Generosity: An Enhancement (48 page)

Schiff asked, “Do Algerians trust happiness?” Garrett almost knocked the tripod over. But Thassa fielded the question on the fly. “We say,
Ki nchouf ham el nass nansa hami
: ‘When I see someone else’s desolation, I forget mine.’ Every Algerian knows that every other Algerian has seen great miseries. And that is . . .
consolation
? Do any of my countrymen hope that science will discover a solution to the sorrow of history? Please! How can even Americans believe this?”

Instead of volleying, as she usually would have, Schiff gave one of the lamest follow-ups Garrett ever heard her deliver. “What makes you happy?”

Before Garrett could stop shooting, the Algerian woman smiled for the first time all interview. She lifted one thin, brown finger, and pointed at him. “That. Oh my God! If I could do what this man does, all day long? That would be a life. I love to look at the world through a viewfinder. I just love it. The worst things about life are beautiful on film.”

Garrett killed the camera and asked to talk to Schiff out in the hall. He started in before she could defend. “You aren’t exactly advancing the frontiers of science here.”

Schiff leveled him with her unnerving hazel eyes. “Not my job, Nick.”

“No? What exactly is your job? I thought it was to give me something engrossing to—”

“We’re telling this woman’s story.”

The words slowed him. But only a little. “You’re supposed to interview hyperthymia, not befriend it. This woman is not exactly a bottomless wellspring of cheer.”

“We’re supposed to film whatever is really there.”

“Oh, shit. Don’t get righteous on me. Not the time for philosophy, Ton. We’re on a deadline here.”

“This girl is not what Kurton says she is. I just think our viewers want to see—”

“Our viewers want science. It’s a
science
show.”

A voice called from inside the apartment. “Everything okay out there?”

When they slunk back into the room, they found Thassa filming
Garrett’s camcorder and lighting gear with her own MiniDV. “Someone wants to pay for my eggs,” she told them. She lifted up her camera coolly and filmed their faces as understanding spread across them: Her
eggs. Her
eggs.

Garrett asked her to repeat the fact on film. Thassa laughed him off. “Interviews must be spontaneous. You can’t tell your subjects what to say. That’s what they teach in film school,
en tout cas
.”

Russell Stone lies in his beloved’s bed, stilled by her bombshell. I step through his possible choices. Every combination of heritage and upbringing dooms him to keep pulling at the sheets and smiling. “What do you mean?”

Candace tells him, in mature phrases, the law as laid down to her. She explains what her job dictates. She lays it out the way she might tell a client that he needs to undergo certain stringent therapies. She goes down the list of Russell’s possible objections, addressing each one sensitively.

“You can’t be saying this,” he says. “She’s a
friend
, isn’t she?”

She nods her head, helpful. “I suppose that’s the point. By any responsible standard of behavior, I should never have become Thassa’s friend in the first place.”

He isn’t getting this. “Are you just worried about your job? Because, Jesus: the whole country’s a nut case. It’s a buyer’s market for what you do. You could work anywhere.”

She explains about personnel files, letters of reference, and all the realities of adult life for which he’s never had much innate aptitude.

“I see,” he says. He sees nothing, except the accusation that he doesn’t make.

She trembles and tears up. But her shoulders and torso remain strangely marble. He puts his arm around her and pulls her flush to him. He murmurs up near her ear. “Don’t worry,” he tells her. “It’s all right. Sleep. You need to work tomorrow. We’ll talk about it in daylight.”

In daylight, they say nothing. She gets Gabe off to school while Stone is still clearing his head and trying to decide if she really said, in the middle of the night, what she really said. His best response is the billion-year-old, time-tested method of freezing up. If he does nothing,
the whole thing may pass overhead without incident. So he keeps still and waits, like the rodent in a raptor’s shadow with whom he shares so many genes.

He doesn’t have the luxury of waiting long. Three days later, he gets an e-mail from Princess Heavy Hullinger. Half a year ago, he shared a weird intimacy with this woman three nights a week. Now her name in his Inbox seems like a fable. The note is a cruel slash at all the writing conventions he once urged on the woman:

hi there, u know there bidding on her genes now? the bid is up to 19K; no u dont and maybe dont care since u havent been in touch but shes getting a bit sick of everything coming down on her at the moment. dont worry were taking care of her, someone has to. I know shed like to hear something so if u have any teachery advice (;)) just e me, im sure shell appreciate.

The note wraps him in a gray cocoon. All of Charlotte’s pieces for him were just exercises in deceit. This is how the woman really writes. Writing has become some mutant thing that will eat him alive and shit him into fertilizer.

He calls Thassa. There’s no answer and no voice mail. He hops on the Red Line and rides down to Roosevelt. It takes a fiscal quarter. He jogs to her dorm building, the pedestrian streams cursing as he wades through them. He turns the corner at Eighth Street and stops.

A knot of people flock the entrance to her building. It’s some kind of ad-hoc Flag Day. A woman with her hands and face painted cerulean sports a hand-lettered poster mounted on her head:
No Jenetic Jimmying.
A younger female, perhaps her daughter, painted to match, wears a sandwich board that reads
Sad and Proud
. A man struggles to remove the helmet of his cartoony hazmat suit. Three college kids in matching
Gee, I’m a GMO
T-shirts exchange raucous laughter. Policemen make two others take down a first-story banner with the two-foot-high words
Bio-Value-Add Me
. A short, hoary black woman—eighty years old if she’s a day—jabs her finger at a white gnome a decade her senior, who holds a limp megaphone at his thigh.
Even as the police try to break up the geriatric scuffle, the woman keeps shouting, “Where the hell is the law in all of this?”

Around the edges, the parade trickles out. But the core of the spectacle holds steady, and other bystanders stop to watch. A woman Stone’s age toting a stack of pamphlets mistakes his expression for disappointment. “You just missed the
StreetSharp News
. They sent two vans. They pulled out about fifteen minutes ago.” She hands him a pamphlet; it’s about how virtually anyone can atomize their egos, dissolve the boundary between their cells and the rest of creation, and tap into the nirvana that spiritual leaders have known about for millennia, all with little medical intervention to speak of. She smiles, like she wants to be his friend.

“Is she here?” Stone asks, his voice veering.

“Who?”

Helpless, he points upward, toward the plate glass of Thassa’s apartment.

“You mean
her
?” The pamphlet woman laughs, like he’s making a joke she doesn’t quite understand yet. “Nobody has seen her for days. That guy says she was at the window on Thursday night. But he’s probably lying.”

Russell Stone clamps both sides of his forehead. “How long have you been here?”

The pamphlet woman seems ready to help, if only she could follow him. “Me? Here? You mean, all together?”

He pauses in the doorway of the music shop where he once hid out from Thassa’s gaze. For the first time in his life, he wishes he had a cell phone. He jogs to the Roosevelt stop, waits for a train, and rides it back up to Logan Square. He calls her latest number, which he’s surprised to find he has memorized. No one answers, of course, and there is no voice mail.

Schiff called Thomas Kurton from the concourse at O’Hare. Garrett sat in the scoop chair next to her, eavesdropping.

“I figured I’d hear from you,” Kurton said, before she could identify herself. “Did you call to gloat?”

“Is it true?” she asked.

“I’m wondering if I’m really your best go-to person for that question.”

“Someone is trying to auction her gametes? I thought it was illegal to bid on body parts.”

He chuckled without mirth. “Thousands of coeds are paying their way through school by ‘donating.’ It’s a bazaar, online. One hundred and fifty ads a day on Craigslist. The question is: What’s a fair market price, for someone with her genetic profile?”

“What’s the going rate?”

“Up to $10,000, if you’re 1300 or higher on the SAT.”

Lots more, apparently, for off-the-chart scores in well-being.

“But are these bids coming from commercial scientists, or just . . .”

“Just rich, infertile couples running their own experiments?”

She could hear the water kneading the rocks and the wind slipping through the evergreens.

“I can think of no use of her sex cells that is both scientifically legitimate and legal. This year, that is. But put them in the freezer for a while—”

“Where are you?” she asked. If he were within shooting distance of LaGuardia, they could get him in front of a camera that evening, while this wistful, penitent mood still ran him. Science. Real science.

“Front porch. I’ve been holing up here all week. I answered when I saw it was you. Tell me, Tonia. Should I have predicted this?”

She was merciful and did not quote back any of a dozen incriminating things he’d said to her on camera. She only wished she had a recorder running now.

He said, “You know, I’m sorry if this complicates the woman’s life. But choices are coming that we all simply have to hammer out.”

Paradise, his voice maintained, was still just down the road. And to bring it about, even suffering was a civic duty.

Then Thomas Kurton’s tone turned, tilted by some small change in the quality of light. “I heard from a colleague at MIT who has been looking over her fMRIs. He thinks there might be something distinctive about the way her hemispheres are communicating. It might help explain . . .”

Tonia Schiff gestured madly in the air to Garrett—a computer, a pad of paper, a wiretap, anything. “I don’t understand. Something structural, or just something she’s learned to . . . ?”

Kurton started to come alive again. “That’s not entirely clear. A good team needs to take a closer look.”