I watch him twist, the way he did so often in real life. Sounds like fun. A little of her poise, and he’d admit: Fun isn’t something I do very well. A little of her candor, and he’d ask: Is this about me or my student?
“And we can wait and see, about taking Thassa to visit the group at Northwestern. No hurry, obviously.”
They stand there awkwardly, two more victims of natural selection, caught between negativity bias and the eternal belief that the future will be slightly better than the present. In possession of all the data she’s going to get, Candace Weld smiles and waves and weaves her way across the homicidal traffic of Michigan Avenue.
He’s still awake the next morning at three thirty, doing the math, wondering how a thirty-two-year-old editor is going to take care of a ten-year-old son who works for NASA, let alone a twenty-three-year-old daughter who’s still in college.
Interior: a lab at Truecyte, one of Thomas Kurton’s many experimental spin-offs. A long room with eight rows of fifteen-foot workbenches, half of them capped by chemical fume hoods. Glassware and reagents spread a chaos across shelves and countertops, although the gloved, safety-goggled lab workers know exactly where everything is.
Some of the profuse gear could be straight out of labs two centuries old: pipettes and flasks, burners and retorts. But the crucial new gear has all gone digital: inscrutable black boxes covered in LEDs, sealed microelectronic sarcophagi that swallow up samples and report the relevant chemistry in clean columns on bright monitors; devices the size of bread machines that accept matchbox cartridges filled with tens of thousands of biological macromolecules suspended in arrays; sensors that read millions of data points in minutes, that make errors only once every few million reads, and that spit out answers to questions three billion years in the making.
The whole room is charged and alert, perched on the threshold of the next liberation.
Thomas Kurton’s close-up fills the video frame, a koala with a shy smile. He could fund-raise for some endangered wildlife fund. At fifty-seven, the man looks like he’s just been awarded a Presidential Junior Investigators grant to visit the National Institutes of Health over summer vacation.
TONIA S CHIFF:
You sure you don’t have a painting tucked away in the attic somewhere, taking the hits for you?
KURTON [deadpan]:
Actually, all you need is a high-resolution JPEG, these days.
He’s befriending the camera-slipping it a rum candy out on the far edges of the playground, while the proctor is distracted by more hardened delinquents. It’s just fun for him, however many times he’s done this, and fun for the casual viewer, stumbling onto Over the Limit after the sudden-death quarterfinal rounds of Be America’s Next UN Ambassador.
KURTON:
Oddly enough, it’s much easier to repair genes in egg cells than it is to do somatic gene therapy in a living person. And the beauty of germline engineering is that the fixes are inheritable! In a few decades, we’re going to be doing everything that way
Crosscut to Tonia Schiff. She’s in a distressed-denim skirt and embroidered vest. She tried once to lose the boho chic, to adopt a wool-suit gravitas for a segment on how easy it would be for anyone to introduce neurotoxins into the air systems of a large office building. But the focus groups weren’t having it. Schiff-hip was essential to the show’s sangfroid. Over the Limit is Tonia, and Tonia is the girl whose hands-in-the-air, wry bewilderment could make anyone’s heart skip a beat, just before the real bedlam hits.
SCHIFF [waving her legal pad]:
Okay, let’s just talk about that “inheritable” for a sec. I mean, forever is a long time, right? Suppose the gene doctors decide that they’ve made a mistake with my mail-order kid
Kurton laughs from the belly. He loves Schiff as much as the next viewer. America’s most irreverent science television journalist.
KURTON:
Well, that’s where the artificial chromosome pairs come in. We can insert them, right alongside the regular set, and load them up with useful genes, as we discover them. And we can flick these genes off and on as desired, without interfering with other gene regulation.
SCHIFF:
Plug-and-play chromosomes. Why didn’t I think of that?
KURTON:
Offspring wouldn’t inherit the artificial chromosome cartridge, of course. But they could get an upgraded version, with all the advances in genetic knowledge since their parents were born.
SCHIFF:
Kind of like downloading a patch to your computer operating system.
KURTON:
Exactly!
SCHIFF [looking around the lab for a SWAT team]:
Ri-ight. And would Microsoft be involved in any of these upgrades?
A cutaway animation sequence follows, base pairs assembling into genes and genes flying in and out of rotating chromosomes, spinning out kinky proteins that bind and catalyze stray chemicals like some sorcerer’s apprentice part-stamping factory. The chemicals swarm into a face, at which the screen splits repeatedly, filling up with patent lawyers, philosophers, a clergyman, a science writer, a senator-judge, and several geneticist-businessmen-those who need to safeguard innovation and those who need to save us from it. Each face gets five words, then ten, the words overlapping, finally all surging together in one mighty Stockhausen tone cluster.
Then, in a wash of time-lapse shots backed by looping, stacked ghetto-house tracks, there comes a collage of courtroom dramas and judicial mind-benders, divorced couples suing each other over frozen embryos, companies making fortunes on cancer screens derived from the genetic material of uncompensated subjects, companies suppressing patented genetic tests that reveal the effectiveness of their patented medications.
Over the Limit: That the show has avoided extinction for four years is already freakish. That each episode passes for compelling television is a miracle of protective coloration. The fight for eyeballs is as merciless as any in nature.
“The Genie” returns to archaic talk. Schiff steers Kurton away from his enhancement fantasies toward practical business, but he keeps sailing out into waters that teem with more astonishing life. And every time, like a lithe pilot fish, Schiff follows him.
She can’t help herself. Her heart, too, beats to something transhuman. You can see it in her face: she’s already working on whole new segments to follow this one. You can see it in the way she tilts in her chair. She’s ready to enhance herself. So are 78 percent of the show’s demographic. Her job is to erase all trace of the thousands of staff hours of research and make every twist of this script sound freshly improvised. Fresh: the core engine of the information economy. Every idea spontaneous, every argument off the cuff. Every word to be consumed before expiration date.
S CHIFF:
I understand you recently became a technology consultant for a start-up venture that specializes in pet cloning.
KURTON:
Regenovia creates delayed identical twins of animals who played important roles in their owners’ lives. For some people, it’s a chance to reexperience all the qualities they loved in their companions.
SCHIFF:
Is it true that a California woman has mortgaged her house to raise the $50,000 needed to bring her dog back from the dead?
KURTON:
A lot of us might be willing to pay as much, for meaningful connection with another living thing.
Kurton’s smart house in Maine does not quite read poetry to him, but it does almost everything else. It darkens and lightens windows, detects motion and shuts off extraneous appliances. The cottage is a monster hybrid, a family summer cabin from the twenties where, just behind the cedar wainscoting, just inside the retrofitted beaded ceiling, cables course and signals seethe in all flavors and protocols. Despite the tangled network of digital devices, Post-it notes cover every surface, like mating butterflies massing in a hidden glade. Thomas sits among them in his rocking chair, with the spray of the Atlantic surf visible outside his smart window, chatting about drugs tailored to fit the individual genome.
Jump to that haunted Cassandra, Anne Harter, in her Oxford warren, her eyes darting everywhere but into the lens:
These people want royalties for tests that used to be free.
They’re prosecuting others for mentioning patented scientific discoveries in public. They own entire organisms.
They own natural fact. What about a few billion years of prior art?
Back on the shores of Boothbay, Thomas Kurton watches the same clip of Harter on a seven-inch screen in his lap while he rocks in his wooden rocker. He nods in sympathy.
I agree; no patent should be allowed to prevent progress. The only thing profit is good for is reinvesting in research. I want a world where the one source of real wealth-genetic possibility-is common knowledge and accessible to everyone.
He talks about the companies he has formed: one synthesizing bio-fuels, one dedicated to rapid sequencing, one set up to perform genetic screens Bayh-Dole has given public science a way to turn itself to the quickest practical use. And so he creates private ventures, releases them into the world like new experiments, creatures compelled to live or die by the same rules of fitness that govern all creation.
What we want is a rich ecosystem: lots of ways of doing business. Lots of ways of doing science. The point is to find out where collective wisdom wants to go
I want the story to stay there, to develop this conflicted, tragically flawed character: collective wisdom. Instead, “The Genie and the Genome” squids off into a wholly unnecessary subplot concerning a healthy middle-class Chicago suburban couple who used preimplantation genetic diagnosis to keep their daughter from inheriting the colon cancer that has ravaged her father’s family. The couple simply had their embryos screened, then implanted one that didn’t contain the lethal mutation. All the others were tucked away in deep freeze, joining the burgeoning population of embryos that float in dreamless suspended animation complete with legal status.
And no group wisdom can possibly condemn these parents for plotting their daughter’s lucky escape.
Tonia Schiff will scour these clips years later on the flight down to Tunis, studying the sardonic show host for signs of herself as the Airbus glides over the black Mediterranean. She’ll freeze-frame through Over the Limit segments, examining the interviews for any hint of what she herself felt about the future of life, before it caught up with her present. Eventually, the battery on her notebook will give out, somewhere over southernmost Sicily. The future Schiff will study the past one for answers, but telegenic to the last, America’s most irreverent science journalist stays hidden in questions.
The group wants to see what the Bliss Chick is like when she’s tipsy. They take Miss Generosity to an Irish bar on North Wells where the bouncers don’t throw you out until you mess all over the floor. Someone should throw them out, just for ordering appletinis. They feed Thassa the first two mixed drinks she’s ever had and won’t let her eat anything. “In the interest of science,” the Joker says.
Everyone’s there except Kiyoshi, who mastered his agoraphobia as far as the bus stop before beelining home. Even Roberto sits in, trying not to spoil the fun. The result of the experiment is that the appletinis leave Thassa exactly like she is when sober, only less steady on her pins.
“You know what she’s like?” Adam says. “Every day, 24-7. She’s like being on a perpetual hit of E.”
“She’s nothing like that,” Roberto hisses. The two battle over the precise effects of 120 milligrams of 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine. The girls look on as all four boys thrash out the matter, which is halfway to a shoving match when Thassa chides them. She channels them back into a group sing-along. She gets them all clapping a backbeat and singing a Berber folk song, like a circle of Kabyle women at a wedding. Strangers at other tables graduate from glaring to joining in.
They play pool. She shows them how much more fun the game is if you’re allowed to nurse the balls a little bit by hand, after hitting them with the stick. She helps everyone get the hang.
They talk about their teacher. Spock declares him as monumentally, magnificently tedious as a John Cage piece. Charlotte and Sue settle on the word hapless. Thassa asks for a definition, then fiercely disagrees. “I think he knows something big. I love him.”
“Umm ” Sue giggles. “Define your terms?”
“I simply love him!”
They settle back into their corner booth, their heads on each other’s shoulders-even brittle Sue Weston-reciting poetry. Thassa has them beat in every language. They don’t even care that they can’t understand four-fifths of her recitation.
“Do you know this Irish man Heaney? ‘Walk on air against your better judgment.’ He deserves immortality, just for that line!”
This line, they understand. The ceiling of the bar vanishes onto the open night, and all parties finally see that there’s no reason on earth why people can’t be one another’s eternal comfort.
But poems end and the night goes on. The group breaks up, scattering to three compass points. John, Charlotte, and Mason follow Thassa south. They want to take the train, but she refuses. “You can walk anywhere in this city. Nothing is so far as you think.” They stroll down glittering Wells, linking arms and harmonizing early Beatles songs, accusing each other of stealing one another’s parts. Thassa is ravenous and stops for kebab, which she makes all three of them taste.
Charlotte and Mason peel off at the Metra station. Mountainous Spock Thornell walks Thassa as far as her dorm. Then Maghreb hospitality, appletinis, American freedom, or hyperthymic naïveté kicks in. She asks him up to her tiny efficiency to see the volume of Tamazight poetry she quoted from tonight, the only possession that has accompanied her everywhere in her long upheaval from Algiers to Paris to Montreal to the world’s erstwhile hog butcher.
Her room is a tiny tent in the desert. Spock barely feels her sit him down, hand him hot hibiscus tea, place the book in his lap, and turn the pages. Deep inside his tangled passageways, he’s already breaking free. Art is whatever you make. Walk on air. No one gets hurt by any true invention. She’s showing him the foreign pages, and the words are all in a Martian alphabet no human being could possibly read. The writing is chaos, the coldest thrill, the best drug of all.
He is slow in all things, monosyllabic, a great believer in the irrelevance of any emotion. But even for Thornell, the night is still magical. He has never been so close to a foreign country. He has never been outside the Midwest, except for the wild expanses of the Web. He’s waking up, after years of the grid system, to a life beyond containing.
What does he want? He wants what anyone wants. He wants this thing he can never have, this effortless glow, the one that’s so exhilarating just to sit this close to. He wants a release from his relentless his-ness-just for a minute, a little of her spark, her art of pulling a story out of annihilation. He wants to eat her flame.
Or he wants to pinch the wick. To snuff her into nothing. To leave her as terrified as anyone.
“Strip,” he says, and pulls at her blouse.
She clasps both hands to her breasts and laughs. “John! Quit. You’re mad!”
Her fear thrills him. “Off. Come on. Let’s go.”
“No! You’re nuts! You’ve lost your mind.”
And he’s loose in total liberty. Walking in the vacuum of outer space. He stands and starts tearing. He’s burned alive, refined inside the thing he needs.
She falls backward, but there’s no place to land. She grabs his wrists, but that’s worse than pointless. He’s twice her size, a crushing dimorphism. It thrills him to see the happiness vanish at last. She can do nothing, and that is more moving than any art.
All impediments tear loose. They are together, skin to skin. He looks down at the helpless brown thing between his legs. It hasn’t gone feral. It’s speaking, still her. She’s saying, “John, not this.” She’s terrified, but not for herself. She says, “John, this kills you.”
He slows to figure what she can possibly mean.
And slams back into the trap of thought. He rears up, rolls off her like she’s burning. She calls out, “Spock?” and the word scalds him. He curls up into a fetus on her carpet, moaning like a thing trying to be unborn.
Mid-November, the semester’s home stretch, and the city drops into real chill. The sky molds over, and even the two-block walk from the El to the college cracks Russell Stone’s skin. Now the lake effect begins to work against this place, and the vanished autumn is just a tease that he should have known better than to trust.
The security guard stops him in the lobby, flanked by two policemen. Someone has invented the scene just to create rising action. Harmon: story starts when a character’s core value no longer suffices to stabilize his world.
Stone is ready to confess, even before he hears the charges. They take him into a first-floor conference room to talk about two of his students. There’s been an incident. The officers are vague, cagey. Law and procedure everywhere. It seems that John Thornell-Mr. Spock, the icy conceptual artist whose most emotional journal entries read like commuter-train schedules-has attempted to force himself on
Stone already knows the victim. He’s known since before he heard the crime. It’s Generosity, who escaped the maiming of Algeria in order to be raped in the States. The moment he laid eyes on the Kabyle woman he knew someone would need to violate her.
Russell sits still and listens to the officers. Thornell has turned himself in. Wandered in a daze into the station on South State and demanded to be put away. By his own account, the American got the Algerian to let him up to her room on false pretenses, then sexually assaulted her. But when the police talked to the alleged victim
Stone knows this already, too, without hearing. When the police went to question Thassadit Amzwar, she denied that anything like rape took place. Yes, she invited Thornell up to her room after an evening out with the other students from their Journal and Journey class. Yes, he did become inappropriately excited. He did tear her skirt and blouse. But that’s where things ended. By her account, she talked the man down without much effort at all. Thornell was crying by the time he left. She was afraid to let him go, afraid he might hurt himself. She was relieved to hear that he’d arrived safely at the police station.
The lead cop can’t figure it. “She knows this case had no bearing on her student visa. She knows she’ll have the full protection of the law if she takes action. But she refuses to file charges.”
The second cop is as mystified as the first. “She actually apologized for giving us unnecessary trouble.”
The police ask Stone if there’s anything important they should know before they release Thornell over his own protests. They grill him about sexual tension, aggressive statements, any part of the classroom dynamic worth reporting. Do the man’s journal entries suggest anything unusual?
They are filled with art at its most inexplicable. Plans for mailing Christmas cards to total strangers, to see how many baffled receivers reciprocate. Plans for selling tickets to the next rain shower, with a stiff surcharge for the good seats. Hand-drawn re-creations of bar codes. Long poems composed of song lines sampled at random intervals off Internet radio. Powerless art in a confidential medium offered up in complete trust to a supportive community. By a would-be rapist.
An image of the man’s cock between Thassa’s thighs cuts through Russell, and he shudders. The man should rot in prison, raped by others. “No,” he whispers. “I wouldn’t say anything unusual.”
And the woman: Any anxious behavior? Any reason why she might be afraid of pressing charges?
They’ve met her. They’ve talked to her. Surely they must have seen. “No,” he tells them. “No reason.”
“We’re afraid this may be some kind of Muslim cultural thing. Many Muslim families will disown a rape victim.”
Christian families, too. “She’s not Muslim,” Russell tells them.
“Arab, then. You know: where the woman gets punished if-”
“She’s not ”
The cops perk up. “Not what?”
“Nothing,” Russell says. She wants her assailant free.
Now the police are all attention. They ask if there’s anything about the woman-any health conditions, behavioral quirks-anything that he should mention.
Well, there’s a set of careful notes sitting in a psychologist’s office just a few floors up. There’s a telephone call-perhaps recorded by conscientious antiterrorist agents listening for references to students of Algerian origin-where a psychologist says that the woman should be studied in a lab.
Stone doesn’t know what is confidential anymore and what the state owns. He hasn’t a clue what he owes to professional discretion, what to justice, what to Candace Weld, what to Thassa Amzwar, and what to basic truth. But it’s pointless to hide from the Informational Oversoul. Everything in the full digital record will be discovered. An hour of digging in the likeliest place and they will find him out.
“It’s possible she might be hyperthymic.” And to their inevitable, blank stares, he explains: “Excessively happy.”
He only answers what the law asks. The policeman with the notebook asks him how to spell the word.
Then he’s supposed to teach the class. He’s known from the start that he’d never get through the semester without disaster. He climbs the seven flights, buying time. He’s buried deep in the Vishnu Schist, forcing his way back up to the present, and every ten steps is a mass extinction.
He hears the group pleasure, from down the hall. Thassa’s voice weaves some goofy solo, and the rest of them laugh in adoring chorus. He rounds the doorway, his anemic frame coiled for pain. They’re all there, huddled in the dingy room, listening to her read from her journal. All except the animal, still in police custody. She’s told no one.
Thassa breaks off in midsentence. The group looks up, caught red-handed in enjoyment. Stone’s eyes search the Berber’s. For an instant, she’s ready to minister to whatever tragedy has hit him. Then she remembers: she’s the injured party. Their faces rewrite each other twice before anyone else in the room realizes anything’s wrong.
And just as quickly, Thassa returns to the clause where she broke off. Russell Stone stumbles toward the mocking oval, book bag to his chest. Soon everyone is chuckling again at her story, about an Algerian and an Indonesian in a Chicago Mexican grocery, neither able to understand two consecutive words of the other’s English. And all the while that her pliant face encourages her audience’s laughs, she’s coaxing the mute teacher, begging him to be okay, as okay as she is. In the sparkle of her glance, she reassures him: John couldn’t help himself, you know. The problem was inside him. The man just couldn’t help.
Back in her snug, cinnamon, Edgewater apartment after nine and a half hours in the counseling center, Weld began her real day’s work. First came forty-five minutes in which her son, Gabriel, gleefully destroyed her at every known flavor of computer game-battles of skill and strategy all rigged to favor the ten-year-olds whose thumbs had already inherited the earth.
Then she conscripted him into fifteen minutes of light housework. After that, she parked the boy in front of the plasma screen as she fixed dinner. She rationed him to an hour of fiction a day, but allowed all the informational programs he could stomach. Recently, the boy had discovered that the early Chicago StreetSharp News was almost as diverting as the average role-playing game. Four stars, Mom; highly entertaining.
As Candace pulled ingredients from the refrigerator, the boy sat cackling at amateur camcorder video of an escaped six-foot pet iguana scrambling across a busy North Side intersection as hulking SUVs veered all over, trying to avoid the reptile. Gabriel hadn’t laughed so hard since the story, a month ago, when two rival architectural tour boats rammed each other in the Chicago River, throwing six culture tourists into the water.
Slicing her son’s grilled chicken into strips-fingers, Mom, always-she heard the sweet news reader (whose glossy friendliness seemed to fill the boy with an inchoate longing he ordinarily reserved for Best Buy gift certificates) announce one of those stories that cause a community to transcend itself and knit together in shared awe.
Two area college students are in the news tonight
Candace Weld oiled her skillet and smiled at the growing commonplace: newsworthy because in the news.
. after turning himself in to the city police and demanding
She let the pan heat and prepped the broccoli. She could get the boy to eat small amounts if she pureed it with butter and a splash of maple syrup.
. a twenty-three-year-old Arab woman in the country on a student visa. The victim of the assault apparently not only persuaded her would-be assailant
As Gabe called, “Mom, what’s a saylent?” her cortex caught up with her limbic system. In three quick steps, she stood in front of the set, curling her boy’s head gently away from the next words.
. close to the woman suggests that she may have hyperthiam hyperthymia, a rare condition that programs a person for unusual levels of elation. It’s not known how the condition contributed either to
“Shit,” the psychologist said.
“Mom! Five bucks, Mom.” The delighted boy leaped up and bee-lined for her purse on the dining-room hutch.
“Fuck.”
Her son beamed. “Ten more!”
The police have released the self-confessed alleged suspect, despite his demand that they
Candace Weld’s field of vision shrank and grayed. Reflux came up her throat. Self-confessed alleged. She lowered herself to the carpet and sat.
The boy set her purse down and crossed back to her. He shook her shoulder, blanching. “Mom? Mom. Never mind. You can keep the money. I don’t need it.”
I see them clearly now: Thassadit Amzwar and her two self-appointed foster guardians, on the verge of that Chicago winter. I assemble the missing bits from out of the reticent archive. I’d dearly love to keep all three tucked away safely in exposition. But they’ve broken out now, despite me, into rising action.
Weld called Stone four times that night. First his line was busy. Then he wouldn’t pick up. She fired off a terse e-mail: I had to learn about this on the news? She redrafted the note three times, blunting her fury at his public diagnosis, that ridiculous little pseudoscientific tag. She focused on the attempted rape. The damage of public airing.
He shoots a message back at five the next morning. It’s frightened and sick with explanations. I was answering under fire, complying with a police investigation. I gave them everything that might possibly have any bearing on the case. I assumed what I said was for the police only.
They need two more e-mails and a jagged phone call before each settles down.
Weld asks if Thassa is all right. He tells her about the confused exchange he had with the Berber after class, in hushed and painful code, Thassa reassuring him that John Thornell’s bungled assault could never have harmed her.
“You didn’t call her last night? After the story ran?”
“I wanted to let her breathe.” After a beat, he adds, “Cowardice.”
Twice, she tells him that he did his best. But they both know: there would have been no Chicago StreetSharp News story without hyperthymia. “How can they possibly have used that word on television? Ridiculous.”
“I’m sorry. I never dreamed the police would sell it to TV.” But of course, television didn’t have to buy it. The media simply exercised eminent domain. Reality has become programming’s wholly owned subsidiary.
However the word got out, Thassadit Amzwar is an instant creative-nonfiction commodity. Harmon number nine: Harm Averted by Surprising Source. You know this story. Everyone knows this story but her. The Berber wouldn’t know how to read this story for the life of her. No doubt she thinks it’s Harmon number two: Group Misunderstands the Needs of an Outcast.
“The rape is my fault,” Stone tells Candace.
“Of course it is,” she agrees. Two handshakes, half of one ambiguous date, and they’ve been married for years. “This is all about you. You must have planted the idea in the man’s head.”
“If I’d been paying attention She’s a walking target. I should have warned her ”
“Are you serious? Criminal sexual abuse. A class-four felony. And she leaves her attacker so shaken he wants to be sent to jail for a decade. She doesn’t need your protection. You need hers.”
The price of information is falling to zero. You can now have almost all of it, anytime, anywhere, for next to nothing. The great majority of data can’t even be given away.
But meaning is like land: no one is making any more of it. With demand rising and supply stagnant, soon only the dead will be able to afford anything more than the smallest gist.
Minutes after the story airs, the Kabyle woman starts traveling abroad.
Search for:
But for a little while longer, the woman is still as meaningless as any local noise. She stays safely hidden in the million global narrowcast microcommunity headlines hatched every second. Bandwidth itself does not threaten her. Information may travel at light speed. But meaning spreads at the speed of dark.
Hidden in the public static are three items of firsthand knowledge. Charlotte Hullinger adds a comment to StreetSharp’s feedback section, correcting some background data. Roberto Muñoz buries an agonized confession of complicity in a ghostly blog visited by three people a month. “I was there when they were getting her drunk.” And Sue Weston posts an almost reverent appraisal on a college discussion forum: “He never had a chance of breaking her. She just blissed that creep away.”
The scene loops through Russell Stone’s head, impossible to edit. It plays against the ceiling of the El train as he slumps in his seat, riding in for the public facedown. He watches his two students, the pleasure of their companionship crossing into animal violence. The scene, in his imagination, stays broad-brushed and dim. Always his downfall in writing: a complete lack of visual resolution. But he needs no great detail to be there. Thornell, the plodding minimalist, as depressed as anyone, electrified by the flash of something godly in the woman. Of course the man tried to force her. Ram himself home. It’s coded into the deep program: fuse your sick genes to whatever looks healthiest. Feel the glow for fifteen seconds, even by killing it
The guard scowls at Russell as the transient adjunct passes through security. Upstairs, in class, to Stone’s relief, Thassa isn’t there. The six surviving students fall silent when he enters the room. Neither respectful nor rebellious: just holding still for the sham of schooling.
They know everything now. They’ve passed around copies of the televised clip, downloaded onto their portable players. All but one were there that night, near accessories. Yet their faces interrogate him.
He should say something, anything. Clumsy or impotent, it doesn’t matter. He owes her that much. Instead, he directs them to the chapter reserved for the end of the syllabus: “Bringing It All Back Home.”
“Remember,” he reads aloud from Harmon’s hectoring text, “denouement doesn’t mean tying up all your loose ends. Quite literally, it’s French for untying.”
They don’t even bother to sneer. They will leave him to rot in the desert of pedagogy. Discussion dies on the vine. He asks for a volunteer for a first journal extract. Not even the Joker Tovar, in his silk-screened T-shirt-Dada: It’s not just for umbrellas anymore-takes the bait. Russell waits. He’s perfectly willing now to stand them off, to sit in silence for the rest of the evening and all that’s left of the semester.
Deliverance comes from the doorway. “Hey, everyone.”
Russell jerks around, between relieved and appalled. She’s dressed in a Thinsulate vest over a hoodie and capris, this winter’s worldwide youth uniform. She is as sober as anyone has ever seen her. But they all sense it, in her encompassing glance: whatever sadness she feels is just empathy for them.
She holds three fingers in the air in front of her, a scout’s salute, which she draws to her pursed lips. “Um, may I just say ”
She drags her backpack to her traditional seat but does not sit.
“Maybe some of you saw the story on the news? It’s just not true. It’s not like that. We all know John.”
None of them knows John. No one in this room knows the least thing about who they’re sitting next to. They’ve traded nothing but the thinnest poses. They should have known as much, as early as the chapters back in week three. Character is a performance born in a core desire that even the performer may not understand.
“That isn’t John, what the news said. John is someone with a great deal of weight? He never hurt me. Okay: he tried for sex by force, but eventually, he knew this was a bad idea.”
No one can look at her or stand another word. No one tells her to stop.
“I probably just confused him. He isn’t the first person he’s not the first man I have ever confused!”
The circle of art students keep faces blanked, all of them would-be molesters.
“Please,” she says. “You know what this is. It’s nothing. It’s just desire. This doesn’t damage me at all. I’m telling you, this isn’t a trauma. I’ve written about this experience. May I just ” She pulls her notebook out of her backpack.
And with the steadfast failure of nerve that has penned his whole life, Russell says, “Maybe not right now?”
She looks at him as if he has just hurt her more than her assailant did. And she’s sorrier for him than she is for John.
The others, too, appraise him. At last they understand his ultimate lesson: Do as I say, not as I do. He’s failed them; he never really believed in journal or in journey. Story can save exactly no one. The only one in this room who knows anything of use is Thassa.
Sue Weston’s face sickens over with tics: How far did he get? Mason twitches on his chair’s edge, his fingers rapping out: You stopped him with what ? Roberto hangs back, hurt that the Algerian isn’t crushed, that she needs them all less than ever.
Only sphinxlike Kiyoshi Sims speaks. “We all knew there was something about you. But I never thought your whole mood thing is like a disease?”
Thassa shakes her head, smiling sadly at Invisiboy, daring him to remember, to step out from this fiction back into the real. “Life is the disease. And believe me: you do not want the cure!”
She is again untouchable. Thornell must have foreseen this, even as he forced himself on her. Rape as surrender. Self-annihilation. The man knew she would destroy him.
It stuns Russell the next morning to discover: her disease is still contagious. Life-threatening but not serious. He wakes up ravenous. He can’t remember the last time that breakfast seemed such a brilliant plot twist. The winter air through the wall cracks braces him, and the table spreads itself. The boiling teapot sings like a boy soprano. The raisin muffin crisping in the toaster smells like muscatel. He’s on a houseboat, moored on one of those mythical rivers that Information has not yet reached. That’s how surely this mood has come on.
How rigorously drab his life has been. He’s worked so hard at his own refugee status, piling up his Red Cross blankets into a tiny bunker. But all protection is powerless against this morning’s brisk breeze-this one. He’s only thirty-two, and more such mornings will keep arriving, despite his strongest resolve. What does he have to resent? Resentment is the coward’s retreat from possibility. He could resent the night sky, for thrilling him.
The teaching job was his just by accident; he might never have met her. And tomorrow night, he’ll have another two hours in the presence of joy. No one can punish him for that.
He grabs the newspaper from the landing and unfolds it on the kitchen counter. He thinks of her second essay-the flight from Algiers-and is kneed hard from behind by love: love for the morning thump of his neighbors through the muffling walls, love for his class’s doomed zeal, love for the lying politicians above the page-one fold, and weirdly, most weirdly, love even for himself, as if he, too, were somehow worth his care.
He takes the coffee beans from the freezer, spoons them in the grinder, and churns. No evolutionary psychology will ever account for the pull of that smell.
He actually sits to eat, like it’s some holiday. It is: Spontaneous Healing Day. He closes his eyes and holds a winter strawberry to the tip of his tongue. The fruit is spongy and sublime. The Arabica-as thick as his confusion-gingers as it hits the back of his throat. He can’t imagine what Thassa’s standing state of grace feels like; an hour of being her would blow him away. But this morning’s gratuitous pleasure gives him an inkling. Liver means heart and heart means joy and she’s stuck with the prophecy, and he is stuck with his gratitude for her.
He pictures the four of them-Candace, her Gabe, Russell, and his former student-on a makeshift outing to the Field Museum, sitting on hide beds around the fire in the massive Pawnee earth lodge, trading stories as winter locks in above the open chimney. They’re up in the second balcony of Orchestra Hall, untouchable by anything but music. Or in the nosebleed heaven of Soldier Field, trying to explain to Thassa why steroid-laced men the size of Arabian Nights djinns are smashing into one another. They mill around in Maxwell Street’s reborn flea market, combing through other people’s castoffs, looking for buried treasure. And the unassailable Algerian turns every neighborhood into an A ticket.
Light streams into his studio from the eastern exposure. The breakfast dishes wash themselves, and still he’s hungry. That’s how surely this thing has come on.
By noon, he’s buried again under other people’s soul-crushing dangling participles and incoherent yearning. And yet, today, he’s well. He himself may never be happy for more than a few island moments. But someone he knows is free, unsponsored, safe, well. He can stand near, catch the spillover. That’s enough. Better than he ever expected. He wouldn’t know what to do with more.
John Thornell is evicted from his jail cell over his continued demands to be locked up. Mesquakie announces his withdrawal from college. It’s not enough. Stone wants the man listed in a public roster of sex offenders, his hundreds of ink drawings defaced, and his journal burned.
Russell schedules an impromptu writing exercise for the final night of class. Journal and Journey’s last page. He carries the topic to school that evening on the train, as if it’s a lightning bug in a jar with holes punched in the lid. Write the journal entry for that future day you would most like to live. The creature flashes when he shakes it.
But when he gets to Mesquakie, the final class is already under way. A reporter from the Reader is sitting in Russell’s place with a flotilla of digital devices spread out on the table, conducting an interview. The journalist, Donna Washburn, has traced the attempted-rape story back to its guilty source. Russell fills with impotent rage. He wants to pitch the intruder out, break her voice recorder, and smash her PDA.
Instead, true to type, he stands feckless in the doorway. Who is he to fight the free spread of information, the public’s right to know? Here is his syllabus, come to life: local detail, close observation, character, tension, inner values in collision-everything he’s supposedly taught this semester, only real.
Thassa catches his eye in midreply. Never mind; I know this. I can tell this. Stone has no doubt that she can acquit herself. It’s the journalist he distrusts.
He takes a corner seat, watching his last lesson plan dissolve. Of course she’s public domain. Nothing the race needs ever stays hidden. Artgrrl and Princess Heavy compete to tell their Thassa stories. Entitled, the reporter milks them. Even Stone gets grilled. But when he makes a move to break up the circus, the journalist asks Thassa, “This hyperthymia. So what exactly is that like?”
A murmur in Tamazight. “It’s not like anything. It’s absurd, this so-called condition. The news made it up.”
“Okay, okay,” Donna Washburn interrupts. “Just tell me, as simply as you can: What does it feel like, being you?”
Thassa lays her palms on the table, beseeching. “I’m telling you it’s nothing. Everybody on earth has this symptom. They just don’t know it!” At this, the whole class laughs.
“All right,” the journalist says. “Let’s leave that for now. Let’s go back to your childhood. They killed your father how?”
Russell cuts off the interview after half an hour. When the miffed Donna Washburn leaves, he looks down at his notes, the topic for the final impromptu. That future day you would most like to live. The topic is gibberish, nothing he’d be willing to write on, himself. You know, Mister? You are a very unfair teacher.
He assigns the topic. Each writes whatever sentences his or her temperament permits. “Write what you know,” Harmon apes, as if it were possible to do anything else.
They do the assignment, then drag Stone to a makeshift end-of-year party, where they make him eat cheese fries and force him to listen again as they explain why blogs are better than print. Everyone wishes everyone else happy holidays, and wistful goodbyes proliferate, like a disease.
The last word belongs to next week’s Reader. Underneath a photo of Thassadit Amzwar surrounded by admiring classmates is a half-page feature, part bio, part flubbed-rape account, part Maghreb travelogue, complete with quotes from a positive-psychology researcher at Northwestern about whether hyperthymia is real, all under the headline: SAVED BY JOY.
A day after the piece appears, Russell Stone gets an e-mail from the department head, thanking him for his job this semester but saying Mesquakie won’t be renewing his contract for spring.
Russell is flipping numbly through von Graffenried’s Journal d’Algérie-mass graves like potato fields, with plywood grave markers-when the phone rings. He checks the caller ID and it’s neither his mother nor his brother. Which means it must be Misty from Mumbai or Brad from Bangalore, calling to ask a few simple questions about his personal satisfaction.
It’s Thassa. From the South Loop. That she calls just when he needs to talk to her is hardly the one major coincidence that every long fiction is allowed. It’s not even a minor one.
“Mister Stone,” she says. “I need your help.”
“Where are you?” he shouts. He’s halfway down the stairs to the street before he hears the cranberry chuckle in her voice.
“No danger,” she says. “I just need writing advice!”
It seems the Reader article has brought out the readers. Dozens of the terminally miserable have gotten her e-mail from the college directory server and are deluging her with intimate inquiries.
“Strange people with Hotmail accounts want me to make them happy. One woman wants to hire me as her personal trainer. She thinks her soul needs a professional workout. Twenty-three messages in two days. What should I tell them all?”
He tells her to throw the e-mails in the trash and empty it.
“I can’t do that! That would be rude. I must write them something. Remember Mr. Harmon?”
“Thassa. Be careful. Don’t tell these people anything about yourself.”
“They don’t want to know anything about me. They just want to know about themselves. They’re so sure I have a secret. I could make up anything at all, and they would believe me.”
“Don’t encourage them. It’ll just make things worse.”
“Thank God I go back to Montreal tomorrow. Canadians are so much easier.”
She asks about his holiday plans. He makes something up. By now I know this man: all the beautiful five-paragraph personal essays he composes for her and then redlines away, in two heartbeats. He doesn’t tell her he won’t be coming back to school in the spring. He just tells her to take care.
“You take care, too. Thank you for your class. I learned so much.” He mumbles some meaningless reply, which makes her laugh. In return, she burbles out, “Happy New Year, Mister Stone! See you then?”
He visits Candace Weld’s office, without an appointment. “It’s a total train wreck. Right out of my worst nightmares.”
Candace studies the Reader article. She doesn’t scold him now; she just reads with practiced steadiness.
“I should have thrown the journalist out the minute I got to class.”
“She would have cornered Thassa afterward.” There’s something reconciled in her voice, the surrender to a development that psychology is powerless to deflect. “It’s just a squib in a local freebie paper. They come and go by the thousands.”
“She’s getting dozens of e-mails from people who want to buy whatever she’s taking.”
Weld looks up from the paper. “Is she all right?”
“Of course she’s all right. That’s the problem. She’s constitutionally incapable of being anything but all right.”
“Are you all right?”
He snaps. “Didn’t that Rogerian parroting go out in the eighties?”
She stays mild. His panic actually seems to fascinate her. “I’m sorry, I don’t see ”
“How would you feel if total strangers started begging you all day long for magic mood bullets?”
She looks at him, lips twisted in amusement, until he realizes what he’s just asked.
“Russell, this is one tough woman. She’ll survive a little media. She’s been through worse.”
“She called me for help.”
“Did she? Maybe she likes you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not a grave not a cradle robber, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“She’s nine years younger than you.” Candace Weld has done the math. “Is that a cradle?”
“A dozen people a day are asking her to bless them. Yes, that makes me nervous.”
The psychologist suggests several practical actions, starting with getting Thassa’s e-mail address removed from the public directory. Just the sound of her voice calms him. He could grow dependent on her competence.
“Don’t beat yourself up about this,” she tells him.
“But that’s my best skill.” The air all around him is full of wireless gossipers and news surfers. “Is it too late for me to become a real patient of yours?”
“We don’t call them patients,” she says. “And yes. It’s too late for that.”
“I’m finished teaching. The college fired me.” He feels nothing. He could be a moon of Pluto.
“Oh, Russell! I’m sorry. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
His silence is textbook: Show, don’t tell.
“That’s not fair to you,” she decides. “None of this is your doing.”
“None of it would have happened if I hadn’t said that damn word to the police.”
“I’m sorry. This must be a real setback.”
“I’m fine. Two jobs was more than I could handle anyway.”
She’s brutally comfortable with extended silence. After a bit, she asks, “So you’re saying we’re no longer colleagues?”
He hears. She’s only six years older than he is. He has already done the math. Happy people have more friends than unhappy ones. Happy people tend to be in long-term relationships.
He feels like he’s plunging. On the plummet down, he asks if he can make dinner for her, this Saturday, at his apartment. “I have one good recipe,” he says. “Mushroom asparagus risotto.”
She pauses long enough for him to think he’s made an enormous miscalculation.
“I can get a sitter,” she murmurs. “A really good grad student in child psych. She watches Gabe play video games all night, then writes up the child-machine interactions.”
“I’m sorry. Bring him, of course.”
“Are you sure? I will, then. You want the sitter, too?”
He just stares at her, slack-jawed, until she adds, “Joking.”
I’m caught like Buridan’s ass, starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction. I see now exactly who these people are and where they came from. But I can’t quite make out what I’m to do with them.
I need to slow down, to describe Stone’s terror of driving, his belief that he might be slated one day to hit a child. I have to mention Weld’s aversion to security cameras, her thrice-weekly yoga class, or how she must feed mealworms to her son’s horned toad when the boy forgets the living world. I need someone to transcribe for me the two lines of e-mail printout from Thassa’s brother that she keeps rolled up in the hem of her shawl. But the three of them pull me along in their own rush to arrive, before all the world’s books get rewritten.
I know the kind of novel I loved to read, back before fact and fable merged. I know what kind of story I’d make from this one, if I could: the kind that, from one word to the next, breaks free. The kind that invents itself out of meaningless detail and thin air. The kind in which there’s no choice like chance.
It would help tremendously if Stone could figure what the woman sees in him. She’s masterfully self-controlled. Her work has her confronting every behavioral strategy and dodge that humans can indulge. Yet she indulges him.
He takes a break from food prep on Saturday afternoon to phone his brother. Robert might have made a great psychologist himself, were it not for the Asperger’s.
Russell talks to his brother as freely as he ever has. “I can’t tell if she actually enjoys my conversation or whether she’s just lonely.”
“You saying there’s a difference?”
He hears Robert typing as he talks. “She must know I’m incapable of amusing anyone.”
“Which is itself pretty damn entertaining.”
“Maybe she’s taken me on as a case after all.”
A gap in the air. “Uhhn. You know bro? You may want to work a little on that self-esteem thing.”
“I can’t imagine what’s in it for her. All we ever talk about is Thassa.”
More furtive mouse-clicking. “Hang Who-sa? Oh, right. The smiley woman.”
“Robert? Are you online? This is like talking to somebody in the middle of a gunfight.”
“What? No. It’s nothing. Just some chick in Romania I play cribbage with on weekends.”
All research gambles against time. Kurton calls it hunting the mastodon. An unruly band with sticks and stones stalks a creature larger than all of them combined. Hang back and lose the prey; rush too soon and get gored. Smart risks live to reproduce; poor ones die off. Thomas Kurton excels at research because his ancestors stalked well.
But for all his research skill, Kurton has never published a word without fear of prematurity. The same temperament that disposes him to skeptical curiosity leaves him forever holding out for more data. True, the road to discovery is paved with the graves of the hesitant. Yet better one of those modest headstones than the more spectacular memorials, those bubble-burst announcements like N-rays or cold fusion.
Back when Joseph Priestley defined research, the race went not to the swift but to the articulate. Ask Scheele or Lavoisier who really discovered oxygen. The clergyman-scientist could hold on to phlogiston for years, almost as a hobby, and still make his immortal contributions to human understanding through sheer eloquence.
But back then, no one could own scientific laws. Now you can. Metabolite has successfully sued another company for publishing the fact that vitamin B-12 deficiency correlates with elevated homocysteine, a risk for heart disease. Myriad can charge $2,600 for a questionable breast-cancer-gene screen, while shutting down labs that develop better alternatives.
Thomas Kurton survives in this world because he’s good at knowing just when the eternally insufficient data must go public. But increasingly, the market is taking once-public facts private. Even colleagues in his own university department, funded by corporate grants, can no longer talk freely to one another.
Kurton doesn’t particularly like the capitalization of life science. But life science doesn’t particularly care about his private dislikes. Those who would keep growing must shed their legacy biases, the way that biology has shed everyone from Galen to Gajdusek. Someday microgreen machines will do to scarcity what Salk did to polio. Then the grants will exceed the applicants. Then we will defeat even competitive rivalry, and all this private profit-seeking will disappear into the eternal gift economy. Until then, Kurton hunts the mastodon as best he can.
But in recent months, some colleagues have wondered whether Kurton’s sense of timing might be slipping. Truecyte has had a study in the pipeline for three years. Everyone down to the beaker washers knows this thing is coming. They’ve scanned the genes of hundreds of individuals, all of them falling along the high end of emotional health. Against these, they’ve compared the scans of hundreds more from deeper down that spectrum. Massive computational biology has identified a group of quantitative trait loci that associate strongly with performances on tests of emotional resilience.
DNA microarrays have already mapped these QTL more precisely, pinpointing them to much more closely spaced markers. Now the markers narrow down even further. The log of the odds scores show a high likelihood that a person’s affective set point depends massively upon a certain network of genes involved in serotonin and dopamine synthesis and transport. The control regions for these genes are polymorphic, with several alleles each. And Truecyte’s association studies identify those specific alleles that correlate with elevated well-being.
This network of genes seems to account for perhaps two-thirds or more of the heritability of emotional temperament. Various permutations of this gene network correlate with contentment, joy, and even, for want of a better term, exuberance. Ex uberare-the pouring forth of fruit.
The sample size is good, while the covariance and standard deviations satisfy almost everyone on the project. Researchers as levelheaded as Amar Patnaik and George Cheung voice the collective anxiety in multiple meetings: it’s time to stake a claim. If they don’t file something soon, some other group in Switzerland or Singapore is going to announce, with data a lot less firm than anything Kurton’s group has already amassed.
But to everyone’s dismay, Kurton remains averse to going public. His reluctance may be just legacy human nature: as stakes rise, even the fearless take cover. History is filled with scientists terrified of publishing big findings. Darwin himself tinkered with his theory for almost two decades before Alfred Wallace’s letter forced his hand.
Some among the senior scientists close to Thomas wonder if his hesitation may even be sociological-just a fear of real-world consequences. From an unsympathetic distance, his reticence looks a lot like nostalgia. How else to explain his continued foot-drag, in the absence of solid objections? He has signed off on the statistical analysis. He’s conceded the results of the index-test method for determining functional differences between the known allelic variations. Still Kurton waits. And he’s begun to repeat with increasing, almost annoying frequency, “All good science pauses.”
No one knows exactly what the chief’s hesitation means. It may be good science; it may be loss of nerve. In practice, it means an extended delay in publishing that any day-given the rate of post-genomic discoveries being plucked daily from the air-could prove fatal. The mastodon will still kill you, whether you charge it or stand stock-still.
Weld consulted with two colleagues first. She tried one of each: stringent Christa Kreuz and expansive Dennis Winfield, the counseling center’s head. Christa was at her hardest-assed. “You’re dating someone who works for the college?”
“He’s not working for the college anymore. And I’m not exactly dating him.”
“He got fired over this incident.”
“He was temporary. They just didn’t renew.”
“It doesn’t feel right, Candace. He comes to talk to you about this student, the student gets raped by another one of his students, and now ”
“She didn’t get raped. She talked her way out.”
“And now you want to sleep with the teacher.”
“I don’t want to sleep with him. I just enjoy his company.”
“Why?”
Weld fell back on that old counseling trick: counting to five. “Because he’s not fatuous and he’s not banal. He feels things. He cares about something other than himself.” She fights off a bizarre impulse to say: He makes me smile. “He thinks. That’s hard to come by, these days.”
“Have you thought about an epistolary relationship? And you might want to keep one copy of everything on file.”
Nor did Dennis Winfield entirely let her off the hook. “In the best world, of course, I’d wish you something less problematical.”
She’d seen it in Dennis’s eye from time to time: in his best world, Dennis wouldn’t be married, she wouldn’t be working for him, and he would be her problem.
“It’s not problematical, Dennis. It’s just companionship.”
“Does he get along with Gabe?”
“I’ve just met him. I only want to be sure I’m not breaking any rules.”
“You’re not breaking any rules. Technically. If you’re sure that you’ve never had a professional relationship with him or the student ” He appraised her. “This is not about some kind of indirect therapy for either one of them, is it?”
She shook her head, exasperated.
“Good. Because you’ve had We’ve been over this in the past. You are a wonderful woman, Candace. But you do need to protect yourself from your best intentions sometimes. Do be careful. Boundaries get blurry so fast.”
She sat still for the justified lecture, and when Dennis encouraged her to come back and talk if she ever felt any uncertainty, she nodded and said she would.
Candace Weld arrives right on time, Saturday night, an experimental tease in her tea-green eyes and a veil of light snow on her hair. She shows up with her chest-high son, who holds out one diffident paw to shake Russell’s. The child has seen this drill before, and places no faith in the latest candidate. As soon as he rescues his hand from Russell’s, he pulls a flashing, bleeping Game Boy back out of his pocket.
Stone ushers them in from the cold. She no longer looks that much like Grace. He was crazy ever to imagine a resemblance. Candace’s features are more fluid and eager. Her eyes don’t have Grace’s webcam look. Her nose twitches like it’s trying to sniff him. She hands him a nice Shiraz, then cups his elbow hello. With her other hand, she shakes a colorful sack of pungent Happy Meal. “For Gabe,” she says.
“I’m carnivorous,” the child at her side explains.
Russell slaps his forehead. “I should have asked.”
The boy shrugs. “Many primates are. But those are cool pictures, anyway.” He points to Stone’s pastels. “Are they like dungeon creatures? Three stars, at least.”
Russell takes a beat. “Thanks, I think.”
Over the meal, he and Candace hunt for a conversation topic other than the only one they’ve ever talked about. Weld is oddly at ease in her awkwardness. She asks about Stone’s magazine editing. He’s too considerate to give her a real answer.
Finally, it’s Stone and the boy who find a theme. Gabe regales his host with tales of an online world called Futopia. The boy raves about his life as a Ranger, discovering ancient artifacts and selling them for tons of gold in cities scattered around virgin continents. Stone marvels to see this sullen child bloom into a full-fledged raconteur, a Marco Polo who can’t get enough of the questions Stone asks.
The mother is embarrassed for the first time all evening. “It’s terrifying. Like there’s a probe directly stimulating the pleasure centers of his brain. He gets ninety minutes a night. I know: it should be zero.”
The kid is all over her in panic. “Mom, no! We’ve talked about this. It’s social. It’s completely social. There’s almost no killing at all.”
After dessert, when the talk runs out, Candace stands and starts stacking dishes. “Leave them,” Russell says. “I’ll get them after you go.” But she insists on helping.
He fills the basin with hot water. She takes a dish towel and stands next to him, snatching dishes as he cleans them. It surprises him to discover how easy she is to be with-just company, just variation, a respite from his own inescapable self. Side by side, five inches from each other, in front of the double basin, he doesn’t even have to look at her to find her painfully pleasing.
She grins, admiring his washing technique. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
Candace Weld is flirting. Russell would like to call it something else, but English won’t cooperate. Chapter four: in any closely observed scene, your key protagonists will have different action objectives, driven by different inner needs.
The boy Gabe sits at the cleared table, flipping through a book that Stone has left out: Emotional Chemistry: How the Brain Lifts and Lowers Us.
“You’re still researching?” she asks.
He twists the sponge into a drinking glass. “Did you know that most people say they are happier than average?”
“I’m not surprised,” she says.
“You’re not?”
“I’m not surprised that that’s what most people say.” She crosses to the cold window casement by the pantry and breathes on the glass. In the condensation, she draws two contentment graphs. The first is a steady, high, straight line. The second is a diagonal, starting at zero and maxing out at the end. She stands aside, a counselor pretending to be an actress playing a schoolteacher. “Which of these two is happier?”
By any measure that Stone can think of, it’s the first.
“Now: which life do most people want to have?”
He stares at his choices. “Are you serious?”
She shrugs. “Number two is a better story. Most people are already pretty happy. What we really want is to be happier. And most people think they will be, in the future. Keeps us in the trenches, I guess.”
She rubs her finger slowly across the chill glass, obliterating all graphs.
“Have you come across Norbert Schwarz’s work? It’s classic. Subjects fill in a questionnaire about life satisfaction. But the subject must go into the next room to make a copy of the questionnaire before filling it in. One group finds a dime sitting on the copy machine. Their lucky day. The control group finds nothing.”
Stone grips a plate. “Don’t tell me.”
“I’m afraid I have to; it’s science! The lucky group reports significantly higher satisfaction with their entire life.”
He grins, shakes his head, and plunges his fists back in the hot water, now tepid to his accustomed hands.
“Don’t take it so hard.” She grazes his shoulder with her towel. “Works with a chocolate bar, too.”
He lifts his hands from the water and presses his soapy palms to his cheeks. “We’re pathetic.”
“We’re beautiful,” she replies. “We just have no idea how we feel or what makes us feel that way!”
“So feeling good is really that cheap?”
“Not cheap.” She traces out a quick hieroglyphic on the upper arm of his waffle shirt. “ Affordable. And easier than we think.”
Easy is exactly the problem. He turns and faces her, holds her eyes for the first time all evening. “And Thassa?”
“And Thassa.” She gazes off into a ceiling corner full of cobwebs he missed in the afternoon’s scrub-down. “She must carry around one hell of a chocolate bar.”
At the evening’s end, mother and son don coats, scarves, hats, and gloves. Outside, the snow is thin but gathering, a taste of things to come. The boy sticks out a king crab claw and shakes Russell’s hand. He promises to show Stone his life in Futopia, anytime. Bundled, the mother turns to Stone, slips one padded arm around his middle, turns her head away, and pulls him into her. She lays her right ear on his clavicle and listens.
He plays dead. The one time Grace was this gentle was right before she left.
Dr. Weld breaks the embrace. “Merry Christmas,” she says. She looks up at him, wincing. She waves an erasing mitten in the air. Don’t worry, it says. Means nothing. A dime’s a dime. Grab it when you see it.
No one at Truecyte searches for the story. They come across it by data mining, scouring the Web with automated scripts and prospecting bots. The company’s intelligent agents race from server to server at all hours, extracting patterns and converging on the next genetic trends before they’ve even materialized.
Nodes, clusters, trackbacks, memes Truth follows bandwidth, as sure as use follows invention. By now, the idea is a commonplace: only that massively parallel computer, the entire human race, is powerful enough to interpret the traffic that it generates. No single expert can calculate the outcome of tomorrow’s big game. But the averaged aggregate guess of hundreds of millions of amateurs can come as close as God.
In this way, a self-assembling network of page traffic presents itself daily to three graduate-student interns trained to prowl around each morning’s tidal pools and pull out shiny things. If two out of the three of them tag the same story, it goes to Kurton’s own news aggregator. And for an hour every morning before dawn, the inventor of rapid gene signature reading mulls over the day’s trove of stories.
He consumes the feeds, looking for new upheaval, the same constant upheaval that has carried him this far. He still remembers the Boethius that his ex-wife made him read at Stanford a third of a century ago, insisting it would make him a better person: no one will ever be safe or well until Fortune upends him.
As Kurton reads, he drags various links into tree branches in his visual concept-mapper, trees that start out as bonsais but-tended and grafted and trained toward the light-grow into redwoods.
People who read stories about subjective well-being also subscribe to posts about affective set point.
People who subscribe to posts about affective set point are also interested in genetic basis of happiness.
People who follow genetic basis of happiness.
comment and respond to/.
spend many page minutes with/.
rate highly/.
frequently link to.
one of several mutually quoting accounts of Kabylia’s outpost in Chicago, stories that spread the keyword hyperthymia like a pheromone trail.
He reads the Reader story and feels the journalist’s excitement. This Kabyle woman has grown up in a vicious free-for-all that makes the stoic Boethius look like a bed-wetting schoolboy. And despite the worst that environment can contribute, her body pumps out the standing gladness that should be every human’s birthright.
Hunch’s role in science has never embarrassed Kurton. And he has a hunch that this woman may be the missing datum that Truecyte’s three-year study needs. If she isn’t, the study will only be strengthened by learning why. He checks with his schedule keeper, who tells him he’ll be at the University of Chicago in the second week of January, for a debate with an Australian Nobelist in literature who believes that scientific investigation has killed the world’s soul.
With six clicks, Kurton finds a contact for the immigrant student. He composes an e-mail, using a Tamazight greeting that he picked up on one of his trips to Morocco. He tells her about his work in understanding what makes humans happy, and his hopes for using genetic information to heal the future. He describes how much his lab has already learned by exploring people like her, and he says how much she would contribute to the study. Everyone alive would love to know a little more about how you tick! He mentions that he’s coming to Chicago and asks if they might meet when he’s in the city. He gives her five ways to contact him. And his e-mail software automatically appends, beneath the obligatory block of personal data, his signature quote:
. whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive.
– Joseph Priestley