Richard Powers - Generosity

When his brain consolidates a bit more, it occurs to him that for the last three years he’s worked at home twice a week at his discretion. But the thought gives him little peace, and he doesn’t understand why, until he realizes the phone is still nagging him.

He picks up and says something with approximately two syllables. The voice on the other end cries out, “Mister! I’m so glad you’re alive.”

The sound of her voice retrieves his dream: a paragraph in an essay that Thassa had written for him had gotten loose and was infecting all kinds of other printed material with sentences that no one had composed.

“It’s you,” he says stupidly, himself again.

“Russell. I’m so happy to hear you. Please tell me you don’t hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” he says. Even to himself, he sounds robotic.

“And Candace? Have I made permanent damage with her?”

A voice in his head that sounds like Candace says, You know I can’t speak for her; you’ll have to talk to Candace. But out loud he reverts: “Candace loves you. She told me, just yesterday.”

“ Al-hamdulillah . Thank God!” And the voice at the other end crumples off into a grateful silence. After a bit, she rallies. “Then why won’t she talk to me, Russell? Everything has become such an ocean.”

Everything has always been mostly ocean. It strikes Stone that a constitutionally happy person in this country is like a New World native at the first touch of smallpox. No antibodies.

“Russell, the news has found me. Another story started spreading this morning. A worse one is going to come out, very soon.”

He tries to remember Candace’s assurances from the night before. Something about bored people going on to the next thing. Apparently, Candace Weld, LCP, is as deluded by need as anyone.

He hears the frail voice say, “Did you know that total strangers want me dead?” The frailty flashes out in anger. “Russell, I’m fed up with this.”

She is entitled.

“Do you remember you once told me, if I had any problems, just ask?”

“Anything,” he says, underlining his own word and flanking it with red-pen question marks.

“Are you very busy in your life at the moment?”

He’s forgotten exactly what subassembly of the collective human project he is responsible for, or when exactly it might be due. “No,” he tells her. “Not very busy at the moment.”

“Can you take me home?”

“To Kabylia?” he asks, incredulous.

The word tears a laugh from her. “Not that one. Too far, that one.”

She wants him to drive her to Canada.

“I’m so sorry to ask, Russell. But if I don’t escape this soon, I’ll go mad. You’re the only one left who can help. I will pay for the essence and expenses, of course.”

When he doesn’t answer, her voice grows frantic. “You could be back home again in three or four days.”

The word baffles him beyond words. Not home ; that one has at least some journalistic meaning. But back isn’t even fiction.

He has never been to Canada.

He hasn’t gone on a road trip with anyone since he and Grace visited the Grand Canyon.

He has never missed two days of work in a row.

He has never gone behind the back of anyone he loves.

He has never in his life done anything that anyone else could possibly construe as resolute.

He has, for most of his existence, dismissed the idea that he might author his own life.

He has become an accessory to her destiny, drive or not.

He does have a driver’s license and a major credit card.

He has never felt so daunted by his own breathing.

He calls Robert, who talks him through the steps of renting a car. His brother is shocked to hear his plans. “Are you sure? Canada , man? It’s a parallel universe up there. The queen on the dollar bills. The guaranteed health care. You are aware of the whole French thing?”

Russell rushes to reassure his brother.

“Chill, Roscoe. It’s called irony. Supposed to be our generation’s native idiom.”

There’s something weirdly chipper about Robert. Stone asks if he’s feeling all right.

“Me? I feel like a million bucks. In 1960 dollars. Don’t hate me, bro, but I’m in good shape these days. Law of averages, I guess. If the docs keep waving their arms around at random, eventually they flick on the light switch by mistake.”

For a few sentences, Robert becomes a salesman for the American Mental Health Industry.

“Go ahead and do this trip, Roscoe. Niagara Falls with this chick. Whatever. And when the honeymoon is over, we’ll get you in to talk to my mechanic. He’s got the whole Stone pharmacogenetic profile worked out already.”

Russell promises to be in touch as soon as he reaches Montreal or runs into trouble, whichever comes first. “Incidentally,” he adds, “you don’t have to mention this trip to Mom.”

“Of course not. Canada? The matriarch would have a coronary. She still thinks the Blue Jays are a terrorist sleeper cell.”

Russell slinks through Pilsen the next morning, scanning the rows of russet apartments in a clownish, chartreuse PT Cruiser. In this part of Chicago, such a car is begging to be rammed. People eye his vehicle as he cowers at the red lights. Every one of them knows he is about to make off with his former student.

Only the implausible staginess of the scene protects Stone. He knows this story: a modernist classic. He’s overly familiar with the book, and he’s even seen both movie adaptations. If this were his actual life, he would never in a million years be caught dead recreating it.

He finds a spot just half a block down from the designated building. He stands in the brick foyer and buzzes. A suspicious “Yes?” cuts through the intercom. He says, “Hello?” He can’t say her name, or his.

“Yes,” she announces. “I’m coming right there.” Her once idiomatic English has spent too many weeks immobile in a plaster cast.

He waits furtively in the vestibule until the elevator rattles to ground and a strange figure peeks around the corner. She steps into the lobby carrying two shoulder bags as large as she is. She’s wearing sunglasses, a dun-colored scarf, and drab olive sweats designed to be invisible. But there’s something else wrong, something he can’t make out until she comes through the foyer door and sweeps him up in a desperate, luggage-crushing hug: her hair has been cut harshly and dyed reddish brown.

“My God,” he says. “What happened?”

She grabs his arm and tugs him out to the street. “Come on, Mister. We’re gone.”

He takes the bags and they fumble to the car. He can’t stop looking at the transformation. She shifts the sunglasses and pulls the scarf tighter around her face. “Please don’t, Russell. You’re making me very sad.” She perks up a little when she sees the car. “It’s fantastic! Totally absurd. Some kind of film accessoire .” She beams at him, convinced that he’s the right man for this job. He puts her bags in back with his, and she climbs into the shotgun seat like they’re off on a family outing.

He steers by trial and error out to the southbound Dan Ryan. Beyond that, improvisation. He has picked up a map at the rental agency: everything from Chicago to Nova Scotia on one double-spread sheet. He just assumed Thassa would know the route, but she’s hopeless as a navigator. She shrugs at the lack of correspondence between the squiggly green interstate on the page and anything observable in the real world. “This map is total fantasy. Someone just invented it!”