Generosity: An Enhancement (49 page)

Say that the six thousand years of writing are a six-hundred-page novel, suitable for getting you through the longest captive flight. Romance, mystery, thriller: a little something for everyone. At a decade a page, it’s a slow starter. Only belatedly does the opening hook—secret marks that hurl meaning magically through time and space—reveal itself to be a Trojan horse. By
page 200
, memory is embalmed beyond recognition, lamented only when anyone still notices it’s gone. If a thing isn’t written down, you can forget about it. The rest is history.

The plot starts to pick up on page 350. After a ridiculously long exposition, the development section starts at last. Characters emerge, cities clashing in the freshness of youth, driven by the varied needs of their patron gods. Wars spread and trade expands. The characters harden and age. They join together into sprawling clans. Freed from the present, papyrus starts to spawn new subplots. By page 400, the basic conflict becomes clear: preservers against revisers, sufficers against maximizers, those who think the book is coming apart versus those who think it’s coming together.

There are a few longueurs for some readers in the middle two-thirds. But this is when the story is at its most desperate: when techne and sophia are still kin, when the distant climax is still ambiguous, the outcome a dead heat between salvation and ruin.

Page 575 starts a series of quick reveals (although each one foreshadowed, early on). Every discovery triggers two more. The cast of characters explodes, as do the sudden reverses. The book makes one of those massive finish-line sprints—twenty-five pages to wrap up all the lingering plot points and force a denouement. The last chapter is filled with deus ex machinas, and on the very final page, the very last paragraph, the characters throw off the limits of the Story So Far and complete their revolt. The ultimate sentence is a direct quote—“Author, we’re outta here”—the happy ending of the race’s own making.

Russell and Candace are clearing the table for Gabe’s choice of evening off-line methadone—Monsters and Mutants: Personal Edition—when
she arrives. They all know it’s her, just from the rhythm of the buzzer. Candace implores Russell with a look, as if they might pretend that no one’s home. But all the lights are on, jazz piano trickles out through the windows, and where else would they be, on a work night, after dinner?

Gabe bounds up and presses the intercom. A homunculus voice comes through the tiny speaker, “Jibreel, Jibreel.
As-Salaamu ’Alaykum.
”

The boy practically shouts back “
Wa ’Alaykum As-Salaam
,” and buzzes her in, in triumph. He’s scolding the woman by the time she reaches the top of the stairs. “I thought you decided we were scum or something.”

Her hands run through the boy’s hair, and he abides them. Her limbs move through a thicker liquid than air. “Jibreel, life has been teaching me.”

Stone holds back in the dining room, trying not to look relieved. He stands between the two women, hands in pockets, facing neither.

“Are you all right?” It must be all right to ask. An awful freedom infuses him, like that day at sixteen when he came home and told both parents he was agnostic. His father went to his grave neither forgiving nor believing him.

Thassa’s eyes close and her chin rises and falls. Her face is primal acquiescence. “I am,” she says, with a peace bordering on irony. She opens her eyes and fixes Candace, timidly. “I’m so sorry to stop in. I am living without a plan these days. My friends are . . . moving me around the city.”

She steps forward and kisses both adults, four face-sides in all. Candace is hospitality itself. She gestures for Thassa to sit, which the Algerian does, as if the tiny dining room is sanctuary.

“Tea?” Candace offers. “Something herbal?” It scares Stone, how easy she is. “Gabe, if you want to put in ten minutes on the machine, you can.”

Pleasure ambushes the boy from all sides. “Can she come?”

“Maybe in a little bit, bird.”

Thassa nods, and he speeds off in a rapture. As soon as he disappears, the Kabyle announces, “I think I must sell these eggs of mine.”

She takes the couple’s shock for disapproval.

“Don’t hate me. The top offering is now $32,000, American. I know: this is insanity. But I could give half to my brother. Five times
what he earns in one year! He could quit his killing job and find a good one. And half for my uncle and aunt, to pay on my student loans.”

“You can’t,” Stone says. He recoils at his own voice.

“Apparently you can, in this country. Our friend Sue Weston has done it twice, up in Evanston.”

“No,” Stone says. “I mean, you can’t do it to yourself.”

The woman turns to him, pleading. She claps the table with one palm. “Russell, what is the difference? You told me yourself you don’t believe my genes are the key to anything. So if some crazy person wants to pay for hallucinations, is it my job to stop them? The more they pay for this, the happier it will make them. And that is the product they want to buy, anyway!”

The argument repels him. He can’t believe she’s making it. “You can’t sell your own offspring.”

Her face crumples in pure bewilderment. “My
what
? You say these eggs . . . ? So you do think these genes are the secret real me!”

Thassa turns to Candace. Stone is mortified to see his girlfriend stand motionless between the table and wall, clutching her elbows. Then Weld comes out of her clinical coma and sits down across from Thassa. A dozen years of classes, research, and professional training have all prepared the counselor for this moment. Candace speaks, and for a moment, her voice drives all the madness from the room.

She explains her compromised position, the protocols of her profession, and the decision her superiors have taken on her behalf. It stuns Stone: the woman is a model of maturity, matter-of-fact, even-keeled. For a moment he thinks: Yes, this is what they should have done months ago. Just the sound of Candace’s voice shows the way back to port.

She stands, goes into her study, and returns with a glossy pamphlet. “This explains everything you need to know about the consultation facilities available to you. Here are the numbers of people you can call. This woman is very good; she can refer you to a reproductive medical counselor.”

“But I want to talk to
you
, Candace.”

Candace nods, in complete agreement. “I can’t help you anymore, sweetie.”

The Algerian sits blinking as at the news of some FIS attack. “Candace? You’re sending me away?”

Weld touches her arm, rubs it. Open and honest. “You know how I will always feel about you.”

The words explain everything. The words are gibberish. Thassa looks to Stone to interpret. Stone stares at the pamphlet in her hands, unable to remember even what he’s doing there.

Thassa looks back and forth between them, insight blossoming. “If this is what you’ve chosen, Candace, I’m sure it’s the right thing. I’m sure it’s best. But I think I should go now.”

She backs toward the door. Candace steps forward to embrace her, but Thassa holds up one palm. She’s down the stairs at a trot before either adult can say anything.

Candace sits, passing her quaking fingers over her eyes. Stone takes awhile to realize that she’s crying, those blank tears that might as easily have been made by biking into a cold wind. He wants to step forward and place his arm on her frozen shoulders. He wants to chase down the stairs and find Thassa, tell her that nothing is as it seems. Candace rises and begins putting away dinner dishes. Stone is still standing on his tiny, germ-free island when Gabe comes back into the room.

The boy is crushed. “She left? Where’d she go? She said she was going to play. She lied!”

Stone looks to Candace, who pauses in her chores. Her voice comes out more trebly than her child’s: “I think it went pretty well. How about you?”

No hay extensión como la que vivimos.

(No place is bigger than where we live.)

—Pablo Neruda, “Soneto XCII,”
Cien sonetos de amor

S
he’ll rise early, before the sun, and for a moment won’t know where she is. She won’t even be sure of
who
. Then the hotel room, her notebook, her computer, the view of a mountain town from a window in western Tunisia, and Tonia Schiff will rematerialize.

The hotel breakfast: a coffee the consistency of clay slip, a baguette, and jam made from a biblical-tasting fruit she can’t identify. After breakfast, Schiff wanders out into a day that’s like a thousand-watt bulb mounted inside an inverted cobalt bowl. She carries a tiny digital video camera. It’s not her first instrument of choice, but it’s light, practical, and sharp enough to give an authentic vérité edge to the pilgrimage. She films everything she sees. She remembers Thassa’s pronouncement: all existence becomes a prize again, through a viewfinder.

She climbs and plunges down the steep streets, through a suq that has seen better centuries, the best of the morning’s produce already gone, the knickknacks tawdry, the vendors calling to her to free up her purse a little for once in her life. She navigates by guidebook up to the Casbah, just to shoot the town’s panorama. There she prowls around La Basilique, documenting the building’s changes in ownership: fourth-century grain storage turned Byzantine church turned mosque, recently returned to a Roman ruin. History is just fluctuations in appetite. Technology changes nothing. Someone, somewhere, sometime will auction off every inclination. When we tire of happiness, someone will make a market in useful despair.

She films the tiny courtyard, lingering on the Latin tablets and tomb inscriptions. She tries to decipher the inflections and conjugations, the ordered grammar of a dead language she learned in a Brussels
high school, forgot all up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and revives now in this flyspeck town on the edge of the old empire, as vendors in the nearby streets call out fruit and vegetable names in Arabic. No place like home. Glued to one pillar is a worn poster for a local band, Rien à Dyr.

Tonia will spend an hour in the church, until an attendant asks her to stop filming. When she rolls out again, the comic-book sky will have tilted toward turquoise. She tracks through the half-excavated Roman baths alongside the spring that has kept the town alive for millennia. She strolls back to the esplanade—pristine, wide, and beautiful—through the heart of the old town that Bourguiba bulldozed in the sixties, in a ruthless improvement to touristic spec. Even this, she preserves in digital video.

On toward noon, she turns down a side alley and is stunned to find herself back near her hotel. She has gotten so twisted around in the maze of streets that for a minute, she can’t shake the feeling that there are two hotels, twin squares absolutely identical, parallel universes occupying identical colonial quartiers on opposite ends of the same hillside town.

She runs back up to her room and gets the two books that she has toted with her all the way from the States. She slips them into her shoulder bag. Her cheap attempt at emotional blackmail: gifts from the irrecoverable past. Secrets of the personal genome.

She debates whether to risk bringing the video camera. She has promised no film, no recording of any kind—absolute concessions required to get the interview at all. But she has banked this whole visit on a change of heart, a softening, once they begin to talk. She has come all this way, at greater expense than the project’s budget allows, in the hopes that she can elicit what no one in two years has been able to obtain. But any chance she has will vanish, if she angers her subject. Fortunately, the camera is no bigger than a family Bible. She drops it into her bag alongside the two books, where it discreetly disappears. She locks her room and trots down two flights of stairs, back into the blazing day.