Richard Powers - Generosity

She carries the man’s correspondence around the globe, along with a dossier of files stolen from the archives of Over the Limit . She searches her folders for that broad-based survey on America’s attitudes toward genetic editing that will open her film in progress:

Two-thirds of Americans would genetically intervene to keep their offspring disease free.

Two-fifths would enhance their children, with the number rising every year.

On average, American parents would give their child ninety-fourth percentile beauty and fifty-seventh percentile brains.

These data keep her awake, working in her narrow rented room as the scent of jasmine blows through her open window. When jet lag finally catches her, she curls up on the hard mattress and goes through the motions of sleep. All the while, on the insides of her eyelids, hopes rise, taboos fade, miracles get marked down, the impossible goes ordinary, chance becomes choice, and Scheherazade keeps whispering, “What is this tale, compared to the one I will tell you tomorrow night, if you but spare me and let me live?”

A hurt message on Stone’s answering machine: Mister! I’m back. I went to your office hours, but they said you weren’t with the college anymore. I sent you a mail, but it bounced. Can you just tell me you are okay?

He writes back and says he’s fine. He’s returned to his real job. He wishes her well in the new semester. I hope you keep up your journal. He writes in a tone to preclude all reply, then checks his mail every fifteen minutes for the next ten hours.

Her answer is seven words: Did they fire you because of me?

No, he insists. That job was only temporary. He never expected to be renewed for spring. It’s the first lie he can remember telling that wasn’t prompted by real-time panic. He falls into the beginner’s trap: too many explanations. I have to focus my time and energies. I’m going to write a book.

She replies immediately: Mabrouk, mabrouk! Fantastic news. Maybe you can tell me all about it, the night of January 12? Candace and I are going to hear a mad scientist who wants to study me. Can you believe it?

Kurton is nursing the three-hundred-dollar shot of orange juice they serve in first class before takeoff when the flight attendant comes on the speakers like an old friend. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to American flight 1803 from Boston to Chicago. If Chicago is not in your travel plans today, now might be a good time to deplane.

He laughs out loud, which makes his seatmate stop thumbing her BlackBerry and look up in alarm. Kurton apologizes and turns back to his notes. He’s working on his comments for the debate with the Australian Nobel novelist and searching for a good hook. As always, random assortment and selection hand him one. He scribbles onto his card stock with a fountain pen: If the future is not your destination, now might be a good time to disembark.

They go down to Hyde Park together, Stone, Weld, and Thassadit. The event is billed as “a dialogue between the Two Cultures,” but seems to be a cross between celebrity gawk and gladiatorial combat. Russell is a mess, and not just because each woman has a hold of an elbow and steers him in a different direction.

Candace needed days to talk him into coming. “You can’t avoid her forever. She wants to see you.”

In fact, he needs another look at her, now that the evening class is history. He’s starting to think that he made her up, that she’s just a good-natured kid he happened to meet in her first flush of college life in an exhilarating city. Even so, one small dose of her could take him through this winter’s unusually rough patch and armor him for spring.

It’s not Thassa he most dreads. It’s the novelist. From their seats near the back of the auditorium, even before the writer steps onto the stage, Russell Stone eyes the exits. Years ago, in Tucson, he read one of the man’s books, a stripped-down parable in the Eastern European style, set in no place or time, imbued with only the faintest outline of a plot and with no pretense of a psychological character study to carry it. But as young Stone homed in on the closing pages, fixed to the cadence of sentences almost biblical, his own life fell away, replaced by a glimpse of human collective desperation so rigorous that it left itself no place to land but in a futile embrace. Stone finished the last paragraph lying on his back on the quarry stone of his apartment floor, unable to raise himself or stop crying or do much of anything except lie there like a grazing animal struck by something massive and ruthless beyond comprehension. When at last he did stand up, startled by the sound of Grace letting herself in the front door, he hid the book behind a shelf of essays. He never mentioned reading it to Grace or anyone.

That was years ago, when he was Thassa’s age. Since then, he’s felt no need to read the man’s six other books. And he’s never again cracked the cover of the novel that so badly wrecked him, afraid of what he might discover. Last year, hearing that the novelist had taken a visiting position at Mr. Rockefeller’s university, he stopped going to his favorite South Side bookstore, just to avoid an accidental sighting. He has avoided two previous, much-publicized public talks. Now he’s condemned to sit in this overflowing auditorium and watch the man whose words transcended the human condition display all the tics of the weakest human. Stone cups his elbows to his ribs and swallows down a small, vague taste of complicit shame.

“Tell me about your book,” Thassa whispers, as the crowd settles.

Candace leans forward. “You’re writing a book ?”

“It’s a fiction,” Stone says, and is rescued by a roomful of applause.

They come onstage together, the Nobel laureate, the genomicist, and the evening’s moderator. Thassa, seated between her escorts, asks Candace, “Which one?” Weld indicates Kurton, who-as the pale laureate studies his shoes-shades his eyes from the stage lights and gazes out, searching the audience for something, perhaps even for Thassa herself.

The “debate” unnerves Russell, right out of the gate. The novelist reads stiffly from a prepared speech, voice shaking. Stone’s man is the most painfully shy person who has ever been forced into a public spectacle. The writer’s thought is so dense that every clause tries to circle back for another try before plunging on. For every point Russell grasps, three break away into the undergrowth. He wants to get down on hands and knees and crawl from the auditorium.

The novelist’s argument is clear enough: genetic enhancement represents the end of human nature. Take control of fate, and you destroy everything that joins us to one another and dignifies life. A story with no end or impediment is no story at all. Replace limits with unbounded appetite, and everything meaningful turns into nightmare.

The quaking man sits down to damningly respectful applause. Stone steals a glance at Thassa; her hands fold in front of her mouth, like she’s praying. She’s off in a land he can’t visit. The country of pure observation.

The geneticist follows. Even walking to the podium, Thomas Kurton is charming. His shoulders bob like a boy on his first day of summer camp. He opens with a quip. “Every divide between the Two Cultures is bridgeable, except this one: humanists write out their talks and scientists extemporize.” Stone peeks at Weld; her knowing profile smile twists his stomach.