Richard Powers - Generosity

Schiff reddens and looks about the café for the waiter to rescue her. The one question she prepped for, and still she’s worthless. How can she name her late-onset need? “I thought I might figure that out as I go.”

Thassa laughs again, tomorrow’s child. “Of course. How else?” She looks up at the mountains, resigned to desire. “Of course you must put me in your film. You have my permission. My blessing. Whatever you came to get from me.”

Schiff takes the calculated gamble. Her downside risk is next to nothing now. She feels under her chair for her shoulder bag. She reaches in and pulls out the digital-video camera.

The Amzwar smile breaks free, matching North Africa’s noon. “Oh, Miss Schiff! You know that’s not possible anymore.” She’s in no way reluctant. In fact, her face is willing, if only film could still record her.

Schiff has long expected the answer, but still she deflates: condemned to nonfiction, no creation allowed. But not quite surrendering yet, she says, “Let me show you something.” She flips open the camera’s viewer and rewinds several weeks, finding the shot she’s after. She hands the device to Thassa.

On the tiny screen, a brown infant girl in a lime jumper takes three speedy all-fours strides, then hoists herself vertical on the leg of a coffee table. She swells with her dazzling triumph over gravity. She squeals in ecstasy and cuts loose, releasing the table leg to tear across the open frontier of carpet. Two steps in, she slams into nothing, comes to a splendidly unplanned stop, and drops seat-first to earth. She sits, stunned by the setback, on the threshold of howling. Instead, she breaks out into gales of untouchable laughter. Her head swivels around the room, already planning her next bone-jarring break into unknown regions.

Thassa studies the shot, her face up close to the three-inch screen. “Mine?” she asks.

Schiff considers the question. Who is anyone’s? But even her long pause is already an answer.

The infant scoots off again for another go at the table leg, the world’s greatest amusement ride. The camera bobs up for a moment, to shoot the reaction of three adults, laughing in reflected joy. One of the faces is familiar-a Donatello still successfully refuting his sixty years. Thassa’s brows pinch in comprehension. She grasps the experiment and nods.

“Are there others? Brothers and sisters?”

“Soon.”

“Her father? Her birth mother?”

“No one you know.”

Feelings fight for Thassa’s face. Anxiety. Bliss. Other related strains. She switches off the device and sets it down.

“Did they rewrite?”

The journalist in Schiff wants to say: Does it matter if they did, this time? They will, in one or another test market, in some country, somewhere, soon. That’s a story no story can deflect. Schiff says nothing at all. Chooses to.

“Is she happy?”

At last an easy one. Schiff grins in pain. “Yes.” Happy as any new toddler, up on two legs for the first time.

And how long might that last? That question, too, is part of the privately funded study.

Schiff makes to retrieve the camera, but Thassa grabs it back. “One more look? If you don’t have to rush anywhere?” She peeks again. Life is out of the crib, and will not be held back by anything so crude as accident.

Thassa keeps rewinding the shot, looking for some denouement. And how does she feel, in the teeth of the evidence? I can’t yet see. I look closer, the whole point of having been out anywhere tonight. I look, and try to decide no more than God.

I watch her fondle the camera for a moment, then slide it back across the table to the filmmaker. Just down the hill, back toward the market, a vendor sings out a marvelous sinew of melody. Another, younger voice mimics him, a whole step higher. The song is a sales pitch, something perishable, yogurt or fruit or fresh bread that will keep only until today’s end. The contest of tenors crescendos and ascends. The dozen patrons of the café share stoic grins. Thassa pushes back her hair and shakes her head.

“Make your film. Tell everything. Tell them my genes had no cure that this place couldn’t break.”

They sit in silence for a long time. But the reporter has one more bribe. “Listen! I brought you some things.” She dives back in the bag and fetches two small books. She hands them across to the apparition, a last temptation from life and the living.

Thassa takes them, and now her face full-flowers into that girl I first saw one night in a tired classroom in a city on the shores of a sea-sized inland lake. She takes the book of Tamazight poems and opens it on a surge of memory. Her lips tighten on the surprise twist of plot. “Perfect. Bless you. I will take this with me.”

She looks past the open page to see the other volume. “Non. C’est pas vrai!” She knows this book. Make Your Writing Come Alive. She reaches out with her left hand, afraid to touch the thing. She flips the pages at random. Ink annotations fill the margins-eager notes and glosses that now seem like the black box of a plane shot out of the sky.

She looks up, her eyes sparking. All might still be well. Yes may yet have the last word, even from across this uncrossable chasm.

“It’s not mine,” she says. “Give it to Russell. He will need this.”

I will need much more. Endless, what I’ll need. But I’ll take what I’m given, and go from there.

She slips the book back across the space between them. But just as Schiff takes it, the text disappears. Neither woman, I guess, will even flinch. The next to vanish off the table will be the camera, then the poems, leaving only their two half-finished teas, a condiments rack, and a menu.

As the two look on, the menu’s French fades. The Arabic follows it into white. So, too, do the sounds from the air around the café, until the only language running through the nearby streets is the one that existed in these parts long before the arrival of writing.

Then the menus and the tea and the condiments dematerialize. Then the filmmaker’s bag. Then the filmmaker herself vanishes back into documentary, banished to nonfiction.

And I’m here again, across from the daughter of happiness as I never will be again, in anything but story. The two of us sit sampling the afternoon’s slow changes, this sun under which there can be nothing new. She’s still alive, my invented friend, just as I conceived her, still uncrushed by the collective need for happier endings. All writing is rewriting.

The air here is tinged with new scents, or old ones I’d forgotten. These smells are the reason I’ve traveled out here, alone. And I am, for once, ready to try on anything the story might permit. What else can I do for her, except defy my type? Happiness, the scientist says, is not a reward for virtue. Happiness is the virtue.

She looks across at me. She always knew it would end like this, that I would follow her into this next new place. She smiles and shakes her head, as if to claim once more that fate has no power over anything crucial. Which it never really does, if I could just remember. What we have been is as nothing; what we will be is ever beyond us. But what kind of story would ever end with us ?

The time for deciding is after you’re dead. I have no choice; delight pours out of me. “How are you?” I ask. “How do you feel ?” She answers in all kinds of generous ways. And for a little while, before this small shared joy, too, disappears back into fact, we sit and watch the Atlas go dark.