Generosity: An Enhancement (41 page)

All the while, she pretends she isn’t jonesing to discover whether the world as she knows it has continued to exist during her day away. At three minutes to the hour, she casually flips on the television (a broken remote left ceremoniously on the bedside table by the hotel staff) and trawls the channels like the worst of quidnuncs.

This two-star hotel in an outpost of forty thousand people in a remote western province of a little country wedged between the chaos of Algeria and the void of Libya pulls in more cosmopolitan broadcasts than she gets in New York. She pounces on the BBC like a starving person. The world is much as she left it. The day has gone like any other, held hostage by the past and doomed by coming appointments. In that closet hotel, each news story announces either imminent extinction or embryonic breakthrough. Hotel residents everywhere—any passenger in transit this night—must be forgiven for thinking that life will be solved at last, one way or the other, by the time they get home.

She flicks off the set and, in the highland silence of that molding room, opens her carry-on. She pulls out a plastic case packed with disks like makeup mirrors, each one storing hours of video. She’s packed only three days of clothes, but more digital clips than she could watch in three weeks. The secret of happiness is meaningful work.

She flips through her archive, the clips she’ll splice together to make her own real firstborn. In the middle of the stiff bed, surrounded by time capsules, she loads a short feature on the most notorious infant in living memory. The girl with that perfectly archaic middle name: Joy.

Whiplashing to think that the footage is three decades old. But the basic trope goes back millennia: a dangerous, destabilizing baby smuggled clandestinely into an unsuspecting world. The doctors don’t
even tell the prospective parents that their little girl will be the first of her kind. Tonia sits on the bed, watching the videotaped birth, a message posted forward to whatever people might inhabit the evolved future. The infant head crowns on Schiff’s screen, and there is Louise Joy Brown, an impossibly slight five and three-quarters pounds, crying her lungs out in that first crisis, air.

The birth cries are nothing, compared to the ones they touch off. Perfectly moderate commentators face the camera and declare the doom of the human race. Almost ridiculous now, this dated hysteria. But almost right.

Schiff sits up in the bed and glances back out the window. A corsage of yellow lights now trace Kef’s edges all the way up the jagged mountain. This town’s basic cure for sterility may often still involve a prayer at the local
zaouia
. But then, so does New York’s.

Tonia turns back to the warnings posted forward from a previous planet. Later technologies make that first artificial conception look like a Hail Mary play. Intrafallopian transfer, intracytoplasmic sperm injection: a dozen of her friends have shopped from that list. A few hundred thousand IVF babies make their way through this night, as dark swings around the globe. The process is nothing now, and the real show is only getting started. A new industry, following only voluntary guidelines, already screens embryos for hundreds of genetic diseases. And Tonia Schiff will bet her return ticket that some billionaire, somewhere, is already paying to have his offspring screened for good traits. The race will take to selling characteristics on websites, like downloadable songs, the day it becomes possible.

She ejects the disk and flips through the stack, looking for the second half of tonight’s double feature. She has documentaries and biographies, old news clips on engineered bacteria, gene transfer, the world-famous photogenic sheep, xenotransplantation, embryos from skin DNA transplanted into eggs, embryos with two mothers and a father, and, from last week, the application for exclusive ownership of a wholly synthetic organism.

Apocalypse has become too commonplace to feel. Of the scribbling in books, there is no end. And all our writing will in time come alive.

She takes notes until she falls asleep. And falling asleep, she’ll tell herself that she asks for almost nothing: one more documentary, one more interview, one more clandestine infant named Joy. But the rim
of cliffs guarding this ancient town mock any theme she might care to film.

Because Donna Washburn, the author of the
Reader
feature, googles her own name only once every two days, a full twenty-one hours pass before she sees herself mentioned in Sue Weston’s blog. Immediately Washburn leaves a message on Thassa’s voice mail, asking for confirmation. But Thassa doesn’t reply by the time the next week’s
Reader
is put to bed. So the paper runs an “unconfirmed rumor” squib. By the time the bit runs, it’s redundant. Jen’s secret identity has started to proliferate through the Web. Within a week, she’s pretty much a publicly traded commodity.

Three weeks before final exams, and Thassadit Amzwar is working flat out on
Come Spring
, trying to get a rough cut done before semester’s end. She hardly even notices the ripples. In this country, where continent-wide cultural transformations root, take over the biosphere, and go extinct several times in every twenty-four-hour news cycle, all she has to do is hunker down, finish the term, and wait until the public attention drifts back to celebrity divorces and custody fights, where it belongs.

The first assault is a simple repeat of last fall. She tries her best to answer the surge of e-mails. A few dozen fanboys and postpartum mothers write to ask,
Is Jen really you? How old were you when you first realized that your genes were making you joyous? Does it still work late at night in winter? Could we meet for coffee, for a chat, for just forty-five minutes? I could be there on Thursday. Minneapolis isn’t all that far from Chicago
 . . .

She’s gentle with these people; it’s not their fault they’ve been misled. After a few days, she reverts to a form letter. It breaks her heart, but she has no choice. She tries to add a personalized sentence at the end of every reply. When she begins to get replies to her replies, she grits her teeth and ignores them.

Then the phone starts ringing. It’s
Self
magazine. Then
People
. Then
Psychology Today
. She gives a couple of phone interviews without even realizing she’s doing so. She gives another one, just by trying to explain that she doesn’t want to talk about what’s not worth talking about. A journalist from the
Trib
begs her to come down to Rhapsody and just have a sandwich. She can hear in his voice that he’s a fine
man with a wife and children who only wants to do his job as best as he can; having a sandwich while explaining the massive misunderstanding can’t do any more harm. When Thassa gets to Rhapsody, there’s a photographer lying in wait alongside the journalist. And this photographer woman—a graduate of Mesquakie—is also just doing her job and living her art.

The interviewers keep asking her to describe exactly how it feels to be exuberant. She asks them, “You have never been?” Yes, they say, but . . .
all the time
? No, she says. Cheerful often. Exuberant sometimes, perhaps frequently, depending on the tally. Everyone alive should feel richly content, ridiculously ahead of the game, a million times luckier than the unborn. What more can she tell them?

They want to know whether she inherited her bliss, whether it comes from the environment, or whether she’s simply willed herself to be happy. She tells them honestly: she hasn’t a clue. They ask if other people in her family are as happy as she is. She says she’d never presume to say how happy anyone else might be.

After four days of the circus, she stops answering her phone. But it tears her up to hear the messages left on her voice mail. She can’t listen to them and
not
call them back. At the same time, she’d dearly like to finish the semester without flunking out. The only answer is to cancel her phone service and start a new one.

This doesn’t prevent total strangers who see the
Tribune
photo from stopping her in the street and greeting her warmly. But then, she used to stop total strangers in the street and greet them the same way. So it’s a wash, and she meets some nice people as a result. Many people she meets tell her how exhilarating it is, just to talk to her. That feels like considerable evidence, to her unscientific mind, that the disease is more contagious than genetic. But no venture capitalists step forward to fund a double-blind controlled study.

Where are Candace and Russell during all of this? They’re slipping off to lunch like international pleasure smugglers. She’s teaching him to cook. He’s sketching her portrait. They’re eating junk food on Navy Pier. They’re listening to Scandinavian reggae at the Aragon. They watch a Chinese gangster film in a hole-in-the-wall Chinatown theater, without benefit of English subtitles. They take Gabe to the Living Toys of the Future exhibit at the Science and Industry.

On nights when Gabe is at his father’s, they lie on Stone’s narrow futon on the oak floor, reading out loud to each other. They do scenes from Shakespeare—Rosalind and Orlando in the Forest of Arden. Jessica and Lorenzo under the floor of heaven. On such a night as this, they might be anywhere.

They carry Thassa around between them, always, blessed by the girl who has brought them together. They see her in every passing curiosity, all the sharp, bright details that now fill their days, feeling a gratitude as obligatory as taxes and death. “We should call her tomorrow,” Candace tells Russell, more than once, as they fall asleep holding each other.

They draft an imaginary book together. The force with which Candace urges the idea on Russell overwhelms him. It doesn’t feel like therapy at all. It feels like remodeling the house. It feels like gardening. It feels like having old friends over for dinner, only without having to clean up.

“Come on,” she cajoles, nudging him with her hip and settling down next to him on his futon. She brandishes his canary-yellow legal pad. “Come on, Mr. Wordsmith. Our one good chance to have things our way. So what do you want to call this thing?”

He can’t stop marveling at her. She’s turned into a goofy twenty-year-old. A grin as infectious as any virus. “Don’t we have to make a few choices first?”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Like whether we’re writing a novel, memoir, history, how-to, self-help, or cookbook?”

“Of course! You mean, like, facts or make-believe. Still a difference nowadays?”

For a while, anyway. Soon it will be all one thing or all the other, although Stone isn’t willing yet to predict which.

Time to choose. “Make-believe,” he declares.

“Great. That’s the one where they can’t sue you, right? So where do we start? We need a cast list. Dozens of three-dimensional, unforgettable characters who bleed when you cut them. People so real you can smell their toenails.”