Generosity

by Richard Powers

  She asked for one. One of everything, for the next three days. Come up with me. Come hike with me, eat with me, bathe with me. Come learn how to want something more than you want to write. Their first night, after burritos in a dusty dive, they holed up in their chilly room. He looked to her to set the pace. Her pace was geological. She wanted him naked under the covers with her, knees up, reading, as if their thirtieth anniversary came before their honeymoon. He was reading The Varieties of Religious Experience. She was deep into Far Tortuga. He loved when she wore her glasses, which she hated to put on. She curled over her book like in prayer, the back of her hand distractedly grazing his thigh. He did not know a body could pound like that. Reading lasted maybe forty minutes, until she turned to him, slipped one leg over his, and asked, “How’s the book?” They read no more that night.

  In the morning, after gorging on complimentary breakfast, they stood on the South Rim giggling like maniacs at the bizarre optical effects: near, middle, and distant cross sections of the earth sliding decoupled against one another like bad back projection in a forties movie. He could not accept the colors, the rose irons and coppery greens. They climbed down Bright Angel into the chasm on foot, she singing Ferde Grofé’s clumping mule theme, he wanting to take her into the thickets of tamarisk and do her like deer. She was insane, insisting that they descend to the Inner Gorge, all the way down to the Vishnu Schist. They made it as far as Plateau Point and barely dragged themselves back up to the rim by nightfall. That night, as if they weren’t dead with fatigue, they skipped the studying and went right to the exam.

  He never imagined that Grace might feel any less than he did. Just hearing her hum contentedly under her breath as she drove home was like returning to a country he didn’t even know he’d been banished from. But back in Tucson, they didn’t move in together, didn’t join futures, didn’t even change their old routine except for sleeping together eight increasingly tense times before her departure to France that May.

  As she left the country, she goosed his ribs and said she expected great things from him. To date, his greatest achievement has been his appearance as a most convincing character in Grace’s deeply convincing first novel.

  He writes down Grand Canyon w/ G, and in that instant, the one-minute timer starts beeping.

  Other things his happiness encyclopedia says:

  Well-being is not one thing. It surprises Stone to read that optimism, satisfaction, capacity for happiness, and capacity for unhappiness are all independent. He puts his average across the four at about.235, or just shy of respectable for the North American league. Nor is he much of a long-ball hitter.

  Happy people have stronger social relationships, more friends, better jobs, higher salaries, and stronger marriages. They are more creative, more altruistic, calmer, healthier, and longer lived. Russell skips the self-scoring checklist.

  Happy people know that they’re happy and don’t need to read happiness books to determine how happy they are. Russell’s book doesn’t actually say this. It’s what psychologists call inferred knowledge.

  People in positive moods are more biased, less logical, and less reliable than people in negative moods. Score one for what the book calls “depressive realism.”

  The prefrontal cortex of happy people lights up more on the left, while the brains of the congenitally dour favor the right. This seems to Russell either profound or meaningless.

  Happiness is probably the most highly heritable component of personality. From 50 to 80 percent of the variation in people’s average happiness may be accounted for by genes. People display an affective set point in infancy that doesn’t change much over a lifetime. For true contentment, the trick is to choose your parents wisely. No argument at the Stone household.

  Yet the conflicted book insists on a role for nurture. Joyousness, it says, is like perfect pitch: a little early training in elation can bring out a trait that might otherwise wither.

  Stone assumes that Algeria’s Time of Horrors is not exactly the early training of choice.

  Late one class, as Thassa is leaving, he works up the courage to ask her how she’s surviving the local Arabophobia. She just grins. “But I’m not an Arab! I’m Kabyle. You might be more Arab than I am. Stone: that’s Hajar . That’s a good Arab name. Hey! Are you planning any terror, Mister?”

  His terror is all unplanned.

  He’s like a man who has just seen some mythic creature fly past the window-teal and ruby against the concrete neighboring high-rise, a species blown a continent off course, not listed in any of the books he now spreads along the windowsill in the hopes of making an ID. A thing of complete unlikelihood. Game for anything. And anything’s game.

  Stone shares an office with two other adjuncts-a converted smoking lounge on the sixth floor. There he holds his first student conferences. The half-hour sessions feel more like counseling jags than writing tutorials.

  Joker Tovar drums on his thigh with a chewed-up uni-ball, his knee pounding like a woodpecker spattering a concrete phone pole. “Digital media is over,” he tells Russell. “Played out. Nobody’s done anything fresh for three months. The whole scene is Night of the Living Dead. And no one has a clue what to do next.”

  Roberto the Thief sits forward on the hot seat, his soul stretched as taut as shrink-wrap. In a soft voice, he announces, “I go to the edge of the abyss every other night. Sometimes I look over.”

  Russell asks, “Would it help you to talk to someone?”

  Roberto just cocks his head. “I’m sorry Help what?”

  Charlotte, intrepid Princess Heavy, shows Russell her portfolio-charcoal vortices of human bodies that look like the Venus of Willendorf, which is to say, a little like Princess Heavy. She works snippets of journal entry around each image. One sketch, more sinewy than the rest, jumps out at Russell. He doesn’t even need the hand-scrawled accompanying passage: It’s like she’s glowing. Like she knows something. Makes me want to be a refugee.

  Maybe it’s just a fragment of indie-song lyric. He flips to the next image, but not fast enough to evade Charlotte. “So what do you make of her?”

  He flips back, holds up the sketch, lifts an eyebrow. He’s remarkably good at being the one thing his father taught him never to be: a fake.

  Charlotte tsks. “I don’t mean the sketch. Is there something broken with her? Or something really fixed?”

  “I don’t know,” he mumbles. “I’ve never met an Algerian before. I probably shouldn’t be discussing-”

  “No, of course not.” Charlotte retrieves her drawings and slips them into her portfolio. “Wouldn’t be caught dead discussing real life.”

  When Thassa is five minutes late for her appointment, Russell unravels. The Islamic Salvation Front has sent a death squad after her. Or the America First people. Her total lack of depressive realism leaves her a walking target.

  At eight minutes after the hour, she sticks her face around the doorjamb, puckered with sweet shame. He’s so relieved to see her that he stands up. He’s shocked all over again at just how short she is: the crown of her curly hair reaches no higher than his collarbone.

  “I’m sorry to be so tardy,” she says. “I was talking to the security guard downstairs.”

  Just the sound of her voice is like a governor’s pardon. Her accent has drifted: too much time in North America. He wants to stop the sound from drifting any further.

  “He has a fascinating story,” she says, touching Stone’s wrist and making him sit. She sits just next to him. “He’s a Bosnian Muslim. Imagine: he taught himself English when he moved here, and now he’s writing a book!”

  Russell treads water. “Do you know him?”

  “I do now! He’s a beautiful man.”

  The adjective stabs him. He’ll never be able to protect her from her own promiscuous warmth. “A Muslim,” he says, brain-dead. “Like you?”

  “Me?” She laughs. “I’m no believer. I’m some kind of half-Christian atheist. My mother’s family have been Catholic for g
enerations. Hey!” She shakes his arm. “Don’t look so surprised! You know that Saint Augustine was Berbère?”

  Russell didn’t know. His ignorance is more or less complete.

  “From Annaba. A Kabyle even more famous than Zidane. But my father was so disgusted with religion that he wouldn’t let it in our house. I don’t know, myself. If there is God, he is just laughing at every religion we invent!”

  He’s stunned silent: faith is not the author of her bliss. Blessed are those who do not believe, and yet see.

  She carries on amusing herself. “You know, maybe those jihad suicide people will really get their seventy-two virgins in heaven-except they will be seventy-two American Christian virgins, saving themselves for their Baptist husbands!”

  Her glee is a dance. Stone seizes up even worse than he does in front of the class. He stutters his way through a few gibberish clauses. He’s stunted by this thing she owns, the thing that beautiful people seem to possess but never really do. If only she were merely beautiful

  Her face is small but ursine. Her nose veers hard to the right, and her eyes are slightly askew. She shouldn’t even be pretty, except for the conspiracy of delight rounding her cheeks. A rill of melted skin runs up the outside of her left arm from elbow to shoulder. How could he have missed it until now? She must think the scar too banal to mention in her journal.

  He says some generic pedantries about her entries for class. She nods and scribbles into her notebook, which she safeguards up near her narrow chest. He tries to say things that won’t look ludicrous, copied down. A few more of his clumsy maxims stolen from Harmon, a little more of her laughter and scribbling, and she turns the page to show him: not notes, but a felt-tip cartoon caricature of him, perfect down to his squint of bewilderment. She draws like she breathes-a gull enjoying a gust.

  Happy people must know something that no one else does. Some key to being alive, obscure and hard-won, almost out of reach. Otherwise, he would have met a truly happy person or two, long before her.

  “What made you apply to this place?” he asks. “How did you choose Chicago?”

  She declares Mesquakie a great college for her major: film arts, the documentary concentration. “I fell in love with films, in high school, in Montreal. I was making little movies for my brother, to make him feel less, um country sick? Homesick. Come on, Thassa! Homesick. I made him funny clips, to get him to laugh. Then, I started splicing? I love film; I just love it. I love putting the shots together. I love dubbing the sounds. Anything! I could play with the editing softwares all day long.”

  He’s so nonplussed he can’t even nod.

  “What I would really love-more than anything?-is to get very skilled, then to go home and make beautiful films, chez nous.”

  “Of course!” At last it clicks: witness and voice, in the world’s most powerful medium. “Like Pontecorvo Has anyone done something like that for the civil war?”

  She smiles confidentially and touches his wrist. Her skin shocks him. “Not politics! Politics and film?” She tsks and waves her index finger like a windshield wiper. “That’s not my glass of tea. No, I just want to shoot-you know! Kabylie. The mountains. The coast. Those peoples. That sky.”

  “Nature?” He can’t keep the bafflement out of his voice. A child of death who’s thrilled about the future. An Algerian who shuns politics. A film lover who chooses the banality of mountains.

  She shakes her head again and pulls a tiny media player out of her rainbow bag. Before he can decode, she shows him her work in progress. A Thassa the size of his fingernail grins at him from inside the matchbox screen. She’s in front of a large fish tank at what must be the Shedd Aquarium. Spots of bioluminescence in the fish blink on and off. Then the glowing spots animate, spelling out the words: Secret Chicagos. A Film by Generosity.

  Then they’re in Grant Park, at the foot of Buckingham Fountain, the spouting green sea horses. It’s a sunny day; people of all stripes stroll around the basin. A mixed-race couple goes by arm in arm. A woman in full hijab tries to rein in two little girls, both in their own white headscarves. A sizable Japanese tour group makes a collective, rising glissando of appreciation at the words of their guide. But the camera settles on an ancient bald man sitting on the edge of the fountain. He’s talking to himself, except that the camera hears.

  I can’t really say I miss it. Italy? God! That’s over sixty years ago. But I like to come down here anyway, because it feels like something back then. You know what I’m saying?

  A voice from behind the camera says, “I know.”

  Maybe I’m finally getting senile. But you know what would be great? If all this water just-if it all just kept flowing Venice!

  With the sweep of his illustrating hand, the water spills over the fountain rim and streams its way up Congress. It doesn’t look like real computer graphics. It looks like a living watercolor, splashes of primaries better than life, and much more generous.

  Russell jerks up, searching her face for clues.

  She giggles. “Compositing,” she explains, freehanding in the air. He nods like an idiot and looks back.

  Boats appear on the watery Congress Parkway. Gondolas paddle upstream, underneath the old post office. San Marco’s materializes alongside the old Illinois Central tracks. The camera swings back, cutting up State Street at high speed. It ducks down into the subway, settles on a dark, middle-aged man standing on the platform waiting for his train.

  I’m from Eastern Turkey, Cappadocia. Every time I come down here, I think of the caves. They should have cities down here, right? They stick all those people up in the air; they can put some underground. Am I right?

  The tube of tunnel stone behind him begins to seethe with hand-drawn passageways. Doorways and windows open in the walls. The camera pops into one of them, then pops out again on a tree-lined street of brick bungalows somewhere in Bronzeville. A young man in leather jacket and felt porkpie studies the lens:

  My kinda town? Sister, you could take a weekend out of the war budget and turn this whole neighborhood into Heaven South. Homes for the homeless. Music falling out of the sky!

  He has only to speak it, and a third-story paradise of visible melody springs up all around him, at tree level.

  So it goes for a handful more shots: Kraków spilling out of a cathedral in West Town, Cinco de Mayo flowing down the Back of the Yards, the Bahai Temple turning into Isfahan, the Devon corridor releasing a desi incense procession.

  “Who made all this?” Russell croaks.

  She dives into her bag and retrieves a Handycam the size of a newborn schnauzer. She’s seen more of this city in a year and a half than he has in his life. He looks at that face, its invincible grin. She’s fearless, ready to travel into any neighborhood. All he can think is: It’s not safe out there. Happiness is a death sentence.

  She squeezes the camera trigger and starts filming him. He grimaces, trying to smile. “But this isn’t really a documentary, is it?”

  She stops filming. Even her frown is delighted. “It isn’t? What is it, then? It’s all perfectly true. Maybe this is your creative nonfiction!”

  “But is there any market for that kind of film?” He can’t help himself. The orphan girl’s self-appointed uncle. “Can you make a living, after school?”

  She waves her hand and scowls. “Pff. Livings are easy. My father was an engineer. He always liked the English expression: There’s no free lunch. That’s crazy! There is only free lunch. We should all be nothing but clouds of frozen dust. This is what science says. All lunch is free. My father was a scientist, but he never understood this one simple scientific fact, poor man.” She shakes her head at the man’s perversity.

  So she didn’t get the bliss from her father, either.

  They talk beyond the allotted half hour. She’s in no hurry to go. Russell realizes that he has saved her appointment for last, just in case it runs overtime. Finally, he can keep her no longer. She stands up to go, scooping her possessions back into the rainbow bag. Sh
e turns to him, her brightness challenging.

  “You know, Mister? You are a very unfair teacher. You make us all read from our journals. But you never read to us from yours!”

  His details are coming to me now, more easily than I care to admit.

  He watches for a long time at the plate-glass window after she leaves, gazing six stories straight down onto the building’s entrance. She takes forever. She’s talking to the Bosnian security-guard novelist again, or to some new newly met, soon-to-be bosom buddy. His chest clutches when she does appear. She takes a few steps south, then slows, distracted by something across the street. She starts up again, then greets a woman walking toward her. She spins around as the woman passes, turns like a planet in an orrery, and calls out. When the woman looks back, Thassa taps her own bare head and laughs something: I like your hat. The stranger’s delight is visible from six floors up.

  Thassa walks down the street as if through a spice bazaar. She takes all of five minutes to go a block. From high up in his spy’s nest, Russell imagines the composited, hand-drawn documentary she’s seeing at all times, while everyone else drags their way through the depressing, psychological realist version: Wabash, blooming into a Casbah watercolor.

  He lifts his eyes to the building across the street-an astonishing, ceramic-clad, honeycomb lattice far beyond anything the present could afford to build. He’s never noticed it before. He glances back down just in time to see the Kabyle girl duck into a building two blocks south: one of the college’s two dormitories. He knows where she lives.

  He grabs his valise, skips down six flights of stairs, bursts out to the street, and follows her south. The air is weirdly ionized; the lake smells like ocean. He’s never noticed, but each shoulder-rubbing façade in this police lineup of buildings is a different color. Marble, sandstone, granite: Paris on the Prairie.