Candace Weld’s field of vision shrank and grayed. Reflux came up her throat. Self-confessed alleged. She lowered herself to the carpet and sat.
The boy set her purse down and crossed back to her. He shook her shoulder, blanching. “Mom? Mom. Never mind. You can keep the money. I don’t need it.”
I see them clearly now: Thassadit Amzwar and her two self-appointed foster guardians, on the verge of that Chicago winter. I assemble the missing bits from out of the reticent archive. I’d dearly love to keep all three tucked away safely in exposition. But they’ve broken out now, despite me, into rising action.
Weld called Stone four times that night. First his line was busy. Then he wouldn’t pick up. She fired off a terse e-mail: I had to learn about this on the news? She redrafted the note three times, blunting her fury at his public diagnosis, that ridiculous little pseudoscientific tag. She focused on the attempted rape. The damage of public airing.
He shoots a message back at five the next morning. It’s frightened and sick with explanations. I was answering under fire, complying with a police investigation. I gave them everything that might possibly have any bearing on the case. I assumed what I said was for the police only.
They need two more e-mails and a jagged phone call before each settles down.
Weld asks if Thassa is all right. He tells her about the confused exchange he had with the Berber after class, in hushed and painful code, Thassa reassuring him that John Thornell’s bungled assault could never have harmed her.
“You didn’t call her last night? After the story ran?”
“I wanted to let her breathe.” After a beat, he adds, “Cowardice.”
Twice, she tells him that he did his best. But they both know: there would have been no Chicago StreetSharp News story without hyperthymia. “How can they possibly have used that word on television? Ridiculous.”
“I’m sorry. I never dreamed the police would sell it to TV.” But of course, television didn’t have to buy it. The media simply exercised eminent domain. Reality has become programming’s wholly owned subsidiary.
However the word got out, Thassadit Amzwar is an instant creative-nonfiction commodity. Harmon number nine: Harm Averted by Surprising Source. You know this story. Everyone knows this story but her. The Berber wouldn’t know how to read this story for the life of her. No doubt she thinks it’s Harmon number two: Group Misunderstands the Needs of an Outcast.
“The rape is my fault,” Stone tells Candace.
“Of course it is,” she agrees. Two handshakes, half of one ambiguous date, and they’ve been married for years. “This is all about you. You must have planted the idea in the man’s head.”
“If I’d been paying attention She’s a walking target. I should have warned her ”
“Are you serious? Criminal sexual abuse. A class-four felony. And she leaves her attacker so shaken he wants to be sent to jail for a decade. She doesn’t need your protection. You need hers.”
The price of information is falling to zero. You can now have almost all of it, anytime, anywhere, for next to nothing. The great majority of data can’t even be given away.
But meaning is like land: no one is making any more of it. With demand rising and supply stagnant, soon only the dead will be able to afford anything more than the smallest gist.
Minutes after the story airs, the Kabyle woman starts traveling abroad.
Your Day’s Dose of Truly Fresh Weirdness in Pincer Movement 3 hours ago, Influence: 3.7
One happy victim, one hapless perp in Closely watched change 9 hours ago, Influence: 5.0
Hype, or hypertimin’? in Shattered Visage 12 hours ago, Influence: 7.8
bust me god dammit, im serious in weasel while you work 1 day ago, Influence: 2.4
Chic a Chicago in Fuming Gaulois 2 days ago, Influence: 2.6
When Goodness Wins in Things That Lift Me 2 days ago, Influence: 6.1
Search for: Arab student rape Chicago Results: 1-10 of about 312
But for a little while longer, the woman is still as meaningless as any local noise. She stays safely hidden in the million global narrowcast microcommunity headlines hatched every second. Bandwidth itself does not threaten her. Information may travel at light speed. But meaning spreads at the speed of dark.
Hidden in the public static are three items of firsthand knowledge. Charlotte Hullinger adds a comment to StreetSharp’s feedback section, correcting some background data. Roberto Muñoz buries an agonized confession of complicity in a ghostly blog visited by three people a month. “I was there when they were getting her drunk.” And Sue Weston posts an almost reverent appraisal on a college discussion forum: “He never had a chance of breaking her. She just blissed that creep away.”
The scene loops through Russell Stone’s head, impossible to edit. It plays against the ceiling of the El train as he slumps in his seat, riding in for the public facedown. He watches his two students, the pleasure of their companionship crossing into animal violence. The scene, in his imagination, stays broad-brushed and dim. Always his downfall in writing: a complete lack of visual resolution. But he needs no great detail to be there. Thornell, the plodding minimalist, as depressed as anyone, electrified by the flash of something godly in the woman. Of course the man tried to force her. Ram himself home. It’s coded into the deep program: fuse your sick genes to whatever looks healthiest. Feel the glow for fifteen seconds, even by killing it
The guard scowls at Russell as the transient adjunct passes through security. Upstairs, in class, to Stone’s relief, Thassa isn’t there. The six surviving students fall silent when he enters the room. Neither respectful nor rebellious: just holding still for the sham of schooling.
They know everything now. They’ve passed around copies of the televised clip, downloaded onto their portable players. All but one were there that night, near accessories. Yet their faces interrogate him.
He should say something, anything. Clumsy or impotent, it doesn’t matter. He owes her that much. Instead, he directs them to the chapter reserved for the end of the syllabus: “Bringing It All Back Home.”
“Remember,” he reads aloud from Harmon’s hectoring text, “denouement doesn’t mean tying up all your loose ends. Quite literally, it’s French for untying.”
They don’t even bother to sneer. They will leave him to rot in the desert of pedagogy. Discussion dies on the vine. He asks for a volunteer for a first journal extract. Not even the Joker Tovar, in his silk-screened T-shirt-Dada: It’s not just for umbrellas anymore-takes the bait. Russell waits. He’s perfectly willing now to stand them off, to sit in silence for the rest of the evening and all that’s left of the semester.
Deliverance comes from the doorway. “Hey, everyone.”
Russell jerks around, between relieved and appalled. She’s dressed in a Thinsulate vest over a hoodie and capris, this winter’s worldwide youth uniform. She is as sober as anyone has ever seen her. But they all sense it, in her encompassing glance: whatever sadness she feels is just empathy for them.
She holds three fingers in the air in front of her, a scout’s salute, which she draws to her pursed lips. “Um, may I just say ”
She drags her backpack to her traditional seat but does not sit.
“Maybe some of you saw the story on the news? It’s just not true. It’s not like that. We all know John.”
None of them knows John. No one in this room knows the least thing about who they’re sitting next to. They’ve traded nothing but the thinnest poses. They should have known as much, as early as the chapters back in week three. Character is a performance born in a core desire that even the performer may not understand.
“That isn’t John, what the news said. John is someone with a great deal of weight? He never hurt me. Okay: he tried for sex by force, but eventually, he knew this was a bad idea.”
No one can look at her or stand another word. No one tells her to stop.
“I probably just confused him. He isn’t the first person he’s not the f
irst man I have ever confused!”
The circle of art students keep faces blanked, all of them would-be molesters.
“Please,” she says. “You know what this is. It’s nothing. It’s just desire. This doesn’t damage me at all. I’m telling you, this isn’t a trauma. I’ve written about this experience. May I just ” She pulls her notebook out of her backpack.
And with the steadfast failure of nerve that has penned his whole life, Russell says, “Maybe not right now?”
She looks at him as if he has just hurt her more than her assailant did. And she’s sorrier for him than she is for John.
The others, too, appraise him. At last they understand his ultimate lesson: Do as I say, not as I do. He’s failed them; he never really believed in journal or in journey. Story can save exactly no one. The only one in this room who knows anything of use is Thassa.
Sue Weston’s face sickens over with tics: How far did he get? Mason twitches on his chair’s edge, his fingers rapping out: You stopped him with what ? Roberto hangs back, hurt that the Algerian isn’t crushed, that she needs them all less than ever.
Only sphinxlike Kiyoshi Sims speaks. “We all knew there was something about you. But I never thought your whole mood thing is like a disease?”
Thassa shakes her head, smiling sadly at Invisiboy, daring him to remember, to step out from this fiction back into the real. “Life is the disease. And believe me: you do not want the cure!”
She is again untouchable. Thornell must have foreseen this, even as he forced himself on her. Rape as surrender. Self-annihilation. The man knew she would destroy him.
It stuns Russell the next morning to discover: her disease is still contagious. Life-threatening but not serious. He wakes up ravenous. He can’t remember the last time that breakfast seemed such a brilliant plot twist. The winter air through the wall cracks braces him, and the table spreads itself. The boiling teapot sings like a boy soprano. The raisin muffin crisping in the toaster smells like muscatel. He’s on a houseboat, moored on one of those mythical rivers that Information has not yet reached. That’s how surely this mood has come on.
How rigorously drab his life has been. He’s worked so hard at his own refugee status, piling up his Red Cross blankets into a tiny bunker. But all protection is powerless against this morning’s brisk breeze-this one. He’s only thirty-two, and more such mornings will keep arriving, despite his strongest resolve. What does he have to resent? Resentment is the coward’s retreat from possibility. He could resent the night sky, for thrilling him.
The teaching job was his just by accident; he might never have met her. And tomorrow night, he’ll have another two hours in the presence of joy. No one can punish him for that.
He grabs the newspaper from the landing and unfolds it on the kitchen counter. He thinks of her second essay-the flight from Algiers-and is kneed hard from behind by love: love for the morning thump of his neighbors through the muffling walls, love for his class’s doomed zeal, love for the lying politicians above the page-one fold, and weirdly, most weirdly, love even for himself, as if he, too, were somehow worth his care.
He takes the coffee beans from the freezer, spoons them in the grinder, and churns. No evolutionary psychology will ever account for the pull of that smell.
He actually sits to eat, like it’s some holiday. It is: Spontaneous Healing Day. He closes his eyes and holds a winter strawberry to the tip of his tongue. The fruit is spongy and sublime. The Arabica-as thick as his confusion-gingers as it hits the back of his throat. He can’t imagine what Thassa’s standing state of grace feels like; an hour of being her would blow him away. But this morning’s gratuitous pleasure gives him an inkling. Liver means heart and heart means joy and she’s stuck with the prophecy, and he is stuck with his gratitude for her.
He pictures the four of them-Candace, her Gabe, Russell, and his former student-on a makeshift outing to the Field Museum, sitting on hide beds around the fire in the massive Pawnee earth lodge, trading stories as winter locks in above the open chimney. They’re up in the second balcony of Orchestra Hall, untouchable by anything but music. Or in the nosebleed heaven of Soldier Field, trying to explain to Thassa why steroid-laced men the size of Arabian Nights djinns are smashing into one another. They mill around in Maxwell Street’s reborn flea market, combing through other people’s castoffs, looking for buried treasure. And the unassailable Algerian turns every neighborhood into an A ticket.
Light streams into his studio from the eastern exposure. The breakfast dishes wash themselves, and still he’s hungry. That’s how surely this thing has come on.
By noon, he’s buried again under other people’s soul-crushing dangling participles and incoherent yearning. And yet, today, he’s well. He himself may never be happy for more than a few island moments. But someone he knows is free, unsponsored, safe, well. He can stand near, catch the spillover. That’s enough. Better than he ever expected. He wouldn’t know what to do with more.
John Thornell is evicted from his jail cell over his continued demands to be locked up. Mesquakie announces his withdrawal from college. It’s not enough. Stone wants the man listed in a public roster of sex offenders, his hundreds of ink drawings defaced, and his journal burned.
Russell schedules an impromptu writing exercise for the final night of class. Journal and Journey’s last page. He carries the topic to school that evening on the train, as if it’s a lightning bug in a jar with holes punched in the lid. Write the journal entry for that future day you would most like to live. The creature flashes when he shakes it.
But when he gets to Mesquakie, the final class is already under way. A reporter from the Reader is sitting in Russell’s place with a flotilla of digital devices spread out on the table, conducting an interview. The journalist, Donna Washburn, has traced the attempted-rape story back to its guilty source. Russell fills with impotent rage. He wants to pitch the intruder out, break her voice recorder, and smash her PDA.
Instead, true to type, he stands feckless in the doorway. Who is he to fight the free spread of information, the public’s right to know? Here is his syllabus, come to life: local detail, close observation, character, tension, inner values in collision-everything he’s supposedly taught this semester, only real.
Thassa catches his eye in midreply. Never mind; I know this. I can tell this. Stone has no doubt that she can acquit herself. It’s the journalist he distrusts.
He takes a corner seat, watching his last lesson plan dissolve. Of course she’s public domain. Nothing the race needs ever stays hidden. Artgrrl and Princess Heavy compete to tell their Thassa stories. Entitled, the reporter milks them. Even Stone gets grilled. But when he makes a move to break up the circus, the journalist asks Thassa, “This hyperthymia. So what exactly is that like?”
A murmur in Tamazight. “It’s not like anything. It’s absurd, this so-called condition. The news made it up.”
“Okay, okay,” Donna Washburn interrupts. “Just tell me, as simply as you can: What does it feel like, being you?”
Thassa lays her palms on the table, beseeching. “I’m telling you it’s nothing. Everybody on earth has this symptom. They just don’t know it!” At this, the whole class laughs.
“All right,” the journalist says. “Let’s leave that for now. Let’s go back to your childhood. They killed your father how?”
Russell cuts off the interview after half an hour. When the miffed Donna Washburn leaves, he looks down at his notes, the topic for the final impromptu. That future day you would most like to live. The topic is gibberish, nothing he’d be willing to write on, himself. You know, Mister? You are a very unfair teacher.
He assigns the topic. Each writes whatever sentences his or her temperament permits. “Write what you know,” Harmon apes, as if it were possible to do anything else.
They do the assignment, then drag Stone to a makeshift end-of-year party, where they make him eat cheese fries and force him to listen again as they explain why blogs are better than print. Ev
eryone wishes everyone else happy holidays, and wistful goodbyes proliferate, like a disease.
The last word belongs to next week’s Reader. Underneath a photo of Thassadit Amzwar surrounded by admiring classmates is a half-page feature, part bio, part flubbed-rape account, part Maghreb travelogue, complete with quotes from a positive-psychology researcher at Northwestern about whether hyperthymia is real, all under the headline: SAVED BY JOY.
A day after the piece appears, Russell Stone gets an e-mail from the department head, thanking him for his job this semester but saying Mesquakie won’t be renewing his contract for spring.
Russell is flipping numbly through von Graffenried’s Journal d’Algérie-mass graves like potato fields, with plywood grave markers-when the phone rings. He checks the caller ID and it’s neither his mother nor his brother. Which means it must be Misty from Mumbai or Brad from Bangalore, calling to ask a few simple questions about his personal satisfaction.
It’s Thassa. From the South Loop. That she calls just when he needs to talk to her is hardly the one major coincidence that every long fiction is allowed. It’s not even a minor one.
“Mister Stone,” she says. “I need your help.”
“Where are you?” he shouts. He’s halfway down the stairs to the street before he hears the cranberry chuckle in her voice.
“No danger,” she says. “I just need writing advice!”
It seems the Reader article has brought out the readers. Dozens of the terminally miserable have gotten her e-mail from the college directory server and are deluging her with intimate inquiries.
“Strange people with Hotmail accounts want me to make them happy. One woman wants to hire me as her personal trainer. She thinks her soul needs a professional workout. Twenty-three messages in two days. What should I tell them all?”
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