Richard Powers - Generosity

He turns to look at her. The car hits the right shoulder rumble strip, and he jerks it back into the lane.

“There is no woman,” Thassa says.

“I don’t There’s what ?”

“You said creative.”

He keeps his eye on the median, watching his past revise. “You’re saying you made her up?”

She waves to a tinted-window minivan passing them. “I assembled from some separate parts. Things I’ve seen.”

“But the real ” He has to stop talking. They pass a mile and a half in silence. She studies the thickets of pine. He does the two breathing exercises that Candace taught him.

A lentil-sized thought at the base of his brain swells to a chickpea. “Your father,” he asks, as calm as midnight. “How did he die?”

“You read about it,” she answers, just as calmly.

“Yes. I did.”

“He was shot,” Thassa says. “In the civil war.”

“By someone else?” Those two finch-eyed holes in the man’s skull

She doesn’t confirm. Or deny.

He thinks: the depression gene, just waiting for the right environment to flower. But his own native spinelessness overcomes Stone, and question time is over. They drive for a long time, through no more than a hair’s breath, on the map. The flanking pines and spruce fall away to a sunny clearing. He asks, “Has this ever happened to you before?”

She smiles at him, an echo of her smile on the first day of class. “This?” That radiance again, hounded by the hungry, clutched by the desperate, reduced by the scientific, dissected by the newshounds, stoned by the religious, bid on by the entrepreneurs, denounced by the disappointed. “ This? Antecedent, Mister Stone!”

For a moment, he sees her on the night of the ice storm. But he wipes away that memory, a nuisance spiderweb. “Is this the first time you’ve ever felt yourself coming apart?”

She puts her sunglasses back on. Her fingers rake shaky lines through her colored hair. “Is that what’s happening to me?”

They’re saved from themselves by the sealike St. Lawrence. They glimpse the islands multiplying on that broad boundary, wooded, still, and sovereign. The spread of highway collapses into a clogged line of vehicles waiting to pass the border check. Under her breath, Thassa half chants a thanksgiving that Stone can’t make out.

It dawns on Russell that he’s about to cross a national border with an Algerian. The press has been diligent these days with rumors and counter-rumors, factions linked to Al Qaeda, an entity that is itself either a finely tuned worldwide network or a fake post-office box. Stone never even noticed the reports until this woman dragged him into the world. In a minute he’ll have to convince an official that he and this woman aren’t sworn to the destruction of any major Christian industrial democracies. With luck, the official might be an Oona fan.

The four lanes of traffic lengthen to a dozen vehicles deep. New cars arrive faster than the old ones clear. A jitter on the newswires, maybe, or Canadian retaliation for some American slight. Every third car is routed off to a holding area and searched. If everyone came out of their protective shells to mill around in political confusion, this would be one of those great scenes of collective meltdown from contemporary developing-world fiction.

They pull up to the border guard, whose day has clearly been longer than their own. But Thassa’s bright “Hello, bonjour !” softens him some. She hands over her Canadian passport, and Stone surrenders his driver’s license.

The guard hands back Russell’s license. “Passport, please.”

Stone laughs, then doesn’t. “I’m sorry. I’m an American. We don’t ”

The guard does his own deep-breathing exercise. He’s more or less ready for the system of nation-states to break down, and Stone, the millionth ignorant prince he’s had to deal with on this matter, has been put on earth merely to mortify him. “The rules have changed, sir. You can still get into Canada with a driver’s license. But you need a passport to get back into the States.”

“What’s happened? Has something happened?”

The man looks at Stone as if he’s dropped down from another planet. “Read much?”

“You’re kidding. So everybody’s a suspect now?”

One glance from the border officer indicates that if Stone speaks another word he will be strip-searched until his skin comes off. Only Thassa’s apologetic smile pacifies the official. He gives the American another chance. “You wouldn’t happen to be carrying a birth certificate?”

Stone has no option but to proceed to the holding area. He and Thassa get out of the car and review their choices. But choice is exactly what they don’t have. Thassa calls her aunt; no one in Montreal can drive the two hundred and fifty kilometers until tomorrow morning. She’s ready to sit in the border detention holding center until then.

She sits on a plastic scoop chair inside the grim concrete room, alongside a platoon of the equally lost, under the eyes of two watchful police. She starts to get the shakes. Her hands are like broom bristles, sweeping the air. “Russell, I’m so sorry. I’m making your life miserable.”

“You aren’t,” he says, confirming with lameness.

“I’m making millions of people miserable. Russell? I can’t seem to stop that.” She curls both arms across her narrow chest and cups her shoulder blades. “Kill the smiling Arab bitch. Dot com.”

He takes her by the elbow. “Come on. It’s nothing. We’ll turn around and find a place for the night. I’ll bring you back tomorrow. Your uncle can come down and take you home. Everything will be fine.”

“Fine?” she asks. “You think this is still possible?”

“I’m sure,” he says. And they walk back to the car.

The motels near the border are full. They find a place on a winding state highway about six miles off the interstate, nestled into the side of a wooded hill. It’s a motor lodge , one of those wormholes back into the sixties, a place right out of Stone’s parents’ Ektachrome slides, from when his folks were young and in love and still vacationing, before the kids came along and soured that show.

An elderly desk clerk with a growth the size of a honeydew melon coming out of his neck is using a magnifier to read an enormous volume of Boccaccio illustrated by Rockwell Kent. He’s surprised by customers and irritated by the interruption. He holds up the magnifying glass as if to fry them.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

Thassa pushes forward and slips off her sunglasses. “Do you have room for us tonight?”

The man glances down at an ancient ledger grid, the day’s blocks more or less empty. “Double?”

Stone freezes. He’s on the South Rim, unable to say just how many rooms they need.

“Yes, please,” Thassa says, pleading with Stone by clasping his wrist bone. Do not abandon me tonight.

The clerk looks up, scrutinizing them. Stone thinks he’s going to demand a marriage license. “Queen or two twins?”

Thassa stumbles on the idiom and Stone blurts out, “Two twins, thanks.”

They sign in and get a dense metal key. On their way out of the lobby to the room, the desk clerk calls after them, “ Ahlan wa Sahlan .”

I look it up, two years later. It means, Welcome. You’re with kin.

Thassa stops, slapped by the words. She starts to tear up. “ Yaïchek ,” she calls back, shaky with gratitude. “ Shukran, shukran. ”

The room spins and shakes as Stone lies on his bed. Pine trees still whip by in his peripheral vision. His blood sugar is all over the place, casualty of the long road fast followed by a fried-dinner binge. The dingy room, filled with a stale stink when they first checked in, now smells fine, either because they’ve opened the windows or because he’s habituated.