The rebuke stung; she knew how deeply she’d failed the man. Both Vice-consul Schiff and his beloved doctor wife felt something hopelessly magnificent about the human adventure, its ability to channel the brute instinct of a few hard-pressed hunter-gatherers into creating Athens, Byzantium, Florence, Isfahan. But in Gilbert Schiff’s considered opinion, the project had been running in reverse for more than a century; the beasts of unlimited appetite were loose and weren’t going back into the kennel anytime soon. Every individual being with any skill had to fight the fatuous, disposable present with everything of worth. Instead, his daughter-his polyglot, caryatid, harpist daughter, National Merit Finalist, queen of the debating society, captain of the chess club, choral society soloist-was partying with the barbarians.
She knew how much she’d once pleased him. On the morning of her first communion, he told her she was closer to perfection than any father could have asked. In her first year of college, during their long Christmas-vacation discussions of late Reginald Marsh and early Stuart Davis, she even detected a little hangdog adoration in his glance, a self-policing cringe ready to punish himself for imagining the full range of her lucky gifts.
The summer that she told him she’d switched to media studies, he was stationed in Oslo. She called him from Providence; the announcement merited more than a letter. He laughed from the gut at the send-up, until he realized it wasn’t one. He regrouped gracefully and told her that he and her mother would back her in anything she chose to study. When she got her first television job, he resigned himself to noble stoicism over her late-onset disease. But he’d have given anything for her cure, if any medicine offered one.
In time, he shifted his hopes from his daughter to her genes. Throughout her twenties, he treated every man she introduced to him with polite reserve. Fun, maybe, for a weekend or Settling a little quickly, aren’t you? In her thirties, he began praising even the bottom-dwellers. So he has a record; half the justices on the D.C. circuit have a criminal sheet. The question is, where does he come down on the Pampers Size Six controversy? Once, he even pronounced the abomination “speed dating.” Both he and Tonia’s mother were too well-bred to come out and tell her, Breed, damn you! But that was all she could do for them, finally.
Tonia never confessed to her parents a genetic defect even more lethal than susceptibility to broadcast. But by thirty-three, the syndrome was undeniable: she possessed no maternal desire whatsoever. One glance at the only available planetary future made having children at best benighted and at worst depraved. Nulliparity-human build-down-was a moral imperative.
But Tonia never made that point to Gilbert Schiff. Even when she was still single at thirty-six, her father held out the same forsaken hope for her as he did for making the case for America abroad under Bush II. “I wouldn’t even insist on a monograph,” he told her, during that wretched phone call just before his death. “I’d be happy with a modest little coauthored study ”
“Someday,” she teased him. “When someone as good as Daddy comes along.” But she was already a member of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, even if she could not quite bring herself to qualify for their Golden Snip Award.
The old diplomat went to his grave nineteen days after that phone call, as defeated by his daughter’s choices as he was by his innocent, beginner country’s embrace of extraordinary rendition. After her father’s death and her mother’s subsequent expatriation, Tonia threw herself into a brief period of purposeful mate-seeking. But the thing about ghosts is that they outlast their own hopes. A dead father is forever beyond placating.
Now she concentrates on appeasing one million total strangers. Each forty-two-minute segment is an exercise in insouciance, taking her sixty hours to perfect. The goal is to compile an accurate map of the present at the scale of one to one, a massive mosaic of thumbnails of the blinding future.
For four decades, Tonia Schiff’s parents kept a pact. However busy they were, whatever remote outpost each of them found themselves in, they always managed to meet every two months for a private dinner. And at that dinner, one of them would argue a fiercely prepared debating motion. Resolved: the human race would have been better off if the agricultural revolution had never happened. Resolved: the government should cap the salaries of professional athletes. Resolved: Bach’s Passions should be banned from concert halls for anti-Semitism. And the other delivered the fiercest possible rebuttal. In this way Gilbert and Sigrid preserved the fires of argument that had supplied such heat to their love.
Now, a decade past the age her parents were when they birthed her, Tonia revives the ritual, with the only difference being that she meets for a new topic twenty times a year with no fixed opponent. Resolved: the human race will not survive its own ingenuity. Resolved: the cure for our chronic despair is just around the corner. And no matter whom she spars with on any given occasion, Tonia Schiff can make the most cataclysmic debate almost as entertaining as reality itself.
Stone sits at his desk with tea and a slice of Dutch rusk, ignoring his stack of delinquent manuscripts. Instead, he reads yet another happiness book checked out from the library. This book stands apart from all the others-the bad seed. The book says happiness is a moving target, a trick of evolution, a bait and switch to keep us running. The doses must keep increasing, just to break even. True contentment demands that we wean ourselves from all desire. The pursuit of happiness will make us miserable. Our only hope is to break the habit.
He lifts his eyes from the page to wonder whether the Algerian woman might be experiencing massive anesthesia from post-traumatic stress disorder. Maybe her free-floating ecstasy might signal a coming collapse. But in all the hours he’s spent in her presence over recent weeks, the lowest she’s ever descended to is mild amusement. She will sit in class from beginning to end, whatever the tempers erupting around her, basking in light and loving her flailing peers. Russell has watched her all class long out of the corner of his eye, levitating in the middle of the fray, shining like some giant horse chestnut in full sun.
Does the woman feel real elation, or does she just imagine it? He runs the meaningless question into the ground.
He launches his slow Internet connection, then stares at the search-engine box, wondering how to initiate a search for unreasonable delight.
He taps in euphoria, and erases it. He taps in manic depression, and deletes that, too. He taps in extreme well-being. And right away, he’s swamped. In the world of free information, the journey of a single step begins in a thousand microcommunities. Inconceivable hours of global manpower have already trampled all over every thought he might have and run it to earth with boundless ingenuity. Even that thought, a digitally proliferating cliché
In less time than it would take to comb through the global auction houses for a favorite childhood toy, he discovers the positive-psychology movement. One more massive development he’s never heard of. An empirical science of happiness-why not? And an international phenomenon-but what isn’t, these days? After centuries of studying all the ways the mind goes wrong, psychology has finally gotten around to studying how it might go right.
The whole field seems to have kick-started around the year 2000, just as the world began to descend into a new round of collective misery. And already the discipline is overflowing with enough articles, books, and conferences to make a casual lurker like Russell Stone overdose.