Richard Powers - Generosity

He roots through her bag, looking for contact information, next of kin. A number, a datum, a molecule that will make sense. Some antidote. Something he can act on. The bag has nothing. A packet of sunflower seeds. Keys. A Handycam. The book of Tamazight poems he once saw her press to a window, its sentences filled with petroglyphs from another planet. Her copy of the text from his godforsaken class. No sane reason in the world for Harmon to be here, unless she meant it as his goodbye gift.

No cashier’s check for $32,000. No journal. Not a scribbled word.

In the infinite wait, he replays everything. All day long he saw her drowning. Yet he turned his back on her for who knows how long, to make his call. Left her alone in a fetid room with cable TV and all the toxins of the dial. Abandoned her to twenty-four-hour headlines, “The Pursuit of Happiness.” She had no antibodies for the dark. No practiced resistance.

He watches her, stretched out peacefully on her bed-almost a sane escape. He bargains, ready to accept anything in science’s arsenal. Cloning. Genetic editing. Yes to it all. Anything but this. He prays to something he doesn’t believe in, begging that she might already have visited a Chicago clinic and harvested.

He can do nothing for her but revise. And he has time to rework entire world anthologies. In the scene he keeps returning to, all the principals assemble in her hospital room. Aunt and uncle, brother, scientists, legal counsel. The group comes to a decision: posthumous reproduction. Try the whole experiment again, in vivo.

He promises God that if she lives, he’ll become another person.

A noise pounds on the air. It descends on the room, slicing and beating. The pulsed assault homes in on Stone until he grasps: the ambulance is airborne.

By the time the helicopter lands in a bare corner of the parking lot, every soul in the remote motel turns out to spectate. The newlywed couple, now vaguely criminal. An elderly pair in crumpled bathrobes. A four-year-old trying to break from his mother’s clutches toward the swinging blades. The motel manager, his finger in a beaten-up volume, his glasses dangling from a lanyard around his neck as he gazes out on the fulfillment of old prophecies.

The paramedics climb from the craft. Stone is out his door, both hands waving. They blow past him in a few steps, a minor obstacle. Everything is uniforms, straps, chrome, electronics, pumps and masks, clipboards and signatures and flashing protocols. Unthinkable capital, thrown at saving a single life.

And as the two med techs strap Thassa into the mobile sling bed, her eyes open. The world gives her nothing to focus on. Her gaze swims at random through the atmosphere, before snagging on Stone. It locks there, even as her bearers port her out the motel room door. Her eyes say, Why is this happening? They say, Forgive me . They say, Stone : Hajar: Please come with.

He stands in the parking lot in the cluster of onlookers, watching the helicopter lift back into the air. The metal insect shrinks away until it is nothing but strobing lights against the seamless night, the blink of an awful species that will succeed ours.

The figure strolls down the hill, growing. But for a long time, Tonia Schiff will be unable to tell anything. Mood, health, mental state: impossible to determine. Not until the figure reaches the café will Tonia even be sure it’s Thassadit Amzwar.

Greatly changed, of course. How could she not be? She descends deliberately-sure-footed mountain Kabyle. Her head cranes, measuring the shops and crowds and markets all around her. At home in the chaos of this day: that’s how Schiff will describe it in her film.

She’s in a loose yellow blouse over a long jade skirt. Her hair is scarved; she looks like a fifties fashion photographer stepping from a top-down Chevy. When she comes within singing distance of the table, her face breaks camouflage. But her smile checks now, to see who might be watching. “Miss Schiff. Tonia. Imagine seeing you again. Imagine!”

They hug, as if they’ve known each other forever. As if they ever knew each other. The waiter descends on them as soon as Thassa sits. He starts in French, but she switches him to Arabic. They talk, an end-of-term quiz that becomes a game show that mutates to a sass match that ends in the waiter’s departure in grinning salute.

Schiff sits back, at sea. “What was all that?”

Can there be more amused embarrassment? “Getting coffee. Welcome to the Maghreb.”

Maybe Schiff will almost understand: the smaller the transaction, the longer the needed parley. I slow her down, let her come into her film the back way, through the suq of endless negotiation.

Tonia switches to French. The whole point of giving her a Brussels childhood. She asks how things stand, back over the border.

The spirit lifts her hands to her shoulders, searching for words large enough to say what is happening again, chez nous . “It’s Algeria. When we hit bottom, we keep digging.”

But the journalist deserves a more detailed answer, and the Algerian gives her one. She lists the week’s death count, says where the attacks occurred, guesses how long the bedlam will likely last this time. She has no hope that her country will escape its inheritance anytime soon. The future has no cure.

“It’s nice to escape for a little,” Thassa says. “Sane here, in this country.” She points to the west. “How long do you suppose that imaginary line through those mountains will make any difference?”

She’s a different person in French-broader and more nimble. The ecstasy is gone now, the untouchable buoyancy muted. What’s left to take its place can at best be called ease. Yet something in her still seems to Schiff ready to go as exuberant as ever, later in this life. Or early in the next.

Thassa asks about Schiff’s trip, but she doesn’t quite hear the reply. She’s looking across the dusty street, at a shirtless boy sitting on a three-legged stool talking to a yellow bird he pins gently between two fingers.

“How are my friends?” she asks. The words are so mild they hardly seem a question.

It strikes Schiff that she could say anything at all. “They’re well, I think.”

“Mister Stone? Candace? Did they get married?”

“I think they will.”

“Good.” Thassa nods to herself. “They must get married. Helping to raise Jibreel could cure Russell.”

Schiff follows the other’s gaze across the street: an empty stool on a sun-splashed sidewalk. She turns back to Thassa and tells her why she’s come.

She tries to describe her film in progress. She starts with the funding, as if the signed donors and secured grants prove the project’s pedigree. But as she gives her sales talk, running through the storyboards, she’s crushed once again by the gap between bright seed and brute germination.

That gap will kill her, but there’s nowhere else to live. She muddles on, hoping that a few choice words might animate the limp thing. Her goal is simple, when it comes down to it: a film about what happens next. The coming age of molecular control, “The Child of Choice”

As Schiff talks, the Algerian comes alive. Play comes back into that face, the kind of light that only art releases. Now Thassa is all questions: How are you shooting it? What gear will you use? Where did you find the archival material? How about hand-drawn compositing?

For a moment, Schiff thinks her pitch might be easier than she ever dreamed. Then Thassa stops cold, on some future memory.

“But why are you making this?”