Richard Powers - Generosity

Life is beeping everywhere, past naming.

He walks until his pretense of courage feels almost believable. Then he opens the phone, looks at the lit dial, and calls back Candace’s number. Nothing happens until he presses a little green receiver icon, a silhouette of a species recently driven extinct by just this kind of device. At the press of that key, all his hopes and fears fly up into geosynchronous orbit and back down again, a lifetime and a few hundred miles to the west.

A woman he once knew picks up and says, “Hello?” Her voice peeks out over sandbags.

“Candace.”

“Russell,” she says, and the word splits through the middle.

“Listen,” he blurts. “This isn’t what you think.”

“Russell.” She’s not exactly crying. But the sounds can’t find traction in her throat. “It doesn’t matter what I think.” She talks fast, before he can embarrass himself further. “Where are you? What are you doing ?”

He falters, but he tells her. There is trust, or there is nothing.

“Yes,” she says. “Okay. I figured you’d be together. You’re all over the news. The two of you. Your students are saying you’ve abducted her. She’s wanted for questioning. And you’re the most famous kidnapping suspect since the guy who stole the Lindbergh baby.”

He looks up into the bones of an enormous conifer. For a while, he wonders if he might not reply at all. “She called me,” he says. “She asked for my help.” He can’t even comprehend the public charges. He only needs to explain himself to his mate. “I’m trying to take her home.”

“Russell.” The name comes sharp and pointed, like a command. “Do you think I didn’t figure that?”

Light bobs over the hill to the west. A lone car slips down the road, some Jurassic creature. He draws closer to the fence and crouches in the dark.

“I told them as much,” Candace says. “I made a statement.”

He can’t follow her. “I don’t You mean you talked to reporters? About What about your job?”

At last the psychologist chuckles. “Job?”

The thing that clamps his throat must have some use. He just can’t imagine what. He sits down on the damp ground. All he can say is, “Thank you.”

“Any time,” she says. “What else is Welfare for? Besides: I’m getting as famous as the two of you. Up there every hour, on the hour. Not the most flattering clip of me, however. A little puffy-looking.”

“Fuck,” he whispers. Not a word either heredity or environment allows him. “Don’t people have anything real to concern themselves with?”

“Russell, the police are out looking for you. People are phoning in tips. A manhunt. Headline News is calling it ‘The Pursuit of Happiness.’ ”

“They’ll get us tomorrow,” he says. “When I take her back to the border. They’ll have our names in the database.” It would have happened today, if he’d given them a passport to process. The police will take them both into custody, until all the stories get ironed out. Thassa will be dragged back into the inferno. She’ll never get home.

“She’s in very bad shape,” he says. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I could come. I could be there by this time tomorrow. It might help.” When the two of them get arrested and held for questioning.

Russell leans against his fence post, underneath the trees and turning stars. This is the woman who once counseled him, in the dark: Close your eyes and write a sentence in the air. Use your left hand. Just one sentence. A simple one. They silent each other. The stars wheel in place above him. And at the center of the innermost circle, he imagines himself signing the air: You’re already here.

When he gets back to the room, the TV is blaring. A man wearing a paratrooper baseball cap is carrying on about a dog who took a bullet for him. Thassa is asleep, curled up on her bed. He cuts the volume slowly, then shuts the set off. He lies faceup on his own bed, reading palmistry in the ceiling cracks. He’ll tell her tomorrow, at breakfast, if the manhunt doesn’t beat him to it. There’s been a slight change in plans. No need to call Montreal anymore, he supposes. It would only trade one anxiety for another.

He turns on his side and watches her sleep, across the gap of beds. Her chest moves so slightly that he must almost supply the motion himself. Even now, she amazes him, how she can find such peace, in the middle of her magnetic storm. It seems to Stone, in this moment, a greater gift: not something given; something made.

Today she felt what he has felt, one day out of every thirty. And she’ll feel worse tomorrow. She must live now with everyone, in turbulent smashed hope. Despair: the mother of science, father of art, discarder of hypotheses, a thing that wants only to eliminate itself from the pool.

But even now, if given the choice, he’d spare her. He watches the flimsy engine of her lungs, holding out against the whole weight of atmosphere. It doesn’t matter what Stone wants, what he believes. The genes of discontentment are loose, and painting the universe. Life’s job is to get out of their way.

He gets up, empties his pockets onto the writing desk, slips off his shoes, pulls a long T-shirt out of his bag, and heads into the bathroom. His Dopp kit sits by the side of the sink, wide open. He steps on a small, hard nub: a pill lodges in the sole of his foot. He looks down and sees three others on the floor. One more on the sink counter, next to the open empty containers. Robert’s Ativan. Russell’s doxylamine. Old Darvons from a wisdom-tooth extraction he was saving for a rainy day. Every remedy his kit has to offer.

He slams back into the other room and crouches at her bedside. He grasps her shoulder and shakes, first briskly, then with real force. She’s pliant, but makes no motion of her own. He shouts at her; the rage comes so easily. Her face stays composed, beatific. He tries to stand her upright and walk her on his arm. She will not stiffen into life.

He holds his ear up to her rib cage, his left eye crushed to her right breast. He’s sure there’s something; there must be something, however far away. Tide in a lake. Her surf ringtone, at the bottom of a deep well.

He holds his finger underneath her nose: the vacuum of deep space.

He scrambles to his feet and heads for the door, the phone, the bathroom faucet, all at once. He hears a voice tell him that he needs to get her to throw up. He can’t figure out how he’s supposed to do that. He sits down on the floor, shaking, clouded, and adrift. And in that instant of annihilation, art at last overtakes him, and he writes.

He can rescind this. He works his way back to the bed, pauses his hand under her nose again: the slightest, world-battering typhoon.

He hacks a path to the phone on the dresser. He flips it open and dials Emergency. He hears a woman on the other end, trying to slow him and get details. He doesn’t have details. The woman asks for an address; he has to scramble outside to read the name of the motel off the marquee. The nurse walks Stone through the steps of clearing the victim’s air passages, checking to see if she’s vomited up into her trachea. The nurse gives him a few simple commands to perform, which Stone confuses as soon as he hangs up.

He settles in to wait for the paramedics. He sponges Thassa and slaps her, trying to keep her as alert as possible. Once, briefly, her muscles take on a little tension, and he manages to walk her for six steps around the bed before dropping her back down onto it. He goes to the door of the room twenty times, looking for anything faintly resembling flashing lights. All he sees is a laughing couple in their late twenties, vivid as newlyweds, out in the parking lot photographing each other as they make comic faces.