Generosity

mentioning a construction sign he saw on the torn-up expressway coming in from O’Hare: Inconvenience is temporary; improvement is permanent. The hall laughs appreciatively, pretty much ready to play.

When the applause ends, the novelist begins the rebuttal. “I’ve used that same expressway myself, and it’s true: improvement has been more or less permanent.” It must be his timing, because only a few people in the hall chuckle. But the laureate now talks with a freedom that gives up on persuading anyone.

The novelist’s metamorphosis baffles Kurton. He replies that anyone who prefers nasty, brutish, and short to glorious and paradisiacal may be suffering from depression. We’ve cured smallpox; we’ve done away with polio. “Of course we want to eliminate the toxic molecular sequences that predispose us to suffering, whether cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s, or heart disease. And if we can prevent the harmful, why not promote the helpful?”

Bunkering down into his seat, Russell can’t even begin to list the objections. He looks to Candace, but she stares straight ahead.

Right at the finish line, the novelist stumbles badly. Instead of pinning Pollyanna to the dissecting table, he capitulates. Enhance away, he says. Enhancement will mean nothing, in the long run. The remodeling of human nature will be as slapdash and flawed as its remodelers. We’ll never feel enhanced. We’ll always be banned from some further Eden. The misery business will remain a growth industry. When fiction goes real, reality will need a more resistant strain of fiction.

Uncertainty ripples through the house. The moderator, on orders from the co-sponsoring booksellers and cafe, chooses the unsettled moment to wrap things up. Democracy is thwarted; there is no Q and A.

Thassa is on her feet before her friends, camera in front of her, filming as the crowd drifts past. To those few who are old enough to resent someone recording them without asking, she just smiles and waves.

Russell is left alone with LPC Weld. “Well?” he asks. He doesn’t have the heart to volunteer what he thinks.

“Well what? It’s not a professional boxing match, you know.”

He cocks an eyebrow. “And you’re not a public relations manager.”

She flares a little, then nods, embarrassed. “Right. Well. I’m afraid it was Optimism, by a technical knockout.”

He wants to tally differently, but can’t.

“Should we try to say hello?” she asks.

He points at the crowd mobbing Thomas Kurton and lifts his palms.

“You’re right,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

They find Thassa conversing with a couple who recognize her from the Reader story. The man asks, “Do your relatives in Canada have your same hypothermia?” The woman asks, “What kind of exercise do you do?”

Candace apologizes to the couple and leads a puzzled Thassa away by the arm. The woman calls after them. “What are your favorite dietary minerals?”

They press through the crowded foyer. Safely outside in the bone-crunching cold, Candace tests Thassa. “You still want to talk to him?”

Thassa stops on the salted sidewalk, clouds of breath condensing around her. “He’s a funny man. We say: he knows how to make the donkey think it’s choosing the rope.”

Russell and Candace trade bewilderment.

Thassa takes their arms and starts forward again. “Yes, I’ll meet him tomorrow, like he wants.”

“He seems harmless enough.” Candace checks with Russell, who is helpless even to nod.

“But the author!” Thassa exclaims. “He’s the one I’d really like to meet. Did you read him ever, Russell?”

High up on the building’s corner, a tiny white coffin of a security camera tracks them with its red cyclopean eye. The last five years of Russell’s life could be reconstructed from archived videotape all over this city. He looks at the Algerian, his face a blank. “I don’t think so.”

“So many thoughts. I wonder if he might be ill? His sadness is so steady. I would love to experiment emotionally on him.”

Candace jerks to a stop. The arm-linked chain breaks. “You what?”

Thassa doesn’t even blush. “Just once! Just for science.”

He has her with the belugas.

On the phone the next morning, Thomas Kurton tells Thassa Amzwar to pick a meeting spot anywhere in the city. She laughs at the blank check. This city has forests in the northwest big enough to get lost in. To the south, black neighborhoods the size of Constantine that white people never enter. Convention centers with the look of fifties science-fiction space colonies. Warehouse districts full of resale contraband peppered with refrigerated corpses. Cemeteries a hundred times the length of a soccer pitch, with gravestones in forty-one languages. There’s Chinatown, Greek Town, Bucktown, Boystown, Little Italy, Little Seoul, little Mexico, little Palestine, little Assyria Two Arab neighborhoods-the southwest Muslims and the northwest Christians-where people from a dozen countries congregate to eat, recite Arabic poetry, and mock one another’s dialects.

She has my problem: too much possibility. A thousand parks, four hundred theaters, three dozen beaches, fifty colleges, fifteen bird sanctuaries, seven botanical gardens, two different zoos, and a glass-encased tropical jungle. Meet anywhere? The scientist doesn’t realize the scale of the place.

She says to meet her in front of the fish temple.

So they meet at the Shedd Aquarium in the depths of winter, on a day pretending to June. For a week the earth has been so warm that even the bulbs in Grant Park are fooled into surfacing. All along the lakefront people stumble, light and jacketless, joking about the boon of planetary climate disaster. It’s exactly the day on which to start the future’s next blank page.

Kurton allots twenty minutes. He has read everything on the Net about Thassa Amzwar. He’s gone through the Reader piece with a highlighter. If she’s half what the accounts make her out to be, he’s ready with a full invitation.

He spots her from a distance as his cab pulls up. She’s standing at the foot of the aquarium steps, in full sun. She looks like a girl whose parents told her to stay put and wait for them, just before they were rounded up by the authorities.

He pays the cab and walks the final hundred yards, watching her chat up a ring of multiracial third graders. In a few sentences, she has the whole volatile class rapt, hypnotized as if by the best interactive television. Their faces are like Prize Day. Their teacher stands behind them, transfixed as well. Thassa Amzwar flips a hand back toward the Chicago cliffs: red and emerald, white and obsidian. The children look on, astonished by the city that springs up behind them.

She sweeps her hand across the panorama out beyond the matchstick marina, pointing to where an entire mirror city plunges into the surface of the lake. Her hands cup into a small open boat, which she floats out to the horizon, into the seaway, past Montreal, and over the swirling Atlantic. The third-grade field trip winds up on the shores of another country.

She catches sight of Kurton where he stands spying. She grins and waves. He crosses to her and takes her hand in his. She laughs and introduces him to the circle of kids, who glare at this party crasher. Their teacher leads them toward the buses and they drag themselves away, calling Thassa’s name in singsong goodbye.

“What were you telling them?” he asks.

“We were just traveling.” She looks back out over the curve of the lake, shaking her head. She’s channeling Kateb Yacine: If the sea were free, Algeria would be rich.

He thanks her again for meeting. She shrugs. “Of course!” She says he looks kinder when he’s not onstage.

“I think your debate partner was very upset, by the end. Maybe you should write him a letter.”

He laughs. “Maybe I should!” He steals a look at his cell; he needs to be at O’Hare by one, for a flight to Minneapolis. And her tempo is clearly Sahara time. He waves toward a nearby bench. “Would you like to sit?”

She frowns. “I thought we could ” She glances at the octagonal Doric temple.

It takes him a moment. “Oh, of course. Have you ever been?”