Generosity: An Enhancement (11 page)

He says some generic pedantries about her entries for class. She nods and scribbles into her notebook, which she safeguards up near her narrow chest. He tries to say things that won’t look ludicrous, copied down. A few more of his clumsy maxims stolen from Harmon, a little more of her laughter and scribbling, and she turns the page to show him: not notes, but a felt-tip cartoon caricature of him, perfect down to his squint of bewilderment. She draws like she breathes—a gull enjoying a gust.

Happy people must
know something
that no one else does. Some key to being alive, obscure and hard-won, almost out of reach. Otherwise, he would have met a truly happy person or two, long before her.

“What made you apply to this place?” he asks. “How did you choose Chicago?”

She declares Mesquakie a great college for her major: film arts, the documentary concentration. “I fell in love with films, in high school, in Montreal. I was making little movies for my brother, to make him feel less, um . . . country sick? Homesick. Come on, Thassa!
Homesick
. I made him funny clips, to get him to laugh. Then, I started . . . splicing? I love film; I just
love
it. I love putting the shots together. I love dubbing the sounds. Anything! I could play with the editing softwares all day long.”

He’s so nonplussed he can’t even nod.

“What I would really love—more than anything?—is to get very skilled, then to go home and make beautiful films,
chez nous
.”

“Of course!” At last it clicks: witness and voice, in the world’s most powerful medium. “Like Pontecorvo . . . Has anyone done something like that for the civil war?”

She smiles confidentially and touches his wrist. Her skin shocks him. “Not politics! Politics and film?” She tsks and waves her index finger like a windshield wiper. “That’s not my glass of tea. No, I just want to shoot—you know!
Kabylie
. The mountains. The coast. Those peoples. That sky.”

“Nature?” He can’t keep the bafflement out of his voice. A child of death who’s thrilled about the future. An Algerian who shuns politics. A film lover who chooses the banality of mountains.

She shakes her head again and pulls a tiny media player out of her rainbow bag. Before he can decode, she shows him her work in progress. A Thassa the size of his fingernail grins at him from inside the matchbox screen. She’s in front of a large fish tank at what must be the Shedd Aquarium. Spots of bioluminescence in the fish blink on and off. Then the glowing spots animate, spelling out the words:
Secret Chicagos. A Film by Generosity
.

Then they’re in Grant Park, at the foot of Buckingham Fountain, the spouting green sea horses. It’s a sunny day; people of all stripes stroll around the basin. A mixed-race couple goes by arm in arm. A woman in full hijab tries to rein in two little girls, both in their own white headscarves. A sizable Japanese tour group makes a collective,
rising glissando of appreciation at the words of their guide. But the camera settles on an ancient bald man sitting on the edge of the fountain. He’s talking to himself, except that the camera hears.

 

I can’t really say I miss it. Italy? God! That’s over sixty years ago. But I like to come down here anyway, because it feels like something . . . back then. You know what I’m saying?

 

A voice from behind the camera says, “I know.”

 

Maybe I’m finally getting senile. But you know what would be great? If all this water just—if it all just kept flowing . . . Venice!

 

With the sweep of his illustrating hand, the water spills over the fountain rim and streams its way up Congress. It doesn’t look like real computer graphics. It looks like a living watercolor, splashes of primaries better than life, and much more generous.

 

Russell jerks up, searching her face for clues.

She giggles. “Compositing,” she explains, freehanding in the air. He nods like an idiot and looks back.

 

Boats appear on the watery Congress Parkway. Gondolas paddle upstream, underneath the old post office. San Marco’s materializes alongside the old Illinois Central tracks. The camera swings back, cutting up State Street at high speed. It ducks down into the subway, settles on a dark, middle-aged man standing on the platform waiting for his train.

 

I’m from Eastern Turkey, Cappadocia. Every time I come down here, I think of the caves. They should have cities down here, right? They stick all those people up in the air; they can put some underground. Am I right?

 

The tube of tunnel stone behind him begins to seethe with hand-drawn passageways. Doorways and windows open in the walls. The camera pops into one of them, then pops out again on a tree-lined
street of brick bungalows somewhere in Bronzeville. A young man in leather jacket and felt porkpie studies the lens:

 

My
kinda town? Sister, you could take a weekend out of the war budget and turn this whole neighborhood into Heaven South. Homes for the homeless. Music falling out of the sky!

 

He has only to speak it, and a third-story paradise of visible melody springs up all around him, at tree level.

So it goes for a handful more shots: Kraków spilling out of a cathedral in West Town, Cinco de Mayo flowing down the Back of the Yards, the Bahai Temple turning into Isfahan, the Devon corridor releasing a desi incense procession.

“Who made all this?” Russell croaks.

She dives into her bag and retrieves a Handycam the size of a newborn schnauzer. She’s seen more of this city in a year and a half than he has in his life. He looks at that face, its invincible grin. She’s fearless, ready to travel into any neighborhood. All he can think is: It’s not safe out there. Happiness is a death sentence.

She squeezes the camera trigger and starts filming him. He grimaces, trying to smile. “But this isn’t really . . . a documentary, is it?”

She stops filming. Even her frown is delighted. “It isn’t? What is it, then? It’s all perfectly true. Maybe this is your creative nonfiction!”

“But is there any market for that kind of film?” He can’t help himself. The orphan girl’s self-appointed uncle. “Can you make a living, after school?”

She waves her hand and scowls. “Pff. Livings are easy. My father was an engineer. He always liked the English expression: There’s no free lunch. That’s crazy! There is
only
free lunch. We should all be nothing but clouds of frozen dust. This is what science says. All lunch is free. My father was a scientist, but he never understood this one simple scientific fact, poor man.” She shakes her head at the man’s perversity.

So she didn’t get the bliss from her father, either.

They talk beyond the allotted half hour. She’s in no hurry to go. Russell realizes that he has saved her appointment for last, just in case it runs overtime. Finally, he can keep her no longer. She stands up to
go, scooping her possessions back into the rainbow bag. She turns to him, her brightness challenging.

“You know, Mister? You are a very unfair teacher. You make us all read from our journals. But you never read to us from yours!”

His details are coming to me now, more easily than I care to admit.

He watches for a long time at the plate-glass window after she leaves, gazing six stories straight down onto the building’s entrance. She takes forever. She’s talking to the Bosnian security-guard novelist again, or to some new newly met, soon-to-be bosom buddy. His chest clutches when she does appear. She takes a few steps south, then slows, distracted by something across the street. She starts up again, then greets a woman walking toward her. She spins around as the woman passes, turns like a planet in an orrery, and calls out. When the woman looks back, Thassa taps her own bare head and laughs something:
I like your hat
. The stranger’s delight is visible from six floors up.

Thassa walks down the street as if through a spice bazaar. She takes all of five minutes to go a block. From high up in his spy’s nest, Russell imagines the composited, hand-drawn documentary she’s seeing at all times, while everyone else drags their way through the depressing, psychological realist version: Wabash, blooming into a Casbah watercolor.

He lifts his eyes to the building across the street—an astonishing, ceramic-clad, honeycomb lattice far beyond anything the present could afford to build. He’s never noticed it before. He glances back down just in time to see the Kabyle girl duck into a building two blocks south: one of the college’s two dormitories. He knows where she lives.

He grabs his valise, skips down six flights of stairs, bursts out to the street, and follows her south. The air is weirdly ionized; the lake smells like ocean. He’s never noticed, but each shoulder-rubbing façade in this police lineup of buildings is a different color. Marble, sandstone, granite: Paris on the Prairie.

He stands across the street from her dormitory, scouring the window grid. He can’t see anything, and he’s just about to skulk away when she appears in a fourth-story window on the right, looking down
on the Wabash pageant. She’s smiling at the possibilities beneath her, sizing up the adventure. She sees him; she doesn’t see him. She lifts one hand. The hand holds a leather-bound book. She cradles the small volume from beneath and spreads it face-open against the window. The alien gesture freezes him.

He ducks into the doorway behind him, heart pounding. A musical-instrument store. He pretends to shop for acoustic guitars. He might, in fact, be interested in guitars. He hasn’t touched one since moving back from Tucson.

He leaves the shop ten minutes later, empty-handed. He walks from campus up to the river, just to clear his head. He feels vaguely criminal. He
is
vaguely criminal.

Home again, he sits on his back deck next to the fire escape, trying to capture in his journal what happened that afternoon. He writes under the yellow deck light as darkness falls, unable to shake her image.

He writes:
She pressed the pages to the glass, as if for someone with a powerful telescope on another planet.

He looks up. The night is clear and the wind comes off the moon and literature has just been invented.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out—you must stay out; and to stay out, you must have some absorbing errand.

—Henry James,
Roderick Hudson

T
he British ethicist with the bloodhound eyes returns to the screen. She’s seated in the library of Magdalen College, Oxford. Her face is lined by a lifetime spent gate-guarding science’s worst excesses. An
Over the Limit
caption identifies her: Anne Harter, Author,
Designs on Humanity
. She says: