Richard Powers - Generosity

He never imagined that Grace might feel any less than he did. Just hearing her hum contentedly under her breath as she drove home was like returning to a country he didn’t even know he’d been banished from. But back in Tucson, they didn’t move in together, didn’t join futures, didn’t even change their old routine except for sleeping together eight increasingly tense times before her departure to France that May.

As she left the country, she goosed his ribs and said she expected great things from him. To date, his greatest achievement has been his appearance as a most convincing character in Grace’s deeply convincing first novel.

He writes down Grand Canyon w/ G , and in that instant, the one-minute timer starts beeping.

Other things his happiness encyclopedia says:

Well-being is not one thing. It surprises Stone to read that optimism, satisfaction, capacity for happiness, and capacity for unhappiness are all independent. He puts his average across the four at about.235, or just shy of respectable for the North American league. Nor is he much of a long-ball hitter.

Happy people have stronger social relationships, more friends, better jobs, higher salaries, and stronger marriages. They are more creative, more altruistic, calmer, healthier, and longer lived. Russell skips the self-scoring checklist.

Happy people know that they’re happy and don’t need to read happiness books to determine how happy they are. Russell’s book doesn’t actually say this. It’s what psychologists call inferred knowledge.

People in positive moods are more biased, less logical, and less reliable than people in negative moods. Score one for what the book calls “depressive realism.”

The prefrontal cortex of happy people lights up more on the left, while the brains of the congenitally dour favor the right. This seems to Russell either profound or meaningless.

Happiness is probably the most highly heritable component of personality. From 50 to 80 percent of the variation in people’s average happiness may be accounted for by genes. People display an affective set point in infancy that doesn’t change much over a lifetime. For true contentment, the trick is to choose your parents wisely. No argument at the Stone household.

Yet the conflicted book insists on a role for nurture. Joyousness, it says, is like perfect pitch: a little early training in elation can bring out a trait that might otherwise wither.

Stone assumes that Algeria’s Time of Horrors is not exactly the early training of choice.

Late one class, as Thassa is leaving, he works up the courage to ask her how she’s surviving the local Arabophobia. She just grins. “But I’m not an Arab! I’m Kabyle. You might be more Arab than I am. Stone : that’s Hajar . That’s a good Arab name. Hey! Are you planning any terror, Mister?”

His terror is all unplanned.

He’s like a man who has just seen some mythic creature fly past the window-teal and ruby against the concrete neighboring high-rise, a species blown a continent off course, not listed in any of the books he now spreads along the windowsill in the hopes of making an ID. A thing of complete unlikelihood. Game for anything. And anything’s game.

Stone shares an office with two other adjuncts-a converted smoking lounge on the sixth floor. There he holds his first student conferences. The half-hour sessions feel more like counseling jags than writing tutorials.

Joker Tovar drums on his thigh with a chewed-up uni-ball, his knee pounding like a woodpecker spattering a concrete phone pole. “Digital media is over,” he tells Russell. “Played out. Nobody’s done anything fresh for three months. The whole scene is Night of the Living Dead . And no one has a clue what to do next.”

Roberto the Thief sits forward on the hot seat, his soul stretched as taut as shrink-wrap. In a soft voice, he announces, “I go to the edge of the abyss every other night. Sometimes I look over.”

Russell asks, “Would it help you to talk to someone?”

Roberto just cocks his head. “I’m sorry Help what ?”

Charlotte, intrepid Princess Heavy, shows Russell her portfolio-charcoal vortices of human bodies that look like the Venus of Willendorf, which is to say, a little like Princess Heavy. She works snippets of journal entry around each image. One sketch, more sinewy than the rest, jumps out at Russell. He doesn’t even need the hand-scrawled accompanying passage: It’s like she’s glowing. Like she knows something. Makes me want to be a refugee.

Maybe it’s just a fragment of indie-song lyric. He flips to the next image, but not fast enough to evade Charlotte. “So what do you make of her?”

He flips back, holds up the sketch, lifts an eyebrow. He’s remarkably good at being the one thing his father taught him never to be: a fake.

Charlotte tsks. “I don’t mean the sketch. Is there something broken with her? Or something really fixed?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “I’ve never met an Algerian before. I probably shouldn’t be discussing-”

“No, of course not.” Charlotte retrieves her drawings and slips them into her portfolio. “Wouldn’t be caught dead discussing real life.”

When Thassa is five minutes late for her appointment, Russell unravels. The Islamic Salvation Front has sent a death squad after her. Or the America First people. Her total lack of depressive realism leaves her a walking target.

At eight minutes after the hour, she sticks her face around the doorjamb, puckered with sweet shame. He’s so relieved to see her that he stands up. He’s shocked all over again at just how short she is: the crown of her curly hair reaches no higher than his collarbone.

“I’m sorry to be so tardy,” she says. “I was talking to the security guard downstairs.”

Just the sound of her voice is like a governor’s pardon. Her accent has drifted: too much time in North America. He wants to stop the sound from drifting any further.

“He has a fascinating story,” she says, touching Stone’s wrist and making him sit. She sits just next to him. “He’s a Bosnian Muslim. Imagine: he taught himself English when he moved here, and now he’s writing a book!”

Russell treads water. “Do you know him?”

“I do now! He’s a beautiful man.”

The adjective stabs him. He’ll never be able to protect her from her own promiscuous warmth. “A Muslim,” he says, brain-dead. “Like you?”

“ Me? ” She laughs. “I’m no believer. I’m some kind of half-Christian atheist. My mother’s family have been Catholic for generations. Hey!” She shakes his arm. “Don’t look so surprised! You know that Saint Augustine was Berbère ?”

Russell didn’t know. His ignorance is more or less complete.

“From Annaba. A Kabyle even more famous than Zidane. But my father was so disgusted with religion that he wouldn’t let it in our house. I don’t know, myself. If there is God, he is just laughing at every religion we invent!”

He’s stunned silent: faith is not the author of her bliss. Blessed are those who do not believe, and yet see.

She carries on amusing herself. “You know, maybe those jihad suicide people will really get their seventy-two virgins in heaven-except they will be seventy-two American Christian virgins, saving themselves for their Baptist husbands!”