“That’s fine,” he tells her. “We’ll do it in a little while.”
She’s hyperventilating. Long, muffled sobs rise up in her. “I’m sorry,” she keeps repeating. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” And then, would-be businesslike, “I dropped my hairbrush.”
She tries to move her arm, to sit up. He recognizes the complete debilitation-the outermost promontory of an outcrop he’s visited. If the hairbrush were God’s magic talisman for returning the world to Eden, she would not be able to sit up and take it. She’s defeated by the future, and a few shots of follicle stimulating hormone.
He raises himself upright but can’t move either. He, too, is paralyzed, by a realization all his own. Maybe she doesn’t have hyperthymia after all. Maybe it’s the other, wilder ride, there all along and undiagnosed, hidden by a mighty effort of will. Only: what is will but what the body allows? If she has been acting up until now, she’s an actress of unthinkable natural gifts.
The dread that grips him lasts only half a minute, wiped away by surprise relief. Their problem is over. Her haplotype has no bio-value whatsoever. She’s just another garden-variety mood-swinger. The world will finally leave the woman in peace. When this news gets out, it will delay genetic improvement by years. The race will be thrown back on inescapable, everyday, ordinary, glorious, redeeming moodiness.
“Russell? Are they going to come after us?”
“No,” he tells her. Something lifts him up bodily, from the inside out. Happiness. “No one even knows we’re here.”
Her torso goes limp and drops back. She can’t have plunged often into this abyss. There’s too much shock in the fall.
He crosses to her and takes her hand. She reaches up and clamps his forearm like a tourniquet. She fixes her eyes on him. “Stone. Hajar . Am I something you might want? Would you like to just hold me for a little and see what happens?”
The sick thought comes to him before he can stop it: one little relentless sperm hitting home, and the $32,000 harvesting problem would be moot. But the problem is solved already. The minute the public learns just what her genes dispose her toward, the market for her eggs will burst as spectacularly as any speculative bubble.
He sits her up and puts his arm around her shoulder. She turns and grapples herself to his chest. He can feel through her shift the full, bony column of her. Desperate warmth, mistakable for anything. Holding her is like coming home. Returning to the soul’s first neighborhood.
“Thassa. You aren’t well. We have to take care of you. You’ll be back in Montreal tomorrow, and you can start to get better. We just need to ride out tonight. Nothing can hurt you; I’m here.”
One of a hundred things he’s learned from her. Assume a virtue, if you have it not. A little creativity with the facts. Lie, if it keeps you alive.
She grabs on to him like she’ll take him down with her. After a while, she breathes a little easier. Her head on his chest nods in agreement. “Yes,” she says. “You are right.” She pushes away and smooths her face with both palms. “I’ll be better soon. I’m a little better already, in fact.” She bends down and retrieves her hairbrush. She brings it back into the bathroom. She goes about the room straightening things, although there’s nothing to straighten.
The film speed gradually returns to normal. Her simple, wishful recovery floors him. It always takes him days to pick himself up again. Is that kind of force willable, or was she born with that as well?
A sound rises like the patience of the sea. He thinks he hears surf. He does, and only on the third breaking wave does he place it: her ringtone. She freezes, as if the device can’t hurt her if she doesn’t reveal her whereabouts.
“You should answer,” he says. “It could be Montreal.”
She goes to her bag and extracts the phone. She reads the ID and cries out. “It’s Candace.”
Russell cringes. His fingers ask for time, recalculating the need to answer.
Thassa monotones, “She wants to tell me to die in hell.”
He tries to object, but bungles it. The two of them sit and listen to the surf die out.
For a long time in the close room, he’s as crippled as she is. Then he masters himself, on nothing but silent words.
“Can I borrow that?” he asks. She nods, but hasn’t the strength to hand him the phone. He has to stand, take it from her lap, and step outside.
The world outside their rented casket floors him. Night is deep and crackling. The air smells of sap, as it must have smelled for millions of years before the first flicker of awareness. He walks down the deserted road, away from the motel’s throb, across a grassy slope and into something that might have been a pasture once. He climbs up along a fence under a stand of trees.
Life is beeping everywhere, past naming.
He walks until his pretense of courage feels almost believable. Then he opens the phone, looks at the lit dial, and calls back Candace’s number. Nothing happens until he presses a little green receiver icon, a silhouette of a species recently driven extinct by just this kind of device. At the press of that key, all his hopes and fears fly up into geosynchronous orbit and back down again, a lifetime and a few hundred miles to the west.
A woman he once knew picks up and says, “Hello?” Her voice peeks out over sandbags.
“Candace.”
“Russell,” she says, and the word splits through the middle.
“Listen,” he blurts. “This isn’t what you think.”
“Russell.” She’s not exactly crying. But the sounds can’t find traction in her throat. “It doesn’t matter what I think.” She talks fast, before he can embarrass himself further. “Where are you? What are you doing?”
He falters, but he tells her. There is trust, or there is nothing.
“Yes,” she says. “Okay. I figured you’d be together. You’re all over the news. The two of you. Your students are saying you’ve abducted her. She’s wanted for questioning. And you’re the most famous kidnapping suspect since the guy who stole the Lindbergh baby.”
He looks up into the bones of an enormous conifer. For a while, he wonders if he might not reply at all. “She called me,” he says. “She asked for my help.” He can’t even comprehend the public charges. He only needs to explain himself to his mate. “I’m trying to take her home.”
“Russell.” The name comes sharp and pointed, like a command. “Do you think I didn’t figure that?”
Light bobs over the hill to the west. A lone car slips down the road, some Jurassic creature. He draws closer to the fence and crouches in the dark.
“I told them as much,” Candace says. “I made a statement.”
He can’t follow her. “I don’t You mean you talked to reporters? About What about your job?”
At last the psychologist chuckles. “Job?”
The thing that clamps his throat must have some use. He just can’t imagine what. He sits down on the damp ground. All he can say is, “Thank you.”
“Any time,” she says. “What else is Welfare for? Besides: I’m getting as famous as the two of you. Up there every hour, on the hour. Not the most flattering clip of me, however. A little puffy-looking.”
“Fuck,” he whispers. Not a word either heredity or environment allows him. “Don’t people have anything real to concern themselves with?”
“Russell, the police are out looking for you. People are phoning in tips. A manhunt. Headline News is calling it ‘The Pursuit of Happiness.’ ”
“They’ll get us tomorrow,” he says. “When I take her back to the border. They’ll have our names in the database.” It would have happened today, if he’d given them a passport to process. The police will take them both into custody, until all the stories get ironed out. Thassa will be dragged back into the inferno. She’ll never get home.
“She’s in very bad shape,” he says. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I could come. I could be there by this time tomorrow. It might help.” When the two of them get arrested and held for q
uestioning.
Russell leans against his fence post, underneath the trees and turning stars. This is the woman who once counseled him, in the dark: Close your eyes and write a sentence in the air. Use your left hand. Just one sentence. A simple one. They silent each other. The stars wheel in place above him. And at the center of the innermost circle, he imagines himself signing the air: You’re already here.
When he gets back to the room, the TV is blaring. A man wearing a paratrooper baseball cap is carrying on about a dog who took a bullet for him. Thassa is asleep, curled up on her bed. He cuts the volume slowly, then shuts the set off. He lies faceup on his own bed, reading palmistry in the ceiling cracks. He’ll tell her tomorrow, at breakfast, if the manhunt doesn’t beat him to it. There’s been a slight change in plans. No need to call Montreal anymore, he supposes. It would only trade one anxiety for another.
He turns on his side and watches her sleep, across the gap of beds. Her chest moves so slightly that he must almost supply the motion himself. Even now, she amazes him, how she can find such peace, in the middle of her magnetic storm. It seems to Stone, in this moment, a greater gift: not something given; something made.
Today she felt what he has felt, one day out of every thirty. And she’ll feel worse tomorrow. She must live now with everyone, in turbulent smashed hope. Despair: the mother of science, father of art, discarder of hypotheses, a thing that wants only to eliminate itself from the pool.
But even now, if given the choice, he’d spare her. He watches the flimsy engine of her lungs, holding out against the whole weight of atmosphere. It doesn’t matter what Stone wants, what he believes. The genes of discontentment are loose, and painting the universe. Life’s job is to get out of their way.
He gets up, empties his pockets onto the writing desk, slips off his shoes, pulls a long T-shirt out of his bag, and heads into the bathroom. His Dopp kit sits by the side of the sink, wide open. He steps on a small, hard nub: a pill lodges in the sole of his foot. He looks down and sees three others on the floor. One more on the sink counter, next to the open empty containers. Robert’s Ativan. Russell’s doxylamine. Old Darvons from a wisdom-tooth extraction he was saving for a rainy day. Every remedy his kit has to offer.
He slams back into the other room and crouches at her bedside. He grasps her shoulder and shakes, first briskly, then with real force. She’s pliant, but makes no motion of her own. He shouts at her; the rage comes so easily. Her face stays composed, beatific. He tries to stand her upright and walk her on his arm. She will not stiffen into life.
He holds his ear up to her rib cage, his left eye crushed to her right breast. He’s sure there’s something; there must be something, however far away. Tide in a lake. Her surf ringtone, at the bottom of a deep well.
He holds his finger underneath her nose: the vacuum of deep space.
He scrambles to his feet and heads for the door, the phone, the bathroom faucet, all at once. He hears a voice tell him that he needs to get her to throw up. He can’t figure out how he’s supposed to do that. He sits down on the floor, shaking, clouded, and adrift. And in that instant of annihilation, art at last overtakes him, and he writes.
He can rescind this. He works his way back to the bed, pauses his hand under her nose again: the slightest, world-battering typhoon.
He hacks a path to the phone on the dresser. He flips it open and dials Emergency. He hears a woman on the other end, trying to slow him and get details. He doesn’t have details. The woman asks for an address; he has to scramble outside to read the name of the motel off the marquee. The nurse walks Stone through the steps of clearing the victim’s air passages, checking to see if she’s vomited up into her trachea. The nurse gives him a few simple commands to perform, which Stone confuses as soon as he hangs up.
He settles in to wait for the paramedics. He sponges Thassa and slaps her, trying to keep her as alert as possible. Once, briefly, her muscles take on a little tension, and he manages to walk her for six steps around the bed before dropping her back down onto it. He goes to the door of the room twenty times, looking for anything faintly resembling flashing lights. All he sees is a laughing couple in their late twenties, vivid as newlyweds, out in the parking lot photographing each other as they make comic faces.
He roots through her bag, looking for contact information, next of kin. A number, a datum, a molecule that will make sense. Some antidote. Something he can act on. The bag has nothing. A packet of sunflower seeds. Keys. A Handycam. The book of Tamazight poems he once saw her press to a window, its sentences filled with petroglyphs from another planet. Her copy of the text from his godforsaken class. No sane reason in the world for Harmon to be here, unless she meant it as his goodbye gift.
No cashier’s check for $32,000. No journal. Not a scribbled word.
In the infinite wait, he replays everything. All day long he saw her drowning. Yet he turned his back on her for who knows how long, to make his call. Left her alone in a fetid room with cable TV and all the toxins of the dial. Abandoned her to twenty-four-hour headlines, “The Pursuit of Happiness.” She had no antibodies for the dark. No practiced resistance.
He watches her, stretched out peacefully on her bed-almost a sane escape. He bargains, ready to accept anything in science’s arsenal. Cloning. Genetic editing. Yes to it all. Anything but this. He prays to something he doesn’t believe in, begging that she might already have visited a Chicago clinic and harvested.
He can do nothing for her but revise. And he has time to rework entire world anthologies. In the scene he keeps returning to, all the principals assemble in her hospital room. Aunt and uncle, brother, scientists, legal counsel. The group comes to a decision: posthumous reproduction. Try the whole experiment again, in vivo.
He promises God that if she lives, he’ll become another person.
A noise pounds on the air. It descends on the room, slicing and beating. The pulsed assault homes in on Stone until he grasps: the ambulance is airborne.
By the time the helicopter lands in a bare corner of the parking lot, every soul in the remote motel turns out to spectate. The newlywed couple, now vaguely criminal. An elderly pair in crumpled bathrobes. A four-year-old trying to break from his mother’s clutches toward the swinging blades. The motel manager, his finger in a beaten-up volume, his glasses dangling from a lanyard around his neck as he gazes out on the fulfillment of old prophecies.
The paramedics climb from the craft. Stone is out his door, both hands waving. They blow past him in a few steps, a minor obstacle. Everything is uniforms, straps, chrome, electronics, pumps and masks, clipboards and signatures and flashing protocols. Unthinkable capital, thrown at saving a single life.
And as the two med techs strap Thassa into the mobile sling bed, her eyes open. The world gives her nothing to focus on. Her gaze swims at random through the atmosphere, before snagging on Stone. It locks there, even as her bearers port her out the motel room door. Her eyes say, Why is this happening? They say, Forgive me. They say, Stone: Hajar: Please come with.
He stands in the parking lot in the cluster of onlookers, watching the helicopter lift back into the air. The metal insect shrinks away until it is nothing but strobing lights against the seamless night, the blink of an awful species that will succeed ours.
The figure strolls down the hill, growing. But for a long time, Tonia Schiff will be unable to tell anything. Mood, health, mental state: impossible to determine. Not until the figure reaches the café will Tonia even be sure it’s Thassadit Amzwar.
Greatly changed, of course. How could she not be? She descends deliberately-sure-footed mountain Kabyle. Her head cranes, measuring the shops and crowds and markets all around her. At home in the chaos of this day: that’s how Schiff will describe it in her film.
She’s in a loose yellow blouse over a long jade skirt. Her hair is scarved; she looks like a fifties fashion photographer stepping from a top-down Chevy. When she comes within singing distance of the table, her face breaks camouflage. But her smile
checks now, to see who might be watching. “Miss Schiff. Tonia. Imagine seeing you again. Imagine!”
They hug, as if they’ve known each other forever. As if they ever knew each other. The waiter descends on them as soon as Thassa sits. He starts in French, but she switches him to Arabic. They talk, an end-of-term quiz that becomes a game show that mutates to a sass match that ends in the waiter’s departure in grinning salute.
Schiff sits back, at sea. “What was all that?”
Can there be more amused embarrassment? “Getting coffee. Welcome to the Maghreb.”
Maybe Schiff will almost understand: the smaller the transaction, the longer the needed parley. I slow her down, let her come into her film the back way, through the suq of endless negotiation.
Tonia switches to French. The whole point of giving her a Brussels childhood. She asks how things stand, back over the border.
The spirit lifts her hands to her shoulders, searching for words large enough to say what is happening again, chez nous. “It’s Algeria. When we hit bottom, we keep digging.”
But the journalist deserves a more detailed answer, and the Algerian gives her one. She lists the week’s death count, says where the attacks occurred, guesses how long the bedlam will likely last this time. She has no hope that her country will escape its inheritance anytime soon. The future has no cure.
“It’s nice to escape for a little,” Thassa says. “Sane here, in this country.” She points to the west. “How long do you suppose that imaginary line through those mountains will make any difference?”
She’s a different person in French-broader and more nimble. The ecstasy is gone now, the untouchable buoyancy muted. What’s left to take its place can at best be called ease. Yet something in her still seems to Schiff ready to go as exuberant as ever, later in this life. Or early in the next.
Thassa asks about Schiff’s trip, but she doesn’t quite hear the reply. She’s looking across the dusty street, at a shirtless boy sitting on a three-legged stool talking to a yellow bird he pins gently between two fingers.
Generosity Page 33