Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers

  “It’s . . .” the smaller addict starts. “It’s hard to, I can’t really . . .”

  “It’s Kabylie!”

  Gabriel snaps up, clutching the mouse. “No it’s not.”

  “It is! That’s Gouraya mountain, there. My grandfather came from not far away. Sidi Touati is just over there.”

  The boy’s alarm confirms an invisible village just over the distant crest.

  “Poor Algeria. Invaded by everyone.”

  Candace stands in the doorway, testing a smile. “What’s going on?”

  Thassa wheels toward her. “They’re occupying my homeland. Again!”

  “We aren’t!” Gabe cries.

  Thassa turns back to wag a finger at the plunderers, but Gabe’s bewilderment is so complete that she hugs his head to her chest and coos a stream of Tamazight that seems to comfort him. “You want Kabylie? Come with me!”

  The boy wants nothing but to be left alone to solitary marauding. But he follows the adults into the dining room and a table so generous that both males stop and stare. Thassa orbits the spread, naming everything. There’s a small volcano of couscous bel osbane, pools of clabbered milk, a mountain lake of shorba with frik and coriander, stacked-up wedges of brik dripping with lemon. “And for dessert, if you are good . . .” She motions toward a mound of sacrificial almond cookies. “Dziriettes. ‘Little Algerians.’ ”

  Gabe stands stunned. “It’s exactly what they eat . . .” He points back toward his remade shadow world.

  Thassa grabs his head to her chest again. “Of course it is! Maybe you’re a little Algerian, in your other life.”

  She sits next to the boy. All meal long she teaches him table words in Arabic. He revels in the gutturals while his mother crows, astonished at his appetite.

  Checking out of her Centre Ville hotel, Tonia Schiff will ask the concierge how to catch the bus to El Kef. The concierge draws a map to the big station at Bab Alioua. Schiff will find the station without a problem—a cushy place, as world bus stations go. But something about Bab Alioua is a glimpse of things to come: a state-controlled, adlibbed exercise in indirection and concealment. Take a number and pitch a tent.

  She asks about the Kef bus at three guichets and gets five different answers. She boards the wrong bus but disembarks just before it takes off for the subterranean world of Tataouine. She gets sent to another waiting area, but a handmade Arabic sign on the door she’s supposed to leave from announces a further unreadable change in plans. She asks around. And around. The bus threatens to leave. Then a semiofficial-looking man declares it’s going to be badly delayed. When Schiff asks again half an hour later, she learns it left twenty minutes ago.

  Tonia Schiff begins to think that her French—so secure her whole life—is nothing but a private hallucination. Finally, a kindly man with a flowing Old Testament beard takes pity on her. He tells Schiff that someone in her situation (one he doesn’t bother spelling out) is better off getting to Kef by louage. He directs her to a nearby carrefour and tells her to ask for the samsar—the go-between—at the Café de l’Avenir.

  The samsar can arrange everything. No worries. But the thing that takes the most arranging is how to divvy up Schiff’s dinars between the potential driver, the samsar, and the samsar’s samsar. A louage is coming soon, the man tells Tonia. But it’s a crowded one, and yesterday, it overheated, two hours into the mountains. That louage, he ventures, is not the louage for her. One epic Arabic cell call later, he announces a much better one that he could probably get her into, if it’s worth his while.

  Schiff sits at a café table for a long time, in a mental fugue state straight out of postwar existentialist fiction. Waiting, she considers how much more fun it is to read such scenes than to live them. But the sun is mild, there is still coffee, and nothing on the horizon suggests that humanity can’t hold out until she records her final interview with it.

  Just as she begins to imagine that it might indeed be possible for even Sisyphus to be happy, a white Peugeot wagon with its rear-left quarter punched in pulls up to the terrace with four others already in it. Tonia hands over one final stack of dinars, gets in the front seat, and buckles in for the three-hour ride.

  The louage passes through the salt flats west of the city, Tunis’s only obvious shantytown. The driver catches Schiff looking and hints ominously that the slum owes its continued existence to World Bank master derivatives. The car bears south a little, then west again, through a plain that graduates—in another advance taste of things to come—imperceptibly from arable to arid.

  Schiff’s guidebook says to keep watch off the right side of the road, at about one hundred kilometers. The Peugeot crests a hill, and down a wide expanse spread the ruins of Dougga. Tonia cries out in admiration. One of the passengers—the one she has dubbed the Tunisian Robert De Niro—leans forward and says, “The best Roman town in North Africa. Edge of the empire.”

  The woman next to him objects with her whole body. Not Roman, she says. Numidian. Then Libyco-Punic.

  Her other seatmate, who had spent the entire trip writing columns of figures into pocket ledgers, claims that the Numidians stole it from the Berbers. The driver plunges into the fray, and the debate turns violent in three languages, only one of which Tonia can follow. The argument over who built the city turns into a fight over who killed it—the Byzantines, the Vandals, the Ottomans, the French, or the UN World Heritage folks.

  “No one killed it,” the driver declares, in a voice suggesting that anyone who disagrees can walk the rest of the way to El Kef. “The land just dried up. The damn empire fell apart. What do you do about that?”

  The whole louage falls silent for five kilometers.

  In one of his long, Tom Swift monologues that began in self-replicating nucleotide sequences and ended up with human colonization of other star systems, Thomas Kurton once told Schiff how all the basic elements of survival—finding food, avoiding prey, selecting mates—depend on holding background noise steady enough to pick out foreground signals. We’re tuned by a billion years of natural engineering to the flashing Now, designed to be dead blind to exactly the kind of huge, slow, incremental changes that will kill us. According to Kurton, the race had two choices: sit like the oblivious frog in the slowly warming pan until we cook, or take our natures into our own hands and sculpt out better angels.

  The cab climbs the hairpin twists on the Grand Parcours Cinq, clawing its way up to Kef. As the massive Djebel Dyr plateau breaches the horizon, Tonia Schiff gets ill. She concentrates her willpower on surviving the last fifteen kilometers, but loses. The rattled driver makes an emergency stop, and Schiff finds a small pit in the yellow rocks just off the road to vomit in. When she comes back to the car, the passengers and driver are arguing about what made her sick.

  On the ridge outside the city, Schiff gazes south toward the pre-Saharan steppe, even as the Sahara comes slowly northward, toward her.

  What does the foster family talk about, over the Maghrebi feast? Four feet from each other, Candace and Russell argue whether anonymous online user ratings for everything from holiday destinations to songbirds are a marvelous new form of cultural interaction (Weld) or the death of the private soul (Stone). Gabe gives the topic one star. When the heat of their hyperboles gets embarrassing, they switch to the recent unmasking of a literary hoax. It turns out that a troubled teenager’s searing memoir—abuse, escape, horrific life on the streets—is really the work of a seasoned, middle-aged feature writer. Candace calls the whole episode fascinating contemporary ethnography. Stone wants the fraud to serve time. Thassa and Gabe just giggle, in bursts of street Arabic.

  The food warms them all. But even with passionate debate, they finish the meal almost before they’ve started. The world’s most ephemeral art form—even worse than magazine writing. What kind of life would let dinner pass in a tenth the time of its preparation? This kind. The kind we’re built for.

  Stone sits facing the coffee table. The article lies in wait for him, occupying one
-quarter of his cerebrum all the way through the dziriettes and coffee. The report is to blame for Candace’s distance all evening. Even Thassa’s attentions to Gabe have seemed preoccupied.

  Russell sits nibbling at his little Algerians, inside a familiar domestic scene that ought to know how badly the world has already doomed it. This craving for a shared meal uses him like a seed burr uses a trouser cuff. Stone has spent eight years getting free of exactly this need. Now he wants it back as badly as he’s ever wanted anything.

  All dinner long, wind shakes the building and sleet tattoos the windowpanes. An ice storm in late March: more freak weather becoming the norm. After dessert is over, the four of them stay huddled around the table, afraid to leave the one warm spot given them.

  Gabe leaves first; he has a heat source elsewhere. He heads down the hall, off to a place whose payoff matrix is far more generous than this one’s. Russell would follow, if Candace didn’t chirp, “You read. We’ll clean up.”

  When he objects to that division of labor, Thassa just laughs. “You want a typical Maghrebi meal? You have to exploit the women.”

  He sits down to study for his supper. The article is hard, harder than he feared. He’s seen some of the vocabulary during his months with the happiness books, but every sentence here has something to defeat him: epistatic, allelic complementation, coefficient of relatedness, noncoding polymorphism, nucleus accumbens, dopaminergic and serotonergic pathways . . . He’s waylaid in the dense hieroglyphics: 5-HTTLPR, QTL, VNTR, BDNF, monoamine oxidase, dihydroxyphenylalanine . . . He wants to stop after every clause and consult Candace. But he’s the experimental control; his job is to say what this article will mean to the congenitally clueless.

  So this is how the species ends. Homo sapiens has already divided, if not into Eloi and the Morlocks, then into demigods and dispossessed, those who can tame living chemistry and those who are mere downstream products. A tiny elite is assembling knowledge more magical than anything in Futopia, perfecting fantastic procedures, determining chemical sequences billions of units long, reading what these spell out, learning how a million proteins interact to assemble body and soul. Meanwhile, Stone and his 99.9 percent of the race can only sit by, helplessly illiterate, simply praying that the story will spare them.

  Russell reads, the clink of dishes and soft words floating in from the next room. Apparently Kurton’s group has found a network of several crucial genes that, rumor has it, help build the gates and portals that channel the brain’s molecules of emotion. Control for any of them, and changes in the rest correlate with changes in sanguinity. The graphs are clean and the correlations strong. The variant combinations of these genes produce several clusters of data points along a spectrum running from darkness to bright. Tune each of the genes to the right flavor, and you have subject C3-16f, just now making her friend laugh over some silliness in the kitchen.

  The article describes how psychological tests virtually predicted C3-16f’s optimal allele assortment—the happiness jackpot. Russell sits back in the rickety recliner, the journal open on his lap. He himself imagined this development long ago, the first night of his writing class. From before she even arrived in this country, Thassadit Amzwar already belonged to these technicians, the child buyers, the purveyors of human improvement. Way back in chapter one, he predicted her ultimate capture by science before book’s end.

  He sits watching a skin of ice crystal culture itself across the living room’s casements. The glass is almost covered, and the ice is thickening. When he looks up from this reverie, the women are standing next to him. They take the sofa, Candace gingerly and Thassa in a flop. The Algerian speaks first. “Nonsense, isn’t it?”

  Stone scans Candace, who clearly wants to believe the same thing.

  “They make me sound like some kind of bio-factory for ivresse. I’m not like that, am I? That’s just silly. Everyone can be as content as they like. It’s certainly not predestiny.”

  Stone wills Candace to look at him. “Is the science any good?”

  “Good science?” She’s not the confident woman that he speaks to every other night, in the dark. He doesn’t know the first thing about her, really. If she were the heroine of some hackneyed genre thing that he got it into his skull to write, he wouldn’t even be able to jot down her main character traits. She seems experimental to him, curiously adrift in data. “I suppose we’re already past worrying about that.”

  The words chill him. “What do you mean?”

  Candace studies the ice-coated windows. “Every conclusion in the article could be discredited next month, and journalists will still be reporting it five years from now.”

  “But say they’re right. It doesn’t change anything in . . . real life, right? I mean, they guarantee confidentiality. No one can find out who . . . ?”

  Candace, professional Candace, studies him, deciding whether jaw-dropping naïveté is genetic or environmental. It’s not fair. He’s the one who was against Thassa going to Boston. Candace thought they would find nothing.

  He assumes a courage that he distinctly doesn’t have. “Look. This isn’t necessarily a crisis.” He turns to Thassa. “If anyone does approach you about this . . . you don’t have to say anything.”

  Russell glances to Candace for moral support. She looks back, crestfallen. Too late, he realizes: his job was not to reassure Thassa about her anonymity. His job was to prove that her friends won’t change how they think of her. And in that, he has just failed spectacularly.

  Thassa leans forward, indignant. “If anyone asks me? Of course I’ll tell them! What do you think? If this is science, give me vaudou. Le marabout!”

  As she speaks the word, the lights flicker and go black. Outside, the streetlamps, too, gutter and cut out. A howl comes from down the hall, then another yelp and a smack into a doorframe. A voice calls, “Mom!” Candace jumps up and blunders past the recliner, stumbling into the dark. Gabriel calls out again. “Mom, I didn’t do anything! I was just playing, and suddenly everything . . .”

  Mother finds child, and child finds hand-cranked flashlight where it lies hiding in the front closet. The four of them huddle in the front room, sure that the power will return any second. Out in the street, a few scattered lights still shine, but the ice coating the windows blunts them to streaks.

  When darkness breaks the ten-minute mark, Thassa suggests an expedition. Candace acquiesces. Gabe is ecstatic as he dons his coat; for once, Edgewater can match Futopia for adventure. They pass through the blackened foyer, navigating by the anemic, hand-cranked light.

  Out in the courtyard, the world has turned strange. The moon blazes crazily, and everything they look on—trees and bushes, the spiked iron fence, the funeral procession of parked cars—everything has gone diamond, encased in a quarter inch of ice.

  Thassa goes down first. She hits the frictionless front stoop and her legs sweep out from under her. She lies on her back, cursing in Tamazight, then stops, amazed, gazing up into a sky sudden with black. All four look up on a scene that electric Chicago has obliterated for a hundred years.

  The Algerian crawls up on her knees, giggling in pain and begging the others to take care. They latch onto one another, inching forward together, an eight-legged, skating thing way out of its biome.

  Other such colonies edge through the shellacked neighborhood, waving their weak beams. A few cars still slalom down the glazed streets, no faster than the sliding pedestrians. Branches are down everywhere, sheared off of weakened trees by the weight of their sudden shells.

  A group of explorers gather outside a house, pointing their flashlights where a branch bigger around than Stone has fallen onto coated power lines and draped them across the roof like a giant’s aborted game of cat’s cradle. Thassa and company slide up to the gathering, obeying some atavistic urge to band together as the world comes apart. Gabe gasps in awe at the destruction. A puffy Gore-Tex kid midway in age between Gabe and Russell chants, “Lines are down all over the place. It’s like a war zone.” He
holds up his cell phone as his authority. “The whole Near North is without power!”

  Everyone slides about, giddy with apocalypse. Strangers chatter together as if they’re from the same close-knit tribe. Neighbors who’ve passed by anonymously every day for years now hug Gabe and pump Candace for her bio. No one knows anything about the ice storm, except for the weather bureau’s complete failure to prepare anyone.

  A young Indian woman consults Stone about canned food and bottled water when a shock crumples the air behind him. The group gasps, and Russell recoils in a hail of sparks. A power transformer comes unstapled from its pole and releases a fountain of fireworks over the group. Everyone shrieks backward, and a couple fall and smack the ice. The Indian woman is down and shouting.

  Thassa skates to her side, helping her up and calming her down. Stone watches from his prone position. She’s been through this before—ice storms in Montreal, explosions in Algiers. She helps the Indian woman away from the sparking transformer, soothing her. Then Thassa rejoins Candace and a frightened Gabe. She jokes and sings to the boy in sinuous Arabic. Before Stone’s eyes his sunny former student turns into a genetic aberration, immune to disaster, a product of chemical reactions qualitatively different from his.

  Even Candace, the eternal champion of nurture over nature, hovers near Thassa with newfound deference. Stone sees her hesitation, the slight bow of her head. Candace, too, can’t help but marvel at that outlier data point, all by itself on the high end of Thomas Kurton’s graph.

  The group splits in two, those for camping around the sparking transformer and those for exploring further. Distant blocks still have light, but they’re blinking out fast. Thassa leads her three down to Foster. The road is scattered with cars, some still creeping, but most left in crazy angles wherever they’ve slid to rest. The commercial strip on Clark through Andersonville is dim. Ice has them.

  The air is chill, but not punishing. Not as bad as the February they’ve just come through. Colder air high above produces this supercooled lacquer of instant ice that, but for a few degrees, would have washed away as March’s final rain.