Generosity

They talk nine times in two weeks. It’s something out of the archaic novels he used to love: a prisoner who lives for the letters from a companion he’s never met. An invalid obsessed with a vivid woman sealed in a century- and-a-half-old daguerreotype.

They keep deep down, amid the productive psychosis of the city. Neither one of them suggests that they get together for lunch or drinks or anything. They are each other’s solitary reading. The world is graduating from face time to MySpace anyway. The two of them are simply a little ahead of the curve

Stone puts it to himself: If the sound of Candace Weld’s voice suffices for the night that needs getting through, why should he escalate? Who decided that words are just action’s junior prom? He’s richer with her now, in the tangled inventions of their nightly sentences, than they would be after three weeks stranded in sexual intimacy.

Not disabled: deliberate. He’s read in his happiness books that deaf couples sometimes refuse medical intervention that might “cure” their offspring and banish them to the world of the hearing. Why should he be forced into the community of touch, when this is his real medium?

Candace’s voice asks for nothing. He can’t simply be imagining it: she’s grateful, as well, for this reprieve from the short-range senses. Yes, their nightly calls may be all too much like how she makes her living. Yet this-the free trade of signs-is where she, too, would live.

He likes when her midnight housekeeping stops, when the only background sound is Candace Weld lowering herself with contentment to a repose he can only imagine. Make me a pallet on your floor.

The question is whether affection can need no more than itself.

He stops being the one who says when their conversations end. She’s the one who sends them off now. And that, too, becomes their ritual. “Well, Master Stone. Any further words for you tonight?”

And one night, to Russell Stone’s quiet astonishment, he discovers: there might be.

Kurton has held up the study for too long, waiting for an ideal subject who will solidify the correlation at the outer edges of their model. Then C3-16f comes to visit. Even before Thassa completes the routine tests, everyone on the project knows what they have: a candidate whose alleles confirm their extreme-end predictions. They measure the lengths of repeating segments in the promoter regions of her transporter genes, then map these variants onto a new data point, high up in the blank area of the graph pointed to by the rest of their data set. And when they see how close she is to the existing straight line of their larger sample, even Thomas Kurton is ready to announce.

They pay the fee for fast-track peer review and-after filing all the appropriate patent papers-they publish in a respectable journal. From a holding pattern to a record finish. All viable labs have been bred for speed, and each generation, science gets better at hunting the mastodon. It’s either that or go extinct.

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

Weeks vanish, during which Stone achieves the moral equivalent of contentment. He works. One part per billion of the world’s magazine prose gets detoxified. His days contain no agitations greater than spam. He returns all the happiness books to the public library, which makes him feel much better. In their place, he reads forty pages of gruesome details a day from a doorstop text about the French colonial enterprise outre- mer. And at intervals frequent enough to steady him and scarce enough to surprise, he has his nighttime lifelines with Candace-travelogues to anywhere.

But there comes a night, in late March, when Stone gets a different call. He can tell from the hello: Candace Weld has news she doesn’t want to give. “Can you come for dinner tomorrow?” She adds a hurried truth-in-advertising, her voice unsure whether it will lure him or scare him away: “Thassa will be here.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Not really wrong.” She keeps her professional calm. “She has a piece she wants you to read.”

“A piece? A story?”

“Maybe.” Candace chuckles without mirth. “A preprint of an article from Kurton’s lab. It’s coming out next week, in something called The Journal of Behavioral Genomics.”

“And she wants me to help her with it? You’re the PhD.”

“She says you’re the best reader she’s ever met.”

He issues the appropriate cry of pain.

“It references her,” Candace says.

“Jesus. Not by name?”

Weld cycles her breathing-p raka , kumbhaka, rechaka. “Not exactly by name. Come have a look.” And before he can beg her to fax him the article, she murmurs, “She’ll be happy to see you.”

Ah, but she’s happy even when rebel groups shoot up her neighborhood.

He buses over to Edgewater the next night. The air is thick with supercooled rain that ices as it hits. It’s six thirty, and the roads are already a hockey rink. He should have called Candace and canceled. The bus fishtails through the intersection at Western and smacks a Lincoln Town Car. Nobody’s hurt, but the bus isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Russell gets out and slides the remaining half mile to Candace’s apartment, slashed the whole way by tiny hypodermics of sleet.

Young Gabriel buzzes him through the foyer. The boy holds out one sullen hand for Russell to high-five. “Happy Persian New Year.”

Stone’s mouth is slow to thaw. “It’s Persian New Year?”

“Well, I think it was like yesterday or something.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t,” the boy confesses.

A high-pitched ululation, and Thassa comes flying at him from down the hall. “Ween ghebtu, ya ustadh? Russell, where have you been?” Her momentum rocks Stone. She squeezes his arms to his ribs. He reminds himself that she’d give the same greeting to a cashier just back from a week’s vacation. She releases and inspects him more shyly. There’s something different about her, some shadow of reserve: the article he’s been summoned here to read.

Candace trails down the hall, smoothing her face and dusting off her flour-spattered teal shirt-dress. Her cheeks flush as she nears. “You’re all ice!”

She strips him of coat and hat, shoes and socks. Over his objections, she pushes him down the hall and into a bathroom, instructing him to dry off his jeans with a blow dryer. She slips in a pair of men’s heavy woolen socks, which just fit. Whose toe space is he taking?

He emerges into one of those casual, upholstered living rooms that experimenters strew with pillows and games and books, then watch from behind two-way mirrors as the inhabitants imitate their normal lives. His three hosts converge on him again, all talking at once. It’s like he’s been dropped down into a time-share burrow somewhere underneath the Shire. And for an instant he’s stabbed by the feeling that the world might be far from over, that life might still have plans for him, that domesticity might yet survive the worst that knowledge can throw at it.