Generosity

by Richard Powers

  “Except for the bit about rewriting the script?”

  He looks genuinely puzzled. “We’ve been doing that all along, as well.”

  “And we’re not allowed to stop until every appetite is satisfied and every itch is scratched.”

  The honest bafflement only grows. What else would you suggest? “Speaking of appetite satisfaction: stay for dinner.”

  She pushes off of the car and drifts toward the house before the invitation is out. “I don’t know. What about this massive calorie-restriction diet you’re on?”

  “I make each one count.”

  Back in a rocker on the wraparound porch, she calls Nicholas Garrett, in Damariscotta. “Boss? Listen. I’m going to be a little delayed. Go on and eat without me.”

  She can hear Keyes cackling in the background: What did I tell you? A hundred bucks, suckers. Pay up.

  She tells Nick she won’t be too late, but no need to wait up. Then she rings off, to her director’s suppressed mirth. She sits in the rocker for a moment, examining herself. It’s not even an effort, really. Not even a decision. Just large molecules, passing their oldest signals back and forth across the infinite synapse gap.

  A noise comes from up in the woods. She can’t tell if it’s a mammal, bird, or something stranger. A throat considerably smaller than hers, but monstrous compared to the rest of creation, moans in spectral restlessness. She waits until the sound returns. It’s a call from back long before contentment and agitation parted ways. She walks around the side of the porch to get a look. There’s nothing to see but dark woods, the prison-bar stand of pines and spruce, the rising hillside, and needle-covered night.

  I have no center. The thought wastes her. Not even a thought: just a fact the exact size of her body. She’s disappeared into playing herself. She has no clue what her bliss is, and trying to follow it would lead worse than nowhere.

  She walks back around the side door to the kitchen, where he’s already started slicing a cornucopia of phytonutrients. “I’m sorry,” she says. She doesn’t even know what she’s saying until she hears it announced. “I’ve got to get back.”

  “Really?” His disappointment is insultingly anemic. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to stay? You should stay. You should experiment. Almost sixty is the new forty.”

  She snickers, as she sometimes does during the show’s more outrageous segments. “I can see that. You guys are all over these smart drugs already, aren’t you?” He doesn’t, she notices, deny it. “Unfortunately, almost forty is the new early retirement.”

  She walks back through the quarry-stone-and-cedar living room, past the shelf of pictures of the ex-wife and two kids, each already on their way to becoming multimillionaires. She grabs her bag and keeps walking. He follows her back out to the Camry. He doesn’t try to touch her.

  At the car, arm’s distance, she tells him, “Thanks again for all the cooperation. This will be one of our better shows. You make fantastic television.”

  He stands there, open as ever, ready for the next big thing. His crinkled face would simply like to discover what drives her. Born researcher. He may not have the happiness gene, but he possesses an ebullience she finds more attractive than beauty.

  “You should stay a little,” he decides. “I’m telling you. You never know what might make you glad.”

  “True, that.” She wants to beg him not to cure melancholy, not for another century or two, anyway. She hears the nocturnal creature call again, from up in the tomb of woods. She puts a hand on Kurton’s shoulder, pecks his pursed lips, opens the car door, and is gone.

  She’s seven miles down the winding, dark road when story crashes over her like a whitecap. She pulls off in front of a trim saltbox store whose laddered signage reads:

  GROCERIES

  GIFTS

  BAIT

  UNITED STATES POST OFFICE

  She fishes in her bag, finds the phone, and-something she never does-pulls back onto the road even while hitting the speed dial. Nicholas picks up. “Hey,” she says. “It’s me.” Whoever that may be. “I’m on my way. Get your hundred dollars back from Pomade Boy. And listen. We need to do one more show on this. Exactly. You’re a mind reader. I can’t imagine she’ll be too hard to hunt down.”

  She says goodbye and snaps the phone shut, feeling grim and purposeful and halfway to vague exuberance.

  Creative nonfiction comes down to this: science now holds routine press conferences. As the article hits print, Truecyte orchestrates their announcement about the network of genes that helps regulate the brain’s set point for well-being. The few dozen science writers, photographers, lawyers, and investment researchers who show up for the Cambridge event know the drill. All the actors in the network adjusted to the fact ten years ago: genetics has become genomics. Science has long since passed beyond the realm of wonder into entrepreneurship. New biochemical properties mean new intellectual property. Nobody mobilizes this much apparatus or lays in that much catering unless they mean to recoup it many times, down the line.

  The mobile crew of Over the Limit is there, of course. And if history ever needs it, they have forty-five minutes of raw video proving that Thomas Kurton is not the first to use the instantly notorious term. That honor belongs to a sixty-five-year-old geologist turned reporter for one of the last popular-science glossies not yet driven to extinction by the Net. It happens at around the thirty-eight-minute mark, after Kurton has talked through his slides, run his animations, and spoken about “a new era in our understanding of the foundations of emotion.”

  First, there’s an erudite question from a wire-service newbie about the ways in which other flavors of 5-HT receptor genes might be implicated. A veteran public-radio reporter asks about the penetration: What percentage of people with these alleles will actually be extremely buoyant? Someone else wants to know what role micro- and macroenvironments play in getting these genes to express. Kurton just shrugs and admits that the hard questions are still at large.

  Then the former geologist and soon-to-retire magazine writer uses the term that everyone else was going to report anyway. “Are you telling us that you’ve found the happiness gene?”

  “No,” Kurton says, the cameras catching his pained frown. “We’re not saying that at all.”

  It’s like Jesus commanding his apostles not to let on about the Lazarus thing.

  “What exactly are you saying?” Something about the science writer’s delivery makes the whole room laugh.

  Kurton takes his time. “We’re saying that we’ve measured a very strong correlation. People with this grouping of key gene variants will be far more likely to enjoy elevated affective set points than those who do not. All other things being equal.”

  All other things are never equal. But before anyone can point out that impossible catch, the éminence grise from the Times asks if the study has pharmaceutical or clinical implications. A grinning Kurton replies, “It might!” A sardonic chuckle issues from the audience, as they realize that’s his final answer.

  Schiff raises her hand. Kurton doesn’t seem to recognize her as he takes her question. “Your hyperthymic subject the one with the optimal combination? How many others like her would you say there are, walking around out there?”

  Kurton can’t suppress a covert grin. “We need more data on the frequency of alleles in different populations and the way they assort with regard to one another. Akiskal estimates that about one in a hundred people in the general population meet the research criteria for hyperthymia. If you forced me to guess right now, I’d say about one in ten thousand of those already fortunate subjects are also immune to unstable negative moods and intemperate behavior.”

  She does the math. “So roughly one in a million?”

  His grin fades, unsure where she’s going. “You could put it that way.”

  She means to ask: Why is the “optimal” configuration so damn rare? What doesn’t natural selection like about it? Why should perfect bliss be hundreds of times less common than
cystic fibrosis? But she misses her chance, and the rest of the conference plays out in variations on: How soon can you make the rest of us feel a little better?

  Even those journalists who use a question mark in their headlines barely disguise their excitement. Science has found a chief genetic contribution to bliss. Genomics now knows what combinations of inherited material help lower negative affect and raise positive. Happiness gene identified? Did you think it would evade detection forever?

  The Alzheimer’s gene, the alcoholism gene, the homosexuality gene, the aggression gene, the novelty gene, the fear gene, the stress gene, the xenophobia gene, the criminal-impulse gene, and the fidelity gene have all come and gone. By the time the happiness gene rolls around, even journalists should have long ago learned to hedge their bets. But traits are hard to shake, and writers have been waiting for this particular secret to come to market since Sumer.

  The wire services each run their own account, reaching a whole rainbow of conclusions about what, if anything, the new findings mean. The 1,100-word Science Times article makes only five to seven errors, depending on who’s counting. Newsweek puts the story on their cover: Better than sex, stronger than money, more lasting than prestige The secret of happiness? BeBorn Happy. Page 28 of the same issue is an ad for a drug company with a substantial financial interest in Truecyte.

  Two of the big-four late-night comedians incorporate the story into their monologues:

  So science has finally discovered that happiness is mostly inherited. But just remember, these are the guys who discovered that sterility may be inherited It’s interesting that, for some reason, the happiness genes aren’t particularly widespread. Not as widespread as, say, the obesity gene. Now the obesity gene: talk about wide spread

  The Truecyte announcement runs through the meme pool like a wave through a football stadium. Websites everywhere poll user responses; the story gets four stars for newsworthiness, four stars for importance, and five stars for entertainment value. By rough count, two-thirds of the commenting public believe that nature contributes more to happiness than nurture, up from 50 percent a year ago. Two in five believe that science will soon be able to manipulate the genetic component of happiness to our advantage. Most people believe that if Truecyte has done original work to make a useful discovery, they should be able to profit exclusively from it. Eleven percent of the general public thought the happiness gene had already been found.

  The discovery hits at the perfect time. The war has spilled over into a third neighboring country, and fatalities are at a forty-five-month high. A new study from the Union of Concerned Scientists shows that global greenhouse-gas emissions may have been greatly underestimated. Scattered outbreaks of a new fatal flu strain come in from central Asia. Recent tests show heavy-metal contaminants increasing dramatically throughout the food chain. Two decades of Ponzi schemes have unraveled the global financial markets and erased trillions of dollars of imaginary wealth. A terrorist cell in Southern California is rounded up, halfway to constructing a dirty bomb.

  And scientists discover the genetic cause of joy.

  In the final cut of “The Genie and the Genome,” finished just after the first article comes out in The Journal of Behavioral Genomics, Kurton refers to her simply as “Jen.” He describes how the group predicted her genomic signature, based solely on her psychological tests. He shows a color-enhanced animation of her fMRI:

  Coordinated activity in these areas associates with sustained positive emotions. Look at her baseline: it’s a symphony.

  His excitement ratchets up when talking about the process:

  You feed the amplified DNA fragments into this high-throughput optical reader We can do a temperament analysis for under $1,000.

  “Do you take Visa?” the off-camera host asks. His smile says: Choose your payment method.

  He’s guarded about the interconnected patents his data rely on, but more voluble about the countless interconnected enzyme factories that contribute to the brain’s reward circuitry. He concedes the many genes that emotional well-being involves. Genes that control the pathways and synthesis of crucial neurotransmitters. Genes that assemble the machinery of neurotransmitter release and reuptake. Genes that wire together the centers of perception, memory, and emotion

  But after another splice, he’s addressing an auditorium full of electrified people. Sixty percent of the room wants to sic the government regulators on him and the other forty are ready to send him to Stockholm. He’s in front of a huge projected slide, twenty feet wide. As he paces in front of the image, waving and conducting, a graph dances across his body.

  The cloud of scatterplots is a thin cigar tipped along a rising diagonal. The vertical axis aggregates selected indicators of subjective wellbeing. The horizontal axis aligns the alleles for genes whose precise identities Thomas Kurton and company now make public for the first time.

  He doesn’t have to draw the implied rising line. The line is there, running through the densest section of the cigar-shaped cloud. Data points fall all over the plane, but not randomly. The points rise as the number of repeated segments in certain gene polymorphisms changes. He focuses on a point high up to the far right, and calls it Jen.

  Jump back to the smart house in Maine. Kurton’s eyes shine for the show’s host, or maybe its million viewers, live and on the Web.

  Think about falling in love. How vibrant and wise you feel. Everything full of meaningful secrets. Amazing things, just about to happen Well, Jen and others up at the high end are like natural athletes of emotion. They fall in love with the entire world. And the world can’t help reciprocating. Genes plus environment, in a positive-feedback loop

  Schiff lobs all the familiar criticisms at him, but he stays Zen.

  Sure, well-being is a quantitative trait. Yes, these genes interact with dozens of others, and with scores of other regulatory factors. We are devoting a whole lot of microarrays and computer cycles to untangling those interactions Of course environment plays a role in their expression. But all these genes affect the way we engage the environment in the first place. There’s even some evidence that an adverse environment can strengthen the expression

  Off camera, Tonia asks:

  But the more of these alleles I have, the greater my joie de vivre?

  His face admits to complexities.

  We don’t even say that. We’ve simply noted a correlation

  Shot-reverse to Schiff, who is enjoying this ride. She herself is far too sunny for her own good. It hasn’t yet dawned on her that this story might actually be nonfiction. She doesn’t get that until a few hours after they stop filming. For the moment, she asks:

  And you can look directly at my genes and tell me my alleles?

  Kurton beams and says:

  Give me your coffee cup. We can take a swab off that.

  They cut the sequence into the piece’s climax. The assembled show airs two weeks later.

  PART FOUR

  THE NEXT FIRST PAGE

  . retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

  – Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  Russell and Candace watch the recorded show together, in her apartment, on her tiny flat-panel television, after Gabe goes to bed. Neither has the nerve to watch the segment alone. Nor do they have the nerve to see each other again, without pretext.

  They kiss each other experimentally on Stone’s arrival, to Gabe’s disgust. “What is this, France or something?” But Russell appeases the boy by spending a little while in Futopia with him, before lights-out for children and showtime for adults.

  Then Russell and Candace settle in, deployed eighteen inches apart on her living room sofa. They kiss again, riskier, as the recording starts. “Thanks,” Candace says. “Helps. Much better than a tranquilizer.”

  Stone almost jumps out of his skin. He has taken half a milligram of Ativan, from a little plastic bottle full of them borrowed from his brother, just before arriving.

  The woman smoothes her hair and st
ares at the screen. Under her breath she tells herself, “Maybe just as habit-forming, Candace.”

  “It’ll be fine,” he says. He can’t figure out what he’s talking about. He finds her mouth again. A moment later, he’s not sure if he really said anything at all.

  Both of them are helpless and pounding by the time “The Genie and the Genome” starts. Each tries to concentrate, but they’re throbbing in unison, audible to each other. They try to follow Kurton’s argument, the one about our vast increase in the ability to improve people. The man seems somehow different from the person they saw onstage, the one who lured Thassa to Boston. “He is charming,” Candace concedes, her hand tracing circles on Russell’s thigh. “There’s no arguing that.”

  Stone should say something. “There isn’t?”

  The show sweeps them headlong, rushed by CGI, rapid crosscuts, and a ruthless synth soundtrack. Everything about the show makes science as sexy as sports. Neither of them watches enough TV to be inoculated. The message floods them: strengthen, sharpen, enhance your chromosomes, be smarter, healthier, and truer. Thrive and be what you want, feeding every need. Live forever, suffused in joy.

  Kurton mentions Thassa by pseudonym, near the show’s end. He talks of her like some design template for the future. “We cured smallpox,” he says. “We eradicated polio. We can hunt down and wipe out misery. There’s no reason why every one of us can’t be equals to our ideal.” In the last lines of the profile, the scientist says, “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that it’s humanity’s job to bring God about.”

  By then, the two viewers are long gone, the television muted, Candace up and astride Russell, bobbing herself to a pulse they find together, Russell her fuse beneath her. They end up shattered, crumpled into each other, a double collapse, both so grateful to be back here, after so long away.