Richard Powers - Generosity

She’s gentle with these people; it’s not their fault they’ve been misled. After a few days, she reverts to a form letter. It breaks her heart, but she has no choice. She tries to add a personalized sentence at the end of every reply. When she begins to get replies to her replies, she grits her teeth and ignores them.

Then the phone starts ringing. It’s Self magazine. Then People . Then Psychology Today . She gives a couple of phone interviews without even realizing she’s doing so. She gives another one, just by trying to explain that she doesn’t want to talk about what’s not worth talking about. A journalist from the Trib begs her to come down to Rhapsody and just have a sandwich. She can hear in his voice that he’s a fine man with a wife and children who only wants to do his job as best as he can; having a sandwich while explaining the massive misunderstanding can’t do any more harm. When Thassa gets to Rhapsody, there’s a photographer lying in wait alongside the journalist. And this photographer woman-a graduate of Mesquakie-is also just doing her job and living her art.

The interviewers keep asking her to describe exactly how it feels to be exuberant. She asks them, “You have never been?” Yes, they say, but all the time ? No, she says. Cheerful often. Exuberant sometimes, perhaps frequently, depending on the tally. Everyone alive should feel richly content, ridiculously ahead of the game, a million times luckier than the unborn. What more can she tell them?

They want to know whether she inherited her bliss, whether it comes from the environment, or whether she’s simply willed herself to be happy. She tells them honestly: she hasn’t a clue. They ask if other people in her family are as happy as she is. She says she’d never presume to say how happy anyone else might be.

After four days of the circus, she stops answering her phone. But it tears her up to hear the messages left on her voice mail. She can’t listen to them and not call them back. At the same time, she’d dearly like to finish the semester without flunking out. The only answer is to cancel her phone service and start a new one.

This doesn’t prevent total strangers who see the Tribune photo from stopping her in the street and greeting her warmly. But then, she used to stop total strangers in the street and greet them the same way. So it’s a wash, and she meets some nice people as a result. Many people she meets tell her how exhilarating it is, just to talk to her. That feels like considerable evidence, to her unscientific mind, that the disease is more contagious than genetic. But no venture capitalists step forward to fund a double-blind controlled study.

Where are Candace and Russell during all of this? They’re slipping off to lunch like international pleasure smugglers. She’s teaching him to cook. He’s sketching her portrait. They’re eating junk food on Navy Pier. They’re listening to Scandinavian reggae at the Aragon. They watch a Chinese gangster film in a hole-in-the-wall Chinatown theater, without benefit of English subtitles. They take Gabe to the Living Toys of the Future exhibit at the Science and Industry.

On nights when Gabe is at his father’s, they lie on Stone’s narrow futon on the oak floor, reading out loud to each other. They do scenes from Shakespeare-Rosalind and Orlando in the Forest of Arden. Jessica and Lorenzo under the floor of heaven. On such a night as this, they might be anywhere.

They carry Thassa around between them, always, blessed by the girl who has brought them together. They see her in every passing curiosity, all the sharp, bright details that now fill their days, feeling a gratitude as obligatory as taxes and death. “We should call her tomorrow,” Candace tells Russell, more than once, as they fall asleep holding each other.

They draft an imaginary book together. The force with which Candace urges the idea on Russell overwhelms him. It doesn’t feel like therapy at all. It feels like remodeling the house. It feels like gardening. It feels like having old friends over for dinner, only without having to clean up.

“Come on,” she cajoles, nudging him with her hip and settling down next to him on his futon. She brandishes his canary-yellow legal pad. “Come on, Mr. Wordsmith. Our one good chance to have things our way. So what do you want to call this thing?”

He can’t stop marveling at her. She’s turned into a goofy twenty-year-old. A grin as infectious as any virus. “Don’t we have to make a few choices first?”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Like whether we’re writing a novel, memoir, history, how-to, self-help, or cookbook?”

“Of course! You mean, like, facts or make-believe. Still a difference nowadays?”

For a while, anyway. Soon it will be all one thing or all the other, although Stone isn’t willing yet to predict which.

Time to choose. “Make-believe,” he declares.

“Great. That’s the one where they can’t sue you, right? So where do we start? We need a cast list. Dozens of three-dimensional, unforgettable characters who bleed when you cut them. People so real you can smell their toenails.”

Unit two on his obsolete syllabus: mannerisms, traits, and core inner values.

“Do we really need characters?” he bleats. “I hate characters. It’s such a cliché, characters .”

“Okay, fine. No characters. That’s new. That’s fresh. I like it. So what’s this thing about?”

On the second Sunday after Easter, Mike Burns, one of the inner circle of younger, magnetic ministers at the two-hundred-acre campus of an interdenominational megachurch in South Barrington, preaches a sermon at the third of four mammoth weekend services on the theme: Do we still enjoy God’s most-favored-nation status? The analysis is blunt-blunter than any recent balance sheet from Washington. Pastor Mike lists the symptoms of a national fall from grace. Drugs, promiscuity, and the occasional massacre plague the nation’s schools. Whole communities are drowning in the Internet’s cesspools. The Chinese economy is set to eat our lunch, along with most of our between-meal snacks. The banking industry has vanished into imagination and unemployment is booming. Violent crime and homosexuality are everywhere, and by any objective measure-standard of living, health care, and general quality of life-the whole country is scraping chassis.

At the climax of his daunting catalog, with a storyteller’s timing, Pastor Mike shifts to a checklist of bounties remaining to those who have kept faith. Americans are still God’s elect, the vicious envy of the rest of the world. Just as the lost could not abide Christ’s serene power and had to put Him to death, so, too, do other clans, terrified by the freedom of America, long to harm it.

But who cares what the enemy wants? the preacher chants. God wants your joyful noise. The best thing you can do for Him here on Earth is to parade His elation. And in the closing minutes of his sermon-a commanding moment cut into the highlights reel for inclusion in the church’s weekly videocast-Pastor Mike gives his flock a true-to-life parable:

“Now let me tell you about a young lady you may have heard about in the news, a girl from a persecuted minority family who somehow escaped from the fanatical, Islamo-sectarian hell of Arab Africa, a pilgrim soul who managed to make her way safely to college in one of the luckiest cities in the luckiest country on earth Science gives this survivor’s joy a medical name and tries to pretend that her perpetual bliss is nothing more than a random, chemical accident. My math- my science-works differently. Do you think it’s just an accident that this woman, who has been through horrors that make our own safer souls shudder to imagine, that this recipient of God’s unstoppable love just happens to be Christian? Do ya Huh? Just chance ?”