Generosity: An Enhancement (16 page)

Three things Russell Stone actually writes about her in his journal that evening:

She’s a middle child, a helper. She doesn’t know how obvious this is.

She’d be the best kind of person to have in your court.

The gaps between her keyboard keys are filled with cookie crumbs.

The class grows closer, reluctant to let the holidays split them. They open up their unedited notebooks to one another. Journal and Journey turns into group therapy by another name. They swap all their hidden hostages now, when they trade their nightly writing. They travel together, down into one another’s darkest places and up to their wind-whipped peaks. For one last moment, the eight of them share something better than a story.

They take on Roberto’s nineteen months of annihilation by meth, the weekend-long punding sprees, taking apart and reassembling an old pendulum clock six times in a row. They join Charlotte’s permanent guerrilla campaign against her father after the baffled automotive executive punches daddy’s little girl in the mouth, then spends the next three years begging for forgiveness. They cheer Kiyoshi’s provisional victory over agoraphobia the day he summons up the courage to order a fish sandwich in a McDonald’s.

And they share Thassa’s bewildered glimpses of the United States—waiting to get a license at the DMV, trying to recycle batteries
at a behemoth box store, witnessing her first televised megachurch evangelical service. Her journal knocks them back down into immigrant senses. Their country goes wilderness again, through her eyes. Her words make it okay to find pleasure in nothing at all—trading folk songs with the mailman or mapping the trees of the near South Side. Joker Tovar cuts his ADD engines and listens, one hand cupped over his eyes. Even Artgrrl Weston drops the groomed irony and nods, like she, too, wants to be Thassa when she grows up.

Suppose that panic or even pointlessness can’t touch us. Say that nothing can touch us, but what we say.

There’s the scene where Stone asks Thassa to stay after class. As if he wants to talk to her about her course writing. The others, on their way to their traditional post-class jamboree, beg him not to monopolize their ringleader for too long.

He’s practiced this speech for so long that he almost gets the question out without bobbling. “There’s something I’d like to talk about. Would you have a minute? We could grab something downstairs . . .”

“Hey!” the Algerian asks. “Are you trying to date me?”

He steps back, slapped. “No! I just thought we could sit for a minute and discuss—”

Thassa laughs and shakes his elbow. “
Yes
, Mister Stone. It’s fine. I’m joking!”

They descend to the makeshift café, off the main-floor lobby. They hit the self-serve tea station and take their paper cups to a tiny steel-mesh table. Stone chatters nervously about the recently discovered miraculous benefits of tea polyphenols. Thassa waves him off. “Kabyle grannies knew about that, long before chemicals!”

Stone asks about Thassa’s surviving family. Thassa pulls pictures from her shoulder bag. She shows off her brother, Mohand, who has dropped out of community college and returned to Algiers, where he makes a living hiring himself out to stand endlessly in line for people mired in the bureaucratic state services. She passes him a shot of her aunt Ruza, the former dentist, tending the water lilies surrounding the chinoiserie pavilion in the Montreal botanical gardens. “A funny city,” the Kabyle says, shaking her head. “But it’s home now.”

Seeing his chance, Stone blurts out, “Do you miss it?”

“Sure! I miss every place I’ve ever lived.”

“Do you ever find yourself a little low? A little gray, down here, in this place?”

She tips her head, trying to figure out what kind of scene they’re writing. “Of course! I think you can imagine. How else to feel, so far from everything?”

“And . . . does that ever frighten you?”

She sighs and looks skyward. Anyone who didn’t know her might say she’s exasperated. “You think I’m too happy, don’t you? The whole world thinks I’m too happy! Isn’t this America? No such thing as too much?”

His pulse spikes, and he looks around to flee. “I’m sorry. I don’t think that. I was just concerned that sometimes—”

She reaches across the table and flicks the back of his hand with her fingernails. “What do you
think
? I’m not strange. I feel everything you do. Can’t you tell that from my journals?”

He catches her eye; she must be joking again. At worst, her journal entries admit to tiny flecks of brown—small craft scattered across an open, golden sea. Everything that he feels? Maybe, if you invert all the doses.

“The problem is really my name.” She’s frowning, or at least it looks like a frown.

Stone shakes his head.

“
Thassadit
. This name means
liver
. I’m stuck with this prophecy. I can’t help it!”

Stone just looks at her, worse than worthless.

“Well, liver is the Tamazight for
heart
. You know!
Joie
. Expansion. Big feeling?”

She won’t say the word. “Generosity?”

“You see? I was doomed from birth.” She looks down, embarrassed. “Russell? The others are waiting at the bistro. Why don’t you join us?”

His heart tries to kickbox its way through his sternum. “I don’t think so.”

“Just ten minutes? You like these people. They like you.”

“I still have some work tonight.” Manuscripts to mark up; enthusiasm to edit back down into harmlessness.

“Please don’t worry about me,” she says. She stands and hugs him.

She’s halfway through the emptied lobby before he can say, “No, of course not.”

He goes home and binges all weekend on nineteenth-century Russian short stories. Just this once, fiction.

I need a
genealogy
for the word. It comes through the loins of that giant Latin
gens
, the one that so liberally shares its family name, family property, family ties, and family plot. The original root of the thing has spread its genes into an absurd number of offspring: genial, genital, genre, gentle, general, generic, germane, germinate, engine, generate, ginger, genius, jaunty, gendarme, genocide, and indigenous, while scattering cousins as far afield as cognate, connate, nascent, native, nation, children, kind. Generous to a fault. Too many progeny for any paternity test.

A heterogeneous word, but how benign? Does
generous
include all those who are by nature genuine, generative, anyone pregnant with connections, keen to make more kin?

Or is generosity a question of having the right blood, the innate germ of the genteel gentry?

It strikes me that genomicists will soon be able to trace a full lineage for any person with more journalistic precision than the dying race of philologists have ever been able to trace a given word’s more recent journey.

Forgive one more massive jump cut. This next frame doesn’t start until two years on. It’s the simplest of predictions to make. Tonia Schiff will find herself on a warehouse-sized plane flying east above the Arctic Circle, unsure what she is hoping to come across at the end of the ride.

She’ll be on a flight to Paris, economy this time, where she will catch a connecting flight to North Africa. A packed plane, 550 passengers: elder hostel groups, college kids with Eurail plans and
Rough Guides
, middle-class French couples—instant aristocrats of the plunging dollar on their way back from overnight shopping in New York—commuter businessmen with their spreadsheets full of pharmaceutical sales or financial services. And on this flight, she will try
several times to watch the episode again, “The Genie and the Genome,” that segment of
Over the Limit
she filmed two years ago. Armed with a notebook computer, several disks from the archives, and dozens of hours of raw clips, she intends to weave a sequel that might somehow redeem her.

The third time through the episode, she’ll get as far as the bit where Kurton starts in on our being “collaborators in creation” when she’ll have to shut off the computer and put it back in her carry-on. She’ll look up through the rows of her fellow passengers, smothered by the coming world. And she’ll think how the species almost completed one magnificent act of self-understanding before it snuffed itself out.

I have her flip up her window slide and look out the plastic portal. Far below, at a distance she won’t be able to calculate, something the size of a continent will slip away west. The endless surface, a sheet of unbroken white just a few years ago, will be speckled all over and shot through with blue.