“How do you feel?”
“Good,” he admits.
“Right. A nice meal or a CD just dropped out of the sky.”
A book, he thinks. Nedjma, by Kateb Yacine. The book Thassa described in her latest journal entry. A dream of escape from the colonized mind.
“Now imagine you’re in a store. You approach the cash register with a purchase, reach inside your pocket for the twenty, and find it’s missing. You accidentally threw it away when disposing of a crumpled tissue.”
He feels the difference, before she has to explain. The freebie was fun; the loss panics him, like he has just let terrorists into his apartment. The bad is crazily out of proportion to the good, and it’s the same twenty bucks.
“I see. I’m a nut job.”
She smiles with disturbing gusto, reaches across the table, and shakes his fingers. “So’s everyone! I’m right there with you, and I’ve studied this stuff. We remember a compliment for about three and a half days, but we hold on to a criticism for months. We think unpleasant events last about sixty percent longer than same-length pleasant ones. Threatening images get our attention faster, and we have to fight harder to look away. We need about five positive events to compensate for one comparable negative one. If you hurt a friend, you have to do five nice things to offset the damage.”
“We’re broken,” he intones.
“Not at all.”
“Five to one! We’re completely incapable of balanced judgment.”
She pulls her hair into a ponytail. She’s warm and clinical, at once. “Actually, if anything, the bias is accurate. There’s a solid reason for it. Think back to the Serengeti.”
“Ah, yes. I remember it well.”
She sticks her tongue out at him, then pretends she didn’t. “If you’re scouting and find food, that’s dandy. But if a pride of lions discovers your hidey-hole while you’re sleeping: Game Over. The bad can hurt you much more than the good can help. So nature selects for pessimists.”
He catches himself twirling his spoon between his fingers. He’s been doing it for minutes. He drops his hands into his lap, like stones. “So how did she slip through?”
The counselor’s face is novice bewilderment. It’s like they’re discussing their daughter’s just-discovered eating disorder. “That’s why I thought someone might want ”
But Candace doesn’t push it. She doesn’t push anything. It’s almost relaxing, and Russell Stone wonders just where this woman’s clinical interests start and stop.
They split the check down the middle. Then they walk back out into the outrageously gorgeous day. The sky is a Chagall deep cobalt, and the buildings are etched against it with a fine ink liner. Even the surly pedestrians pressing past them seem like friends. The psychologist sighs. “Just look at this beautiful place!” Grace’s good twin twists her face up at him, and he has to look away.
He closes his eyes and inhales. He’s deeply depressed by the thought: true happiness may depend on the weather. And in the next breath, he’s depressed that it might not. One of his happiness manuals claims that weather and mood strongly correlate, but only until people are cued to notice it
“So why should autumn make people feel so good?”
She smiles secretly. “I don’t know the precise chemistry. I’m sure it’s been studied.”
It’s the perfect day to play the tourist in one’s own life. They walk three blocks, into the shopping crowds surging up and down the Magnificent Mile, hunting for a cure to their misery that has not yet hit the market. She cranes her neck up at the Hancock. “When was the last time you went up?”
He squints at the calculation. “Sixteen years ago?”
Her eyes are aghast, delighted. “Come on. You can see four states from up there. And a good seventy-five percent of them aren’t ours!”
In my country, a new work of fiction is published every thirty minutes. That’s 17,530 new volumes annually, not including Web publication. Even assuming a tenth of the U.S. rate in other parts of the world, the total figure may be something like 50,000 invented worlds in this year alone.
Say the infant novel was born four centuries ago and grew at the rate of 100 titles a year for its first several decades. Say the curve shoots up sometime in the last century. I don’t know: a million total novels seems a plausible worldwide guess. You know what the next decade will bring. Beyond that, imagining is beyond imagining.
I try to calculate how many of those million-and-growing volumes are saddled with a romance-bright or doomed, healthy or diseased. I can’t do the math. Surely it must be most of them.
Sexual selection, the surest and most venerable form of eugenics, has molded us into the fiction-needing readers we are today. Part of me would love to belong to a species free, now and then, to read about something other than its own imprisonment. The rest of me knows that the novel will always be a kind of Stockholm syndrome-love letters to the urge that has abducted us.
They stand at the glass wall, elbow to elbow, watching crowds flow through the gorges below them. The city turns into a techno-opera, a glorious nanotechnological enterprise beyond the power of any coordinated forces to engineer. They find their neighborhoods, the college, six universities, a dozen museums and monuments, the dead stockyards and living stadiums, churches and commodities exchanges, the river-reversing channel, the four-mile-wide particle accelerator off in the distance. Their city is a staging ground too huge and hungry to dope out, lying like a scale maquette at their feet.
“Gabe loves it up here,” Candace says. She keeps her eyes earthward. “My son. Anything complicated and blinking, from high up. Ten years old, and he already has a résumé on file with NASA.”
“High up or deep down.” Stone talks to the glass, remembering. “Or far away, in some parallel universe. A thousand years before or after, anywhere but now.”
“That’s right!” She smiles at him, surprised. “How do you know my little guy?”
He shrugs: met him way back. “So tell me where that comes from. Infinite hunger for the unreal. Why should that be useful, in little boys?”
She gazes back down at the microbe races. He watches her trying to take in the panorama. Puzzled, vulnerable, hand-knit: she will not look like this again, the next time he sees her.
“I wish I knew.”
Numbing to the aerial view, they return to ground. The elevator drops so fast his ears hurt. This scene ends with Candace Weld studying him in return, in the tower lobby.
“So. Mr. Stone. I’m sorry to say, but I’ve enjoyed this. We should do it again somewhere else, sometime.”
He wonders if she means the Sears Skydeck.
Though he stays silent, she doesn’t wither. “I’m all about gathering more data. We in the social sciences like to avoid the small-N problem.”
“I sure. That sounds like fun.”
I watch him twist, the way he did so often in real life. Sounds like fun. A little of her poise, and he’d admit: Fun isn’t something I do very well. A little of her candor, and he’d ask: Is this about me or my student?
“And we can wait and see, about taking Thassa to visit the group at Northwestern. No hurry, obviously.”
They stand there awkwardly, two more victims of natural selection, caught between negativity bias and the eternal belief that the future will be slightly better than the present. In possession of all the data she’s going to get, Candace Weld smiles and waves and weaves her way across the homicidal traffic of Michigan Avenue.
He’s still awake the next morning at three thirty, doing the math, wondering how a thirty-two-year-old editor is going to take care of a ten-year-old son who works for NASA, let alone a twenty-three-year-old daughter who’s still in college.