Richard Powers - Generosity

By the time Russell reaches the Mesquakie lobby, he’s quivering. All the bitchy, nail-biting, tattooed, fashionably depressive art students that so terrified him last week now seem like guardian angels. He wants to hug these harmless ingenues, gods of health and childlike benevolence. Meeting his group again is like the summer’s last poolside party.

The Americans read their entries aloud. In a voice so self-effacing it’s almost mute, Invisiboy Kiyoshi Sims describes getting paid to stay up all night on Provigil and exercise online wizard and warrior characters for busy professionals in his Geneva neighborhood. The Joker Tovar inducts them all into the perils of Wilmette: “My mother was once busted on Christmas Eve for letting more than half of her sidewalk luminaria candles blow out.”

Then Thassa. She reads her words like she’s just discovered them. Her voice brings Algiers-dry, white, and merciless-into the fluorescent classroom. She reads about herself as a young girl, pausing her game of kickball under the back-alley clotheslines to watch three men put a fourth into the trunk of a beige Peugeot. She recounts her father’s death, almost poetry. When she gets to her mother’s “wistful sickness,” she stops for a long time. Her face is flushed and her eyes run, but she lifts her head and looks around the room gamely. No American can meet her gaze.

She returns to her words and finishes, back in that sunlit upland where she started. Algiers is once again a stack of sugar cubes rising from the Mediterranean. Maybe it’s distance or time, American sanctuary, or a refugee’s anesthesia, but she’s good, everything that happened to her family is good, as are all things still to come. She radiates awe at ever having survived adolescence. Her brows relax and her eyes spark, ready for any scenario life might bring.

“What do you think?” she asks her peers. She shakes her head at the standing brutality of her birthright. “Can you imagine such a mad place?”

Princess Heavy Hullinger breaks the silence. “Could I see that for one second?” She snatches the pages out of the smiling woman’s hands. Studying Thassa’s sentences, Charlotte shakes her head and chants, “Damn, damn, damn.”

The others melt into questions. Thassa answers with more stories. She tells them about the Islamists’ futile attempts to save the faithful from exposure to Southern European reality television. She describes her family running the finger of her father’s corpse over the fingerprint reader of his computer, to unlock the machine again after his death. She tells about her brother Mohand’s ill-fated turn as Cheb Tony in a Raï adaptation of West Side Story .

She laughs as she talks, as if she hadn’t just treated them all to a misery that would have broken saints. A few more anecdotes and she hooks even Spock Thornell. They all chatter at once, competing for Miss Generosity’s nod. Before Teacherman can pay lip service to the evening’s reading assignment from Make Your Writing Come Alive , their two shared hours end.

But no one quite wants to leave. They’re addicted to the woman’s elation. Charlotte-Princess Heavy-takes charge. “Okay, people: we’re going to the Beanery right now and continue this.” She points a threatening finger at Russell: “ All of us.”

And so Russell Stone rolls down Roosevelt with a pack of art students on their way to a coffee shop on a warm September night. He takes up the rear with an embarrassed Kiyoshi Sims, toward whom Thassa, from her circle of admirers, keeps turning and shooting warm looks. It thrills Russell: she could have any one of them, and she likes the geek.

The front ranks luxuriate down the vacated street, as thick and slow as the moment’s pleasure, hanging on each other’s shoulders, pulling at each other’s arms, loud and here and full of eyes, under the best of the city’s light shows, laughing and strolling, tuned to one another, embracing the spectacle of night all around them and feeding on the Algerian girl’s standing enchantment. Rising together on a heart-how can I say it?-too soon made glad.

Years ago, on a night much warmer, Stone walked with his own glad pack, equally free. I picture his band wandering with this same slow sweep, through the streets of Tucson’s vanished Presidio, under a desert sky that between them, they owned. They sauntered together, the week before thesis deposit, on their way to their shared inheritance, planning the history of their unstoppable literary gang. Theirs was one of those great movie plots, where a handful of specialists come together to pull off an impossible caper: the classicist, the prince of the streets, the brainy one, the buckshot comic, the lyric queen of dialogue. They would change the way that writing worked, break the tyranny of convention, and reenchant the tired reading public with a runaway playfulness that not even the dead could resist.

Six months later, their movement collapsed. Ground down by realism, the gang scattered. Two of them bailed into office jobs. One became a dedicated drunk. One of them builds houses up in the Pacific Northwest and claims to be writing a three-hundred-thousand-word novel, one hundred words a week. Only one of them-Russell’s Grace-proved merciless and mean enough for real creativity.

And one of that once invulnerable group can no longer even imagine his byline on any printed piece without succumbing to a profound death wish. That one tags along tonight on the streets of Chicago, ten steps behind another invincible pack, this one in orbit around a woman who might have walked out of a story he once dreamed of writing.

Has he ever fallen in love with a fictional character? I might as well ask: Is the man alive? He’s just a few genes away from those famous rhesus monkeys, clinging to their terry-cloth mothers as if life depended on it. The trait has all kinds of value: the ability to get warm from the mere symbol of smoke.

But which fictional loves? Okay: an early, inchoate lust for Jo March. He burned with the need to befriend Emma Woodhouse, to pass her funny notes in the mind’s eternal freshman biology class. With Dorothea Brooke, he took long rambles through the countryside, camping out with her under the stars and never touching anything but her lips. Much later, Odette was great fun, until she wasn’t. He tried to protect Daisy Miller, and failed miserably. He tried to desire Daisy Buchanan, but failed to do much more than shake her till she whimpered.

Emma Bovary scared the crap out of him, and he blanched in the corner with illicit craving every time they were in the same room. His time with Anna Arkadyevna was full of insane letters and rash, stolen meetings; she came to him in full sun, standing up, to excess, and right at the perfect moment in his own too-prosaic life. Lily Bart appalled him on two continents, but by the end, he would have done anything for her, had she but asked. Like the authors of the world canon, Russell Stone had a disproportionate fondness for pretty suicides.

There were scores of others: blind dates, admirations from afar, one-night stands, happy domesticities ending in no-fault divorces. He fell madly, licentiously, guiltily, and often, always without sense or purpose. And each time out, the woman on the page reduced all actual women to pale, insufficient reminders of the full-throated real.

But here’s the thing about this man: a few months after he read any book, its plot twists faded into fuzzy sepia and he could deny, bald-faced, even to himself, that any leading woman had ever had his whole soul under her pretty thumb. That, too, seems to be an endlessly useful and preserved trait: the ability to revise at will.