Generosity

the windowsill in the hopes of making an ID. A thing of complete unlikelihood. Game for anything. And anything’s game.

Stone shares an office with two other adjuncts-a converted smoking lounge on the sixth floor. There he holds his first student conferences. The half-hour sessions feel more like counseling jags than writing tutorials.

Joker Tovar drums on his thigh with a chewed-up uni-ball, his knee pounding like a woodpecker spattering a concrete phone pole. “Digital media is over,” he tells Russell. “Played out. Nobody’s done anything fresh for three months. The whole scene is Night of the Living Dead. And no one has a clue what to do next.”

Roberto the Thief sits forward on the hot seat, his soul stretched as taut as shrink-wrap. In a soft voice, he announces, “I go to the edge of the abyss every other night. Sometimes I look over.”

Russell asks, “Would it help you to talk to someone?”

Roberto just cocks his head. “I’m sorry Help what?”

Charlotte, intrepid Princess Heavy, shows Russell her portfolio-charcoal vortices of human bodies that look like the Venus of Willendorf, which is to say, a little like Princess Heavy. She works snippets of journal entry around each image. One sketch, more sinewy than the rest, jumps out at Russell. He doesn’t even need the hand-scrawled accompanying passage: It’s like she’s glowing. Like she knows something. Makes me want to be a refugee.

Maybe it’s just a fragment of indie-song lyric. He flips to the next image, but not fast enough to evade Charlotte. “So what do you make of her?”

He flips back, holds up the sketch, lifts an eyebrow. He’s remarkably good at being the one thing his father taught him never to be: a fake.

Charlotte tsks. “I don’t mean the sketch. Is there something broken with her? Or something really fixed?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “I’ve never met an Algerian before. I probably shouldn’t be discussing-”

“No, of course not.” Charlotte retrieves her drawings and slips them into her portfolio. “Wouldn’t be caught dead discussing real life.”

When Thassa is five minutes late for her appointment, Russell unravels. The Islamic Salvation Front has sent a death squad after her. Or the America First people. Her total lack of depressive realism leaves her a walking target.

At eight minutes after the hour, she sticks her face around the doorjamb, puckered with sweet shame. He’s so relieved to see her that he stands up. He’s shocked all over again at just how short she is: the crown of her curly hair reaches no higher than his collarbone.

“I’m sorry to be so tardy,” she says. “I was talking to the security guard downstairs.”

Just the sound of her voice is like a governor’s pardon. Her accent has drifted: too much time in North America. He wants to stop the sound from drifting any further.

“He has a fascinating story,” she says, touching Stone’s wrist and making him sit. She sits just next to him. “He’s a Bosnian Muslim. Imagine: he taught himself English when he moved here, and now he’s writing a book!”

Russell treads water. “Do you know him?”

“I do now! He’s a beautiful man.”

The adjective stabs him. He’ll never be able to protect her from her own promiscuous warmth. “A Muslim,” he says, brain-dead. “Like you?”

“Me?” She laughs. “I’m no believer. I’m some kind of half-Christian atheist. My mother’s family have been Catholic for generations. Hey!” She shakes his arm. “Don’t look so surprised! You know that Saint Augustine was Berbere?”

Russell didn’t know. His ignorance is more or less complete.

“From Annaba. A Kabyle even more famous than Zidane. But my father was so disgusted with religion that he wouldn’t let it in our house. I don’t know, myself. If there is God, he is just laughing at every religion we invent!”

He’s stunned silent: faith is not the author of her bliss. Blessed are those who do not believe, and yet see.

She carries on amusing herself. “You know, maybe those jihad suicide people will really get their seventy-two virgins in heaven-except they will be seventy-two American Christian virgins, saving themselves for their Baptist husbands!”

Her glee is a dance. Stone seizes up even worse than he does in front of the class. He stutters his way through a few gibberish clauses. He’s stunted by this thing she owns, the thing that beautiful people seem to possess but never really do. If only she were merely beautiful

Her face is small but ursine. Her nose veers hard to the right, and her eyes are slightly askew. She shouldn’t even be pretty, except for the conspiracy of delight rounding her cheeks. A rill of melted skin runs up the outside of her left arm from elbow to shoulder. How could he have missed it until now? She must think the scar too banal to mention in her journal.

He says some generic pedantries about her entries for class. She nods and scribbles into her notebook, which she safeguards up near her narrow chest. He tries to say things that won’t look ludicrous, copied down. A few more of his clumsy maxims stolen from Harmon, a little more of her laughter and scribbling, and she turns the page to show him: not notes, but a felt-tip cartoon caricature of him, perfect down to his squint of bewilderment. She draws like she breathes-a gull enjoying a gust.

Happy people must know something that no one else does. Some key to being alive, obscure and hard-won, almost out of reach. Otherwise, he would have met a truly happy person or two, long before her.

“What made you apply to this place?” he asks. “How did you choose Chicago?”

She declares Mesquakie a great college for her major: film arts, the documentary concentration. “I fell in love with films, in high school, in Montreal. I was making little movies for my brother, to make him feel less, um country sick? Homesick. Come on, Thassa! Homesick. I made him funny clips, to get him to laugh. Then, I started splicing? I love film; I just love it. I love putting the shots together. I love dubbing the sounds. Anything! I could play with the editing softwares all day long.”

He’s so nonplussed he can’t even nod.

“What I would really love-more than anything?-is to get very skilled, then to go home and make beautiful films, chez nous.”

“Of course!” At last it clicks: witness and voice, in the world’s most powerful medium. “Like Pontecorvo Has anyone done something like that for the civil war?”

She smiles confidentially and touches his wrist. Her skin shocks him. “Not politics! Politics and film?” She tsks and waves her index finger like a windshield wiper. “That’s not my glass of tea. No, I just want to shoot-you know! Kabylie. The mountains. The coast. Those peoples. That sky.”

“Nature?” He can’t keep the bafflement out of his voice. A child of death who’s thrilled about the future. An Algerian who shuns politics. A film lover who chooses the banality of mountains.

She shakes her head again and pulls a tiny media player out of her rainbow bag. Before he can decode, she shows him her work in progress. A Thassa the size of his fingernail grins at him from inside the matchbox screen. She’s in front of a large fish tank at what must be the Shedd Aquarium. Spots of bioluminescence in the fish blink on and off. Then the glowing spots animate, spelling out the words: Secret Chicagos. A Film by Generosity.

Then they’re in Grant Park, at the foot of Buckingham Fountain, the spouting green sea horses. It’s a sunny day; people of all stripes stroll around the basin. A mixed-race couple goes by arm in arm. A woman in full hijab tries to rein in two little girls, both in their own white headscarves. A sizable Japanese tour group makes a collective, rising glissando of appreciation at the words of their guide. But the camera settles on an ancient bald man sitting on the edge of the fountain. He’s talking to himself, except that the camera hears.

I can’t really say I miss it. Italy? God! That’s over sixty years ago. But I like to come down here anyway,