Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers

  Two-thirds of Americans would genetically intervene to keep their offspring disease free.

  Two-fifths would enhance their children, with the number rising every year.

  On average, American parents would give their child ninety-fourth percentile beauty and fifty-seventh percentile brains.

  These data keep her awake, working in her narrow rented room as the scent of jasmine blows through her open window. When jet lag finally catches her, she curls up on the hard mattress and goes through the motions of sleep. All the while, on the insides of her eyelids, hopes rise, taboos fade, miracles get marked down, the impossible goes ordinary, chance becomes choice, and Scheherazade keeps whispering, “What is this tale, compared to the one I will tell you tomorrow night, if you but spare me and let me live?”

  A hurt message on Stone’s answering machine: Mister! I’m back. I went to your office hours, but they said you weren’t with the college anymore. I sent you a mail, but it bounced. Can you just tell me you are okay?

  He writes back and says he’s fine. He’s returned to his real job. He wishes her well in the new semester. I hope you keep up your journal. He writes in a tone to preclude all reply, then checks his mail every fifteen minutes for the next ten hours.

  Her answer is seven words: Did they fire you because of me?

  No, he insists. That job was only temporary. He never expected to be renewed for spring. It’s the first lie he can remember telling that wasn’t prompted by real-time panic. He falls into the beginner’s trap: too many explanations. I have to focus my time and energies. I’m going to write a book.

  She replies immediately: Mabrouk, mabrouk! Fantastic news. Maybe you can tell me all about it, the night of January 12? Candace and I are going to hear a mad scientist who wants to study me. Can you believe it?

  Kurton is nursing the three-hundred-dollar shot of orange juice they serve in first class before takeoff when the flight attendant comes on the speakers like an old friend. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to American flight 1803 from Boston to Chicago. If Chicago is not in your travel plans today, now might be a good time to deplane.

  He laughs out loud, which makes his seatmate stop thumbing her BlackBerry and look up in alarm. Kurton apologizes and turns back to his notes. He’s working on his comments for the debate with the Australian Nobel novelist and searching for a good hook. As always, random assortment and selection hand him one. He scribbles onto his card stock with a fountain pen: If the future is not your destination, now might be a good time to disembark.

  They go down to Hyde Park together, Stone, Weld, and Thassadit. The event is billed as “a dialogue between the Two Cultures,” but seems to be a cross between celebrity gawk and gladiatorial combat. Russell is a mess, and not just because each woman has a hold of an elbow and steers him in a different direction.

  Candace needed days to talk him into coming. “You can’t avoid her forever. She wants to see you.”

  In fact, he needs another look at her, now that the evening class is history. He’s starting to think that he made her up, that she’s just a good-natured kid he happened to meet in her first flush of college life in an exhilarating city. Even so, one small dose of her could take him through this winter’s unusually rough patch and armor him for spring.

  It’s not Thassa he most dreads. It’s the novelist. From their seats near the back of the auditorium, even before the writer steps onto the stage, Russell Stone eyes the exits. Years ago, in Tucson, he read one of the man’s books, a stripped-down parable in the Eastern European style, set in no place or time, imbued with only the faintest outline of a plot and with no pretense of a psychological character study to carry it. But as young Stone homed in on the closing pages, fixed to the cadence of sentences almost biblical, his own life fell away, replaced by a glimpse of human collective desperation so rigorous that it left itself no place to land but in a futile embrace. Stone finished the last paragraph lying on his back on the quarry stone of his apartment floor, unable to raise himself or stop crying or do much of anything except lie there like a grazing animal struck by something massive and ruthless beyond comprehension. When at last he did stand up, startled by the sound of Grace letting herself in the front door, he hid the book behind a shelf of essays. He never mentioned reading it to Grace or anyone.

  That was years ago, when he was Thassa’s age. Since then, he’s felt no need to read the man’s six other books. And he’s never again cracked the cover of the novel that so badly wrecked him, afraid of what he might discover. Last year, hearing that the novelist had taken a visiting position at Mr. Rockefeller’s university, he stopped going to his favorite South Side bookstore, just to avoid an accidental sighting. He has avoided two previous, much-publicized public talks. Now he’s condemned to sit in this overflowing auditorium and watch the man whose words transcended the human condition display all the tics of the weakest human. Stone cups his elbows to his ribs and swallows down a small, vague taste of complicit shame.

  “Tell me about your book,” Thassa whispers, as the crowd settles.

  Candace leans forward. “You’re writing a book?”

  “It’s a fiction,” Stone says, and is rescued by a roomful of applause.

  They come onstage together, the Nobel laureate, the genomicist, and the evening’s moderator. Thassa, seated between her escorts, asks Candace, “Which one?” Weld indicates Kurton, who—as the pale laureate studies his shoes—shades his eyes from the stage lights and gazes out, searching the audience for something, perhaps even for Thassa herself.

  The “debate” unnerves Russell, right out of the gate. The novelist reads stiffly from a prepared speech, voice shaking. Stone’s man is the most painfully shy person who has ever been forced into a public spectacle. The writer’s thought is so dense that every clause tries to circle back for another try before plunging on. For every point Russell grasps, three break away into the undergrowth. He wants to get down on hands and knees and crawl from the auditorium.

  The novelist’s argument is clear enough: genetic enhancement represents the end of human nature. Take control of fate, and you destroy everything that joins us to one another and dignifies life. A story with no end or impediment is no story at all. Replace limits with unbounded appetite, and everything meaningful turns into nightmare.

  The quaking man sits down to damningly respectful applause. Stone steals a glance at Thassa; her hands fold in front of her mouth, like she’s praying. She’s off in a land he can’t visit. The country of pure observation.

  The geneticist follows. Even walking to the podium, Thomas Kurton is charming. His shoulders bob like a boy on his first day of summer camp. He opens with a quip. “Every divide between the Two Cultures is bridgeable, except this one: humanists write out their talks and scientists extemporize.” Stone peeks at Weld; her knowing profile smile twists his stomach.

  Kurton praises the long, mysterious journey of literature. “Imaginative writing has always been the engine of future fact.” He thanks his opponent. “You’ve made a lot of good points that I’ll have to think about.” He concedes that genetic enhancement does force major reconsiderations, starting with the boundaries between justice and fate, the natural and the inevitable. “But so did the capture of fire and the invention of agriculture.”

  He invites a thought experiment. Suppose you want to have a baby, but you’re at high risk for conveying cystic fibrosis. You go to the clinic, where the doctors, by screening your eggs, guarantee that your child will be born free of a hideous and fatal disease. “Not too many prospective parents will have a problem with that.”

  As the scientist speaks, the novelist stares down at the table in front of him, his head in his hands. Russell Stone wants to mercy-kill him.

  Thomas Kurton sees only the audience. “Now suppose you come to the clinic already pregnant, and tests show cystic fibrosis in your fetus. Assuming that the doctors can bring a treatment risk down to acceptable levels . . .”

  Russell glances at
Candace, who winces back. He looks at Thassa. She holds up a tiny digital movie camera and pans it around the auditorium. At his glance, she grabs his arm and pulls his ear near her mouth. “Many beautiful faces in here tonight. I’m so glad we came!”

  Her casual touch pumps his neck full of blood. Minutes pass before he can concentrate on Kurton again. The geneticist progresses to removing the disease gene from the germ line before the malicious message has a chance to get copied again.

  Russell comes alert when Kurton invokes the uses of literature. “For most of human history, when existence was too short and bleak to mean anything, we needed stories to compensate. But now that we’re on the verge of living the long, pain-reduced, and satisfying life that our brains deserve, it’s time for art to lead us beyond noble stoicism.”

  In short: if it’s getting too rich for you, get off the ride. The Nobel novelist looks like he wants to do just that. Kurton concedes that change is always upheaval. “But upheaval is opportunity’s maiden name.” He concludes by mentioning a construction sign he saw on the torn-up expressway coming in from O’Hare: Inconvenience is temporary; improvement is permanent. The hall laughs appreciatively, pretty much ready to play.

  When the applause ends, the novelist begins the rebuttal. “I’ve used that same expressway myself, and it’s true: improvement has been more or less permanent.” It must be his timing, because only a few people in the hall chuckle. But the laureate now talks with a freedom that gives up on persuading anyone.

  The novelist’s metamorphosis baffles Kurton. He replies that anyone who prefers nasty, brutish, and short to glorious and paradisiacal may be suffering from depression. We’ve cured smallpox; we’ve done away with polio. “Of course we want to eliminate the toxic molecular sequences that predispose us to suffering, whether cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s, or heart disease. And if we can prevent the harmful, why not promote the helpful?”

  Bunkering down into his seat, Russell can’t even begin to list the objections. He looks to Candace, but she stares straight ahead.

  Right at the finish line, the novelist stumbles badly. Instead of pinning Pollyanna to the dissecting table, he capitulates. Enhance away, he says. Enhancement will mean nothing, in the long run. The remodeling of human nature will be as slapdash and flawed as its remodelers. We’ll never feel enhanced. We’ll always be banned from some further Eden. The misery business will remain a growth industry. When fiction goes real, reality will need a more resistant strain of fiction.

  Uncertainty ripples through the house. The moderator, on orders from the co-sponsoring booksellers and café, chooses the unsettled moment to wrap things up. Democracy is thwarted; there is no Q and A.

  Thassa is on her feet before her friends, camera in front of her, filming as the crowd drifts past. To those few who are old enough to resent someone recording them without asking, she just smiles and waves.

  Russell is left alone with LPC Weld. “Well?” he asks. He doesn’t have the heart to volunteer what he thinks.

  “Well what? It’s not a professional boxing match, you know.”

  He cocks an eyebrow. “And you’re not a public relations manager.”

  She flares a little, then nods, embarrassed. “Right. Well. I’m afraid it was Optimism, by a technical knockout.”

  He wants to tally differently, but can’t.

  “Should we try to say hello?” she asks.

  He points at the crowd mobbing Thomas Kurton and lifts his palms.

  “You’re right,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They find Thassa conversing with a couple who recognize her from the Reader story. The man asks, “Do your relatives in Canada have your same hypothermia?” The woman asks, “What kind of exercise do you do?”

  Candace apologizes to the couple and leads a puzzled Thassa away by the arm. The woman calls after them. “What are your favorite dietary minerals?”

  They press through the crowded foyer. Safely outside in the bone-crunching cold, Candace tests Thassa. “You still want to talk to him?”

  Thassa stops on the salted sidewalk, clouds of breath condensing around her. “He’s a funny man. We say: he knows how to make the donkey think it’s choosing the rope.”

  Russell and Candace trade bewilderment.

  Thassa takes their arms and starts forward again. “Yes, I’ll meet him tomorrow, like he wants.”

  “He seems harmless enough.” Candace checks with Russell, who is helpless even to nod.

  “But the author!” Thassa exclaims. “He’s the one I’d really like to meet. Did you read him ever, Russell?”

  High up on the building’s corner, a tiny white coffin of a security camera tracks them with its red cyclopean eye. The last five years of Russell’s life could be reconstructed from archived videotape all over this city. He looks at the Algerian, his face a blank. “I don’t think so.”

  “So many thoughts. I wonder if he might be ill? His sadness is so . . . steady. I would love to experiment emotionally on him.”

  Candace jerks to a stop. The arm-linked chain breaks. “You what?”

  Thassa doesn’t even blush. “Just once! Just for science.”

  He has her with the belugas.

  On the phone the next morning, Thomas Kurton tells Thassa Amzwar to pick a meeting spot anywhere in the city. She laughs at the blank check. This city has forests in the northwest big enough to get lost in. To the south, black neighborhoods the size of Constantine that white people never enter. Convention centers with the look of fifties science-fiction space colonies. Warehouse districts full of resale contraband peppered with refrigerated corpses. Cemeteries a hundred times the length of a soccer pitch, with gravestones in forty-one languages. There’s Chinatown, Greek Town, Bucktown, Boystown, Little Italy, Little Seoul, little Mexico, little Palestine, little Assyria . . . Two Arab neighborhoods—the southwest Muslims and the northwest Christians—where people from a dozen countries congregate to eat, recite Arabic poetry, and mock one another’s dialects.

  She has my problem: too much possibility. A thousand parks, four hundred theaters, three dozen beaches, fifty colleges, fifteen bird sanctuaries, seven botanical gardens, two different zoos, and a glass-encased tropical jungle. Meet anywhere? The scientist doesn’t realize the scale of the place.

  She says to meet her in front of the fish temple.

  So they meet at the Shedd Aquarium in the depths of winter, on a day pretending to June. For a week the earth has been so warm that even the bulbs in Grant Park are fooled into surfacing. All along the lakefront people stumble, light and jacketless, joking about the boon of planetary climate disaster. It’s exactly the day on which to start the future’s next blank page.

  Kurton allots twenty minutes. He has read everything on the Net about Thassa Amzwar. He’s gone through the Reader piece with a highlighter. If she’s half what the accounts make her out to be, he’s ready with a full invitation.

  He spots her from a distance as his cab pulls up. She’s standing at the foot of the aquarium steps, in full sun. She looks like a girl whose parents told her to stay put and wait for them, just before they were rounded up by the authorities.

  He pays the cab and walks the final hundred yards, watching her chat up a ring of multiracial third graders. In a few sentences, she has the whole volatile class rapt, hypnotized as if by the best interactive television. Their faces are like Prize Day. Their teacher stands behind them, transfixed as well. Thassa Amzwar flips a hand back toward the Chicago cliffs: red and emerald, white and obsidian. The children look on, astonished by the city that springs up behind them.

  She sweeps her hand across the panorama out beyond the matchstick marina, pointing to where an entire mirror city plunges into the surface of the lake. Her hands cup into a small open boat, which she floats out to the horizon, into the seaway, past Montreal, and over the swirling Atlantic. The third-grade field trip winds up on the shores of another country.

  She catches sight of Kurton where he stands spying. She
grins and waves. He crosses to her and takes her hand in his. She laughs and introduces him to the circle of kids, who glare at this party crasher. Their teacher leads them toward the buses and they drag themselves away, calling Thassa’s name in singsong goodbye.

  “What were you telling them?” he asks.

  “We were just traveling.” She looks back out over the curve of the lake, shaking her head. She’s channeling Kateb Yacine: If the sea were free, Algeria would be rich.

  He thanks her again for meeting. She shrugs. “Of course!” She says he looks kinder when he’s not onstage.

  “I think your debate partner was very upset, by the end. Maybe you should write him a letter.”

  He laughs. “Maybe I should!” He steals a look at his cell; he needs to be at O’Hare by one, for a flight to Minneapolis. And her tempo is clearly Sahara time. He waves toward a nearby bench. “Would you like to sit?”

  She frowns. “I thought we could . . . ?” She glances at the octagonal Doric temple.

  It takes him a moment. “Oh, of course. Have you ever been?”

  Her face is like someone texting a lover. “Not today!”

  As they stand in line for tickets, she confesses to coming almost every week. The simplest pleasure—watching fish glide by on the other side of murky-green glass—never goes stale and needs no escalation. She’s jumped off the hedonic treadmill and doesn’t habituate. Goose bumps run up Kurton’s neck—piloerection, puffing up against danger—archaic reflex pirated by that spin-off of no known survival value: awe.

  They circle the great central tank, Thassa studying the blue-spotted stingray and Kurton studying her. She holds the gaze of a leatherback; the creature is as transfixed by her as any scientist. Even her walk is eerie; she springs like she’s on a smaller planet with weaker gravity.