Generosity: An Enhancement (23 page)

They need two more e-mails and a jagged phone call before each settles down.

Weld asks if Thassa is all right. He tells her about the confused exchange he had with the Berber after class, in hushed and painful code, Thassa reassuring
him
that John Thornell’s bungled assault could never have harmed her.

“You didn’t call her last night? After the story ran?”

“I wanted to let her breathe.” After a beat, he adds, “Cowardice.”

Twice, she tells him that he did his best. But they both know: there would have been no
Chicago StreetSharp News
story without
hyperthymia
. “How can they possibly have used that word on television? Ridiculous.”

“I’m sorry. I never dreamed the police would sell it to TV.” But of course, television didn’t have to buy it. The media simply exercised eminent domain.
Reality
has become
programming’s
wholly owned subsidiary.

However the word got out, Thassadit Amzwar is an instant creative-nonfiction commodity. Harmon number nine: Harm Averted by Surprising Source. You know this story. Everyone knows this story but her. The Berber wouldn’t know how to read this story for the life of her. No doubt she thinks it’s Harmon number two: Group Misunderstands the Needs of an Outcast.

“The rape is my fault,” Stone tells Candace.

“Of course it is,” she agrees. Two handshakes, half of one ambiguous date, and they’ve been married for years. “This is all about you. You must have planted the idea in the man’s head.”

“If I’d been paying attention . . . She’s a walking target. I should have warned her . . .”

“Are you serious? Criminal sexual abuse. A class-four felony. And she leaves her attacker so shaken he wants to be sent to jail for a decade. She doesn’t need your protection. You need hers.”

The price of information is falling to zero. You can now have almost all of it, anytime, anywhere, for next to nothing. The great majority of data can’t even be given away.

But meaning is like land: no one is making any more of it. With demand rising and supply stagnant, soon only the dead will be able to afford anything more than the smallest gist.

Minutes after the story airs, the Kabyle woman starts traveling abroad.

Your Day’s Dose of Truly Fresh Weirdness
in
Pincer Movement
3 hours ago,
Influence
: 3.7

One happy victim, one hapless perp
in
Closely watched change
9 hours ago,
Influence
: 5.0

Hype, or hypertimin’?
in
Shattered Visage
12 hours ago,
Influence
: 7.8

bust me god dammit, im serious
in
weasel while you work
1 day ago,
Influence
: 2.4

Chic a Chicago
in
Fuming Gaulois
2 days ago,
Influence
: 2.6

When Goodness Wins
in
Things That Lift Me
2 days ago,
Influence
: 6.1

Search for:
Arab student rape Chicago
Results: 1–10 of about 312

But for a little while longer, the woman is still as meaningless as any local noise. She stays safely hidden in the million global narrowcast microcommunity headlines hatched every second. Bandwidth itself does not threaten her. Information may travel at light speed. But meaning spreads at the speed of dark.

Hidden in the public static are three items of firsthand knowledge. Charlotte Hullinger adds a comment to
StreetSharp
’s feedback section, correcting some background data. Roberto Muñoz buries an agonized confession of complicity in a ghostly blog visited by three people a month. “I was there when they were getting her drunk.” And Sue Weston posts an almost reverent appraisal on a college discussion forum: “He never had a chance of breaking her. She just blissed that creep away.”

The scene loops through Russell Stone’s head, impossible to edit. It plays against the ceiling of the El train as he slumps in his seat, riding in for the public facedown. He watches his two students, the pleasure of their companionship crossing into animal violence. The scene, in his imagination, stays broad-brushed and dim. Always his downfall in writing: a complete lack of visual resolution. But he needs no great detail to be there. Thornell, the plodding minimalist, as depressed as anyone, electrified by the flash of something godly in
the woman. Of course the man tried to force her. Ram himself home. It’s coded into the deep program: fuse your sick genes to whatever looks healthiest. Feel the glow for fifteen seconds, even by killing it . . .

The guard scowls at Russell as the transient adjunct passes through security. Upstairs, in class, to Stone’s relief, Thassa isn’t there. The six surviving students fall silent when he enters the room. Neither respectful nor rebellious: just holding still for the sham of schooling.

They know everything now. They’ve passed around copies of the televised clip, downloaded onto their portable players. All but one were there that night, near accessories. Yet their faces interrogate
him
.

He should say something, anything. Clumsy or impotent, it doesn’t matter. He owes her that much. Instead, he directs them to the chapter reserved for the end of the syllabus: “Bringing It All Back Home.”

“
Remember
,” he reads aloud from Harmon’s hectoring text, “denouement
doesn’t mean tying up all your loose ends. Quite literally, it’s French for untying.”

They don’t even bother to sneer. They will leave him to rot in the desert of pedagogy. Discussion dies on the vine. He asks for a volunteer for a first journal extract. Not even the Joker Tovar, in his silk-screened T-shirt—
Dada: It’s not just for umbrellas anymore
—takes the bait. Russell waits. He’s perfectly willing now to stand them off, to sit in silence for the rest of the evening and all that’s left of the semester.

Deliverance comes from the doorway. “Hey, everyone.”

Russell jerks around, between relieved and appalled. She’s dressed in a Thinsulate vest over a hoodie and capris, this winter’s worldwide youth uniform. She is as sober as anyone has ever seen her. But they all sense it, in her encompassing glance: whatever sadness she feels is just empathy for them.

She holds three fingers in the air in front of her, a scout’s salute, which she draws to her pursed lips. “Um, may I just say . . . ?”

She drags her backpack to her traditional seat but does not sit.

“Maybe some of you saw the story on the news? It’s just not true. It’s not like that. We all know John.”

None of them knows John. No one in this room knows the least thing about who they’re sitting next to. They’ve traded nothing but the thinnest poses. They should have known as much, as early as the chapters back in week three.
Character is a performance born in a core desire that even the performer may not understand.

“That isn’t John, what the news said. John is someone with a great
deal of . . . weight? He never hurt me. Okay: he tried for sex by force, but eventually, he knew this was a bad idea.”

No one can look at her or stand another word. No one tells her to stop.

“I probably just confused him. He isn’t the first person . . . he’s not the first man I have ever confused!”

The circle of art students keep faces blanked, all of them would-be molesters.

“Please,” she says. “You know what this is. It’s nothing. It’s just . . . desire. This doesn’t damage me at all. I’m telling you, this isn’t a trauma. I’ve written about this experience. May I just . . . ?” She pulls her notebook out of her backpack.

And with the steadfast failure of nerve that has penned his whole life, Russell says, “Maybe not right now?”

She looks at him as if he has just hurt her more than her assailant did. And she’s sorrier for him than she is for John.

The others, too, appraise him. At last they understand his ultimate lesson:
Do as I say, not as I do.
He’s failed them; he never really believed in journal or in journey. Story can save exactly no one. The only one in this room who knows anything of use is Thassa.

Sue Weston’s face sickens over with tics:
How far did he get?
Mason twitches on his chair’s edge, his fingers rapping out:
You stopped him with
what
?
Roberto hangs back, hurt that the Algerian isn’t crushed, that she needs them all less than ever.

Only sphinxlike Kiyoshi Sims speaks. “We all knew there was something about you. But I never thought your whole mood thing is like . . . a
disease
?”

Thassa shakes her head, smiling sadly at Invisiboy, daring him to remember, to step out from this fiction back into the real. “Life is the disease. And believe me: you do not want the cure!”

She is again untouchable. Thornell must have foreseen this, even as he forced himself on her. Rape as surrender. Self-annihilation. The man knew she would destroy him.

It stuns Russell the next morning to discover: her disease is still contagious. Life-threatening but not serious. He wakes up ravenous. He can’t remember the last time that breakfast seemed such a brilliant plot twist. The winter air through the wall cracks braces him, and the
table spreads itself. The boiling teapot sings like a boy soprano. The raisin muffin crisping in the toaster smells like muscatel. He’s on a houseboat, moored on one of those mythical rivers that Information has not yet reached. That’s how surely this mood has come on.