Richard Powers - Generosity

“But they can do whatever they want with it?”

“Well, I can’t think what they might do aside from study it.”

“And when she writes, ‘Everything is much more interesting than I thought ’?”

“I think it’s safe to conclude that that’s a good thing. Russell? Can I call you back in an hour, after Gabe goes down?”

She does. And whether it’s the lateness of the hour, his Zen cupboard bedroom, the blackness cut by the single megaphone beam of streetlamp out his window, the shoehorn of phone pressed against his ear, the chill of his arms above the down comforter, or the sound of the woman’s restorative voice, Stone feels it might be safe to conclude that Candace Weld is, herself, another good thing.

A Truecyte geneticist named Dr. Julia Thorn takes Thassa’s family history. Thassa gives what she can, although her knowledge of medical details is spotty at best. Dr. Thorn asks if they might test and take samples from her near kin. Thassa phones her aunt in Montreal, who declines on grounds of privacy. Her uncle in Paris refuses out of a deep-seated suspicion of all things biotechnological. Her brother, Mohand, is currently under house arrest in Algiers for participating in a march for Kabyle autonomy back in November.

Dr. Thorn can’t help asking. The question isn’t scientific; the answer nothing but anecdotal. “Are any of your relatives like you?”

“They say I’m just like my mother’s sister. Everyone always calls her the Sufi.”

“Could we test her?”

“Oh, heaven no! She died in the Relizane massacres. With many others.”

Candace calls Russell at that same late hour each night Thassa is in Boston. Weld’s field has known about the need for ritual almost as long as Stone’s. And when the two of them go on talking three nights a week, even after Thassa returns to Chicago, this ritual becomes theirs:

The phone rings at 11:00 p.m., an hour after the cutoff set by every civilized rule for the day’s last call. He picks up on the second ring and says “Hello?” as if it might be anyone from prank radio to Homeland Security. She tries for silly- I was afraid you might say that or How does “hello” make you feel? -and he’ll smile in his street-lit room and say, “Hey.” Then they’ll be off and running, comparing notes about all old things under the sun.

Sometimes they talk for only ten minutes. Sometimes they go an hour. Thassa is no longer the sole focus of their investigation. Mostly they talk about humans, their infinite gullibility, and how you almost have to love them, just for the endless ways they’re capable of being duped.

They become an ancient couple, and all their previous incarnations-Candace and her ex, Marty; Russell and his abortive Grace-become just experiments each tried once, failed hypotheses that now, at worst, provide good punch lines. They’ve both required some trial and error to hit on the obvious: talk beats passion, two out of three falls.

Russell can’t imagine Weld’s motives, but he’s deeply grateful for the distance. It helps him enormously, not to have to look at her. So long as her face doesn’t set him off, he doesn’t have to time-travel. All the real-world stresses that Stone can never handle in real time he can cope with like this -in words, revised together, stories at night that last only a few minutes and give him a day to prep for, in between.

He hears her doing chores as she talks. Picking up toys. Pulling dishes from the dishwasher. They are the sounds of the life he always thought might be his someday. The pleasures he has long found only in books.

She asks him about the work in progress, the book that Thassa mentioned in Hyde Park. She’s wanted to ask for weeks. Her waiting so long to raise the topic moves him.

“I lied,” he says. “To keep Thassa from worrying about me. It’s all in my head. There is no book. There’s not even a nonbook.”

“Do you wish there were?”

It no longer bothers him, the echo therapy. He knows now that it’s just Candace, doing what she’s trained to do. If she stopped doing it, she’d be someone else.

“I don’t know. I’ve lost some basic human sympathy. I can see fantastic characters. Hear them perfectly. My head hurts sometimes, they’re so close. I can see exactly what they’re doing to themselves. But I get ill the minute I try to describe them.”

“Use someone else,” she whispers, as sexy as the dark. “Find a teller.”

At the sound of her, his soul breaks out and tours. She’s right. The city at this hour is packed with potential narrators. On a back street in Wrigleyville, two of his former students are smoking salvia and filming each other traveling through the universe, for posting on YouTube. On Oak Street Beach, an old Polish civil servant with one and a quarter legs makes her annual February midnight plunge into the freezing lake, with her husband as lifeguard. In an invisible squat on the roof of the Aon Center, an illegal Tanzanian immigrant protects the whole town from destruction through the sheer force of his will. Any one of them could rescue Stone’s fiction from crib death.

He does not tell her the real problem: fiction is obsolete. Engineering has lapped it.

What would his book be about, if it dared set foot in this world? She doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t say. It might be about the odds against ever feeling at home in the world again. About huge movements of capital that render self-realization quaint at best. About the catastrophe of collective wisdom getting what we want, at last.

He gives up his secret to her: the three stories he published once, in another life. He tells her how badly he wishes he could unpublish them all.

She tells him that even God was appalled by His first draft. Candace’s encouragement sounds exactly like the kind he once offered his students.

She says, “Are you in your bedroom?”

The question quickens him.

“Are you lying down? Do me a favor. Close your eyes and write a sentence in the air. Use your left hand. Just one sentence. A simple one.”

He writes: They sit and watch the Atlas go dark.

“How does that feel?”

It feels strange. Almost alive.

“Does it make you want to know what happens next?”

“I’m afraid that was the next.”

“Then write what happens just before.”

He has no trouble writing, he tells her. It’s the permanent public archive that terrifies him.

She says: Go to one of the free blog giveaway sites. Create an anonymous log-in, an altered ego. Just start watching, out loud, in words. Just say what has happened to you, in this life.

“I can’t,” he tells her. “That’s the problem. It’s not mine to tell.”

Then change it all, slightly, so no one gets hurt. Set the tale in some imaginary landscape, some otherworldly Chicago of naked invention. Forget about scene or plot or dialogue. Engineer a style you yourself would never dream of using. Confess or lie, show or tell, over-or underwrite: it doesn’t matter. Your words will be public again, and no one will even know they exist, except one or two accidental scavengers. And everything you write can alter in a heartbeat.

He does as commanded. It’s almost a pleasure, two nights later, to describe how miserably the experiment fails.