Generosity: An Enhancement (9 page)

“Look,” Robert says, concerned. “Little bro. I’ve known you, like,
always, right? Euphoria is not for you. You used to sit in front of the Saturday-morning cartoons like you were studying for a final exam. You’re the kind of guy who needs his pleasures in very modest dosages. Have you thought about maybe a multivitamin?”

“I’ll try that,” Russell tells his brother.

Robert chuckles at whatever truculent antenna he is trying to hogtie. “Roscoe, let’s face facts. We’re depressives. It’s in the Stone gene pool. Embrace it. It wouldn’t have hung around for so many generations if it wasn’t essential.”

Thomas Kurton has never doubted that happiness is chemical. Meaningless to call it anything else. Like a third of the country, he’s tried mood brighteners. They did indeed brighten him, a little. But they also smeared him. They took away a little of that fighter-pilot clarity. So he ditched the brighteners; if he had to choose, he’d rather be keen than bright.

But he has never accepted that people should have to choose.

He talks often about the massive structural flaw in the way the brain processes delight. The machinery of gladness that
Homo sapiens
evolved over millions of years in the bush is an evolutionary hangover in the world that
Homo sapiens
has built. Back on the savannah, stress kept us alive. Natural selection shaped us for productive discontent, with glimmers of heavenly mirage to keep us going. As Kurton puts it in his article “Stairway to Paradise”:

A mix of nasty neurochemical pathways, built, doubtless, by a small set of legacy genes, now plagues us with negative feedback loops and illusory come-ons. What passes for everyday consciousness feels to me increasingly like borderline psychosis. Depression had its uses once, when mankind was on the run. But now that we’re somewhat safe, it’s time to free the subjugated populace and show what the race can do, armed with sustainable satisfaction at last.

His sister had a chemistry set: Kurton’s life follows from that. He was eight, Patty ten. Up until then, he had been the better magician. He
could make a coin look like he was bending it over his thumb. Now, overnight, Patty could combine two perfectly clear liquids and turn them a shocking pink. There was no contest. Her magic blew his out of the water, and consumed him with jealousy.

He took to theft: no other choice. He tinkered in the darkness of her closet while Patty was out of the house. he worked with tiny bits of chemical, so she would never know that anything was missing. Somehow, she always knew, and she’d explode with all the violence that the chemical safety manual warned about.

The fourth time his sister caught him sneaking experiments behind her back, she gave him the set. Truth was, she couldn’t stand the smells. Patty had been born with the wrong alleles. Even ammonium chloride turned her stomach, and after her first few excursions, she couldn’t bring herself to open the vials.

Three months into his sole proprietorship of the chemicals, young Tom completed all 150 experiments in the printed booklet and began inventing his own. His alarmed parents bought him a grandiose expansion for Christmas, although such gear was beyond the budget of a Detroit assembly lineman with five children. Armed with “forty-nine solvents, catalysts, and reagents . . . one thousand hours of pure chemistry!” the boy never really broke stride in his life again.

Even without that proximal cause, he might have landed someplace nearby. From early childhood, he showed all the signs: the model rocketry, the ham radios, the long afternoons gazing into tidal pools, the complete Herbert S. Zim Golden Guides, and later, the expanding universe of cheap science-fiction paperbacks, those lyric hymns to alien life-forms with the surreal cover art where you couldn’t tell buildings from geographical features from living things.

Eighth-grade frog dissection revealed how nearby species were already more alien than any fiction. His first microscope opened his eyes to life’s true measurements. Diatoms everywhere, whose biomass dwarfed those mutant giants too large to see the real scale of living. In high school, he discovered the Haldane quote about God’s inordinate fondness for beetles. The year Kurton came through puberty, God disappeared altogether, replaced by deeper wonder.

In senior year, he read
Microbe Hunters
. He turned his bedroom into a shrine to de Kruif’s heroic microbiologists. He painted the names Pasteur, Koch, Reed, and Ehrlich on his ceiling, the last thing
he saw at night and the first thing he opened his eyes on in the morning. His mother couldn’t object; he was heading to Cornell on full scholarship in the fall.

In short: Kurton’s genes might have led him to genomics, no matter what environment threw at him. But environment pulled all the right triggers, at just the right times. All the right teachers, the right toys, the right texts in the right order. In the first month of college, he came across the most beautiful concluding sentence in world lit, words that gave him far more epiphany than any novel. The book itself was a long, hard slog, but oh, that arrival!

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

By sophomore year, he was spending long hours in the lab, in his private chapel with its very own fume hood.
Do not put your nose over the unknown; waft the air of the unknown to your nose.
In his third year, he earned a key to the storeroom, where all the supplies were lined up in orderly glorious ranges on the shelves. Sometimes he would simply stand among them, as if on the podium in front of an orchestra, listening.

In graduate school at Stanford he made his first real discovery—a gene-promoter mechanism that no one on earth knew about. The find infused him with terrible urgency, a hurry to discover something else, now, before all the discoveries were made. And when, in his late twenties, his research team assayed the milk of their transgenic cows and confirmed the presence of a protein they themselves had placed there alongside all of nature’s own tangled enzymes, he felt for two months that he could die satisfied.

Then the two months ended, two months during which he had done absolutely nothing new for the world. Frantic again, he returned to the lab, to learn something about real work.

He and his girlfriend—a sociologist who studied the power of crowds—got married. They had two children, one of each. He and his wife raised the kids somehow, between them. It crushed Thomas to
discover his daughter could not abide the smell of life science. It hurt him worse to discover that his son preferred making money to making discoveries. He released the children into the laboratories of their own lives. He got divorced. He wished his ex-wife all the world’s fresh horizons. Later, he had affairs, when there was time. But the love he really lived for was
knowing
.

That thrill of first discovery returned a handful of times over the next twenty years, in diminished forms. He pushed himself forward on the pleasure of
first
: first place, first to lay eyes on, first in the hearts of his peer reviewers. But he wanted more than simple primacy.
First
was just a sporting bagatelle. To look on a thing that had been true since the start of creation but never grasped until
you
made it so: no euphoria available to the human brain could match it. Cleaner than drugs, broader and more powerful than sex—Huxley’s “divine dipsomania.” Anyone who tasted it once would spend the rest of his life trying for more.

Science fit the very folds of Tom Kurton’s brain. Its exuberance tempered the tedium of daily lab work, kept him alert, overrode fatigue, and rendered risks trivial. And the goal of scientific exuberance, like the goal of life, which it helped to propel, was to replicate itself.

And so his life, from the simplest of beginnings, has spun out endless living forms, not all of them viable, not all of them pretty, not all of them sane or even wise, but each a turbulent attempt to lay bare the order in things, and all of them variations most wonderful.

Russell Stone lies in bed at night, reading about Algeria and its victims until he can’t breathe. He reads about a “vast national passion for reticence.” He reads about a culture struggling to emerge from feudal female sequestering and subservience. He can’t connect these accounts to his student’s existence. Even her years in Canada don’t explain such a leap.

When the Algeria books threaten to suck him under, he switches to a layperson’s handbook on happiness that he’s checked out from the public library. He flips around in it, buffet style, hoping that some paragraph somewhere might explain
something
, or at least lull him to sleep.

Sleep is not an option. He reads on, squinting at the clinical studies.
One study claims that the most satisfied people are also those who can list the most peak experiences in sixty seconds. He sits up in bed with his yellow legal tablet and tries to write down the happiest moments in his life. The first one he remembers stops him cold.

He’s tried to kill it, over the years: the three-day escape with Grace Cozma to Flagstaff that frosty March, in their last spring in the writing program. Her idea:
Come up with me to see the canyon. I have to see the damn Grand Canyon before I escape this place.
Until then, the farthest they’d gone was her ordering him to lick Mexican beer off her fingers one crazed happy hour after workshop.

They rented a car—midsized luxury sedan, when they couldn’t afford economy—and drove up. But until they were standing at the reception desk in the ponderosa-pine lodge in Flagstaff, he had no idea whether Grace would ask for one room or two.

She asked for one. One of everything, for the next three days.
Come up with me.
Come hike with me, eat with me, bathe with me. Come learn how to want something more than you want to write. Their first night, after burritos in a dusty dive, they holed up in their chilly room. He looked to her to set the pace. Her pace was geological. She wanted him naked under the covers with her, knees up, reading, as if their thirtieth anniversary came before their honeymoon. He was reading
The Varieties of Religious Experience
. She was deep into
Far Tortuga
. He loved when she wore her glasses, which she hated to put on. She curled over her book like in prayer, the back of her hand distractedly grazing his thigh. He did not know a body could pound like that. Reading lasted maybe forty minutes, until she turned to him, slipped one leg over his, and asked, “How’s the book?” They read no more that night.