Generosity: An Enhancement (47 page)

It’s late already, but a night drive will clear his head. He throws his still-packed bag into the Insight, the most fuel-efficient vehicle ever sold on the mass market. He’d have bought it for the engineering achievement alone. Only innovation, now, will buy the race enough time to work its next escape.

He drives for hours, into the night. He keeps himself awake listening to an audiobook of
The Plague
, the novel that defeated him at Stanford, when his ex-wife made him read it.
You want to devote your life to life science? Read this first.

He’s gone back to Camus after talking with Thassa about the man. She filled him in on all the context he missed when reading the work in his twenties. She quoted the author’s notorious declaration, at the height of the savage war:
If I have to choose between justice and my mother, I would choose my mother.
Kurton’s justice is the freedom of research, rapidly decamping to the western Pacific Rim. His mother has been in a home in Westchester County for the last four years, ever since her defective APOE allele caught up with her. The choice would still not be easy, but it would be clear.

As a young man, Thomas never thought to wonder why Camus’s Oran had so few named Arabs in it. Thassa set him straight on that as well.
I do love him
, the Algerian said.
He was both beautiful and humane. But also as blind as anyone with his background.
Thomas finds him blindly humane, too, as he drives up to Maine in the dark. But the problem is not with the enlightened
pied-noir
. The problem is with the craft of fiction.

The whole grandiose idea that life’s meaning plays out in individual negotiations makes the scientist wince. Intimate consciousness, domestic tranquility, self-making: Kurton considers them all blatant distractions from the true explosion in human capability. Fiction seems at best willfully naïve. Too many soul-searchers wandering head-down through too many self-created crises, while all about them, the race is changing the universe. That much is clear to Kurton, as he slips off the interstate and onto the winding, coastal Route 1.

Worse, fiction’s perpetual mistaking of correlation for causation
drives Kurton nuts. Even Camus can’t help deploying bits of his characters’ histories as if they explained all subsequent behaviors and beliefs. The trick smacks of an environmental determinism more reductive than anything that has ever come out of Kurton’s labs.
My upbringing made me do it . . .

Kurton knows never to give his own biographical details to any reporter, or if he has to, to make them up. That’s what the brain-body loop does, anyway: it’s not the traumas Thomas remembers that shape Thomas—not so long as Thomas shapes the traumas Thomas remembers. He has never tried to hide his background; it’s just irrelevant. Kurton’s discoveries are only interesting if someone with completely different needs can reproduce them. The double-blind study frees human history from the trap of bias and sets it loose in a place beyond personality.

He wants to live long enough to witness a new, post-genomic fiction, one that grasps the interpenetrating loops of inheritance and upbringing so tangled that every cause is some other cause’s effect. One that, through a kind of collaborative writing, shakes free of the prejudices of any individual maker. For now, fiction remains at best a scattershot mood-regulating concoction—a powerful if erratic cocktail like Ritalin for ADHD, or benzodiazepines for the sociophobe. In time, like every other human creation, it will be replaced by better, more precise molecular fine-tuning.

The Plague
ends about half an hour outside of East Boothbay. The road by then is black and barely two car widths. Through the speakers scattered around the capsule of Kurton’s car, the narrator speaks those words that so puzzled Thomas as a grad student:

He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

He parks his car halfway up the driveway and stands for a while on the sloping hill, looking down toward his dock. He scouts the sheltered
cove just to the left of the dock, where once again tonight, from the dark water (although not so dark that day as now), his eleven-year-old brother Brad emerges, bathed in a magic blue light, an electrostatic globe that jerks him about like a livid puppet before kicking him up limp, forever, onto the pebbled beach. Brad, so skeptical and taciturn that even a sky full of thunderheads could not rouse him from the water. And Tommy, empirical Tommy, long out of the water and halfway up to the house, and life . . .

Upstairs in what was for decades his parents’ old bayside bedroom, the smell of cedar and musty quilts sends Kurton instantly to sleep.

He wakes refreshed but a little hangdog that something so small as a paving brick could send him so far for safety. Over a breakfast of half a scoop of steel-cut oats, he checks his BlackBerry feeds. His aggregator for the name Amzwar produces so much junk he is forced to skim. He’s stopped by an item that has already started to multiply and mutate. Several print and Web journalists are reporting an offer by a midsized Bay Area biotech firm of $14,000 for ten of the Algerian woman’s eggs.

He looks up from the device in disbelief. Down the hill on the rock-scattered coast, a stand of spruce bends out over the contesting water, as they have for longer than people have been here to see them.

Twice more in the days after the broadcast, Stone tries to get Candace to talk about Thassa’s on-air transformation into Joan of Arc. He watches the segment again online. Candace does, too, or he doesn’t know her from Eve. But each time he brings up the performance, Candace—by taint or training one shade saner than Russell—shunts him onto healthier topics.

But now he’s okay with her dodge. Okay with everything; not even her growing yogic retreat bothers him. These last three nights, his appetite for her has been embarrassing. He’s taken her above, behind, in front, below. And she lets him. She’s been painfully beautiful, in the wake of Oona. She has been his keel, since even before they were lovers. She helps him see himself, helps him have a say over who he wants to be. Whatever the world insists on dragging them into, he
is with her, and her bubble of self-possession is big enough for three.

He, Candace, and Gabe sit at her kitchen playing Yahtzee. She’s given the boy unlimited gaming time, so long as the game has physical bits and he’s playing with real, present humans. Russell is on a literal roll, pushing his luck far beyond what the dice should allow and getting away with it. He hits number after number, as if controlling the pips telekinetically. His odds-defying streak sends the boy into thrilled fits. “You’re cheating! Mom, tell him to stop!” When the game ends, they leave Gabe sitting at the kitchen table, still rolling the dice, trying to crack the secret of Stone’s spectacular run.

In her bed, Candace is sapphire, something he does not know in her. She runs her hands all over him, hunting from a distance for a key she has misplaced. After much searching, her need is answered. They lie together, emptied out. She curls away from him, tucks her backside into his belly, but holds on tight to his encircling arm. In the still room, she says,
I love you
. It’s simple discovery, all surprise forbearance, like she’s just been assigned a difficult but necessary journey.

Her head nods a minute confirmation on the pillow next to him. He fills with a certainty such as he has only felt twice in his life. The thought rushes him. Whatever this brings, he wants it. “That sounds very good to me,” he whispers to her spine. “Can we put that in our book?”

She clasps his arm tighter: a given. The scene has already been written. He watches her fall from confirmation into sleep, by intervals too small to change anything. There is no fear; there is no elation. Only the fact of this shared day.

He watches her asleep. What could he say about her face, emptied of look, that would make it live for someone a hundred years from now? Or a hundred hundred. A sleeping face forgets every waking technology; sleep at 2020 should be intelligible to the Neolithic. Her eyes start to twitch a little, and then her lips. He could make her say anything at all, in her sleep, in their growing, coauthored volume.

She starts to snore. Small, seersucker, Laura Ashley snores. If he was fighting his love for her at all up until this moment, he now loses. The snores crescendo, and although he holds perfectly still in his joy, her own sound rouses her. She wakes confused, defensive. “I wasn’t!” she says, still asleep. She opens her eyes, turns to look at him. “Was I?”

“Hey,” he tells her, nuzzling her downy neck. “Let’s get engaged, or something.”

She sits up and inspects the room, puzzled. Someone has rearranged all its furniture in her sleep. “Russell? I have to tell you something. We can’t see Thassa anymore.”

The footage of Thassa on
The Oona Show
made an eerie art film in its own right: her far-focusing eyes, the ecstatic fear, the angelic irritation shaking free of all human markets. Schiff couldn’t get enough. She studied the shots of the genetically blessed woman, already splicing them into a much larger script: a single forty-two-minute hour about how the eons-long pursuit of happiness was at last cutting to the chase.

She and the
Over the Limit
crew worked from a rough outline: nine minutes on the chemical bases of moods; eight on neurogenetics; eleven on hyperthymia and its now famous mascot, Thassa Amzwar; and ten on the coming ability to manipulate genetic disposition. That left four minutes for transitions and Schiff’s interludes. She’d already done two interviews with key researchers in the biology of contentment. The show interns were busy raiding the archive for usable footage, while the art team set to work on fantastic animation.

The day after
The Oona Show
, Schiff and Garrett arrived to film Thassa in her dorm. The building had thinned out for the summer break, but a cluster of Jen-spotters loitered in the entrance. They clamored around Garrett’s tripods and lights, bugging him for information. A sallow ectomorph asked Schiff to sign his iPod with a Sharpie. One woman of about thirty, puffy and near tears, tried to force her way into the building alongside them, saying it was absolutely essential that she talk to the happiness girl right away. The lobby security guard turned her away, not for the first time.

Upstairs, in Thassa’s narrow, film-filled efficiency, they found a woman far from ecstatic. She sat holding her elbows on a small, three-colored kilim that stretched across the room. Garrett barely had space to mount the camera and lights, unfurl the reflectors, and still get both women into the shot. As he started filming, Thassa wrapped herself in stoicism. Schiff, stripped of sass, transformed into some kind of acolyte. She asked Thassa about her upbringing. Garrett, nonplussed, kept shooting. But when the two women began to talk about Kabylia,
Thassa relaxed and showed the first sparks of a spirit that might be worth filming, let alone engineering.