Generosity

reason why every one of us can’t be equals to our ideal.” In the last lines of the profile, the scientist says, “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that it’s humanity’s job to bring God about.”

By then, the two viewers are long gone, the television muted, Candace up and astride Russell, bobbing herself to a pulse they find together, Russell her fuse beneath her. They end up shattered, crumpled into each other, a double collapse, both so grateful to be back here, after so long away.

Then they’re in her bed. The second time is slow. They turn each other all ways, tasting, playing, giving over-all either of them ever wanted. Whatever the first reason, there’s no other point now than to fit together. It takes all his will not to tell her he loves her, over and over. And he would, if words weren’t as hindering as fur on fish. But this is what he thinks, curled up safely into her amazing back, plummeting into sleep: Thank you. Thank you for raising me from the dead.

They wake in light, to a disoriented Gabe calling, “Mom? Don’t we need to get up? Mom? Why is the TV on?”

Candace springs up and startles when she sees Russell. She covers her mouth with her hand, half in this morning’s start and half still in the ocean of last night. She kisses him, chastely now, her breath loamy and close, stale with slept-on bliss. Her neck and pits, too, smell fusty but familiar. Fitting. She grins and shies a finger to her lips. She shouts to the door, “Morning, sweetie. I’ll be right out!” She pantomimes to Russell, Wait here, then laughs again at the idiot gesture. She tumbles into long johns and a sweatshirt and disappears.

So-a French farce: yet another story you know by heart. Only in this one, the other man is four feet tall.

Russell stretches out diagonally in her sheets, territory he has already marked. The sheets still hold her gamey scent. He has read how people choose their mates on smell and some sixth sense, a pheromone whiff off histocompatibility complexes other than their own, but recognized. He was doomed to end up here, in her bed, from the moment they sniffed each other.

For months he’s watched the film in his head, sure that this inevitable collision would end in fumbling disaster. Sure he’d come away from a night with Candace condemned forever to the life of an impotent poet, without even the consolation of writing poems. Now all the focused force of dread vanishes in a rush of surprise fitness, leaving him vast amounts of surplus energy with which to enjoy the woman again, at the earliest possible opportunity. All the best writing is rewriting.

He feels good. Contemptuously good. Every inscrutable thing that Thassa has ever said about how easy this state is to achieve now feels stunningly obvious. And yet this burst of happiness will be deducted from any remaining share owed to him in the afterlife.

Beyond the door, a mother makes right again the world of her child that has come apart a little in the night. Russell breathes in; only the memory of last night’s television persists in rasping him. And even that burr is obscured by the side effects of the Ativan and the image of a woman lifting and lowering herself gratefully on him.

She lets herself back into the room, flushed. She leans against the door, a makeshift barricade. “I’m so sorry about this! I’ll just get dressed and take him to school. Then I have to head in ”

“Sounds good. I’ll just lie here like a satiated drone.”

She grins, comes to the bed, and climbs all-fours on top of him. “You are wonderful. Simply wonderful.”

She means someone else. Or some other word. But maybe he is, this morning. For this moment, anyway, full of something much like wonder.

He watches her stand in her closet and do a demure reverse striptease until she is Candace Weld again, pleated, rose-colored college psychologist. The moment she’s dressed, they lose each other again. He pulls the covers over his thin chest. She looks everywhere but at him. “Stay as long as you like,” she says. “You know where the coffee is. I’ll check in with Thassa from work. See what she thought about the show.”

“Good plan.”

She crosses to him and kisses him on the forehead. He kisses her on the chin. In afterthought, she sits on the edge of the bed and rests her hand on his sternum. “I hope ”

“Yes,” he says. “Me, too.”

She goes to the door, touches her lips, sends his germs back to him on the carrier air. The door opens and she stumbles out into the hall, into a bolting ten-year-old.

When Candace called, Thassa had already recovered from the show. She laughed at the scientific pseudonym that Dr. Kurton gave her. “He must have stolen it. From a film I showed him.”

The Algerian seemed as resilient as her alleles made her. “It’s not so bad as I feared. Kind of science fiction, right? Nothing to do with me, anyway. Now it’s Jen’s problem! Although, did you see that anime of my brain? My own brain, working. Very strange, that.”

That night, at their usual time, Candace checked in with Russell.

“How did she sound?” he asked.

The psychologist sighed. “Happy. As usual.”

“I know the feeling. Except for the ‘usual.’ ”

And the two of them went on to speak of more pressing things.

The scientific community’s reaction starts noisy and amps up fast. A madly democratic chorus weighs in on radio, television, and the Internet, and in newspapers and university lecture halls.

The press leaps on the usual expert witnesses. In the States, they swarm around Jonathan Dornan. Three internationally bestselling books explaining evolutionary genetics to the intelligent layperson make him the automatic go-to for anything spelled with the letters G, A, C, and T. Dr. Dornan gives a guardedly appreciative quote to the AP: “Ten thousand genes get expressed in the human brain. We understand fewer than one percent of them. This research begins to give us a handle on what happens in forming baseline temperament.”

Others doubt the paper’s details can be redeemed, let alone refined. In laboratories from Tubingen to Beijing, skeptical researchers object to the idea that anything so complex could derive from so small a number of genes.

Nobel laureate Anthony Blaze writes a much-reproduced Guardian op-ed:

We must once and for all outgrow our obsolete ideas about heredity. Genes don’t code for traits. They synthesize proteins. And single proteins can do incredibly different things, depending on where and when they’re produced We have no gambling gene, no intelligence gene, no gene for language or walking upright or even a single gene for curly hair, for that matter. We certainly possess no set of genes whose function is to make us happy.

This piece just feeds Truecyte’s original firestorm. Geneticists on four continents caution about overstating the case for nurture. There’s nothing magical about behavior or temperament. When the crucial genes are missing, no amount of outside stimuli can compensate. Maybe FOXP2 isn’t a gene “for language,” two German researchers point out in an Economist reply, but the lack of a good copy of it prevents the development of speech.

Other speakers come to Blaze’s defense in dozens of international forums rushed together in the wake of the story. The Kurton-doubters concede that a single gene defect can knock out a complex behavior. But that doesn’t mean complex behaviors derive from a single gene. One bad allele can cause depression. But a few good ones don’t necessarily cause bliss.

Researchers whose greatest social stress consists of writing grant proposals slink out of their labs and into broadcast studios. They summarize the complex article using short, digestible sentences of simple words. On cue, across the big three monotheistic target markets, creationists flood the call-in lines, leading the discussions into threads more tangled than any enzyme pathway.

A hard-core genetic determinist from the University of Leiden, interviewed on BBC Four, points to the haunting twin studies: the more genes any two people share in common, the more likely they are to share dispositions, no