“A story? You mean a fib?” But Schiff’s on-screen voice-over drowned Tonia out. The day may come, hostess Schiff said, when we will choose our children as carefully as we now choose our mates. We may select our natures the way we screen for a career. All the larger, qualifying, problematical follow-up had been clipped away.
The show ended with a rapid-fire, crosscut auction—various people saying how much they would pay for an imperturbably luminous outlook on life. The last face in the accelerating cavalcade was Thomas Kurton’s, repeating, Listen. The shot pulled back to reveal the man speaking on Schiff’s two-inch phone screen. The show host watched as the genomicist intoned again, Six hundred generations ago, we were scratching on the walls of caves. Now we’re sequencing genomes.
In the last shot, Schiff looked up from the minuscule screen, smiled her crooked smile, and asked the camera, If we accomplished all of that as frightened, negatively biased, misery-prone creatures, what might we accomplish when genomics takes us . . . over our inborn limits?
In the cut to black, the few dozen people in the room began to applaud. Pete Vitale craned around from the row in front of Tonia and scanned the reactions. “Yeah? Pretty clean? No major surgery?” He stood and stretched, beaming. “All right. Thanks, all. Off to finishing. Remember: meeting on the transcranial-stimulation script at three. And everyone back here for the cyberwar brainstorming on Friday.”
“Pete,” Tonia said, and felt herself falling. “Pete. We have some major problems here.”
The crew kept filing out. Tonia herself barely registered her own objection. Vitale turned to look, sidesaddling away from her.
Tonia tried smiling. “You do realize this is total shit?”
The director stopped and turned, along with Garrett and Keyes.
“The way this has been cut, we are just fanning the unsubstantiated hype. If even one-tenth of this should turn out to be real, then we ought . . . Don’t you think we should at least mention the challenges? We’re still a science show, right? Don’t you think we should restore some of those scenes with all the objecting researchers?”
The cluster of rearguard crew paused in the double doors of the theater at the scent of drama. “Tonia,” Garrett said, somewhere between peremptory and resigned.
“We’ve got Kurton himself having all those second thoughts. And that poor girl—she was ragged, Pete. This whole carnival is making her wretched. You’ve cut the interview to make her look—”
“It’s done, Ton. You heard everyone sign off.”
She saw, in clean animation, the assembly lines inside her cells thrown into wartime production. Even as it rose up in her throat, she wanted to know what caused this bile. These men she hated? But she’d hated them for years. Her public smackdown and humiliation of a few minutes ago? She wasn’t so vain. Some early parental moral inculcation that she’d managed to resist for decades? Late-onset honesty or scruples or guilt or any of a dozen other predispositions lurking inside her haplotype, just waiting like a heart attack or cancer to be pushed over a threshold and expressed full-blown? Why get righteous now?
Runaway branching feedback—who knew how? Everything, she decided: everything is caused by nothing short of everything else.
What she found so amusing about the unfolding scene was how well all the performers already knew it, even before she spoke her lines. They’d seen it too often to count, in every packaged narrative they’d ever consumed. They had her revolt pegged, long before she herself had seen it coming. The room filled with a deep, almost respectful compliance, everyone ready to play the parts that had been scored for each of them so long ago.
Pete Vitale asked, from a great way off, “You have problems with this work?”
“Tonia, don’t,” Garrett warned again.
“It’s cool,” Kenny said. “Let her blow. She can’t be the only one of us who never uncorks.”
But even the coffee-bearers and copyboys standing in the doorway already knew this story.
Schiff gave in to the warm, predestined familiarity of it all. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to be so predict . . . We don’t have to labor this. I can just cut to the credits here.” She turned and walked up the aisle and through the knot in the doorway, which parted, fascinated, for her.
Behind her, Garrett told Vitale, “You better go save your nest egg.”
Vitale called out, “Tonia, come on. Come back. We can recut anything you want.”
“Hey: bye-bye, baby,” Kenny said. “Who needs her? Bring on the clones.” And the last thing she heard as she slipped from the screening room was Keyes asking, “Bitch thinks her face can’t be replaced?”
For three crosstown blocks, Tonia Schiff hammers herself for her own long complicity. Five seasons perfecting a voguey pose in the face of anything iridescent. But the future has been feeding on her all along, as sure as any bloodsucker. As sure as she and her collaborators have fed on that ragged woman.
Every twelfth person she passes almost recognizes her. I glimpse her at last, skirting along at a panicked if aimless trot, reflected in five long panes of department-store glass. She glimpses herself—all she has ever tried for, the thing she’s wanted to be from birth. Blameless observer. But the blameless can’t afford to look. Just looking is already the worst kind of guilt.
She comes up for air again in Times Square. Genes loose, tearing everywhere, splash their riot messages across a horizon of hundred-foot flashing screens. The future floods her with messages. She stops for the light at Eighth, and for a long sixty seconds, she wants to be more than dead.
Chance tries to hand her something, a film she can just dimly begin to see. I want to heckle her, from years away: Look harder . . .
She turns uptown. For the next six blocks, she starts to make out the shape of her reparation. She’ll assemble the simplest of documentaries, a look at life about to be born. A simple take on things to come, the past’s only shot at payback . . . Production should be no problem. Schiff has a track record, fame; funding is hers for the asking.
By the time she hits the park, she’s committed. She has a name already: “The Child of Choice.” She heads through the Merchants’ Gate and cuts up toward the Reservoir, already filming in her head. And a hundred steps into that town-sized open-air ark, she feels suddenly, inexplicably well, ridiculously healthy. She’d almost say free, if she didn’t know better.
The long-deliberating judge in Truecyte v. Future Families Fertility Center, Houston at last concludes that the fair market value of Thassa’s eggs in no way depends upon the discovered association patented by Thomas Kurton, et al. Truecyte is entitled to a reasonable licensing fee for any novel tests or products resulting from their discovery, but they cannot profit from any transactions involving an unaltered, preexisting genome.
The decision is a blow to Truecyte, one that might never have happened without Kurton’s provocation. Yet the judgment rocks the biotech industry, shocking the experts in intellectual property law as well as that small fraction of the general public who are still following the case. It calls into question the whole idea of ownable bio-value. Some talking heads declare it the fast track to the future. More say that the choke of potential profit will kill innovation.
Future Families declares it a forward-looking guarantee of social progress. Truecyte instantly files an appeal. Pundits both paid and self-employed conclude that the decision can’t possibly stand.
But for now—this now—Thassa Amzwar is free to donate her eggs for more money than her brother could earn in years.
Days pass in a short forever. Stone and Weld go on seeing each other. They spend three nights out of seven together. They cook, revising favorite recipes. They talk less and watch more family television. They watch several incredibly dramatic historical re-creations. They watch documentaries about forms of life that should never have survived into the present. Gabe no longer considers either of them a Yahtzee challenge, and he tries to train them in Liar’s Dice.
Candace starts Stone on li
ttle projects. She teaches him yoga and brings him to the gym for a session on the balance beam. They no longer play the novel-writing game. She no longer brings up work, psychology, will, North Africa, science, French, Arabic, or the future. He is just as careful never to say a thing that could be mistaken for second-guessing.
Their days are stable and respectful, and they could go on unchanged until Stone dies and his genome disappears peacefully from the face of the earth. But when he’s home alone, he scours the Web for news. It doesn’t feel traitorous. He can’t endanger Candace just by looking. His searches turn up hearsay enough to make him all flavors of crazy.
He wakes up in hot darkness, from a vile dream. He was something medical, in a surgical gown, maybe an anesthesiologist, watching while the patient woke up in the middle of having a gelatinous internal organ removed with a coal scoop. He shudders awake, then instantly suppresses any movement, lest he wake Candace.
But Candace isn’t there. He’s in his own bed, his own apartment, by himself. He has confused the chill of solitude with the other kind, again. It’s 1:30, but it takes him three entire lifetimes between then and 2:45 before he admits there will be no more sleeping tonight.
He tries reading, old guilty pleasures—love poetry, nineteenth-century behemoth novels, clever contemporary metafiction—but nothing speeds the clock or makes him the least bit drowsy. He’s done with breakfast by five. At 8:00 a.m., he starts wandering around the apartment with the phone in his hands. At 9:01, he calls in late to work. Immediately after, he dials Charlotte Hullinger. He gets her voice mail. He hangs up and goes down his old class roster, landing on Sue Weston.
Artgrrl picks up with a sleepy “Hey.” He starts to identify himself, but she cuts him off. “I know who it is, Teacherman.” Her voice is odd, almost flirtatious. She says, “We were wondering how long it would take you to check in.”
“Where is she?” he asks, too quickly.
“Southwest side? She’s fine. She’s like a week or two away from delivering the goods. Only . . .”
He hears her teeter, trying to decide. Decide if the thing is worth mentioning. Decide if he can be trusted. A twenty-one-year-old, experimenting with wisdom.
“I think the shots are changing her. They can do that, you know. She’s different.”
Shots. Changing. He’s back in the depravity of his dream. “What do you mean, different?”
“Those hormones have her on a roller coaster. I actually saw her cry. She’s just like anybody, now.”
He wants to ask if he can see her, but he can’t. Can’t do that to Candace. Can’t bear to hear Sue Weston tell him, She doesn’t want that.
“Give her my best,” he tells his former student.
Artgrrl asks, “How good is that?” He doesn’t wield the grade book anymore. He never really did.
He creeps to work and spends nine hours making bad prose worse. He calls Candace in the afternoon and asks if they might see each other later, although they aren’t scheduled until tomorrow. She’s characteristically supportive, and he’s at her place before she gets home. He waits on her doorstep; he’s still not comfortable with letting himself in.
She greets him with a kiss, apologizing. “I don’t have much for dinner. Gabe is at his father’s.” Stone wonders why people can never call their former spouses by name. He suggests they go out, to a Lebanese place four blocks away. Lebanon: far enough for mutual comfort. Candace perks up at the idea, a chance holiday.
He tells her over the mezze. He’s been debating all day whether to say anything. But withholding finally seems the bigger betrayal. He says, “I heard from one of my students today.” Is it possible for anyone to go through forty-eight hours without inviting someone else to buy a lie? “She was very concerned about Thassa.”
Candace folds her arms on the table in front of her. She looks up, bright, game. But she’s not about to volunteer a thing.
“She thinks the hormone treatment for the . . . the donation thing might be making Thassa emotionally unstable.” He lets the statement hang just long enough for the two of them to die a few times. “Can they do that?”
Her smile doesn’t waver, per se. It just turns inward, chastising itself for the foolishness of hope. Of course they had to arrive here, eventually. What self-respecting author would let them escape alive? Weld spreads her palms out flat on the tabletop. “I suppose they can, Russell. It’s not really my line. You might see what you find on the Web.”
He throws his knife down on his plate. A dime-sized chip shoots off the edge, narrowly skirting her eye. She cries out and shields her face. She drops her hands into her lap, looks down, and composes herself, yoga-style.
He wants to apologize, but his body won’t let him. A censorious waiter comes by to swap out the broken plate. They sit silently while order is restored. Then she’s all decorum again. It relieves and maddens him, how quickly she recovers.
“Russell, don’t hate me. I’ve worked so hard on this. Since I was two years old I’ve been a helper. Total facilitator. Absolutely codependent. My first marriage?” She hears the adjective, and flushes a little. But practice powers through embarrassment. “All my life I’ve defined myself by what I can do for others. I’ve finally found a way to do that legitimately, without slighting myself or anyone else, with the help of a whole lot of other people to keep me honest. Don’t make me backslide. You know I love you.”
“Me?” he intones dully. “What about her?”
Her head tilts. “Thassa? Of course I love her. What do you think? The whole world loves her. That’s the problem here.”
Some primal mucus thing seizes his brain, and he can’t even have thoughts, let alone speak them.
“Russell. She’s beyond my help now. Letting her go is my gift to her. Honoring the work that I’ve done on myself. Trusting her. Not interfering.”
“Your gift? Your gift to her?”
“And to myself. To my real clients. The ones I can keep helping, if I can keep this job.”
“What if they tell you to stop seeing me? What if I still taught at that hellhole?”
She reaches across the table to stay his buzzing hand. Or contain it, before it throws something else. “You don’t. And they won’t. Truth is? Thassa doesn’t need us. She has more inner strength than any person her age I’ve ever met. The public is already sick of her. When this is done, she can go back to living her own rich life.”
But the truth is in her voice as clear as if she spoke it: Not at Mesquakie. Not in Chicago. Not in this country. He takes his hand away from her and applies it industriously to removing the condensation from his water glass. “It doesn’t sicken you, what’s happening? This psychosis over the . . . eggs?”
She nods, infinitely patient. She closes her eyes in admission. Her understanding disgusts him. “I hate that this is happening. It makes me very sad. I hate myself for not fighting it. But this is the life I have to live in.”
The words sound to Stone like some kind of pop-psych Serenity Prayer. Yet screaming at her would be insane. Everything he values—even his bedrock fidelity—is as arbitrary as any sequence of nucleotides. How valuable can fidelity be, anyway, if it isn’t viable? Candace is more fit for the future than he will ever be. She must be right about all of this. About everything except the only thing: Thassa does need them.
After dinner, they walk ad hoc back toward her apartment. Candace chatters about a beautiful book she’s reading, in which a contemporary man falls in love with a nineteenth-century woman on the basis of the comments she has scrawled in the margins of several books. Stone freezes at the top of her street.
“You know, I should probably go home.”
Something spasms across her face and is gone in a heartbeat.
“I’m about three weeks behind at the magazine. Also, I didn’t sleep that well last night.”
She’s nodding sympathetically before he even finishes explaining. “Of course, of course. I didn’t think I’d see you until . . . What a treat!” She kis
ses him full on and squeezes his ribs until he gasps. He smiles apologetically, breaks free, waves, then turns back toward the El stop.
But he doesn’t go straight to the train. Instead, he wanders down Ridge until he finds a pharmacy. He’s nervous going in, ready for someone to stop him and check his motives. He wants to call his brother, Robert, for advice, but of course the only good pay phone is a dead pay phone. He tells himself that if any twelve-year-old in America can do this, so can he. He goes to the sleep-aid aisle and focuses, until he finds a package with a bright-red starburst reading, “Most powerful help with insomnia available without a prescription!” Active ingredient, doxylamine. The high school cashier can’t sell the person in front of Stone a bottle of beer, but she can sell Stone the sedative.
“Hi!” She greets Russell hugely. “Are you a member of our Rewards Program?”
He blinks. “You’re going to reward me for taking these?”
“You don’t have to take them.” Her laugh turns timid. “You just have to pay for them.”
“And my reward?”
She looks at him the way she might regard a mid-season-replacement show destined to be canceled itself after two episodes. “You get to buy more of them, for less.”
He has what he’s sure is a billion-dollar idea: a single punch card valid at all the outlets owned by the top multinationals, from maternity hospitals to mortuaries. A huge lump of cash—percentage of your gross lifetime payout—handed back at the finish line.
“I try not to store up my rewards in this world,” he tells the cashier.
He’s still feeling guilty about the crack long after he gets home. It’s the most aggressive thing he’s said to any stranger in years.
He’s so fatigued he’s sure he’ll be all right without the doxylamine. In fact, he does fall asleep, but wakes several pages later, in what he thinks must be the middle of the night. It’s 10:18. He tosses for a while, until he’s sure he has exhausted the possibilities of stoicism. He gets up and takes exactly 50 percent of the recommended dose. He does that three more times, at twenty-minute intervals, until consciousness is just some dim glint in the proto-eye of some bony fish in him, evolving on the cold sea floor of the Carboniferous.