Richard Powers - Generosity

“She’ll be fine,” Candace says, peeling his claw off of her arm and taking it in her hand.

Of course, she will. He’s never doubted that Thassa would be anything less.

The soundstage is a low-ceilinged box packed with raked theater seats. It’s filled with dolly-mounted cameras, floodlights, boom mics, flat-screen monitors, and skeins of cabling as thick as anacondas. In a glass-encased mezzanine, Stone can see banks of mixing boards-a private space program or an underground command bunker. The whole show is operated by tattooed, headset-wearing kids who look like his former students. They probably are Mesquakie students, from a few years ago at most.

The audience sits in a dark oubliette. In the center of the LED-speckled blackness, bathed in grow lights so bright it hurts Stone’s eyes to look, sits a cozy living room ripped out of someone’s mission-style home: a flower show in the middle of an airplane hangar.

Five camera crews dolly around like crack artillery emplacements. One of the squads is smaller, their gear more mobile. Russell knows the woman standing next to the cameraman before he recognizes her. He looks away, somehow guilty.

Candace notices. “Is that who I think it is?”

“Who?” he says. But she’s impossible to mistake: Thomas Kurton’s television interviewer. Popular science’s most striking public face. The woman who presided over their first moments of sexual exploration.

“What are they doing here?” Candace asks. “Didn’t they film their show already?”

Her question is lost in an audience swell. Someone walks out onstage, but it’s not Oona. It turns out to be the audience’s personal trainer. He starts with a few jokes that soon have the audience in the aisles. Stone gets only half of them. He turns to Candace for explanation. She’s pinching the bridge of her nose and smiling stoically. At what, Stone can’t say.

The trainer talks the audience through the next forty minutes. He explains how important it is that everyone be themselves and respond honestly to any meltdowns that Oona and her guests get into. Monitors spread throughout the room will give simple cues to help indicate where laughter or surprise might be appropriate. “So let’s try out a couple of responses, all right? I said, ‘All right?’ I can’t hear you ”

The audience eats it up. Stone shoots a dazed look at the woman on his right. She’s a kindly forty-year-old pukka elf who reminds him exactly of his sister, if he had a sister. She sneaks him a grin while shaking her head and applauding along with everyone. Stone starts to clap, too. He keeps his eyes on the trainer, afraid even to glance at Candace.

The personal trainer takes them through a gamut of responses. They get quite good at shared dismay, shock, and pleasure. When the audience is one finely tuned globe of communal good feeling, the trainer tells two more jokes and leaves to an ovation. Music starts up, brassy and buoyant. A voice comes out of nowhere and the audience starts pumping, even before Stone can check the monitors for a cue.

Oona skips into the glowing living room, warm and confident and a little abashed by the affection flowing from her hundreds of studio friends. Exhilaration courses over the rows of seats. When she steps to the front of the stage and smiles, Stone feels he’s known this woman forever. She’s someone he’d like to have as a friend-girl in an adjoining cubicle at Becoming You . She’s the person his mother was, when his mother was young and still went out in public. He wants to reassure Oona, to thank her for her wry normality. She scares the hell out of him, and she hasn’t even started talking.

Something pulls at his fingers. He looks down at Candace, who is trying to free her crushed hand from his grip.

Stop worrying , she mouths, over the applause. It’ll be fine.

He’s shot through with gratitude for this woman. He couldn’t even sit in this place without her, let alone pretend that anything might be fine .

Oona waves her hands, helpless with pep. “Thank you, everybody. You’re all simply amazing!”

The uproar crests again.

“Today on the show Thank you! Today on the show ”

The word sends Stone into a fugue. They’re on a show . Show, don’t tell. All for show. If bad things come down while they’re here, they can just return to the unshown.

“. we’re going to talk with several experts in different fields who’ll tell us-ready for this?-the secret of happiness.”

The audience erupts again, as if they already possess it.

“Yep. How about that ? That’s got to be worth your price of admission, right there!”

She makes several more promises, all in the voice of everyone’s favorite high school English teacher. A great surge of appreciation ends in a sudden mood drop. Stone looks around, confused.

“Commercial break,” Candace whispers.

Stone struggles with the idea. Out there, in the world, the show never wavers. In here, it ebbs and flows, like any bipolar creature.

In minutes, the thrill is back. Oona’s first guest arrives with fanfare. He’s a broadcast and Web psychologist whom everyone in the room friended long ago. His message: We’re incapable of predicting what will make us happy. Consequently, it’s best to stay loose and keep revising the plan. Socialize, volunteer, listen to music, and get out of the house. The man’s witty pragmatism makes Russell want to bunker down with the shades pulled. Stone checks Candace. She screws up her mouth and sighs. The audience laughs and claps and resolves to forgive themselves more and live a little freer.

The broadcast psychologist and Oona debate about whether it’s harder to be happy or to lose weight. They drop into another brief depressive interval, followed by a more manic return. Then Oona gets serious and asks her worldwide audience, “Could it be we’re simply hardwired for happiness? Our next guest, a leading genomic researcher, believes he has the answer. Friends, please welcome Dr. Thomas Kurton.”

Kurton’s five minutes agitate even Candace. Every time the Donatello man speaks, she tugs at Stone’s sleeve with silent objections. Kurton talks so rationally about dopamine receptors and inherited good cheer that the audience must see he’s dangerous. But the monitors keep their counsel, and each guest is left alone to take her private cues directly from Oona’s face.

And Oona’s face harbors the wary hope coded into those humans who lie smack in the middle of the normal distribution curve. “So you can look at my DNA and tell me how upbeat I usually am, relative to the rest of humanity?”

Kurton grins into the studio lights. “We can make a reasonable guess at where, on the spectrum of human buoyancy, a given constellation of genetic variation will probably fall.”

The broadcast psychologist tumbles forward in his chair and tries to interrupt. But Oona waves him down. “Hold on. And you can do this for how much?”

Her half-guilty, half-greedy comic timing is perfect. The audience laughs, and Thomas Kurton laughs with them. “Gene sequencing is getting a hundred times cheaper and faster every year. Someday you’ll be able to order behavioral-trait tests for less than you’d pay a psychological testing service. And the answers won’t depend on self-reporting.”

It hits Stone: the man can say anything at all. Sober measurement or wild prediction-it makes no difference. He’s on the show. And the show, not the lab, is where the race will engineer its future.

The psychologist can contain himself no longer. “Is knowing my happiness quotient going to make me any happier?”

His timing is not as good as Oona’s. She blows by him again, fascinated with Kurton. “Here’s what I’m wondering. You see, I’m dating this guy? Yeah Some of you may have read about that?”