Richard Powers - Generosity

“I understand,” he tells the board, only two of whom meet his eye. And weirdly, he does. He stands, makes the rounds, shakes the hands of his executioners. But already he’s working again. For the last several months, since the study was published, he has had in the back of his mind the idea for another project, a whole new experiment for releasing the happiness-gene complex back into the wild and studying it in situ. But the idea is far too rich for any institutional backing. Now he has the time, the liberty, the isolation to run that test. The final freedom of the exiled mind. Every event-especially extinction-can turn to endless new forms most beautiful.

And by a minor coincidence I don’t know how to handle any other way, Candace Weld reads the Time article about Truecyte v. Future Families , late that afternoon. No one has told Weld that she can’t read about Thassa in her off hours. She wants to call Russell, just to talk about the decision. She hasn’t heard from him since he bolted from her front stoop.

By ring four, she wonders if he’s ducking her. His silence has been too long to be anything but choice. By the seventh ring, she’s gripping the phone and mouthing, Pick up, damn it. Of course he has no voice mail.

She squeezes the Off button and cradles the phone. She spends forty-five minutes cleaning up after Gabe, her time-honored method for regaining emotional control. When she finishes, she goes online and binges horribly, like she hasn’t in months. She searches the news pages of the top three engines, sorting by time. She combs the blogs for every occurrence and permutation of “Thassa Amzwar.” It stuns her, how much poisonous shit is milling around out there, toxic bacteria doubling and redoubling, dividing and mutating on no food supply whatsoever.

But after ten minutes of scouring, she discovers: there is food. A whole, steaming barnyard full of it. An energy source big enough that even the moribund print media start to tap into it. Four Mesquakie art students have announced that the Algerian woman is missing from the apartment where they’ve been hiding her. And they claim she has been lured away by her former writing teacher.

I watch to see how Candace Weld can respond to this news. But she herself is paralyzed with looking.

For a long time, Chicago refuses to disappear behind them. The city sprawls for a hundred miles, its hinterland industries like freight strewn from a cargo plane. Only the sun proves that the car isn’t stuck in an enormous loop.

Just beyond South Bend, Stone has an epiphany. He knows why he could never in his life or anytime thereafter write fiction: he’s crushed under the unbearable burden of a plot. He could never survive the responsibility of making something happen. Plot is preposterous: event following event in a chain of clean causes, rising action building to inevitable climax and resolving into meaning. Who could be suckered by that? The classic tension graph is a vicious lie, the negation of a mature grasp of reality. Story is antilife, the brain protecting itself from its only possible finale.

Right around Elkhart, Russell concludes that truth laughs at narrative design. Realism-the whole threadbare patch job of consoling conventions-is like one of those painkillers that gets you addicted without helping anything. In reality, a million things happen all at once for no good reason, until some idiot texting on his cell plows into you on the expressway in northern Indiana. The End. Not exactly The Great Gatsby . Sales: zip. Critical reception: total bewilderment. A failed avant-garde experiment. Not even a decent allegory. Even the cutout bin doesn’t want it.

Stone shares none of these literary insights with his former pupil. In fact, he studiously avoids talking about anything substantive whatsoever. He just drives as best he can, while Thassa rides shotgun and flips nervously across the AM spectrum. Love Radio and Hate Radio: both only succeed in further agitating her. Every one hundred seconds, she cranes around to look through the back window of the PT Cruiser, as if the assembled posse of human history were coming down the interstate after them, to take tissue samples.

Stone’s covert glances suffice to confirm: she has lost her repertoire for defeating anxiety. But then, she has never really had such repertoire. She never needed any; she didn’t know what anxiety was. She sits quietly, trying to smile, smoothing her chopped hair. On the outskirts of Toledo, listening to a call-in show on the possibility of opening up a second Security Front, she says, “Tell me the craziness is over, Russell.”

He tells her.

She doesn’t need to stop to stretch or relieve herself. She needs nothing to eat or drink. She wants only to keep driving. When they do stop for gas outside Sandusky, she won’t take more than three steps away from the car.

Stone buys a real map and studies it. He discovers that they should have headed north out of the city toward Flint, to cross over the border at Port Huron. They could still double back, swing up to Detroit and cross to Windsor. But he decides it’s too late to do anything but follow the long skirt south of the lakes, toward the crossings another few hundred miles to the east.

He apologizes for lengthening the trip. She pats his shoulder and lays her cheek against it. “Everything is fine,” she tells him. “Don’t worry. I don’t care, if only we’re getting closer.”

She’ll be better when they’re farther down the road. She’s had more practice at being well than anyone Stone has ever known. If she can’t find her center once they’re free and clear, then humans have no center honest enough to be worth finding.

Somewhere still in Ohio the radio becomes too much, and Thassa sends the voices into limbo. Silence then is glorious, keeping them alert and safe for a good thirty-five minutes. After another half an hour, even silence adds to the weight of breathing.

Beyond the expressway shoulder, distant descendants of Burma-Shave signs flick past. Thassa reads them out loud, for no reason except to speed another fifteen seconds. “Terrorists love,” she murmurs above the wheel noise. “Gun control. An unarmed public. Is their goal.”

Her sunglasses rest on top of the unnervingly cropped dyed hair. The scarf is shed, nowhere. She holds her camera on her lap, often lifting and pointing it over the dash or through the passenger window. If she’s really filming, all she’s getting is desolate Midwest motion blur. She reads through the viewfinder, chasing the tiny white signs with her lens. “Tested in peace. Proven in war. Guns in the home. Even the score.”

She reads aloud at odd intervals, for more than an hour. “Two million dead in Darfur Sudan,” she tells him. “And it all started with a gun ban.”

She looks at him for explanations. He offers none. She says, to the window, “I see why Dr. Kurton wants to upgrade people.”

He says, “Tell me about your brother.” The question surprises them both. Her vision dimples, and she’s off, remembering stories she hasn’t told anyone in years. Mohand organizing a World Cup in the streets around the Parc de la Louisiane with boys from eleven different countries. His thinking that Quebec winters weren’t fit even for animals. Wanting to become the premier Amazigh Canadian hip-hop artist, practicing for hours in the council apartment’s bathroom, driving their aunt and uncle mad. How he planned to make a living as a male model, and how he spent five months’ savings on a portfolio of publicity shots that came to nothing. How he blamed all the troubles in his life on having to learn his native language after he already spoke two others. How he left Montreal and returned to Algiers just to prove that his mind hadn’t been permanently colonized by two hundred years of nightmare.