Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers

  Here the woman appealed to the scientist, who smiled so broadly that anyone just tuning in would have thought that he was the one guilty of inherited pleasure. Keyes caught both faces in close-up at just the right moment. He also managed to catch, in the iconic host’s reaction, the first awareness that she faced a guest rebellion.

  O: Okay, let me ask it this way. Were your parents happy?

  TA: My parents? My parents lived through war their whole lives. They never knew their own language. Everyone was their enemy, and then they died. How happy are most Americans?

  The Americans in this room were less than pleased. Many of them looked ready to demand an emotional refund. Someone had misled the general public. The woman with the perfect genetic temperament wasn’t even amusing. This woman was testy. And the audience had been set up for some elaborate practical joke.

  The famous host made further jabs, increasingly desperate. She shifted to Kurton, asking him to talk about Miss Amzwar’s neurotransmitter levels and her fMRI. Miss Amzwar interrupted. Why are you looking for our spirits in molecules? Very old wine in new bottles!

  Her exasperation turned contagious. The program headed toward precisely the kind of disaster that kept audiences addicted to live broadcasts.

  O: Sister, if you’re telling us that you’re as miserable as the rest of us, why did you come on this show?

  The audience exploded into cheers and catcalls. The despondent Jen bent her neck oddly away from the camera, as if someone had her soul pinched between his thumb and forefinger and was twisting it. Her face clouded, and she sank into a darkness that bordered on bitter. Schiff felt the woman drift to the brink of a public breakdown. Yet even the descent seemed a work of art—repugnance as robustly enjoyed as any mood.

  Keyes’s camera, along with the four Oona Show units, nailed what happened next. With another shoulder twist, the Algerian shook off temptation and passed into a state more solid than anger. She rose up on the couch and surveyed the room. Something large hijacked her irritation, some uncontainable affection for everything that grew from twenty-three chromosomes. Her enzymes aligned, she began to speak, and in one surge her easy tide lifted all the boats.

  Digital clips of her outbreak hit the Web for worldwide consumption as early as that evening. They multiplied for days after the air date. And by the following week, the YouTube imitations began to appear. The otherworldly glow of the soliloquy came less from Thassa Amzwar’s words than from her posture, the quiet knowledge that poured out of the woman, despite her best efforts. And this was the aura that teenage girls everywhere attempted to copy, in an epidemic of two-minute DV viruses that broke out on machines across all the advanced countries.

  Later, Schiff spent hours hunting down the proliferating performances, which had by then become one of the most popular amateur theatricals on the Net.

  “Oona, listen,” a pretty Vancouver Eurasian lip-synchs, in her own shot-perfect re-creation of the segment. “I promise you: This is easy. Nothing is more obvious.”

  A stocky blond high school junior wearing a Berber blouse in her Orlando bedroom recites for the lens, “People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful.”

  Atlanta: “Even a minute is more than we deserve.” Spokane, Allentown: “No one should be anything but dead.” San Diego, Concord, Moline: “Instead, we get honey out of rocks. Miracles from nothing.”

  “It’s easy,” all the Thassa Amzwars across the globe swear to anyone who’ll listen. “We don’t need to get better. We’re already us. And everything that is, is ours.”

  Stone and Weld snatch her from the clamoring studio audience and whisk her off to a hidden soft-serve ice cream dive somewhere west of Greek Town. Neither of Thassa’s foster guardians has the courage to ask anything but whether she’s all right.

  Her all-rightness extends to being ravenous. She wolfs down nine hundred calories while wondering out loud, “What exactly is my crime, do you think? I simply enjoy this world. Why do they treat me as some kind of threat to civilization?” She says nothing about her teetering in front of the camera, that brittle moment when she seemed half in love with nihilism. But she confesses to thinking she’d never escape the post-show crush alive.

  When she comes up for air two waffle cones later, she mentions, a little embarrassed, her pre-show meeting with Tonia Schiff. “You remember her? The funny narrator from the genomes program? Of course you do!”

  Stone and Weld nod, red.

  “She wants to make another film. The other side of this so-called destiny story. She thinks there’s much more to tell about my . . . feeling well. She thinks I’m being made into some kind of prophecy. She wants to help, I think.”

  Stone checks with Candace, who chooses this precise moment to clam up. He sees in her face exactly how it is: too scrupulous to give the advice she wants to, too committed to trust to intervene. He pleads with her: Don’t leave me here alone. But Candace’s eyes blink with a first little ten-dollar dose of fear.

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” he asks Thassa. If Weld won’t be herself, he’ll have to be her. “With all this exposure right now . . .”

  Thassa pets his shoulder with her paper cup. “You’re right, Russell. Of course you are. But this is the woman who I want to be when I grow up. She can teach me a lot about film. Maybe more than school can.”

  With a glance, she implores Candace. All the psychologist can do is raise an eyebrow.

  Methodically, Thassa shreds her napkin. She murmurs a few Tamazight words of encouragement to herself. “It’s a funny thing. I’m Kabyle. We’re supposed to be so private by nature. Ach—nature! It’s meaningless, isn’t it? I know what you think. But maybe another show can finish all this nonsense. Jen must disappear. Maybe Miss Schiff can help kill her.”

  She looks to her friends for their approval. She’s forgotten, in the moment’s stress, how no one needs to decide more than God. And God decides at just that minute to send through the door of the ice cream joint a pair of retired women who instantly recognize the foreign creature they just saw on television an hour ago. It takes the trio twenty minutes to escape from Thassa’s admirers.

  They say goodbye to one another back in the South Loop. Thassa is restless again, her eyes casting in all directions for the sequel that might extricate her. They drop her off at her dorm, where a cluster of superchurch Christians and Mesquakie Oona Show fans already gather for autographs. Thassa goes stoically to her fate. “Russell, Candace: you are wonderful. Let’s meet again, on a calmer day.”

  They watch the recorded show again that night, in Edgewater. Gabe watches with them. The boy is so excited he almost levitates. “We know her, Mom. She’s my friend. This is like . . . six stars. Seven!” He’s a little upset by that moment when Thassa threatens to implode. But he knows how a good ending needs a brush with disaster in order for it to mean anything. When the strong finish comes, it’s like he’s willed it into being.

  On his way off to bed, the happy boy asks Russell, “You staying over again tonight? Whatever. My dad says he’s cool with it.”

  In bed, Russell and Candace reprise the argument they’ve been rehearsing all day. “The stress is getting to her,” he says. A second look at the show convinces him. “I’ve never seen her like that. She was this close to losing it.”

  Candace, meanwhile, has recovered. Her own little worm of fear has put out wings and become some beautiful gadfly. “Russell. It’s over. She won’t have to do it again. So she hit a shaky patch. Rough edges, same as anyone. I don’t think she was in real trouble, even for a minute. Look how she ended!”

  But all he can think about are those thirty seconds when Miss Generosity lay pinned under a boulder as heavy as any that has ever crushed him. He sees something new in her, something better than he ever expected.

  “Leave it,” the woman in bed next to him says. “Stop worrying. She was fine.”

  He rolls over and straddles her. He presses his body down across her length, cupping
her shoulders, pressing his mouth between her breasts. How wrong can this counselor be? The girl wasn’t fine, not by a long shot. She was susceptible. Desperate. Magnificent. Exhilarating.

  The note from Dennis Winfield reached Weld two days later. A note, not a visit: trouble. Weld knew what it had to be about. The only mystery was why it took so long in coming. Perhaps the counseling center needed time to make an airtight case.

  At least Dennis showed the decency to reprimand her privately before convening the whole tribunal. She could work with Dennis one-on-one. He had a thing about her. She didn’t even need to play him; he played himself, whenever the two of them sat in a room together.

  She came to his office at the appointed time, all sails trim and ready to navigate any accusation.

  Dennis opened conventionally enough. “You’re in a relationship with this man? Sleeping together?” He sounded more than professionally hurt.

  Weld reminded Dennis that she’d consulted him. Both he and Christa Kreuz had green-lighted her dating Russell Stone.

  “We did not give you license to violate ethics.”

  She fell back in her chair. “Violate . . . ?” Dennis fended off her glance with his chin. She no longer recognized him. She tried to slow her heartbeat and take stock. “I have never violated professional ethics in my life.”

  She’d blurred a boundary once or twice. Let clients need her more than was good. But that was early on, before she graduated from her own temperamental weaknesses. “How dare you, Dennis. I’ve done nothing that you and your morals policewoman didn’t sign off on. Just what are you accusing me of?”

  “Inappropriate emotional intimacy with a client.”

  She jerked forward, indignant. “He’s not a client. We’ve been all over this—”

  “Not your boyfriend,” Dennis said. “Your boyfriend’s girlfriend.”

  Candace slumped back into her chair. Panic plumed through her chest. Someone held her head underwater. Even before Dennis spelled out the accusation, she saw it, complete. And indisputable. She sobered horribly, like she’d been on a jag with some wild, five-minute party drug and she was just now coming to, witnessing her sluttish behavior from a distance.

  “She isn’t a client,” Weld said, pathetic even to herself.

  “She’s a student at this college. She was in your office for an appointment last week.”

  “That wasn’t an appointment,” Candace bleated. “That was . . .” But all she could think to say was personal.

  “You’re in a severely impaired position here.” Dennis examined a legal tablet full of evidence.

  Candace looked away to the window, into the dappled sunlight of the west. No objection possible. How had she managed to hide the truth from herself for so many months? It had all seemed genuine, legitimate. In truth, she’d backslid massively into her own worst trait, sought the love and approval of someone she should never have been more than professionally considerate to. She’d fancied herself the girl’s big sister, her guide and protector. What had she been, really? Her flatterer. Impaired. Years’ worth of self-correcting effort, and Weld had gone nowhere. Her character had her chained, forever complicit.

  “Dennis?” she said, finding his eyes. “Yes. You’re right. I need to go back into counseling.”

  He kept his gaze on his legal pad. “You need more than that. This is license-threatening stuff. This student is on national television, on the edge of emotional disaster, and she’s sleeping over at your house? She’s your pal? And all the while you’re dispensing advice like some kind of fairy godmother, setting her up with private research outfits . . .”

  Candace Weld sat and watched as the future stripped her of meaningful work. Everything she’d struggled to become would be held against her. She cast about for prnyma, but her lungs were crushed. She dropped her head, cupped her hands around her engorged throat, and dissolved in tears.

  Dennis studied his notes, pretending composure. “You will go into therapy,” he said. “Christa will get you referred.”

  She almost stood up then and walked out of the office. Only the mortgage prevented her.

  “And of course you’ll have no contact with Thassadit Amzwar.” He pronounced the name like something from Iowa. “If she approaches you for advice of any kind, you will refer her to Christa and curtail any further interaction.”

  Neither bearable nor possible. She fully granted the wrongness of her action and the validity of every reprimand that Dennis threw at her. But she did not merit punitive action. Not reprimand for what she’d fought so hard to correct.

  “And my relationship?”

  Dennis looked at her at last, his eyes narrowed in what any student of human psychology could only call disgust. “That’s between you and him. You think he’s willing to give her up for you?”

  I always knew I’d lose my nerve in the end. Kurton set free by his data; Thassa turning brittle; Stone an easy mark in the crosshairs of love. Now Candace, on the auction block. A part of me wanted to love this woman since she was no more than the sketchiest invention. I thought she would be my mainstay, and now she’s breaking. I don’t have the heart to learn her choice.

  All I want is for my friends to survive the story intact. All the story wants is to wreck anything solid in them. No one would write a word, if he remembered how much fiction eventually comes true.

  The genomicist, too, has a rough night. I’ve said so little about him that you may not care. That’s more cowardice on my part. In the absence of detail, you’ve been seeing him as an uncle, an old biology teacher, some more solid scientist you recently came across in another book or film. You might feel anything toward him—curiosity, hatred, attraction. The world’s two camps of readers, split by inborn temperament, need two inimical things, and each has long ago decided to love or loathe this man according to those needs.

  But feel this much, anyway:

  Thomas arrives back in Logan on the flight from Chicago, mystified as to why Thassa Amzwar would lash out at him on national TV. The audience outcry also baffles him. He’s satisfied enough with his own performance: hopeful but accurate. He’s confident that public controversy can’t hurt science. Nothing, really, can hurt science. All the Luddites in the country turning out with torches and pitchforks would succeed only in sending research abroad. Everything discoverable will be discovered; he’d bet his lab on that. And every truth that research turns up simply becomes more environment, part of survival’s calculus, no less than air, food, climate, or water.

  Yet this backlash takes him on the chin, as bad as the first fray he landed in, back at the Cardinal Hayes High School science fair. He understands the tribal fear and self-protection behind this aggression. But his work aims only to relieve ill health, free people from the body’s caprice, and crack open the prison of inherited fate.

  He strolls through the mobbed baggage claim with his single carry-on. The airport loop is a snarl of shuttles, taxis, and cars. The matter transporter will not come a day too soon. Two people on the Blue Line back into the city think they recognize him from The Oona Show. But they decide no; the founder of seven biotech companies, adviser to six scientific journals, and discoverer of the major genetic contribution to human well-being can’t possibly be riding the subway.

  He gets out at Government Center and walks to his brownstone on Beacon Street; walking reduces the risk of many major disease predispositions. It’s late afternoon, and the streets fill with the change of shifts. Vendors, Bible-waving preachers, one-man bands, and stump speakers cluster at the foot of the hill beneath the State House, as crowds pour down the subway steps at Park Street. He cuts across the lustrous Common, exhilarated by the human pageant. Fifty yards away from his front door, he sees that his first-floor bay window has been smashed. He trots the rest of the way, saving a few seconds by rushing to a crime committed hours earlier.

  He finds a paver pulled up from the sidewalk sitting in his living room. He turns it over in his trembling hands, looking for the attached
note. There is no attached note. He sits down, light-headed, confused. Why send someone a message, if there’s no message?

  He knows the message. Are we not men? Leave us the hell alone. He sits for a few minutes, afraid to call the police. He shuts off the light, to hide his silhouette. After a while, he goes down into the cellar and brings up a piece of pressboard large enough to cover the broken window. He tacks it into place, a barrier, at least. Then he leaves a voice mail with his handyman.

  He makes himself a blueberry soy shake, which calms him a little. He goes online to see what kind of hate-mongering the show produced. Reaction is all over the map, from morose to ecstatic. But he sees no violent threats, at first glance. He logs off the browser and occupies himself with the surge of waiting correspondence. But he works at no more than half efficiency. He recoils at every floorboard creek, waiting for the follow-up message. After an hour of twitching, rather than continue to spin out, he decides to drive up to Maine.

  It’s late already, but a night drive will clear his head. He throws his still-packed bag into the Insight, the most fuel-efficient vehicle ever sold on the mass market. He’d have bought it for the engineering achievement alone. Only innovation, now, will buy the race enough time to work its next escape.

  He drives for hours, into the night. He keeps himself awake listening to an audiobook of The Plague, the novel that defeated him at Stanford, when his ex-wife made him read it. You want to devote your life to life science? Read this first.

  He’s gone back to Camus after talking with Thassa about the man. She filled him in on all the context he missed when reading the work in his twenties. She quoted the author’s notorious declaration, at the height of the savage war: If I have to choose between justice and my mother, I would choose my mother. Kurton’s justice is the freedom of research, rapidly decamping to the western Pacific Rim. His mother has been in a home in Westchester County for the last four years, ever since her defective APOE allele caught up with her. The choice would still not be easy, but it would be clear.