Generosity: An Enhancement (22 page)

The lead cop can’t figure it. “She knows this case had no bearing on her student visa. She knows she’ll have the full protection of the law if she takes action. But she refuses to file charges.”

The second cop is as mystified as the first. “She actually apologized for giving us unnecessary trouble.”

The police ask Stone if there’s anything important they should know before they release Thornell over his own protests. They grill him about sexual tension, aggressive statements, any part of the classroom dynamic worth reporting. Do the man’s journal entries suggest anything unusual?

They are filled with art at its most inexplicable. Plans for mailing Christmas cards to total strangers, to see how many baffled receivers reciprocate. Plans for selling tickets to the next rain shower, with a stiff surcharge for the good seats. Hand-drawn re-creations of bar codes. Long poems composed of song lines sampled at random intervals off
Internet radio. Powerless art in a confidential medium offered up in complete trust to a supportive community. By a would-be rapist.

An image of the man’s cock between Thassa’s thighs cuts through Russell, and he shudders. The man should rot in prison, raped by others. “No,” he whispers. “I wouldn’t say anything unusual.”

And the woman: Any anxious behavior? Any reason why she might be afraid of pressing charges?

They’ve met her. They’ve talked to her. Surely they must have seen. “No,” he tells them. “No reason.”

“We’re afraid this may be some kind of Muslim cultural thing. Many Muslim families will disown a rape victim.”

Christian families, too.
“She’s not Muslim,” Russell tells them.

“Arab, then. You know: where the woman gets punished if—”

“She’s not . . .”

The cops perk up. “Not what?”

“Nothing,” Russell says. She wants her assailant free.

Now the police are all attention. They ask if there’s anything about the woman—any health conditions, behavioral quirks—anything that he should mention.

Well, there’s a set of careful notes sitting in a psychologist’s office just a few floors up. There’s a telephone call—perhaps recorded by conscientious antiterrorist agents listening for references to students of Algerian origin—where a psychologist says that the woman should be studied in a lab.

Stone doesn’t know what is confidential anymore and what the state owns. He hasn’t a clue what he owes to professional discretion, what to justice, what to Candace Weld, what to Thassa Amzwar, and what to basic truth. But it’s pointless to hide from the Informational Oversoul. Everything in the full digital record will be discovered. An hour of digging in the likeliest place and they will find him out.

“It’s possible she might be hyperthymic.” And to their inevitable, blank stares, he explains: “Excessively happy.”

He only answers what the law asks. The policeman with the notebook asks him how to spell the word.

Then he’s supposed to teach the class. He’s known from the start that he’d never get through the semester without disaster. He climbs the seven flights, buying time. He’s buried deep in the Vishnu Schist,
forcing his way back up to the present, and every ten steps is a mass extinction.

He hears the group pleasure, from down the hall. Thassa’s voice weaves some goofy solo, and the rest of them laugh in adoring chorus. He rounds the doorway, his anemic frame coiled for pain. They’re all there, huddled in the dingy room, listening to her read from her journal. All except the animal, still in police custody. She’s told no one.

Thassa breaks off in midsentence. The group looks up, caught red-handed in enjoyment. Stone’s eyes search the Berber’s. For an instant, she’s ready to minister to whatever tragedy has hit him. Then she remembers:
she’s
the injured party. Their faces rewrite each other twice before anyone else in the room realizes anything’s wrong.

And just as quickly, Thassa returns to the clause where she broke off. Russell Stone stumbles toward the mocking oval, book bag to his chest. Soon everyone is chuckling again at her story, about an Algerian and an Indonesian in a Chicago Mexican grocery, neither able to understand two consecutive words of the other’s English. And all the while that her pliant face encourages her audience’s laughs, she’s coaxing the mute teacher, begging him to be okay, as okay as she is. In the sparkle of her glance, she reassures him:
John couldn’t help himself, you know. The problem was inside him. The man just couldn’t help.

Back in her snug, cinnamon, Edgewater apartment after nine and a half hours in the counseling center, Weld began her real day’s work. First came forty-five minutes in which her son, Gabriel, gleefully destroyed her at every known flavor of computer game—battles of skill and strategy all rigged to favor the ten-year-olds whose thumbs had already inherited the earth.

Then she conscripted him into fifteen minutes of light housework. After that, she parked the boy in front of the plasma screen as she fixed dinner. She rationed him to an hour of fiction a day, but allowed all the informational programs he could stomach. Recently, the boy had discovered that the early
Chicago StreetSharp News
was almost as diverting as the average role-playing game.
Four stars, Mom; highly entertaining
.

As Candace pulled ingredients from the refrigerator, the boy sat cackling at amateur camcorder video of an escaped six-foot pet iguana scrambling across a busy North Side intersection as hulking SUVs
veered all over, trying to avoid the reptile. Gabriel hadn’t laughed so hard since the story, a month ago, when two rival architectural tour boats rammed each other in the Chicago River, throwing six culture tourists into the water.

Slicing her son’s grilled chicken into strips—
fingers, Mom, always
—she heard the sweet news reader (whose glossy friendliness seemed to fill the boy with an inchoate longing he ordinarily reserved for Best Buy gift certificates) announce one of those stories that cause a community to transcend itself and knit together in shared awe.

Two area college students are in the news tonight . . .

Candace Weld oiled her skillet and smiled at the growing commonplace: newsworthy because in the news.

. . . after turning himself in to the city police and demanding . . .

She let the pan heat and prepped the broccoli. She could get the boy to eat small amounts if she pureed it with butter and a splash of maple syrup.

. . . a twenty-three-year-old Arab woman in the country on a student visa. The victim of the assault apparently not only persuaded her would-be assailant . . .

As Gabe called, “Mom, what’s a
saylent
?” her cortex caught up with her limbic system. In three quick steps, she stood in front of the set, curling her boy’s head gently away from the next words.

. . . close to the woman suggests that she may have hyperthiam . . . hyperthymia, a rare condition that programs a person for unusual levels of elation. It’s not known how the condition contributed either to . . .

“Shit,” the psychologist said.

“Mom! Five bucks, Mom.” The delighted boy leaped up and bee-lined for her purse on the dining-room hutch.

“Fuck.”

Her son beamed. “Ten more!”

The police have released the self-confessed alleged suspect, despite his demand that they . . .

Candace Weld’s field of vision shrank and grayed. Reflux came up her throat. Self-confessed alleged. She lowered herself to the carpet and sat.

The boy set her purse down and crossed back to her. He shook her shoulder, blanching. “Mom? Mom. Never mind. You can keep the money. I don’t need it.”

I see them clearly now: Thassadit Amzwar and her two self-appointed foster guardians, on the verge of that Chicago winter. I assemble the missing bits from out of the reticent archive. I’d dearly love to keep all three tucked away safely in exposition. But they’ve broken out now, despite me, into rising action.

Weld called Stone four times that night. First his line was busy. Then he wouldn’t pick up. She fired off a terse e-mail:
I had to learn about this on the news?
She redrafted the note three times, blunting her fury at his public diagnosis, that ridiculous little pseudoscientific tag. She focused on the attempted rape. The damage of public airing.

He shoots a message back at five the next morning. It’s frightened and sick with explanations.
I was answering under fire, complying with a police investigation. I gave them everything that might possibly have any bearing on the case. I assumed what I said was for the police only.