Generosity Page 9

  He couldn’t even pretend composure. She liked that in him. “What am I describing?”

  “We can talk more, if you’d like. About why she disturbs you. You could make another appointment.”

  For a moment, Fyodor fumbled. Then all the visiting instructor wanted was to get away.

  For her doctoral thesis, Candace Weld had studied 480 cases and analyzed the various ways that clients ended their treatments. Some reached a satisfying stopping place. Some terminated prematurely, when they were almost home. Others spent years going nowhere before finally throwing in the towel. This one, she knew from the moment he walked into her office, was destined to terminate before therapy even began.

  But waiting was her art, and her medium, the blind confusion of others. “Come talk whenever you like,” she told him. “I’m here, if anything changes.”

  She sits in the chair next to him, Grace poised on the South Rim. He fights to keep from lapsing into old, private patois. He answers her professional questions, hearing himself stutter as if on tape delay. She gives him nothing but her guarded opinion that Thassa is probably not about to hurt herself. He’s come to the wrong place. This woman is a licensed counselor. He needs a positive psychologist. He wants to apologize for wasting her time. He’s long ago written off his own.

  They stand and shake hands. She starts to speak, but something stops her. He has the weirdest sense that she recognizes him. She almost remembers that they, in another life, were lovers.

  “Wait a moment,” Candace Weld tells him. She crosses to her desk. She walks the way Grace would have, if Grace had been the person he thought she was. She riffles through a drawer and retrieves a small white rectangle. She writes something on it, then holds it out to Russell at arm’s length.

  The gesture freezes him. The outthrust arm, the cradling grasp: it’s Thassa, pressing her book against the plate-glass window. He shrinks from the offering. But she holds it steady, reeling him back in.

  It’s only her business card. He takes it like it’s an archaeological artifact. The college logo, a counseling center address, her name and title, phone and e-mail, and another phone number scribbled in ink. “That’s my direct line.”

  In tiny italic font, centered beneath the words “Licensed Clinical Psychologist,” he reads:

  You have cause-so have we all-of joy.

  He’s sixteen, and seated in a metal lawn chair in the backyard of his childhood home, struggling through a mildewed Shakespeare, with the dictionary and encyclopedia on a drinks table beside him. July of his junior year in high school, and for months, he’s felt an overwhelming premonition that he’ll be a playwright when he grows up.

  The premonition was a lie. He never quite grasped drama, never got the hang of how people really talk, never mastered human psychology. The best he managed was a scene or two of clumsy imitation vérité.

  He lifts his head, again fighting the sense of being scripted. He searches for any hint that she’s running him through an elaborate psychological experiment. But her face is frank and open in a way Grace’s never was.

  “For our escape is much beyond our loss.” He doesn’t mean to speak out loud.

  She stares at him. “Oh! The quote. I do like that one. The students usually do, too.”

  “Is this the only card you use?”

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  No reason. Less than no reason.

  Back outside, on the street below, whiplash settles in. The appointment has done nothing but fill him with shame. Who is he to police someone else’s well-being? A cold wind slices down from Milwaukee. A week ago, the city was a blast kiln. The temperature has dropped from ninety to sixty in four days. Seasonal affective disorder: the entire spinning planet must be bipolar.

  Seven things worth journaling about Candace Weld:

  Boston accent, not yet obliterated by the Midwest.

  She used to be religious; now she’s empirical.

  She’s never been without some calling. For the last twelve years, it has been reminding people that they’re free.

  Her office walls have three pictures of sisters and two of girlfriends. Five of her little boy. None of the boy’s father.

  She has twice taken herself off cases after developing compromising emotional attachments.

  Most of her clients love her. The few that hate her need her love.

  She wakes up every morning feeling almost criminal that she can make a living doing exactly what she was born to do.

  Three things Russell Stone actually writes about her in his journal that evening:

  She’s a middle child, a helper. She doesn’t know how obvious this is.

  She’d be the best kind of person to have in your court.

  The gaps between her keyboard keys are filled with cookie crumbs.

  The class grows closer, reluctant to let the holidays split them. They open up their unedited notebooks to one another. Journal and Journey turns into group therapy by another name. They swap all their hidden hostages now, when they trade their nightly writing. They travel together, down into one another’s darkest places and up to their wind-whipped peaks. For one last moment, the eight of them share something better than a story.

  They take on Roberto’s nineteen months of annihilation by meth, the weekend-long punding sprees, taking apart and reassembling an old pendulum clock six times in a row. They join Charlotte’s permanent guerrilla campaign against her father after the baffled automotive executive punches daddy’s little girl in the mouth, then spends the next three years begging for forgiveness. They cheer Kiyoshi’s provisional victory over agoraphobia the day he summons up the courage to order a fish sandwich in a McDonald’s.

  And they share Thassa’s bewildered glimpses of the United States-waiting to get a license at the DMV, trying to recycle batteries at a behemoth box store, witnessing her first televised megachurch evangelical service. Her journal knocks them back down into immigrant senses. Their country goes wilderness again, through her eyes. Her words make it okay to find pleasure in nothing at all-trading folk songs with the mailman or mapping the trees of the near South Side. Joker Tovar cuts his ADD engines and listens, one hand cupped over his eyes. Even Artgrrl Weston drops the groomed irony and nods, like she, too, wants to be Thassa when she grows up.

  Suppose that panic or even pointlessness can’t touch us. Say that nothing can touch us, but what we say.

  There’s the scene where Stone asks Thassa to stay after class. As if he wants to talk to her about her course writing. The others, on their way to their traditional post-class jamboree, beg him not to monopolize their ringleader for too long.

  He’s practiced this speech for so long that he almost gets the question out without bobbling. “There’s something I’d like to talk about. Would you have a minute? We could grab something downstairs ”

  “Hey!” the Algerian asks. “Are you trying to date me?”

  He steps back, slapped. “No! I just thought we could sit for a minute and discuss-”

  Thassa laughs and shakes his elbow. “Yes, Mister Stone. It’s fine. I’m joking!”

  They descend to the makeshift café, off the main-floor lobby. They hit the self-serve tea station and take their paper cups to a tiny steel-mesh table. Stone chatters nervously about the recently discovered miraculous benefits of tea polyphenols. Thassa waves him off. “Kabyle grannies knew about that, long before chemicals!”

  Stone asks about Thassa’s surviving family. Thassa pulls pictures from her shoulder bag. She shows off her brother, Mohand, who has dropped out of community college and returned to Algiers, where he makes a living hiring himself out to stand endlessly in line for people mired in the bureaucratic state services. She passes him a shot of her aunt Ruza, the former dentist, tending the water lilies surrounding the chinoiserie pavilion in the Montreal botanical gardens. “A funny city,” the Kabyle says, shaking her head. “But it’s home now.”

  Seeing his chance, Stone blurts out, “Do you miss it?”

 
; “Sure! I miss every place I’ve ever lived.”

  “Do you ever find yourself a little low? A little gray, down here, in this place?”

  She tips her head, trying to figure out what kind of scene they’re writing. “Of course! I think you can imagine. How else to feel, so far from everything?”

  “And does that ever frighten you?”

  She sighs and looks skyward. Anyone who didn’t know her might say she’s exasperated. “You think I’m too happy, don’t you? The whole world thinks I’m too happy! Isn’t this America? No such thing as too much?”

  His pulse spikes, and he looks around to flee. “I’m sorry. I don’t think that. I was just concerned that sometimes-”

  She reaches across the table and flicks the back of his hand with her fingernails. “What do you think? I’m not strange. I feel everything you do. Can’t you tell that from my journals?”

  He catches her eye; she must be joking again. At worst, her journal entries admit to tiny flecks of brown-small craft scattered across an open, golden sea. Everything that he feels? Maybe, if you invert all the doses.

  “The problem is really my name.” She’s frowning, or at least it looks like a frown.

  Stone shakes his head.

  “Thassadit. This name means liver. I’m stuck with this prophecy. I can’t help it!”

  Stone just looks at her, worse than worthless.

  “Well, liver is the Tamazight for heart. You know! Joie. Expansion. Big feeling?”

  She won’t say the word. “Generosity?”

  “You see? I was doomed from birth.” She looks down, embarrassed. “Russell? The others are waiting at the bistro. Why don’t you join us?”

  His heart tries to kickbox its way through his sternum. “I don’t think so.”

  “Just ten minutes? You like these people. They like you.”

  “I still have some work tonight.” Manuscripts to mark up; enthusiasm to edit back down into harmlessness.

  “Please don’t worry about me,” she says. She stands and hugs him.

  She’s halfway through the emptied lobby before he can say, “No, of course not.”

  He goes home and binges all weekend on nineteenth-century Russian short stories. Just this once, fiction.

  I need a genealogy for the word. It comes through the loins of that giant Latin gens, the one that so liberally shares its family name, family property, family ties, and family plot. The original root of the thing has spread its genes into an absurd number of offspring: genial, genital, genre, gentle, general, generic, germane, germinate, engine, generate, ginger, genius, jaunty, gendarme, genocide, and indigenous, while scattering cousins as far afield as cognate, connate, nascent, native, nation, children, kind. Generous to a fault. Too many progeny for any paternity test.

  A heterogeneous word, but how benign? Does generous include all those who are by nature genuine, generative, anyone pregnant with connections, keen to make more kin?

  Or is generosity a question of having the right blood, the innate germ of the genteel gentry?

  It strikes me that genomicists will soon be able to trace a full lineage for any person with more journalistic precision than the dying race of philologists have ever been able to trace a given word’s more recent journey.

  Forgive one more massive jump cut. This next frame doesn’t start until two years on. It’s the simplest of predictions to make. Tonia Schiff will find herself on a warehouse-sized plane flying east above the Arctic Circle, unsure what she is hoping to come across at the end of the ride.

  She’ll be on a flight to Paris, economy this time, where she will catch a connecting flight to North Africa. A packed plane, 550 passengers: elder hostel groups, college kids with Eurail plans and Rough Guides, middle-class French couples-instant aristocrats of the plunging dollar on their way back from overnight shopping in New York-commuter businessmen with their spreadsheets full of pharmaceutical sales or financial services. And on this flight, she will try several times to watch the episode again, “The Genie and the Genome,” that segment of Over the Limit she filmed two years ago. Armed with a notebook computer, several disks from the archives, and dozens of hours of raw clips, she intends to weave a sequel that might somehow redeem her.

  The third time through the episode, she’ll get as far as the bit where Kurton starts in on our being “collaborators in creation” when she’ll have to shut off the computer and put it back in her carry-on. She’ll look up through the rows of her fellow passengers, smothered by the coming world. And she’ll think how the species almost completed one magnificent act of self-understanding before it snuffed itself out.

  I have her flip up her window slide and look out the plastic portal. Far below, at a distance she won’t be able to calculate, something the size of a continent will slip away west. The endless surface, a sheet of unbroken white just a few years ago, will be speckled all over and shot through with blue.

  Tonia Schiff will sit for seven hours in the melee of the concourse at Orly Sud waiting for her connection to Tunis. Say it has happened already, just the way it will. Her flight is delayed and reposted half a dozen times. Reading becomes impossible, in the seething free-for-all of the gate. Continuous PA announcements shred all thought, and the age of talking to strangers in transit ended long ago.

  To pass the time, she scans the crowd for cognitive biases. It’s a nasty little hobby, one that has driven away several boyfriends, including a trophy congressman whom she almost considered marrying. But the habit is too consoling to break.

  All the flavors of bad science are out in force. Several twitchy passengers bandwagon around a sealed jet bridge for no good reason except that others are standing there. A red-faced Russian, sick with information bias, accosts a beleaguered ticket agent, who indulges a little skilled déformation professionnelle of her own. A pretty young couple hold hands and together influence the departure monitor by staring at it. And a loud compatriot of Schiff’s complains to no one about the loss of an upgraded seat that was never really his.

  Here in the portal to the northernmost South, the glottal cadences of Arabic already immerse Schiff. The sounds of the crowd broaden and deepen into rhythms she no longer recognizes. A three-generation clan sits next to her, decked out in holiday-finest tunics and scarves among ziggurats of cardboard boxes lashed up with string-presents from France for an entire village, once they get home.

  The father of this family in transit could almost be that mythic fair-haired, blue-eyed, Afro-Eurasian Kabyle that so obsessed nineteenth-century Europeans. Then again, they could all be Schiff’s own distant cousins, differing from her by only a handful of alleles.

  She thinks: Look at me-as Islamophobic as anyone. Phobic of contemporary Muslims, anyway. For Golden Age Muslims, she feels the respect most people save for dead patriots. Alhazen, Avicenna, Averroës: advancing science when Europe was still waist-deep in angels and devils. Then something happened. Exploration stopped, replaced by received wisdom. Observation, washed away by certainty.

  Much the same is happening again, this time on Schiff’s branch of the family tree. Her own government has long crusaded against all kinds of science, secure in the revealed knowledge they needed. Now Schiff herself wades into the middle of a fray that might just turn the moderate American citizen against any more discovery.

  Once she assumed that it was just a matter of time before humanity mastered its own destiny. Now she knows that only the past is inevitable. Reason could break down at any moment. Look at Orly Sud.

  Enough philosophy; she has sworn off it. Philosophy never consoled anyone. Tonia Schiff finds an outlet and flips on her notebook again. She cues up her rough clips and searches for a way to splice their cataclysms into a future worth birthing.

  Then comes the next classroom scene. From Friday to Monday, ten suicides have succeeded in metropolitan Chicago, six of them the result of mood disorders, the second-leading medical killer of people Stone’s age. From the time he says goodbye to Thassa in the college cafet
eria until he sees her again in next week’s classroom, 287 people nationwide take their own lives. It’s number three in Harmon’s list of most frequently used plots.

  Stone holds forth to the class, clunking his way through Harmon’s chapter on focalization:

  The world has seconds and minutes and hours and years and centuries, but only the mind has long and short. The world has inches and yards and miles, but only the mind can turn near into far

  “Grandpa Fred has finally lost it,” Princess Heavy says. “He’s starting to drool.”

  “Totally,” Spock agrees. “The man is whack. Fascinating.”

  The rest of the class piles on, and pretty soon, Frederick Harmon is left in a quivering, bloody pulp in the center of their encounter group. Russell loses his losers and abandons the lecture in favor of more journal read-alouds.

  He conducts the group feedback the same way he always does. But Thassa, who grazed his shoulder on her way in, just sits in the oval in a bubble of contentment. He tries to draw her into the discussion, but she hovers alongside it, soaking the words in. To receive may now be more generous than to give.

  Invisiboy apologizes to everyone. “I’m sorry you all have to listen to my lameness. Twenty-five new blog posts every second, and every one of them is more entertaining than my entry.”

  Charlotte berates him. “You shouldn’t worry about entertaining anyone.” Before Russell has a chance to shout Yes! she adds, “Nothing really matters except entertaining yourself.”

  Russell moves the group on to John Thornell’s excerpt. Spock reads a piece about playing paintball up in Wisconsin with a dozen strangers for thirty-six hours without sleeping. When he’s done, Russell can do nothing but sit, his face yipping, unable to sink the putt of appropriate response.