Generosity: An Enhancement (17 page)

Tonia Schiff will sit for seven hours in the melee of the concourse at Orly Sud waiting for her connection to Tunis. Say it has happened already, just the way it will. Her flight is delayed and reposted half a dozen times. Reading becomes impossible, in the seething free-for-all of the gate. Continuous PA announcements shred all thought, and the age of talking to strangers in transit ended long ago.

To pass the time, she scans the crowd for cognitive biases. It’s a nasty little hobby, one that has driven away several boyfriends, including a trophy congressman whom she almost considered marrying. But the habit is too consoling to break.

All the flavors of bad science are out in force. Several twitchy passengers bandwagon around a sealed jet bridge for no good reason except that others are standing there. A red-faced Russian, sick with information bias, accosts a beleaguered ticket agent, who indulges a little skilled
déformation professionnelle
of her own. A pretty young couple hold hands and together influence the departure monitor by staring at it. And a loud compatriot of Schiff’s complains to no one about the loss of an upgraded seat that was never really his.

Here in the portal to the northernmost South, the glottal cadences of Arabic already immerse Schiff. The sounds of the crowd
broaden and deepen into rhythms she no longer recognizes. A three-generation clan sits next to her, decked out in holiday-finest tunics and scarves among ziggurats of cardboard boxes lashed up with string—presents from France for an entire village, once they get
home
.

The father of this family in transit could almost be that mythic fair-haired, blue-eyed, Afro-Eurasian Kabyle that so obsessed nineteenth-century Europeans. Then again, they could all be Schiff’s own distant cousins, differing from her by only a handful of alleles.

She thinks:
Look at me—as Islamophobic as anyone.
Phobic of contemporary Muslims, anyway. For Golden Age Muslims, she feels the respect most people save for dead patriots. Alhazen, Avicenna, Averroës: advancing science when Europe was still waist-deep in angels and devils. Then something happened. Exploration stopped, replaced by received wisdom. Observation, washed away by certainty.

Much the same is happening again, this time on Schiff’s branch of the family tree. Her own government has long crusaded against all kinds of science, secure in the revealed knowledge they needed. Now Schiff herself wades into the middle of a fray that might just turn the moderate American citizen against any more discovery.

Once she assumed that it was just a matter of time before humanity mastered its own destiny. Now she knows that only the past is inevitable. Reason could break down at any moment. Look at Orly Sud.

Enough philosophy; she has sworn off it. Philosophy never consoled anyone. Tonia Schiff finds an outlet and flips on her notebook again. She cues up her rough clips and searches for a way to splice their cataclysms into a future worth birthing.

Then comes the next classroom scene. From Friday to Monday, ten suicides have succeeded in metropolitan Chicago, six of them the result of mood disorders, the second-leading medical killer of people Stone’s age. From the time he says goodbye to Thassa in the college cafeteria until he sees her again in next week’s classroom, 287 people nationwide take their own lives. It’s number three in Harmon’s list of most frequently used plots.

Stone holds forth to the class, clunking his way through Harmon’s chapter on focalization:

The world has
seconds
and
minutes
and
hours
and
years
and
centuries
, but only the mind has
long
and
short
. The world has
inches
and
yards
and
miles
, but only the mind can turn
near
into
far
 . . .

“Grandpa Fred has finally lost it,” Princess Heavy says. “He’s starting to drool.”

“Totally,” Spock agrees. “The man is whack. Fascinating.”

The rest of the class piles on, and pretty soon, Frederick Harmon is left in a quivering, bloody pulp in the center of their encounter group. Russell loses his losers and abandons the lecture in favor of more journal read-alouds.

He conducts the group feedback the same way he always does. But Thassa, who grazed his shoulder on her way in, just sits in the oval in a bubble of contentment. He tries to draw her into the discussion, but she hovers alongside it, soaking the words in. To receive may now be more generous than to give.

Invisiboy apologizes to everyone. “I’m sorry you all have to listen to my lameness. Twenty-five new blog posts every second, and every one of them is more entertaining than my entry.”

Charlotte berates him. “You shouldn’t worry about entertaining anyone.” Before Russell has a chance to shout
Yes!
she adds, “Nothing really matters except entertaining yourself.”

Russell moves the group on to John Thornell’s excerpt. Spock reads a piece about playing paintball up in Wisconsin with a dozen strangers for thirty-six hours without sleeping. When he’s done, Russell can do nothing but sit, his face yipping, unable to sink the putt of appropriate response.

He tries, ever so gently, to suggest room for improvement. He cloaks the suggestion in a general observation. “As I always say, all the best writing is rewriting.” The circle just blinks at him. No way they’re buying perpetual revision. Half of them don’t even believe in the Shift key.

Counterstrike dismisses Teacherman. It’s his God-given constitutional right. He gives Spock’s entry his highest praise: “Perfect the way it is, boo. Don’t change a word. The thing flows like manga.”

They have to explain to Russell what manga is.

“Comic books?” Teacherman pleads. “Do we really have to go there?” His eyes latch onto Roberto, usually reliable in bringing the group back to sense.

But even Muñoz turns on him. “Well,” the Thief whispers, his hands like balls of bailing wire, “the best comics must be better than any print-only book. It kind of follows: pictures plus words gives you more to work with than just words alone.”

“What about interiority?” Russell challenges. “Complex levels of concealed thought? Things that aren’t material or visible. What about getting deep inside people’s heads?”

“I hate books that tell me what people think,” Princess Heavy says.

“Exactly,” Counterstrike agrees. “That Henry James guy? He is right at the top of my bitch-slap list.”

Russell snaps. “Fine. Let’s all just drown in shiny consumer shit.” He hears the word too late, garbling himself only at syllable’s end, like a television censor asleep at the bleep switch.

Even Thassa is stunned. They all sit frozen, until the Joker says, “Only the mind can turn shit into shiny.”

Stone apologizes to everyone, twice. He’s so ashamed he can’t even restart the conversation. He lets them go early. He’s ready to resign. Mesquakie was crazy to hire him.

The Berber woman stays after class. It’s all he can do to meet her eye. “Are you ill?” she asks.

Of course he’s ill; he’s alive, isn’t he?

She puts the back of her hand to his forehead. “Mmm. Yes. Warm. You need poly-pheelys, I think.”

They take the elevator down together. She studies him, shyly, but shows no need to ask about his meltdown. She just wants him to be well. Same as she wants from any stranger she passes on the street. She just needs him to delight in the world’s obvious inconsequence. It’s all she’s ever needed from anyone, in any country.

The elevator opens into the main lobby. Three night students straggle in, grinning knowingly as they exit. Thassa stops. Her olive skin blushes russet. “Maybe your problem is that you believe too much in words.”

He can’t even reply
maybe
. All he can do is stand wincing at everything in this life that ever made him happy. She takes his elbow and steers him toward the corner café. He follows her to the tea canteen, then freezes, dead. Seated at one of the tiny mesh tables is Grace’s double, the psychologist, Candace Weld.

Weeks later, Candace Weld would try to decide if she’d deliberately ambushed them. She’d been working late, catching up on session annotation. Between a sick soul and the healthy law, nothing mattered more than a good document trail. She was adding a closing appraisal to Russell Stone’s interview when she noticed in her notes that his evening class was just about to let out. Gabe was at his father’s; nothing waited back at her apartment except dirty dishes. She still had a good three hours of work. She put in one more, then went downstairs and sat for a moment on the edge of the café. She wasn’t even sure she could pick out an Algerian from the mix of evening students. But a potentially hypomanic one she might just notice.

They came from the elevators arm in arm. Candace couldn’t control her face, and Fyodor certainly saw her fail to. He shook his arm free fast enough to startle the girl. That’s when Candace Weld wondered what exactly she’d come for, sitting idly in the college lobby, when she should have been heading home.

Weld told her clients that if she ever saw them in public, she would never acknowledge them unless they initiated. She got so practiced at that professionalism that she sometimes failed to acknowledge simple friends. Russell Stone was not a client, of course; he had come to her in consultation only. Had he come out of the elevators alone, she probably would have said hello. But not like this.

She didn’t have to. Fast enough to surprise all three of them, the adjunct steered the girl toward the counselor’s table and made introductions. He didn’t say
friend
. He didn’t say
psychologist
. He didn’t say
student
. He just gave names and let the roles fend for themselves. She did admire that.

The girl was no girl. Twenty-three, but the radiance made her seem younger. People, like paintings, usually darkened with age.

“You
know
this man?” the Algerian asked. “That’s perfect! May we join . . . ?”

Without Stone’s prior account, Weld might have thought she had just come from a concert or film, some exhilarating work of art that made life, for a moment, seem kind and solvable.

“I was just leaving,” Weld said.

“Five minutes?” The student grabbed her instructor’s wrist and shook it. “You know this man. You have to explain him to me.”

As Candace Weld did whenever she was lost, she grinned broadly.
And in that moment of her confusion, the pair sat down. The younger woman could not stop beaming at Weld, her eyes all speculation. As soon as she hit the chair, she rose again. “I’ll make the tea. What do you take? I know already what this man drinks.”

As soon as the student wandered away to the self-serve station, the teacher started up, in that male shorthand that needs each word to do twelve things. “I’m sorry.”

Weld donned her counselor’s mask. “For what?”

“She’s trying to cheer me up.”

“Why is that?”

“I lost my temper in class.”

The man was artless, whatever else he was. But before Candace Weld could press deeper, Thassadit Amzwar returned with three hot drinks. She handed them out, saying, “
Saha, saha
.” Weld put hers to her lips and set it down, just to be doing something.

Thassadit asked, “So did you know this man when he was young?”

“No,” Weld said, stupidly adding, “not really.”