Richard Powers - Generosity

Light streams into his studio from the eastern exposure. The breakfast dishes wash themselves, and still he’s hungry. That’s how surely this thing has come on.

By noon, he’s buried again under other people’s soul-crushing dangling participles and incoherent yearning. And yet, today, he’s well. He himself may never be happy for more than a few island moments. But someone he knows is free, unsponsored, safe, well. He can stand near, catch the spillover. That’s enough. Better than he ever expected. He wouldn’t know what to do with more.

John Thornell is evicted from his jail cell over his continued demands to be locked up. Mesquakie announces his withdrawal from college. It’s not enough. Stone wants the man listed in a public roster of sex offenders, his hundreds of ink drawings defaced, and his journal burned.

Russell schedules an impromptu writing exercise for the final night of class. Journal and Journey’s last page. He carries the topic to school that evening on the train, as if it’s a lightning bug in a jar with holes punched in the lid. Write the journal entry for that future day you would most like to live. The creature flashes when he shakes it.

But when he gets to Mesquakie, the final class is already under way. A reporter from the Reader is sitting in Russell’s place with a flotilla of digital devices spread out on the table, conducting an interview. The journalist, Donna Washburn, has traced the attempted-rape story back to its guilty source. Russell fills with impotent rage. He wants to pitch the intruder out, break her voice recorder, and smash her PDA.

Instead, true to type, he stands feckless in the doorway. Who is he to fight the free spread of information, the public’s right to know? Here is his syllabus, come to life: local detail, close observation, character, tension, inner values in collision-everything he’s supposedly taught this semester, only real.

Thassa catches his eye in midreply. Never mind; I know this. I can tell this. Stone has no doubt that she can acquit herself. It’s the journalist he distrusts.

He takes a corner seat, watching his last lesson plan dissolve. Of course she’s public domain. Nothing the race needs ever stays hidden. Artgrrl and Princess Heavy compete to tell their Thassa stories. Entitled, the reporter milks them. Even Stone gets grilled. But when he makes a move to break up the circus, the journalist asks Thassa, “This hyperthymia . So what exactly is that like?”

A murmur in Tamazight. “It’s not like anything. It’s absurd, this so-called condition. The news made it up.”

“Okay, okay,” Donna Washburn interrupts. “Just tell me, as simply as you can: What does it feel like, being you?”

Thassa lays her palms on the table, beseeching. “I’m telling you it’s nothing. Everybody on earth has this symptom. They just don’t know it!” At this, the whole class laughs.

“All right,” the journalist says. “Let’s leave that for now. Let’s go back to your childhood. They killed your father how?”

Russell cuts off the interview after half an hour. When the miffed Donna Washburn leaves, he looks down at his notes, the topic for the final impromptu. That future day you would most like to live. The topic is gibberish, nothing he’d be willing to write on, himself. You know, Mister? You are a very unfair teacher.

He assigns the topic. Each writes whatever sentences his or her temperament permits. “Write what you know,” Harmon apes, as if it were possible to do anything else.

They do the assignment, then drag Stone to a makeshift end-of-year party, where they make him eat cheese fries and force him to listen again as they explain why blogs are better than print. Everyone wishes everyone else happy holidays, and wistful goodbyes proliferate, like a disease.

The last word belongs to next week’s Reader . Underneath a photo of Thassadit Amzwar surrounded by admiring classmates is a half-page feature, part bio, part flubbed-rape account, part Maghreb travelogue, complete with quotes from a positive-psychology researcher at Northwestern about whether hyperthymia is real, all under the headline: SAVED BY JOY.

A day after the piece appears, Russell Stone gets an e-mail from the department head, thanking him for his job this semester but saying Mesquakie won’t be renewing his contract for spring.

Russell is flipping numbly through von Graffenried’s Journal d’Algérie -mass graves like potato fields, with plywood grave markers-when the phone rings. He checks the caller ID and it’s neither his mother nor his brother. Which means it must be Misty from Mumbai or Brad from Bangalore, calling to ask a few simple questions about his personal satisfaction.

It’s Thassa. From the South Loop. That she calls just when he needs to talk to her is hardly the one major coincidence that every long fiction is allowed. It’s not even a minor one.

“Mister Stone,” she says. “I need your help.”

“Where are you?” he shouts. He’s halfway down the stairs to the street before he hears the cranberry chuckle in her voice.

“No danger,” she says. “I just need writing advice!”

It seems the Reader article has brought out the readers. Dozens of the terminally miserable have gotten her e-mail from the college directory server and are deluging her with intimate inquiries.

“Strange people with Hotmail accounts want me to make them happy. One woman wants to hire me as her personal trainer. She thinks her soul needs a professional workout. Twenty-three messages in two days. What should I tell them all?”

He tells her to throw the e-mails in the trash and empty it.

“I can’t do that! That would be rude. I must write them something . Remember Mr. Harmon?”

“Thassa. Be careful. Don’t tell these people anything about yourself.”

“They don’t want to know anything about me . They just want to know about themselves. They’re so sure I have a secret. I could make up anything at all, and they would believe me.”

“Don’t encourage them. It’ll just make things worse.”

“Thank God I go back to Montreal tomorrow. Canadians are so much easier.”

She asks about his holiday plans. He makes something up. By now I know this man: all the beautiful five-paragraph personal essays he composes for her and then redlines away, in two heartbeats. He doesn’t tell her he won’t be coming back to school in the spring. He just tells her to take care.

“You take care, too. Thank you for your class. I learned so much.” He mumbles some meaningless reply, which makes her laugh. In return, she burbles out, “Happy New Year, Mister Stone! See you then?”

He visits Candace Weld’s office, without an appointment. “It’s a total train wreck. Right out of my worst nightmares.”

Candace studies the Reader article. She doesn’t scold him now; she just reads with practiced steadiness.

“I should have thrown the journalist out the minute I got to class.”

“She would have cornered Thassa afterward.” There’s something reconciled in her voice, the surrender to a development that psychology is powerless to deflect. “It’s just a squib in a local freebie paper. They come and go by the thousands.”

“She’s getting dozens of e-mails from people who want to buy whatever she’s taking.”