For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through the collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however skeptical we might be.
– Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10ݣChapters
And on a May night in the near future, Tonia Schiff will land at Tunis-Carthage International. Seen from the airport shuttle, the dense glow surprises her. So much flickering enterprise up so late, refining fresh surplus into new necessities. Tunis glitters as furtively as any of the earth’s two-hundred-or-so-million-inhabitant cities. This one just happens to be four thousand years old.
The science-show host wakes up in the Centre Ville, feeling that she’s landed by mistake in southern Italy. Only the palms along Avenue Mohammed V reassure Tonia. And these turn out to be just a holdover French colonial fantasy. For a day, she wanders at random. The perfect day to play the tourist in one’s own life. She climbs up to the Belvedere, loses herself in the tight medina maze, strolls through the bey’s palace. She stands overwhelmed in the heart of the suq, beyond the simplest bargaining.
A pair of guards turn her away at the entrance to the Grande Mosquée, on account of her clothes. She tells herself she’ll try again later, more suitably dressed, but knows she won’t.
The city’s scent veers crazily from dawn to dusk. In the morning, fetid breezes blow over the dried salt lake, mixing with exhaust. Toward sundown, the flower vendors creep out to thread the cafés with jasmine garlands. A tiny white snail of a flower, whose scent is like falling down a bottomless well: solvent, secret, and as strange as sex, with final arrival lying just a few inches below reach Tonia Schiff might have come to this place for that smell alone.
The next day will be clearer still. In midmorning, she’ll make her way out to the marble carcass of Carthage. She winds up sitting at a stone table above the surf, aside the Chicago of the ancient world, scribbling production notes for her redemptive film now under way. Salt spray from the Mediterranean curls her pages. Coastal sun douses her, in a country she was sure she’d never live long enough to see.
The sea air is heavenly. Even the smearing haze over the city is beautiful. At a nearby table, a family of six picnics. A sinuous voice dances out of their radio; a woman who sounds seven feet tall threads a melody around instruments Schiff can’t even name. She won’t be able to tell the key, the scale, the words, the age, or even the feelings at stake. Her ignorance verges on glorious.
She digs into her bag and pulls out a beaten-up copy of Frederick P. Harmon’s Make Your Writing Come Alive. The book’s spine was broken long before it came to Tonia. She lays the volume flat on the table, open to chapter two: “Vital Fiction.” Ink fills the margins-words in three languages, sketches, diagrams, snaking arrows. Half the sentences are underlined in an elaborate, uncrackable color-code. The last paragraph on
Here is the single most important secret of vivid writing: let your reader travel freely. No border checks, no customs declarations, no visa: let every reader reach the country of her innermost need.
In the margin, next to “travel freely,” the Berber woman has written “scares some people.”
“Innermost” is circled. Above it, the words “le plus profond” lead to another phrase in a language Tonia Schiff won’t be able to tell from random scratches in stone
Thassa reads Kurton’s message on a computer in a Montreal Public Library branch six blocks from her aunt and uncle’s council flat. She’s still on winter vacation and looking for messages from someone else-an interest only now dawning on me. She has had scores of e-mails from strangers in the last week, but this one ranks with the strangest. She laughs at the would-be Berber greeting. She clicks on the link in Kurton’s signature but can’t make much of the site. She googles “how you tick,” but ends up more in the dark than when she started.
She refuses to snub anyone, even obvious cranks. Many of the most interesting people in her life seemed like cranks, at first. She forwards the entire message to Chicago, adding a note of her own:
Chère Candace,
No foggy clue what this means. Yiii: it’s sci-ence! So you know all about that, and you told me once if anything ever looks funny, just to ask your opinion.
Your opinion?
Je t’embrasse très fort.
T.
Candace Weld’s opinion was split at best. She read three print interviews with Thomas Kurton and listened to the man play himself on a podcast. She found him vaguely messianic, but neither the thuggish Edward Teller nor the grandiose Craig Venter that scared or envious reporters made him out to be. Weld knew plenty of researchers like Kurton. She’d gone to school with them, studied under them, competed with them for her own PhD. These men had simply accepted science’s latest survival adaptation-salesmanship. Any funded researcher who condemned them was a hypocrite.
She looked up the full Priestley quote from Kurton’s signature, finding ten different mutations that fanned across the Web in adaptive radiation. Thousands of people were out there, disseminating the clergyman-chemist’s ecstatic vision. The coming paradise was fast becoming a start-up industry all its own:
[N]ature, including both its materials, and its laws, will be more at our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence in it, and will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able (and, I believe, more disposed) to communicate happiness to others
Part of Weld wanted this genomicist to see Thassa, to be there when the transhumanist met something that no amount of blood work, tissue samples, or gene sequencing would ever explain. Thassadit Amzwar’s gift had little to do with molecules; on that, Candace was ready to bet her own well-being. The Kabyle had found something about how best to be alive. Mr. Omega Point could find the same, by meeting her.
Candace recalled Dennis Winfield’s warning about boundaries, and she briefly considered consulting him. But Thassa had written her as a friend, not as a client. Candace wrote back on her Gmail account, not her college one. She told Thassa what she’d learned about the controversial scientist. Thassa should feel no obligation to meet the man, but if she wanted to, Candace would be happy to chaperone.
The reply came in, as good as predictable. That’s great. That’s perfect. Can Mister Stone come, too?
Men will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able to communicate happiness to others. Schiff reads the words at the end of dozens of e-mails. She reads at night by the dim ceiling light in her hotel above the ficus trees on Avenue Habib Bourguiba. Whatever the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal. Beyond imagining
She carries the man’s correspondence around the globe, along with a dossier of files stolen from the archives of Over the Limit. She searches her folders for that broad-based survey on America’s attitudes toward genetic editing that will open her film in progress:
Two-thirds of Americans would genetically intervene to keep their offspring disease free.
Two-fifths would enhance their children, with the number rising every year.
On average, American parents would give their child ninety-fourth percentile beauty and fifty-seventh percentile brains.
These data keep her awake, working in her narrow rented room as the scent of jasmine blows through her open window. When jet lag finally catches her, she curls up on the hard mattress and goes through the motions of sleep. All the while, on the insides of her eyelids, hopes rise, taboos fade, miracles get marked down, the impossible goes ordinary, chance becomes choice, and Scheherazade keeps whispering, “What is this tale, compared to the one I will tell you tomorrow night, if you but spare me and let me live?”
A hurt message on Stone’s answering machine: Mister! I’m back. I went to your office hours, but they said you weren’t with the college anymore. I sent you a mail, but it bounced. Can you just tell me you are okay?
He writes back and says he’s fine. He’s returned to his real job. He wishes her well in the new semester. I hope you keep up your journal. He writes in a tone to preclude all reply, then checks his mail every fifteen minutes for the next ten hours.
Her answer is seven words: Did they fire you because of me?
No, he insists. That job was only temporary. He never expected to be renewed for spring. It’s the first lie he can remember telling that wasn’t prompted by real-time panic. He falls into the beginner’s trap: too many explanations. I have to focus my time and energies. I’m going to write a book.
She replies immediately: Mabrouk, mabrouk! Fantastic news. Maybe you can tell me all about it, the night of January 12? Candace and I are going to hear a mad scientist who wants to study me. Can you believe it?
Kurton is nursing the three-hundred-dollar shot of orange juice they serve in first class before takeoff when the flight attendant comes on the speakers like an old friend. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to American flight 1803 from Boston to Chicago. If Chicago is not in your travel plans today, now might be a good time to deplane.
He laughs out loud, which makes his seatmate stop thumbing her BlackBerry and look up in alarm. Kurton apologizes and turns back to his notes. He’s working on his comments for the debate with the Australian Nobel novelist and searching for a good hook. As always, random assortment and selection hand him one. He scribbles onto his card stock with a fountain pen: If the future is not your destination, now might be a good time to disembark.
They go down to Hyde Park together, Stone, Weld, and Thassadit. The event is billed as “a dialogue between the Two Cultures,” but seems to be a cross between celebrity gawk and gladiatorial combat. Russell is a mess, and not just because each woman has a hold of an elbow and steers him in a different direction.
Candace needed days to talk him into coming. “You can’t avoid her forever. She wants to see you.”
In fact, he needs another look at her, now that the evening class is history. He’s starting to think that he made her up, that she’s just a good-natured kid he happened to meet in her first flush of college life in an exhilarating city. Even so, one small dose of her could take him through this winter’s unusually rough patch and armor him for spring.
It’s not Thassa he most dreads. It’s the novelist. From their seats near the back of the auditorium, even before the writer steps onto the stage, Russell Stone eyes the exits. Years ago, in Tucson, he read one of the man’s books, a stripped-down parable in the Eastern European style, set in no place or time, imbued with only the faintest outline of a plot and with no pretense of a psychological character study to carry it. But as young Stone homed in on the closing pages, fixed to the cadence of sentences almost biblical, his own life fell away, replaced by a glimpse of human collective desperation so rigorous that it left itself no place to land but in a futile embrace. Stone finished the last paragraph lying on his back on the quarry stone of his apartment floor, unable to raise himself or stop crying or do much of anything except lie there like a grazing animal struck by something massive and ruthless beyond comprehension. When at last he did stand up, startled by the sound of Grace letting herself in the front door, he hid the book behind a shelf of essays. He never mentioned reading it to Grace or anyone.
That was years ago, when he was Thassa’s age. Since then, he’s felt no need to read the man’s six other books. And he’s never again cracked the cover of the novel that so badly wrecked him, afraid of what he might discover. Last year, hearing that the novelist had taken a visiting position at Mr. Rockefeller’s university, he stopped going to his favorite South Side bookstore, just to avoid an accidental sighting. He has avoided two previous, much-publicized public talks. Now he’s condemned to sit in this overflowing auditorium and watch the man whose words transcended the human condition display all the tics of the weakest human. Stone cups his elbows to his ribs and swallows down a small, vague taste of complicit shame.
“Tell me about your book,” Thassa whispers, as the crowd settles.
Candace leans forward. “You’re writing a book?”
“It’s a fiction,” Stone says, and is rescued by a roomful of applause.
They come onstage together, the Nobel laureate, the genomicist, and the evening’s moderator. Thassa, seated between her escorts, asks Candace, “Which one?” Weld indicates Kurton, who-as the pale laureate studies his shoes-shades his eyes from the stage lights and gazes out, searching the audience for something, perhaps even for Thassa herself.
The “debate” unnerves Russell, right out of the gate. The novelist reads stiffly from a prepared speech, voice shaking. Stone’s man is the most painfully shy person who has ever been forced into a public spectacle. The writer’s thought is so dense that every clause tries to circle back for another try before plunging on. For every point Russell grasps, three break away into the undergrowth. He wants to get down on hands and knees and crawl from the auditorium.
The novelist’s argument is clear enough: genetic enhancement represents the end of human nature. Take control of fate, and you destroy everything that joins us to one another and dignifies life. A story with no end or impediment is no story at all. Replace limits with unbounded appetite, and everything meaningful turns into nightmare.
The quaking man sits down to damningly respectful applause. Stone steals a glance at Thassa; her hands fold in front of her mouth, like she’s praying. She’s off in a land he can’t visit. The country of pure observation.
The geneticist follows. Even walking to the podium, Thomas Kurton is charming. His shoulders bob like a boy on his first day of summer camp. He opens with a quip. “Every divide between the Two Cultures is bridgeable, except this one: humanists write out their talks and scientists extemporize.” Stone peeks at Weld; her knowing profile smile twists his stomach.
Kurton praises the long, mysterious journey of literature. “Imaginative writing has always been the engine of future fact.” He thanks his opponent. “You’ve made a lot of good points that I’ll have to think about.” He concedes that genetic enhancement does force major reconsiderations, starting with the boundaries between justice and fate, the natural and the inevitable. “But so did the capture of fire and the invention of agriculture.”
He invites a thought experiment. Suppose you want to have a baby, but you’re at high risk for conveying cystic fibrosis. You go to the clinic, where the doctors, by screening your eggs, guarantee that your child will be born free of a hideous and fatal disease. “Not too many prospective parents will have a problem with that.”
As the scientist speaks, the novelist stares down at the table in front of him, his head in his hands. Russell Stone wants to mercy-kill him.
Thomas Kurton sees only the audience. “Now suppose you come to the clinic already pregnant, and tests show cystic fibrosis in your fetus. Assuming that the doctors can bring a treatment risk down to acceptable levels ”
Russell glances at Candace, who winces back. He looks at Thassa. She holds up a tiny digital movie camera and pans it around the auditorium. At his glance, she grabs his arm and pulls his ear near her mouth. “Many beautiful faces in here tonight. I’m so glad we came!”
Her casual touch pumps his neck full of blood. Minutes pass before he can concentrate on Kurton again. The geneticist progresses to removing the disease gene from the germ line before the malicious message has a chance to get copied again.
Russell comes alert when Kurton invokes the uses of literature. “For most of human history, when existence was too short and bleak to mean anything, we needed stories to compensate. But now that we’re on the verge of living the long, pain-reduced, and satisfying life that our brains deserve, it’s time for art to lead us beyond noble stoicism.”
In short: if it’s getting too rich for you, get off the ride. The Nobel novelist looks like he wants to do just that. Kurton concedes that change is always upheaval. “But upheaval is opportunity’s maiden name.” He concludes by mentioning a construction sign he saw on the torn-up expressway coming in from O’Hare: Inconvenience is temporary; improvement is permanent. The hall laughs appreciatively, pretty much ready to play.
When the applause ends, the novelist begins the rebuttal. “I’ve used that same expressway myself, and it’s true: improvement has been more or less permanent.” It must be his timing, because only a few people in the hall chuckle. But the laureate now talks with a freedom that gives up on persuading anyone.
The novelist’s metamorphosis baffles Kurton. He replies that anyone who prefers nasty, brutish, and short to glorious and paradisiacal may be suffering from depression. We’ve cured smallpox; we’ve done away with polio. “Of course we want to eliminate the toxic molecular sequences that predispose us to suffering, whether cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s, or heart disease. And if we can prevent the harmful, why not promote the helpful?”
Bunkering down into his seat, Russell can’t even begin to list the objections. He looks to Candace, but she stares straight ahead.
Right at the finish line, the novelist stumbles badly. Instead of pinning Pollyanna to the dissecting table, he capitulates. Enhance away, he says. Enhancement will mean nothing, in the long run. The remodeling of human nature will be as slapdash and flawed as its remodelers. We’ll never feel enhanced. We’ll always be banned from some further Eden. The misery business will remain a growth industry. When fiction goes real, reality will need a more resistant strain of fiction.
Uncertainty ripples through the house. The moderator, on orders from the co-sponsoring booksellers and café, chooses the unsettled moment to wrap things up. Democracy is thwarted; there is no Q and A.
Thassa is on her feet before her friends, camera in front of her, filming as the crowd drifts past. To those few who are old enough to resent someone recording them without asking, she just smiles and waves.
Russell is left alone with LPC Weld. “Well?” he asks. He doesn’t have the heart to volunteer what he thinks.
“Well what? It’s not a professional boxing match, you know.”
He cocks an eyebrow. “And you’re not a public relations manager.”
She flares a little, then nods, embarrassed. “Right. Well. I’m afraid it was Optimism, by a technical knockout.”
He wants to tally differently, but can’t.
“Should we try to say hello?” she asks.
He points at the crowd mobbing Thomas Kurton and lifts his palms.
“You’re right,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”
They find Thassa conversing with a couple who recognize her from the Reader story. The man asks, “Do your relatives in Canada have your same hypothermia?” The woman asks, “What kind of exercise do you do?”
Candace apologizes to the couple and leads a puzzled Thassa away by the arm. The woman calls after them. “What are your favorite dietary minerals?”
They press through the crowded foyer. Safely outside in the bone-crunching cold, Candace tests Thassa. “You still want to talk to him?”
Thassa stops on the salted sidewalk, clouds of breath condensing around her. “He’s a funny man. We say: he knows how to make the donkey think it’s choosing the rope.”
Russell and Candace trade bewilderment.
Thassa takes their arms and starts forward again. “Yes, I’ll meet him tomorrow, like he wants.”
“He seems harmless enough.” Candace checks with Russell, who is helpless even to nod.
“But the author!” Thassa exclaims. “He’s the one I’d really like to meet. Did you read him ever, Russell?”
High up on the building’s corner, a tiny white coffin of a security camera tracks them with its red cyclopean eye. The last five years of Russell’s life could be reconstructed from archived videotape all over this city. He looks at the Algerian, his face a blank. “I don’t think so.”
“So many thoughts. I wonder if he might be ill? His sadness is so steady. I would love to experiment emotionally on him.”
Candace jerks to a stop. The arm-linked chain breaks. “You what?”
Thassa doesn’t even blush. “Just once! Just for science.”
He has her with the belugas.
On the phone the next morning, Thomas Kurton tells Thassa Amzwar to pick a meeting spot anywhere in the city. She laughs at the blank check. This city has forests in the northwest big enough to get lost in. To the south, black neighborhoods the size of Constantine that white people never enter. Convention centers with the look of fifties science-fiction space colonies. Warehouse districts full of resale contraband peppered with refrigerated corpses. Cemeteries a hundred times the length of a soccer pitch, with gravestones in forty-one languages. There’s Chinatown, Greek Town, Bucktown, Boystown, Little Italy, Little Seoul, little Mexico, little Palestine, little Assyria Two Arab neighborhoods-the southwest Muslims and the northwest Christians-where people from a dozen countries congregate to eat, recite Arabic poetry, and mock one another’s dialects.
She has my problem: too much possibility. A thousand parks, four hundred theaters, three dozen beaches, fifty colleges, fifteen bird sanctuaries, seven botanical gardens, two different zoos, and a glass-encased tropical jungle. Meet anywhere? The scientist doesn’t realize the scale of the place.
She says to meet her in front of the fish temple.
So they meet at the Shedd Aquarium in the depths of winter, on a day pretending to June. For a week the earth has been so warm that even the bulbs in Grant Park are fooled into surfacing. All along the lakefront people stumble, light and jacketless, joking about the boon of planetary climate disaster. It’s exactly the day on which to start the future’s next blank page.
Kurton allots twenty minutes. He has read everything on the Net about Thassa Amzwar. He’s gone through the Reader piece with a highlighter. If she’s half what the accounts make her out to be, he’s ready with a full invitation.
He spots her from a distance as his cab pulls up. She’s standing at the foot of the aquarium steps, in full sun. She looks like a girl whose parents told her to stay put and wait for them, just before they were rounded up by the authorities.
He pays the cab and walks the final hundred yards, watching her chat up a ring of multiracial third graders. In a few sentences, she has the whole volatile class rapt, hypnotized as if by the best interactive television. Their faces are like Prize Day. Their teacher stands behind them, transfixed as well. Thassa Amzwar flips a hand back toward the Chicago cliffs: red and emerald, white and obsidian. The children look on, astonished by the city that springs up behind them.
She sweeps her hand across the panorama out beyond the matchstick marina, pointing to where an entire mirror city plunges into the surface of the lake. Her hands cup into a small open boat, which she floats out to the horizon, into the seaway, past Montreal, and over the swirling Atlantic. The third-grade field trip winds up on the shores of another country.
She catches sight of Kurton where he stands spying. She grins and waves. He crosses to her and takes her hand in his. She laughs and introduces him to the circle of kids, who glare at this party crasher. Their teacher leads them toward the buses and they drag themselves away, calling Thassa’s name in singsong goodbye.
“What were you telling them?” he asks.
“We were just traveling.” She looks back out over the curve of the lake, shaking her head. She’s channeling Kateb Yacine: If the sea were free, Algeria would be rich.
He thanks her again for meeting. She shrugs. “Of course!” She says he looks kinder when he’s not onstage.
“I think your debate partner was very upset, by the end. Maybe you should write him a letter.”
He laughs. “Maybe I should!” He steals a look at his cell; he needs to be at O’Hare by one, for a flight to Minneapolis. And her tempo is clearly Sahara time. He waves toward a nearby bench. “Would you like to sit?”
She frowns. “I thought we could ” She glances at the octagonal Doric temple.
It takes him a moment. “Oh, of course. Have you ever been?”
Her face is like someone texting a lover. “Not today!”
As they stand in line for tickets, she confesses to coming almost every week. The simplest pleasure-watching fish glide by on the other side of murky-green glass-never goes stale and needs no escalation. She’s jumped off the hedonic treadmill and doesn’t habituate. Goose bumps run up Kurton’s neck-piloerection, puffing up against danger-archaic reflex pirated by that spin-off of no known survival value: awe.
They circle the great central tank, Thassa studying the blue-spotted stingray and Kurton studying her. She holds the gaze of a leatherback; the creature is as transfixed by her as any scientist. Even her walk is eerie; she springs like she’s on a smaller planet with weaker gravity.
They wander through the Caribbean and Amazon. They peer into the past of cichlid-mad Victoria, a lake on the brink of death. He understands: the aquarium is this woman’s own test. She screens him first, before she’ll let him draw a drop of blood. Two Hispanic school-girls tumble past them in front of the lungfish, each holding a sheet filled with furious check marks. The taller shouts at her rumpled sidekick, “Are you getting your theory yet?”
The meeting has already lasted longer than Kurton planned. They haven’t even glanced at the consent paperwork. He should be anxious, but he’s not. He has seen five previous cases of reputed hyperthymia without mania. This one is the first that might be real. Just being around her is a mild euphoric.
Half an hour in the woman’s presence and Kurton makes a decision. Science is half hunch, and his funding is ample, anyway. This one needs more than DNA genotyping. She merits the full workup. He asks her, “How would you like to fly out to Boston for a weekend?” He lays it out: a full suite of psychological tests. Comprehensive biochemical analysis. Functional brain imaging. Salivary cortisol levels. Protein counts. Finally, genetic sequencing, beginning with three chromosomal areas of special interest
“What are you looking for?” she asks.
He tells her about the hot sites already located: the dopamine receptor D4 gene on chromosome 11, whose longer form correlates with extroversion and novelty-seeking. He describes the serotonin transporter gene on the long arm of chromosome 17, whose short allele associates with negative emotions.
“You want to see how long my genes are?”
“We’re studying a genomic network that’s involved in assembling the brain’s emotional centers. A few variations seem to make a lot of difference. We’d like to see what varieties you have.”
“Boston is by the ocean,” she says.
“If you like this city,” he promises, “you’ll love Boston.”
“Can I see where they made the tea party?”
He knows nothing at all about Algeria’s war of independence. He has never even heard about the massacre at Sétif. “How do you know about that?”
“I did my homework! It’s true, I would like to see this city of yours. But I don’t like to miss classes.”
Kurton says the visit can be as short as she likes.
She takes him down to the leafy sea dragons. The scientist has somehow missed these creatures’ existence. He pushes his face up to the glass, boggled. They are, by any measure, beyond fiction, madder than anything out of Tolkien. A sea horse cousin, but gone Daliesque, the deformed things have flowing banners pasted all over them, from dappled branches down to frilly spines. The drapery looks like clunky high school theatrical costumes. Taxonomy’s late-night brainstorming, gone unhinged.
The dragons float, propelled by tiny fins in their necks and tails. He stares into pure possibility, feeling how feeble imagination is, alongside evolution. He remembers Life in a Coral Reef, a book he wolfed down at age nine and came away from with a hunger he has yet to satisfy.
Thassa, on the far side of the tank, peeps through the creature foliage into Kurton’s face. “What are those? Feet? Horns? Look: it’s growing a tree out of the back of its head. Okay, Science. Please explain.”
He starts with the standard model. The one you can find anywhere, aside from a quarter of American high schools. Start with a genetic template for making enzymes. Let chance make small errors copying the templates
She waves her palm in the air. “That’s no explanation.”
He starts again, from the other end of the beautiful synthesis. Some slightly more seaweedy-looking sea horse has a slightly better chance
“Yes. Le camouflage. That’s always the reason. Hiding, and also advertising. Can nature say only two things? But look at the cost to these poor creatures. They struggle just to swim!”
“Whatever survives a little better”-Kurton drops into his media voice-“is a little more likely to-”
“Certainly,” she replies. “Survival is always handy! But what are they surviving better than?”
Slightly better than something that’s not quite a leafy sea dragon.
“You are the man who got cows to make medicines. If I come to Boston, can you give me one of those branches, growing out of the back of my head?”
“It might take a few tries.”
She crouches down again, examining the implausible monster. “Farhana? Hnnn? Tu es heureuse là-dedans, ma belle? What do you think, Mr. Kurton? Can fish be happy the way we are happy?”
“No one knows-yet. But ask me again, in a few years.”
An announcement comes over the building’s speakers: a behavior display in the oceanarium will start in fifteen minutes. She shoots him a hopeful look. He checks his watch and decides that she’s worth missing a plane for. Minneapolis can wait. For the first time in months, he’s enjoying being in a place more than he’ll enjoy leaving it.
The water-theater design is pure genius. The glass curtain arcing behind the huge tank vanishes, and the pool merges seamlessly with the endless lake beyond. The day is azure, and they could be sitting in a Carthaginian amphitheater on the shores of the Mediterranean. A creature breaks the surface, then another. Three sleek gray missiles clear the water and plunge in synchrony back in. The crowd gasps, music starts up, a human with a wireless headset and a fish bucket appears, and it’s showtime.
Soon, pods of marine mammals are spinning, leaping, tail-dancing, squirting, and chattering-everything that the woman with the wireless headset asks them to do. It looks like mutually alien species breaking through into shared play.
No one is more pleased than this show’s regular. She asks the scientist, “Do you think they truly understand her?”
“She’s making little hand signals.”
“Obviously! But this signal communicates, no?”
That’s when he tells her. Only a handful of genes separate speaking primates from mute ones. When humans are born with one of these genes knocked out, they can’t learn language. “Soon, we’ll be able to fix or replace those genes. So I don’t know. If belugas are a kind of disabled intelligence, maybe we have a moral obligation to give them language genes, someday.”
She grabs his elbow, thrilled. “Serious? Serious?”
And he knows, then, that she’s coming to Boston.
They say goodbye where they met, out on the sun-coated steps. She stands peering at the rainbow skyline, enraptured again, as if she forgot these buildings existed while she was away, underwater. She promises to go over all the paperwork and call his secretary to make travel arrangements.
He offers a hand, which she squeezes. “Houta alik,” he says.
The words start her giggling.
“What? Did I say it wrong?”
She shakes her head, still laughing. “How do you know this?”
“I did my homework on you. At least I thought I did.”
“No; I’m sorry. It’s good. But do you know what it means?”
“I was told it meant good luck.”
“Yes, sure. But really ” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder, backed toward the Doric temple. Her eyes light up with more pointless pleasure. Every novel is allowed one major coincidence and one minor one. “It means: A fish on you.”
Stone succumbs and calls Candace. This must be three days before Thassa heads east. He should call Thassa herself, but that would involve courage. Instead, he abuses Weld. It’s her job to calm neurotics. Everyone must suffer the penance of their abilities.
“You can’t just let her go out there,” he tells the psychologist.
“It’s not my decision.”
“One word from you and she’d return the tickets.”
“Or one word from you,” she counters.
“Me? What do I know about science? You’re the authority.”
“Authority?”
“This whole thing is bogus. Nothing as complicated as feeling can possibly reduce to genetics. You have to tell her that.” Her silence rattles him. “Come on. You know this isn’t good science. They can’t possibly think they’ll find anything.”
“Are you worried they might?”
He reads to her from a ten-month-old article in US News & World Report calling Thomas Kurton the “Sergei Diaghilev of genomics.”
She says something about science being self-correcting. If the man is bogus, he’ll disappear. If not, others will validate his work. The discoverer doesn’t matter; only the discovery does.
“You can’t possibly believe that.”
She asks, “Why does this upset you so much?”
He wants to say: Please don’t therapy me. Instead, he manages, “It’s exploitation. We’re complicit. We’ve been given this amazing gift, and somebody wants to take it apart and look inside without voiding the warranty. She’s not an object.”
“No, you’re right. She’s a college kid who gets an all-expenses-paid vacation to Beantown. She can say no if she wants.”
“All right. Fine. Just remind her she can refuse any test she doesn’t want to take.”
Candace says they’ve been over all the human subject protection guidelines. “Russell. She’s fine. Anyone who survived a childhood in Algiers can survive a weekend in Boston.”
You know the story in Boston. You know what the lab will have to discover.
Thassa flies out. She lands on that Logan runway jutting out into Boston Harbor, thinking until the last second that the plane is going into the drink. She’s prepared to die, but she’s delighted when she doesn’t.
Even as the plane touches down, it’s snowing. The northern world is dark by early afternoon, and she finds the harborside dusk unbearably beautiful. They put her up in a hotel ten minutes from the lab. She’s never stayed in a hotel before. She cries out at the spread of the Charles and laughs at the view of Beacon Hill climbing the far shore. She loves the town center, the jumbled harbor, the genteel circus of Downtown Crossing, the Freedom Trail’s inscrutable red thread, the colonial churches with their thin white steeples fingering God. The whole city plays itself, as if a movie of the real place.
She gives all her money to street people. She listens to the buskers in the subway, staying for three full songs and applauding, solo, after each. She’s a shameless tourist, keen for everything. She especially loves the graveyards-King’s Chapel, the Granary, Copp’s Hill. She gets no frisson from the names of the famous dead. Not even natives get that anymore. She just loves the slate tombstones, with their winged skulls and their quatrains of eternity, the patches of holy ground surrounded by amnesiac skyscrapers.
In Cambridge, near the lab, the streetlights carry banners celebrating the twenty-three human chromosomes. She succumbs fatalistically to the lab tests. If something interesting truly does coil up in her cells, someone will find it. If not Truecyte, then some other research group, private or public, will pinpoint whatever part of the secret of happiness lies hidden in the body. This decade or the next. The species will learn to read whatever is there to be read.
Her job, meanwhile, is to see the sights as best she can. Hit the Freedom Trail, before history catches up with it.
Stone calls Candace on Thassa’s second night out east. They compare the short e-mails each has received. Stone pillories her with questions. “What does she mean when she says, ‘They took my DNA’?”
“That’s nothing, Russell. Painless and noninvasive.”
“But they can do whatever they want with it?”
“Well, I can’t think what they might do aside from study it.”
“And when she writes, ‘Everything is much more interesting than I thought ’?”
“I think it’s safe to conclude that that’s a good thing. Russell? Can I call you back in an hour, after Gabe goes down?”
She does. And whether it’s the lateness of the hour, his Zen cupboard bedroom, the blackness cut by the single megaphone beam of streetlamp out his window, the shoehorn of phone pressed against his ear, the chill of his arms above the down comforter, or the sound of the woman’s restorative voice, Stone feels it might be safe to conclude that Candace Weld is, herself, another good thing.
A Truecyte geneticist named Dr. Julia Thorn takes Thassa’s family history. Thassa gives what she can, although her knowledge of medical details is spotty at best. Dr. Thorn asks if they might test and take samples from her near kin. Thassa phones her aunt in Montreal, who declines on grounds of privacy. Her uncle in Paris refuses out of a deep-seated suspicion of all things biotechnological. Her brother, Mohand, is currently under house arrest in Algiers for participating in a march for Kabyle autonomy back in November.
Dr. Thorn can’t help asking. The question isn’t scientific; the answer nothing but anecdotal. “Are any of your relatives like you?”
“They say I’m just like my mother’s sister. Everyone always calls her the Sufi.”
“Could we test her?”
“Oh, heaven no! She died in the Relizane massacres. With many others.”
Candace calls Russell at that same late hour each night Thassa is in Boston. Weld’s field has known about the need for ritual almost as long as Stone’s. And when the two of them go on talking three nights a week, even after Thassa returns to Chicago, this ritual becomes theirs:
The phone rings at 11:00 p.m., an hour after the cutoff set by every civilized rule for the day’s last call. He picks up on the second ring and says “Hello?” as if it might be anyone from prank radio to Homeland Security. She tries for silly-I was afraid you might say that or How does “hello” make you feel?-and he’ll smile in his street-lit room and say, “Hey.” Then they’ll be off and running, comparing notes about all old things under the sun.
Sometimes they talk for only ten minutes. Sometimes they go an hour. Thassa is no longer the sole focus of their investigation. Mostly they talk about humans, their infinite gullibility, and how you almost have to love them, just for the endless ways they’re capable of being duped.
They become an ancient couple, and all their previous incarnations-Candace and her ex, Marty; Russell and his abortive Grace-become just experiments each tried once, failed hypotheses that now, at worst, provide good punch lines. They’ve both required some trial and error to hit on the obvious: talk beats passion, two out of three falls.
Russell can’t imagine Weld’s motives, but he’s deeply grateful for the distance. It helps him enormously, not to have to look at her. So long as her face doesn’t set him off, he doesn’t have to time-travel. All the real-world stresses that Stone can never handle in real time he can cope with like this-in words, revised together, stories at night that last only a few minutes and give him a day to prep for, in between.
He hears her doing chores as she talks. Picking up toys. Pulling dishes from the dishwasher. They are the sounds of the life he always thought might be his someday. The pleasures he has long found only in books.
She asks him about the work in progress, the book that Thassa mentioned in Hyde Park. She’s wanted to ask for weeks. Her waiting so long to raise the topic moves him.
“I lied,” he says. “To keep Thassa from worrying about me. It’s all in my head. There is no book. There’s not even a nonbook.”
“Do you wish there were?”
It no longer bothers him, the echo therapy. He knows now that it’s just Candace, doing what she’s trained to do. If she stopped doing it, she’d be someone else.
“I don’t know. I’ve lost some basic human sympathy. I can see fantastic characters. Hear them perfectly. My head hurts sometimes, they’re so close. I can see exactly what they’re doing to themselves. But I get ill the minute I try to describe them.”
“Use someone else,” she whispers, as sexy as the dark. “Find a teller.”
At the sound of her, his soul breaks out and tours. She’s right. The city at this hour is packed with potential narrators. On a back street in Wrigleyville, two of his former students are smoking salvia and filming each other traveling through the universe, for posting on YouTube. On Oak Street Beach, an old Polish civil servant with one and a quarter legs makes her annual February midnight plunge into the freezing lake, with her husband as lifeguard. In an invisible squat on the roof of the Aon Center, an illegal Tanzanian immigrant protects the whole town from destruction through the sheer force of his will. Any one of them could rescue Stone’s fiction from crib death.
He does not tell her the real problem: fiction is obsolete. Engineering has lapped it.
What would his book be about, if it dared set foot in this world? She doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t say. It might be about the odds against ever feeling at home in the world again. About huge movements of capital that render self-realization quaint at best. About the catastrophe of collective wisdom getting what we want, at last.
He gives up his secret to her: the three stories he published once, in another life. He tells her how badly he wishes he could unpublish them all.
She tells him that even God was appalled by His first draft. Candace’s encouragement sounds exactly like the kind he once offered his students.
She says, “Are you in your bedroom?”
The question quickens him.
“Are you lying down? Do me a favor. Close your eyes and write a sentence in the air. Use your left hand. Just one sentence. A simple one.”
He writes: They sit and watch the Atlas go dark.
“How does that feel?”
It feels strange. Almost alive.
“Does it make you want to know what happens next?”
“I’m afraid that was the next.”
“Then write what happens just before.”
He has no trouble writing, he tells her. It’s the permanent public archive that terrifies him.
She says: Go to one of the free blog giveaway sites. Create an anonymous log-in, an altered ego. Just start watching, out loud, in words. Just say what has happened to you, in this life.
“I can’t,” he tells her. “That’s the problem. It’s not mine to tell.”
Then change it all, slightly, so no one gets hurt. Set the tale in some imaginary landscape, some otherworldly Chicago of naked invention. Forget about scene or plot or dialogue. Engineer a style you yourself would never dream of using. Confess or lie, show or tell, over-or underwrite: it doesn’t matter. Your words will be public again, and no one will even know they exist, except one or two accidental scavengers. And everything you write can alter in a heartbeat.
He does as commanded. It’s almost a pleasure, two nights later, to describe how miserably the experiment fails.
“I just kept thinking, We’re overrun with this stuff. It’s out of control. Kill yours before it multiplies.”
“I see,” she says. Wholly without judgment. He can hear her private diagnosis: patient has lost his nerve.
He closes his eyes and writes in the air. Left-handed, from Yacine’s Nedjma: Keep still or say the unspeakable.
Another night. Candace says, “Thassa called today.”
“Did she?” The topic might be Chinese hydroelectric development.
“She was full of Boston stories.”
“Was she?”
“She thinks she’s upset you.”
“Why would she think that?”
Candace won’t play. She’s trained not to. “You never answered her messages from the trip. She’s afraid you’re angry at her for going out.”
He’s not even sure what that might mean: Thassa afraid. She can’t possibly be losing any sleep. He doesn’t care who she gives her genome away to. He doesn’t care what science might find out about her. He wants Truecyte to work out the precise biochemistry for every ridiculous bait-and-switch human emotion that people have ever taken seriously and then develop an antidote. Fifty years from tonight, between genetic intervention, rising consumer satisfaction, upgraded telecommunications, pharmacology, the solidifying hive mind, improved diet, exercise, and behavioral modification, anger will be less of a concern than ringworm.
“I’d be ridiculous to be angry at her,” he says.
“You would be,” the therapist agrees.
Chance grows like a tumor in Stone. Ever since Thassa went to Boston, he’s been plagued by the body’s code, the twenty thousand genes hatching their million protein votes into his heart, lungs, and flooded brain. In the dark, safely on his end of the phone line, he asks the counselor, “How programmed are we?”
Candace will not fictionalize for him. The data keep accumulating: impulsivity, aggression, anxiety, self-destruction-all heritable. The genetic contribution to addictive behavior: 30 to 50 percent. Anorexia and bulimia: a 70 percent genetic component. “But still, the students who come to see me change. They can get better.”
“From talking to you? Or from drugs?”
“From both. The point is, for better or worse, will and words make a difference.”
“How much of a difference?”
For whatever reason, she humors his despair. “I don’t know, Russell. How much is enough? Did I ever tell you about my tightrope lessons? For my final exam, I walked across a twelve-foot gap on a piece of hemp half the width of my foot. Twenty feet in the air. And I’m terrified of standing on a footstool. Turns out, you just take one baby step. Then another. I’ve seen it happen. Temperament can self-modify. People can get free, or at least a little freer. And then a little more.”
“But not as free as we’re bred to believe we are.”
“Gosh, Russell. You make life sound like a sadistic experiment.”
“Let’s just say the grant proposal would never have passed my ethics board.”
“Hope is useful, man. It keeps us moving.”
“I see. Like a hamster wheel?”
He likes the sound of her midnight sigh.
They talk nine times in two weeks. It’s something out of the archaic novels he used to love: a prisoner who lives for the letters from a companion he’s never met. An invalid obsessed with a vivid woman sealed in a century-and-a-half-old daguerreotype.
They keep deep down, amid the productive psychosis of the city. Neither one of them suggests that they get together for lunch or drinks or anything. They are each other’s solitary reading. The world is graduating from face time to MySpace anyway. The two of them are simply a little ahead of the curve
Stone puts it to himself: If the sound of Candace Weld’s voice suffices for the night that needs getting through, why should he escalate? Who decided that words are just action’s junior prom? He’s richer with her now, in the tangled inventions of their nightly sentences, than they would be after three weeks stranded in sexual intimacy.
Not disabled: deliberate. He’s read in his happiness books that deaf couples sometimes refuse medical intervention that might “cure” their offspring and banish them to the world of the hearing. Why should he be forced into the community of touch, when this is his real medium?
Candace’s voice asks for nothing. He can’t simply be imagining it: she’s grateful, as well, for this reprieve from the short-range senses. Yes, their nightly calls may be all too much like how she makes her living. Yet this-the free trade of signs-is where she, too, would live.
He likes when her midnight housekeeping stops, when the only background sound is Candace Weld lowering herself with contentment to a repose he can only imagine. Make me a pallet on your floor.
The question is whether affection can need no more than itself.
He stops being the one who says when their conversations end. She’s the one who sends them off now. And that, too, becomes their ritual. “Well, Master Stone. Any further words for you tonight?”
And one night, to Russell Stone’s quiet astonishment, he discovers: there might be.
Kurton has held up the study for too long, waiting for an ideal subject who will solidify the correlation at the outer edges of their model. Then C3-16f comes to visit. Even before Thassa completes the routine tests, everyone on the project knows what they have: a candidate whose alleles confirm their extreme-end predictions. They measure the lengths of repeating segments in the promoter regions of her transporter genes, then map these variants onto a new data point, high up in the blank area of the graph pointed to by the rest of their data set. And when they see how close she is to the existing straight line of their larger sample, even Thomas Kurton is ready to announce.
They pay the fee for fast-track peer review and-after filing all the appropriate patent papers-they publish in a respectable journal. From a holding pattern to a record finish. All viable labs have been bred for speed, and each generation, science gets better at hunting the mastodon. It’s either that or go extinct.
Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.
Weeks vanish, during which Stone achieves the moral equivalent of contentment. He works. One part per billion of the world’s magazine prose gets detoxified. His days contain no agitations greater than spam. He returns all the happiness books to the public library, which makes him feel much better. In their place, he reads forty pages of gruesome details a day from a doorstop text about the French colonial enterprise outre-mer. And at intervals frequent enough to steady him and scarce enough to surprise, he has his nighttime lifelines with Candace-travelogues to anywhere.
But there comes a night, in late March, when Stone gets a different call. He can tell from the hello: Candace Weld has news she doesn’t want to give. “Can you come for dinner tomorrow?” She adds a hurried truth-in-advertising, her voice unsure whether it will lure him or scare him away: “Thassa will be here.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Not really wrong.” She keeps her professional calm. “She has a piece she wants you to read.”
“A piece? A story?”
“Maybe.” Candace chuckles without mirth. “A preprint of an article from Kurton’s lab. It’s coming out next week, in something called The Journal of Behavioral Genomics.”
“And she wants me to help her with it? You’re the PhD.”
“She says you’re the best reader she’s ever met.”
He issues the appropriate cry of pain.
“It references her,” Candace says.
“Jesus. Not by name?”
Weld cycles her breathing-p raka , kumbhaka, rechaka. “Not exactly by name. Come have a look.” And before he can beg her to fax him the article, she murmurs, “She’ll be happy to see you.”
Ah, but she’s happy even when rebel groups shoot up her neighborhood.
He buses over to Edgewater the next night. The air is thick with supercooled rain that ices as it hits. It’s six thirty, and the roads are already a hockey rink. He should have called Candace and canceled. The bus fishtails through the intersection at Western and smacks a Lincoln Town Car. Nobody’s hurt, but the bus isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Russell gets out and slides the remaining half mile to Candace’s apartment, slashed the whole way by tiny hypodermics of sleet.
Young Gabriel buzzes him through the foyer. The boy holds out one sullen hand for Russell to high-five. “Happy Persian New Year.”
Stone’s mouth is slow to thaw. “It’s Persian New Year?”
“Well, I think it was like yesterday or something.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t,” the boy confesses.
A high-pitched ululation, and Thassa comes flying at him from down the hall. “Ween ghebtu, ya ustadh? Russell, where have you been?” Her momentum rocks Stone. She squeezes his arms to his ribs. He reminds himself that she’d give the same greeting to a cashier just back from a week’s vacation. She releases and inspects him more shyly. There’s something different about her, some shadow of reserve: the article he’s been summoned here to read.
Candace trails down the hall, smoothing her face and dusting off her flour-spattered teal shirt-dress. Her cheeks flush as she nears. “You’re all ice!”
She strips him of coat and hat, shoes and socks. Over his objections, she pushes him down the hall and into a bathroom, instructing him to dry off his jeans with a blow dryer. She slips in a pair of men’s heavy woolen socks, which just fit. Whose toe space is he taking?
He emerges into one of those casual, upholstered living rooms that experimenters strew with pillows and games and books, then watch from behind two-way mirrors as the inhabitants imitate their normal lives. His three hosts converge on him again, all talking at once. It’s like he’s been dropped down into a time-share burrow somewhere underneath the Shire. And for an instant he’s stabbed by the feeling that the world might be far from over, that life might still have plans for him, that domesticity might yet survive the worst that knowledge can throw at it.
The preprint sits on a cleared edge of the cluttered coffee table, waiting for him. It looks like something that might come in a registered envelope: injunction, medical notification, summons. He glances at Candace. She’s already read it, and her face shows.
“You promised,” Gabe accosts him. “You said you would, back when I was at your house.”
“Go,” Candace instructs the mystified Stone. Discovery can wait. “We’re busy in the kitchen anyway.”
Thassa, too, shoos them off. “Don’t worry. But get ready for the amazing!” It takes Stone a moment to realize: she means the meal. Only then does he smell the travelogue aromas issuing from down the hall.
“They’re making something foreign,” Gabe warns. “Zero stars.” With the right male ally, he might be emboldened to make a break for it.
He pulls Stone into a back room that’s a cross between a Hindu temple and NORAD’s facility under Cheyenne Mountain. If some newly mutated virus were to decimate the race tomorrow, a fair chunk of civilization’s id from the Paleolithic to the Nanotech Age could be re-created out of this room’s strewn treasures. The overflowing dragon’s hoard of Wi-Fi medieval castles, interstellar Monopoly sets, speech-recognizing ant colonies, and GPS-ready counterterrorist dolls seems to contain a total of three books. Stone picks up one: Danny Dunn and the International Clone Cartel. “Don’t you read?”
Gabriel is already booting up Darth Sauron’s Personal Quantum Rearrangement Center. “Uh ye-ah? Like all the time? Hey! Put that down and come over here.”
Stone does as ordered. On the screen is something like the animated Saturday-morning adventures he and Robert used to watch back in the day, only sharper, richer, and much more deeply realized. Also, there’s the little matter of Gabriel actually moving around in the animated universe and leaving behind footprints.
“I’m sorry about the quality,” Gabe says, mostly to the screen. “The frame rates on this piece of junk are pretty much down the toilet. You should come see it on my dad’s machine sometime.”
“Sure,” Russell says. What they move through on-screen is as smooth and textured as waking life.
“This is Chaoseeker. The character I was telling you about?”
Only then does Stone realize: they’re in Futopia, the persistent, massively multiplayer world that Candace’s son and millions of others around the globe find far more rewarding than anything the less persistent real world has to offer.
Gabe in Futopia looks much as he does in Edgewater, aside from the steroidal body mass and the wings. He circles in the air, a lazy spiral over a megalopolis that-unknown to either boy-is modeled on the most futuristic wards of Tokyo.
“Where do you want to go?” the flying child asks.
Omnipotence-induced nausea washes over Stone. He shrugs, paralyzed, but the angel doesn’t wait for an answer. It peels over the cityscape, banking across a harbor filled with frenetic activity. Alter-Gabe heads over an ocean of deepening blues. Small craft toss on the stormy waters. The horizon offers a spectrum of available weather from sunburst to squalls.
The boy flies in a trance, beyond speech. They skim over monstrous islands, mashups of ancient cultural memories and historical nostalgia-medieval bestiaries, frontier romances, Victorian steam-punk, and recombinant hybrids of everything from spell-casting spacemen to Panzer-driving elves.
Gabe mistakes his visitor’s vertigo for thrill. “Can you believe my mother doesn’t get this?”
“How big is this place?”
“Which? The whole Endless! You can even create new lands, if you gather enough power.”
Stone nods, for no one. When we run out of resources, we can always move here.
He breathes easier when the flying boy touches down in a desolate landscape. The coast, a plain of ocher rocks, a stone farmhouse. “One of my homes,” Chaoseeker explains. The only moving things are birds and the occasional large mammals, off on the rim of olive-riddled mountains.
“Where are we?”
But the reward centers in the boy’s brain spark so fiercely it degrades his power of speech. “I built this here I’m a quest There’s a relic from the Old Ways I have to ”
He trots up into the foothills, ducking into hidden canyons, fending off the occasional assaults of hungry creatures under the remorseless sun. Now and then he finds a sparkling artifact, which he pockets. “We can trade this for great stuff, back in the village.”
It’s something out of colonialist fantasy literature. The boy’s real jaw hangs panting and his eyes dart in heightened alert. Futopia taps into more of the child’s legacy nervous system than Chicago ever will. Candace’s boy is a junkie, addicted to something that can match any narcotic floating around the public school system.
Futopia spreads before Stone. He, too, might wander forever in mysterious mountains in search of hidden relics, driven by a pleasure as much in need of constant renewal as sex. After each momentary injection of success, always another goal. A little repeated exposure and Russell could easily become as enslaved as this child.
Years ago, in a different desert, under a rock face filled with petroglyphs, Grace cut him his first line of cocaine on a pocket mirror. It terrified him, but she offered up the rite in such innocence-an exploratory lark required of all aspiring writers-that he gave himself over to her and breathed in the dust. It did almost nothing. It made his two front teeth glow and numbed his gums. Yes, the afternoon was glorious; yes, he felt full and funny and grateful and even powerful. But that’s what an afternoon with Grace always made him feel.
A week later, he asked, offhand, How hard is it to get that stuff? She laughed so long at his casual pretense that he realized: he would do this chemical never again, or he would do it forever. Something in his cells had come into life pre-addicted, as it had for his father and uncle and great-aunt and probably his brother. And the only cure for him was never to take the first taste.
“She hates this,” the boy says. “She thinks it’s fake. But it’s no faker than her phone life.”
Russell doesn’t even want to ask. “Take me somewhere else,” he tells Gabe.
“Wait! We’re really close. Let’s try over there.”
There’s no more talking to him. Stone leans back on his stool and watches his guide, the child of the future. Happy citizen of the place that cultural evolution has finally created to shelter the brain, after its long exile.
Just when Russell is about to flee, the door opens, framing Thassa against the blazing hallway. Two steps and she’s kneeling between them, one arm around each of their shoulders. “Jibreel. Mister Stone. What are you men doing?”
Gabe says, “What did you call me?”
She studies the screen and her eyes narrow. “Hey! Where is that?”
“It’s ” the smaller addict starts. “It’s hard to, I can’t really ”
“It’s Kabylie!”
Gabriel snaps up, clutching the mouse. “No it’s not.”
“It is! That’s Gouraya mountain, there. My grandfather came from not far away. Sidi Touati is just over there.”
The boy’s alarm confirms an invisible village just over the distant crest.
“Poor Algeria. Invaded by everyone.”
Candace stands in the doorway, testing a smile. “What’s going on?”
Thassa wheels toward her. “They’re occupying my homeland. Again!”
“We aren’t!” Gabe cries.
Thassa turns back to wag a finger at the plunderers, but Gabe’s bewilderment is so complete that she hugs his head to her chest and coos a stream of Tamazight that seems to comfort him. “You want Kabylie? Come with me!”
The boy wants nothing but to be left alone to solitary marauding. But he follows the adults into the dining room and a table so generous that both males stop and stare. Thassa orbits the spread, naming everything. There’s a small volcano of couscous bel osbane, pools of clabbered milk, a mountain lake of shorba with frik and coriander, stacked-up wedges of brik dripping with lemon. “And for dessert, if you are good ” She motions toward a mound of sacrificial almond cookies. “ Dziriettes. ‘Little Algerians.’ ”
Gabe stands stunned. “It’s exactly what they eat ” He points back toward his remade shadow world.
Thassa grabs his head to her chest again. “Of course it is! Maybe you’re a little Algerian, in your other life.”
She sits next to the boy. All meal long she teaches him table words in Arabic. He revels in the gutturals while his mother crows, astonished at his appetite.
Checking out of her Centre Ville hotel, Tonia Schiff will ask the concierge how to catch the bus to El Kef. The concierge draws a map to the big station at Bab Alioua. Schiff will find the station without a problem-a cushy place, as world bus stations go. But something about Bab Alioua is a glimpse of things to come: a state-controlled, adlibbed exercise in indirection and concealment. Take a number and pitch a tent.
She asks about the Kef bus at three guichets and gets five different answers. She boards the wrong bus but disembarks just before it takes off for the subterranean world of Tataouine. She gets sent to another waiting area, but a handmade Arabic sign on the door she’s supposed to leave from announces a further unreadable change in plans. She asks around. And around. The bus threatens to leave. Then a semiofficial-looking man declares it’s going to be badly delayed. When Schiff asks again half an hour later, she learns it left twenty minutes ago.
Tonia Schiff begins to think that her French-so secure her whole life-is nothing but a private hallucination. Finally, a kindly man with a flowing Old Testament beard takes pity on her. He tells Schiff that someone in her situation (one he doesn’t bother spelling out) is better off getting to Kef by louage. He directs her to a nearby carrefour and tells her to ask for the samsar-the go-between-at the Café de l’Avenir.
The samsar can arrange everything. No worries. But the thing that takes the most arranging is how to divvy up Schiff’s dinars between the potential driver, the samsar, and the samsar’s samsar. A louage is coming soon, the man tells Tonia. But it’s a crowded one, and yesterday, it overheated, two hours into the mountains. That louage, he ventures, is not the louage for her. One epic Arabic cell call later, he announces a much better one that he could probably get her into, if it’s worth his while.
Schiff sits at a café table for a long time, in a mental fugue state straight out of postwar existentialist fiction. Waiting, she considers how much more fun it is to read such scenes than to live them. But the sun is mild, there is still coffee, and nothing on the horizon suggests that humanity can’t hold out until she records her final interview with it.
Just as she begins to imagine that it might indeed be possible for even Sisyphus to be happy, a white Peugeot wagon with its rear-left quarter punched in pulls up to the terrace with four others already in it. Tonia hands over one final stack of dinars, gets in the front seat, and buckles in for the three-hour ride.
The louage passes through the salt flats west of the city, Tunis’s only obvious shantytown. The driver catches Schiff looking and hints ominously that the slum owes its continued existence to World Bank master derivatives. The car bears south a little, then west again, through a plain that graduates-in another advance taste of things to come-imperceptibly from arable to arid.
Schiff’s guidebook says to keep watch off the right side of the road, at about one hundred kilometers. The Peugeot crests a hill, and down a wide expanse spread the ruins of Dougga. Tonia cries out in admiration. One of the passengers-the one she has dubbed the Tunisian Robert De Niro-leans forward and says, “The best Roman town in North Africa. Edge of the empire.”
The woman next to him objects with her whole body. Not Roman, she says. Numidian. Then Libyco-Punic.
Her other seatmate, who had spent the entire trip writing columns of figures into pocket ledgers, claims that the Numidians stole it from the Berbers. The driver plunges into the fray, and the debate turns violent in three languages, only one of which Tonia can follow. The argument over who built the city turns into a fight over who killed it-the Byzantines, the Vandals, the Ottomans, the French, or the UN World Heritage folks.
“No one killed it,” the driver declares, in a voice suggesting that anyone who disagrees can walk the rest of the way to El Kef. “The land just dried up. The damn empire fell apart. What do you do about that?”
The whole louage falls silent for five kilometers.
In one of his long, Tom Swift monologues that began in self-replicating nucleotide sequences and ended up with human colonization of other star systems, Thomas Kurton once told Schiff how all the basic elements of survival-finding food, avoiding prey, selecting mates-depend on holding background noise steady enough to pick out foreground signals. We’re tuned by a billion years of natural engineering to the flashing Now, designed to be dead blind to exactly the kind of huge, slow, incremental changes that will kill us. According to Kurton, the race had two choices: sit like the oblivious frog in the slowly warming pan until we cook, or take our natures into our own hands and sculpt out better angels.
The cab climbs the hairpin twists on the Grand Parcours Cinq, clawing its way up to Kef. As the massive Djebel Dyr plateau breaches the horizon, Tonia Schiff gets ill. She concentrates her willpower on surviving the last fifteen kilometers, but loses. The rattled driver makes an emergency stop, and Schiff finds a small pit in the yellow rocks just off the road to vomit in. When she comes back to the car, the passengers and driver are arguing about what made her sick.
On the ridge outside the city, Schiff gazes south toward the pre-Saharan steppe, even as the Sahara comes slowly northward, toward her.
What does the foster family talk about, over the Maghrebi feast? Four feet from each other, Candace and Russell argue whether anonymous online user ratings for everything from holiday destinations to songbirds are a marvelous new form of cultural interaction (Weld) or the death of the private soul (Stone). Gabe gives the topic one star. When the heat of their hyperboles gets embarrassing, they switch to the recent unmasking of a literary hoax. It turns out that a troubled teenager’s searing memoir-abuse, escape, horrific life on the streets-is really the work of a seasoned, middle-aged feature writer. Candace calls the whole episode fascinating contemporary ethnography. Stone wants the fraud to serve time. Thassa and Gabe just giggle, in bursts of street Arabic.
The food warms them all. But even with passionate debate, they finish the meal almost before they’ve started. The world’s most ephemeral art form-even worse than magazine writing. What kind of life would let dinner pass in a tenth the time of its preparation? This kind. The kind we’re built for.
Stone sits facing the coffee table. The article lies in wait for him, occupying one-quarter of his cerebrum all the way through the dziriettes and coffee. The report is to blame for Candace’s distance all evening. Even Thassa’s attentions to Gabe have seemed preoccupied.
Russell sits nibbling at his little Algerians, inside a familiar domestic scene that ought to know how badly the world has already doomed it. This craving for a shared meal uses him like a seed burr uses a trouser cuff. Stone has spent eight years getting free of exactly this need. Now he wants it back as badly as he’s ever wanted anything.
All dinner long, wind shakes the building and sleet tattoos the windowpanes. An ice storm in late March: more freak weather becoming the norm. After dessert is over, the four of them stay huddled around the table, afraid to leave the one warm spot given them.
Gabe leaves first; he has a heat source elsewhere. He heads down the hall, off to a place whose payoff matrix is far more generous than this one’s. Russell would follow, if Candace didn’t chirp, “You read. We’ll clean up.”
When he objects to that division of labor, Thassa just laughs. “You want a typical Maghrebi meal? You have to exploit the women.”
He sits down to study for his supper. The article is hard, harder than he feared. He’s seen some of the vocabulary during his months with the happiness books, but every sentence here has something to defeat him: epistatic, allelic complementation, coefficient of relatedness, noncoding polymorphism, nucleus accumbens, dopaminergic and serotonergic pathways He’s waylaid in the dense hieroglyphics: 5-HTTLPR, QTL, VNTR, BDNF, monoamine oxidase, dihydroxyphenylalanine He wants to stop after every clause and consult Candace. But he’s the experimental control; his job is to say what this article will mean to the congenitally clueless.
So this is how the species ends. Homo sapiens has already divided, if not into Eloi and the Morlocks, then into demigods and dispossessed, those who can tame living chemistry and those who are mere downstream products. A tiny elite is assembling knowledge more magical than anything in Futopia, perfecting fantastic procedures, determining chemical sequences billions of units long, reading what these spell out, learning how a million proteins interact to assemble body and soul. Meanwhile, Stone and his 99.9 percent of the race can only sit by, helplessly illiterate, simply praying that the story will spare them.
Russell reads, the clink of dishes and soft words floating in from the next room. Apparently Kurton’s group has found a network of several crucial genes that, rumor has it, help build the gates and portals that channel the brain’s molecules of emotion. Control for any of them, and changes in the rest correlate with changes in sanguinity. The graphs are clean and the correlations strong. The variant combinations of these genes produce several clusters of data points along a spectrum running from darkness to bright. Tune each of the genes to the right flavor, and you have subject C3-16f, just now making her friend laugh over some silliness in the kitchen.
The article describes how psychological tests virtually predicted C3-16f’s optimal allele assortment-the happiness jackpot. Russell sits back in the rickety recliner, the journal open on his lap. He himself imagined this development long ago, the first night of his writing class. From before she even arrived in this country, Thassadit Amzwar already belonged to these technicians, the child buyers, the purveyors of human improvement. Way back in chapter one, he predicted her ultimate capture by science before book’s end.
He sits watching a skin of ice crystal culture itself across the living room’s casements. The glass is almost covered, and the ice is thickening. When he looks up from this reverie, the women are standing next to him. They take the sofa, Candace gingerly and Thassa in a flop. The Algerian speaks first. “Nonsense, isn’t it?”
Stone scans Candace, who clearly wants to believe the same thing.
“They make me sound like some kind of bio-factory for ivresse. I’m not like that, am I? That’s just silly. Everyone can be as content as they like. It’s certainly not predestiny.”
Stone wills Candace to look at him. “Is the science any good?”
“Good science?” She’s not the confident woman that he speaks to every other night, in the dark. He doesn’t know the first thing about her, really. If she were the heroine of some hackneyed genre thing that he got it into his skull to write, he wouldn’t even be able to jot down her main character traits. She seems experimental to him, curiously adrift in data. “I suppose we’re already past worrying about that.”
The words chill him. “What do you mean?”
Candace studies the ice-coated windows. “Every conclusion in the article could be discredited next month, and journalists will still be reporting it five years from now.”
“But say they’re right. It doesn’t change anything in real life, right? I mean, they guarantee confidentiality. No one can find out who ”
Candace, professional Candace, studies him, deciding whether jaw-dropping naïveté is genetic or environmental. It’s not fair. He’s the one who was against Thassa going to Boston. Candace thought they would find nothing.
He assumes a courage that he distinctly doesn’t have. “Look. This isn’t necessarily a crisis.” He turns to Thassa. “If anyone does approach you about this you don’t have to say anything.”
Russell glances to Candace for moral support. She looks back, crestfallen. Too late, he realizes: his job was not to reassure Thassa about her anonymity. His job was to prove that her friends won’t change how they think of her. And in that, he has just failed spectacularly.
Thassa leans forward, indignant. “If anyone asks me? Of course I’ll tell them! What do you think? If this is science, give me vaudou. Le marabout!”
As she speaks the word, the lights flicker and go black. Outside, the streetlamps, too, gutter and cut out. A howl comes from down the hall, then another yelp and a smack into a doorframe. A voice calls, “Mom!” Candace jumps up and blunders past the recliner, stumbling into the dark. Gabriel calls out again. “Mom, I didn’t do anything! I was just playing, and suddenly everything ”
Mother finds child, and child finds hand-cranked flashlight where it lies hiding in the front closet. The four of them huddle in the front room, sure that the power will return any second. Out in the street, a few scattered lights still shine, but the ice coating the windows blunts them to streaks.
When darkness breaks the ten-minute mark, Thassa suggests an expedition. Candace acquiesces. Gabe is ecstatic as he dons his coat; for once, Edgewater can match Futopia for adventure. They pass through the blackened foyer, navigating by the anemic, hand-cranked light.
Out in the courtyard, the world has turned strange. The moon blazes crazily, and everything they look on-trees and bushes, the spiked iron fence, the funeral procession of parked cars-everything has gone diamond, encased in a quarter inch of ice.
Thassa goes down first. She hits the frictionless front stoop and her legs sweep out from under her. She lies on her back, cursing in Tamazight, then stops, amazed, gazing up into a sky sudden with black. All four look up on a scene that electric Chicago has obliterated for a hundred years.
The Algerian crawls up on her knees, giggling in pain and begging the others to take care. They latch onto one another, inching forward together, an eight-legged, skating thing way out of its biome.
Other such colonies edge through the shellacked neighborhood, waving their weak beams. A few cars still slalom down the glazed streets, no faster than the sliding pedestrians. Branches are down everywhere, sheared off of weakened trees by the weight of their sudden shells.
A group of explorers gather outside a house, pointing their flashlights where a branch bigger around than Stone has fallen onto coated power lines and draped them across the roof like a giant’s aborted game of cat’s cradle. Thassa and company slide up to the gathering, obeying some atavistic urge to band together as the world comes apart. Gabe gasps in awe at the destruction. A puffy Gore-Tex kid midway in age between Gabe and Russell chants, “Lines are down all over the place. It’s like a war zone.” He holds up his cell phone as his authority. “The whole Near North is without power!”
Everyone slides about, giddy with apocalypse. Strangers chatter together as if they’re from the same close-knit tribe. Neighbors who’ve passed by anonymously every day for years now hug Gabe and pump Candace for her bio. No one knows anything about the ice storm, except for the weather bureau’s complete failure to prepare anyone.
A young Indian woman consults Stone about canned food and bottled water when a shock crumples the air behind him. The group gasps, and Russell recoils in a hail of sparks. A power transformer comes unstapled from its pole and releases a fountain of fireworks over the group. Everyone shrieks backward, and a couple fall and smack the ice. The Indian woman is down and shouting.
Thassa skates to her side, helping her up and calming her down. Stone watches from his prone position. She’s been through this before-ice storms in Montreal, explosions in Algiers. She helps the Indian woman away from the sparking transformer, soothing her. Then Thassa rejoins Candace and a frightened Gabe. She jokes and sings to the boy in sinuous Arabic. Before Stone’s eyes his sunny former student turns into a genetic aberration, immune to disaster, a product of chemical reactions qualitatively different from his.
Even Candace, the eternal champion of nurture over nature, hovers near Thassa with newfound deference. Stone sees her hesitation, the slight bow of her head. Candace, too, can’t help but marvel at that outlier data point, all by itself on the high end of Thomas Kurton’s graph.
The group splits in two, those for camping around the sparking transformer and those for exploring further. Distant blocks still have light, but they’re blinking out fast. Thassa leads her three down to Foster. The road is scattered with cars, some still creeping, but most left in crazy angles wherever they’ve slid to rest. The commercial strip on Clark through Andersonville is dim. Ice has them.
The air is chill, but not punishing. Not as bad as the February they’ve just come through. Colder air high above produces this supercooled lacquer of instant ice that, but for a few degrees, would have washed away as March’s final rain.
The foursome doubles back to the Red Line stop, to put Thassa on a train south. Thassa tows Gabe along by the back of her jacket, a compact droshky right out of Tolstoy. As the sleigh corners, the boy spins out, maniacal wonder in his eyes. The world is perverse and jagged after all. The boy absorbs this sudden wildness as if he’d willed it. He swings around and shoots Russell a crazed glance. The thrill goes right through Stone. He, too, the frozen boy in him, wants ice to be stronger than order.
They meet an elderly Asian in a parka coming out of the doors of the El stop. He waves both gloved hands: Don’t even try. “No more train tonight. Everything stopped.” He’s wearing the dazed little grin of disaster.
They peek into the turnstiles, where a burly CTA official in a puffy coat turns them away.
“How long?” Stone asks. But the uniformed man just shrugs.
The four of them mill near the station doors, waiting for a second opinion. The trains are stilled. The network is breaking down. The city slips into dementia. Stone is primed by the article: signals, synapses, precursors and pathways, transporters and receptors. The urban web, too, has unthinkably more ways of wonking out than of working properly. What thought is Chicago seizing on now, as its cells misfire?
A young gay couple slides toward them from the east. “Forget about it,” Gabe tells them. “They’re not running.”
“Get out! Are you serious?” They glance inside, but the CTA official nixes them. “Shit!” the smaller of the pair giggles, as if his music-player battery just went dead. “Plan B, come in. Where are you, Plan B, over?” The couple skates off into blackness, singing, I love to go a-wandering
Candace peers northbound down the tracks. They’re as blank and silent as the afterlife. “Sleepover at my house,” she announces. Her son cheers.
Stone’s dread come to life. “I can walk home.”
Candace groans. “Russell! I cannot believe you just said that.”
“Really. It’s not that far.”
“Don’t be a nitwit.”
Her son howls in pleasure at the slur. Thassa smiles, too. “You do say some funny things sometimes, Mister. Never mind. That’s why we love you.”
They creep back to Candace’s through three lapidary blocks. The furnace is knocked out, but the apartment is still warm. The adults go about transforming the place into a candlelit séance. Candace gets her son in bed, with an extra blanket, although the odds of the boy sleeping anytime soon are what science might call nonexistent. Gabe whispers to her, like he’s praying. “I’m scared, Mom. What’s going to happen?”
She starts to reassure him. The night is not that cold; the power will be back soon.
“Not that! The whole computer shut off before I could save. I could be totally dead!”
She kisses his forehead in the dark. “You’ll grow back.” That’s the beauty of the digital-replacement world. That’s why everyone is moving there.
She comes back out to the living room, where Thassa and Russell are reviewing the article by the light of six votive candles. “You and I can share my bed,” Candace says. Stone flinches, though she’s pointing at Thassa. Candace smiles a little ruefully and adds, “The man gets the sofa.”
Thassa stands and takes the article from Stone’s hands. “Please stop reading, Russell. You’ll hurt your eyes.” She squeezes his shoulder, grabs two candles, and follows Candace down the hallway to the master bedroom, calling good night.
The sound of fumbling in a linen closet, and Candace comes back out, her arms full of flannel. Stone helps her tuck the sheets around the sofa cushions. His ribs clamp around his pounding heart. His chemicals are idiots, unable to tell an empty symbol from a full one, suckered by nothing more meaningful than propinquity.
He drops his voice. “Is it true?” She looks at him, baffled. “The article?”
Candace stands, holding her neck. “I don’t know. It sure sounds impressive.” In the low light of all these candles, she’s a La Tour. “Hang on. I’ll get you some blankets.” She heads back down the hall. Russell tags after her with a candle, pretending to be useful in this, at least.
She pauses before the linen-closet door. Signals race on the air. She feels the molding with one hand, then turns, the back of her pelvis pressing against the wall, bracing it. Her legs are slightly splayed. One hand drops and reads the stucco, while the other holds her auburn hair off her forehead. Russell comes to a stop in front of her. The flame of his votive casts a globe around them. She just studies him, her pupils dilated, her breath coming in surges. Waiting is her art; her medium, the confusion of others.
Wanting her has never been Stone’s problem. She knows him exactly, his hopes and fears, his reach and shortfall, and still she stands there, holding her hair from her eyes, not quite daring him, just studying to see if he, too, might think that it’s possible to double-cross nature, exploit the exploiter once, in this life.
He holds the candle to her cheek, leans forward, and puts his mouth on hers. Lowering a bucket to a well. He watches her close her eyes and thaw. His chemicals teach something that he long ago discounted.
A sigh comes from down the hall, the master bedroom door closes, and they both snap back to the business of blankets. “Here you are,” she says, loading him. An inward smile tightens her lips. He doesn’t know the word for it. Wise. “Call me if you need anything. You have my number, I think. Sleep well.” And she walks down the hall, brisk and rhythmic, letting herself into the closed bedroom, from which emerges a brisk duet of laughter.
He goes about the apartment, putting out candles. For a minute, he’s a surplice-covered twelve-year-old altar boy following the Benediction at St. John’s Episcopal, Aurora. Amazingly, that ancient creature is still paddling around inside him like some coelacanth, protected by the rumor of its own extinction.
The apartment gathers in eerie silence-no compressor, no blower, no hum or ticking of any powered device. He gets in bed fully dressed. He falls asleep to a ridiculous sense of rightness, dopamine run pointlessly amok. And he does sleep, on his sofa-pillow bed, deeper than any reason. But he dreams himself into a Pynchon novel, with an international cartel trading in the arcane incunabula hidden in people’s cells. His own sperm carries a sequence on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and he has to chase through several genomically controlled cities, looking for a doctor who will transfuse his gametes.
He wakes early to the second day of spring. All the lights are on. He rises and makes the rounds, turning them all off. The devices all flash 12:00. He looks outside. The spell is broken. Sometime after midnight, the earth warmed ten degrees. The diamond crust has crumbled and liquefied. Neighbors are scraping off their cars and driving away. The disaster is over, before extracting any but the most token sacrifice. A shame.
Stone relieves his long-suffering bladder, splashes tepid water on his face, and bumbles in the kitchen to start the coffee. From the boy’s room comes the click of keys. Voices muzzy with morning hum from down the hall. Steps falter; doors open and close. Communal return to consciousness: the routine that he’s spent his whole life fleeing.
Candace emerges first. She’s immaculate as ever, in tan blouse and creased gray slacks, but her face is somehow different. Pale and ever so slightly featureless. Cosmetic-free. She raises a thin eyebrow at him.
“Party’s over? Back to the salt mines?”
He nods sympathetically and hands her a cup of coffee.
“Bless you. You’re a secular saint.” She sits wrapped around her stimulant, sufficient unto the day.
Before they’re forced into the exigency of talk, Thassa shows. She’s puffy, frazzled, and wobbly. Her eyes are still pinched shut. “Do not look at me. Not a happy sight!”
Her loginess is deeply comforting. She doesn’t spring up full-blown with the sun. Science should test her now, put this bleary, sedated postadolescent into the data set, before she’s had her morning tea.
Gabe comes out, more charged than the three adults combined. “Everything’s fine,” he reassures Stone, chopping the air. “I only lost like a tenth of my Experience.”
They share another meal, American style this time. They sit at the small round table over synchronized cereal. Why do we need to turn the most naked animal dependency aside from breathing into a religious ritual?
Everyone’s already late. The whole city. The roads have mostly melted, and Candace decides to drive. Stone refuses a lift. All three beg him to get in the car, but he holds his ground. He looks at Thassa, heading off to a last week of normalcy before the subtlest biochemical assays ever discovered publicly declare her a freak of nature. Her face apologizes. What else can I do?
It’s Chicago, morning rush hour. Crusts of ice fall from the blowing branches. Stone steps back, out of the range of anyone’s embrace. The riders wave, the car pulls out, and he starts the long slog back home through the disenchanted world.
“Give me your coffee cup,” Thomas Kurton tells Schiff, who’s caught by the second camera. “We can take a swab off that.” It’s a funny, telegenic moment. Director, camera operators, and sound tech share a look with Tonia, and they all wordlessly agree to a wrap.
But the minute the DV cameras turn off, Kurton does as threatened. He flings himself up off the porch rocker and into his utility room, where he retrieves a six-inch cotton swab. He tears the sterile packaging, dips into Tonia Schiff’s coffee-cup backwash, and seals the swab in its plastic housing.
The gesture is weirdly intimate. “I now have your genetic profile. Your SNPs and indels-the variations in your genome of any significance. I can identify your ancestors-and your descendants. I can predict your health and development, and I can even speculate about your disposition. I can make a good bet of your likely age span and what you’ll die of, if you don’t get hit by a car first. Hide this away in the cooler for a few years, and I’ll be able to do a whole lot more. Would you like a look? It’s the closest thing to time travel you’ll ever get.”
The man has morphed into something out of Wagner. The whole crew regrets shutting down the cameras too soon. The future hits Tonia, and her stomach folds. She rearguards: “Am I allowed to look? Or is somebody like you going to sue me for infringement?”
“Good question. Let’s say the law is in a period of adjustment at the moment.”
She’s not really listening. She has her eyes on the plastic tube and its contents, which he’s waving around in the air like a conductor’s baton. “I’m sorry. Could I just ”
He teases her for a second, the swab barely out of reach. “Sure. It’s all yours.” He turns to the mesmerized film crew. “Anyone want to wash the other cups?”
Schiff and Kurton are still disputing the phrase the wisdom of repugnance as the crew brings the gear down to the van. Tonia looks up to see her colleagues spinning their wheels, waiting for her. “Go on ahead. I’ll meet you back at the B and B in Damariscotta.”
The smirking crew pulls away in the van, but not before that punk Kenny Keyes gives her a little knowing finger salute off the side of his nose. She denies him the pleasure of a reaction.
She drifts alongside Kurton back up the driveway. They’ve talked to each other for weeks, on and off camera, testing each other’s bright and dark places, familiar, now, as any two adversaries. She watches him stack empty flower pots. “People will be swabbing each other soon, won’t they? Before you hire somebody. Before you marry somebody. Consent or not. We’re going to be on file with hospitals, corporations, the government ”
“I believe that is already under way.”
“It doesn’t bother you, does it? How creepy society is going to get.”
He shrugs his shoulders, like a sixteen-year-old answering the question What the hell do you think you’re doing? “There was a time when income tax and government-issued IDs were unthinkably creepy. Technology changes what we think is intolerable.”
She squirrels the line away for use in the interview’s introduction.
He stares down through the thin line of pines across the road to the shimmering water, a Boy’s Book of Adventure look. “Would you like to take a quick sail? We have a couple of hours before dusk.”
His boat is a beautiful little gaff-rigged twelve-footer, cedar, oak, and Doug fir, from the sixties. He takes them down the inlet past the headlands, then hands her the rudder. Gulls gather on the rocky spit, like whispers. As the sky plushes out toward ginger and the waves quiet, he leans back against the front of the cockpit, toying with a cleat. They glide on no sound. She comes about, catches the wind, settles into the flow, and is filled with the most profound sense of aimlessness to be had anywhere.
“May I ask you something? Completely off the record.”
He tilts his face back in a speckle of sun, eyes closed, smile compliant.
“How in God’s name do your companies make a profit?”
He laughs so hard it folds him upright. “You’re making a small assumption, there.”
“Seriously. You must be bleeding money away into all these projects, some of which, if you’ll pardon me, seem as flaky as pie crust. Okay: You have a couple of drug patents. You’ve licensed a pair of processes to larger pharmaceutical outfits. And you own the rights to two diagnostic screens. But all of that together can’t possibly pay for even half the R and D-”
He juts out his iconoclastic chin. “You’re right! It doesn’t!”
She tacks again, taking a bead back up the inlet, toward his dock and home. “So how do you stay in business?”
He smiles more generously, unable to keep from admiring her. “You’re not much of a businessman, are you?”
“Enough of one to know that credits are supposed to be greater than debits.”
He waves away the nuisance technicalities. “Forget about bookkeeping. You can’t bookkeep what’s coming. In a few years, we’re going to be biologically literate. We’ll have figured out how to make cells do whatever chemistry we want. You think computer programming has changed the world? Wait till we start programming the genome.”
“Thomas. Relax. We’re done filming.”
He turns toward starboard and pushes his curls back over the crown of his head. “I’m sorry if I sound like I’m still performing. But believe me. It’s coming.”
“Okay. So medicine keeps getting more complicated. I see the revenue potential there, down the line. But you can’t run a business without products. What exactly are you selling?”
He gazes at her with the warmth caught so nakedly on film an hour earlier. “At the moment, Truecyte is in the business of selling the same product as most of the biotech sector: vaporware. But the venture capitalists know what’s in the pipeline.”
His voice drops to the hush of the wake against the hull. “The coming market is endless. Think about the five years just before the Internet. The five years just before the steam engine. Only those companies that free themselves of preconceptions will take advantage of the biggest structural change in society since ”
The simile eludes him, as irrelevant as bookkeeping. The sail starts to luff. She nudges the tiller and lets out the boom. Whatever Thomas Kurton’s knowledge of the future, he’s right, in any case, about her. For all her seasons Over the Limit, she’s never really taken the flood of transcendental hype seriously. That’s been her source of appeal: the clear-eyed, unflappable skeptic who simply wants to see the future’s photo ID.
She brings the boat in line with his dock, now yawning up in front of them. Together she and Kurton furl the sail and drift into a light knock against the hanging tire bumpers. Kurton leaps onto the dock, ties down the prow and stern, and helps her over the gunwales.
On the dock, she says, “You really think we’re going to get life to play by our rules?” The sun burnishes the water’s surface. In a moment, the air and the pines on the crag behind them turn crazed orange.
He comes next to her and takes her forearm. She has predicted this, with no skill in futurism at all. She lets him. It feels lovely. In her experience, it has never not felt lovely, at first. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. Does knowing the chemistry change anything? How long ago did she discover that lovely was a chemical trick?
“I’m telling you: Forget what you know. Free your mind. Use your imagination.” His eyes fish for hers. No end of stories play in his. Microbes that live on dioxins and digest waste plastics. Fast-growing trees that sequester greenhouse gases. Human beings free from all congenital disease.
She looks away, back out over the water. “You’re overselling again.”
“It’s not sales. It’s just what happens next.” His thumb strokes her wrist. He lets go of her arm. He shrugs again, and in that simple gesture suggests that all literature, all fiction, all prediction to date is nothing more than a preparatory sketch of the possibilities available to the human animal.
He detaches and wraps the tiller, tucks it under his arm, and climbs back up the boardwalk toward the house. She falls in at his side, the rhythm of this early evening remarkably familiar to her.
He thinks out loud. “Your show will run. Your gang will edit me into some sort of white-coated huckster too cheerily Faustian to hear how nutty he sounds. Good television, right?”
She asks him, with a scowl, not to pity himself or resent the millions of dollars in free advertising.
“You’ll weave this whole story about a man and his company and its detractors and competitors. You’ll construct this whole dramatic arc for Truecyte Listen: Truecyte is nothing. Truecyte is irrelevant. Yes, we’re in the spotlight at the moment. But you know how science works now. Several hundred thousand researchers, propelled along on collective will. None of us fast enough to keep up. We make this big announcement, this exciting but ambiguous finding, and within a few weeks, a dozen more start-ups are all breathing down our necks, threatening to beat us to this thing.”
She can’t keep irritation from flooding her voice. “What thing?”
He turns and points back out over the water, now a swirl of cinnamon. “Fifteen minutes ago, you were the queen of creation. Correct? I saw it in your face.”
She blushes, some other flush of chemicals. But you can’t have opinions about truth.
“If your alleles were a little different, you’d feel that way most of the time.”
Her head shakes, all by itself. “And if I were William Gates the Third, I’d buy me a nice little inlet like this and a sloop to call my own.”
He smiles as richly as she did fifteen minutes ago. “With the right genetic compliment, you wouldn’t even need an inlet. You wouldn’t need anything. Your enemies could be shelling you, and you’d still be filled with a confident desire to make something worthwhile of the day.”
“And this is a good thing?”
They cross the coast road and head up the foot of his drive. She doesn’t want to speak again, but she does. “This woman with all the right alleles: Does she even know she’s that happy? If she’s that lifted up all the time, does she even have a measure ”
“Oh, she goes up and down like anyone else. It’s just that her envelope of high and low is considerably higher than ours.”
Schiff pauses by her rented Camry. The crew is waiting for her in Damariscotta. She needs to rejoin them for dinner and postmortems. They have to be at Logan first thing tomorrow. “That’s my point. I’m happier than most people, but what good does that do me? She’s happier than I am. If you moved us all up a notch, wouldn’t we just acclimate and forget, like we do with everything else? Wouldn’t ten just become the new seven?”
“I wondered about that, too, until I met this ten. And the weird thing is, her genome differs from yours by only a few small tweaks.”
She sees it in Thomas Kurton’s trusting, suppliant face: There’s only one real resource. One fungible commodity that the future will trade in. “You’re going to make us all happy. Is that the plan?”
His eyebrows crumple and his lips sour. She’s hurt him, at least as much as he’s capable of being hurt by anyone. He shrugs off her mockery. “A little more capable of being well in this world. But not if you don’t want it, of course.”
“You folks have finally found the formula for soma. Damn.”
He breathes out a long-suffering sigh and leans against her car. “First, I really do hope that Aldous Huxley is burning in the pain-ennobling hell of his choice. That book is one of the most dangerous, hope-impeding, ideological rants ever written. Just because the author is stunted by some virtuous vision of embattled humanism, the rest of the race is supposed to keep suffering for all time?”
“I’m not sure that’s exactly his-”
“Second, yes: our initial products, if you insist, will likely consist of pharmaceuticals. But not the shot-in-the-dark stuff that we dispense today. Drugs tailor-made to the genome of the recipient. Smart bullets, genetically personalized prescriptions, and the sooner we get there, the faster we can finally get medicine out of the dark ages. Once we understand the brain chemistry behind depression and elation ”
He catches himself this time. He nods, repentant, but the fingers of both hands flick rapidly against his thumbs. “I’m sorry. I’m an enthusiast. Guilty. What’s your problem with that? I assume you have no moral qualms about curing depression? We’re talking about substances that will be to today’s serotonin reuptake inhibitors what fentanyl is to biting on a towel.”
“Why do I have the funny feeling that genetically tailored pills are just the beginning?” She catches him appraising her hair with the gaze of a connoisseur. Her left hand sweeps up, brushes back her flowing bangs, and lets them fall again.
He copies her involuntarily. “Because you are America’s most irreverent science television journalist.” His voice can’t help revering that irreverent.
“And all this public talk about life-span extension-”
“Oh, we’re working on that, too. Quality and quantity. Listen. We’re after the same thing humanity has been after since toolmaking.”
“Except for the bit about rewriting the script?”
He looks genuinely puzzled. “We’ve been doing that all along, as well.”
“And we’re not allowed to stop until every appetite is satisfied and every itch is scratched.”
The honest bafflement only grows. What else would you suggest? “Speaking of appetite satisfaction: stay for dinner.”
She pushes off of the car and drifts toward the house before the invitation is out. “I don’t know. What about this massive calorie-restriction diet you’re on?”
“I make each one count.”
Back in a rocker on the wraparound porch, she calls Nicholas Garrett, in Damariscotta. “Boss? Listen. I’m going to be a little delayed. Go on and eat without me.”
She can hear Keyes cackling in the background: What did I tell you? A hundred bucks, suckers. Pay up.
She tells Nick she won’t be too late, but no need to wait up. Then she rings off, to her director’s suppressed mirth. She sits in the rocker for a moment, examining herself. It’s not even an effort, really. Not even a decision. Just large molecules, passing their oldest signals back and forth across the infinite synapse gap.
A noise comes from up in the woods. She can’t tell if it’s a mammal, bird, or something stranger. A throat considerably smaller than hers, but monstrous compared to the rest of creation, moans in spectral restlessness. She waits until the sound returns. It’s a call from back long before contentment and agitation parted ways. She walks around the side of the porch to get a look. There’s nothing to see but dark woods, the prison-bar stand of pines and spruce, the rising hillside, and needle-covered night.
I have no center. The thought wastes her. Not even a thought: just a fact the exact size of her body. She’s disappeared into playing herself. She has no clue what her bliss is, and trying to follow it would lead worse than nowhere.
She walks back around the side door to the kitchen, where he’s already started slicing a cornucopia of phytonutrients. “I’m sorry,” she says. She doesn’t even know what she’s saying until she hears it announced. “I’ve got to get back.”
“Really?” His disappointment is insultingly anemic. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to stay? You should stay. You should experiment. Almost sixty is the new forty.”
She snickers, as she sometimes does during the show’s more outrageous segments. “I can see that. You guys are all over these smart drugs already, aren’t you?” He doesn’t, she notices, deny it. “Unfortunately, almost forty is the new early retirement.”
She walks back through the quarry-stone-and-cedar living room, past the shelf of pictures of the ex-wife and two kids, each already on their way to becoming multimillionaires. She grabs her bag and keeps walking. He follows her back out to the Camry. He doesn’t try to touch her.
At the car, arm’s distance, she tells him, “Thanks again for all the cooperation. This will be one of our better shows. You make fantastic television.”
He stands there, open as ever, ready for the next big thing. His crinkled face would simply like to discover what drives her. Born researcher. He may not have the happiness gene, but he possesses an ebullience she finds more attractive than beauty.
“You should stay a little,” he decides. “I’m telling you. You never know what might make you glad.”
“True, that.” She wants to beg him not to cure melancholy, not for another century or two, anyway. She hears the nocturnal creature call again, from up in the tomb of woods. She puts a hand on Kurton’s shoulder, pecks his pursed lips, opens the car door, and is gone.
She’s seven miles down the winding, dark road when story crashes over her like a whitecap. She pulls off in front of a trim saltbox store whose laddered signage reads:
GROCERIES
GIFTS
BAIT
UNITED STATES POST OFFICE
She fishes in her bag, finds the phone, and-something she never does-pulls back onto the road even while hitting the speed dial. Nicholas picks up. “Hey,” she says. “It’s me.” Whoever that may be. “I’m on my way. Get your hundred dollars back from Pomade Boy. And listen. We need to do one more show on this. Exactly. You’re a mind reader. I can’t imagine she’ll be too hard to hunt down.”
She says goodbye and snaps the phone shut, feeling grim and purposeful and halfway to vague exuberance.
Creative nonfiction comes down to this: science now holds routine press conferences. As the article hits print, Truecyte orchestrates their announcement about the network of genes that helps regulate the brain’s set point for well-being. The few dozen science writers, photographers, lawyers, and investment researchers who show up for the Cambridge event know the drill. All the actors in the network adjusted to the fact ten years ago: genetics has become genomics. Science has long since passed beyond the realm of wonder into entrepreneurship. New biochemical properties mean new intellectual property. Nobody mobilizes this much apparatus or lays in that much catering unless they mean to recoup it many times, down the line.
The mobile crew of Over the Limit is there, of course. And if history ever needs it, they have forty-five minutes of raw video proving that Thomas Kurton is not the first to use the instantly notorious term. That honor belongs to a sixty-five-year-old geologist turned reporter for one of the last popular-science glossies not yet driven to extinction by the Net. It happens at around the thirty-eight-minute mark, after Kurton has talked through his slides, run his animations, and spoken about “a new era in our understanding of the foundations of emotion.”
First, there’s an erudite question from a wire-service newbie about the ways in which other flavors of 5-HT receptor genes might be implicated. A veteran public-radio reporter asks about the penetration: What percentage of people with these alleles will actually be extremely buoyant? Someone else wants to know what role micro- and macroenvironments play in getting these genes to express. Kurton just shrugs and admits that the hard questions are still at large.
Then the former geologist and soon-to-retire magazine writer uses the term that everyone else was going to report anyway. “Are you telling us that you’ve found the happiness gene?”
“No,” Kurton says, the cameras catching his pained frown. “We’re not saying that at all.”
It’s like Jesus commanding his apostles not to let on about the Lazarus thing.
“What exactly are you saying?” Something about the science writer’s delivery makes the whole room laugh.
Kurton takes his time. “We’re saying that we’ve measured a very strong correlation. People with this grouping of key gene variants will be far more likely to enjoy elevated affective set points than those who do not. All other things being equal.”
All other things are never equal. But before anyone can point out that impossible catch, the éminence grise from the Times asks if the study has pharmaceutical or clinical implications. A grinning Kurton replies, “It might!” A sardonic chuckle issues from the audience, as they realize that’s his final answer.
Schiff raises her hand. Kurton doesn’t seem to recognize her as he takes her question. “Your hyperthymic subject the one with the optimal combination? How many others like her would you say there are, walking around out there?”
Kurton can’t suppress a covert grin. “We need more data on the frequency of alleles in different populations and the way they assort with regard to one another. Akiskal estimates that about one in a hundred people in the general population meet the research criteria for hyperthymia. If you forced me to guess right now, I’d say about one in ten thousand of those already fortunate subjects are also immune to unstable negative moods and intemperate behavior.”
She does the math. “So roughly one in a million?”
His grin fades, unsure where she’s going. “You could put it that way.”
She means to ask: Why is the “optimal” configuration so damn rare? What doesn’t natural selection like about it? Why should perfect bliss be hundreds of times less common than cystic fibrosis? But she misses her chance, and the rest of the conference plays out in variations on: How soon can you make the rest of us feel a little better?
Even those journalists who use a question mark in their headlines barely disguise their excitement. Science has found a chief genetic contribution to bliss. Genomics now knows what combinations of inherited material help lower negative affect and raise positive. Happiness gene identified? Did you think it would evade detection forever?
The Alzheimer’s gene, the alcoholism gene, the homosexuality gene, the aggression gene, the novelty gene, the fear gene, the stress gene, the xenophobia gene, the criminal-impulse gene, and the fidelity gene have all come and gone. By the time the happiness gene rolls around, even journalists should have long ago learned to hedge their bets. But traits are hard to shake, and writers have been waiting for this particular secret to come to market since Sumer.
The wire services each run their own account, reaching a whole rainbow of conclusions about what, if anything, the new findings mean. The 1,100-word Science Times article makes only five to seven errors, depending on who’s counting. Newsweek puts the story on their cover: Better than sex, stronger than money, more lasting than prestige The secret of happiness? BeBorn Happy.
Two of the big-four late-night comedians incorporate the story into their monologues:
So science has finally discovered that happiness is mostly inherited. But just remember, these are the guys who discovered that sterility may be inherited It’s interesting that, for some reason, the happiness genes aren’t particularly widespread. Not as widespread as, say, the obesity gene. Now the obesity gene: talk about wide spread
The Truecyte announcement runs through the meme pool like a wave through a football stadium. Websites everywhere poll user responses; the story gets four stars for newsworthiness, four stars for importance, and five stars for entertainment value. By rough count, two-thirds of the commenting public believe that nature contributes more to happiness than nurture, up from 50 percent a year ago. Two in five believe that science will soon be able to manipulate the genetic component of happiness to our advantage. Most people believe that if Truecyte has done original work to make a useful discovery, they should be able to profit exclusively from it. Eleven percent of the general public thought the happiness gene had already been found.
The discovery hits at the perfect time. The war has spilled over into a third neighboring country, and fatalities are at a forty-five-month high. A new study from the Union of Concerned Scientists shows that global greenhouse-gas emissions may have been greatly underestimated. Scattered outbreaks of a new fatal flu strain come in from central Asia. Recent tests show heavy-metal contaminants increasing dramatically throughout the food chain. Two decades of Ponzi schemes have unraveled the global financial markets and erased trillions of dollars of imaginary wealth. A terrorist cell in Southern California is rounded up, halfway to constructing a dirty bomb.
And scientists discover the genetic cause of joy.
In the final cut of “The Genie and the Genome,” finished just after the first article comes out in The Journal of Behavioral Genomics, Kurton refers to her simply as “Jen.” He describes how the group predicted her genomic signature, based solely on her psychological tests. He shows a color-enhanced animation of her fMRI:
Coordinated activity in these areas associates with sustained positive emotions. Look at her baseline: it’s a symphony.
His excitement ratchets up when talking about the process:
You feed the amplified DNA fragments into this high-throughput optical reader We can do a temperament analysis for under $1,000.
“Do you take Visa?” the off-camera host asks. His smile says: Choose your payment method.
He’s guarded about the interconnected patents his data rely on, but more voluble about the countless interconnected enzyme factories that contribute to the brain’s reward circuitry. He concedes the many genes that emotional well-being involves. Genes that control the pathways and synthesis of crucial neurotransmitters. Genes that assemble the machinery of neurotransmitter release and reuptake. Genes that wire together the centers of perception, memory, and emotion
But after another splice, he’s addressing an auditorium full of electrified people. Sixty percent of the room wants to sic the government regulators on him and the other forty are ready to send him to Stockholm. He’s in front of a huge projected slide, twenty feet wide. As he paces in front of the image, waving and conducting, a graph dances across his body.
The cloud of scatterplots is a thin cigar tipped along a rising diagonal. The vertical axis aggregates selected indicators of subjective wellbeing. The horizontal axis aligns the alleles for genes whose precise identities Thomas Kurton and company now make public for the first time.
He doesn’t have to draw the implied rising line. The line is there, running through the densest section of the cigar-shaped cloud. Data points fall all over the plane, but not randomly. The points rise as the number of repeated segments in certain gene polymorphisms changes. He focuses on a point high up to the far right, and calls it Jen.
Jump back to the smart house in Maine. Kurton’s eyes shine for the show’s host, or maybe its million viewers, live and on the Web.
Think about falling in love. How vibrant and wise you feel. Everything full of meaningful secrets. Amazing things, just about to happen Well, Jen and others up at the high end are like natural athletes of emotion. They fall in love with the entire world. And the world can’t help reciprocating. Genes plus environment, in a positive-feedback loop
Schiff lobs all the familiar criticisms at him, but he stays Zen.
Sure, well-being is a quantitative trait. Yes, these genes interact with dozens of others, and with scores of other regulatory factors. We are devoting a whole lot of microarrays and computer cycles to untangling those interactions Of course environment plays a role in their expression. But all these genes affect the way we engage the environment in the first place. There’s even some evidence that an adverse environment can strengthen the expression
Off camera, Tonia asks:
But the more of these alleles I have, the greater my joie de vivre?
His face admits to complexities.
We don’t even say that. We’ve simply noted a correlation
Shot-reverse to Schiff, who is enjoying this ride. She herself is far too sunny for her own good. It hasn’t yet dawned on her that this story might actually be nonfiction. She doesn’t get that until a few hours after they stop filming. For the moment, she asks:
And you can look directly at my genes and tell me my alleles?
Kurton beams and says:
Give me your coffee cup. We can take a swab off that.
They cut the sequence into the piece’s climax. The assembled show airs two weeks later.