Generosity

Dennis studied his notes, pretending composure. “You will go into therapy,” he said. “Christa will get you referred.”

She almost stood up then and walked out of the office. Only the mortgage prevented her.

“And of course you’ll have no contact with Thassadit Amzwar.” He pronounced the name like something from Iowa. “If she approaches you for advice of any kind, you will refer her to Christa and curtail any further interaction.”

Neither bearable nor possible. She fully granted the wrongness of her action and the validity of every reprimand that Dennis threw at her. But she did not merit punitive action. Not reprimand for what she’d fought so hard to correct.

“And my relationship?”

Dennis looked at her at last, his eyes narrowed in what any student of human psychology could only call disgust. “That’s between you and him. You think he’s willing to give her up for you?”

I always knew I’d lose my nerve in the end. Kurton set free by his data; Thassa turning brittle; Stone an easy mark in the crosshairs of love. Now Candace, on the auction block. A part of me wanted to love this woman since she was no more than the sketchiest invention. I thought she would be my mainstay, and now she’s breaking. I don’t have the heart to learn her choice.

All I want is for my friends to survive the story intact. All the story wants is to wreck anything solid in them. No one would write a word, if he remembered how much fiction eventually comes true.

The genomicist, too, has a rough night. I’ve said so little about him that you may not care. That’s more cowardice on my part. In the absence of detail, you’ve been seeing him as an uncle, an old biology teacher, some more solid scientist you recently came across in another book or film. You might feel anything toward him-curiosity, hatred, attraction. The world’s two camps of readers, split by inborn temperament, need two inimical things, and each has long ago decided to love or loathe this man according to those needs.

But feel this much, anyway:

Thomas arrives back in Logan on the flight from Chicago, mystified as to why Thassa Amzwar would lash out at him on national TV. The audience outcry also baffles him. He’s satisfied enough with his own performance: hopeful but accurate. He’s confident that public controversy can’t hurt science. Nothing, really, can hurt science. All the Luddites in the country turning out with torches and pitchforks would succeed only in sending research abroad. Everything discoverable will be discovered; he’d bet his lab on that. And every truth that research turns up simply becomes more environment, part of survival’s calculus, no less than air, food, climate, or water.

Yet this backlash takes him on the chin, as bad as the first fray he landed in, back at the Cardinal Hayes High School science fair. He understands the tribal fear and self-protection behind this aggression. But his work aims only to relieve ill health, free people from the body’s caprice, and crack open the prison of inherited fate.

He strolls through the mobbed baggage claim with his single carry-on. The airport loop is a snarl of shuttles, taxis, and cars. The matter transporter will not come a day too soon. Two people on the Blue Line back into the city think they recognize him from The Oona Show. But they decide no; the founder of seven biotech companies, adviser to six scientific journals, and discoverer of the major genetic contribution to human well-being can’t possibly be riding the subway.

He gets out at Government Center and walks to his brownstone on Beacon Street; walking reduces the risk of many major disease predispositions. It’s late afternoon, and the streets fill with the change of shifts. Vendors, Bible-waving preachers, one-man bands, and stump speakers cluster at the foot of the hill beneath the State House, as crowds pour down the subway steps at Park Street. He cuts across the lustrous Common, exhilarated by the human pageant. Fifty yards away from his front door, he sees that his first-floor bay window has been smashed. He trots the rest of the way, saving a few seconds by rushing to a crime committed hours earlier.

He finds a paver pulled up from the sidewalk sitting in his living room. He turns it over in his trembling hands, looking for the attached note. There is no attached note. He sits down, light-headed, confused. Why send someone a message, if there’s no message?

He knows the message. Are we not men? Leave us the hell alone. He sits for a few minutes, afraid to call the police. He shuts off the light, to hide his silhouette. After a while, he goes down into the cellar and brings up a piece of pressboard large enough to cover the broken window. He tacks it into place, a barrier, at least. Then he leaves a voice mail with his handyman.

He makes himself a blueberry soy shake, which calms him a little. He goes online to see what kind of hate- mongering the show produced. Reaction is all over the map, from morose to ecstatic. But he sees no violent threats, at first glance. He logs off the browser and occupies himself with the surge of waiting correspondence. But he works at no more than half efficiency. He recoils at every floorboard creek, waiting for the follow-up message. After an hour of twitching, rather than continue to spin out, he decides to drive up to Maine.

It’s late already, but a night drive will clear his head. He throws his still-packed bag into the Insight, the most fuel-efficient vehicle ever sold on the mass market. He’d have bought it for the engineering achievement alone. Only innovation, now, will buy the race enough time to work its next escape.

He drives for hours, into the night. He keeps himself awake listening to an audiobook of The Plague, the novel that defeated him at Stanford, when his ex-wife made him read it. You want to devote your life to life science? Read this first.

He’s gone back to Camus after talking with Thassa about the man. She filled him in on all the context he missed when reading the work in his twenties. She quoted the author’s notorious declaration, at the height of the savage war: If I have to choose between justice and my mother, I would choose my mother. Kurton’s justice is the freedom of research, rapidly decamping to the western Pacific Rim. His mother has been in a home in Westchester County for the last four years, ever since her defective APOE allele caught up with her. The choice would still not be easy, but it would be clear.

As a young man, Thomas never thought to wonder why Camus’s Oran had so few named Arabs in it. Thassa set him straight on that as well. I do love him, the Algerian said. He was both beautiful and humane. But also as blind as anyone with his background. Thomas finds him blindly humane, too, as he drives up to Maine in the dark. But the problem is not with the enlightened pied- noir. The problem is with the craft of fiction.

The whole grandiose idea that life’s meaning plays out in individual negotiations makes the scientist wince. Intimate consciousness, domestic tranquility, self-making: Kurton considers them all blatant distractions from the true explosion in human capability. Fiction seems at best willfully naive. Too many soul-searchers wandering head- down through too many self-created crises, while all about them, the race is changing the universe. That much is clear to Kurton, as he slips off the interstate and onto the winding, coastal Route 1.

Worse, fiction’s perpetual mistaking of correlation for causation drives Kurton nuts. Even Camus can’t help deploying bits of his characters’ histories as if they explained all subsequent behaviors and beliefs. The trick smacks of an environmental determinism more reductive than anything that has ever come out of Kurton’s labs. My upbringing made me do it

Kurton knows never to give his own biographical details to any reporter, or if he has to, to make them up. That’s what the brain-body loop does, anyway: it’s not the traumas Thomas remembers that shape Thomas-not so long as Thomas shapes the traumas Thomas remembers. He has never tried to hide his background; it’s just irrelevant. Kurton’s discoveries are only interesting if someone with completely different needs can reproduce them. The double-blind study frees human history from the trap of bias and sets it loose in a place beyond personality.

He wants to live long enough to witness a new, post-genomic fiction, one that grasps the interpenetrating loops of inheritance and upbringing so tangled that every cause is some other cause’s effect. One that, through a kind of collaborative writing, shakes free of the prejudices of any individual maker. For now, fiction remains at best a scattershot mood-regulating concoction-a powerful if erratic cocktail like Ritalin for ADHD, or benzodiazepines for the sociophobe. In time, like every other human creation, it will be replaced by better, more precise molecular fine- tuning.

The Plague ends about half an hour outside of East Boothbay. The road by then is