As Candace pulled ingredients from the refrigerator, the boy sat cackling at amateur camcorder video of an escaped six-foot pet iguana scrambling across a busy North Side intersection as hulking SUVs veered all over, trying to avoid the reptile. Gabriel hadn’t laughed so hard since the story, a month ago, when two rival architectural tour boats rammed each other in the Chicago River, throwing six culture tourists into the water.
Slicing her son’s grilled chicken into strips-fingers, Mom, always-she heard the sweet news reader (whose glossy friendliness seemed to fill the boy with an inchoate longing he ordinarily reserved for Best Buy gift certificates) announce one of those stories that cause a community to transcend itself and knit together in shared awe.
Two area college students are in the news tonight
Candace Weld oiled her skillet and smiled at the growing commonplace: newsworthy because in the news.
. after turning himself in to the city police and demanding
She let the pan heat and prepped the broccoli. She could get the boy to eat small amounts if she pureed it with butter and a splash of maple syrup.
. a twenty-three-year-old Arab woman in the country on a student visa. The victim of the assault apparently not only persuaded her would-be assailant
As Gabe called, “Mom, what’s a saylent?” her cortex caught up with her limbic system. In three quick steps, she stood in front of the set, curling her boy’s head gently away from the next words.
. close to the woman suggests that she may have hyperthiam hyperthymia, a rare condition that programs a person for unusual levels of elation. It’s not known how the condition contributed either to
“Shit,” the psychologist said.
“Mom! Five bucks, Mom.” The delighted boy leaped up and bee-lined for her purse on the dining-room hutch.
“Fuck.”
Her son beamed. “Ten more!”
The police have released the self-confessed alleged suspect, despite his demand that they
Candace Weld’s field of vision shrank and grayed. Reflux came up her throat. Self-confessed alleged. She lowered herself to the carpet and sat.
The boy set her purse down and crossed back to her. He shook her shoulder, blanching. “Mom? Mom. Never mind. You can keep the money. I don’t need it.”
I see them clearly now: Thassadit Amzwar and her two self-appointed foster guardians, on the verge of that Chicago winter. I assemble the missing bits from out of the reticent archive. I’d dearly love to keep all three tucked away safely in exposition. But they’ve broken out now, despite me, into rising action.
Weld called Stone four times that night. First his line was busy. Then he wouldn’t pick up. She fired off a terse e-maiclass="underline" I had to learn about this on the news? She redrafted the note three times, blunting her fury at his public diagnosis, that ridiculous little pseudoscientific tag. She focused on the attempted rape. The damage of public airing.
He shoots a message back at five the next morning. It’s frightened and sick with explanations. I was answering under fire, complying with a police investigation. I gave them everything that might possibly have any bearing on the case. I assumed what I said was for the police only.
They need two more e-mails and a jagged phone call before each settles down.
Weld asks if Thassa is all right. He tells her about the confused exchange he had with the Berber after class, in hushed and painful code, Thassa reassuring him that John Thornell’s bungled assault could never have harmed her.
“You didn’t call her last night? After the story ran?”
“I wanted to let her breathe.” After a beat, he adds, “Cowardice.”
Twice, she tells him that he did his best. But they both know: there would have been no Chicago StreetSharp News story without hyperthymia. “How can they possibly have used that word on television? Ridiculous.”
“I’m sorry. I never dreamed the police would sell it to TV.” But of course, television didn’t have to buy it. The media simply exercised eminent domain. Reality has become programming’s wholly owned subsidiary.
However the word got out, Thassadit Amzwar is an instant creative-nonfiction commodity. Harmon number nine: Harm Averted by Surprising Source. You know this story. Everyone knows this story but her. The Berber wouldn’t know how to read this story for the life of her. No doubt she thinks it’s Harmon number two: Group Misunderstands the Needs of an Outcast.
“The rape is my fault,” Stone tells Candace.
“Of course it is,” she agrees. Two handshakes, half of one ambiguous date, and they’ve been married for years. “This is all about you. You must have planted the idea in the man’s head.”
“If I’d been paying attention She’s a walking target. I should have warned her ”
“Are you serious? Criminal sexual abuse. A class-four felony. And she leaves her attacker so shaken he wants to be sent to jail for a decade. She doesn’t need your protection. You need hers.”
The price of information is falling to zero. You can now have almost all of it, anytime, anywhere, for next to nothing. The great majority of data can’t even be given away.
But meaning is like land: no one is making any more of it. With demand rising and supply stagnant, soon only the dead will be able to afford anything more than the smallest gist.
Minutes after the story airs, the Kabyle woman starts traveling abroad.
Search for:
But for a little while longer, the woman is still as meaningless as any local noise. She stays safely hidden in the million global narrowcast microcommunity headlines hatched every second. Bandwidth itself does not threaten her. Information may travel at light speed. But meaning spreads at the speed of dark.
Hidden in the public static are three items of firsthand knowledge. Charlotte Hullinger adds a comment to StreetSharp’s feedback section, correcting some background data. Roberto Muñoz buries an agonized confession of complicity in a ghostly blog visited by three people a month. “I was there when they were getting her drunk.” And Sue Weston posts an almost reverent appraisal on a college discussion forum: “He never had a chance of breaking her. She just blissed that creep away.”