Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers

  Thassa catches his eye in midreply. Never mind; I know this. I can tell this. Stone has no doubt that she can acquit herself. It’s the journalist he distrusts.

  He takes a corner seat, watching his last lesson plan dissolve. Of course she’s public domain. Nothing the race needs ever stays hidden. Artgrrl and Princess Heavy compete to tell their Thassa stories. Entitled, the reporter milks them. Even Stone gets grilled. But when he makes a move to break up the circus, the journalist asks Thassa, “This hyperthymia. So what exactly is that like?”

  A murmur in Tamazight. “It’s not like anything. It’s absurd, this so-called condition. The news made it up.”

  “Okay, okay,” Donna Washburn interrupts. “Just tell me, as simply as you can: What does it feel like, being you?”

  Thassa lays her palms on the table, beseeching. “I’m telling you it’s nothing. Everybody on earth has this symptom. They just don’t know it!” At this, the whole class laughs.

  “All right,” the journalist says. “Let’s leave that for now. Let’s go back to your childhood. They killed your father . . . how?”

  Russell cuts off the interview after half an hour. When the miffed Donna Washburn leaves, he looks down at his notes, the topic for the final impromptu. That future day you would most like to live. The topic is gibberish, nothing he’d be willing to write on, himself. You know, Mister? You are a very unfair teacher.

  He assigns the topic. Each writes whatever sentences his or her temperament permits. “Write what you know,” Harmon apes, as if it were possible to do anything else.

  They do the assignment, then drag Stone to a makeshift end-of-year party, where they make him eat cheese fries and force him to listen again as they explain why blogs are better than print. Everyone wishes everyone else happy holidays, and wistful goodbyes proliferate, like a disease.

  The last word belongs to next week’s Reader. Underneath a photo of Thassadit Amzwar surrounded by admiring classmates is a half-page feature, part bio, part flubbed-rape account, part Maghreb travelogue, complete with quotes from a positive-psychology researcher at Northwestern about whether hyperthymia is real, all under the headline: SAVED BY JOY.

  A day after the piece appears, Russell Stone gets an e-mail from the department head, thanking him for his job this semester but saying Mesquakie won’t be renewing his contract for spring.

  Russell is flipping numbly through von Graffenried’s Journal d’Algérie—mass graves like potato fields, with plywood grave markers—when the phone rings. He checks the caller ID and it’s neither his mother nor his brother. Which means it must be Misty from Mumbai or Brad from Bangalore, calling to ask a few simple questions about his personal satisfaction.

  It’s Thassa. From the South Loop. That she calls just when he needs to talk to her is hardly the one major coincidence that every long fiction is allowed. It’s not even a minor one.

  “Mister Stone,” she says. “I need your help.”

  “Where are you?” he shouts. He’s halfway down the stairs to the street before he hears the cranberry chuckle in her voice.

  “No danger,” she says. “I just need writing advice!”

  It seems the Reader article has brought out the readers. Dozens of the terminally miserable have gotten her e-mail from the college directory server and are deluging her with intimate inquiries.

  “Strange people with Hotmail accounts want me to make them happy. One woman wants to hire me as her personal trainer. She thinks her soul needs a professional workout. Twenty-three messages in two days. What should I tell them all?”

  He tells her to throw the e-mails in the trash and empty it.

  “I can’t do that! That would be rude. I must write them something. Remember Mr. Harmon?”

  “Thassa. Be careful. Don’t tell these people anything about yourself.”

  “They don’t want to know anything about me. They just want to know about themselves. They’re so sure I have a secret. I could make up anything at all, and they would believe me.”

  “Don’t encourage them. It’ll just make things worse.”

  “Thank God I go back to Montreal tomorrow. Canadians are so much easier.”

  She asks about his holiday plans. He makes something up. By now I know this man: all the beautiful five-paragraph personal essays he composes for her and then redlines away, in two heartbeats. He doesn’t tell her he won’t be coming back to school in the spring. He just tells her to take care.

  “You take care, too. Thank you for your class. I learned so much.” He mumbles some meaningless reply, which makes her laugh. In return, she burbles out, “Happy New Year, Mister Stone! See you then?”

  He visits Candace Weld’s office, without an appointment. “It’s a total train wreck. Right out of my worst nightmares.”

  Candace studies the Reader article. She doesn’t scold him now; she just reads with practiced steadiness.

  “I should have thrown the journalist out the minute I got to class.”

  “She would have cornered Thassa afterward.” There’s something reconciled in her voice, the surrender to a development that psychology is powerless to deflect. “It’s just a squib in a local freebie paper. They come and go by the thousands.”

  “She’s getting dozens of e-mails from people who want to buy whatever she’s taking.”

  Weld looks up from the paper. “Is she all right?”

  “Of course she’s all right. That’s the problem. She’s constitutionally incapable of being anything but all right.”

  “Are you all right?”

  He snaps. “Didn’t that Rogerian parroting go out in the eighties?”

  She stays mild. His panic actually seems to fascinate her. “I’m sorry, I don’t see . . .”

  “How would you feel if total strangers started begging you all day long for magic mood bullets?”

  She looks at him, lips twisted in amusement, until he realizes what he’s just asked.

  “Russell, this is one tough woman. She’ll survive a little media. She’s been through worse.”

  “She called me for help.”

  “Did she? Maybe she likes you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not a grave . . . not a cradle robber, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  “She’s nine years younger than you.” Candace Weld has done the math. “Is that a cradle?”

  “A dozen people a day are asking her to bless them. Yes, that makes me nervous.”

  The psychologist suggests several practical actions, starting with getting Thassa’s e-mail address removed from the public directory. Just the sound of her voice calms him. He could grow dependent on her competence.

  “Don’t beat yourself up about this,” she tells him.

  “But that’s my best skill.” The air all around him is full of wireless gossipers and news surfers. “Is it too late for me to become a real patient of yours?”

  “We don’t call them patients,” she says. “And yes. It’s too late for that.”

  “I’m finished teaching. The college fired me.” He feels nothing. He could be a moon of Pluto.

  “Oh, Russell! I’m sorry. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  His silence is textbook: Show, don’t tell.

  “That’s not fair to you,” she decides. “None of this is your doing.”

  “None of it would have happened if I hadn’t said that damn word to the police.”

  “I’m sorry. This must be a real setback.”

  “I’m fine. Two jobs was more than I could handle anyway.”

  She’s brutally comfortable with extended silence. After a bit, she asks, “So you’re saying we’re no longer colleagues?”

  He hears. She’s only six years older than he is. He has already done the math. Happy people have more friends than unhappy ones. Happy people tend to be in long-term relationships.

  He feels like he’s plunging. On the plummet down, he asks if he can make dinner for her, this Saturday, at his apartment. “I have one good recipe,�
� he says. “Mushroom asparagus risotto.”

  She pauses long enough for him to think he’s made an enormous miscalculation.

  “I can get a sitter,” she murmurs. “A really good grad student in child psych. She watches Gabe play video games all night, then writes up the child-machine interactions.”

  “I’m sorry. Bring him, of course.”

  “Are you sure? I will, then. You want the sitter, too?”

  He just stares at her, slack-jawed, until she adds, “Joking.”

  I’m caught like Buridan’s ass, starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction. I see now exactly who these people are and where they came from. But I can’t quite make out what I’m to do with them.

  I need to slow down, to describe Stone’s terror of driving, his belief that he might be slated one day to hit a child. I have to mention Weld’s aversion to security cameras, her thrice-weekly yoga class, or how she must feed mealworms to her son’s horned toad when the boy forgets the living world. I need someone to transcribe for me the two lines of e-mail printout from Thassa’s brother that she keeps rolled up in the hem of her shawl. But the three of them pull me along in their own rush to arrive, before all the world’s books get rewritten.

  I know the kind of novel I loved to read, back before fact and fable merged. I know what kind of story I’d make from this one, if I could: the kind that, from one word to the next, breaks free. The kind that invents itself out of meaningless detail and thin air. The kind in which there’s no choice like chance.

  It would help tremendously if Stone could figure what the woman sees in him. She’s masterfully self-controlled. Her work has her confronting every behavioral strategy and dodge that humans can indulge. Yet she indulges him.

  He takes a break from food prep on Saturday afternoon to phone his brother. Robert might have made a great psychologist himself, were it not for the Asperger’s.

  Russell talks to his brother as freely as he ever has. “I can’t tell if she actually enjoys my conversation or whether she’s just lonely.”

  “You saying there’s a difference?”

  He hears Robert typing as he talks. “She must know I’m incapable of amusing anyone.”

  “Which is itself pretty damn entertaining.”

  “Maybe she’s taken me on as a case after all.”

  A gap in the air. “Uhhn. You know . . . bro? You may want to work a little on that self-esteem thing.”

  “I can’t imagine what’s in it for her. All we ever talk about is Thassa.”

  More furtive mouse-clicking. “Hang . . . Who-sa? Oh, right. The smiley woman.”

  “Robert? Are you online? This is like talking to somebody in the middle of a gunfight.”

  “What? No. It’s nothing. Just some chick in Romania I play cribbage with on weekends.”

  All research gambles against time. Kurton calls it hunting the mastodon. An unruly band with sticks and stones stalks a creature larger than all of them combined. Hang back and lose the prey; rush too soon and get gored. Smart risks live to reproduce; poor ones die off. Thomas Kurton excels at research because his ancestors stalked well.

  But for all his research skill, Kurton has never published a word without fear of prematurity. The same temperament that disposes him to skeptical curiosity leaves him forever holding out for more data. True, the road to discovery is paved with the graves of the hesitant. Yet better one of those modest headstones than the more spectacular memorials, those bubble-burst announcements like N-rays or cold fusion.

  Back when Joseph Priestley defined research, the race went not to the swift but to the articulate. Ask Scheele or Lavoisier who really discovered oxygen. The clergyman-scientist could hold on to phlogiston for years, almost as a hobby, and still make his immortal contributions to human understanding through sheer eloquence.

  But back then, no one could own scientific laws. Now you can. Metabolite has successfully sued another company for publishing the fact that vitamin B-12 deficiency correlates with elevated homocysteine, a risk for heart disease. Myriad can charge $2,600 for a questionable breast-cancer-gene screen, while shutting down labs that develop better alternatives.

  Thomas Kurton survives in this world because he’s good at knowing just when the eternally insufficient data must go public. But increasingly, the market is taking once-public facts private. Even colleagues in his own university department, funded by corporate grants, can no longer talk freely to one another.

  Kurton doesn’t particularly like the capitalization of life science. But life science doesn’t particularly care about his private dislikes. Those who would keep growing must shed their legacy biases, the way that biology has shed everyone from Galen to Gajdusek. Someday microgreen machines will do to scarcity what Salk did to polio. Then the grants will exceed the applicants. Then we will defeat even competitive rivalry, and all this private profit-seeking will disappear into the eternal gift economy. Until then, Kurton hunts the mastodon as best he can.

  But in recent months, some colleagues have wondered whether Kurton’s sense of timing might be slipping. Truecyte has had a study in the pipeline for three years. Everyone down to the beaker washers knows this thing is coming. They’ve scanned the genes of hundreds of individuals, all of them falling along the high end of emotional health. Against these, they’ve compared the scans of hundreds more from deeper down that spectrum. Massive computational biology has identified a group of quantitative trait loci that associate strongly with performances on tests of emotional resilience.

  DNA microarrays have already mapped these QTL more precisely, pinpointing them to much more closely spaced markers. Now the markers narrow down even further. The log of the odds scores show a high likelihood that a person’s affective set point depends massively upon a certain network of genes involved in serotonin and dopamine synthesis and transport. The control regions for these genes are polymorphic, with several alleles each. And Truecyte’s association studies identify those specific alleles that correlate with elevated well-being.

  This network of genes seems to account for perhaps two-thirds or more of the heritability of emotional temperament. Various permutations of this gene network correlate with contentment, joy, and even, for want of a better term, exuberance. Ex uberare—the pouring forth of fruit.

  The sample size is good, while the covariance and standard deviations satisfy almost everyone on the project. Researchers as levelheaded as Amar Patnaik and George Cheung voice the collective anxiety in multiple meetings: it’s time to stake a claim. If they don’t file something soon, some other group in Switzerland or Singapore is going to announce, with data a lot less firm than anything Kurton’s group has already amassed.

  But to everyone’s dismay, Kurton remains averse to going public. His reluctance may be just legacy human nature: as stakes rise, even the fearless take cover. History is filled with scientists terrified of publishing big findings. Darwin himself tinkered with his theory for almost two decades before Alfred Wallace’s letter forced his hand.

  Some among the senior scientists close to Thomas wonder if his hesitation may even be sociological—just a fear of real-world consequences. From an unsympathetic distance, his reticence looks a lot like nostalgia. How else to explain his continued foot-drag, in the absence of solid objections? He has signed off on the statistical analysis. He’s conceded the results of the index-test method for determining functional differences between the known allelic variations. Still Kurton waits. And he’s begun to repeat with increasing, almost annoying frequency, “All good science pauses.”

  No one knows exactly what the chief’s hesitation means. It may be good science; it may be loss of nerve. In practice, it means an extended delay in publishing that any day—given the rate of post-genomic discoveries being plucked daily from the air—could prove fatal. The mastodon will still kill you, whether you charge it or stand stock-still.

  Weld consulted with two colleagues first. She tried one of each: stringent
Christa Kreuz and expansive Dennis Winfield, the counseling center’s head. Christa was at her hardest-assed. “You’re dating someone who works for the college?”

  “He’s not working for the college anymore. And I’m not exactly dating him.”

  “He got fired over this incident.”

  “He was temporary. They just didn’t renew.”

  “It doesn’t feel right, Candace. He comes to talk to you about this student, the student gets raped by another one of his students, and now . . . ?”

  “She didn’t get raped. She talked her way out.”

  “And now you want to sleep with the teacher.”

  “I don’t want to sleep with him. I just enjoy his company.”

  “Why?”

  Weld fell back on that old counseling trick: counting to five. “Because he’s not fatuous and he’s not banal. He feels things. He cares about something other than himself.” She fights off a bizarre impulse to say: He makes me smile. “He thinks. That’s hard to come by, these days.”

  “Have you thought about an epistolary relationship? And you might want to keep one copy of everything on file.”

  Nor did Dennis Winfield entirely let her off the hook. “In the best world, of course, I’d wish you something less problematical.”

  She’d seen it in Dennis’s eye from time to time: in his best world, Dennis wouldn’t be married, she wouldn’t be working for him, and he would be her problem.

  “It’s not problematical, Dennis. It’s just companionship.”

  “Does he get along with Gabe?”

  “I’ve just met him. I only want to be sure I’m not breaking any rules.”

  “You’re not breaking any rules. Technically. If you’re sure that you’ve never had a professional relationship with him or the student . . .” He appraised her. “This is not about some kind of indirect therapy for either one of them, is it?”