Richard Powers - Generosity

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 his 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.