Richard Powers - Generosity

Weld looks up from the paper. “Is she all right?”

“Of course she’s all right. That’s the problem. She’s constitutionally incapable of being anything but all right.”

“Are you all right?”

He snaps. “Didn’t that Rogerian parroting go out in the eighties?”

She stays mild. His panic actually seems to fascinate her. “I’m sorry, I don’t see ”

“How would you feel if total strangers started begging you all day long for magic mood bullets?”

She looks at him, lips twisted in amusement, until he realizes what he’s just asked.

“Russell, this is one tough woman. She’ll survive a little media. She’s been through worse.”

“She called me for help.”

“Did she? Maybe she likes you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not a grave not a cradle robber, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“She’s nine years younger than you.” Candace Weld has done the math. “Is that a cradle?”

“A dozen people a day are asking her to bless them. Yes, that makes me nervous.”

The psychologist suggests several practical actions, starting with getting Thassa’s e-mail address removed from the public directory. Just the sound of her voice calms him. He could grow dependent on her competence.

“Don’t beat yourself up about this,” she tells him.

“But that’s my best skill.” The air all around him is full of wireless gossipers and news surfers. “Is it too late for me to become a real patient of yours?”

“We don’t call them patients,” she says. “And yes. It’s too late for that.”

“I’m finished teaching. The college fired me.” He feels nothing. He could be a moon of Pluto.

“Oh, Russell! I’m sorry. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

His silence is textbook: Show, don’t tell.

“That’s not fair to you,” she decides. “None of this is your doing.”

“None of it would have happened if I hadn’t said that damn word to the police.”

“I’m sorry. This must be a real setback.”

“I’m fine. Two jobs was more than I could handle anyway.”

She’s brutally comfortable with extended silence. After a bit, she asks, “So you’re saying we’re no longer colleagues?”

He hears. She’s only six years older than he is. He has already done the math. Happy people have more friends than unhappy ones. Happy people tend to be in long-term relationships.

He feels like he’s plunging. On the plummet down, he asks if he can make dinner for her, this Saturday, at his apartment. “I have one good recipe,” he says. “Mushroom asparagus risotto.”

She pauses long enough for him to think he’s made an enormous miscalculation.

“I can get a sitter,” she murmurs. “A really good grad student in child psych. She watches Gabe play video games all night, then writes up the child-machine interactions.”

“I’m sorry. Bring him, of course.”

“Are you sure? I will, then. You want the sitter, too?”

He just stares at her, slack-jawed, until she adds, “Joking.”

I’m caught like Buridan’s ass, starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction. I see now exactly who these people are and where they came from. But I can’t quite make out what I’m to do with them.

I need to slow down, to describe Stone’s terror of driving, his belief that he might be slated one day to hit a child. I have to mention Weld’s aversion to security cameras, her thrice-weekly yoga class, or how she must feed mealworms to her son’s horned toad when the boy forgets the living world. I need someone to transcribe for me the two lines of e-mail printout from Thassa’s brother that she keeps rolled up in the hem of her shawl. But the three of them pull me along in their own rush to arrive , before all the world’s books get rewritten.

I know the kind of novel I loved to read, back before fact and fable merged. I know what kind of story I’d make from this one, if I could: the kind that, from one word to the next, breaks free. The kind that invents itself out of meaningless detail and thin air. The kind in which there’s no choice like chance.

It would help tremendously if Stone could figure what the woman sees in him. She’s masterfully self-controlled. Her work has her confronting every behavioral strategy and dodge that humans can indulge. Yet she indulges him.

He takes a break from food prep on Saturday afternoon to phone his brother. Robert might have made a great psychologist himself, were it not for the Asperger’s.

Russell talks to his brother as freely as he ever has. “I can’t tell if she actually enjoys my conversation or whether she’s just lonely.”

“You saying there’s a difference?”

He hears Robert typing as he talks. “She must know I’m incapable of amusing anyone.”

“Which is itself pretty damn entertaining.”

“Maybe she’s taken me on as a case after all.”

A gap in the air. “Uhhn. You know bro? You may want to work a little on that self-esteem thing.”

“I can’t imagine what’s in it for her. All we ever talk about is Thassa.”

More furtive mouse-clicking. “Hang Who-sa? Oh, right. The smiley woman.”

“Robert? Are you online? This is like talking to somebody in the middle of a gunfight.”

“What? No. It’s nothing. Just some chick in Romania I play cribbage with on weekends.”

All research gambles against time. Kurton calls it hunting the mastodon . An unruly band with sticks and stones stalks a creature larger than all of them combined. Hang back and lose the prey; rush too soon and get gored. Smart risks live to reproduce; poor ones die off. Thomas Kurton excels at research because his ancestors stalked well.

But for all his research skill, Kurton has never published a word without fear of prematurity. The same temperament that disposes him to skeptical curiosity leaves him forever holding out for more data. True, the road to discovery is paved with the graves of the hesitant. Yet better one of those modest headstones than the more spectacular memorials, those bubble-burst announcements like N-rays or cold fusion.

Back when Joseph Priestley defined research, the race went not to the swift but to the articulate. Ask Scheele or Lavoisier who really discovered oxygen. The clergyman-scientist could hold on to phlogiston for years, almost as a hobby, and still make his immortal contributions to human understanding through sheer eloquence.

But back then, no one could own scientific laws. Now you can. Metabolite has successfully sued another company for publishing the fact that vitamin B-12 deficiency correlates with elevated homocysteine, a risk for heart disease. Myriad can charge $2,600 for a questionable breast-cancer-gene screen, while shutting down labs that develop better alternatives.

Thomas Kurton survives in this world because he’s good at knowing just when the eternally insufficient data must go public. But increasingly, the market is taking once-public facts private. Even colleagues in his own university department, funded by corporate grants, can no longer talk freely to one another.

Kurton doesn’t particularly like the capitalization of life science. But life science doesn’t particularly care about his private dislikes. Those who would keep growing must shed their legacy biases, the way that biology has shed everyone from Galen to Gajdusek. Someday microgreen machines will do to scarcity what Salk did to polio. Then the grants will exceed the applicants. Then we will defeat even competitive rivalry, and all this private profit-seeking will disappear into the eternal gift economy. Until then, Kurton hunts the mastodon as best he can.