Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers

  He takes her by the elbow. “Come on. It’s nothing. We’ll turn around and find a place for the night. I’ll bring you back tomorrow. Your uncle can come down and take you home. Everything will be fine.”

  “Fine?” she asks. “You think this is still possible?”

  “I’m sure,” he says. And they walk back to the car.

  The motels near the border are full. They find a place on a winding state highway about six miles off the interstate, nestled into the side of a wooded hill. It’s a motor lodge, one of those wormholes back into the sixties, a place right out of Stone’s parents’ Ektachrome slides, from when his folks were young and in love and still vacationing, before the kids came along and soured that show.

  An elderly desk clerk with a growth the size of a honeydew melon coming out of his neck is using a magnifier to read an enormous volume of Boccaccio illustrated by Rockwell Kent. He’s surprised by customers and irritated by the interruption. He holds up the magnifying glass as if to fry them.

  “Yes? Can I help you?”

  Thassa pushes forward and slips off her sunglasses. “Do you have room for us tonight?”

  The man glances down at an ancient ledger grid, the day’s blocks more or less empty. “Double?”

  Stone freezes. He’s on the South Rim, unable to say just how many rooms they need.

  “Yes, please,” Thassa says, pleading with Stone by clasping his wrist bone. Do not abandon me tonight.

  The clerk looks up, scrutinizing them. Stone thinks he’s going to demand a marriage license. “Queen or two twins?”

  Thassa stumbles on the idiom and Stone blurts out, “Two twins, thanks.”

  They sign in and get a dense metal key. On their way out of the lobby to the room, the desk clerk calls after them, “Ahlan wa Sahlan.”

  I look it up, two years later. It means, Welcome. You’re with kin.

  Thassa stops, slapped by the words. She starts to tear up. “Yaïchek,” she calls back, shaky with gratitude. “Shukran, shukran.”

  The room spins and shakes as Stone lies on his bed. Pine trees still whip by in his peripheral vision. His blood sugar is all over the place, casualty of the long road fast followed by a fried-dinner binge. The dingy room, filled with a stale stink when they first checked in, now smells fine, either because they’ve opened the windows or because he’s habituated.

  She’s in the bathroom, under the shower for close to thirty minutes. At dinner, she was listless. He wants to knock on the door to makes sure she’s all right. He’s thinking: Her beautiful essays for me were lies.

  All right: not lies. Invention. What did that make them? Less beautiful? More suspect? Unfair, misleading, personal . . .

  Performance, in place of the real. Devices, in place of facts. The events she described were all fabricated from whole cloth. Not what happened: what could have happened. What might have.

  Her father was shot, but maybe not by someone else.

  Then, a thought that sits him up in bed. Those essays are not her only fiction. She has been authoring something else. How high is her real emotional set point, by nature? How happy is she, really? All of that testing, out in Boston, the psychological measurements so carefully correlated with the rigorous gene sequencing: nothing but self-reportage. Even science asked her to tell them a story.

  Maybe she has faked a good half of her bliss.

  And now, when he most needs time to think, to process the causal chains rippling through his head, she chooses that moment to come out of the bathroom at last. She’s in a loose, rose-colored shift that falls to her knees, a towel wrapped around her head. She tries to beam at him, as if she were the same content creature she ever was. Only now, the act exhausts her.

  She sits on the end of her own bed, loosens the towel from her head, and squeezes clumps of hair in the roll of terry cloth. “You know, Mister Stone, if this were Algeria, my brother and uncle would have to come here tomorrow morning and kill us both.”

  A forced laugh escapes her. She tilts her head and begins running a hairbrush through her now red tangles. Her hand moves slowly, as if combing oatmeal. He can see the outline of her tiny breasts through the billow of her shift and looks away.

  He thinks of anything but her, listens to anything but that brush wicking through her ruined hair.

  She stops dead still. “What is that beeping?”

  “What beeping?” he echoes. He sits up, and his bed rustles.

  “Shh. Listen. There. That.”

  He titters, in case she’s joking. She isn’t. “That? That’s a bird, Thassa.”

  Her words come out flushed and wild. “A bird? Oh my God, Russell, you’re right. It’s a bird. A bird, beeping.” Something small hits the floor with a soft thud. The hairbrush. And something larger falls back on the squeaking bed: Thassadit Amzwar. These sounds are followed by another one, even stranger. It starts as almost a whistle, then a low wail turning terrified. Weeks of bombardment, and she breaks.

  She tries to turn the keening into words. “Something’s happening to me, Russell. I have to get out of this place.”

  He does not move. He feels himself go weirdly calm. “Tomorrow,” he promises. “It will be okay. You’ll feel stronger. You should call your uncle now.”

  “I can’t. I just . . . can’t.” The words are clayey, distorted through a horrible mouth that can’t hold its shape.

  “That’s fine,” he tells her. “We’ll do it in a little while.”

  She’s hyperventilating. Long, muffled sobs rise up in her. “I’m sorry,” she keeps repeating. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” And then, would-be businesslike, “I dropped my hairbrush.”

  She tries to move her arm, to sit up. He recognizes the complete debilitation—the outermost promontory of an outcrop he’s visited. If the hairbrush were God’s magic talisman for returning the world to Eden, she would not be able to sit up and take it. She’s defeated by the future, and a few shots of follicle stimulating hormone.

  He raises himself upright but can’t move either. He, too, is paralyzed, by a realization all his own. Maybe she doesn’t have hyperthymia after all. Maybe it’s the other, wilder ride, there all along and undiagnosed, hidden by a mighty effort of will. Only: what is will but what the body allows? If she has been acting up until now, she’s an actress of unthinkable natural gifts.

  The dread that grips him lasts only half a minute, wiped away by surprise relief. Their problem is over. Her haplotype has no bio-value whatsoever. She’s just another garden-variety mood-swinger. The world will finally leave the woman in peace. When this news gets out, it will delay genetic improvement by years. The race will be thrown back on inescapable, everyday, ordinary, glorious, redeeming moodiness.

  “Russell? Are they going to come after us?”

  “No,” he tells her. Something lifts him up bodily, from the inside out. Happiness. “No one even knows we’re here.”

  Her torso goes limp and drops back. She can’t have plunged often into this abyss. There’s too much shock in the fall.

  He crosses to her and takes her hand. She reaches up and clamps his forearm like a tourniquet. She fixes her eyes on him. “Stone. Hajar. Am I something you might want? Would you like to just hold me for a little and see what happens?”

  The sick thought comes to him before he can stop it: one little relentless sperm hitting home, and the $32,000 harvesting problem would be moot. But the problem is solved already. The minute the public learns just what her genes dispose her toward, the market for her eggs will burst as spectacularly as any speculative bubble.

  He sits her up and puts his arm around her shoulder. She turns and grapples herself to his chest. He can feel through her shift the full, bony column of her. Desperate warmth, mistakable for anything. Holding her is like coming home. Returning to the soul’s first neighborhood.

  “Thassa. You aren’t well. We have to take care of you. You’ll be back in Montreal tomorrow, and you can start to get better. We just need to ride out tonight. Nothing
can hurt you; I’m here.”

  One of a hundred things he’s learned from her. Assume a virtue, if you have it not. A little creativity with the facts. Lie, if it keeps you alive.

  She grabs on to him like she’ll take him down with her. After a while, she breathes a little easier. Her head on his chest nods in agreement. “Yes,” she says. “You are right.” She pushes away and smooths her face with both palms. “I’ll be better soon. I’m a little better already, in fact.” She bends down and retrieves her hairbrush. She brings it back into the bathroom. She goes about the room straightening things, although there’s nothing to straighten.

  The film speed gradually returns to normal. Her simple, wishful recovery floors him. It always takes him days to pick himself up again. Is that kind of force willable, or was she born with that as well?

  A sound rises like the patience of the sea. He thinks he hears surf. He does, and only on the third breaking wave does he place it: her ringtone. She freezes, as if the device can’t hurt her if she doesn’t reveal her whereabouts.

  “You should answer,” he says. “It could be Montreal.”

  She goes to her bag and extracts the phone. She reads the ID and cries out. “It’s Candace.”

  Russell cringes. His fingers ask for time, recalculating the need to answer.

  Thassa monotones, “She wants to tell me to die in hell.”

  He tries to object, but bungles it. The two of them sit and listen to the surf die out.

  For a long time in the close room, he’s as crippled as she is. Then he masters himself, on nothing but silent words.

  “Can I borrow that?” he asks. She nods, but hasn’t the strength to hand him the phone. He has to stand, take it from her lap, and step outside.

  The world outside their rented casket floors him. Night is deep and crackling. The air smells of sap, as it must have smelled for millions of years before the first flicker of awareness. He walks down the deserted road, away from the motel’s throb, across a grassy slope and into something that might have been a pasture once. He climbs up along a fence under a stand of trees.

  Life is beeping everywhere, past naming.

  He walks until his pretense of courage feels almost believable. Then he opens the phone, looks at the lit dial, and calls back Candace’s number. Nothing happens until he presses a little green receiver icon, a silhouette of a species recently driven extinct by just this kind of device. At the press of that key, all his hopes and fears fly up into geosynchronous orbit and back down again, a lifetime and a few hundred miles to the west.

  A woman he once knew picks up and says, “Hello?” Her voice peeks out over sandbags.

  “Candace.”

  “Russell,” she says, and the word splits through the middle.

  “Listen,” he blurts. “This isn’t what you think.”

  “Russell.” She’s not exactly crying. But the sounds can’t find traction in her throat. “It doesn’t matter what I think.” She talks fast, before he can embarrass himself further. “Where are you? What are you doing?”

  He falters, but he tells her. There is trust, or there is nothing.

  “Yes,” she says. “Okay. I figured you’d be together. You’re all over the news. The two of you. Your students are saying you’ve abducted her. She’s wanted for questioning. And you’re the most famous kidnapping suspect since the guy who stole the Lindbergh baby.”

  He looks up into the bones of an enormous conifer. For a while, he wonders if he might not reply at all. “She called me,” he says. “She asked for my help.” He can’t even comprehend the public charges. He only needs to explain himself to his mate. “I’m trying to take her home.”

  “Russell.” The name comes sharp and pointed, like a command. “Do you think I didn’t figure that?”

  Light bobs over the hill to the west. A lone car slips down the road, some Jurassic creature. He draws closer to the fence and crouches in the dark.

  “I told them as much,” Candace says. “I made a statement.”

  He can’t follow her. “I don’t . . . You mean you talked to reporters? About . . . What about your job?”

  At last the psychologist chuckles. “Job?”

  The thing that clamps his throat must have some use. He just can’t imagine what. He sits down on the damp ground. All he can say is, “Thank you.”

  “Any time,” she says. “What else is Welfare for? Besides: I’m getting as famous as the two of you. Up there every hour, on the hour. Not the most flattering clip of me, however. A little puffy-looking.”

  “Fuck,” he whispers. Not a word either heredity or environment allows him. “Don’t people have anything real to concern themselves with?”

  “Russell, the police are out looking for you. People are phoning in tips. A manhunt. Headline News is calling it ‘The Pursuit of Happiness.’ ”

  “They’ll get us tomorrow,” he says. “When I take her back to the border. They’ll have our names in the database.” It would have happened today, if he’d given them a passport to process. The police will take them both into custody, until all the stories get ironed out. Thassa will be dragged back into the inferno. She’ll never get home.

  “She’s in very bad shape,” he says. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I could come. I could be there by this time tomorrow. It might help.” When the two of them get arrested and held for questioning.

  Russell leans against his fence post, underneath the trees and turning stars. This is the woman who once counseled him, in the dark: Close your eyes and write a sentence in the air. Use your left hand. Just one sentence. A simple one. They silent each other. The stars wheel in place above him. And at the center of the innermost circle, he imagines himself signing the air: You’re already here.

  When he gets back to the room, the TV is blaring. A man wearing a paratrooper baseball cap is carrying on about a dog who took a bullet for him. Thassa is asleep, curled up on her bed. He cuts the volume slowly, then shuts the set off. He lies faceup on his own bed, reading palmistry in the ceiling cracks. He’ll tell her tomorrow, at breakfast, if the manhunt doesn’t beat him to it. There’s been a slight change in plans. No need to call Montreal anymore, he supposes. It would only trade one anxiety for another.

  He turns on his side and watches her sleep, across the gap of beds. Her chest moves so slightly that he must almost supply the motion himself. Even now, she amazes him, how she can find such peace, in the middle of her magnetic storm. It seems to Stone, in this moment, a greater gift: not something given; something made.

  Today she felt what he has felt, one day out of every thirty. And she’ll feel worse tomorrow. She must live now with everyone, in turbulent smashed hope. Despair: the mother of science, father of art, discarder of hypotheses, a thing that wants only to eliminate itself from the pool.

  But even now, if given the choice, he’d spare her. He watches the flimsy engine of her lungs, holding out against the whole weight of atmosphere. It doesn’t matter what Stone wants, what he believes. The genes of discontentment are loose, and painting the universe. Life’s job is to get out of their way.

  He gets up, empties his pockets onto the writing desk, slips off his shoes, pulls a long T-shirt out of his bag, and heads into the bathroom. His Dopp kit sits by the side of the sink, wide open. He steps on a small, hard nub: a pill lodges in the sole of his foot. He looks down and sees three others on the floor. One more on the sink counter, next to the open empty containers. Robert’s Ativan. Russell’s doxylamine. Old Darvons from a wisdom-tooth extraction he was saving for a rainy day. Every remedy his kit has to offer.

  He slams back into the other room and crouches at her bedside. He grasps her shoulder and shakes, first briskly, then with real force. She’s pliant, but makes no motion of her own. He shouts at her; the rage comes so easily. Her face stays composed, beatific. He tries to stand her upright and walk her on his arm. She will not stiffen into life.

  He holds his ear up to her rib cage, his left eye crush
ed to her right breast. He’s sure there’s something; there must be something, however far away. Tide in a lake. Her surf ringtone, at the bottom of a deep well.

  He holds his finger underneath her nose: the vacuum of deep space.

  He scrambles to his feet and heads for the door, the phone, the bathroom faucet, all at once. He hears a voice tell him that he needs to get her to throw up. He can’t figure out how he’s supposed to do that. He sits down on the floor, shaking, clouded, and adrift. And in that instant of annihilation, art at last overtakes him, and he writes.

  He can rescind this. He works his way back to the bed, pauses his hand under her nose again: the slightest, world-battering typhoon.

  He hacks a path to the phone on the dresser. He flips it open and dials Emergency. He hears a woman on the other end, trying to slow him and get details. He doesn’t have details. The woman asks for an address; he has to scramble outside to read the name of the motel off the marquee. The nurse walks Stone through the steps of clearing the victim’s air passages, checking to see if she’s vomited up into her trachea. The nurse gives him a few simple commands to perform, which Stone confuses as soon as he hangs up.

  He settles in to wait for the paramedics. He sponges Thassa and slaps her, trying to keep her as alert as possible. Once, briefly, her muscles take on a little tension, and he manages to walk her for six steps around the bed before dropping her back down onto it. He goes to the door of the room twenty times, looking for anything faintly resembling flashing lights. All he sees is a laughing couple in their late twenties, vivid as newlyweds, out in the parking lot photographing each other as they make comic faces.

  He roots through her bag, looking for contact information, next of kin. A number, a datum, a molecule that will make sense. Some antidote. Something he can act on. The bag has nothing. A packet of sunflower seeds. Keys. A Handycam. The book of Tamazight poems he once saw her press to a window, its sentences filled with petroglyphs from another planet. Her copy of the text from his godforsaken class. No sane reason in the world for Harmon to be here, unless she meant it as his goodbye gift.