Richard Powers - Generosity

The words chill him. “What do you mean?”

Candace studies the ice-coated windows. “Every conclusion in the article could be discredited next month, and journalists will still be reporting it five years from now.”

“But say they’re right. It doesn’t change anything in real life, right? I mean, they guarantee confidentiality. No one can find out who ”

Candace, professional Candace, studies him, deciding whether jaw-dropping naïveté is genetic or environmental. It’s not fair. He’s the one who was against Thassa going to Boston. Candace thought they would find nothing.

He assumes a courage that he distinctly doesn’t have. “Look. This isn’t necessarily a crisis.” He turns to Thassa. “If anyone does approach you about this you don’t have to say anything.”

Russell glances to Candace for moral support. She looks back, crestfallen. Too late, he realizes: his job was not to reassure Thassa about her anonymity. His job was to prove that her friends won’t change how they think of her. And in that, he has just failed spectacularly.

Thassa leans forward, indignant. “If anyone asks me? Of course I’ll tell them! What do you think? If this is science, give me vaudou. Le marabout! ”

As she speaks the word, the lights flicker and go black. Outside, the streetlamps, too, gutter and cut out. A howl comes from down the hall, then another yelp and a smack into a doorframe. A voice calls, “Mom!” Candace jumps up and blunders past the recliner, stumbling into the dark. Gabriel calls out again. “Mom, I didn’t do anything! I was just playing, and suddenly everything ”

Mother finds child, and child finds hand-cranked flashlight where it lies hiding in the front closet. The four of them huddle in the front room, sure that the power will return any second. Out in the street, a few scattered lights still shine, but the ice coating the windows blunts them to streaks.

When darkness breaks the ten-minute mark, Thassa suggests an expedition. Candace acquiesces. Gabe is ecstatic as he dons his coat; for once, Edgewater can match Futopia for adventure. They pass through the blackened foyer, navigating by the anemic, hand-cranked light.

Out in the courtyard, the world has turned strange. The moon blazes crazily, and everything they look on-trees and bushes, the spiked iron fence, the funeral procession of parked cars-everything has gone diamond, encased in a quarter inch of ice.

Thassa goes down first. She hits the frictionless front stoop and her legs sweep out from under her. She lies on her back, cursing in Tamazight, then stops, amazed, gazing up into a sky sudden with black. All four look up on a scene that electric Chicago has obliterated for a hundred years.

The Algerian crawls up on her knees, giggling in pain and begging the others to take care. They latch onto one another, inching forward together, an eight-legged, skating thing way out of its biome.

Other such colonies edge through the shellacked neighborhood, waving their weak beams. A few cars still slalom down the glazed streets, no faster than the sliding pedestrians. Branches are down everywhere, sheared off of weakened trees by the weight of their sudden shells.

A group of explorers gather outside a house, pointing their flashlights where a branch bigger around than Stone has fallen onto coated power lines and draped them across the roof like a giant’s aborted game of cat’s cradle. Thassa and company slide up to the gathering, obeying some atavistic urge to band together as the world comes apart. Gabe gasps in awe at the destruction. A puffy Gore-Tex kid midway in age between Gabe and Russell chants, “Lines are down all over the place. It’s like a war zone.” He holds up his cell phone as his authority. “The whole Near North is without power!”

Everyone slides about, giddy with apocalypse. Strangers chatter together as if they’re from the same close-knit tribe. Neighbors who’ve passed by anonymously every day for years now hug Gabe and pump Candace for her bio. No one knows anything about the ice storm, except for the weather bureau’s complete failure to prepare anyone.

A young Indian woman consults Stone about canned food and bottled water when a shock crumples the air behind him. The group gasps, and Russell recoils in a hail of sparks. A power transformer comes unstapled from its pole and releases a fountain of fireworks over the group. Everyone shrieks backward, and a couple fall and smack the ice. The Indian woman is down and shouting.

Thassa skates to her side, helping her up and calming her down. Stone watches from his prone position. She’s been through this before-ice storms in Montreal, explosions in Algiers. She helps the Indian woman away from the sparking transformer, soothing her. Then Thassa rejoins Candace and a frightened Gabe. She jokes and sings to the boy in sinuous Arabic. Before Stone’s eyes his sunny former student turns into a genetic aberration, immune to disaster, a product of chemical reactions qualitatively different from his.

Even Candace, the eternal champion of nurture over nature, hovers near Thassa with newfound deference. Stone sees her hesitation, the slight bow of her head. Candace, too, can’t help but marvel at that outlier data point, all by itself on the high end of Thomas Kurton’s graph.

The group splits in two, those for camping around the sparking transformer and those for exploring further. Distant blocks still have light, but they’re blinking out fast. Thassa leads her three down to Foster. The road is scattered with cars, some still creeping, but most left in crazy angles wherever they’ve slid to rest. The commercial strip on Clark through Andersonville is dim. Ice has them.

The air is chill, but not punishing. Not as bad as the February they’ve just come through. Colder air high above produces this supercooled lacquer of instant ice that, but for a few degrees, would have washed away as March’s final rain.

The foursome doubles back to the Red Line stop, to put Thassa on a train south. Thassa tows Gabe along by the back of her jacket, a compact droshky right out of Tolstoy. As the sleigh corners, the boy spins out, maniacal wonder in his eyes. The world is perverse and jagged after all. The boy absorbs this sudden wildness as if he’d willed it. He swings around and shoots Russell a crazed glance. The thrill goes right through Stone. He, too, the frozen boy in him, wants ice to be stronger than order.

They meet an elderly Asian in a parka coming out of the doors of the El stop. He waves both gloved hands: Don’t even try . “No more train tonight. Everything stopped.” He’s wearing the dazed little grin of disaster.

They peek into the turnstiles, where a burly CTA official in a puffy coat turns them away.

“How long?” Stone asks. But the uniformed man just shrugs.

The four of them mill near the station doors, waiting for a second opinion. The trains are stilled. The network is breaking down. The city slips into dementia. Stone is primed by the article: signals, synapses, precursors and pathways, transporters and receptors. The urban web, too, has unthinkably more ways of wonking out than of working properly. What thought is Chicago seizing on now, as its cells misfire?

A young gay couple slides toward them from the east. “Forget about it,” Gabe tells them. “They’re not running.”

“Get out! Are you serious?” They glance inside, but the CTA official nixes them. “Shit!” the smaller of the pair giggles, as if his music-player battery just went dead. “Plan B, come in. Where are you, Plan B, over?” The couple skates off into blackness, singing, I love to go a-wandering

Candace peers northbound down the tracks. They’re as blank and silent as the afterlife. “Sleepover at my house,” she announces. Her son cheers.