Generosity: An Enhancement (35 page)

The air is chill, but not punishing. Not as bad as the February they’ve just come through. Colder air high above produces this supercooled lacquer of instant ice that, but for a few degrees, would have washed away as March’s final rain.

The foursome doubles back to the Red Line stop, to put Thassa on a train south. Thassa tows Gabe along by the back of her jacket, a compact droshky right out of Tolstoy. As the sleigh corners, the boy spins out, maniacal wonder in his eyes. The world is perverse and jagged after all. The boy absorbs this sudden wildness as if he’d willed it. He swings around and shoots Russell a crazed glance. The thrill goes right through Stone. He, too, the frozen boy in him, wants ice to be stronger than order.

They meet an elderly Asian in a parka coming out of the doors of the El stop. He waves both gloved hands:
Don’t even try
. “No more train tonight. Everything stopped.” He’s wearing the dazed little grin of disaster.

They peek into the turnstiles, where a burly CTA official in a puffy coat turns them away.

“How long?” Stone asks. But the uniformed man just shrugs.

The four of them mill near the station doors, waiting for a second opinion. The trains are stilled. The network is breaking down. The city slips into dementia. Stone is primed by the article: signals, synapses, precursors and pathways, transporters and receptors. The urban web, too, has unthinkably more ways of wonking out than of working properly. What thought is Chicago seizing on now, as its cells misfire?

A young gay couple slides toward them from the east. “Forget about it,” Gabe tells them. “They’re not running.”

“Get out! Are you serious?” They glance inside, but the CTA official nixes them. “Shit!” the smaller of the pair giggles, as if his music-player battery just went dead. “Plan B, come in. Where are you, Plan
B, over?” The couple skates off into blackness, singing,
I love to go a-wandering
 . . .

Candace peers northbound down the tracks. They’re as blank and silent as the afterlife. “Sleepover at my house,” she announces. Her son cheers.

Stone’s dread come to life. “I can walk home.”

Candace groans. “Russell! I can
not
believe you just said that.”

“Really. It’s not that far.”

“Don’t be a nitwit.”

Her son howls in pleasure at the slur. Thassa smiles, too. “You do say some funny things sometimes, Mister. Never mind. That’s why we love you.”

They creep back to Candace’s through three lapidary blocks. The furnace is knocked out, but the apartment is still warm. The adults go about transforming the place into a candlelit séance. Candace gets her son in bed, with an extra blanket, although the odds of the boy sleeping anytime soon are what science might call nonexistent. Gabe whispers to her, like he’s praying. “I’m scared, Mom. What’s going to happen?”

She starts to reassure him. The night is not that cold; the power will be back soon.

“Not that! The whole computer shut off before I could save. I could be totally dead!”

She kisses his forehead in the dark. “You’ll grow back.” That’s the beauty of the digital-replacement world. That’s why everyone is moving there.

She comes back out to the living room, where Thassa and Russell are reviewing the article by the light of six votive candles. “You and I can share my bed,” Candace says. Stone flinches, though she’s pointing at Thassa. Candace smiles a little ruefully and adds, “The man gets the sofa.”

Thassa stands and takes the article from Stone’s hands. “Please stop reading, Russell. You’ll hurt your eyes.” She squeezes his shoulder, grabs two candles, and follows Candace down the hallway to the master bedroom, calling good night.

The sound of fumbling in a linen closet, and Candace comes back out, her arms full of flannel. Stone helps her tuck the sheets around the sofa cushions. His ribs clamp around his pounding heart.
His chemicals are idiots, unable to tell an empty symbol from a full one, suckered by nothing more meaningful than propinquity.

He drops his voice. “Is it true?” She looks at him, baffled. “The article?”

Candace stands, holding her neck. “I don’t know. It sure sounds impressive.” In the low light of all these candles, she’s a La Tour. “Hang on. I’ll get you some blankets.” She heads back down the hall. Russell tags after her with a candle, pretending to be useful in this, at least.

She pauses before the linen-closet door. Signals race on the air. She feels the molding with one hand, then turns, the back of her pelvis pressing against the wall, bracing it. Her legs are slightly splayed. One hand drops and reads the stucco, while the other holds her auburn hair off her forehead. Russell comes to a stop in front of her. The flame of his votive casts a globe around them. She just studies him, her pupils dilated, her breath coming in surges. Waiting is her art; her medium, the confusion of others.

Wanting her has never been Stone’s problem. She knows him exactly, his hopes and fears, his reach and shortfall, and still she stands there, holding her hair from her eyes, not quite daring him, just studying to see if he, too, might think that it’s possible to double-cross nature, exploit the exploiter once, in this life.

He holds the candle to her cheek, leans forward, and puts his mouth on hers. Lowering a bucket to a well. He watches her close her eyes and thaw. His chemicals teach something that he long ago discounted.

A sigh comes from down the hall, the master bedroom door closes, and they both snap back to the business of blankets. “Here you are,” she says, loading him. An inward smile tightens her lips. He doesn’t know the word for it.
Wise.
“Call me if you need anything. You have my number, I think. Sleep well.” And she walks down the hall, brisk and rhythmic, letting herself into the closed bedroom, from which emerges a brisk duet of laughter.

He goes about the apartment, putting out candles. For a minute, he’s a surplice-covered twelve-year-old altar boy following the Benediction at St. John’s Episcopal, Aurora. Amazingly, that ancient creature is still paddling around inside him like some coelacanth, protected by the rumor of its own extinction.

The apartment gathers in eerie silence—no compressor, no blower, no hum or ticking of any powered device. He gets in bed fully dressed. He falls asleep to a ridiculous sense of rightness, dopamine run pointlessly amok. And he does sleep, on his sofa-pillow bed, deeper than any reason. But he dreams himself into a Pynchon novel, with an international cartel trading in the arcane incunabula hidden in people’s cells. His own sperm carries a sequence on the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
, and he has to chase through several genomically controlled cities, looking for a doctor who will transfuse his gametes.

He wakes early to the second day of spring. All the lights are on. He rises and makes the rounds, turning them all off. The devices all flash 12:00. He looks outside. The spell is broken. Sometime after midnight, the earth warmed ten degrees. The diamond crust has crumbled and liquefied. Neighbors are scraping off their cars and driving away. The disaster is over, before extracting any but the most token sacrifice. A shame.

Stone relieves his long-suffering bladder, splashes tepid water on his face, and bumbles in the kitchen to start the coffee. From the boy’s room comes the click of keys. Voices muzzy with morning hum from down the hall. Steps falter; doors open and close. Communal return to consciousness: the routine that he’s spent his whole life fleeing.

Candace emerges first. She’s immaculate as ever, in tan blouse and creased gray slacks, but her face is somehow different. Pale and ever so slightly featureless.
Cosmetic-free
. She raises a thin eyebrow at him.

“Party’s over? Back to the salt mines?”

He nods sympathetically and hands her a cup of coffee.

“Bless you. You’re a secular saint.” She sits wrapped around her stimulant, sufficient unto the day.

Before they’re forced into the exigency of talk, Thassa shows. She’s puffy, frazzled, and wobbly. Her eyes are still pinched shut. “Do
not
look at me. Not a happy sight!”

Her loginess is deeply comforting. She doesn’t spring up full-blown with the sun. Science should test her now, put this bleary, sedated postadolescent into the data set, before she’s had her morning tea.

Gabe comes out, more charged than the three adults combined.
“Everything’s fine,” he reassures Stone, chopping the air. “I only lost like a tenth of my Experience.”

They share another meal, American style this time. They sit at the small round table over synchronized cereal. Why do we need to turn the most naked animal dependency aside from breathing into a religious ritual?

Everyone’s already late. The whole city. The roads have mostly melted, and Candace decides to drive. Stone refuses a lift. All three beg him to get in the car, but he holds his ground. He looks at Thassa, heading off to a last week of normalcy before the subtlest biochemical assays ever discovered publicly declare her a freak of nature. Her face apologizes.
What else can I do?

It’s Chicago, morning rush hour. Crusts of ice fall from the blowing branches. Stone steps back, out of the range of anyone’s embrace. The riders wave, the car pulls out, and he starts the long slog back home through the disenchanted world.

“Give me your coffee cup,” Thomas Kurton tells Schiff, who’s caught by the second camera. “We can take a swab off that.” It’s a funny, telegenic moment. Director, camera operators, and sound tech share a look with Tonia, and they all wordlessly agree to a wrap.

But the minute the DV cameras turn off, Kurton does as threatened. He flings himself up off the porch rocker and into his utility room, where he retrieves a six-inch cotton swab. He tears the sterile packaging, dips into Tonia Schiff’s coffee-cup backwash, and seals the swab in its plastic housing.

The gesture is weirdly intimate. “I now have your genetic profile. Your SNPs and indels—the variations in your genome of any significance. I can identify your ancestors—and your descendants. I can predict your health and development, and I can even speculate about your disposition. I can make a good bet of your likely age span and what you’ll die of, if you don’t get hit by a car first. Hide this away in the cooler for a few years, and I’ll be able to do a whole lot more. Would you like a look? It’s the closest thing to time travel you’ll ever get.”

The man has morphed into something out of Wagner. The whole crew regrets shutting down the cameras too soon. The future hits Tonia, and her stomach folds. She rearguards: “Am I
allowed
to look? Or is somebody like you going to sue me for infringement?”

“Good question. Let’s say the law is in a period of adjustment at the moment.”

She’s not really listening. She has her eyes on the plastic tube and its contents, which he’s waving around in the air like a conductor’s baton. “I’m sorry. Could I just . . . ?”

He teases her for a second, the swab barely out of reach. “Sure. It’s all yours.” He turns to the mesmerized film crew. “Anyone want to wash the other cups?”

Schiff and Kurton are still disputing the phrase
the wisdom of repugnance
as the crew brings the gear down to the van. Tonia looks up to see her colleagues spinning their wheels, waiting for her. “Go on ahead. I’ll meet you back at the B and B in Damariscotta.”

The smirking crew pulls away in the van, but not before that punk Kenny Keyes gives her a little knowing finger salute off the side of his nose. She denies him the pleasure of a reaction.