Richard Powers - Generosity

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 first 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.