No hay extensión como la que vivimos.
(No place is bigger than where we live.)
– Pablo Neruda, “Soneto XCII,” Cien sonetos de amor
She’ll rise early, before the sun, and for a moment won’t know where she is. She won’t even be sure of who. Then the hotel room, her notebook, her computer, the view of a mountain town from a window in western Tunisia, and Tonia Schiff will rematerialize.
The hotel breakfast: a coffee the consistency of clay slip, a baguette, and jam made from a biblical-tasting fruit she can’t identify. After breakfast, Schiff wanders out into a day that’s like a thousand-watt bulb mounted inside an inverted cobalt bowl. She carries a tiny digital video camera. It’s not her first instrument of choice, but it’s light, practical, and sharp enough to give an authentic vérité edge to the pilgrimage. She films everything she sees. She remembers Thassa’s pronouncement: all existence becomes a prize again, through a viewfinder.
She climbs and plunges down the steep streets, through a suq that has seen better centuries, the best of the morning’s produce already gone, the knickknacks tawdry, the vendors calling to her to free up her purse a little for once in her life. She navigates by guidebook up to the Casbah, just to shoot the town’s panorama. There she prowls around La Basilique, documenting the building’s changes in ownership: fourth-century grain storage turned Byzantine church turned mosque, recently returned to a Roman ruin. History is just fluctuations in appetite. Technology changes nothing. Someone, somewhere, sometime will auction off every inclination. When we tire of happiness, someone will make a market in useful despair.
She films the tiny courtyard, lingering on the Latin tablets and tomb inscriptions. She tries to decipher the inflections and conjugations, the ordered grammar of a dead language she learned in a Brussels high school, forgot all up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and revives now in this flyspeck town on the edge of the old empire, as vendors in the nearby streets call out fruit and vegetable names in Arabic. No place like home. Glued to one pillar is a worn poster for a local band, Rien à Dyr.
Tonia will spend an hour in the church, until an attendant asks her to stop filming. When she rolls out again, the comic-book sky will have tilted toward turquoise. She tracks through the half-excavated Roman baths alongside the spring that has kept the town alive for millennia. She strolls back to the esplanade-pristine, wide, and beautiful-through the heart of the old town that Bourguiba bulldozed in the sixties, in a ruthless improvement to touristic spec. Even this, she preserves in digital video.
On toward noon, she turns down a side alley and is stunned to find herself back near her hotel. She has gotten so twisted around in the maze of streets that for a minute, she can’t shake the feeling that there are two hotels, twin squares absolutely identical, parallel universes occupying identical colonial quartiers on opposite ends of the same hillside town.
She runs back up to her room and gets the two books that she has toted with her all the way from the States. She slips them into her shoulder bag. Her cheap attempt at emotional blackmail: gifts from the irrecoverable past. Secrets of the personal genome.
She debates whether to risk bringing the video camera. She has promised no film, no recording of any kind-absolute concessions required to get the interview at all. But she has banked this whole visit on a change of heart, a softening, once they begin to talk. She has come all this way, at greater expense than the project’s budget allows, in the hopes that she can elicit what no one in two years has been able to obtain. But any chance she has will vanish, if she angers her subject. Fortunately, the camera is no bigger than a family Bible. She drops it into her bag alongside the two books, where it discreetly disappears. She locks her room and trots down two flights of stairs, back into the blazing day.
She wanted to meet in Algiers, of course. Better yet, Bône, Sétif-anyplace in Kabylia. But two months ago, an unnamed terrorist group attached a bomb to the undercarriage of a personnel carrier near the Hassi Messaoud oil field in east-central Algeria, killing nineteen people and wounding twelve. The attack would have been routine, in a country that suffers such strikes as often as North America suffers sports championships. But among the dead this time were three U.S. “advisers,” all of them in uniform.
Schiff didn’t even know her country had military personnel in Algeria. Nor did most of the world, gauging from the fallout on six continents. The State Department immediately issued a travel ban, and the chance of a visa vanished into fiction. A town just over the Tunisian border is as close as she will get-a compromise solution with narrative possibilities all its own.
Schiff will find herself sitting in the designated café, forty-five minutes early. She has no trouble finding the place. The Café de la Liberté, just behind the Association de Sauvegarde de la Médina. She has checked it on maps for a week. She made sure it was truly there, earlier that morning. You’re a Western woman; no one will trouble you.
She has been denied further phone contact on the thinnest of fatalisms. “I will be there, Ms. Schiff. And if I’m not, a phone won’t help. We both just have to trust.” Schiff sits nursing what is surely the worst tea she has ever encountered anywhere in the world, served in a beautiful enameled glass. The liquid has been repeatedly boiled down to something the consistency and sweetness of a hot Popsicle, served with a jaunty sprig of mint on top. She wants to film it, but she’s afraid to take the DV camera out of the bag. Every ten minutes a waiter turns up to scowl at her for being a single woman sitting in a café, for thinking taboo thoughts, and for not making any more headway on the innocuous beverage. But Tonia has bought her right to sit in silence, and no one shoos her away.
She sits and does what she’s done now for three days: reads Thassa’s beaten-up copy of Make Your Writing Come Alive. At 12:48 local time, she opens it and points to a passage at random, divining by scripture. Harmon says:
Everywhere in the world, for almost all of human history, most people would have mocked the thought that a person might beat fate.
Several lifetimes later, at 12:53, she goes to the well again:
Some characters seem to be born with a blazing red X on their forehead.
The author seems to be getting shrewder, the longer that Schiff spends away from home. At 12:57, Harmon decides:
The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.
She can’t decide whether this is profound or portentous commonplace. All she knows is that the author isn’t helping her nerves. She periscopes the streets, jerking in recognition at every moving figure of approximately the right size and age. She goes on checking her watch every forty seconds until five minutes after the appointed hour. The whole idea is absurd: two people on opposite sides of the planet arranging to meet at a café on the edge of nowhere, at exactly 1:00 p.m. local time on a Thursday afternoon at the end of the age of chance.
The midday muezzins sing longingly to her, promises scattered evenly around the horizon. Long after all the root causes of such needs have been found and addressed, people will still answer the nomadic call to prayer. For centuries after the transgenics have pulled up stakes and gone elsewhere, many will still seek the cure this world cannot give.
At exactly 1:20, Schiff comes to the conclusion that she’s been stood up. She has blown a week out of her life, spent $3,000, and journeyed 5,000 miles just to sit in a café and sip the most cloying tea known to mankind. Her film will never get made. No chance to redeem herself. The race will blunder into the age of choice without so much as a proxy vote from her.
She’ll flip open Harmon again, but she won’t like the passage she lands on. She’ll try again, and once more after that-as many times as I say-until she hits upon a divination destined for her:
A great amount of ink has been spilled in the belief that when every other peace fails us, we still have words.
She’ll look up from the page, trying to decide if the words give her any consolation to write home about. And there, working toward her down the sloping street, still two hundred meters away, will be the leisurely, reconciled, unmistakable silhouette of the figure she has come halfway around the world to learn from.
Kurton descends from his coastal cabin and returns to work. His first public act is an injunction against the Houston clinic that wins the bidding for a dozen of Thassa’s sex cells. News of a deal has spread like a contagion from biotech newsletters to tacky bio sites: the happiness woman has signed away her eggs for $32,000.
Kurton files to stop the deal. His argument is simple, and similar to those upheld for decades in America’s courts. Whatever they mean to use the eggs for, this clinic is buying a genome whose increased bio-value results directly from the association studies performed by Truecyte. Truecyte’s intellectual efforts have established a correlation, and the company has filed for the appropriate patents. So if this fertility clinic means to profit from the probability of increased emotional health inherent in Thassadit Amzwar’s genome, then they owe Truecyte a licensing fee.
Journalists of every stripe converge on Kurton, and he talks to all of them. “We’ve done the research,” he tells a prominent op-ed commentator, for a wire-syndicated piece called “Fixing the Price of Delight”: “And we’ve determined $800 million to be a fair pro rata evaluation of the accumulated future benefits of our finding, as enjoyed by all its direct descendants into the indefinite future ”
In short, a nuisance suit, but one whose motives baffle all commentators. Thomas Kurton, who has long taken a beating for hustling humanity into the consumer-genomics era, is now hammered in scores of blogs for gratuitously impeding a free-market transaction and asserting ownership over a woman’s genes.
Several posses of self-deputizing reporters descend on the Houston clinic for comment. Dr. Sidney Green, the facility’s director, declares that his staff will carry on with their collection of the woman’s gametes unless restrained by a court of law.
As the public furor spins out, the wheels of justice fail to find traction. Legal analysts split between those who see this case as no different from a routine egg donation and those who feel that denying Truecyte compensation would reverse three decades of intellectual-property rulings. Uphold the claim, and everyone might soon be paying licensing fees to procreate. Throw it out, and billions of dollars of bio-economic property rights will go up in pollen dust.
An Episcopalian priest turned bioethicist who teaches at Illinois Institute of Technology goes on Chicago talk radio to try to slow down “this terrible and dehumanizing drift toward the trade in human traits.” He points out that successful donation can happen fairly efficiently these days, and if the extracted things get fertilized and turned into embryos soon after collection, no amount of law short of slaughter of the innocents will be able to reverse that step. But the judge in the Truecyte filing refuses to be hurried.
The alarmed congressman from Illinois’s Seventh Congressional District makes a speech on Capitol Hill. It’s really just a long-planned attack on the use of paid studies in the pharmaceutical industry. But the congressman works in a reference to the “joy genome” controversy in his home district, playing to his constituency while insisting on the need to rein in the bio-economy.
In all the noise, Jen falls badly in the eyes of those millions who so recently took her to their hearts. As far as the vocal majority is concerned, she’s become something sinister. Sure, lots of people take money for their potential offspring, but few agree to take so much. How could this shining woman, the standard-bearer of bodily happiness, put such a price tag on her gift? She should place it in the public domain.
Thassa’s egg contract makes her fair game for every kind of Web-disinhibited public attack. She turns pariah in several demographic sectors, especially among the adoring teenage girls who aped her Oona appearance just a few news cycles ago. A West Coast techno band writes her into a biting song, which ultimately goes on to make ten times more money than Houston wants to pay Thassa for her eggs.
Pastor Mike Burns, from the South Barrington megachurch, preaches a much e-mailed sermon in which he distances himself from his earlier proclamations about Thassadit Amzwar. “God may send us many messages, but we make our own errors in translation. Thank God He’s always ready to forgive!”
A great national debate ensues on whether feeling happy is the same as being happy, and over the ways in which earned happiness differs from happiness purchased by one’s parents at birth. This debate plays out on sitcoms everywhere.
The Economist runs an experimental, Java-based decision market program that allows people to bid on the actual price-somewhere between $32,000 and $800 million-that a tenfold increase in the odds of inheriting an unshakably happy disposition should fetch on the open market. The running average closes in asymptotically on $740,000, which is, coincidentally, close to the lifetime cost of chronic, nonresponsive bipolar disorder.
A giant international reality-show production company called Endemic successfully markets the idea of a sudden-death competition pitting gangs of potential sperm donors against one another for the honor of fertilizing a single woman, who must eliminate them on the basis of their genotypes until only one remains. The company tells the skeptical press that the concept was in development long before Thassa’s egg auction went public.
Three writers from National Lampoon, Inc. (AMEX: NLN) start a humor site called
Throughout, Thomas Kurton goes on giving his careful, scientific opinion on every question that anyone places in front of him. He does one final television interview with Tonia Schiff, for her genomic-happiness episode. They sit on a bench in the Boston Common, twenty yards from where Ralph Waldo Emerson turned into a transparent eyeball and saw all the currents of the Universal Being circulating through him. On film, Kurton struggles to remain game, but he comes across as stoic at best.
I frankly don’t understand most of this reaction. Mass psychology is too hard for me. Genomics is trivial, compared to sociology.
Tonia Schiff seems almost indignant. She asks whether Truecyte can honestly demand a licensing fee on an unmodified human genome. He replies:
We’re licensing the laborious and expensive discovery that a particular combination of alleles increases the probability of a particularly desirable health benefit. If you want to keep encouraging innovation, you have to reward that.
She asks him why Truecyte, a for-profit venture, has undercut their own business interests by demanding a fee that no potential client could pay. He replies that many human institutions have paid much larger sums for much smaller return. She can’t flush him out of hiding. When she goads him into predicting how large the genomic-happiness industry might be in ten years, he responds with all the resignation of a Tibetan monk.
If a reasonably alert person wants to be exhilarated, she just has to read a little evolution. Think of it: a Jupiter flyby, emerging out of nothing. A few slavish chemicals producing damn near omnipotent brains That discovery is better than any drug, any luxury commodity, or any religion. Science should be enough to make any person endlessly well. Why do we need happiness when we can have knowing?
When she suggests that very few people are temperamentally capable of sharing his vision, he bites out his words.
Listen: Six hundred generations ago, we were scratching on the walls of caves. Now we’re sequencing genomes. Three billion years of accident is about to become something truly meaningful. If that doesn’t inspire us, we don’t deserve to survive ourselves.
When the camera stops, journalist and subject say goodbye without so much as shaking hands.
Saint Augustine, the old Berber, once wrote, Factus est Deus homo ut homo fieret Deus: God became man so that man might become God. He also said, even more popularly, Dilige et quod vis fac: Love, and do as you wish. But that was before our abilities so far outstripped our love.
Oona decides on a follow-up show long before the demands for one start swelling. Dr. Sidney Green, afraid of the legal repercussions of anything he might say in public, hedges until his accountants run spreadsheets on all the possible scenarios and his lawyers devise an unbeatable game plan. Thomas Kurton is ready in a heartbeat for a second chance.
But when Oona’s people try to contact Thassadit Amzwar, they discover what the wired world has known for two days: Jen has gone missing. She can’t be raised by any medium. A continuous vigil outside her Mesquakie dorm attests that nothing remotely resembling a five-foot-one North African woman has come anywhere near the building. The bandwidth swarms with so many flavors of rumor that the police begin to make inquiries. The school has no idea of her whereabouts. Kurton swears he’s had no communication with her since their joint TV appearance. No one comes forward with any further information.
The police find the record of the now ancient attempted rape. They contact her erstwhile teacher, who, like the law-abiding, civilization-committed idiot he is, surrenders the e-mail from Charlotte Hullinger. Princess Heavy, savvier child of the future age, lies through her teeth to the authorities. She admits that a few of Thassa’s friends were, for a while, moving her around from apartment to apartment. But Charlotte claims that no one has seen or heard from Thassa for weeks.
The truth is, the genetic destiny of the race is holed up in Adam Tovar’s vacant apartment in Pilsen. Adam is off cruising with Somali pirate friends that he has stayed in touch with since their brief introduction the summer before. Thassa stays in the two-room apartment all day long, afraid of stepping out and being recognized. The apartment is a sweatbox, but the heat pleases Thassa, triggering primal memories.
For hours, she points her camera out Adam’s fifth-story window, toward Eighteenth Street, filming the Mexican shoppers passing in front of the once Bohemian and Polish neo-baroque buildings. Then she loads her clips into the editing software on her notebook, using her graphics tablet to paint over and animate them. As imprisonments go, this one is omnipotent. Sometimes she uses Adam’s Internet connection to go online and see what the world is saying about her. She finds the website that says she should be killed. She begins to see why some people might want that.
At night she has her books. She memorizes long Tamazight lyric poems from out of her beloved leather-bound anthology. These she performs out loud, in the apartment’s front room, as if for a gathered audience. In bed, she makes herself drowsy by reading Frederick P. Harmon. She falls asleep thinking of all the ways that a creative narrator might rescue her from nonfiction. She’s sustained only by knowing that the public must eventually grow bored, forget about her, and go on to the next story.
Her friends bring her food, supplies, and DVDs. Sue, Charlotte, and even Mason take their turns in the rotation. Roberto drives her to the North Side facility that monitors her for the Houston clinic.
From Invisiboy Sims, she asks more heroic services. She has been fine injecting herself with the first round of fertility hormones. But now the follow-up must be administered via a vastly larger needle. “I just can’t anymore,” she tells Kiyoshi. “I need your help.”
He tries to negotiate. He asks if he can just jab her through her skirt. It’s not possible, she tells the terrified apprentice. “You have to swab the area first.”
In a Midtown production studio, the Over the Limit crew gathered in a screening room to watch the rough first pass of the episode called “The Cooking of Joy.” A stiff dose of hormonal excitement passed through the assembled group, the anticipation that always came with a hot episode. Nothing in all of life could match work that tapped into the moment.
Schiff slipped into a second-row seat next to Kenny Keyes and Nick Garrett, just behind Pete Vitale, the segment’s director. Keyes and Garrett brayed at each other, even louder than usual. “You know,” Keyes said, “if I die just before all this crap gets implemented, I’m going to be supremely pissed. Can you imagine? Being the last generation to suffer from stupid, pointless misery.”
“Christ,” Garrett said. “One hundred and fifty billion people just like you have lived and died. You’ve had it better than any of them.”
“I see,” Kenny answered bitterly. “So you’re one of those glass 99 percent full guys?”
As the lights dimmed, Schiff looked around the room at the full crew-twenty-five men and seven women-a ratio as bad as that of the fields they filmed. The double-X chromosome and scientific aptitude: yet one more hot-button issue of scriptedness that no one would ever be able to think clearly about. It struck Schiff that she’d never get to do a show on the topic. Such issues were, for any foreseeable future, over the limits of acceptable science entertainment.
Tonia always enjoyed the episodes before the music got added-a last chance to grasp the ideas without her viscera being manipulated by sound. But nothing ever protected her from the vague disgust of watching herself play herself on the screen. She did not slink like that; she did not purr like that; she was not that soul of cool, remote hip.
Tonia the viewer battened down to weather this episode’s intro. Schiff the on-screen host said, Why is it that some human beings seem to be born with an extra dose of delight in life? The off-screen Tonia twisted in her seat. She’d thought it the most simpleminded of all the intros they had filmed; she couldn’t believe that Vitale had settled on it. Some people just seem to shoot straight toward joy, the way an airport dog heads for backpacks full of contraband.
From there, Schiff’s voice-over plunged into the biological basis of bliss. A stunning, swooshy CGI sequence zoomed into the eyes of a deliriously happy woman, tunneling through her optic nerve and into her brain. The view tunneled down by several orders of magnitude, landing in the nucleus of one of her nerve cells. There, in spectacular 3-D, the histone-wound coils of her DNA unzipped and bared their template surfaces to complementary strings of mRNA, which slipped into the ribosomes to be read by fleets of tRNA, each one porting its specified amino acid into the growing folds of a catalytic protein.
The molecular flyby gave Tonia vertigo. She watched the newly minted protein machines spin off the assembly line. As the sequence zoomed out, these catalysts began clamping and unzipping more DNA, igniting new genes, clipping and tamping together more RNA messages. Pulling back steadily by powers of ten, the sequence revealed the feedback loops of transmitters, receptors, and synapses that aggregated in ever-higher networks of neuronal chorus.
Just as Tonia forgot that she was inside an artist’s rendering, the animation zoomed out in a whoosh until it snaked back through the eyes of the deliriously happy woman, whose molecules had engineered her into something like the velvet rapture of orgasm.
The on-screen Schiff reappeared and said something clever that the off-screen Tonia tried not to hear. And before Tonia could follow the jump, her filmic alter ego was telling the story of twin boys, one raised in Minneapolis and the other in L.A. The two brothers never met until they were thirty-five, at which point they discovered that they shared a list of identical happiness triggers that included juggling, harmonica music, cedar trees, and the actress Felicity Kendal.
“Amazing,” Kenny Keyes said, shaking his head in awe. “That’s just killer.”
The on-screen Schiff said, Some researchers believe that the genetic contribution to our gladness thermostat may be as high as 80 percent.
The off-screen Tonia raised her hand. “Hang on a sec.” The film kept rolling. “Something’s been cut here. That whole segment about how quickly the hedonic set-point correlation falls off for fraternal twins.”
Pete Vitale nodded, on top of the objection. “We were getting several people saying it was complicated. Confusing.”
“But it’s important,” Schiff insisted. “We don’t want viewers to think that happiness is hereditary like height is.”
“What is it with you and height?” Kenny asked.
Vitale surveyed the group, even as they kept watching the segment. “Show of hands? Those for restoring the complications? Right. We run as is.”
By then the show had progressed to interviews with a neuroscientist, a positive psychologist, and Thomas Kurton. Talk of genes involved in extroversion, anxiety, and congeniality led to speculation about the “gladness thermostat.” Various predictions about gene-tailored happiness drugs seemed as groundless to Tonia as they had during filming.
By the time the scene with Thassadit Amzwar unfolded, Tonia feltill. All their clips of the manhandled, displaced Berber had been edited to eliminate any cloud or edge. The woman’s increasingly tumbled landscape had been cropped to just the smooth vistas. “This isn’t right,” Schiff said, without turning around. “We’re not doing justice to her. We have to use some of the rockier stuff, too.”
“We’re trying to tell a story here,” Garrett said.
“A story? You mean a fib?” But Schiff’s on-screen voice-over drowned Tonia out. The day may come, hostess Schiff said, when we will choose our children as carefully as we now choose our mates. We may select our natures the way we screen for a career. All the larger, qualifying, problematical follow-up had been clipped away.
The show ended with a rapid-fire, crosscut auction-various people saying how much they would pay for an imperturbably luminous outlook on life. The last face in the accelerating cavalcade was Thomas Kurton’s, repeating, Listen. The shot pulled back to reveal the man speaking on Schiff’s two-inch phone screen. The show host watched as the genomicist intoned again, Six hundred generations ago, we were scratching on the walls of caves. Now we’re sequencing genomes.
In the last shot, Schiff looked up from the minuscule screen, smiled her crooked smile, and asked the camera, If we accomplished all of that as frightened, negatively biased, misery-prone creatures, what might we accomplish when genomics takes us over our inborn limits?
In the cut to black, the few dozen people in the room began to applaud. Pete Vitale craned around from the row in front of Tonia and scanned the reactions. “Yeah? Pretty clean? No major surgery?” He stood and stretched, beaming. “All right. Thanks, all. Off to finishing. Remember: meeting on the transcranial-stimulation script at three. And everyone back here for the cyberwar brainstorming on Friday.”
“Pete,” Tonia said, and felt herself falling. “Pete. We have some major problems here.”
The crew kept filing out. Tonia herself barely registered her own objection. Vitale turned to look, sidesaddling away from her.
Tonia tried smiling. “You do realize this is total shit?”
The director stopped and turned, along with Garrett and Keyes.
“The way this has been cut, we are just fanning the unsubstantiated hype. If even one-tenth of this should turn out to be real, then we ought Don’t you think we should at least mention the challenges? We’re still a science show, right? Don’t you think we should restore some of those scenes with all the objecting researchers?”
The cluster of rearguard crew paused in the double doors of the theater at the scent of drama. “Tonia,” Garrett said, somewhere between peremptory and resigned.
“We’ve got Kurton himself having all those second thoughts. And that poor girl-she was ragged, Pete. This whole carnival is making her wretched. You’ve cut the interview to make her look-”
“It’s done, Ton. You heard everyone sign off.”
She saw, in clean animation, the assembly lines inside her cells thrown into wartime production. Even as it rose up in her throat, she wanted to know what caused this bile. These men she hated? But she’d hated them for years. Her public smackdown and humiliation of a few minutes ago? She wasn’t so vain. Some early parental moral inculcation that she’d managed to resist for decades? Late-onset honesty or scruples or guilt or any of a dozen other predispositions lurking inside her haplotype, just waiting like a heart attack or cancer to be pushed over a threshold and expressed full-blown? Why get righteous now?
Runaway branching feedback-who knew how? Everything, she decided: everything is caused by nothing short of everything else.
What she found so amusing about the unfolding scene was how well all the performers already knew it, even before she spoke her lines. They’d seen it too often to count, in every packaged narrative they’d ever consumed. They had her revolt pegged, long before she herself had seen it coming. The room filled with a deep, almost respectful compliance, everyone ready to play the parts that had been scored for each of them so long ago.
Pete Vitale asked, from a great way off, “You have problems with this work?”
“Tonia, don’t,” Garrett warned again.
“It’s cool,” Kenny said. “Let her blow. She can’t be the only one of us who never uncorks.”
But even the coffee-bearers and copyboys standing in the doorway already knew this story.
Schiff gave in to the warm, predestined familiarity of it all. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to be so predict We don’t have to labor this. I can just cut to the credits here.” She turned and walked up the aisle and through the knot in the doorway, which parted, fascinated, for her.
Behind her, Garrett told Vitale, “You better go save your nest egg.”
Vitale called out, “Tonia, come on. Come back. We can recut anything you want.”
“Hey: bye-bye, baby,” Kenny said. “Who needs her? Bring on the clones.” And the last thing she heard as she slipped from the screening room was Keyes asking, “Bitch thinks her face can’t be replaced?”
For three crosstown blocks, Tonia Schiff hammers herself for her own long complicity. Five seasons perfecting a voguey pose in the face of anything iridescent. But the future has been feeding on her all along, as sure as any bloodsucker. As sure as she and her collaborators have fed on that ragged woman.
Every twelfth person she passes almost recognizes her. I glimpse her at last, skirting along at a panicked if aimless trot, reflected in five long panes of department-store glass. She glimpses herself-all she has ever tried for, the thing she’s wanted to be from birth. Blameless observer. But the blameless can’t afford to look. Just looking is already the worst kind of guilt.
She comes up for air again in Times Square. Genes loose, tearing everywhere, splash their riot messages across a horizon of hundred-foot flashing screens. The future floods her with messages. She stops for the light at Eighth, and for a long sixty seconds, she wants to be more than dead.
Chance tries to hand her something, a film she can just dimly begin to see. I want to heckle her, from years away: Look harder
She turns uptown. For the next six blocks, she starts to make out the shape of her reparation. She’ll assemble the simplest of documentaries, a look at life about to be born. A simple take on things to come, the past’s only shot at payback Production should be no problem. Schiff has a track record, fame; funding is hers for the asking.
By the time she hits the park, she’s committed. She has a name already: “The Child of Choice.” She heads through the Merchants’ Gate and cuts up toward the Reservoir, already filming in her head. And a hundred steps into that town-sized open-air ark, she feels suddenly, inexplicably well, ridiculously healthy. She’d almost say free, if she didn’t know better.
The long-deliberating judge in Truecyte v. Future Families Fertility Center, Houston at last concludes that the fair market value of Thassa’s eggs in no way depends upon the discovered association patented by Thomas Kurton, et al. Truecyte is entitled to a reasonable licensing fee for any novel tests or products resulting from their discovery, but they cannot profit from any transactions involving an unaltered, preexisting genome.
The decision is a blow to Truecyte, one that might never have happened without Kurton’s provocation. Yet the judgment rocks the biotech industry, shocking the experts in intellectual property law as well as that small fraction of the general public who are still following the case. It calls into question the whole idea of ownable bio-value. Some talking heads declare it the fast track to the future. More say that the choke of potential profit will kill innovation.
Future Families declares it a forward-looking guarantee of social progress. Truecyte instantly files an appeal. Pundits both paid and self-employed conclude that the decision can’t possibly stand.
But for now-this now-Thassa Amzwar is free to donate her eggs for more money than her brother could earn in years.
Days pass in a short forever. Stone and Weld go on seeing each other. They spend three nights out of seven together. They cook, revising favorite recipes. They talk less and watch more family television. They watch several incredibly dramatic historical re-creations. They watch documentaries about forms of life that should never have survived into the present. Gabe no longer considers either of them a Yahtzee challenge, and he tries to train them in Liar’s Dice.
Candace starts Stone on little projects. She teaches him yoga and brings him to the gym for a session on the balance beam. They no longer play the novel-writing game. She no longer brings up work, psychology, will, North Africa, science, French, Arabic, or the future. He is just as careful never to say a thing that could be mistaken for second-guessing.
Their days are stable and respectful, and they could go on unchanged until Stone dies and his genome disappears peacefully from the face of the earth. But when he’s home alone, he scours the Web for news. It doesn’t feel traitorous. He can’t endanger Candace just by looking. His searches turn up hearsay enough to make him all flavors of crazy.
He wakes up in hot darkness, from a vile dream. He was something medical, in a surgical gown, maybe an anesthesiologist, watching while the patient woke up in the middle of having a gelatinous internal organ removed with a coal scoop. He shudders awake, then instantly suppresses any movement, lest he wake Candace.
But Candace isn’t there. He’s in his own bed, his own apartment, by himself. He has confused the chill of solitude with the other kind, again. It’s 1:30, but it takes him three entire lifetimes between then and 2:45 before he admits there will be no more sleeping tonight.
He tries reading, old guilty pleasures-love poetry, nineteenth-century behemoth novels, clever contemporary metafiction-but nothing speeds the clock or makes him the least bit drowsy. He’s done with breakfast by five. At 8:00 a.m., he starts wandering around the apartment with the phone in his hands. At 9:01, he calls in late to work. Immediately after, he dials Charlotte Hullinger. He gets her voice mail. He hangs up and goes down his old class roster, landing on Sue Weston.
Artgrrl picks up with a sleepy “Hey.” He starts to identify himself, but she cuts him off. “I know who it is, Teacherman.” Her voice is odd, almost flirtatious. She says, “We were wondering how long it would take you to check in.”
“Where is she?” he asks, too quickly.
“Southwest side? She’s fine. She’s like a week or two away from delivering the goods. Only ”
He hears her teeter, trying to decide. Decide if the thing is worth mentioning. Decide if he can be trusted. A twenty-one-year-old, experimenting with wisdom.
“I think the shots are changing her. They can do that, you know. She’s different.”
Shots. Changing. He’s back in the depravity of his dream. “What do you mean, different?”
“Those hormones have her on a roller coaster. I actually saw her cry. She’s just like anybody, now.”
He wants to ask if he can see her, but he can’t. Can’t do that to Candace. Can’t bear to hear Sue Weston tell him, She doesn’t want that.
“Give her my best,” he tells his former student.
Artgrrl asks, “How good is that?” He doesn’t wield the grade book anymore. He never really did.
He creeps to work and spends nine hours making bad prose worse. He calls Candace in the afternoon and asks if they might see each other later, although they aren’t scheduled until tomorrow. She’s characteristically supportive, and he’s at her place before she gets home. He waits on her doorstep; he’s still not comfortable with letting himself in.
She greets him with a kiss, apologizing. “I don’t have much for dinner. Gabe is at his father’s.” Stone wonders why people can never call their former spouses by name. He suggests they go out, to a Lebanese place four blocks away. Lebanon: far enough for mutual comfort. Candace perks up at the idea, a chance holiday.
He tells her over the mezze. He’s been debating all day whether to say anything. But withholding finally seems the bigger betrayal. He says, “I heard from one of my students today.” Is it possible for anyone to go through forty-eight hours without inviting someone else to buy a lie? “She was very concerned about Thassa.”
Candace folds her arms on the table in front of her. She looks up, bright, game. But she’s not about to volunteer a thing.
“She thinks the hormone treatment for the the donation thing might be making Thassa emotionally unstable.” He lets the statement hang just long enough for the two of them to die a few times. “Can they do that?”
Her smile doesn’t waver, per se. It just turns inward, chastising itself for the foolishness of hope. Of course they had to arrive here, eventually. What self-respecting author would let them escape alive? Weld spreads her palms out flat on the tabletop. “I suppose they can, Russell. It’s not really my line. You might see what you find on the Web.”
He throws his knife down on his plate. A dime-sized chip shoots off the edge, narrowly skirting her eye. She cries out and shields her face. She drops her hands into her lap, looks down, and composes herself, yoga-style.
He wants to apologize, but his body won’t let him. A censorious waiter comes by to swap out the broken plate. They sit silently while order is restored. Then she’s all decorum again. It relieves and maddens him, how quickly she recovers.
“Russell, don’t hate me. I’ve worked so hard on this. Since I was two years old I’ve been a helper. Total facilitator. Absolutely codependent. My first marriage?” She hears the adjective, and flushes a little. But practice powers through embarrassment. “All my life I’ve defined myself by what I can do for others. I’ve finally found a way to do that legitimately, without slighting myself or anyone else, with the help of a whole lot of other people to keep me honest. Don’t make me backslide. You know I love you.”
“Me?” he intones dully. “What about her?”
Her head tilts. “Thassa? Of course I love her. What do you think? The whole world loves her. That’s the problem here.”
Some primal mucus thing seizes his brain, and he can’t even have thoughts, let alone speak them.
“Russell. She’s beyond my help now. Letting her go is my gift to her. Honoring the work that I’ve done on myself. Trusting her. Not interfering.”
“Your gift? Your gift to her?”
“And to myself. To my real clients. The ones I can keep helping, if I can keep this job.”
“What if they tell you to stop seeing me? What if I still taught at that hellhole?”
She reaches across the table to stay his buzzing hand. Or contain it, before it throws something else. “You don’t. And they won’t. Truth is? Thassa doesn’t need us. She has more inner strength than any person her age I’ve ever met. The public is already sick of her. When this is done, she can go back to living her own rich life.”
But the truth is in her voice as clear as if she spoke it: Not at Mesquakie. Not in Chicago. Not in this country. He takes his hand away from her and applies it industriously to removing the condensation from his water glass. “It doesn’t sicken you, what’s happening? This psychosis over the eggs?”
She nods, infinitely patient. She closes her eyes in admission. Her understanding disgusts him. “I hate that this is happening. It makes me very sad. I hate myself for not fighting it. But this is the life I have to live in.”
The words sound to Stone like some kind of pop-psych Serenity Prayer. Yet screaming at her would be insane. Everything he values-even his bedrock fidelity-is as arbitrary as any sequence of nucleotides. How valuable can fidelity be, anyway, if it isn’t viable? Candace is more fit for the future than he will ever be. She must be right about all of this. About everything except the only thing: Thassa does need them.
After dinner, they walk ad hoc back toward her apartment. Candace chatters about a beautiful book she’s reading, in which a contemporary man falls in love with a nineteenth-century woman on the basis of the comments she has scrawled in the margins of several books. Stone freezes at the top of her street.
“You know, I should probably go home.”
Something spasms across her face and is gone in a heartbeat.
“I’m about three weeks behind at the magazine. Also, I didn’t sleep that well last night.”
She’s nodding sympathetically before he even finishes explaining. “Of course, of course. I didn’t think I’d see you until What a treat!” She kisses him full on and squeezes his ribs until he gasps. He smiles apologetically, breaks free, waves, then turns back toward the El stop.
But he doesn’t go straight to the train. Instead, he wanders down Ridge until he finds a pharmacy. He’s nervous going in, ready for someone to stop him and check his motives. He wants to call his brother, Robert, for advice, but of course the only good pay phone is a dead pay phone. He tells himself that if any twelve-year-old in America can do this, so can he. He goes to the sleep-aid aisle and focuses, until he finds a package with a bright-red starburst reading, “Most powerful help with insomnia available without a prescription!” Active ingredient, doxylamine. The high school cashier can’t sell the person in front of Stone a bottle of beer, but she can sell Stone the sedative.
“Hi!” She greets Russell hugely. “Are you a member of our Rewards Program?”
He blinks. “You’re going to reward me for taking these?”
“You don’t have to take them.” Her laugh turns timid. “You just have to pay for them.”
“And my reward?”
She looks at him the way she might regard a mid-season-replacement show destined to be canceled itself after two episodes. “You get to buy more of them, for less.”
He has what he’s sure is a billion-dollar idea: a single punch card valid at all the outlets owned by the top multinationals, from maternity hospitals to mortuaries. A huge lump of cash-percentage of your gross lifetime payout-handed back at the finish line.
“I try not to store up my rewards in this world,” he tells the cashier.
He’s still feeling guilty about the crack long after he gets home. It’s the most aggressive thing he’s said to any stranger in years.
He’s so fatigued he’s sure he’ll be all right without the doxylamine. In fact, he does fall asleep, but wakes several pages later, in what he thinks must be the middle of the night. It’s 10:18. He tosses for a while, until he’s sure he has exhausted the possibilities of stoicism. He gets up and takes exactly 50 percent of the recommended dose. He does that three more times, at twenty-minute intervals, until consciousness is just some dim glint in the proto-eye of some bony fish in him, evolving on the cold sea floor of the Carboniferous.
The tear of a fire alarm rips him awake. It’s still just half past ten, and his brain works for many cycles before it latches onto the concept of morning. His room blazes with sunlight. The fire alarm is his phone. He wonders whatever possessed him to keep the phone by the bed.
He’s an hour and a half late for work. The phone must be his old relay-race buddy from high school, the owner of Becoming You, calling to fire him. If he ignores the call and gets to the office before the phone stops ringing, he might still be able to save himself.
When his brain consolidates a bit more, it occurs to him that for the last three years he’s worked at home twice a week at his discretion. But the thought gives him little peace, and he doesn’t understand why, until he realizes the phone is still nagging him.
He picks up and says something with approximately two syllables. The voice on the other end cries out, “Mister! I’m so glad you’re alive.”
The sound of her voice retrieves his dream: a paragraph in an essay that Thassa had written for him had gotten loose and was infecting all kinds of other printed material with sentences that no one had composed.
“It’s you,” he says stupidly, himself again.
“Russell. I’m so happy to hear you. Please tell me you don’t hate me.”
“I don’t hate you,” he says. Even to himself, he sounds robotic.
“And Candace? Have I made permanent damage with her?”
A voice in his head that sounds like Candace says, You know I can’t speak for her; you’ll have to talk to Candace. But out loud he reverts: “Candace loves you. She told me, just yesterday.”
“Al-hamdulillah. Thank God!” And the voice at the other end crumples off into a grateful silence. After a bit, she rallies. “Then why won’t she talk to me, Russell? Everything has become such an ocean.”
Everything has always been mostly ocean. It strikes Stone that a constitutionally happy person in this country is like a New World native at the first touch of smallpox. No antibodies.
“Russell, the news has found me. Another story started spreading this morning. A worse one is going to come out, very soon.”
He tries to remember Candace’s assurances from the night before. Something about bored people going on to the next thing. Apparently, Candace Weld, LCP, is as deluded by need as anyone.
He hears the frail voice say, “Did you know that total strangers want me dead?” The frailty flashes out in anger. “Russell, I’m fed up with this.”
She is entitled.
“Do you remember you once told me, if I had any problems, just ask?”
“Anything,” he says, underlining his own word and flanking it with red-pen question marks.
“Are you very busy in your life at the moment?”
He’s forgotten exactly what subassembly of the collective human project he is responsible for, or when exactly it might be due. “No,” he tells her. “Not very busy at the moment.”
“Can you take me home?”
“To Kabylia?” he asks, incredulous.
The word tears a laugh from her. “Not that one. Too far, that one.”
She wants him to drive her to Canada.
“I’m so sorry to ask, Russell. But if I don’t escape this soon, I’ll go mad. You’re the only one left who can help. I will pay for the essence and expenses, of course.”
When he doesn’t answer, her voice grows frantic. “You could be back home again in three or four days.”
The word baffles him beyond words. Not home; that one has at least some journalistic meaning. But back isn’t even fiction.
He has never been to Canada.
He hasn’t gone on a road trip with anyone since he and Grace visited the Grand Canyon.
He has never missed two days of work in a row.
He has never gone behind the back of anyone he loves.
He has never in his life done anything that anyone else could possibly construe as resolute.
He has, for most of his existence, dismissed the idea that he might author his own life.
He has become an accessory to her destiny, drive or not.
He does have a driver’s license and a major credit card.
He has never felt so daunted by his own breathing.
He calls Robert, who talks him through the steps of renting a car. His brother is shocked to hear his plans. “Are you sure? Canada, man? It’s a parallel universe up there. The queen on the dollar bills. The guaranteed health care. You are aware of the whole French thing?”
Russell rushes to reassure his brother.
“Chill, Roscoe. It’s called irony. Supposed to be our generation’s native idiom.”
There’s something weirdly chipper about Robert. Stone asks if he’s feeling all right.
“Me? I feel like a million bucks. In 1960 dollars. Don’t hate me, bro, but I’m in good shape these days. Law of averages, I guess. If the docs keep waving their arms around at random, eventually they flick on the light switch by mistake.”
For a few sentences, Robert becomes a salesman for the American Mental Health Industry.
“Go ahead and do this trip, Roscoe. Niagara Falls with this chick. Whatever. And when the honeymoon is over, we’ll get you in to talk to my mechanic. He’s got the whole Stone pharmacogenetic profile worked out already.”
Russell promises to be in touch as soon as he reaches Montreal or runs into trouble, whichever comes first. “Incidentally,” he adds, “you don’t have to mention this trip to Mom.”
“Of course not. Canada? The matriarch would have a coronary. She still thinks the Blue Jays are a terrorist sleeper cell.”
Russell slinks through Pilsen the next morning, scanning the rows of russet apartments in a clownish, chartreuse PT Cruiser. In this part of Chicago, such a car is begging to be rammed. People eye his vehicle as he cowers at the red lights. Every one of them knows he is about to make off with his former student.
Only the implausible staginess of the scene protects Stone. He knows this story: a modernist classic. He’s overly familiar with the book, and he’s even seen both movie adaptations. If this were his actual life, he would never in a million years be caught dead recreating it.
He finds a spot just half a block down from the designated building. He stands in the brick foyer and buzzes. A suspicious “Yes?” cuts through the intercom. He says, “Hello?” He can’t say her name, or his.
“Yes,” she announces. “I’m coming right there.” Her once idiomatic English has spent too many weeks immobile in a plaster cast.
He waits furtively in the vestibule until the elevator rattles to ground and a strange figure peeks around the corner. She steps into the lobby carrying two shoulder bags as large as she is. She’s wearing sunglasses, a dun-colored scarf, and drab olive sweats designed to be invisible. But there’s something else wrong, something he can’t make out until she comes through the foyer door and sweeps him up in a desperate, luggage-crushing hug: her hair has been cut harshly and dyed reddish brown.
“My God,” he says. “What happened?”
She grabs his arm and tugs him out to the street. “Come on, Mister. We’re gone.”
He takes the bags and they fumble to the car. He can’t stop looking at the transformation. She shifts the sunglasses and pulls the scarf tighter around her face. “Please don’t, Russell. You’re making me very sad.” She perks up a little when she sees the car. “It’s fantastic! Totally absurd. Some kind of film accessoire.” She beams at him, convinced that he’s the right man for this job. He puts her bags in back with his, and she climbs into the shotgun seat like they’re off on a family outing.
He steers by trial and error out to the southbound Dan Ryan. Beyond that, improvisation. He has picked up a map at the rental agency: everything from Chicago to Nova Scotia on one double-spread sheet. He just assumed Thassa would know the route, but she’s hopeless as a navigator. She shrugs at the lack of correspondence between the squiggly green interstate on the page and anything observable in the real world. “This map is total fantasy. Someone just invented it!”
He sees an exit ramp that says Indiana and heads toward it. Chapters later, they’re still stopped in a bumper-to-bumper bottleneck somewhere this side of Gary. Thassa fishes across the radio dial, but every station only leaves her more agitated. She knows how to be a refugee, but not a renegade.
She shuts off the radio and turns to him. “Tell me about your childhood, Russell. Did you ever run away from home before?”
The journey of a single mile begins with a thousand regrets.
Man goes fugitive with ambiguous woman: the oldest story in the book. I’ve written that one myself, hundreds of times, in my sleep. And every time, the story wanted to break away, lose itself, escape altogether its birthright plot
On the day that Russell and Thassa make their break for the north, Thomas Kurton walks into a special meeting of the Truecyte board of directors.
He knows these men and women. He handpicked them: good scientists and skillful executives all. But he has small patience for even regular meetings, let alone the extra sessions. The whole purpose of incorporating is to let business free up science to do science. It’s not really Kurton’s job to keep teaching the adolescent enterprise new ways to stay solvent; that’s what the MBAs are for. He does not really care if Truecyte manages to stay in business or not: the point is to discover if it can.
Every company Kurton has founded is a creature let loose in the world. Together, they’re part of a longitudinal experiment in determining which forms of human desire are evolutionarily viable. Still, he shows up for the latest Truecyte fire drill, sips at the herbal tea, nibbles at the spreads of fruit, and jokes with his fellow board members, all the while prepared to supply his own blunt opinions about any course corrections the collective organism needs to make.
Peter Weschler, CFO, starts the formal meeting. He calls for two quick presentations-mind-numbing slides by the inner circle meant to reassure the inner circle that the company is fundamentally fit, with no Mendelian diseases. Truecyte has two new products in the pipeline and a small library of licensable processes that may prove instrumental to future genetic research.
But the venture capitalists have threatened to pull the plug and write off Truecyte’s rising flood of red. “I’ll put it simply,” Weschler says. “Two of the top three stakeholders want to know what in hell is going on.”
All eyes at the long glass conference table flicker deniably toward Thomas Kurton, who takes some time to realize that he’s being reprimanded. When he does come alive, he’s sardonic in his own defense. “You know, if this association study has survived the scrutiny of hundreds of hostile competitors over the last few months, it should survive the scrutiny of friendly investors.”
“No one is challenging the study,” Weschler says.
“It’s impeccable science,” Thomas says.
Zhang Jung Li, the CEO, says, “This is not really about scientific practice qua science.”
“We had to push you to get the study out,” Weschler reminds Thomas.
Kurton simply can’t imagine what the investors have a right to fuss about. Research has tied a genomic network to a high-level behavioral trait. How can such a finding be anything but a gold mine?
“They want,” the steady proteomics researcher George Cheung growls, “an explanation of all the recent questionable business decisions and publicity.”
Calm falls over Kurton. “I don’t see how they can hold us accountable for the media fallout ”
Weschler flips through a yellow legal pad. It looks to me, from my distance, weirdly like the pad Stone used to prepare his first day of class. “They want to know why you grandstanded for an $800 million licensing fee and came up empty-handed. They want to know how getting humiliated in court fits into the company business model.”
Kurton nods appreciatively. It’s the first interesting question posed by the VCs since founding. He himself, after several days of reflection, still has no good public explanation for his action aside from sentimentality.
“I see,” he says. “And they won’t be satisfied until heads roll.”
He means it poetically. But no one at the table speaks a word.
The silence replicates until even Kurton can’t fail to read it. “You’re not Are you asking me to resign?”
He looks around the table, enlightened at last. If only these hired assassins were bolder, could plunge the knife in with less sheepish chagrin, he might take some pleasure in this scene. He glares at them, grinning: Run your damn cost-benefit analyses. Side with the smart money. But do not apologize for surviving.
No one says anything for way too long. Finally, Zhang Jung Li speaks. “Realistically put, Thomas, we have to get back to more practical research.”
What does nature call this? Cannibalism? Parricide? Fatal parasitism? Thomas fights down the urge to say anything; the entire spectrum of available responses feels puerile. He can’t keep from smiling; the drama just seems so absurdly conventional, like one of those cheap paperback genres: death by robot insurrection or unstoppable nanotech gray goo. His company, straight out of his own what? Loins? Frontal lobes? His own company is transcending him.
He wants to dismiss the lot, as summarily as he appointed them. But his every possible defense is forestalled. He himself saw to that, when he set up the company bylaws. Has made sure that the group desire would not be crippled by his own.
His feet and hands go cold. He’s not what he was. He has let some strange idealism blind him. He hasn’t even the strength to play himself anymore. The alpha researcher in him falters, and with the stumble comes an almost instant drop in serotonin. So long as he produced the prizes, so long as he was profitable, the tribe let him mate with everything in sight. Now, at the first sign of weakness, they launch this inevitable takedown
He remembers the thousand beautiful implications of his association study, and a parent’s panic seizes him. The genetic screen for well-being will be shelved in favor of more practical, portable projects. The real work-overcoming the limits of our archaic design-will be crushed underneath this creature that cares less about the nature of things than about feeding and shitting and reproducing and expanding its range.
All life long, he has believed in the one nonarbitrary enterprise, fairer than any politics, truer than any religion, deeper than any artwork: measurement. Double-blind, randomize, and test again: something will circulate, something cold and real and beyond mere desire. Something that can put us inside the atom, outside the solar system. Something that can come to change even its own enabling code
The method is life’s magnificence, our one external court of appeal. Koch, Reed, Pasteur-the pantheon of heroes stenciled onto his boyhood ceiling-could have been other names. Often, they were other names, not always recorded. Individuals will come and go; the method will leverage them, or find new bodies. Truth can escape all local frailties.
Or so he has always thought. Now, way too late for an intelligent man, he sees: Crucial facts might easily go missing. To be discovered, it hardly suffices that a thing be true.
Yet the beauty of the method is its utter indifference. All life long, Kurton has predicted the upgrade of human life by its evolutionary heirs. It remains the species’ unique destiny to preside over the design of its own obsolescence. Thomas’s one job now is to show how peacefully a good transhumanist can die.
“I understand,” he tells the board, only two of whom meet his eye. And weirdly, he does. He stands, makes the rounds, shakes the hands of his executioners. But already he’s working again. For the last several months, since the study was published, he has had in the back of his mind the idea for another project, a whole new experiment for releasing the happiness-gene complex back into the wild and studying it in situ. But the idea is far too rich for any institutional backing. Now he has the time, the liberty, the isolation to run that test. The final freedom of the exiled mind. Every event-especially extinction-can turn to endless new forms most beautiful.
And by a minor coincidence I don’t know how to handle any other way, Candace Weld reads the Time article about Truecyte v. Future Families, late that afternoon. No one has told Weld that she can’t read about Thassa in her off hours. She wants to call Russell, just to talk about the decision. She hasn’t heard from him since he bolted from her front stoop.
By ring four, she wonders if he’s ducking her. His silence has been too long to be anything but choice. By the seventh ring, she’s gripping the phone and mouthing, Pick up, damn it. Of course he has no voice mail.
She squeezes the Off button and cradles the phone. She spends forty-five minutes cleaning up after Gabe, her time-honored method for regaining emotional control. When she finishes, she goes online and binges horribly, like she hasn’t in months. She searches the news pages of the top three engines, sorting by time. She combs the blogs for every occurrence and permutation of “Thassa Amzwar.” It stuns her, how much poisonous shit is milling around out there, toxic bacteria doubling and redoubling, dividing and mutating on no food supply whatsoever.
But after ten minutes of scouring, she discovers: there is food. A whole, steaming barnyard full of it. An energy source big enough that even the moribund print media start to tap into it. Four Mesquakie art students have announced that the Algerian woman is missing from the apartment where they’ve been hiding her. And they claim she has been lured away by her former writing teacher.
I watch to see how Candace Weld can respond to this news. But she herself is paralyzed with looking.
For a long time, Chicago refuses to disappear behind them. The city sprawls for a hundred miles, its hinterland industries like freight strewn from a cargo plane. Only the sun proves that the car isn’t stuck in an enormous loop.
Just beyond South Bend, Stone has an epiphany. He knows why he could never in his life or anytime thereafter write fiction: he’s crushed under the unbearable burden of a plot. He could never survive the responsibility of making something happen. Plot is preposterous: event following event in a chain of clean causes, rising action building to inevitable climax and resolving into meaning. Who could be suckered by that? The classic tension graph is a vicious lie, the negation of a mature grasp of reality. Story is antilife, the brain protecting itself from its only possible finale.
Right around Elkhart, Russell concludes that truth laughs at narrative design. Realism-the whole threadbare patch job of consoling conventions-is like one of those painkillers that gets you addicted without helping anything. In reality, a million things happen all at once for no good reason, until some idiot texting on his cell plows into you on the expressway in northern Indiana. The End. Not exactly The Great Gatsby. Sales: zip. Critical reception: total bewilderment. A failed avant-garde experiment. Not even a decent allegory. Even the cutout bin doesn’t want it.
Stone shares none of these literary insights with his former pupil. In fact, he studiously avoids talking about anything substantive whatsoever. He just drives as best he can, while Thassa rides shotgun and flips nervously across the AM spectrum. Love Radio and Hate Radio: both only succeed in further agitating her. Every one hundred seconds, she cranes around to look through the back window of the PT Cruiser, as if the assembled posse of human history were coming down the interstate after them, to take tissue samples.
Stone’s covert glances suffice to confirm: she has lost her repertoire for defeating anxiety. But then, she has never really had such repertoire. She never needed any; she didn’t know what anxiety was. She sits quietly, trying to smile, smoothing her chopped hair. On the outskirts of Toledo, listening to a call-in show on the possibility of opening up a second Security Front, she says, “Tell me the craziness is over, Russell.”
He tells her.
She doesn’t need to stop to stretch or relieve herself. She needs nothing to eat or drink. She wants only to keep driving. When they do stop for gas outside Sandusky, she won’t take more than three steps away from the car.
Stone buys a real map and studies it. He discovers that they should have headed north out of the city toward Flint, to cross over the border at Port Huron. They could still double back, swing up to Detroit and cross to Windsor. But he decides it’s too late to do anything but follow the long skirt south of the lakes, toward the crossings another few hundred miles to the east.
He apologizes for lengthening the trip. She pats his shoulder and lays her cheek against it. “Everything is fine,” she tells him. “Don’t worry. I don’t care, if only we’re getting closer.”
She’ll be better when they’re farther down the road. She’s had more practice at being well than anyone Stone has ever known. If she can’t find her center once they’re free and clear, then humans have no center honest enough to be worth finding.
Somewhere still in Ohio the radio becomes too much, and Thassa sends the voices into limbo. Silence then is glorious, keeping them alert and safe for a good thirty-five minutes. After another half an hour, even silence adds to the weight of breathing.
Beyond the expressway shoulder, distant descendants of Burma-Shave signs flick past. Thassa reads them out loud, for no reason except to speed another fifteen seconds. “Terrorists love,” she murmurs above the wheel noise. “Gun control. An unarmed public. Is their goal.”
Her sunglasses rest on top of the unnervingly cropped dyed hair. The scarf is shed, nowhere. She holds her camera on her lap, often lifting and pointing it over the dash or through the passenger window. If she’s really filming, all she’s getting is desolate Midwest motion blur. She reads through the viewfinder, chasing the tiny white signs with her lens. “Tested in peace. Proven in war. Guns in the home. Even the score.”
She reads aloud at odd intervals, for more than an hour. “Two million dead in Darfur Sudan,” she tells him. “And it all started with a gun ban.”
She looks at him for explanations. He offers none. She says, to the window, “I see why Dr. Kurton wants to upgrade people.”
He says, “Tell me about your brother.” The question surprises them both. Her vision dimples, and she’s off, remembering stories she hasn’t told anyone in years. Mohand organizing a World Cup in the streets around the Parc de la Louisiane with boys from eleven different countries. His thinking that Quebec winters weren’t fit even for animals. Wanting to become the premier Amazigh Canadian hip-hop artist, practicing for hours in the council apartment’s bathroom, driving their aunt and uncle mad. How he planned to make a living as a male model, and how he spent five months’ savings on a portfolio of publicity shots that came to nothing. How he blamed all the troubles in his life on having to learn his native language after he already spoke two others. How he left Montreal and returned to Algiers just to prove that his mind hadn’t been permanently colonized by two hundred years of nightmare.
Russell needs to know: Have you told him what’s happening to you? But he doesn’t ask. It’s enough for now that her tales of Mohand return Thassa a little to herself.
Miles down the road, she takes off her seat belt, ignoring the car’s bleating protests. She spins around up on her knees, nestles into the seat back, and films the interstate disappearing behind them. She speaks to the vanishing landscape. “How can I thank you, Mister? You saved me. You were the only one I could call. I was letting them kill me a little, back there.”
“I did nothing. I just love you.” His militant demurral pops out of him before he hears it. Blood runs uphill into his face, and he wants to red-pen his whole existence.
She swings back down onto the seat, facing him. Weight lifts off her, and for a moment, she’s invulnerable again, converting all the world’s madness into grateful play. She clasps his right thigh near the knee and shakes it, making him accelerate. “Don’t you think I know this thing, Russell Stone? You are a very amusing fellow, sometimes.”
It takes another twenty miles for his pulse to return to base rate. She stays aloft for the whole stretch, scribbling into an art notebook, smiling to herself. “Always keep a journal of your day. You never know when you might experience something you want to remember!” How she can work without carsickness is a mystery as profound as the rest of her physiology.
In the jutting nub of Pennsylvania, Thassa pulls a phone from her purse and calls her aunt. Stone can decode nothing except the otherworldly, musical cadence, the switches from French to Arabic. She’s relating some story with no emotional tie whatsoever to the nightmare she has just escaped. Stone listens, grateful for every note that sounds like the woman who sat in his classroom last fall, reminding the entire roster that only a fool tries to decide more than God.
If she mentions an estimated arrival in Montreal, it must be on some scale of mountain time that Stone has never experienced. She hangs up without any explanation aside from “Good food waiting for us at home, Mister.”
They pass billboards for everything-clothing outlets, telcom packages, medical supplies, fast food and faster drink, starter homes, recreational vehicles, casinos, lottery tickets, psychological counseling, secret surefire investments, teen abstinence, sex-toy warehouses, partnering websites, and cutting-edge prophecy services.
“Give in to the Present,” Thassa reads.
“What?” he snaps.
She flinches, then giggles. “It’s just a sign, Russell. ‘Give in to the Pleasant. Pleasant taste of ’ ”
“Oh,” he says. “Of course.”
“Avoid hell,” she says, her affect falling again. “Repent. Trust Jesus now. Next exit sixty miles.”
Somewhere between Fredonia and Angola, New York-in short, smack in the middle of implausible invention-they stop to get more gas. She’s edgy again, in the parking lot of the service station. She dons the sunglasses and head scarf before she gets out of the car, as if disguise is just common sense. Maybe she’s right. Proliferating pictures of the bliss mutant long ago stole her freedom of movement.
The nineteen-year-old behind the cash register does gawk at her, but only, Stone hopes, the way any young American heterosexual hormonal firestorm from upstate New York would gawk at a twenty-three-year-old Berber in a drab olive sweat suit and bad hair dye.
The map suggests they shoot north at Syracuse and cross at a place called Thousand Islands. Thassa measures the distance with a barrette and calculates the remaining travel time on her fingers. They’re halfway home, and if they push, they could pull into Montreal before sunrise. She breathes easier, seeing how close they are to the border. But even an Algerian-especially an Algerian-ought to know this genre.
They pass through archaic resort towns, famous ghost wrecks of American industrial history, collapsed utopian and religious communities. They talk about everything now-her parents’ infatuated anger toward the French, his long fascination with the Unabomber, the mythic origin of the Kabyles, a fantastic Egyptian film he saw eleven years ago and has never since been able to identify, an old family car that he and his brother once wrecked, the varied agendas of the world’s great cities, the odds of humanity soon cooking to death, a thrush that once threw itself at her bedroom window at ten-second intervals for the better part of two days.
The camera is long since packed away. Thassa needs to keep talking now, about anything at all, so long as it dates back before the last three months. She’s like some infected farm animal, brought low by something it can’t even imagine. Microbes without borders. Her system struggles to reject this invasion, as it would any alien tissue. His job is to keep talking, to hold up his end of the trivia as if everything will come right again, if they only imagine.
Even now, just riding alongside her helps him recognize himself. If he could drive with her in this car until he learned the habit by heart, the certainty of who he is, equal to the brief, scattered days he’s been given
She means more to him now, stunned, than she did when she rode the world.
Pointless tenderness, evolution’s ultimate trick. The product of a handful of genes, hitting on strategies to keep themselves in play. A force three billion years in the making, coughing up a thing ridiculously makeshift and erratic, more wasteful than the peacock’s tail. Stone tags along behind a caravan of SUVs, tooling north. Maybe even love is just a minor node in a vast network pushing toward new and unimaginable exploits
Candace should be with them. She loves this woman as much as anyone.
In the neck of upstate New York, Thassa falls asleep. She goes slack in her seat, slumping onto Stone’s shoulder. There’s a burr that sounds like a problem with the engine. Then he places it: she’s humming in her sleep. A simple, repetitive tune built on no scale Stone recognizes. He thinks he hears her chant the word vava When she wakes ten minutes later, he doesn’t ask her what song she was dreaming, and she doesn’t volunteer.
They track north along the edge of Lake Ontario. Late afternoon is done and evening layers in. The sun falters, and they’ve been driving so long that the highway starts to float. They pass through an enfilade of pines flanking the road. They roll down the windows. The dry, cool air plays on their skin and their hearts crack open.
The day is late, and they know each other now in the way that only two people stuck together in a car forever can. “You know,” he tells her, his eyes three hundred yards down the road, “it’s funny. I think about that old woman all the time. I go through long stretches where I think about her almost every day.”
“What old woman, Russell?”
He’s shocked that she can’t read his mind. “The one you wrote about for your first paper. The one who took forever to climb a few stairs of the Cultural Center.”
He feels her studying his profile. She asks, “Why do you think about her?”
He’s wondered about this, too, almost as long as he’s wondered about the woman. He can’t say why, but he can say something. “You did, in two pages, without effort, what I’ve wanted to do my whole life. You took the simplest, most ordinary thing-something I’ve rushed past a thousand times a day-and lifted You made her next step the only thing in existence worth worrying about. I think about the woman, whether she’s still alive, what she’s doing right now, whether she could still make it up those stairs, nine months later.”
“No,” Thassa says. “She can’t.”
He turns to look at her. The car hits the right shoulder rumble strip, and he jerks it back into the lane.
“There is no woman,” Thassa says.
“I don’t There’s what?”
“You said creative.”
He keeps his eye on the median, watching his past revise. “You’re saying you made her up?”
She waves to a tinted-window minivan passing them. “I assembled from some separate parts. Things I’ve seen.”
“But the real ” He has to stop talking. They pass a mile and a half in silence. She studies the thickets of pine. He does the two breathing exercises that Candace taught him.
A lentil-sized thought at the base of his brain swells to a chickpea. “Your father,” he asks, as calm as midnight. “How did he die?”
“You read about it,” she answers, just as calmly.
“Yes. I did.”
“He was shot,” Thassa says. “In the civil war.”
“By someone else?” Those two finch-eyed holes in the man’s skull
She doesn’t confirm. Or deny.
He thinks: the depression gene, just waiting for the right environment to flower. But his own native spinelessness overcomes Stone, and question time is over. They drive for a long time, through no more than a hair’s breath, on the map. The flanking pines and spruce fall away to a sunny clearing. He asks, “Has this ever happened to you before?”
She smiles at him, an echo of her smile on the first day of class. “This?” That radiance again, hounded by the hungry, clutched by the desperate, reduced by the scientific, dissected by the newshounds, stoned by the religious, bid on by the entrepreneurs, denounced by the disappointed. “ This? Antecedent, Mister Stone!”
For a moment, he sees her on the night of the ice storm. But he wipes away that memory, a nuisance spiderweb. “Is this the first time you’ve ever felt yourself coming apart?”
She puts her sunglasses back on. Her fingers rake shaky lines through her colored hair. “Is that what’s happening to me?”
They’re saved from themselves by the sealike St. Lawrence. They glimpse the islands multiplying on that broad boundary, wooded, still, and sovereign. The spread of highway collapses into a clogged line of vehicles waiting to pass the border check. Under her breath, Thassa half chants a thanksgiving that Stone can’t make out.
It dawns on Russell that he’s about to cross a national border with an Algerian. The press has been diligent these days with rumors and counter-rumors, factions linked to Al Qaeda, an entity that is itself either a finely tuned worldwide network or a fake post-office box. Stone never even noticed the reports until this woman dragged him into the world. In a minute he’ll have to convince an official that he and this woman aren’t sworn to the destruction of any major Christian industrial democracies. With luck, the official might be an Oona fan.
The four lanes of traffic lengthen to a dozen vehicles deep. New cars arrive faster than the old ones clear. A jitter on the newswires, maybe, or Canadian retaliation for some American slight. Every third car is routed off to a holding area and searched. If everyone came out of their protective shells to mill around in political confusion, this would be one of those great scenes of collective meltdown from contemporary developing-world fiction.
They pull up to the border guard, whose day has clearly been longer than their own. But Thassa’s bright “Hello, bonjour!” softens him some. She hands over her Canadian passport, and Stone surrenders his driver’s license.
The guard hands back Russell’s license. “Passport, please.”
Stone laughs, then doesn’t. “I’m sorry. I’m an American. We don’t ”
The guard does his own deep-breathing exercise. He’s more or less ready for the system of nation-states to break down, and Stone, the millionth ignorant prince he’s had to deal with on this matter, has been put on earth merely to mortify him. “The rules have changed, sir. You can still get into Canada with a driver’s license. But you need a passport to get back into the States.”
“What’s happened? Has something happened?”
The man looks at Stone as if he’s dropped down from another planet. “Read much?”
“You’re kidding. So everybody’s a suspect now?”
One glance from the border officer indicates that if Stone speaks another word he will be strip-searched until his skin comes off. Only Thassa’s apologetic smile pacifies the official. He gives the American another chance. “You wouldn’t happen to be carrying a birth certificate?”
Stone has no option but to proceed to the holding area. He and Thassa get out of the car and review their choices. But choice is exactly what they don’t have. Thassa calls her aunt; no one in Montreal can drive the two hundred and fifty kilometers until tomorrow morning. She’s ready to sit in the border detention holding center until then.
She sits on a plastic scoop chair inside the grim concrete room, alongside a platoon of the equally lost, under the eyes of two watchful police. She starts to get the shakes. Her hands are like broom bristles, sweeping the air. “Russell, I’m so sorry. I’m making your life miserable.”
“You aren’t,” he says, confirming with lameness.
“I’m making millions of people miserable. Russell? I can’t seem to stop that.” She curls both arms across her narrow chest and cups her shoulder blades. “Kill the smiling Arab bitch. Dot com.”
He takes her by the elbow. “Come on. It’s nothing. We’ll turn around and find a place for the night. I’ll bring you back tomorrow. Your uncle can come down and take you home. Everything will be fine.”
“Fine?” she asks. “You think this is still possible?”
“I’m sure,” he says. And they walk back to the car.
The motels near the border are full. They find a place on a winding state highway about six miles off the interstate, nestled into the side of a wooded hill. It’s a motor lodge, one of those wormholes back into the sixties, a place right out of Stone’s parents’ Ektachrome slides, from when his folks were young and in love and still vacationing, before the kids came along and soured that show.
An elderly desk clerk with a growth the size of a honeydew melon coming out of his neck is using a magnifier to read an enormous volume of Boccaccio illustrated by Rockwell Kent. He’s surprised by customers and irritated by the interruption. He holds up the magnifying glass as if to fry them.
“Yes? Can I help you?”
Thassa pushes forward and slips off her sunglasses. “Do you have room for us tonight?”
The man glances down at an ancient ledger grid, the day’s blocks more or less empty. “Double?”
Stone freezes. He’s on the South Rim, unable to say just how many rooms they need.
“Yes, please,” Thassa says, pleading with Stone by clasping his wrist bone. Do not abandon me tonight.
The clerk looks up, scrutinizing them. Stone thinks he’s going to demand a marriage license. “Queen or two twins?”
Thassa stumbles on the idiom and Stone blurts out, “Two twins, thanks.”
They sign in and get a dense metal key. On their way out of the lobby to the room, the desk clerk calls after them, “Ahlan wa Sahlan.”
I look it up, two years later. It means, Welcome. You’re with kin.
Thassa stops, slapped by the words. She starts to tear up. “Yaïchek,” she calls back, shaky with gratitude. “ Shukran, shukran.”
The room spins and shakes as Stone lies on his bed. Pine trees still whip by in his peripheral vision. His blood sugar is all over the place, casualty of the long road fast followed by a fried-dinner binge. The dingy room, filled with a stale stink when they first checked in, now smells fine, either because they’ve opened the windows or because he’s habituated.
She’s in the bathroom, under the shower for close to thirty minutes. At dinner, she was listless. He wants to knock on the door to makes sure she’s all right. He’s thinking: Her beautiful essays for me were lies.
All right: not lies. Invention. What did that make them? Less beautiful? More suspect? Unfair, misleading, personal
Performance, in place of the real. Devices, in place of facts. The events she described were all fabricated from whole cloth. Not what happened: what could have happened. What might have.
Her father was shot, but maybe not by someone else.
Then, a thought that sits him up in bed. Those essays are not her only fiction. She has been authoring something else. How high is her real emotional set point, by nature? How happy is she, really? All of that testing, out in Boston, the psychological measurements so carefully correlated with the rigorous gene sequencing: nothing but self-reportage. Even science asked her to tell them a story.
Maybe she has faked a good half of her bliss.
And now, when he most needs time to think, to process the causal chains rippling through his head, she chooses that moment to come out of the bathroom at last. She’s in a loose, rose-colored shift that falls to her knees, a towel wrapped around her head. She tries to beam at him, as if she were the same content creature she ever was. Only now, the act exhausts her.
She sits on the end of her own bed, loosens the towel from her head, and squeezes clumps of hair in the roll of terry cloth. “You know, Mister Stone, if this were Algeria, my brother and uncle would have to come here tomorrow morning and kill us both.”
A forced laugh escapes her. She tilts her head and begins running a hairbrush through her now red tangles. Her hand moves slowly, as if combing oatmeal. He can see the outline of her tiny breasts through the billow of her shift and looks away.
He thinks of anything but her, listens to anything but that brush wicking through her ruined hair.
She stops dead still. “What is that beeping?”
“What beeping?” he echoes. He sits up, and his bed rustles.
“Shh. Listen. There. That.”
He titters, in case she’s joking. She isn’t. “That? That’s a bird, Thassa.”
Her words come out flushed and wild. “A bird? Oh my God, Russell, you’re right. It’s a bird. A bird, beeping.” Something small hits the floor with a soft thud. The hairbrush. And something larger falls back on the squeaking bed: Thassadit Amzwar. These sounds are followed by another one, even stranger. It starts as almost a whistle, then a low wail turning terrified. Weeks of bombardment, and she breaks.
She tries to turn the keening into words. “Something’s happening to me, Russell. I have to get out of this place.”
He does not move. He feels himself go weirdly calm. “Tomorrow,” he promises. “It will be okay. You’ll feel stronger. You should call your uncle now.”
“I can’t. I just can’t.” The words are clayey, distorted through a horrible mouth that can’t hold its shape.
“That’s fine,” he tells her. “We’ll do it in a little while.”
She’s hyperventilating. Long, muffled sobs rise up in her. “I’m sorry,” she keeps repeating. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” And then, would-be businesslike, “I dropped my hairbrush.”
She tries to move her arm, to sit up. He recognizes the complete debilitation-the outermost promontory of an outcrop he’s visited. If the hairbrush were God’s magic talisman for returning the world to Eden, she would not be able to sit up and take it. She’s defeated by the future, and a few shots of follicle stimulating hormone.
He raises himself upright but can’t move either. He, too, is paralyzed, by a realization all his own. Maybe she doesn’t have hyperthymia after all. Maybe it’s the other, wilder ride, there all along and undiagnosed, hidden by a mighty effort of will. Only: what is will but what the body allows? If she has been acting up until now, she’s an actress of unthinkable natural gifts.
The dread that grips him lasts only half a minute, wiped away by surprise relief. Their problem is over. Her haplotype has no bio-value whatsoever. She’s just another garden-variety mood-swinger. The world will finally leave the woman in peace. When this news gets out, it will delay genetic improvement by years. The race will be thrown back on inescapable, everyday, ordinary, glorious, redeeming moodiness.
“Russell? Are they going to come after us?”
“No,” he tells her. Something lifts him up bodily, from the inside out. Happiness. “No one even knows we’re here.”
Her torso goes limp and drops back. She can’t have plunged often into this abyss. There’s too much shock in the fall.
He crosses to her and takes her hand. She reaches up and clamps his forearm like a tourniquet. She fixes her eyes on him. “Stone. Hajar . Am I something you might want? Would you like to just hold me for a little and see what happens?”
The sick thought comes to him before he can stop it: one little relentless sperm hitting home, and the $32,000 harvesting problem would be moot. But the problem is solved already. The minute the public learns just what her genes dispose her toward, the market for her eggs will burst as spectacularly as any speculative bubble.
He sits her up and puts his arm around her shoulder. She turns and grapples herself to his chest. He can feel through her shift the full, bony column of her. Desperate warmth, mistakable for anything. Holding her is like coming home. Returning to the soul’s first neighborhood.
“Thassa. You aren’t well. We have to take care of you. You’ll be back in Montreal tomorrow, and you can start to get better. We just need to ride out tonight. Nothing can hurt you; I’m here.”
One of a hundred things he’s learned from her. Assume a virtue, if you have it not. A little creativity with the facts. Lie, if it keeps you alive.
She grabs on to him like she’ll take him down with her. After a while, she breathes a little easier. Her head on his chest nods in agreement. “Yes,” she says. “You are right.” She pushes away and smooths her face with both palms. “I’ll be better soon. I’m a little better already, in fact.” She bends down and retrieves her hairbrush. She brings it back into the bathroom. She goes about the room straightening things, although there’s nothing to straighten.
The film speed gradually returns to normal. Her simple, wishful recovery floors him. It always takes him days to pick himself up again. Is that kind of force willable, or was she born with that as well?
A sound rises like the patience of the sea. He thinks he hears surf. He does, and only on the third breaking wave does he place it: her ringtone. She freezes, as if the device can’t hurt her if she doesn’t reveal her whereabouts.
“You should answer,” he says. “It could be Montreal.”
She goes to her bag and extracts the phone. She reads the ID and cries out. “It’s Candace.”
Russell cringes. His fingers ask for time, recalculating the need to answer.
Thassa monotones, “She wants to tell me to die in hell.”
He tries to object, but bungles it. The two of them sit and listen to the surf die out.
For a long time in the close room, he’s as crippled as she is. Then he masters himself, on nothing but silent words.
“Can I borrow that?” he asks. She nods, but hasn’t the strength to hand him the phone. He has to stand, take it from her lap, and step outside.
The world outside their rented casket floors him. Night is deep and crackling. The air smells of sap, as it must have smelled for millions of years before the first flicker of awareness. He walks down the deserted road, away from the motel’s throb, across a grassy slope and into something that might have been a pasture once. He climbs up along a fence under a stand of trees.
Life is beeping everywhere, past naming.
He walks until his pretense of courage feels almost believable. Then he opens the phone, looks at the lit dial, and calls back Candace’s number. Nothing happens until he presses a little green receiver icon, a silhouette of a species recently driven extinct by just this kind of device. At the press of that key, all his hopes and fears fly up into geosynchronous orbit and back down again, a lifetime and a few hundred miles to the west.
A woman he once knew picks up and says, “Hello?” Her voice peeks out over sandbags.
“Candace.”
“Russell,” she says, and the word splits through the middle.
“Listen,” he blurts. “This isn’t what you think.”
“Russell.” She’s not exactly crying. But the sounds can’t find traction in her throat. “It doesn’t matter what I think.” She talks fast, before he can embarrass himself further. “Where are you? What are you doing?”
He falters, but he tells her. There is trust, or there is nothing.
“Yes,” she says. “Okay. I figured you’d be together. You’re all over the news. The two of you. Your students are saying you’ve abducted her. She’s wanted for questioning. And you’re the most famous kidnapping suspect since the guy who stole the Lindbergh baby.”
He looks up into the bones of an enormous conifer. For a while, he wonders if he might not reply at all. “She called me,” he says. “She asked for my help.” He can’t even comprehend the public charges. He only needs to explain himself to his mate. “I’m trying to take her home.”
“Russell.” The name comes sharp and pointed, like a command. “Do you think I didn’t figure that?”
Light bobs over the hill to the west. A lone car slips down the road, some Jurassic creature. He draws closer to the fence and crouches in the dark.
“I told them as much,” Candace says. “I made a statement.”
He can’t follow her. “I don’t You mean you talked to reporters? About What about your job?”
At last the psychologist chuckles. “Job?”
The thing that clamps his throat must have some use. He just can’t imagine what. He sits down on the damp ground. All he can say is, “Thank you.”
“Any time,” she says. “What else is Welfare for? Besides: I’m getting as famous as the two of you. Up there every hour, on the hour. Not the most flattering clip of me, however. A little puffy-looking.”
“Fuck,” he whispers. Not a word either heredity or environment allows him. “Don’t people have anything real to concern themselves with?”
“Russell, the police are out looking for you. People are phoning in tips. A manhunt. Headline News is calling it ‘The Pursuit of Happiness.’ ”
“They’ll get us tomorrow,” he says. “When I take her back to the border. They’ll have our names in the database.” It would have happened today, if he’d given them a passport to process. The police will take them both into custody, until all the stories get ironed out. Thassa will be dragged back into the inferno. She’ll never get home.
“She’s in very bad shape,” he says. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I could come. I could be there by this time tomorrow. It might help.” When the two of them get arrested and held for questioning.
Russell leans against his fence post, underneath the trees and turning stars. This is the woman who once counseled him, in the dark: Close your eyes and write a sentence in the air. Use your left hand. Just one sentence. A simple one. They silent each other. The stars wheel in place above him. And at the center of the innermost circle, he imagines himself signing the air: You’re already here.
When he gets back to the room, the TV is blaring. A man wearing a paratrooper baseball cap is carrying on about a dog who took a bullet for him. Thassa is asleep, curled up on her bed. He cuts the volume slowly, then shuts the set off. He lies faceup on his own bed, reading palmistry in the ceiling cracks. He’ll tell her tomorrow, at breakfast, if the manhunt doesn’t beat him to it. There’s been a slight change in plans. No need to call Montreal anymore, he supposes. It would only trade one anxiety for another.
He turns on his side and watches her sleep, across the gap of beds. Her chest moves so slightly that he must almost supply the motion himself. Even now, she amazes him, how she can find such peace, in the middle of her magnetic storm. It seems to Stone, in this moment, a greater gift: not something given; something made.
Today she felt what he has felt, one day out of every thirty. And she’ll feel worse tomorrow. She must live now with everyone, in turbulent smashed hope. Despair: the mother of science, father of art, discarder of hypotheses, a thing that wants only to eliminate itself from the pool.
But even now, if given the choice, he’d spare her. He watches the flimsy engine of her lungs, holding out against the whole weight of atmosphere. It doesn’t matter what Stone wants, what he believes. The genes of discontentment are loose, and painting the universe. Life’s job is to get out of their way.
He gets up, empties his pockets onto the writing desk, slips off his shoes, pulls a long T-shirt out of his bag, and heads into the bathroom. His Dopp kit sits by the side of the sink, wide open. He steps on a small, hard nub: a pill lodges in the sole of his foot. He looks down and sees three others on the floor. One more on the sink counter, next to the open empty containers. Robert’s Ativan. Russell’s doxylamine. Old Darvons from a wisdom-tooth extraction he was saving for a rainy day. Every remedy his kit has to offer.
He slams back into the other room and crouches at her bedside. He grasps her shoulder and shakes, first briskly, then with real force. She’s pliant, but makes no motion of her own. He shouts at her; the rage comes so easily. Her face stays composed, beatific. He tries to stand her upright and walk her on his arm. She will not stiffen into life.
He holds his ear up to her rib cage, his left eye crushed to her right breast. He’s sure there’s something; there must be something, however far away. Tide in a lake. Her surf ringtone, at the bottom of a deep well.
He holds his finger underneath her nose: the vacuum of deep space.
He scrambles to his feet and heads for the door, the phone, the bathroom faucet, all at once. He hears a voice tell him that he needs to get her to throw up. He can’t figure out how he’s supposed to do that. He sits down on the floor, shaking, clouded, and adrift. And in that instant of annihilation, art at last overtakes him, and he writes.
He can rescind this. He works his way back to the bed, pauses his hand under her nose again: the slightest, world-battering typhoon.
He hacks a path to the phone on the dresser. He flips it open and dials Emergency. He hears a woman on the other end, trying to slow him and get details. He doesn’t have details. The woman asks for an address; he has to scramble outside to read the name of the motel off the marquee. The nurse walks Stone through the steps of clearing the victim’s air passages, checking to see if she’s vomited up into her trachea. The nurse gives him a few simple commands to perform, which Stone confuses as soon as he hangs up.
He settles in to wait for the paramedics. He sponges Thassa and slaps her, trying to keep her as alert as possible. Once, briefly, her muscles take on a little tension, and he manages to walk her for six steps around the bed before dropping her back down onto it. He goes to the door of the room twenty times, looking for anything faintly resembling flashing lights. All he sees is a laughing couple in their late twenties, vivid as newlyweds, out in the parking lot photographing each other as they make comic faces.
He roots through her bag, looking for contact information, next of kin. A number, a datum, a molecule that will make sense. Some antidote. Something he can act on. The bag has nothing. A packet of sunflower seeds. Keys. A Handycam. The book of Tamazight poems he once saw her press to a window, its sentences filled with petroglyphs from another planet. Her copy of the text from his godforsaken class. No sane reason in the world for Harmon to be here, unless she meant it as his goodbye gift.
No cashier’s check for $32,000. No journal. Not a scribbled word.
In the infinite wait, he replays everything. All day long he saw her drowning. Yet he turned his back on her for who knows how long, to make his call. Left her alone in a fetid room with cable TV and all the toxins of the dial. Abandoned her to twenty-four-hour headlines, “The Pursuit of Happiness.” She had no antibodies for the dark. No practiced resistance.
He watches her, stretched out peacefully on her bed-almost a sane escape. He bargains, ready to accept anything in science’s arsenal. Cloning. Genetic editing. Yes to it all. Anything but this. He prays to something he doesn’t believe in, begging that she might already have visited a Chicago clinic and harvested.
He can do nothing for her but revise. And he has time to rework entire world anthologies. In the scene he keeps returning to, all the principals assemble in her hospital room. Aunt and uncle, brother, scientists, legal counsel. The group comes to a decision: posthumous reproduction. Try the whole experiment again, in vivo.
He promises God that if she lives, he’ll become another person.
A noise pounds on the air. It descends on the room, slicing and beating. The pulsed assault homes in on Stone until he grasps: the ambulance is airborne.
By the time the helicopter lands in a bare corner of the parking lot, every soul in the remote motel turns out to spectate. The newlywed couple, now vaguely criminal. An elderly pair in crumpled bathrobes. A four-year-old trying to break from his mother’s clutches toward the swinging blades. The motel manager, his finger in a beaten-up volume, his glasses dangling from a lanyard around his neck as he gazes out on the fulfillment of old prophecies.
The paramedics climb from the craft. Stone is out his door, both hands waving. They blow past him in a few steps, a minor obstacle. Everything is uniforms, straps, chrome, electronics, pumps and masks, clipboards and signatures and flashing protocols. Unthinkable capital, thrown at saving a single life.
And as the two med techs strap Thassa into the mobile sling bed, her eyes open. The world gives her nothing to focus on. Her gaze swims at random through the atmosphere, before snagging on Stone. It locks there, even as her bearers port her out the motel room door. Her eyes say, Why is this happening? They say, Forgive me. They say, Stone: Hajar: Please come with.
He stands in the parking lot in the cluster of onlookers, watching the helicopter lift back into the air. The metal insect shrinks away until it is nothing but strobing lights against the seamless night, the blink of an awful species that will succeed ours.
The figure strolls down the hill, growing. But for a long time, Tonia Schiff will be unable to tell anything. Mood, health, mental state: impossible to determine. Not until the figure reaches the café will Tonia even be sure it’s Thassadit Amzwar.
Greatly changed, of course. How could she not be? She descends deliberately-sure-footed mountain Kabyle. Her head cranes, measuring the shops and crowds and markets all around her. At home in the chaos of this day: that’s how Schiff will describe it in her film.
She’s in a loose yellow blouse over a long jade skirt. Her hair is scarved; she looks like a fifties fashion photographer stepping from a top-down Chevy. When she comes within singing distance of the table, her face breaks camouflage. But her smile checks now, to see who might be watching. “Miss Schiff. Tonia. Imagine seeing you again. Imagine!”
They hug, as if they’ve known each other forever. As if they ever knew each other. The waiter descends on them as soon as Thassa sits. He starts in French, but she switches him to Arabic. They talk, an end-of-term quiz that becomes a game show that mutates to a sass match that ends in the waiter’s departure in grinning salute.
Schiff sits back, at sea. “What was all that?”
Can there be more amused embarrassment? “Getting coffee. Welcome to the Maghreb.”
Maybe Schiff will almost understand: the smaller the transaction, the longer the needed parley. I slow her down, let her come into her film the back way, through the suq of endless negotiation.
Tonia switches to French. The whole point of giving her a Brussels childhood. She asks how things stand, back over the border.
The spirit lifts her hands to her shoulders, searching for words large enough to say what is happening again, chez nous. “It’s Algeria. When we hit bottom, we keep digging.”
But the journalist deserves a more detailed answer, and the Algerian gives her one. She lists the week’s death count, says where the attacks occurred, guesses how long the bedlam will likely last this time. She has no hope that her country will escape its inheritance anytime soon. The future has no cure.
“It’s nice to escape for a little,” Thassa says. “Sane here, in this country.” She points to the west. “How long do you suppose that imaginary line through those mountains will make any difference?”
She’s a different person in French-broader and more nimble. The ecstasy is gone now, the untouchable buoyancy muted. What’s left to take its place can at best be called ease. Yet something in her still seems to Schiff ready to go as exuberant as ever, later in this life. Or early in the next.
Thassa asks about Schiff’s trip, but she doesn’t quite hear the reply. She’s looking across the dusty street, at a shirtless boy sitting on a three-legged stool talking to a yellow bird he pins gently between two fingers.
“How are my friends?” she asks. The words are so mild they hardly seem a question.
It strikes Schiff that she could say anything at all. “They’re well, I think.”
“Mister Stone? Candace? Did they get married?”
“I think they will.”
“Good.” Thassa nods to herself. “They must get married. Helping to raise Jibreel could cure Russell.”
Schiff follows the other’s gaze across the street: an empty stool on a sun-splashed sidewalk. She turns back to Thassa and tells her why she’s come.
She tries to describe her film in progress. She starts with the funding, as if the signed donors and secured grants prove the project’s pedigree. But as she gives her sales talk, running through the storyboards, she’s crushed once again by the gap between bright seed and brute germination.
That gap will kill her, but there’s nowhere else to live. She muddles on, hoping that a few choice words might animate the limp thing. Her goal is simple, when it comes down to it: a film about what happens next. The coming age of molecular control, “The Child of Choice”
As Schiff talks, the Algerian comes alive. Play comes back into that face, the kind of light that only art releases. Now Thassa is all questions: How are you shooting it? What gear will you use? Where did you find the archival material? How about hand-drawn compositing?
For a moment, Schiff thinks her pitch might be easier than she ever dreamed. Then Thassa stops cold, on some future memory.
“But why are you making this?”
Schiff reddens and looks about the café for the waiter to rescue her. The one question she prepped for, and still she’s worthless. How can she name her late-onset need? “I thought I might figure that out as I go.”
Thassa laughs again, tomorrow’s child. “Of course. How else?” She looks up at the mountains, resigned to desire. “Of course you must put me in your film. You have my permission. My blessing. Whatever you came to get from me.”
Schiff takes the calculated gamble. Her downside risk is next to nothing now. She feels under her chair for her shoulder bag. She reaches in and pulls out the digital-video camera.
The Amzwar smile breaks free, matching North Africa’s noon. “Oh, Miss Schiff! You know that’s not possible anymore.” She’s in no way reluctant. In fact, her face is willing, if only film could still record her.
Schiff has long expected the answer, but still she deflates: condemned to nonfiction, no creation allowed. But not quite surrendering yet, she says, “Let me show you something.” She flips open the camera’s viewer and rewinds several weeks, finding the shot she’s after. She hands the device to Thassa.
On the tiny screen, a brown infant girl in a lime jumper takes three speedy all-fours strides, then hoists herself vertical on the leg of a coffee table. She swells with her dazzling triumph over gravity. She squeals in ecstasy and cuts loose, releasing the table leg to tear across the open frontier of carpet. Two steps in, she slams into nothing, comes to a splendidly unplanned stop, and drops seat-first to earth. She sits, stunned by the setback, on the threshold of howling. Instead, she breaks out into gales of untouchable laughter. Her head swivels around the room, already planning her next bone-jarring break into unknown regions.
Thassa studies the shot, her face up close to the three-inch screen. “Mine?” she asks.
Schiff considers the question. Who is anyone’s? But even her long pause is already an answer.
The infant scoots off again for another go at the table leg, the world’s greatest amusement ride. The camera bobs up for a moment, to shoot the reaction of three adults, laughing in reflected joy. One of the faces is familiar-a Donatello still successfully refuting his sixty years. Thassa’s brows pinch in comprehension. She grasps the experiment and nods.
“Are there others? Brothers and sisters?”
“Soon.”
“Her father? Her birth mother?”
“No one you know.”
Feelings fight for Thassa’s face. Anxiety. Bliss. Other related strains. She switches off the device and sets it down.
“Did they rewrite?”
The journalist in Schiff wants to say: Does it matter if they did, this time? They will, in one or another test market, in some country, somewhere, soon. That’s a story no story can deflect. Schiff says nothing at all. Chooses to.
“Is she happy?”
At last an easy one. Schiff grins in pain. “Yes.” Happy as any new toddler, up on two legs for the first time.
And how long might that last? That question, too, is part of the privately funded study.
Schiff makes to retrieve the camera, but Thassa grabs it back. “One more look? If you don’t have to rush anywhere?” She peeks again. Life is out of the crib, and will not be held back by anything so crude as accident.
Thassa keeps rewinding the shot, looking for some denouement. And how does she feel, in the teeth of the evidence? I can’t yet see. I look closer, the whole point of having been out anywhere tonight. I look, and try to decide no more than God.
I watch her fondle the camera for a moment, then slide it back across the table to the filmmaker. Just down the hill, back toward the market, a vendor sings out a marvelous sinew of melody. Another, younger voice mimics him, a whole step higher. The song is a sales pitch, something perishable, yogurt or fruit or fresh bread that will keep only until today’s end. The contest of tenors crescendos and ascends. The dozen patrons of the café share stoic grins. Thassa pushes back her hair and shakes her head.
“Make your film. Tell everything. Tell them my genes had no cure that this place couldn’t break.”
They sit in silence for a long time. But the reporter has one more bribe. “Listen! I brought you some things.” She dives back in the bag and fetches two small books. She hands them across to the apparition, a last temptation from life and the living.
Thassa takes them, and now her face full-flowers into that girl I first saw one night in a tired classroom in a city on the shores of a sea-sized inland lake. She takes the book of Tamazight poems and opens it on a surge of memory. Her lips tighten on the surprise twist of plot. “Perfect. Bless you. I will take this with me.”
She looks past the open page to see the other volume. “Non. C’est pas vrai!” She knows this book. Make Your Writing Come Alive. She reaches out with her left hand, afraid to touch the thing. She flips the pages at random. Ink annotations fill the margins-eager notes and glosses that now seem like the black box of a plane shot out of the sky.
She looks up, her eyes sparking. All might still be well. Yes may yet have the last word, even from across this uncrossable chasm.
“It’s not mine,” she says. “Give it to Russell. He will need this.”
I will need much more. Endless, what I’ll need. But I’ll take what I’m given, and go from there.
She slips the book back across the space between them. But just as Schiff takes it, the text disappears. Neither woman, I guess, will even flinch. The next to vanish off the table will be the camera, then the poems, leaving only their two half-finished teas, a condiments rack, and a menu.
As the two look on, the menu’s French fades. The Arabic follows it into white. So, too, do the sounds from the air around the café, until the only language running through the nearby streets is the one that existed in these parts long before the arrival of writing.
Then the menus and the tea and the condiments dematerialize. Then the filmmaker’s bag. Then the filmmaker herself vanishes back into documentary, banished to nonfiction.
And I’m here again, across from the daughter of happiness as I never will be again, in anything but story. The two of us sit sampling the afternoon’s slow changes, this sun under which there can be nothing new. She’s still alive, my invented friend, just as I conceived her, still uncrushed by the collective need for happier endings. All writing is rewriting.
The air here is tinged with new scents, or old ones I’d forgotten. These smells are the reason I’ve traveled out here, alone. And I am, for once, ready to try on anything the story might permit. What else can I do for her, except defy my type? Happiness, the scientist says, is not a reward for virtue. Happiness is the virtue.
She looks across at me. She always knew it would end like this, that I would follow her into this next new place. She smiles and shakes her head, as if to claim once more that fate has no power over anything crucial. Which it never really does, if I could just remember. What we have been is as nothing; what we will be is ever beyond us. But what kind of story would ever end with us?
The time for deciding is after you’re dead. I have no choice; delight pours out of me. “How are you?” I ask. “How do you feel?” She answers in all kinds of generous ways. And for a little while, before this small shared joy, too, disappears back into fact, we sit and watch the Atlas go dark.