Generosity: An Enhancement (4 page)

He started a wry, detailed description of his mother’s obsession with food supplements. He lingered over her enthusiasm for DHEA, with which she pared herself down to four hours of sleep a night. He described how kavalactones got her elected to the school board. But four thousand words into the portrait, he realized he couldn’t possibly publish it, let alone mail it to Grace. He couldn’t imagine what he’d been thinking, ridiculing his own flesh and blood for anyone to read.

He wrote an account of Pima County estate auctions. Every magazine he sent it to rejected it as polite and lifeless. He composed several short nature features involving no people at all. When even the nature magazines asked him to liven up his accounts with a little quirky presence, he lost heart.

Grace, back from France, called him from New York. She was
having trouble finishing her novel. Come out, she begged. Just for an escapade. Or at least send something fresh to read. “Something to unfreeze me. You know: the stuff you do. The wicked stuff. The grotesques. Everybody I’m reading is a patronizing bore.”

He closed his eyes, gripped the phone, and laid out his sins for her, like a literary prize. He told her about Stan Newstetter. She laughed at him, harder than she’d ever laughed at his stories. Book-club moms were podcasting their teenage daughters’ first sexual forays, and he was beating himself up for misrepresenting street people? He was crazy. Worse: he was threatening to become tedious.

He told her about Charlie Melendez. She couldn’t understand. “You didn’t make that man hurt himself. He volunteered everything.”

He confessed that he hadn’t run the piece past Charlie before publication.

They argued. She hung up on him. He vowed he wouldn’t pick up for her the next couple of times she called. She never gave him the chance. Eighteen months later, her novel was published. It included a hilarious portrait of a small-town reporter terrified that his human interest stories were returning to haunt him.

He went back to his community newspaper job. But his interview subjects no longer opened up to him. After half a year, he lost all ability to put together a basic lifestyle feature. He considered returning to grad school, to train as a political correspondent or economics reporter.

He could no longer read anything even vaguely confessional. Intimate revelations or domestic disclosures creeped him out. He dosed himself with popular science and commodity histories—how the spice trade or the cultivation of the bee set mankind on an unforeseen destiny.

Best of all, he liked the white space, the virgin territory bordering a page. All his life he used to ink up that space, fill it with passionate editorial:
Couldn’t have said it better myself
or
Stop this argument before it kills again!
Now he no longer wrote in books. In fact, he started making the rounds of Bookman’s stores, buying up the best impersonal books faster than he could read them, just to save them from scribblers.

He left Tucson. He returned to Aurora, to live with his mother in his boyhood home in the Fox Valley. His brother was still there, working
for a satellite-dish company. Russell got a job in construction. The clean, repetitive tasks were best. He loved to staple insulation, to cut and nail large square pieces of Sheetrock to freshly plumbed studs. When he was in the flow, even his boss’s hate-mongering talk radio didn’t bother him.

He installed things for his mother: new kitchen cabinets, which she loved; oak bookshelves, which she couldn’t fill. He dated sometimes—kind women who were after exactly nothing. Many nights, he and his brother played long matches of deferential Ping-Pong in the basement on the warped table of their childhood. He read himself to sleep on
Silkworms and Civilization
and
A Small Guide to the Big Bang
.

He went to his ten-year high-school reunion. The prospect held no more dread than any working day. He didn’t mind listening to his successful classmates’ achievements. He almost enjoyed telling his own riches-to-rags story. Confession was his only penance.

A former buddy from the sophomore year 4 × 100 relay was intrigued. “You’re a published writer?”

Was
, Russell corrected.

The buddy—accomplished deadbeat throughout his youth—had hit on a publishing scheme that threatened to turn him into a philanthropist. He’d founded a self-improvement magazine called
Becoming You
. Foods, workouts, lifestyles, finance: one of thousands, yes. But
Becoming You
had a twist: all the copy was subscriber-generated. And all subscriber-contributors were paid in quantities of advertisers’ goods. Write a feature on how micronutrients reversed your declining memory, and you won a year’s supply of Pom-a-Grenade antioxidant cocktail. Advertising exposure, underwritten costs, deeply involved subscribers, and the wisdom of crowds combined to leverage the zeitgeist.

Come to Chicago, the buddy told Russell Stone. Become a part of
Becoming You
.

Russell demurred: he no longer wrote for publication. But the buddy didn’t need Stone’s writing. He needed Stone to turn scores of semiliterate, fervent testimonials into something readable.

The offer felt oddly appealing. True, the pieces would be
personal
in the worst way. But the person in question wouldn’t be Russell Stone. Ghosting for amateurs was the perfect contrition.

Russell worked the job as if volunteering for a humanitarian
NGO. With his new income, he found a Logan Square studio and decorated it with dozens of pastel scenes that he drew, now that Ping-Pong no longer filled his evenings. The ten-by-ten-inch pictures showed bright, fluid human figures caught in the process of becoming lakes, clouds, or trees.

Say he eventually fell in with Marie White, a giving soul who loved to come over and read in bed next to Russell while he edited. They never chafed over anything, except his paintings. Marie thought he had a gift, and people with gifts were morally obligated to develop them. Russell just laughed at her, which stung Marie into silence.

After fourteen months, Marie wrote him a full-page note on Matisse stationery saying she was afraid that Russell might be melancholic, which kind of made her love him, but she couldn’t afford to sacrifice her life to his disease. She had to get on with making her own future, and she hoped that Russell would do the same. She was thinking of starting to see someone—a kind gallery owner, in fact. And if Russell ever finally realized how nice his paintings were, she could put him in touch . . .

Becoming You
took up the slack. Editing gave the same pleasure as hanging Sheetrock. He fixed predications, aligned parallel structures, undangled participles, unmixed metaphors, and collared runaway modifiers. He ran a comb through the tangled thickets of prose until they almost shone. He went into the River North office three days a week, and he worked three more out of his apartment. Consummate tedium became his art. For two years, he kept to his verbal trade, hoping to sink without a ripple beneath the earth’s crust. He could edit
Becoming You
for the rest of his life, provided he died in early middle age.

He edited a piece written by an administrative secretary at Mesquakie College about how to fight depression by feeding squirrels. The grateful woman alerted him to an emergency hiring in the Writing Department. A memoirist who taught the Journal and Journey course had taken unpaid leave after a bad episode with mood enhancers that made him travel to San Francisco and assault a blogger who’d insulted one of his published reminiscences about his father.

To Russell Stone’s astonishment, he met the job’s prerequisites. He had the degree and prestigious publications, albeit none for eight
years. With just a month to staff the course, the college was ready to take anyone. The interview felt weirdly furtive, as if Russell were defrauding a credit union.

He got the job and crammed for three weeks, prep that the opening night’s class scattered to the winds. But that night goes so well that now, for the first time in years, he imagines himself, with something like shock, becoming someone quite different again, by this time next semester.

From where I sit, the whole human race did something stupid when young—pulled some playful stunt that damaged someone. The secret of survival is forgetting. If evolution favored conscience, everything with a backbone would have hanged itself from the ceiling fan eons ago, and invertebrates would once again be running the place.

“The Genie and the Genome”—final cut—opens with that relentless, digital techno-throb that stands for
coming soon
. Out of the pulsing blackness emerges a face Donatello might have cast, successfully refuting middle age. The eyebrows arch. The mouth twitches shyly and confides:

 

Enhancement. Why shouldn’t we make ourselves better than we are now? We’re incomplete. Why leave something as fabulous as life up to chance?

 

The impish face turns golden and explodes. Each shiny shard tumbles away into more throbbing blackness.

Another face fades in from the void, a big, gruff, empirical Friar Tuck.

 

Insane? No, I wouldn’t say Thomas Kurton is insane. I might say profoundly nutty. But Darwin was nuts too, right?

 

Tuck shrugs, and his shoulder ripple starts a whirlpool that washes him away. The smiling Donatello rises from the flood.

 

A lot of people think this is all science fiction. But then, we live in a country where 68 percent of folks don’t believe in evolution . . .

 

His face tears in two and rolls up into a double helix. Out of that spiral appears a woman with straight brown hair and eyes as sad as a bloodhound’s. In a clipped Midlands accent, she declares:

 

One-fifth of human genes have already been patented. You have to pay a license fee just to look at them. People like Thomas Kurton buy and sell genetic material like it’s movie rights . . .

 

She turns into a sand painting that the wind scatters. Next comes a quick, cross-fade cavalcade of talking heads: