Generosity

by Richard Powers

  He stands across the street from her dormitory, scouring the window grid. He can’t see anything, and he’s just about to skulk away when she appears in a fourth-story window on the right, looking down on the Wabash pageant. She’s smiling at the possibilities beneath her, sizing up the adventure. She sees him; she doesn’t see him. She lifts one hand. The hand holds a leather-bound book. She cradles the small volume from beneath and spreads it face-open against the window. The alien gesture freezes him.

  He ducks into the doorway behind him, heart pounding. A musical-instrument store. He pretends to shop for acoustic guitars. He might, in fact, be interested in guitars. He hasn’t touched one since moving back from Tucson.

  He leaves the shop ten minutes later, empty-handed. He walks from campus up to the river, just to clear his head. He feels vaguely criminal. He is vaguely criminal.

  Home again, he sits on his back deck next to the fire escape, trying to capture in his journal what happened that afternoon. He writes under the yellow deck light as darkness falls, unable to shake her image.

  He writes: She pressed the pages to the glass, as if for someone with a powerful telescope on another planet.

  He looks up. The night is clear and the wind comes off the moon and literature has just been invented.

  PART TWO

  WALK ON AIR

  True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out-you must stay out; and to stay out, you must have some absorbing errand.

  – Henry James, Roderick Hudson

  The British ethicist with the bloodhound eyes returns to the screen. She’s seated in the library of Magdalen College, Oxford. Her face is lined by a lifetime spent gate-guarding science’s worst excesses. An Over the Limit caption identifies her: Anne Harter, Author, Designs on Humanity. She says:

  More expensive, high-tech antiaging breakthroughs will just produce even more horrendous differences between the haves and have-nots. If we really want to extend the average human life span, then let’s supply clean drinking water to the majority of the planet that doesn’t have it.

  Cutaway, and the caption reads: University of Tokyo conference, “The Future of Aging.” Thomas Kurton stands behind a podium, covered in hazelnut curls, fifty-seven going on thirty-two, a Sarastro of the cult of antioxidants. He speaks from the hip:

  The script that has kept us in gloom and dread is about to be rewritten. Labs across the globe are closing in on those ridiculous genetic errors that cause life to suicide. Aging is not just a disease; it’s the mother of all maladies. And humankind may finally have a shot at curing it.

  Cut back to Oxford: Professor Harter questions the scientific basis to Kurton’s optimism. Back in Todai, Kurton cites the discovery of a single gene mutation that more than doubles the life span of Caenorhabditis elegans.

  Oxford:

  Aging is not the enemy; the enemy is despair.

  Tokyo:

  Cure age, and you beat a dozen ailments at once. You might even help depression.

  The camera turns the scientist and ethicist into a bickering couple, airing their grievances in front of friends.

  A quick jump to Maine, where keen Tonia Schiff asks Kurton:

  What about those people who say society can’t survive more old people than it already has?

  He can’t ratchet down that boyish smile.

  Naysayers have always been around to challenge any human dream. And that’s good! But that objection just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m talking about a future where the aged aren’t old.

  Back to Anne Harter, in Oxford:

  Dr. Kurton might want to fund an association study for the wishful-thinking gene.

  The match is as unfair as genetics. The scientist is brighter, more informed, and more relaxed. All Harter can do is sink her teeth into his ankle and hang on.

  Kurton, back in the Maine cabin:

  People want to live longer and better. When they can do both, they will. Ethics is just going to have to catch up.

  Tonia Schiff sits, her knee to his, enjoying the ride:

  How do you think the market will price the fountain of youth?

  He does this funny little head-bow of concentration, like he’s never been asked this question and he wants to think about it, for the sheer pleasure of thought.

  Well, the market seems to price food and water fairly effectively. It could use a little help pricing medications, I suppose.

  Schiff, in something like awe at the man’s ingenuousness:

  Do you really mean to live forever?

  He rocks good-naturedly and squeezes the back of his neck.

  We’ll see how far I get. I’m on calorie restriction, daily workout, and a few supplements, especially megadoses of resveratrol. If I can keep myself healthy for another twenty years, at our present rate of discovery

  The techno beat starts up again. Cross-fade to a slowly focusing midrange shot, and the genomicist floats twenty stories in the air over the apocalyptic dreamscape of Hachik Crossing, Shibuya, Tokyo. Below him spreads Times Square squared-spectral neon blazes fringing a bank of LCD screens each several stories high, towering over seven major thoroughfares that converge in the world’s largest pedestrian scramble, which, from twenty stories up, looks like mitosis under the microscope. Multilevel train station, bass-thumping department stores, costume outlets, twisting warrens of mirror-lined game arcades The streetlights stop all traffic, and the accumulated mounds of crowd disgorge into one another, massing into the intersection from all sides in an orderly, omnidirectional tsunami.

  Thomas Kurton gazes down on this orgy of the urban dispossessed. The camera follows his gaze: kids as bowerbirds; kids as noble savages; kids as Kogal Californians; kids from the outer reaches of galaxies far, far away; kids as baggy, knee-socked, schoolgirl-sailor prostitutes; kids as mutants-cosplay, Catgirl, GothLoli, maid-nurse-bunny-all in a gentle, frenzied, nightly theatrical performance of rebellion that will wander home at four in the morning to broom-closet apartments and wake up two hours later to head to classes or clerical jobs.

  The scientist looks down into the costumed mass and smiles.

  We’re trapped in a faulty design, stuck in a bad plot. We want to become something else. It’s what we’ve wanted since the story started. And now we can have it.

  The camera follows him into a glass elevator and plunges down into the maelstrom. The transparent capsule opens, and Thomas Kurton disappears into the carnival of midnight Shibuya.

  Tonia Schiff appears briefly out of character at the seven-minute mark in “The Genie and the Genome.” She’s seated near the front of that University of Tokyo auditorium, looking nothing like the show host who scampers through the interview segments. Her alert amusement disappears. For two seconds, her aura teeters, scared by the show onstage. Then the camera dives back into the sea of eager faces behind her in the auditorium.

  She surfaces again ten seconds later, in the milling crowd. Even the way she stands and chats feels somehow experimental. Something in her hand movements hints at her childhood in New York and Washington, her adolescence in Brussels and Bonn. She speaks to one scientist in flowing German, but stops for a moment to greet a passing acquaintance with a few snippets of Japanese.

  She turns to a couple next to her and says something that makes them bloom. She learned the trick from her father, a career diplomat: how to make everyone she meets feel like a conversational genius. From her mother, a medical policy adviser for international relief agencies, she’s learned how to turn a person’s worst impulses to good use. That is the secret of her edutainment fame: assure us all that we might still become the authors of our own lives. She’ll use the skill again, later, on a New York soundstage, filming the lead-in to this show’s segment. A flash of cosmopolitan charm undercut by a sardonic grin: “My kind of future would probably ask, ‘If I let you have your way with me tonight, will you still respect me in the morning?’ ”

  From childhood through the age of
twenty, Tonia Schiff nurtured the belief (acquired in a series of elite international schools) that the deepest satisfaction available to anyone lay in those cultural works that survive the test of Long Time. But a collision with postcolonialism in her second semester studying art history at Brown shook her faith in masterpieces. A course in the Marxist interpretation of the Italian Renaissance left her furious. For a little while longer she soldiered on, fighting the good fight for artistic transcendence, until she realized that all the commanding officers had already negotiated safe passage away from the rout.

  In her junior year, vulnerable now to the world’s corruption, she belatedly discovered (blindingly obvious to everyone else alive) the lock on human consciousness enjoyed by the medium that her parents always treated as a lethal pandemic that would one day be successfully eradicated. At the age of twenty, Tonia Schiff, fair-haired, blue-eyed heir of dying high culture, at last got roughed up by television, and loved every minute of it.

  In short order, she discovered:

  Broadcast was what Grimm’s fairy tales wanted to be when they grew up

  Broadcast was an eight-lane autobahn into the amygdala

  Broadcast was the only addiction that left you more socially functional

  Broadcast was what Homo ergaster daydreamed about, on the shores of Lake Turkana, between meals

  One semester of Modern Visual Media Studies taught her that she didn’t want to analyze the stuff; she wanted to make it. After graduation, she talked her way into a Manhattan production studio, reassuring them that the Ivy liberal-arts degree could be overcome. She served time as a fact-checker for local news, where she learned, to her astonishment, what her country really looked like. From there, she worked her way onto a team specializing in archival footage for the Hitler Channel.

  She realized, early on, how fast broadcast was becoming narrowcast, and she signed on with a boutique production outfit to work for a consumer-electronics tech showcase that the whole crew called Geek of the Week. She graduated to assistant producer and executed her responsibilities meticulously until someone had the brilliant idea to let her try hosting. The camera loved her, and so did the week’s geeks. In front of the lens, her old Brahmin insouciance combined with a sexy bewilderment to turn her into everybody’s favorite new toy with a new toy. Her arched-eyebrow amusement at the constant torrents of techno-novelty made Over the Limit, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, “science like you wished it had been, back in high school.”

  Each week, the show delivers another round of Scientific American meets Götterdämmerung. In the months just before “The Genie and the Genome,” they do:

  off-the-shelf electronic surveillance

  drugs that eliminate the need for sleep

  geisha bots

  thought-reading fMRI

  Augmented Cognition weapons systems

  runaway nano-replicators

  radio frequency skimming

  untraceable performance enhancers

  remotely implantable human ID chips

  viral terrorism

  Frankenfoods

  neural marketing

  smart, networked commodities

  The show taps into the oldest campfire secret: in terror begins possibility. A sizable slice of the viewing public has unlimited appetite for all the latest ways that godly gadgets will destroy their lives. Schiff measures the success of each segment by the number of illegal clips floating around the Internet the next day. Even the occasional Photoshopped nude of her seems a testimonial.

  It’s beyond lucky, getting to spend all her hours in the company of ingenious people. Her interviews have led to a few intense adventures with amusingly driven men. But even the ones who know how to entertain themselves need far more approval than she can deliver without irony. The best of these intervals are bittersweet, like Mahler by candlelight. In between, she’s content with her circuit through the exercise rooms of three-star hotels, listening to podcasts of technology-show competitors while on the elliptical cross-trainer. Lately, she has begun to bid in online auction houses on the letters of famous inventors. She imagines giving the whole collection to the smartest of her nieces, when she graduates from high school.

  Meanwhile, Tonia enjoys the admiration of everyone she knows except her humanitarian mother. Sigrid Schiff-Bordet watches the program now and then, when she’s not in Afghanistan or Mali. Tonia’s mother long ago adjusted to the world’s basic schizophrenia. She thinks nothing about passing from climate-controlled concourses studded with free drinking fountains into armed outposts where mortars battle over a few potable liters. But she can’t adjust to Over the Limit.

  “I’m too old for your stories,” Sigrid tells Tonia. “I’ve voided my citizenship in that kind of future. You have to let me die a functional illiterate.”

  Once, in the closest thing to a compliment she could muster, Dr. Schiff-Bordet told her daughter, “Your show is probably good for me. It sickens me to watch, but it’s powerful medicine. Like chemotherapy for the naïve soul.”

  As for Tonia’s father, Gilbert Schiff died three years before “The Genie and the Genome,” at age sixty-nine, of a massive heart attack in the consulate in Tyumen. Two weeks before his death, in one of their biweekly phone calls, his daughter had the gall-or call it the enduring filial pride-to ask him when he was going to write his long-postponed diplomatic memoirs. The former young cultural attaché under Camelot had managed to survive in the State Department all the way through Bush the Second, battered up to the rank of vice-consul, still trying to convince the six billion neighbors that America had gentle, nuanced, humble, and diverse insights to offer the world conversation. Tonia had grown up on his increasingly embattled accounts, a foreign policy hiding inside the official foreign policy, a beautiful losing proposition that only a handful of lifers kept alive.

  Her father answered her challenge in his best stentorian white-tie voice. “No one wants to read my autobiography. Story of my life.” She foolishly pressed him, hinting at the ticking clock, until he released his last, jagged barb. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll write my memoirs as soon as you give up the technology ringmaster act and write that history of interwar regionalist realism you once promised me.”

  The rebuke stung; she knew how deeply she’d failed the man. Both Vice-consul Schiff and his beloved doctor wife felt something hopelessly magnificent about the human adventure, its ability to channel the brute instinct of a few hard-pressed hunter-gatherers into creating Athens, Byzantium, Florence, Isfahan. But in Gilbert Schiff’s considered opinion, the project had been running in reverse for more than a century; the beasts of unlimited appetite were loose and weren’t going back into the kennel anytime soon. Every individual being with any skill had to fight the fatuous, disposable present with everything of worth. Instead, his daughter-his polyglot, caryatid, harpist daughter, National Merit Finalist, queen of the debating society, captain of the chess club, choral society soloist-was partying with the barbarians.

  She knew how much she’d once pleased him. On the morning of her first communion, he told her she was closer to perfection than any father could have asked. In her first year of college, during their long Christmas-vacation discussions of late Reginald Marsh and early Stuart Davis, she even detected a little hangdog adoration in his glance, a self-policing cringe ready to punish himself for imagining the full range of her lucky gifts.

  The summer that she told him she’d switched to media studies, he was stationed in Oslo. She called him from Providence; the announcement merited more than a letter. He laughed from the gut at the send-up, until he realized it wasn’t one. He regrouped gracefully and told her that he and her mother would back her in anything she chose to study. When she got her first television job, he resigned himself to noble stoicism over her late-onset disease. But he’d have given anything for her cure, if any medicine offered one.

  In time, he shifted his hopes from his daughter to her genes. Throughout her twenties, he treated every man she introduced t
o him with polite reserve. Fun, maybe, for a weekend or Settling a little quickly, aren’t you? In her thirties, he began praising even the bottom-dwellers. So he has a record; half the justices on the D.C. circuit have a criminal sheet. The question is, where does he come down on the Pampers Size Six controversy? Once, he even pronounced the abomination “speed dating.” Both he and Tonia’s mother were too well-bred to come out and tell her, Breed, damn you! But that was all she could do for them, finally.

  Tonia never confessed to her parents a genetic defect even more lethal than susceptibility to broadcast. But by thirty-three, the syndrome was undeniable: she possessed no maternal desire whatsoever. One glance at the only available planetary future made having children at best benighted and at worst depraved. Nulliparity-human build-down-was a moral imperative.

  But Tonia never made that point to Gilbert Schiff. Even when she was still single at thirty-six, her father held out the same forsaken hope for her as he did for making the case for America abroad under Bush II. “I wouldn’t even insist on a monograph,” he told her, during that wretched phone call just before his death. “I’d be happy with a modest little coauthored study ”

  “Someday,” she teased him. “When someone as good as Daddy comes along.” But she was already a member of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, even if she could not quite bring herself to qualify for their Golden Snip Award.