Generosity

He hears her doing chores as she talks. Picking up toys. Pulling dishes from the dishwasher. They are the sounds of the life he always thought might be his someday. The pleasures he has long found only in books.

She asks him about the work in progress, the book that Thassa mentioned in Hyde Park. She’s wanted to ask for weeks. Her waiting so long to raise the topic moves him.

“I lied,” he says. “To keep Thassa from worrying about me. It’s all in my head. There is no book. There’s not even a nonbook.”

“Do you wish there were?”

It no longer bothers him, the echo therapy. He knows now that it’s just Candace, doing what she’s trained to do. If she stopped doing it, she’d be someone else.

“I don’t know. I’ve lost some basic human sympathy. I can see fantastic characters. Hear them perfectly. My head hurts sometimes, they’re so close. I can see exactly what they’re doing to themselves. But I get ill the minute I try to describe them.”

“Use someone else,” she whispers, as sexy as the dark. “Find a teller.”

At the sound of her, his soul breaks out and tours. She’s right. The city at this hour is packed with potential narrators. On a back street in Wrigleyville, two of his former students are smoking salvia and filming each other traveling through the universe, for posting on YouTube. On Oak Street Beach, an old Polish civil servant with one and a quarter legs makes her annual February midnight plunge into the freezing lake, with her husband as lifeguard. In an invisible squat on the roof of the Aon Center, an illegal Tanzanian immigrant protects the whole town from destruction through the sheer force of his will. Any one of them could rescue Stone’s fiction from crib death.

He does not tell her the real problem: fiction is obsolete. Engineering has lapped it.

What would his book be about, if it dared set foot in this world? She doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t say. It might be about the odds against ever feeling at home in the world again. About huge movements of capital that render self-realization quaint at best. About the catastrophe of collective wisdom getting what we want, at last.

He gives up his secret to her: the three stories he published once, in another life. He tells her how badly he wishes he could unpublish them all.

She tells him that even God was appalled by His first draft. Candace’s encouragement sounds exactly like the kind he once offered his students.

She says, “Are you in your bedroom?”

The question quickens him.

“Are you lying down? Do me a favor. Close your eyes and write a sentence in the air. Use your left hand. Just one sentence. A simple one.”

He writes: They sit and watch the Atlas go dark.

“How does that feel?”

It feels strange. Almost alive.

“Does it make you want to know what happens next?”

“I’m afraid that was the next.”

“Then write what happens just before.”

He has no trouble writing, he tells her. It’s the permanent public archive that terrifies him.

She says: Go to one of the free blog giveaway sites. Create an anonymous log-in, an altered ego. Just start watching, out loud, in words. Just say what has happened to you, in this life.

“I can’t,” he tells her. “That’s the problem. It’s not mine to tell.”

Then change it all, slightly, so no one gets hurt. Set the tale in some imaginary landscape, some otherworldly Chicago of naked invention. Forget about scene or plot or dialogue. Engineer a style you yourself would never dream of using. Confess or lie, show or tell, over-or underwrite: it doesn’t matter. Your words will be public again, and no one will even know they exist, except one or two accidental scavengers. And everything you write can alter in a heartbeat.

He does as commanded. It’s almost a pleasure, two nights later, to describe how miserably the experiment fails.

“I just kept thinking, We’re overrun with this stuff. It’s out of control. Kill yours before it multiplies.”

“I see,” she says. Wholly without judgment. He can hear her private diagnosis: patient has lost his nerve.

He closes his eyes and writes in the air. Left-handed, from Yacine’s Nedjma: Keep still or say the unspeakable.

Another night. Candace says, “Thassa called today.”

“Did she?” The topic might be Chinese hydroelectric development.

“She was full of Boston stories.”

“Was she?”

“She thinks she’s upset you.”

“Why would she think that?”

Candace won’t play. She’s trained not to. “You never answered her messages from the trip. She’s afraid you’re angry at her for going out.”

He’s not even sure what that might mean: Thassa afraid. She can’t possibly be losing any sleep. He doesn’t care who she gives her genome away to. He doesn’t care what science might find out about her. He wants Truecyte to work out the precise biochemistry for every ridiculous bait-and-switch human emotion that people have ever taken seriously and then develop an antidote. Fifty years from tonight, between genetic intervention, rising consumer satisfaction, upgraded telecommunications, pharmacology, the solidifying hive mind, improved diet, exercise, and behavioral modification, anger will be less of a concern than ringworm.

“I’d be ridiculous to be angry at her,” he says.

“You would be,” the therapist agrees.

Chance grows like a tumor in Stone. Ever since Thassa went to Boston, he’s been plagued by the body’s code, the twenty thousand genes hatching their million protein votes into his heart, lungs, and flooded brain. In the dark, safely on his end of the phone line, he asks the counselor, “How programmed are we?”

Candace will not fictionalize for him. The data keep accumulating: impulsivity, aggression, anxiety, self- destruction-all heritable. The genetic contribution to addictive behavior: 30 to 50 percent. Anorexia and bulimia: a 70 percent genetic component. “But still, the students who come to see me change. They can get better.”

“From talking to you? Or from drugs?”

“From both. The point is, for better or worse, will and words make a difference.”

“How much of a difference?”

For whatever reason, she humors his despair. “I don’t know, Russell. How much is enough? Did I ever tell you about my tightrope lessons? For my final exam, I walked across a twelve-foot gap on a piece of hemp half the width of my foot. Twenty feet in the air. And I’m terrified of standing on a footstool. Turns out, you just take one baby step. Then another. I’ve seen it happen. Temperament can self-modify. People can get free, or at least a little freer. And then a little more.”

“But not as free as we’re bred to believe we are.”

“Gosh, Russell. You make life sound like a sadistic experiment.”

“Let’s just say the grant proposal would never have passed my ethics board.”

“Hope is useful, man. It keeps us moving.”

“I see. Like a hamster wheel?”

He likes the sound of her midnight sigh.