He spots her from a distance as his cab pulls up. She’s standing at the foot of the aquarium steps, in full sun. She looks like a girl whose parents told her to stay put and wait for them, just before they were rounded up by the authorities.
He pays the cab and walks the final hundred yards, watching her chat up a ring of multiracial third graders. In a few sentences, she has the whole volatile class rapt, hypnotized as if by the best interactive television. Their faces are like Prize Day. Their teacher stands behind them, transfixed as well. Thassa Amzwar flips a hand back toward the Chicago cliffs: red and emerald, white and obsidian. The children look on, astonished by the city that springs up behind them.
She sweeps her hand across the panorama out beyond the matchstick marina, pointing to where an entire mirror city plunges into the surface of the lake. Her hands cup into a small open boat, which she floats out to the horizon, into the seaway, past Montreal, and over the swirling Atlantic. The third-grade field trip winds up on the shores of another country.
She catches sight of Kurton where he stands spying. She grins and waves. He crosses to her and takes her hand in his. She laughs and introduces him to the circle of kids, who glare at this party crasher. Their teacher leads them toward the buses and they drag themselves away, calling Thassa’s name in singsong goodbye.
“What were you telling them?” he asks.
“We were just traveling.” She looks back out over the curve of the lake, shaking her head. She’s channeling Kateb Yacine: If the sea were free, Algeria would be rich.
He thanks her again for meeting. She shrugs. “Of course!” She says he looks kinder when he’s not onstage.
“I think your debate partner was very upset, by the end. Maybe you should write him a letter.”
He laughs. “Maybe I should!” He steals a look at his cell; he needs to be at O’Hare by one, for a flight to Minneapolis. And her tempo is clearly Sahara time. He waves toward a nearby bench. “Would you like to sit?”
She frowns. “I thought we could ” She glances at the octagonal Doric temple.
It takes him a moment. “Oh, of course. Have you ever been?”
Her face is like someone texting a lover. “Not today!”
As they stand in line for tickets, she confesses to coming almost every week. The simplest pleasure-watching fish glide by on the other side of murky-green glass-never goes stale and needs no escalation. She’s jumped off the hedonic treadmill and doesn’t habituate. Goose bumps run up Kurton’s neck-piloerection, puffing up against danger-archaic reflex pirated by that spin-off of no known survival value: awe.
They circle the great central tank, Thassa studying the blue-spotted stingray and Kurton studying her. She holds the gaze of a leatherback; the creature is as transfixed by her as any scientist. Even her walk is eerie; she springs like she’s on a smaller planet with weaker gravity.
They wander through the Caribbean and Amazon. They peer into the past of cichlid-mad Victoria, a lake on the brink of death. He understands: the aquarium is this woman’s own test. She screens him first, before she’ll let him draw a drop of blood. Two Hispanic school-girls tumble past them in front of the lungfish, each holding a sheet filled with furious check marks. The taller shouts at her rumpled sidekick, “Are you getting your theory yet?”
The meeting has already lasted longer than Kurton planned. They haven’t even glanced at the consent paperwork. He should be anxious, but he’s not. He has seen five previous cases of reputed hyperthymia without mania. This one is the first that might be real. Just being around her is a mild euphoric.
Half an hour in the woman’s presence and Kurton makes a decision. Science is half hunch, and his funding is ample, anyway. This one needs more than DNA genotyping. She merits the full workup. He asks her, “How would you like to fly out to Boston for a weekend?” He lays it out: a full suite of psychological tests. Comprehensive biochemical analysis. Functional brain imaging. Salivary cortisol levels. Protein counts. Finally, genetic sequencing, beginning with three chromosomal areas of special interest
“What are you looking for?” she asks.
He tells her about the hot sites already located: the dopamine receptor D4 gene on chromosome 11, whose longer form correlates with extroversion and novelty-seeking. He describes the serotonin transporter gene on the long arm of chromosome 17, whose short allele associates with negative emotions.
“You want to see how long my genes are?”
“We’re studying a genomic network that’s involved in assembling the brain’s emotional centers. A few variations seem to make a lot of difference. We’d like to see what varieties you have.”
“Boston is by the ocean,” she says.
“If you like this city,” he promises, “you’ll love Boston.”
“Can I see where they made the tea party?”
He knows nothing at all about Algeria’s war of independence. He has never even heard about the massacre at Sétif. “How do you know about that?”
“I did my homework! It’s true, I would like to see this city of yours. But I don’t like to miss classes.”
Kurton says the visit can be as short as she likes.
She takes him down to the leafy sea dragons. The scientist has somehow missed these creatures’ existence. He pushes his face up to the glass, boggled. They are, by any measure, beyond fiction, madder than anything out of Tolkien. A sea horse cousin, but gone Daliesque, the deformed things have flowing banners pasted all over them, from dappled branches down to frilly spines. The drapery looks like clunky high school theatrical costumes. Taxonomy’s late-night brainstorming, gone unhinged.
The dragons float, propelled by tiny fins in their necks and tails. He stares into pure possibility, feeling how feeble imagination is, alongside evolution. He remembers Life in a Coral Reef, a book he wolfed down at age nine and came away from with a hunger he has yet to satisfy.
Thassa, on the far side of the tank, peeps through the creature foliage into Kurton’s face. “What are those? Feet? Horns? Look: it’s growing a tree out of the back of its head. Okay, Science. Please explain.”
He starts with the standard model. The one you can find anywhere, aside from a quarter of American high schools. Start with a genetic template for making enzymes. Let chance make small errors copying the templates
She waves her palm in the air. “That’s no explanation.”
He starts again, from the other end of the beautiful synthesis. Some slightly more seaweedy-looking sea horse has a slightly better chance
“Yes. Le camouflage. That’s always the reason. Hiding, and also advertising. Can nature say only two things? But look at the cost to these poor creatures. They struggle just to swim!”
“Whatever survives a little better”-Kurton drops into his media voice-“is a little more likely to-”
“Certainly,” she replies. “Survival is always handy! But what are they surviving better than?”
Slightly better than something that’s not quite a leafy sea dragon.
“You are the man who got cows to make medicines. If I come to Boston, can you give me one of those branches, growing out of the back of my head?”
“It might take a few tries.”
She crouches down again, examining the implausible monster. “Farhana? Hnnn? Tu es heureuse là-dedans, ma belle? What do you think, Mr. Kurton? Can fish be happy the way we are happy?”
“No one knows-yet. But ask me again, in a few years.”
An announcement comes over the building’s speakers: a behavior display in the oceanarium will start in fifteen minutes. She shoots him a hopeful look. He checks his watch and decides that she’s worth missing a plane for. Minneapolis can wait. For the first time in months, he’s enjoying being in a place more than he’ll enjoy leaving it.