Generosity: An Enhancement (38 page)

His excitement ratchets up when talking about the process:

 

You feed the amplified DNA fragments into this high-throughput optical reader . . . We can do a temperament analysis for under $1,000.

 

“Do you take Visa?” the off-camera host asks. His smile says:
Choose your payment method.

He’s guarded about the interconnected patents his data rely on, but more voluble about the countless interconnected enzyme factories that contribute to the brain’s reward circuitry. He concedes the many genes that emotional well-being involves. Genes that control the pathways and synthesis of crucial neurotransmitters. Genes that assemble the machinery of neurotransmitter release and reuptake. Genes that wire together the centers of perception, memory, and emotion . . .

But after another splice, he’s addressing an auditorium full of electrified people. Sixty percent of the room wants to sic the government regulators on him and the other forty are ready to send him to Stockholm. He’s in front of a huge projected slide, twenty feet wide. As he paces in front of the image, waving and conducting, a graph dances across his body.

The cloud of scatterplots is a thin cigar tipped along a rising diagonal. The vertical axis aggregates selected indicators of subjective wellbeing. The horizontal axis aligns the alleles for genes whose precise identities Thomas Kurton and company now make public for the first time.

He doesn’t have to draw the implied rising line. The line is
there
, running through the densest section of the cigar-shaped cloud. Data points fall all over the plane, but not randomly. The points rise as the number of repeated segments in certain gene polymorphisms changes. He focuses on a point high up to the far right, and calls it
Jen
.

Jump back to the smart house in Maine. Kurton’s eyes shine for the show’s host, or maybe its million viewers, live and on the Web.

 

Think about falling in love. How vibrant and wise you feel. Everything full of meaningful secrets. Amazing things, just about to happen . . . Well, Jen and others up at the high end are like natural athletes of emotion. They fall in love with the entire world. And the world can’t help reciprocating. Genes
plus
environment, in a positive-feedback loop . . .

 

Schiff lobs all the familiar criticisms at him, but he stays Zen.

 

Sure, well-being is a quantitative trait. Yes, these genes interact with dozens of others, and with scores of other regulatory factors. We are devoting a whole lot of microarrays and computer cycles to untangling those interactions . . .
Of course
environment plays a role in their expression. But all these genes affect the way we
engage the environment in the first place. There’s even some evidence that an adverse environment can
strengthen
the expression . . .

 

Off camera, Tonia asks:

 

But the more of these alleles I have, the greater my joie de vivre?

 

His face admits to complexities.

 

We don’t even say that. We’ve simply noted a correlation . . .

 

Shot-reverse to Schiff, who is enjoying this ride. She herself is far too sunny for her own good. It hasn’t yet dawned on her that this story might actually be nonfiction. She doesn’t get that until a few hours after they stop filming. For the moment, she asks:

 

And you can look directly at my genes and tell me my alleles?

 

Kurton beams and says:

 

Give me your coffee cup. We can take a swab off that.

 

They cut the sequence into the piece’s climax. The assembled show airs two weeks later.

. . . retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

—Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick

R
ussell and Candace watch the recorded show together, in her apartment, on her tiny flat-panel television, after Gabe goes to bed. Neither has the nerve to watch the segment alone. Nor do they have the nerve to see each other again, without pretext.

They kiss each other experimentally on Stone’s arrival, to Gabe’s disgust. “What is this, France or something?” But Russell appeases the boy by spending a little while in Futopia with him, before lights-out for children and showtime for adults.

Then Russell and Candace settle in, deployed eighteen inches apart on her living room sofa. They kiss again, riskier, as the recording starts. “Thanks,” Candace says. “Helps. Much better than a tranquilizer.”

Stone almost jumps out of his skin. He has taken half a milligram of Ativan, from a little plastic bottle full of them borrowed from his brother, just before arriving.

The woman smoothes her hair and stares at the screen. Under her breath she tells herself, “Maybe just as habit-forming, Candace.”

“It’ll be fine,” he says. He can’t figure out what he’s talking about. He finds her mouth again. A moment later, he’s not sure if he really said anything at all.

Both of them are helpless and pounding by the time “The Genie and the Genome” starts. Each tries to concentrate, but they’re throbbing in unison, audible to each other. They try to follow Kurton’s argument, the one about our vast increase in the ability to improve people. The man seems somehow different from the person they saw onstage, the one who lured Thassa to Boston. “He
is
charming,” Candace concedes, her hand tracing circles on Russell’s thigh. “There’s no arguing that.”

Stone should say something. “There isn’t?”

The show sweeps them headlong, rushed by CGI, rapid crosscuts, and a ruthless synth soundtrack. Everything about the show makes science as sexy as sports. Neither of them watches enough TV to be inoculated. The message floods them: strengthen, sharpen, enhance your chromosomes, be smarter, healthier, and truer. Thrive and be what you want, feeding every need. Live forever, suffused in joy.

Kurton mentions Thassa by pseudonym, near the show’s end. He talks of her like some design template for the future. “We cured smallpox,” he says. “We eradicated polio. We can hunt down and wipe out misery. There’s no reason why every one of us can’t be equals to our ideal.” In the last lines of the profile, the scientist says, “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that it’s humanity’s job to bring God about.”

By then, the two viewers are long gone, the television muted, Candace up and astride Russell, bobbing herself to a pulse they find together, Russell her fuse beneath her. They end up shattered, crumpled into each other, a double collapse, both so grateful to be back
here
, after so long away.

Then they’re in her bed. The second time is slow. They turn each other all ways, tasting, playing, giving over—all either of them ever wanted. Whatever the first reason, there’s no other point now than to fit together. It takes all his will not to tell her he loves her, over and over. And he would, if words weren’t as hindering as fur on fish. But this is what he thinks, curled up safely into her amazing back, plummeting into sleep:
Thank you. Thank you for raising me from the dead.

They wake in light, to a disoriented Gabe calling, “Mom? Don’t we need to get up? Mom? Why is the TV on?”

Candace springs up and startles when she sees Russell. She covers her mouth with her hand, half in this morning’s start and half still in the ocean of last night. She kisses him, chastely now, her breath loamy and close, stale with slept-on bliss. Her neck and pits, too, smell fusty but familiar. Fitting. She grins and shies a finger to her lips. She shouts to the door, “Morning, sweetie. I’ll be right out!” She pantomimes to Russell,
Wait here
, then laughs again at the idiot gesture. She tumbles into long johns and a sweatshirt and disappears.

So—a French farce: yet another story you know by heart. Only in this one, the other man is four feet tall.

Russell stretches out diagonally in her sheets, territory he has already marked. The sheets still hold her gamey scent. He has read how people choose their mates on smell and some sixth sense, a pheromone whiff off histocompatibility complexes other than their own, but recognized. He was doomed to end up here, in her bed, from the moment they sniffed each other.

For months he’s watched the film in his head, sure that this inevitable collision would end in fumbling disaster. Sure he’d come away from a night with Candace condemned forever to the life of an impotent poet, without even the consolation of writing poems. Now all the focused force of dread vanishes in a rush of surprise fitness, leaving him vast amounts of surplus energy with which . . . to enjoy the woman again, at the earliest possible opportunity. All the best writing is rewriting.

He feels good. Contemptuously good. Every inscrutable thing that Thassa has ever said about how easy this state is to achieve now feels stunningly obvious. And yet this burst of happiness will be deducted from any remaining share owed to him in the afterlife.

Beyond the door, a mother makes right again the world of her child that has come apart a little in the night. Russell breathes in; only the memory of last night’s television persists in rasping him. And even that burr is obscured by the side effects of the Ativan and the image of a woman lifting and lowering herself gratefully on him.

She lets herself back into the room, flushed. She leans against the door, a makeshift barricade. “I’m so sorry about this! I’ll just get dressed and take him to school. Then I have to head in . . .”

“Sounds good. I’ll just lie here like a satiated drone.”

She grins, comes to the bed, and climbs all-fours on top of him. “You are wonderful. Simply wonderful.”

She means someone else. Or some other word. But maybe he is, this morning. For this moment, anyway, full of something much like wonder.

He watches her stand in her closet and do a demure reverse striptease until she is Candace Weld again, pleated, rose-colored college psychologist. The moment she’s dressed, they lose each other again. He pulls the covers over his thin chest. She looks everywhere but at him. “Stay as long as you like,” she says. “You know where the coffee is. I’ll check in with Thassa from work. See what she thought about the show.”

“Good plan.”

She crosses to him and kisses him on the forehead. He kisses her on the chin. In afterthought, she sits on the edge of the bed and rests her hand on his sternum. “I hope . . .”

“Yes,” he says. “Me, too.”

She goes to the door, touches her lips, sends his germs back to him on the carrier air. The door opens and she stumbles out into the hall, into a bolting ten-year-old.