Generosity

When white guys walking on strangers’ roofs in Oak Brook start using any given street argot, it’s time to seal the word up in the dictionary mausoleum.

“You know that stuff you’re taking?” Russell asks.

“What, the fulvic acid?”

“No. The emotion stuff.”

“The selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor? Not to worry. I got the kinks out. It’s working fine now.”

“Can it make you I don’t know euphoric?”

Robert makes the sound of a laugh. “I told you. All it does is let me talk to strangers without wigging. Makes me feel a little bigger than I am. Like I’ve got something to give other people.”

A shudder crests across Russell’s skull. The drug makes his brother more generous.

“Pretty subtle effect,” Robert insists. “Really: once you get over the slight depersonalization, it’s no biggie.”

“Sure, but do you think that other people who take it might get more-”

“Little brother wants euphoria? Huh. I’d have to shop around.”

“It’s not I’m not looking for, for myself It’s about that class I’m teaching.”

“I got ya,” Robert says, not convinced that Russell is teaching anything.

Russell pictures his brother micropositioning a dish with one hand, C-clamping the cell to his face with the other. It doesn’t matter. You never have anyone’s full attention anymore, anyway. Focus has gone the way of other flightless birds. “There’s a girl in the class a woman, and I just wanted to know if-”

“You want Rohypnol? Date rape? Don’t do it, man; you can go to prison. Like for ever.”

Russell says nothing. Prison would simplify many things.

“Look,” Robert says, concerned. “Little bro. I’ve known you, like, always, right? Euphoria is not for you. You used to sit in front of the Saturday-morning cartoons like you were studying for a final exam. You’re the kind of guy who needs his pleasures in very modest dosages. Have you thought about maybe a multivitamin?”

“I’ll try that,” Russell tells his brother.

Robert chuckles at whatever truculent antenna he is trying to hogtie. “Roscoe, let’s face facts. We’re depressives. It’s in the Stone gene pool. Embrace it. It wouldn’t have hung around for so many generations if it wasn’t essential.”

Thomas Kurton has never doubted that happiness is chemical. Meaningless to call it anything else. Like a third of the country, he’s tried mood brighteners. They did indeed brighten him, a little. But they also smeared him. They took away a little of that fighter-pilot clarity. So he ditched the brighteners; if he had to choose, he’d rather be keen than bright.

But he has never accepted that people should have to choose.

He talks often about the massive structural flaw in the way the brain processes delight. The machinery of gladness that Homo sapiens evolved over millions of years in the bush is an evolutionary hangover in the world that Homo sapiens has built. Back on the savannah, stress kept us alive. Natural selection shaped us for productive discontent, with glimmers of heavenly mirage to keep us going. As Kurton puts it in his article “Stairway to Paradise”:

A mix of nasty neurochemical pathways, built, doubtless, by a small set of legacy genes, now plagues us with negative feedback loops and illusory come-ons. What passes for everyday consciousness feels to me increasingly like borderline psychosis. Depression had its uses once, when mankind was on the run. But now that we’re somewhat safe, it’s time to free the subjugated populace and show what the race can do, armed with sustainable satisfaction at last.

His sister had a chemistry set: Kurton’s life follows from that. He was eight, Patty ten. Up until then, he had been the better magician. He could make a coin look like he was bending it over his thumb. Now, overnight, Patty could combine two perfectly clear liquids and turn them a shocking pink. There was no contest. Her magic blew his out of the water, and consumed him with jealousy.

He took to theft: no other choice. He tinkered in the darkness of her closet while Patty was out of the house. he worked with tiny bits of chemical, so she would never know that anything was missing. Somehow, she always knew, and she’d explode with all the violence that the chemical safety manual warned about.

The fourth time his sister caught him sneaking experiments behind her back, she gave him the set. Truth was, she couldn’t stand the smells. Patty had been born with the wrong alleles. Even ammonium chloride turned her stomach, and after her first few excursions, she couldn’t bring herself to open the vials.

Three months into his sole proprietorship of the chemicals, young Tom completed all 150 experiments in the printed booklet and began inventing his own. His alarmed parents bought him a grandiose expansion for Christmas, although such gear was beyond the budget of a Detroit assembly lineman with five children. Armed with “forty-nine solvents, catalysts, and reagents one thousand hours of pure chemistry!” the boy never really broke stride in his life again.

Even without that proximal cause, he might have landed someplace nearby. From early childhood, he showed all the signs: the model rocketry, the ham radios, the long afternoons gazing into tidal pools, the complete Herbert S. Zim Golden Guides, and later, the expanding universe of cheap science-fiction paperbacks, those lyric hymns to alien life-forms with the surreal cover art where you couldn’t tell buildings from geographical features from living things.

Eighth-grade frog dissection revealed how nearby species were already more alien than any fiction. His first microscope opened his eyes to life’s true measurements. Diatoms everywhere, whose biomass dwarfed those mutant giants too large to see the real scale of living. In high school, he discovered the Haldane quote about God’s inordinate fondness for beetles. The year Kurton came through puberty, God disappeared altogether, replaced by deeper wonder.

In senior year, he read Microbe Hunters. He turned his bedroom into a shrine to de Kruif’s heroic microbiologists. He painted the names Pasteur, Koch, Reed, and Ehrlich on his ceiling, the last thing he saw at night and the first thing he opened his eyes on in the morning. His mother couldn’t object; he was heading to Cornell on full scholarship in the fall.

In short: Kurton’s genes might have led him to genomics, no matter what environment threw at him. But environment pulled all the right triggers, at just the right times. All the right teachers, the right toys, the right texts in the right order. In the first month of college, he came across the most beautiful concluding sentence in world lit, words that gave him far more epiphany than any novel. The book itself was a long, hard slog, but oh, that arrival!

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

By sophomore year, he was spending long hours in the lab, in his private chapel with its very own fume hood. Do not put your nose over the unknown; waft the air of the unknown to your nose. In his third year, he earned a key to the storeroom, where all the supplies were lined up in orderly glorious ranges on the shelves. Sometimes he would simply stand among them, as if on the podium in front of an orchestra, listening.

In graduate school at Stanford he made his first real discovery-a gene-promoter mechanism that no one on earth knew about. The find infused him with terrible urgency, a hurry to discover something else, now, before all the discoveries were made. And when, in his late twenties, his research team assayed the milk of their transgenic cows and confirmed the presence of a protein they themselves had placed there alongside all of nature’s own tangled