She flips through her archive, the clips she’ll splice together to make her own real firstborn. In the middle of the stiff bed, surrounded by time capsules, she loads a short feature on the most notorious infant in living memory. The girl with that perfectly archaic middle name: Joy.
Whiplashing to think that the footage is three decades old. But the basic trope goes back millennia: a dangerous, destabilizing baby smuggled clandestinely into an unsuspecting world. The doctors don’t even tell the prospective parents that their little girl will be the first of her kind. Tonia sits on the bed, watching the videotaped birth, a message posted forward to whatever people might inhabit the evolved future. The infant head crowns on Schiff’s screen, and there is Louise Joy Brown, an impossibly slight five and three-quarters pounds, crying her lungs out in that first crisis, air.
The birth cries are nothing, compared to the ones they touch off. Perfectly moderate commentators face the camera and declare the doom of the human race. Almost ridiculous now, this dated hysteria. But almost right.
Schiff sits up in the bed and glances back out the window. A corsage of yellow lights now trace Kef’s edges all the way up the jagged mountain. This town’s basic cure for sterility may often still involve a prayer at the local zaouia. But then, so does New York’s.
Tonia turns back to the warnings posted forward from a previous planet. Later technologies make that first artificial conception look like a Hail Mary play. Intrafallopian transfer, intracytoplasmic sperm injection: a dozen of her friends have shopped from that list. A few hundred thousand IVF babies make their way through this night, as dark swings around the globe. The process is nothing now, and the real show is only getting started. A new industry, following only voluntary guidelines, already screens embryos for hundreds of genetic diseases. And Tonia Schiff will bet her return ticket that some billionaire, somewhere, is already paying to have his offspring screened for good traits. The race will take to selling characteristics on websites, like downloadable songs, the day it becomes possible.
She ejects the disk and flips through the stack, looking for the second half of tonight’s double feature. She has documentaries and biographies, old news clips on engineered bacteria, gene transfer, the world-famous photogenic sheep, xenotransplantation, embryos from skin DNA transplanted into eggs, embryos with two mothers and a father, and, from last week, the application for exclusive ownership of a wholly synthetic organism.
Apocalypse has become too commonplace to feel. Of the scribbling in books, there is no end. And all our writing will in time come alive.
She takes notes until she falls asleep. And falling asleep, she’ll tell herself that she asks for almost nothing: one more documentary, one more interview, one more clandestine infant named Joy. But the rim of cliffs guarding this ancient town mock any theme she might care to film.
Because Donna Washburn, the author of the Reader feature, googles her own name only once every two days, a full twenty-one hours pass before she sees herself mentioned in Sue Weston’s blog. Immediately Washburn leaves a message on Thassa’s voice mail, asking for confirmation. But Thassa doesn’t reply by the time the next week’s Reader is put to bed. So the paper runs an “unconfirmed rumor” squib. By the time the bit runs, it’s redundant. Jen’s secret identity has started to proliferate through the Web. Within a week, she’s pretty much a publicly traded commodity.
Three weeks before final exams, and Thassadit Amzwar is working flat out on Come Spring, trying to get a rough cut done before semester’s end. She hardly even notices the ripples. In this country, where continent-wide cultural transformations root, take over the biosphere, and go extinct several times in every twenty-four-hour news cycle, all she has to do is hunker down, finish the term, and wait until the public attention drifts back to celebrity divorces and custody fights, where it belongs.
The first assault is a simple repeat of last fall. She tries her best to answer the surge of e-mails. A few dozen fanboys and postpartum mothers write to ask, Is Jen really you? How old were you when you first realized that your genes were making you joyous? Does it still work late at night in winter? Could we meet for coffee, for a chat, for just forty-five minutes? I could be there on Thursday. Minneapolis isn’t all that far from Chicago
She’s gentle with these people; it’s not their fault they’ve been misled. After a few days, she reverts to a form letter. It breaks her heart, but she has no choice. She tries to add a personalized sentence at the end of every reply. When she begins to get replies to her replies, she grits her teeth and ignores them.
Then the phone starts ringing. It’s Self magazine. Then People. Then Psychology Today. She gives a couple of phone interviews without even realizing she’s doing so. She gives another one, just by trying to explain that she doesn’t want to talk about what’s not worth talking about. A journalist from the Trib begs her to come down to Rhapsody and just have a sandwich. She can hear in his voice that he’s a fine man with a wife and children who only wants to do his job as best as he can; having a sandwich while explaining the massive misunderstanding can’t do any more harm. When Thassa gets to Rhapsody, there’s a photographer lying in wait alongside the journalist. And this photographer woman-a graduate of Mesquakie-is also just doing her job and living her art.
The interviewers keep asking her to describe exactly how it feels to be exuberant. She asks them, “You have never been?” Yes, they say, but all the time? No, she says. Cheerful often. Exuberant sometimes, perhaps frequently, depending on the tally. Everyone alive should feel richly content, ridiculously ahead of the game, a million times luckier than the unborn. What more can she tell them?
They want to know whether she inherited her bliss, whether it comes from the environment, or whether she’s simply willed herself to be happy. She tells them honestly: she hasn’t a clue. They ask if other people in her family are as happy as she is. She says she’d never presume to say how happy anyone else might be.
After four days of the circus, she stops answering her phone. But it tears her up to hear the messages left on her voice mail. She can’t listen to them and not call them back. At the same time, she’d dearly like to finish the semester without flunking out. The only answer is to cancel her phone service and start a new one.
This doesn’t prevent total strangers who see the Tribune photo from stopping her in the street and greeting her warmly. But then, she used to stop total strangers in the street and greet them the same way. So it’s a wash, and she meets some nice people as a result. Many people she meets tell her how exhilarating it is, just to talk to her. That feels like considerable evidence, to her unscientific mind, that the disease is more contagious than genetic. But no venture capitalists step forward to fund a double-blind controlled study.
Where are Candace and Russell during all of this? They’re slipping off to lunch like international pleasure smugglers. She’s teaching him to cook. He’s sketching her portrait. They’re eating junk food on Navy Pier. They’re listening to Scandinavian reggae at the Aragon. They watch a Chinese gangster film in a hole-in-the-wall Chinatown theater, without benefit of English subtitles. They take Gabe to the Living Toys of the Future exhibit at the Science and Industry.