Richard Powers - Generosity

Russell needs to know: Have you told him what’s happening to you? But he doesn’t ask. It’s enough for now that her tales of Mohand return Thassa a little to herself.

Miles down the road, she takes off her seat belt, ignoring the car’s bleating protests. She spins around up on her knees, nestles into the seat back, and films the interstate disappearing behind them. She speaks to the vanishing landscape. “How can I thank you, Mister? You saved me. You were the only one I could call. I was letting them kill me a little, back there.”

“I did nothing. I just love you.” His militant demurral pops out of him before he hears it. Blood runs uphill into his face, and he wants to red-pen his whole existence.

She swings back down onto the seat, facing him. Weight lifts off her, and for a moment, she’s invulnerable again, converting all the world’s madness into grateful play. She clasps his right thigh near the knee and shakes it, making him accelerate. “Don’t you think I know this thing, Russell Stone? You are a very amusing fellow, sometimes.”

It takes another twenty miles for his pulse to return to base rate. She stays aloft for the whole stretch, scribbling into an art notebook, smiling to herself. “Always keep a journal of your day. You never know when you might experience something you want to remember!” How she can work without carsickness is a mystery as profound as the rest of her physiology.

In the jutting nub of Pennsylvania, Thassa pulls a phone from her purse and calls her aunt. Stone can decode nothing except the otherworldly, musical cadence, the switches from French to Arabic. She’s relating some story with no emotional tie whatsoever to the nightmare she has just escaped. Stone listens, grateful for every note that sounds like the woman who sat in his classroom last fall, reminding the entire roster that only a fool tries to decide more than God.

If she mentions an estimated arrival in Montreal, it must be on some scale of mountain time that Stone has never experienced. She hangs up without any explanation aside from “Good food waiting for us at home, Mister.”

They pass billboards for everything-clothing outlets, telcom packages, medical supplies, fast food and faster drink, starter homes, recreational vehicles, casinos, lottery tickets, psychological counseling, secret surefire investments, teen abstinence, sex-toy warehouses, partnering websites, and cutting-edge prophecy services.

“Give in to the Present,” Thassa reads.

“What?” he snaps.

She flinches, then giggles. “It’s just a sign, Russell. ‘Give in to the Pleasant. Pleasant taste of ’ ”

“Oh,” he says. “Of course.”

“Avoid hell,” she says, her affect falling again. “Repent. Trust Jesus now. Next exit sixty miles.”

Somewhere between Fredonia and Angola, New York-in short, smack in the middle of implausible invention-they stop to get more gas. She’s edgy again, in the parking lot of the service station. She dons the sunglasses and head scarf before she gets out of the car, as if disguise is just common sense. Maybe she’s right. Proliferating pictures of the bliss mutant long ago stole her freedom of movement.

The nineteen-year-old behind the cash register does gawk at her, but only, Stone hopes, the way any young American heterosexual hormonal firestorm from upstate New York would gawk at a twenty-three-year-old Berber in a drab olive sweat suit and bad hair dye.

The map suggests they shoot north at Syracuse and cross at a place called Thousand Islands. Thassa measures the distance with a barrette and calculates the remaining travel time on her fingers. They’re halfway home, and if they push, they could pull into Montreal before sunrise. She breathes easier, seeing how close they are to the border. But even an Algerian-especially an Algerian-ought to know this genre.

They pass through archaic resort towns, famous ghost wrecks of American industrial history, collapsed utopian and religious communities. They talk about everything now-her parents’ infatuated anger toward the French, his long fascination with the Unabomber, the mythic origin of the Kabyles, a fantastic Egyptian film he saw eleven years ago and has never since been able to identify, an old family car that he and his brother once wrecked, the varied agendas of the world’s great cities, the odds of humanity soon cooking to death, a thrush that once threw itself at her bedroom window at ten-second intervals for the better part of two days.

The camera is long since packed away. Thassa needs to keep talking now, about anything at all, so long as it dates back before the last three months. She’s like some infected farm animal, brought low by something it can’t even imagine. Microbes without borders. Her system struggles to reject this invasion, as it would any alien tissue. His job is to keep talking, to hold up his end of the trivia as if everything will come right again, if they only imagine.

Even now, just riding alongside her helps him recognize himself. If he could drive with her in this car until he learned the habit by heart, the certainty of who he is, equal to the brief, scattered days he’s been given

She means more to him now, stunned, than she did when she rode the world.

Pointless tenderness, evolution’s ultimate trick. The product of a handful of genes, hitting on strategies to keep themselves in play. A force three billion years in the making, coughing up a thing ridiculously makeshift and erratic, more wasteful than the peacock’s tail. Stone tags along behind a caravan of SUVs, tooling north. Maybe even love is just a minor node in a vast network pushing toward new and unimaginable exploits

Candace should be with them. She loves this woman as much as anyone.

In the neck of upstate New York, Thassa falls asleep. She goes slack in her seat, slumping onto Stone’s shoulder. There’s a burr that sounds like a problem with the engine. Then he places it: she’s humming in her sleep. A simple, repetitive tune built on no scale Stone recognizes. He thinks he hears her chant the word vava When she wakes ten minutes later, he doesn’t ask her what song she was dreaming, and she doesn’t volunteer.

They track north along the edge of Lake Ontario. Late afternoon is done and evening layers in. The sun falters, and they’ve been driving so long that the highway starts to float. They pass through an enfilade of pines flanking the road. They roll down the windows. The dry, cool air plays on their skin and their hearts crack open.

The day is late, and they know each other now in the way that only two people stuck together in a car forever can. “You know,” he tells her, his eyes three hundred yards down the road, “it’s funny. I think about that old woman all the time. I go through long stretches where I think about her almost every day.”

“What old woman, Russell?”

He’s shocked that she can’t read his mind. “The one you wrote about for your first paper. The one who took forever to climb a few stairs of the Cultural Center.”

He feels her studying his profile. She asks, “Why do you think about her?”

He’s wondered about this, too, almost as long as he’s wondered about the woman. He can’t say why, but he can say something. “You did, in two pages, without effort, what I’ve wanted to do my whole life. You took the simplest, most ordinary thing-something I’ve rushed past a thousand times a day-and lifted You made her next step the only thing in existence worth worrying about. I think about the woman, whether she’s still alive, what she’s doing right now, whether she could still make it up those stairs, nine months later.”

“No,” Thassa says. “She can’t.”