Generosity

by Richard Powers

  The old diplomat went to his grave nineteen days after that phone call, as defeated by his daughter’s choices as he was by his innocent, beginner country’s embrace of extraordinary rendition. After her father’s death and her mother’s subsequent expatriation, Tonia threw herself into a brief period of purposeful mate-seeking. But the thing about ghosts is that they outlast their own hopes. A dead father is forever beyond placating.

  Now she concentrates on appeasing one million total strangers. Each forty-two-minute segment is an exercise in insouciance, taking her sixty hours to perfect. The goal is to compile an accurate map of the present at the scale of one to one, a massive mosaic of thumbnails of the blinding future.

  For four decades, Tonia Schiff’s parents kept a pact. However busy they were, whatever remote outpost each of them found themselves in, they always managed to meet every two months for a private dinner. And at that dinner, one of them would argue a fiercely prepared debating motion. Resolved: the human race would have been better off if the agricultural revolution had never happened. Resolved: the government should cap the salaries of professional athletes. Resolved: Bach’s Passions should be banned from concert halls for anti-Semitism. And the other delivered the fiercest possible rebuttal. In this way Gilbert and Sigrid preserved the fires of argument that had supplied such heat to their love.

  Now, a decade past the age her parents were when they birthed her, Tonia revives the ritual, with the only difference being that she meets for a new topic twenty times a year with no fixed opponent. Resolved: the human race will not survive its own ingenuity. Resolved: the cure for our chronic despair is just around the corner. And no matter whom she spars with on any given occasion, Tonia Schiff can make the most cataclysmic debate almost as entertaining as reality itself.

  Stone sits at his desk with tea and a slice of Dutch rusk, ignoring his stack of delinquent manuscripts. Instead, he reads yet another happiness book checked out from the library. This book stands apart from all the others-the bad seed. The book says happiness is a moving target, a trick of evolution, a bait and switch to keep us running. The doses must keep increasing, just to break even. True contentment demands that we wean ourselves from all desire. The pursuit of happiness will make us miserable. Our only hope is to break the habit.

  He lifts his eyes from the page to wonder whether the Algerian woman might be experiencing massive anesthesia from post-traumatic stress disorder. Maybe her free-floating ecstasy might signal a coming collapse. But in all the hours he’s spent in her presence over recent weeks, the lowest she’s ever descended to is mild amusement. She will sit in class from beginning to end, whatever the tempers erupting around her, basking in light and loving her flailing peers. Russell has watched her all class long out of the corner of his eye, levitating in the middle of the fray, shining like some giant horse chestnut in full sun.

  Does the woman feel real elation, or does she just imagine it? He runs the meaningless question into the ground.

  He launches his slow Internet connection, then stares at the search-engine box, wondering how to initiate a search for unreasonable delight.

  He taps in euphoria, and erases it. He taps in manic depression, and deletes that, too. He taps in extreme well-being. And right away, he’s swamped. In the world of free information, the journey of a single step begins in a thousand microcommunities. Inconceivable hours of global manpower have already trampled all over every thought he might have and run it to earth with boundless ingenuity. Even that thought, a digitally proliferating cliché

  In less time than it would take to comb through the global auction houses for a favorite childhood toy, he discovers the positive-psychology movement. One more massive development he’s never heard of. An empirical science of happiness-why not? And an international phenomenon-but what isn’t, these days? After centuries of studying all the ways the mind goes wrong, psychology has finally gotten around to studying how it might go right.

  The whole field seems to have kick-started around the year 2000, just as the world began to descend into a new round of collective misery. And already the discipline is overflowing with enough articles, books, and conferences to make a casual lurker like Russell Stone overdose.

  Results 1 through 10 of about 9,300,000. He feels that vertigo he gets from going out to the end of Navy Pier and glancing back at the hundred-story, steel-and-glass towers spinning out their million innovations per cubic meter per minute. He scrolls through the matches, this network of seething bits at last made visible to anyone with a browser. The vision is almost bracing, the feeling Russell had as a boy of ten, when he and his brother, Robert, stood in the mist at Table Rock, Niagara Falls, shouting in the murderous cascade. The sheer scale absolves him. The world falls at too many buckets per second for him to rescue anyone.

  He clicks on link after link, diving down into the maelstrom of discovery, not sure what he is looking for, but finding no end of things he isn’t.

  Russell finds what he’s after at last, not online but in archaic print. He sees it in a sidebar in his latest bedside happiness manual, a tinted box with the heading “The Better Without the Bitter?”

  Have you ever come across someone with an oversized appetite for life? Someone who seems to feel nothing but major keys, resiliently joyous, impervious to distress? Some people are simply the big winners in genetics’ happiness roulette. They live every day bathed in renewable elation, enjoying a constant mania without the depression, ecstasy without the cyclic despair. These people (and they are very rare) may possess a trait called hyperthymia

  He hasn’t made it up. It’s biological. Researchers study it. It has a Greek name.

  But don’t be fooled: people who are exhilarated, inspired, and full of vibrant life may actually suffer from hypomania, a condition associated with full-fledged bipolar disorder. Hyperthymia is a durable trait; hypomania is a cyclical state. The first can be life-enhancing, the second, deadly. As usual, it’s best to leave a full diagnosis to the professionals.

  The thought creeps up on him, as unreal as that euphoric refugee. The woman has something that should be looked at. He, Russell Stone, in deeply over his head, needs to consult a real professional about Thassa Amzwar.

  He tries the Mesquakie home portal. The college must have shrinks, or whatever the latest euphemism calls them. With little effort, he finds it: Psychological Services Center. On the screen, it looks just like a brokerage. The counselors each have their own page for potential student clients to scan.

  He searches their images, feeling no more than a twinge of shame. He has used website photographs to pick a dentist. He has checked out the Facebook mugs of the amateur authors he edits. It doesn’t feel creepy anymore. It feels like self-defense. If his grandchildren ever read the journal entry where he considers the ethics of “face peeping,” they’ll just laugh. If he doesn’t burn his journals first. If he ever has grandchildren. Maybe his grandchildren will post his journals on whatever replaces the Internet, alongside every embarrassing photo of him ever taken. It won’t even be posting anymore. Shared will be the default condition.

  Face peeping does for Russell what selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors do for his brother. It allows him to cope with a torrent of strangers, without wigging.

  The first psychologist looks like a ridiculously benign Realtor. The second looks like somebody’s fervently maiden aunt. The third would eat him for breakfast with just a squirt of no-cholesterol spread. The fourth stops him dead.

  She’s Grace’s clone.

  Only older, he thinks. Then he remembers: Grace is older now, too. Candace Weld, Licensed Clinical Psychologist, looks so much like Grace Cozma that Russell goes tachycardic. He sees the differences, but none is big enough for his gut to give a damn. It’s Grace, give or take; the spray of fight-or-flight hormones cascading through his limbs proves it.

  He folds his shaking hands behind his neck. He feels himself plummeting into paranormal genre fiction. Know this story? He wrote it. He should close h
is browser, flush his history, delete all his cookies, and run.

  The words on the profile page swim into focus:

  Candace Weld works with students who are coping with stress, anxiety, low self-esteem, burnout, and difficult relationships. She also specializes in eating disorders and questions of body image. Candace helps students understand that feeling good about themselves is more important than being “perfect ”

  He rereads, reeling, wondering how Grace could have come to this. He stares at the picture of the counselor; the resemblance weakens, but not the recognition. All his pictures of Grace went long ago to the flame, so he has nothing to compare this woman to. After another few minutes of paralyzed staring, what’s left of Grace Cozma’s face blends into this one.

  Someone else dials the center, gives his Mesquakie ID number, and asks for an appointment. He hears that someone say No, not urgent and Nothing really wrong with me. An appointments secretary who has heard that particular danger signal once too often slips him in for early next week.

  I bring him back his old obsession-at least her face. It isn’t my idea. This twist has been lying in wait for him. For years now, Russell Stone has bunkered down against the memory of a woman he doesn’t even like. He’s written his own ghost story, in advance.

  I never seek out uncanny plots. I find them way too cheaply gratifying. I stay away from books with inexplicable coincidences, prophetic events, or eerie parallels. But they seem to find me anyway. And when I do read them, however conventional, they rip me open and turn me into someone else.

  This is what the Algerian tells me: live first, decide later. Love the genre that you most suspect. Good judgment will spare you nothing, least of all your life. Flow, words: there’s only one story, and it’s filled with doubles. The time for deciding how much you like it is after you’re dead.

  Candace Weld’s picture, vita, and life philosophy sit online in the Mesquakie directory for any spammer or sicko to find. Any nut with a keyboard could stalk her. Russell could probably get her credit history without too much trouble. In fact, the lightest digging reveals that she’s got a ten-year-old boy with a photo-filled page on a kids’ social networking site. It took the species millions of years to climb down out of the trees, and only ten years more to jump into the fishbowl.

  Five afternoons later he’s up in the counseling center, trying to keep his limbs from shaking free of his body. The reception area is cheerful and fabric-oriented. Two female students sit nearby, each texting into their laps. In the stack of magazines spread around for waiting clients, he finds, to his horror, a copy of Becoming You with his fingerprints all over the text.

  They call him in by anonymous number. He’s a wreck by the time he reaches the office. Candace Weld, LPC, rises from an L-shaped desk in the corner to shake his hand. She introduces herself, but he knows her already. She holds herself nothing like Grace: a cardinal in place of a scarlet tanager. She regards him, her face tipped in a tentative smile. She’s maybe thirty-eight, six years older than she should be. But the puzzled eyes, the brave cheeks, and the childish pug nose combine to slam his chest.

  “Please sit,” she says, and waves at a stuffed chair. She sits in another, angled toward him. A shaded reading lamp stands between them. A half-height bookshelf hugs the wall behind her, filled with books on healthy living. He recognizes one of the happiness encyclopedias he’s been poring over these last weeks. On the wall above the bookshelf hangs the azure dream of Hopper’s Lee Shore. The room is an aggressively cozy corner of a furniture showroom. They sit together, home again after a long day, trying to decide on pizza versus sushi. Grace, wild Grace, domestically tranquil at last.

  “How can I help you?” she asks, her face a cheerful blank. It’s no one he’s ever met.

  He tilts his head and grimaces as warmly as he can. “I’m not here for myself, really. I’m concerned about one of my students.”

  She recoils an inch. For just an instant, he’s unreadable. Like he’s grabbed her by the elbow and started cackling. Then she smiles and says, “That’s fine. Tell me.”

  Weld thought: This man has recently been shocked to discover that he still has a future. He sat in her stuffed chair, his eyes panning like a security camera, his chest so cupped that she twitched a little when he claimed to have come about someone else.

  Four weeks earlier, yet another besieged student had erupted and shot up yet another school, this one in Wisconsin, only three hundred miles away. It happened every other semester, like some natural cycle, and every time, in the wake of the tragedy, a wave of concerned Mesquakie instructors flooded the counseling center. When those waves hit, the counselors were cautioned to work doubly hard at treating each case as if it were unique.

  Candace Weld started the consultation with all the set protocols: Has the student made any direct or implied threats? Does the student display violent, erratic, or aggressive behavior? The questions just baffled the visiting instructor. Does the student display behavior that might require immediate medical attention? His each no was increasingly agitated.

  Early on in every consultation, Weld liked to give her clients vivid shorthand names. She often tagged her art students after artists-Munch, a photography MFA candidate badly in need of lorazepam. Botero, a pale girl who planned to eat her way into her mother’s heart. Morandi, a sandy glass-bottle freshman reconciled to his gray still life. But Russell Stone was a writer, or, as he explained, “At least I play one in the classroom.” Fyodor, she decided, penning the name at the upper right of her fresh spiral pad: Fyodor, feverish with beliefs.

  In what way did he find the student’s behavior troubling?

  He laid out the whole story, which Candace Weld noted in detail. Document everything. The stranger the tale, the more important the paper trail. She leaned forward into his accounts, as if some scrap might otherwise fall between them. As he launched into his exposition-Algeria, murder, exile-she had to remind herself to stop listening and keep writing.

  He wandered deep into backstory. She tried to guide him, but he seemed trapped inside a thick volume, and all the pace and cadence of her profession were powerless to extract him.

  She asked: Are you worried Ms. Amzwar might be suffering some kind of breakdown?

  Her transcript has him answering: “I’m worried that she is excessively happy, in a way that can’t possibly be right.”

  Why not?

  “Because she’s an Algerian civil war orphan refugee.”

  Why couldn’t an Algerian refugee be happy?

  But at that question, Fyodor just slumped and shrugged.

  She asked if he’d consulted with anyone at the college-any of Ms. Amzwar’s other teachers.

  “One or two of the other students ”

  Seeking another opinion had clearly never occurred to him.

  Had Ms. Amzwar ever approached him in distress?

  Fyodor: “I’m not sure she’s capable of distress.”

  Then why, exactly, was he so concerned?

  “From what I understand, if she’s truly hyperthymic, then she doesn’t need anything from anyone. But if she has hypomania, she’s in trouble. All that elation is just waiting to crash.”

  She breathed in and transcribed his words, not for the first time in her counseling career silently cursing Wikipedia. Out loud, she said, “She’d have to make an appointment for me to do a complete assessment.”

  He shut his eyes, then opened them. “Of course. I just don’t know how I can ask her to do that without ”

  “Without asking her to see a psychological counselor?”

  He nodded, defeated.

  “I understand,” she said. “Tough to tell someone, ‘Get help. You’re too happy.’ ”

  He nodded again, his lip half curling. Fyodor smiled.

  “You should consult with her other instructors. See if any of them are also concerned.”

  “Okay,” he said, not even pretending that he might.

  Obeying the protocols, Candace Weld bit down an
d started again. Would he say that Thassadit Amzwar was sociable?

  The question amused him. “Every single person she meets is a long-lost friend.”

  Did Thassadit race or free-associate when she talked?

  “Just the opposite. She brings everyone back down to a reasonable pace.”

  Did she fidget or jiggle or bite her nails?

  “She sits beaming for the whole class period.”

  Did she ever seem cryptic or allusive or grandiose?

  “My God, no.”

  Was she ever edgy or aggressive?

  He twisted his lips and shook his head, the question too ludicrous to humor.

  What did she eat? How much did she sleep? He answered the best he could. Something heartbreakingly amateur clung to him. But he wasn’t the subject of the consultation.

  The psychologist set down her pen. She steepled her fingers to her lips. “Maybe someone should get a urine sample from this woman?”

  He took his time answering. She admired that.

  “If I knew a drug that produced sustained, intense, level, loving well-being without any trace of stupor or edge, I’d take it myself.”

  She cocked her head and twisted her lips. “You’d have to. Everyone else would already be on it.”

  He laughed then, a sharp little bark of alarm. She caught her hand smoothing her cheek and dropped it into her lap. “You’ve never seen her get irritable?”

  He waited a beat, but only out of respect. “I’ve watched her for almost two months, and I’ve never seen her even grimace.”

  She flipped through her notes for a hidden explanation. “Obviously, I can’t say anything without seeing her in person. This isn’t a diagnosis. I’d never say you have no cause for concern. But you aren’t really describing mania, from what I can tell.”