Generosity

by Richard Powers

  She sits dripping contentment as Artgrrl reads a journal entry about how America’s real divide is not conservative versus liberal, rich versus poor, or rationalists versus Christians, but people with passports versus people without. At every third turn of phrase, Thassa smacks both cheeks and says, “Yes, yes-perfect!” And the object of her praise starts to levitate.

  Their ninth night together, she brings a Tupperware wheel of pastry to class: honey-soaked clouds of semolina with a name-timchepoucht-the others can’t even repeat after her. “What you can’t find in life,” she tells them, “you have to make yourself!” The rest of them eat freely, hoping that whatever chronic, viral euphoria infects her has also contaminated her kitchen.

  That night, the group-so protective of one another when reading aloud their raw journal entries-has its first fight. It starts with the evening’s assignment from Make Your Writing Come Alive: Frederick P. Harmon’s smug insistence that everything ever written derives from one of only twenty-four possible plots.

  “I have a little theory about that theory,” Counterstrike Mason announces. “I’m thinking that’s what you might call a fucking brain fart.”

  Russell says nothing. He has preached freedom for weeks; he can’t police them now.

  Spock Thornell does the calculus. “Disagree. If anything, the man’s being generous. I’d put it at half that number. A dozen story lines, tops.”

  “You’re shitting me!” Counterstrike bangs the oval table. “It’s billions. As many stories as there are-”

  “Everyone’s a major motion picture,” Princess Heavy sneers. “Every life, based on a true story.”

  “Listen ” Counterstrike sounds desperate. “I’m not saying everybody is interesting. I’m just saying that no two This whole mathematical permutation thing is bullshit.”

  Artgrrl raises her fist. “Exactly! How many times have you seen this story? Nine people argue about how many plots there are. One of them gets up and throws herself out the window, just to prove-”

  “That’s Harmon number twelve.” Spock holds up the page. “Personal Sacrifice for Moral Belief.”

  “Or, or, or ” Roberto stresses his way down the list of possibilities. “Or number seventeen: Passion Disrupts Judgment.”

  Princess Heavy oozes mock approval. “Or number twenty: Audacious Experiment. Choose your own adventure!”

  Lumpers and splitters square off, as if victory here will decide things out in the unplotted world. They nibble at Thassa’s timchepoucht, which tastes of ancient oases.

  Kiyoshi, the Invisiboy, sets down his pen and looks up. He’s the last person Russell expects to wander into the crossfire. “There’s something I don’t get about this class. I mean, are we supposed to be making up stories, with a plot and everything? Or are we just supposed to put down what actually happens?”

  The others go on arguing, as if Invisiboy’s confusion is just one more available story line.

  “When you really stop and think about it,” the Joker concludes, “there have to be something like three? I mean: happy ending, miserable ending, and ‘Watch me get all arty.’ ”

  It’s two, Russell thinks, though no one bothers to ask him. It’s the old, elemental two, the only two that anyone will read: the future arrives to smack around the past, or the past reaches out to strangle the future. Hero goes on journey; stranger comes to town.

  Here in front of him, at any event, is one plot no one will ever bother writing down: A happy girl passes through the world’s wretchedness and stays happy. The hung jury turns to Miss Generosity, who hugs herself against their combined outrage. By tacit agreement, Thassa’s vote is now worth any three of theirs.

  “Yo, Genie!” Charlotte corners her. “What do you think? Lots of stories, or not?”

  Her radiant face insists, This one is easy. “No hurry!” she tells them. “The time to choose that is after we’re dead.”

  I search for Russell Stone all over. I read the almanac for that year. I read his class textbook, of course. I read back issues of his magazine. I even loot those hall-of-mirrors avant-garde novels whose characters try to escape their authors, the kind he once loved, the kind he thought he’d write one day, before he gave up fiction.

  He’s nowhere, except in his work. On the day shift, in between classes, he puts in his stints on Becoming You. He sits motionless in his shared cubicle in the refurbished River North warehouse, pruning effusion back to the root.

  According to many of the two thousand new self-help titles that appear every year, once a person rises above poverty, income influences well-being only slightly, and social class affects it just a little more. Marriage counts for a bit, and volunteering works wonders. But nothing short of pharmaceuticals can help sustain contentment as much as a satisfying job.

  What pleasure does he get from his selfless editing? Stone strikes me as the kind of guy who might not know what his pleasures are. He’s not alone. No one does: the happiness books are adamant on this. We’re shaped to think the things we want will make us happy. But shaped to take only the briefest thrill in getting. Wanting is what having wants to recover.

  Russell phones his brother-the first call he’s made from work since the half-minute dinner negotiations he used to make with Marie. He reaches Robert’s cell; it still amazes Stone that his own flesh and blood even has a cell. All the remaining hunter-gatherers on Papua New Guinea will be packing loaded smartphones before Russell goes mobile. Mobile is the last thing in existence he wants to be. His every original thought is already being interrupted by real time.

  His brother is camped on some stranger’s pitched roof in Oak Brook. It’s what he does-crawl around on strangers’ roofs, installing satellite receivers. He tells people he’s in the throughput business. It troubles Robert that a lot of the general public is still getting only a few dozen stories an hour. His company can get anyone up to a couple hundred plus. And then there’s retrieval and on-demand and downloading. As he often tries explaining to Russell, it’s all about shifting. Time shifting and place shifting. Taste shifting and mood shifting. And if you get the throughput up high enough, it’s like nobody’s even telling you stories anymore; it’s like you’re making them up yourself.

  “You busy?” Russell asks. “Got a minute?”

  “No problem,” his brother tells him. “Parallel is more efficient than serial.”

  For some reason, Robert always has time for Stone. He still thinks that Russell is going to be famous someday: a famous writer, whose hilarious stories will pour through the pipes of all the need-shifting, narrative-addicted strangers in the country.

  “Bro?” Robert prompts, when Russell says nothing. “’Sup?”

  When white guys walking on strangers’ roofs in Oak Brook start using any given street argot, it’s time to seal the word up in the dictionary mausoleum.

  “You know that stuff you’re taking?” Russell asks.

  “What, the fulvic acid?”

  “No. The emotion stuff.”

  “The selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor? Not to worry. I got the kinks out. It’s working fine now.”

  “Can it make you I don’t know euphoric?”

  Robert makes the sound of a laugh. “I told you. All it does is let me talk to strangers without wigging. Makes me feel a little bigger than I am. Like I’ve got something to give other people.”

  A shudder crests across Russell’s skull. The drug makes his brother more generous.

  “Pretty subtle effect,” Robert insists. “Really: once you get over the slight depersonalization, it’s no biggie.”

  “Sure, but do you think that other people who take it might get more-”

  “Little brother wants euphoria? Huh. I’d have to shop around.”

  “It’s not I’m not looking for, for myself It’s about that class I’m teaching.”

  “I got ya,” Robert says, not convinced that Russell is teaching anything.

  Russell pictures his brother micropositioning a dish with one hand, C-c
lamping the cell to his face with the other. It doesn’t matter. You never have anyone’s full attention anymore, anyway. Focus has gone the way of other flightless birds. “There’s a girl in the class a woman, and I just wanted to know if-”

  “You want Rohypnol? Date rape? Don’t do it, man; you can go to prison. Like for ever.”

  Russell says nothing. Prison would simplify many things.

  “Look,” Robert says, concerned. “Little bro. I’ve known you, like, always, right? Euphoria is not for you. You used to sit in front of the Saturday-morning cartoons like you were studying for a final exam. You’re the kind of guy who needs his pleasures in very modest dosages. Have you thought about maybe a multivitamin?”

  “I’ll try that,” Russell tells his brother.

  Robert chuckles at whatever truculent antenna he is trying to hogtie. “Roscoe, let’s face facts. We’re depressives. It’s in the Stone gene pool. Embrace it. It wouldn’t have hung around for so many generations if it wasn’t essential.”

  Thomas Kurton has never doubted that happiness is chemical. Meaningless to call it anything else. Like a third of the country, he’s tried mood brighteners. They did indeed brighten him, a little. But they also smeared him. They took away a little of that fighter-pilot clarity. So he ditched the brighteners; if he had to choose, he’d rather be keen than bright.

  But he has never accepted that people should have to choose.

  He talks often about the massive structural flaw in the way the brain processes delight. The machinery of gladness that Homo sapiens evolved over millions of years in the bush is an evolutionary hangover in the world that Homo sapiens has built. Back on the savannah, stress kept us alive. Natural selection shaped us for productive discontent, with glimmers of heavenly mirage to keep us going. As Kurton puts it in his article “Stairway to Paradise”:

  A mix of nasty neurochemical pathways, built, doubtless, by a small set of legacy genes, now plagues us with negative feedback loops and illusory come-ons. What passes for everyday consciousness feels to me increasingly like borderline psychosis. Depression had its uses once, when mankind was on the run. But now that we’re somewhat safe, it’s time to free the subjugated populace and show what the race can do, armed with sustainable satisfaction at last.

  His sister had a chemistry set: Kurton’s life follows from that. He was eight, Patty ten. Up until then, he had been the better magician. He could make a coin look like he was bending it over his thumb. Now, overnight, Patty could combine two perfectly clear liquids and turn them a shocking pink. There was no contest. Her magic blew his out of the water, and consumed him with jealousy.

  He took to theft: no other choice. He tinkered in the darkness of her closet while Patty was out of the house. he worked with tiny bits of chemical, so she would never know that anything was missing. Somehow, she always knew, and she’d explode with all the violence that the chemical safety manual warned about.

  The fourth time his sister caught him sneaking experiments behind her back, she gave him the set. Truth was, she couldn’t stand the smells. Patty had been born with the wrong alleles. Even ammonium chloride turned her stomach, and after her first few excursions, she couldn’t bring herself to open the vials.

  Three months into his sole proprietorship of the chemicals, young Tom completed all 150 experiments in the printed booklet and began inventing his own. His alarmed parents bought him a grandiose expansion for Christmas, although such gear was beyond the budget of a Detroit assembly lineman with five children. Armed with “forty-nine solvents, catalysts, and reagents one thousand hours of pure chemistry!” the boy never really broke stride in his life again.

  Even without that proximal cause, he might have landed someplace nearby. From early childhood, he showed all the signs: the model rocketry, the ham radios, the long afternoons gazing into tidal pools, the complete Herbert S. Zim Golden Guides, and later, the expanding universe of cheap science-fiction paperbacks, those lyric hymns to alien life-forms with the surreal cover art where you couldn’t tell buildings from geographical features from living things.

  Eighth-grade frog dissection revealed how nearby species were already more alien than any fiction. His first microscope opened his eyes to life’s true measurements. Diatoms everywhere, whose biomass dwarfed those mutant giants too large to see the real scale of living. In high school, he discovered the Haldane quote about God’s inordinate fondness for beetles. The year Kurton came through puberty, God disappeared altogether, replaced by deeper wonder.

  In senior year, he read Microbe Hunters. He turned his bedroom into a shrine to de Kruif’s heroic microbiologists. He painted the names Pasteur, Koch, Reed, and Ehrlich on his ceiling, the last thing he saw at night and the first thing he opened his eyes on in the morning. His mother couldn’t object; he was heading to Cornell on full scholarship in the fall.

  In short: Kurton’s genes might have led him to genomics, no matter what environment threw at him. But environment pulled all the right triggers, at just the right times. All the right teachers, the right toys, the right texts in the right order. In the first month of college, he came across the most beautiful concluding sentence in world lit, words that gave him far more epiphany than any novel. The book itself was a long, hard slog, but oh, that arrival!

  There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

  By sophomore year, he was spending long hours in the lab, in his private chapel with its very own fume hood. Do not put your nose over the unknown; waft the air of the unknown to your nose. In his third year, he earned a key to the storeroom, where all the supplies were lined up in orderly glorious ranges on the shelves. Sometimes he would simply stand among them, as if on the podium in front of an orchestra, listening.

  In graduate school at Stanford he made his first real discovery-a gene-promoter mechanism that no one on earth knew about. The find infused him with terrible urgency, a hurry to discover something else, now, before all the discoveries were made. And when, in his late twenties, his research team assayed the milk of their transgenic cows and confirmed the presence of a protein they themselves had placed there alongside all of nature’s own tangled enzymes, he felt for two months that he could die satisfied.

  Then the two months ended, two months during which he had done absolutely nothing new for the world. Frantic again, he returned to the lab, to learn something about real work.

  He and his girlfriend-a sociologist who studied the power of crowds-got married. They had two children, one of each. He and his wife raised the kids somehow, between them. It crushed Thomas to discover his daughter could not abide the smell of life science. It hurt him worse to discover that his son preferred making money to making discoveries. He released the children into the laboratories of their own lives. He got divorced. He wished his ex-wife all the world’s fresh horizons. Later, he had affairs, when there was time. But the love he really lived for was knowing.

  That thrill of first discovery returned a handful of times over the next twenty years, in diminished forms. He pushed himself forward on the pleasure of first: first place, first to lay eyes on, first in the hearts of his peer reviewers. But he wanted more than simple primacy. First was just a sporting bagatelle. To look on a thing that had been true since the start of creation but never grasped until you made it so: no euphoria available to the human brain could match it. Cleaner than drugs, broader and more powerful than sex-Huxley’s “divine dipsomania.” Anyone who tasted it once would spend the rest of his life trying for more.

  Science fit the very folds of Tom Kurton’s brain. Its exuberance tempered the tedium of daily lab work, kept him alert, overrode fatigue, and rendered risks trivial. And the goal of scientific exuberance, like the goal of life, which it helped to propel, w
as to replicate itself.

  And so his life, from the simplest of beginnings, has spun out endless living forms, not all of them viable, not all of them pretty, not all of them sane or even wise, but each a turbulent attempt to lay bare the order in things, and all of them variations most wonderful.

  Russell Stone lies in bed at night, reading about Algeria and its victims until he can’t breathe. He reads about a “vast national passion for reticence.” He reads about a culture struggling to emerge from feudal female sequestering and subservience. He can’t connect these accounts to his student’s existence. Even her years in Canada don’t explain such a leap.

  When the Algeria books threaten to suck him under, he switches to a layperson’s handbook on happiness that he’s checked out from the public library. He flips around in it, buffet style, hoping that some paragraph somewhere might explain something, or at least lull him to sleep.

  Sleep is not an option. He reads on, squinting at the clinical studies. One study claims that the most satisfied people are also those who can list the most peak experiences in sixty seconds. He sits up in bed with his yellow legal tablet and tries to write down the happiest moments in his life. The first one he remembers stops him cold.

  He’s tried to kill it, over the years: the three-day escape with Grace Cozma to Flagstaff that frosty March, in their last spring in the writing program. Her idea: Come up with me to see the canyon. I have to see the damn Grand Canyon before I escape this place. Until then, the farthest they’d gone was her ordering him to lick Mexican beer off her fingers one crazed happy hour after workshop.

  They rented a car-midsized luxury sedan, when they couldn’t afford economy-and drove up. But until they were standing at the reception desk in the ponderosa-pine lodge in Flagstaff, he had no idea whether Grace would ask for one room or two.