Richard Powers - Generosity

He looks up from the device in disbelief. Down the hill on the rock-scattered coast, a stand of spruce bends out over the contesting water, as they have for longer than people have been here to see them.

Twice more in the days after the broadcast, Stone tries to get Candace to talk about Thassa’s on-air transformation into Joan of Arc. He watches the segment again online. Candace does, too, or he doesn’t know her from Eve. But each time he brings up the performance, Candace-by taint or training one shade saner than Russell-shunts him onto healthier topics.

But now he’s okay with her dodge. Okay with everything; not even her growing yogic retreat bothers him. These last three nights, his appetite for her has been embarrassing. He’s taken her above, behind, in front, below. And she lets him. She’s been painfully beautiful, in the wake of Oona. She has been his keel, since even before they were lovers. She helps him see himself, helps him have a say over who he wants to be. Whatever the world insists on dragging them into, he is with her, and her bubble of self-possession is big enough for three.

He, Candace, and Gabe sit at her kitchen playing Yahtzee. She’s given the boy unlimited gaming time, so long as the game has physical bits and he’s playing with real, present humans. Russell is on a literal roll, pushing his luck far beyond what the dice should allow and getting away with it. He hits number after number, as if controlling the pips telekinetically. His odds-defying streak sends the boy into thrilled fits. “You’re cheating! Mom, tell him to stop!” When the game ends, they leave Gabe sitting at the kitchen table, still rolling the dice, trying to crack the secret of Stone’s spectacular run.

In her bed, Candace is sapphire, something he does not know in her. She runs her hands all over him, hunting from a distance for a key she has misplaced. After much searching, her need is answered. They lie together, emptied out. She curls away from him, tucks her backside into his belly, but holds on tight to his encircling arm. In the still room, she says, I love you . It’s simple discovery, all surprise forbearance, like she’s just been assigned a difficult but necessary journey.

Her head nods a minute confirmation on the pillow next to him. He fills with a certainty such as he has only felt twice in his life. The thought rushes him. Whatever this brings, he wants it. “That sounds very good to me,” he whispers to her spine. “Can we put that in our book?”

She clasps his arm tighter: a given. The scene has already been written. He watches her fall from confirmation into sleep, by intervals too small to change anything. There is no fear; there is no elation. Only the fact of this shared day.

He watches her asleep. What could he say about her face, emptied of look, that would make it live for someone a hundred years from now? Or a hundred hundred. A sleeping face forgets every waking technology; sleep at 2020 should be intelligible to the Neolithic. Her eyes start to twitch a little, and then her lips. He could make her say anything at all, in her sleep, in their growing, coauthored volume.

She starts to snore. Small, seersucker, Laura Ashley snores. If he was fighting his love for her at all up until this moment, he now loses. The snores crescendo, and although he holds perfectly still in his joy, her own sound rouses her. She wakes confused, defensive. “I wasn’t!” she says, still asleep. She opens her eyes, turns to look at him. “Was I?”

“Hey,” he tells her, nuzzling her downy neck. “Let’s get engaged, or something.”

She sits up and inspects the room, puzzled. Someone has rearranged all its furniture in her sleep. “Russell? I have to tell you something. We can’t see Thassa anymore.”

The footage of Thassa on The Oona Show made an eerie art film in its own right: her far-focusing eyes, the ecstatic fear, the angelic irritation shaking free of all human markets. Schiff couldn’t get enough. She studied the shots of the genetically blessed woman, already splicing them into a much larger script: a single forty-two-minute hour about how the eons-long pursuit of happiness was at last cutting to the chase.

She and the Over the Limit crew worked from a rough outline: nine minutes on the chemical bases of moods; eight on neurogenetics; eleven on hyperthymia and its now famous mascot, Thassa Amzwar; and ten on the coming ability to manipulate genetic disposition. That left four minutes for transitions and Schiff’s interludes. She’d already done two interviews with key researchers in the biology of contentment. The show interns were busy raiding the archive for usable footage, while the art team set to work on fantastic animation.

The day after The Oona Show , Schiff and Garrett arrived to film Thassa in her dorm. The building had thinned out for the summer break, but a cluster of Jen-spotters loitered in the entrance. They clamored around Garrett’s tripods and lights, bugging him for information. A sallow ectomorph asked Schiff to sign his iPod with a Sharpie. One woman of about thirty, puffy and near tears, tried to force her way into the building alongside them, saying it was absolutely essential that she talk to the happiness girl right away. The lobby security guard turned her away, not for the first time.

Upstairs, in Thassa’s narrow, film-filled efficiency, they found a woman far from ecstatic. She sat holding her elbows on a small, three-colored kilim that stretched across the room. Garrett barely had space to mount the camera and lights, unfurl the reflectors, and still get both women into the shot. As he started filming, Thassa wrapped herself in stoicism. Schiff, stripped of sass, transformed into some kind of acolyte. She asked Thassa about her upbringing. Garrett, nonplussed, kept shooting. But when the two women began to talk about Kabylia, Thassa relaxed and showed the first sparks of a spirit that might be worth filming, let alone engineering.

Schiff asked, “Do Algerians trust happiness?” Garrett almost knocked the tripod over. But Thassa fielded the question on the fly. “We say, Ki nchouf ham el nass nansa hami : ‘When I see someone else’s desolation, I forget mine.’ Every Algerian knows that every other Algerian has seen great miseries. And that is consolation ? Do any of my countrymen hope that science will discover a solution to the sorrow of history? Please! How can even Americans believe this?”

Instead of volleying, as she usually would have, Schiff gave one of the lamest follow-ups Garrett ever heard her deliver. “What makes you happy?”

Before Garrett could stop shooting, the Algerian woman smiled for the first time all interview. She lifted one thin, brown finger, and pointed at him. “That. Oh my God! If I could do what this man does, all day long? That would be a life. I love to look at the world through a viewfinder. I just love it. The worst things about life are beautiful on film.”

Garrett killed the camera and asked to talk to Schiff out in the hall. He started in before she could defend. “You aren’t exactly advancing the frontiers of science here.”

Schiff leveled him with her unnerving hazel eyes. “Not my job, Nick.”

“No? What exactly is your job? I thought it was to give me something engrossing to-”

“We’re telling this woman’s story.”

The words slowed him. But only a little. “You’re supposed to interview hyperthymia, not befriend it. This woman is not exactly a bottomless wellspring of cheer.”

“We’re supposed to film whatever is really there.”

“Oh, shit. Don’t get righteous on me. Not the time for philosophy, Ton. We’re on a deadline here.”