Richard Powers - Generosity

TA: Naturally, no. I’m often sleeping.

O: How much of your personal happiness is in your genes?

TA: Ask this man. He knows everything about genes.

O: We’ve asked him already. What do you think?

TA: How can I know, Oona? What does it even mean? One hundred percent? Fifty? Zero?

Confusion gathered in the room behind Schiff, the buzz of a stirred hive. Even the prompting monitors were perplexed. Schiff made Keyes pan around the restive room.

O: Were you born happy? Were you a happy baby?

TA: Listen. I was thinking. Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it’s one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don’t even know that we are infected. A virus can even change your genes, can’t it?

Here the woman appealed to the scientist, who smiled so broadly that anyone just tuning in would have thought that he was the one guilty of inherited pleasure. Keyes caught both faces in close-up at just the right moment. He also managed to catch, in the iconic host’s reaction, the first awareness that she faced a guest rebellion.

O: Okay, let me ask it this way. Were your parents happy?

TA: My parents? My parents lived through war their whole lives. They never knew their own language. Everyone was their enemy, and then they died. How happy are most Americans?

The Americans in this room were less than pleased. Many of them looked ready to demand an emotional refund. Someone had misled the general public. The woman with the perfect genetic temperament wasn’t even amusing. This woman was testy . And the audience had been set up for some elaborate practical joke.

The famous host made further jabs, increasingly desperate. She shifted to Kurton, asking him to talk about Miss Amzwar’s neurotransmitter levels and her fMRI. Miss Amzwar interrupted. Why are you looking for our spirits in molecules? Very old wine in new bottles!

Her exasperation turned contagious. The program headed toward precisely the kind of disaster that kept audiences addicted to live broadcasts.

O: Sister, if you’re telling us that you’re as miserable as the rest of us, why did you come on this show?

The audience exploded into cheers and catcalls. The despondent Jen bent her neck oddly away from the camera, as if someone had her soul pinched between his thumb and forefinger and was twisting it. Her face clouded, and she sank into a darkness that bordered on bitter. Schiff felt the woman drift to the brink of a public breakdown. Yet even the descent seemed a work of art-repugnance as robustly enjoyed as any mood.

Keyes’s camera, along with the four Oona Show units, nailed what happened next. With another shoulder twist, the Algerian shook off temptation and passed into a state more solid than anger. She rose up on the couch and surveyed the room. Something large hijacked her irritation, some uncontainable affection for everything that grew from twenty-three chromosomes. Her enzymes aligned, she began to speak, and in one surge her easy tide lifted all the boats.

Digital clips of her outbreak hit the Web for worldwide consumption as early as that evening. They multiplied for days after the air date. And by the following week, the YouTube imitations began to appear. The otherworldly glow of the soliloquy came less from Thassa Amzwar’s words than from her posture, the quiet knowledge that poured out of the woman, despite her best efforts. And this was the aura that teenage girls everywhere attempted to copy, in an epidemic of two-minute DV viruses that broke out on machines across all the advanced countries.

Later, Schiff spent hours hunting down the proliferating performances, which had by then become one of the most popular amateur theatricals on the Net.

“Oona, listen,” a pretty Vancouver Eurasian lip-synchs, in her own shot-perfect re-creation of the segment. “I promise you: This is easy. Nothing is more obvious.”

A stocky blond high school junior wearing a Berber blouse in her Orlando bedroom recites for the lens, “People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful.”

Atlanta: “Even a minute is more than we deserve.” Spokane, Allentown: “No one should be anything but dead.” San Diego, Concord, Moline: “Instead, we get honey out of rocks. Miracles from nothing.”

“It’s easy,” all the Thassa Amzwars across the globe swear to anyone who’ll listen. “We don’t need to get better. We’re already us. And everything that is, is ours.”

Stone and Weld snatch her from the clamoring studio audience and whisk her off to a hidden soft-serve ice cream dive somewhere west of Greek Town. Neither of Thassa’s foster guardians has the courage to ask anything but whether she’s all right.

Her all-rightness extends to being ravenous. She wolfs down nine hundred calories while wondering out loud, “What exactly is my crime, do you think? I simply enjoy this world. Why do they treat me as some kind of threat to civilization?” She says nothing about her teetering in front of the camera, that brittle moment when she seemed half in love with nihilism. But she confesses to thinking she’d never escape the post-show crush alive.

When she comes up for air two waffle cones later, she mentions, a little embarrassed, her pre-show meeting with Tonia Schiff. “You remember her? The funny narrator from the genomes program? Of course you do!”

Stone and Weld nod, red.

“She wants to make another film. The other side of this so-called destiny story. She thinks there’s much more to tell about my feeling well. She thinks I’m being made into some kind of prophecy. She wants to help, I think.”

Stone checks with Candace, who chooses this precise moment to clam up. He sees in her face exactly how it is: too scrupulous to give the advice she wants to, too committed to trust to intervene. He pleads with her: Don’t leave me here alone . But Candace’s eyes blink with a first little ten-dollar dose of fear.

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” he asks Thassa. If Weld won’t be herself, he’ll have to be her. “With all this exposure right now ”

Thassa pets his shoulder with her paper cup. “You’re right, Russell. Of course you are. But this is the woman who I want to be when I grow up. She can teach me a lot about film. Maybe more than school can.”

With a glance, she implores Candace. All the psychologist can do is raise an eyebrow.

Methodically, Thassa shreds her napkin. She murmurs a few Tamazight words of encouragement to herself. “It’s a funny thing. I’m Kabyle. We’re supposed to be so private by nature. Ach- nature ! It’s meaningless, isn’t it? I know what you think. But maybe another show can finish all this nonsense. Jen must disappear. Maybe Miss Schiff can help kill her.”

She looks to her friends for their approval. She’s forgotten, in the moment’s stress, how no one needs to decide more than God. And God decides at just that minute to send through the door of the ice cream joint a pair of retired women who instantly recognize the foreign creature they just saw on television an hour ago. It takes the trio twenty minutes to escape from Thassa’s admirers.

They say goodbye to one another back in the South Loop. Thassa is restless again, her eyes casting in all directions for the sequel that might extricate her. They drop her off at her dorm, where a cluster of superchurch Christians and Mesquakie Oona Show fans already gather for autographs. Thassa goes stoically to her fate. “Russell, Candace: you are wonderful. Let’s meet again, on a calmer day.”

They watch the recorded show again that night, in Edgewater. Gabe watches with them. The boy is so excited he almost levitates. “We know her, Mom. She’s my friend . This is like six stars. Seven!” He’s a little upset by that moment when Thassa threatens to implode. But he knows how a good ending needs a brush with disaster in order for it to mean anything. When the strong finish comes, it’s like he’s willed it into being.