Richard Powers - Generosity

A Facebook user named OtherAngie confesses to being Jen. Her pokes explode, and within three days, her friend count skyrockets from 500 to 8,000+. Half the people leaving comments on her page dare her to prove the claim. She’s holding her own, spinning out elaborate accounts of her irrepressible psychohistory and her recent discovery by science, when three other Facebook users announce that she’s full of shit, because each of them happens to be Jen. Then a dozen people on MySpace jump the claim, and the game wipes out as fast as it started.

The tag phrase “u r so jen” disseminates through the mobile texting community. By the end of the month, the word graduates from adjective all the way to verb. I jen you not.

Sometime near the invention of writing, a single mutation began making its way through the human gene pool. The variant may have arisen once, somewhere in the Middle East. Or it may have appeared independently in the Arabian Peninsula and somewhere in Sweden. Whatever else the gene variation does, it prevents the lactase enzyme from being shut off after weaning. Those with the variation enjoy a prolonged digestive infancy and can drink milk their whole life long.

When tribes began to keep domesticated cattle, the variant humans had a novel advantage: a food source the others couldn’t digest. Some three hundred generations later, most adults of Northern European ancestry can consume milk with impunity, with the skill still spreading around the globe like a pandemic.

I want to know how long three hundred generations is, on an evolutionary scale. I want to know how fast lactose tolerance will move through the rest of the dairy-fed globe. I need to know how fast a tolerance for the lactose of human kindness might spread-how long it might take for the generosity haplotype to run through the race and fit us out with a new, stunning skill.

Thassa gets wind of her anonymous renown. You’d have to be an off-the-grid Tuareg not to come across the happiness gene somewhere in some medium. And people who react to stories about the happiness gene also react to stories about the woman who has it in spades.

She follows the mounting Jen speculation on blogs across the Web. She even leaves comments here and there, saying that no such creature exists. In fact, Jen is more imaginary to her than Gabe Weld’s little digital angel. If people want mystery and imagination and inexplicable temperament, they should just read Assia Djebar. The whole “genetically perfect happy woman” story will disappear as fast as last month’s runaway curiosity-a young man from Maryland who can tell with 98 percent accuracy when any other human being is lying. And Jen will leave no more lasting a trace.

The doings of Thassa’s alter ego are the least of her worries. The spring semester is nearing its climax, and she’s struggling. The demands of the film curriculum and her own appetite leave her overstretched. She’s taking Advanced Production; Culture, Race, and Media; History of Documentary; Location Sound Recording; and Ecology, the last of her general-education requirements. She’s singing in the Balkan choir and trying to form a Maghrebi one. She’s showing Kabyle films to the weekly CineClub, where she’s already given elaborate presentations on Bouguermouh’s La Colline oubliée , Meddour’s La Montagne de Baya , and Hadjadj’s Machaho . She’s fallen in with bad mah-jongg influences. And she’s started what can only be called a liaison.

It begins when Kiyoshi Sims, seated next to her in the media lab, shows her a transitions trick in the digital-video editing software. She, in turn, shows him how to sit for fifteen minutes in the school cafeteria without having a panic attack. Almost by chance, they develop a routine. He helps edit her semester studio project, a short composited sequence called Come Spring . And she slowly desensitizes him to going out deeper into public.

By late April, they’ve graduated to the point where he can sit with her in that famous blues club on South State on a Friday afternoon, long enough to eat something. They share fried catfish and okra with honey-mustard sauce and beers that neither of them touch, listening to the Delta twelve-bar keening over the sound system. Kiyoshi has grown so bold as to drum along on the tabletop. Now and then he even rips a little air-guitar lick, although his riffs are so discreet it’s more like air ukulele. He stops when anyone nearby makes a sudden move.

They sit in the shallows of contentment, just about to wrap things up and return to their respective Friday-night film editing, when Sue Weston discovers them. Neither of them has seen Artgrrl for weeks. They share a minireunion, after which a terrified Kiyoshi slips away and barricades himself in the men’s room.

Sue shoots Thassa an I’m-onto-you grin. Thassa braces, preparing an explanation of the Sims-Amzwar special relationship. Surely the art-school ecosystem is broad enough to permit such a symbiosis.

But Artgrrl blindsides her. “It’s you, isn’t it? The woman with the happiness genes. You’re all over the Net. Jen is Miss Generosity.”

Thassa flips a fork across the table, decidedly ungenerous. “Jen is a scientific hallucination.”

Artgrrl steps back, her face crinkling. “Of course it’s you!” She swallowed a little stimulant twenty minutes earlier, a prelude to Friday night, and it’s juked her up a notch. “I can’t believe nobody’s made the connection. I mean, those other stories about you, last winter? The whole hyper thing ”

The Kabyle lowers her head and places her ear on the tabletop. “There is nothing special in my blood.”

Weston sits down in Kiyoshi’s abandoned chair and places a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe not. But what difference does that make? This whole Jen thing is on the verge of being, like, the It deal of the season, and it’s not going to last much longer. You should go for this. Think of the eyeballs. You could post your films and get thousands C’mon, girl. Fame is the new sex!”

Thassa lifts her head, a dry little glint. “Hey! What about the old sex, first?”

“Are you for real ?”

“I can’t help. I come from a repressive culture.”

“Oh, my God.” The American covers her gaping mouth. “They didn’t like, cut you or anything, over there?”

“Oh, not that repressive culture! I mean Quebec.”

Sue’s grin tries to steer into the skid.

Thassa touches two fingers to her elbow. “You shouldn’t believe everything you think!”

The suckered American fingers her lips. “You lying little minx!” She steps back from the Algerian, approving. “You’re messing with me.” But before Sue can right herself, Kiyoshi returns, hoping to retrieve his computer bag and make a clean getaway before the human-contact thing gets out of hand. Sue reappraises the shrinking boy and giggles with new admiration.

Thassa follows Kiyoshi in escape. But before she can flee, Sue squeezes her goodbye, gauging her again with that gleam. You can’t hide from me , the look says. Have fun with Invisiboy, if you don’t kill him first .

Later that night, Sue Weston logs in to her blog and posts her new entry: “Bird of Happiness, Tagged.” She spells out the argument with a clarity that would make her onetime writing instructor proud. She links to last November’s StreetSharp transcript, the Reader article, and all the noise of a few months before. Just the facts. Nonfiction, without the creative. Her own kind of science, with first prize for priority.