Generosity

“I still have some work tonight.” Manuscripts to mark up; enthusiasm to edit back down into harmlessness.

“Please don’t worry about me,” she says. She stands and hugs him.

She’s halfway through the emptied lobby before he can say, “No, of course not.”

He goes home and binges all weekend on nineteenth-century Russian short stories. Just this once, fiction.

I need a genealogy for the word. It comes through the loins of that giant Latin gens, the one that so liberally shares its family name, family property, family ties, and family plot. The original root of the thing has spread its genes into an absurd number of offspring: genial, genital, genre, gentle, general, generic, germane, germinate, engine, generate, ginger, genius, jaunty, gendarme, genocide, and indigenous, while scattering cousins as far afield as cognate, connate, nascent, native, nation, children, kind. Generous to a fault. Too many progeny for any paternity test.

A heterogeneous word, but how benign? Does generous include all those who are by nature genuine, generative, anyone pregnant with connections, keen to make more kin?

Or is generosity a question of having the right blood, the innate germ of the genteel gentry?

It strikes me that genomicists will soon be able to trace a full lineage for any person with more journalistic precision than the dying race of philologists have ever been able to trace a given word’s more recent journey.

Forgive one more massive jump cut. This next frame doesn’t start until two years on. It’s the simplest of predictions to make. Tonia Schiff will find herself on a warehouse-sized plane flying east above the Arctic Circle, unsure what she is hoping to come across at the end of the ride.

She’ll be on a flight to Paris, economy this time, where she will catch a connecting flight to North Africa. A packed plane, 550 passengers: elder hostel groups, college kids with Eurail plans and Rough Guides, middle-class French couples-instant aristocrats of the plunging dollar on their way back from overnight shopping in New York-commuter businessmen with their spreadsheets full of pharmaceutical sales or financial services. And on this flight, she will try several times to watch the episode again, “The Genie and the Genome,” that segment of Over the Limit she filmed two years ago. Armed with a notebook computer, several disks from the archives, and dozens of hours of raw clips, she intends to weave a sequel that might somehow redeem her.

The third time through the episode, she’ll get as far as the bit where Kurton starts in on our being “collaborators in creation” when she’ll have to shut off the computer and put it back in her carry-on. She’ll look up through the rows of her fellow passengers, smothered by the coming world. And she’ll think how the species almost completed one magnificent act of self-understanding before it snuffed itself out.

I have her flip up her window slide and look out the plastic portal. Far below, at a distance she won’t be able to calculate, something the size of a continent will slip away west. The endless surface, a sheet of unbroken white just a few years ago, will be speckled all over and shot through with blue.

Tonia Schiff will sit for seven hours in the melee of the concourse at Orly Sud waiting for her connection to Tunis. Say it has happened already, just the way it will. Her flight is delayed and reposted half a dozen times. Reading becomes impossible, in the seething free-for-all of the gate. Continuous PA announcements shred all thought, and the age of talking to strangers in transit ended long ago.

To pass the time, she scans the crowd for cognitive biases. It’s a nasty little hobby, one that has driven away several boyfriends, including a trophy congressman whom she almost considered marrying. But the habit is too consoling to break.

All the flavors of bad science are out in force. Several twitchy passengers bandwagon around a sealed jet bridge for no good reason except that others are standing there. A red-faced Russian, sick with information bias, accosts a beleaguered ticket agent, who indulges a little skilled deformation professionnelle of her own. A pretty young couple hold hands and together influence the departure monitor by staring at it. And a loud compatriot of Schiff’s complains to no one about the loss of an upgraded seat that was never really his.

Here in the portal to the northernmost South, the glottal cadences of Arabic already immerse Schiff. The sounds of the crowd broaden and deepen into rhythms she no longer recognizes. A three-generation clan sits next to her, decked out in holiday-finest tunics and scarves among ziggurats of cardboard boxes lashed up with string- presents from France for an entire village, once they get home.

The father of this family in transit could almost be that mythic fair-haired, blue-eyed, Afro-Eurasian Kabyle that so obsessed nineteenth-century Europeans. Then again, they could all be Schiff’s own distant cousins, differing from her by only a handful of alleles.

She thinks: Look at me-as Islamophobic as anyone. Phobic of contemporary Muslims, anyway. For Golden Age Muslims, she feels the respect most people save for dead patriots. Alhazen, Avicenna, Averroes: advancing science when Europe was still waist-deep in angels and devils. Then something happened. Exploration stopped, replaced by received wisdom. Observation, washed away by certainty.

Much the same is happening again, this time on Schiff’s branch of the family tree. Her own government has long crusaded against all kinds of science, secure in the revealed knowledge they needed. Now Schiff herself wades into the middle of a fray that might just turn the moderate American citizen against any more discovery.

Once she assumed that it was just a matter of time before humanity mastered its own destiny. Now she knows that only the past is inevitable. Reason could break down at any moment. Look at Orly Sud.

Enough philosophy; she has sworn off it. Philosophy never consoled anyone. Tonia Schiff finds an outlet and flips on her notebook again. She cues up her rough clips and searches for a way to splice their cataclysms into a future worth birthing.

Then comes the next classroom scene. From Friday to Monday, ten suicides have succeeded in metropolitan Chicago, six of them the result of mood disorders, the second-leading medical killer of people Stone’s age. From the time he says goodbye to Thassa in the college cafeteria until he sees her again in next week’s classroom, 287 people nationwide take their own lives. It’s number three in Harmon’s list of most frequently used plots.

Stone holds forth to the class, clunking his way through Harmon’s chapter on focalization:

The world has seconds and minutes and hours and years and centuries, but only the mind has long and short. The world has inches and yards and miles, but only the mind can turn near into far

“Grandpa Fred has finally lost it,” Princess Heavy says. “He’s starting to drool.”

“Totally,” Spock agrees. “The man is whack. Fascinating.”

The rest of the class piles on, and pretty soon, Frederick Harmon is left in a quivering, bloody pulp in the center of their encounter group. Russell loses his losers and abandons the lecture in favor of more journal read- alouds.

He conducts the group feedback the same way he always does. But Thassa, who grazed his shoulder on her way in, just sits in the oval in a bubble of contentment. He tries to draw her into the discussion, but she hovers alongside it, soaking the words in. To receive may now be more generous than to give.

Invisiboy apologizes to everyone. “I’m sorry you all have to listen to my lameness. Twenty-five new blog posts every second, and every one of them is more entertaining than my entry.”

Charlotte berates him. “You shouldn’t worry about entertaining anyone.” Before Russell has a chance to shout Yes! she adds, “Nothing really matters except entertaining yourself.”

Russell moves the group on to John Thornell’s excerpt. Spock reads a piece about playing paintball up in