“Good,” she says, meaning nothing. They make plans, plans the Kabyle might just as well have written for them. Candace Weld names a place dangerously close to Water Tower, a nice Moroccan restaurant. “That’s next to Algeria, right?”
“Streeterville, I think.”
She waits just a beat, her silence wicked. “Am I supposed to laugh at that?”
Candace ran her own experiment once, three years earlier. The packet sat for at least a day, in plain sight, in her mail slot at the counseling center. The creamy envelope with the coneflower painted on the bottom right corner must have been handled by at least two of the center’s clerical staff. The nub was small and folded into thick paper, but still it amazed Candace that the bulge had alarmed no one.
The letter was unsigned and handwritten, its fat, loopy script with balloon i-dots the graphological equivalent of that coneflower stationery. It read:
Don’t judge the ride till you tried!!!
And nestling happily in the top crease of the unfolded page was a flat, bright-yellow pill stamped, absurdly, with the universal smiley-face icon.
Weld knew at once who had mailed the pill. It came from a free-spirit painting major Weld called Frankenthaler, who had all sorts of complications, including ritual praying to the spirit of anorexia: O goddess Ana, in your depravity . . . She had told Weld all about an amazing series of expeditions on threshold doses of so-called X: Everything just perks up, and you wonder who killed the big bad wolf.
Weld had given Frankenthaler the usual literature, with its well-researched warnings. And Frankenthaler, feeling judged, had sent her this tiny yellow sun. The pill could not be cheap, on a student budget, and for any twenty-year-old to care about the empathic education of any adult was almost touching. Weld should have turned it in immediately to the center for analysis. Instead, she slipped it into her purse until she had a chance to think.
Carrying around a Schedule I drug as she walked through the university building to the street altered her awareness all by itself. She’d read about the substance over the years, and three of her friends had described it in detail. She knew of at least one psychologist who’d used MDMA in his practice, before it was banned. Her husband, Martin, had tried it before their marriage, and he called it one of the most meaningful experiences of his life.
Now, just having the stuff in her purse gave Candace sympathetic symptoms. She felt the unbearable dearness of the faces coming downstream in the rush-hour foot torrent along Adams. She could talk to them without talking. She could see with ridiculous clarity all of the needs lining their faces. She felt the full, desperate desires of a populace 58 percent of whom needed some kind of chemical intervention just to manage. All this from a little pill sitting in the bottom of her purse.
This was in her last few months together with Marty. She thought: Just go home, put it on your tongue, talk with the man like a little child for the next four hours, rediscover the world with him as if it were freshly invented. Save your relationship. Bend a little. Put your family back together. Just try it, in the interest of science.
She stood in line at the car park, clutching her magnetic-strip card as if it were her lottery ticket out of Purgatory. Even the man in the cashier cage seemed Shakespearean. On Lake Shore Drive North, she remembered Frankenthaler’s awed description of how she’d sat in her kitchen, looking at a box of Mister Salty pretzels, feeling gratitude and wonder for everything in the solar system: I was afraid to look out of the window on the park across the way. Scared it would be more than I could take. But I looked, and I was astounded. Peace just overpowered me. I’d spent my whole life coming here, and now I was home. Everyone alive deserves to feel that way once.
For a day after her mistake Weld felt depressed, a depression as strong as the residual effect of any phenethylamine. Hers was an intense sadness at the thought that some brain-chemical look-alike could simulate for an hour any human emotional state in the spectrum. Not just simulate: duplicate. Produce for real.
In their next session together, Frankenthaler asked if Weld had gotten any recent presents in the mail. Candace said she had. An excited Frankenthaler asked, “And?”
Weld just smiled wistfully. “I flushed it down the sink, I’m afraid.”
So there’s a scene where adjunct and counselor meet for another consultation, this time over bisteeya. Weld shows up looking like another person: flannel slacks and a funky hand-knit sweater. She catches him eyeing it. “Knitting is supposed to be the best relaxation. You can see the rows where it worked and the rows where . . . not so much.”
“You made this?” He tries to gauge how much surprise is flattering.
She nods, beaming. “I started taking knitting lessons right around the time that I began studying how to read Mayan glyphs. Now I can kind of do both!”
He’s braced for an ordeal, so he’s off balance all lunch long when talk is nothing but pleasant. She’s not without her own anxieties about handing Thassa over to the positive-psychology labs. She’s exploratory and knowledgeable and open to negotiation. She genuinely wants to know what Stone thinks.
He thinks science can turn up nothing that he didn’t already intuit, the first night of class.
She nods at his objections. She has no idea she’s attractive, and probably doesn’t care. The anti-Grace. It strikes him that she may not even like the way she looks. A wave of lust courses through him, which he rides out.
They talk about work histories, life at Mesquakie, near north neighborhoods, the industrial fear state. Over date pudding, she tells him about negativity bias. I’m not really sure if she tells him this over date pudding, of course, or even if she tells him at this lunch at all. But she tells him, at some point, early on. That much is nonfiction: no creation necessary.
She tells him to imagine he’s in a deserted parking lot and a twenty-dollar bill blows right in front of him. There’s no one in sight he can return it to.
“How do you feel?”
“Good,” he admits.
“Right. A nice meal or a CD just dropped out of the sky.”
A book, he thinks. Nedjma, by Kateb Yacine. The book Thassa described in her latest journal entry. A dream of escape from the colonized mind.
“Now imagine you’re in a store. You approach the cash register with a purchase, reach inside your pocket for the twenty, and find it’s missing. You accidentally threw it away when disposing of a crumpled tissue.”
He feels the difference, before she has to explain. The freebie was fun; the loss panics him, like he has just let terrorists into his apartment. The bad is crazily out of proportion to the good, and it’s the same twenty bucks.
“I see. I’m a nut job.”
She smiles with disturbing gusto, reaches across the table, and shakes his fingers. “So’s everyone! I’m right there with you, and I’ve studied this stuff. We remember a compliment for about three and a half days, but we hold on to a criticism for months. We think unpleasant events last about sixty percent longer than same-length pleasant ones. Threatening images get our attention faster, and we have to fight harder to look away. We need about five positive events to compensate for one comparable negative one. If you hurt a friend, you have to do five nice things to offset the damage.”
“We’re broken,” he intones.
“Not at all.”
“Five to one! We’re completely incapable of balanced judgment.”
She pulls her hair into a ponytail. She’s warm and clinical, at once. “Actually, if anything, the bias is accurate. There’s a solid reason for it. Think back to the Serengeti.”
“Ah, yes. I remember it well.”
She sticks her tongue out at him, then pretends she didn’t. “If you’re scouting and find food, that’s dandy. But if a pride of lions discovers your hidey-hole while you’re sleeping: Game Over. The bad can hurt you much more than the good can help. So nature selects for pessimists.”
He catches himself twirling his spoon between his fingers. He’s been doing
it for minutes. He drops his hands into his lap, like stones. “So how did she slip through?”
The counselor’s face is novice bewilderment. It’s like they’re discussing their daughter’s just-discovered eating disorder. “That’s why I thought someone might want . . .”
But Candace doesn’t push it. She doesn’t push anything. It’s almost relaxing, and Russell Stone wonders just where this woman’s clinical interests start and stop.
They split the check down the middle. Then they walk back out into the outrageously gorgeous day. The sky is a Chagall deep cobalt, and the buildings are etched against it with a fine ink liner. Even the surly pedestrians pressing past them seem like friends. The psychologist sighs. “Just look at this beautiful place!” Grace’s good twin twists her face up at him, and he has to look away.
He closes his eyes and inhales. He’s deeply depressed by the thought: true happiness may depend on the weather. And in the next breath, he’s depressed that it might not. One of his happiness manuals claims that weather and mood strongly correlate, but only until people are cued to notice it . . .
“So why should autumn make people feel so good?”
She smiles secretly. “I don’t know the precise chemistry. I’m sure it’s been studied.”
It’s the perfect day to play the tourist in one’s own life. They walk three blocks, into the shopping crowds surging up and down the Magnificent Mile, hunting for a cure to their misery that has not yet hit the market. She cranes her neck up at the Hancock. “When was the last time you went up?”
He squints at the calculation. “Sixteen years ago?”
Her eyes are aghast, delighted. “Come on. You can see four states from up there. And a good seventy-five percent of them aren’t ours!”
In my country, a new work of fiction is published every thirty minutes. That’s 17,530 new volumes annually, not including Web publication. Even assuming a tenth of the U.S. rate in other parts of the world, the total figure may be something like 50,000 invented worlds in this year alone.
Say the infant novel was born four centuries ago and grew at the rate of 100 titles a year for its first several decades. Say the curve shoots up sometime in the last century. I don’t know: a million total novels seems a plausible worldwide guess. You know what the next decade will bring. Beyond that, imagining is beyond imagining.
I try to calculate how many of those million-and-growing volumes are saddled with a romance—bright or doomed, healthy or diseased. I can’t do the math. Surely it must be most of them.
Sexual selection, the surest and most venerable form of eugenics, has molded us into the fiction-needing readers we are today. Part of me would love to belong to a species free, now and then, to read about something other than its own imprisonment. The rest of me knows that the novel will always be a kind of Stockholm syndrome—love letters to the urge that has abducted us.
They stand at the glass wall, elbow to elbow, watching crowds flow through the gorges below them. The city turns into a techno-opera, a glorious nanotechnological enterprise beyond the power of any coordinated forces to engineer. They find their neighborhoods, the college, six universities, a dozen museums and monuments, the dead stockyards and living stadiums, churches and commodities exchanges, the river-reversing channel, the four-mile-wide particle accelerator off in the distance. Their city is a staging ground too huge and hungry to dope out, lying like a scale maquette at their feet.
“Gabe loves it up here,” Candace says. She keeps her eyes earthward. “My son. Anything complicated and blinking, from high up. Ten years old, and he already has a résumé on file with NASA.”
“High up or deep down.” Stone talks to the glass, remembering. “Or far away, in some parallel universe. A thousand years before or after, anywhere but now.”
“That’s right!” She smiles at him, surprised. “How do you know my little guy?”
He shrugs: met him way back. “So tell me where that comes from. Infinite hunger for the unreal. Why should that be useful, in little boys?”
She gazes back down at the microbe races. He watches her trying to take in the panorama. Puzzled, vulnerable, hand-knit: she will not look like this again, the next time he sees her.
“I wish I knew.”
Numbing to the aerial view, they return to ground. The elevator drops so fast his ears hurt. This scene ends with Candace Weld studying him in return, in the tower lobby.
“So. Mr. Stone. I’m sorry to say, but I’ve enjoyed this. We should do it again somewhere else, sometime.”
He wonders if she means the Sears Skydeck.
Though he stays silent, she doesn’t wither. “I’m all about gathering more data. We in the social sciences like to avoid the small-N problem.”
“I . . . sure. That sounds like fun.”
I watch him twist, the way he did so often in real life. Sounds like fun. A little of her poise, and he’d admit: Fun isn’t something I do very well. A little of her candor, and he’d ask: Is this about me or my student?
“And we can wait and see, about taking Thassa to visit the group at Northwestern. No hurry, obviously.”
They stand there awkwardly, two more victims of natural selection, caught between negativity bias and the eternal belief that the future will be slightly better than the present. In possession of all the data she’s going to get, Candace Weld smiles and waves and weaves her way across the homicidal traffic of Michigan Avenue.
He’s still awake the next morning at three thirty, doing the math, wondering how a thirty-two-year-old editor is going to take care of a ten-year-old son who works for NASA, let alone a twenty-three-year-old daughter who’s still in college.
Interior: a lab at Truecyte, one of Thomas Kurton’s many experimental spin-offs. A long room with eight rows of fifteen-foot workbenches, half of them capped by chemical fume hoods. Glassware and reagents spread a chaos across shelves and countertops, although the gloved, safety-goggled lab workers know exactly where everything is.
Some of the profuse gear could be straight out of labs two centuries old: pipettes and flasks, burners and retorts. But the crucial new gear has all gone digital: inscrutable black boxes covered in LEDs, sealed microelectronic sarcophagi that swallow up samples and report the relevant chemistry in clean columns on bright monitors; devices the size of bread machines that accept matchbox cartridges filled with tens of thousands of biological macromolecules suspended in arrays; sensors that read millions of data points in minutes, that make errors only once every few million reads, and that spit out answers to questions three billion years in the making.
The whole room is charged and alert, perched on the threshold of the next liberation.
Thomas Kurton’s close-up fills the video frame, a koala with a shy smile. He could fund-raise for some endangered wildlife fund. At fifty-seven, the man looks like he’s just been awarded a Presidential Junior Investigators grant to visit the National Institutes of Health over summer vacation.
TONIA SCHIFF:
You sure you don’t have a painting tucked away in the attic somewhere, taking the hits for you?
KURTON [deadpan]:
Actually, all you need is a high-resolution JPEG, these days.
He’s befriending the camera—slipping it a rum candy out on the far edges of the playground, while the proctor is distracted by more hardened delinquents. It’s just fun for him, however many times he’s done this, and fun for the casual viewer, stumbling onto Over the Limit after the sudden-death quarterfinal rounds of Be America’s Next UN Ambassador.
KURTON:
Oddly enough, it’s much easier to repair genes in egg cells than it is to do somatic gene therapy in a living person. And the beauty of germline engineering is that the fixes are inheritable! In a few decades, we’re going to be doing everything that way . . .
Crosscut to Tonia Schiff. She’s in a distressed-denim skirt and embroidered vest. She tried once to lose the boho chic, to adopt a wool-suit gravitas for a segment on how easy it would be f
or anyone to introduce neurotoxins into the air systems of a large office building. But the focus groups weren’t having it. Schiff-hip was essential to the show’s sangfroid. Over the Limit is Tonia, and Tonia is the girl whose hands-in-the-air, wry bewilderment could make anyone’s heart skip a beat, just before the real bedlam hits.
SCHIFF [waving her legal pad]:
Okay, let’s just talk about that “inheritable” for a sec. I mean, forever is a long time, right? Suppose the gene doctors decide that they’ve made a mistake with my mail-order kid . . .
Kurton laughs from the belly. He loves Schiff as much as the next viewer. America’s most irreverent science television journalist.
KURTON:
Well, that’s where the artificial chromosome pairs come in. We can insert them, right alongside the regular set, and load them up with useful genes, as we discover them. And we can flick these genes off and on as desired, without interfering with other gene regulation.
SCHIFF:
Plug-and-play chromosomes. Why didn’t I think of that?
KURTON:
Offspring wouldn’t inherit the artificial chromosome cartridge, of course. But they could get an upgraded version, with all the advances in genetic knowledge since their parents were born.
SCHIFF:
Kind of like downloading a patch to your computer operating system.
KURTON:
Exactly!
SCHIFF [looking around the lab for a SWAT team]:
Ri-ight. And would Microsoft be involved in any of these upgrades?
A cutaway animation sequence follows, base pairs assembling into genes and genes flying in and out of rotating chromosomes, spinning out kinky proteins that bind and catalyze stray chemicals like some sorcerer’s apprentice part-stamping factory. The chemicals swarm into a face, at which the screen splits repeatedly, filling up with patent lawyers, philosophers, a clergyman, a science writer, a senator-judge, and several geneticist-businessmen—those who need to safeguard innovation and those who need to save us from it. Each face gets five words, then ten, the words overlapping, finally all surging together in one mighty Stockhausen tone cluster.
Generosity: An Enhancement Page 11