Generosity: An Enhancement (54 page)

He calls Robert, who talks him through the steps of renting a car. His brother is shocked to hear his plans. “Are you sure?
Canada
, man? It’s a parallel universe up there. The queen on the dollar bills. The guaranteed health care. You are aware of the whole French thing?”

Russell rushes to reassure his brother.

“Chill, Roscoe. It’s called irony. Supposed to be our generation’s native idiom.”

There’s something weirdly chipper about Robert. Stone asks if he’s feeling all right.

“Me? I feel like a million bucks. In 1960 dollars. Don’t hate me, bro, but I’m in good shape these days. Law of averages, I guess. If the docs keep waving their arms around at random, eventually they flick on the light switch by mistake.”

For a few sentences, Robert becomes a salesman for the American Mental Health Industry.

“Go ahead and do this trip, Roscoe. Niagara Falls with this chick. Whatever. And when the honeymoon is over, we’ll get you in to talk to my mechanic. He’s got the whole Stone pharmacogenetic profile worked out already.”

Russell promises to be in touch as soon as he reaches Montreal or runs into trouble, whichever comes first. “Incidentally,” he adds, “you don’t have to mention this trip to Mom.”

“Of course not. Canada? The matriarch would have a coronary. She still thinks the Blue Jays are a terrorist sleeper cell.”

Russell slinks through Pilsen the next morning, scanning the rows of russet apartments in a clownish, chartreuse PT Cruiser. In this part of Chicago, such a car is begging to be rammed. People eye his vehicle as he cowers at the red lights. Every one of them knows he is about to make off with his former student.

Only the implausible staginess of the scene protects Stone. He knows this story: a modernist classic. He’s overly familiar with the book, and he’s even seen both movie adaptations. If this were his
actual life, he would never in a million years be caught dead recreating it.

He finds a spot just half a block down from the designated building. He stands in the brick foyer and buzzes. A suspicious “Yes?” cuts through the intercom. He says, “Hello?” He can’t say her name, or his.

“Yes,” she announces. “I’m coming right there.” Her once idiomatic English has spent too many weeks immobile in a plaster cast.

He waits furtively in the vestibule until the elevator rattles to ground and a strange figure peeks around the corner. She steps into the lobby carrying two shoulder bags as large as she is. She’s wearing sunglasses, a dun-colored scarf, and drab olive sweats designed to be invisible. But there’s something else wrong, something he can’t make out until she comes through the foyer door and sweeps him up in a desperate, luggage-crushing hug: her hair has been cut harshly and dyed reddish brown.

“My God,” he says. “What happened?”

She grabs his arm and tugs him out to the street. “Come on, Mister. We’re gone.”

He takes the bags and they fumble to the car. He can’t stop looking at the transformation. She shifts the sunglasses and pulls the scarf tighter around her face. “Please don’t, Russell. You’re making me very sad.” She perks up a little when she sees the car. “It’s fantastic! Totally absurd. Some kind of film
accessoire
.” She beams at him, convinced that he’s the right man for this job. He puts her bags in back with his, and she climbs into the shotgun seat like they’re off on a family outing.

He steers by trial and error out to the southbound Dan Ryan. Beyond that, improvisation. He has picked up a map at the rental agency: everything from Chicago to Nova Scotia on one double-spread sheet. He just assumed Thassa would know the route, but she’s hopeless as a navigator. She shrugs at the lack of correspondence between the squiggly green interstate on the page and anything observable in the real world. “This map is total fantasy. Someone just invented it!”

He sees an exit ramp that says Indiana and heads toward it. Chapters later, they’re still stopped in a bumper-to-bumper bottleneck somewhere this side of Gary. Thassa fishes across the radio dial, but
every station only leaves her more agitated. She knows how to be a refugee, but not a renegade.

She shuts off the radio and turns to him. “Tell me about your childhood, Russell. Did you ever run away from home before?”

The journey of a single mile begins with a thousand regrets.

Man goes fugitive with ambiguous woman: the oldest story in the book. I’ve written that one myself, hundreds of times, in my sleep. And every time, the story wanted to break away, lose itself, escape altogether its birthright
plot
 . . .

On the day that Russell and Thassa make their break for the north, Thomas Kurton walks into a special meeting of the Truecyte board of directors.

He knows these men and women. He handpicked them: good scientists and skillful executives all. But he has small patience for even regular meetings, let alone the extra sessions. The whole purpose of incorporating is to let business free up science to do science. It’s not really Kurton’s job to keep teaching the adolescent enterprise new ways to stay solvent; that’s what the MBAs are for. He does not really care if Truecyte manages to stay in business or not: the point is to discover if it can.

Every company Kurton has founded is a creature let loose in the world. Together, they’re part of a longitudinal experiment in determining which forms of human desire are evolutionarily viable. Still, he shows up for the latest Truecyte fire drill, sips at the herbal tea, nibbles at the spreads of fruit, and jokes with his fellow board members, all the while prepared to supply his own blunt opinions about any course corrections the collective organism needs to make.

Peter Weschler, CFO, starts the formal meeting. He calls for two quick presentations—mind-numbing slides by the inner circle meant to reassure the inner circle that the company is fundamentally fit, with no Mendelian diseases. Truecyte has two new products in the pipeline and a small library of licensable processes that may prove instrumental to future genetic research.

But the venture capitalists have threatened to pull the plug and write off Truecyte’s rising flood of red. “I’ll put it simply,” Weschler
says. “Two of the top three stakeholders want to know what in hell is going on.”

All eyes at the long glass conference table flicker deniably toward Thomas Kurton, who takes some time to realize that he’s being reprimanded. When he does come alive, he’s sardonic in his own defense. “You know, if this association study has survived the scrutiny of hundreds of hostile competitors over the last few months, it should survive the scrutiny of friendly investors.”

“No one is challenging the study,” Weschler says.

“It’s impeccable science,” Thomas says.

Zhang Jung Li, the CEO, says, “This is not really about scientific practice qua science.”

“We had to push
you
to get the study out,” Weschler reminds Thomas.

Kurton simply can’t imagine what the investors have a right to fuss about. Research has tied a genomic network to a high-level behavioral trait. How can such a finding be anything but a gold mine?

“They want,” the steady proteomics researcher George Cheung growls, “an explanation of all the recent questionable business decisions and publicity.”

Calm falls over Kurton. “I don’t see how they can hold us accountable for the media fallout . . .”

Weschler flips through a yellow legal pad. It looks to me, from my distance, weirdly like the pad Stone used to prepare his first day of class. “They want to know why you grandstanded for an $800 million licensing fee and came up empty-handed. They want to know how getting humiliated in court fits into the company business model.”

Kurton nods appreciatively. It’s the first interesting question posed by the VCs since founding. He himself, after several days of reflection, still has no good public explanation for his action aside from sentimentality.

“I see,” he says. “And they won’t be satisfied until heads roll.”

He means it poetically. But no one at the table speaks a word.

The silence replicates until even Kurton can’t fail to read it. “You’re not . . . Are you asking me to resign?”

He looks around the table, enlightened at last. If only these hired assassins were bolder, could plunge the knife in with less sheepish chagrin, he might take some pleasure in this scene. He glares at them,
grinning: Run your damn cost-benefit analyses. Side with the smart money. But do not apologize for surviving.

No one says anything for way too long. Finally, Zhang Jung Li speaks. “Realistically put, Thomas, we have to get back to more practical research.”

What does nature call this? Cannibalism? Parricide? Fatal parasitism? Thomas fights down the urge to say anything; the entire spectrum of available responses feels puerile. He can’t keep from smiling; the drama just seems so absurdly conventional, like one of those cheap paperback genres: death by robot insurrection or unstoppable nanotech gray goo.
His
company, straight out of his own . . . what? Loins? Frontal lobes? His own company is transcending him.

He wants to dismiss the lot, as summarily as he appointed them. But his every possible defense is forestalled. He himself saw to that, when he set up the company bylaws. Has made sure that the group desire would not be crippled by his own.

His feet and hands go cold. He’s not what he was. He has let some strange idealism blind him. He hasn’t even the strength to play himself anymore. The alpha researcher in him falters, and with the stumble comes an almost instant drop in serotonin. So long as he produced the prizes, so long as he was
profitable
, the tribe let him mate with everything in sight. Now, at the first sign of weakness, they launch this inevitable takedown . . .