Generosity

Miss Thassadit Amzwar.”

Thassa stumbles from the wings, squinting in the klieg lights’ blaze. A gasp comes from the house: she’s foreign. She’s wearing a pair of tight green straight-leg jeans and a puffy white Berber blouse embroidered with rainbow around the collar and wrists. She has on every piece of good-luck silver Russell has ever seen her wear. Those onstage clap along with the audience. Thassa sits on the sofa, leaning forward, legs together, peering out into the blackness. She spots her friends and waves. When the clapping quiets, she says, “Why are you all cheering? I haven’t said anything yet!”

Stone presses his eyes and Candace starts to cry. Everyone around them breaks out in a new, delighted ovation.

Nine minutes of television-a broadcast eternity. Watching the scene unfold over the shoulder of her own show’s cameraman, Tonia Schiff couldn’t help feeling, I’ve seen this film before. She could have written the spectacle’s script herself. Thassadit Amzwar came out onstage to a rock anthem, as if some trained seal of elation. The ingenue sat down, surrounded by her examiners, before an audience cranked up on a network high, teetering between the two primal feeding frenzies of hope and doubt. And as in every version of this movie that Schiff had ever seen, some well-meaning but helpless figure lurked on the boundaries of the audience, filled with shameful complicity. At least she was off camera this time.

The Algerian woman sat in the eye of the churning show, far away in an impenetrable place, pulling an imaginary shawl over her shoulders. Schiff marveled at the self-possession, freakish for a woman of any age, let alone twenty-three. In another era, Thassadit Amzwar might have been celebrated as a mystic. The famous host dangled questions in front of her like twine before a cat.

O: Would you call yourself one of the happiest people ever born?

TA: Of course not! Why would I call myself that?

O: You know what I’m asking.

TA: I feel very well. Very happy to be alive.

O: And you feel like that all the time?

TA: Naturally, no. I’m often sleeping.

O: How much of your personal happiness is in your genes?

TA: Ask this man. He knows everything about genes.

O: We’ve asked him already. What do you think?

TA: How can I know, Oona? What does it even mean? One hundred percent? Fifty? Zero?

Confusion gathered in the room behind Schiff, the buzz of a stirred hive. Even the prompting monitors were perplexed. Schiff made Keyes pan around the restive room.

O: Were you born happy? Were you a happy baby?

TA: Listen. I was thinking. Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it’s one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don’t even know that we are infected. A virus can even change your genes, can’t it?

Here the woman appealed to the scientist, who smiled so broadly that anyone just tuning in would have thought that he was the one guilty of inherited pleasure. Keyes caught both faces in close-up at just the right moment. He also managed to catch, in the iconic host’s reaction, the first awareness that she faced a guest rebellion.

O: Okay, let me ask it this way. Were your parents happy?

TA: My parents? My parents lived through war their whole lives. They never knew their own language. Everyone was their enemy, and then they died. How happy are most Americans?

The Americans in this room were less than pleased. Many of them looked ready to demand an emotional refund. Someone had misled the general public. The woman with the perfect genetic temperament wasn’t even amusing. This woman was testy. And the audience had been set up for some elaborate practical joke.

The famous host made further jabs, increasingly desperate. She shifted to Kurton, asking him to talk about Miss Amzwar’s neurotransmitter levels and her fMRI. Miss Amzwar interrupted. Why are you looking for our spirits in molecules? Very old wine in new bottles!

Her exasperation turned contagious. The program headed toward precisely the kind of disaster that kept audiences addicted to live broadcasts.

O: Sister, if you’re telling us that you’re as miserable as the rest of us, why did you come on this show?

The audience exploded into cheers and catcalls. The despondent Jen bent her neck oddly away from the camera, as if someone had her soul pinched between his thumb and forefinger and was twisting it. Her face clouded, and she sank into a darkness that bordered on bitter. Schiff felt the woman drift to the brink of a public breakdown. Yet even the descent seemed a work of art-repugnance as robustly enjoyed as any mood.

Keyes’s camera, along with the four Oona Show units, nailed what happened next. With another shoulder twist, the Algerian shook off temptation and passed into a state more solid than anger. She rose up on the couch and surveyed the room. Something large hijacked her irritation, some uncontainable affection for everything that grew from twenty-three chromosomes. Her enzymes aligned, she began to speak, and in one surge her easy tide lifted all the boats.

Digital clips of her outbreak hit the Web for worldwide consumption as early as that evening. They multiplied for days after the air date. And by the following week, the YouTube imitations began to appear. The otherworldly glow of the soliloquy came less from Thassa Amzwar’s words than from her posture, the quiet knowledge that poured out of the woman, despite her best efforts. And this was the aura that teenage girls everywhere attempted to copy, in an epidemic of two-minute DV viruses that broke out on machines across all the advanced countries.

Later, Schiff spent hours hunting down the proliferating performances, which had by then become one of the most popular amateur theatricals on the Net.

“Oona, listen,” a pretty Vancouver Eurasian lip-synchs, in her own shot-perfect re-creation of the segment. “I promise you: This is easy. Nothing is more obvious.”

A stocky blond high school junior wearing a Berber blouse in her Orlando bedroom recites for the lens, “People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful.”

Atlanta: “Even a minute is more than we deserve.” Spokane, Allentown: “No one should be anything but dead.” San Diego, Concord, Moline: “Instead, we get honey out of rocks. Miracles from nothing.”

“It’s easy,” all the Thassa Amzwars across the globe swear to anyone who’ll listen. “We don’t need to get better. We’re already us. And everything that is, is ours.”

Stone and Weld snatch her from the clamoring studio audience and whisk her off to a hidden soft-serve ice cream dive somewhere west of Greek Town. Neither of Thassa’s foster guardians has the courage to ask anything but whether she’s all right.

Her all-rightness extends to being ravenous. She wolfs down nine hundred calories while wondering out loud, “What exactly is my crime, do you think? I simply enjoy this world. Why do they treat me as some kind of threat to civilization?” She says nothing about her teetering in front of the camera, that brittle moment when she seemed half in love with nihilism. But she confesses to thinking she’d never escape the post-show crush alive.