She breaks his silence. “Hey. You’re not a Christian, are you? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt.”
He has dreamed of mailing her things himself-old folk mix tapes, guides for surviving America, essays that her essays reminded him of, dizzy little books of Hopkins and Blake. “No. I was born My parents brought me up It doesn’t matter. I’m not really anything, really.”
“Good. I’m nothing, either. I’m a Maghreb Algerian Kabyle Catholic Atheist French Canadian on a student visa. I can’t help these people.”
“We should ask Candace.”
“I don’t know, Russell. I love Candace. That’s not the point. But Candace always tells me to do just what I think is right. She’s a big one for self-discovery, that Candace. I’ll simply pretend I already asked.”
He could suggest other solutions. But he doesn’t. He’s weakened by his recent bout with joy. Joy does little to increase one’s judgment. Happiness is not the condition you want to be in when you need to be at your most competent.
He asks if she has someplace in the city to hide out until finals. She can think of no place, and he doesn’t offer any. He tells her to protect herself, to be gentle but firm about her time. The main thing is to get over the semester finish line and get back home.
“Home,” she agrees. “That would be a beautiful place to get back to. One small problem, Mister. No trips home anytime soon. I’m enrolled in Summer One courses!”
They share an awkward pause. He thinks about offering her his place. But that’s crazy. They both hold still. For a moment, it’s so quiet I’m afraid they’ll hear me listening in. Then she asks him how his book is going, and we’re all safe again.
“Great.” He laughs. “I have a coauthor. Friend of yours.”
“Candace? Are you serious?” He can’t read her, her nonnative register. But he can hear her doing the math. “You and Candace are together?”
As together as anything, he supposes. “Yes. Yes, we are.” His answer surprises him more than her question.
“That’s wonderful, Russell. I’m happy for you. I’m happy for Candace. You are great with Jibreel. And I’m happy for this book you’re working on together. Now could you please tell me what it’s about?”
He smiles at her petulance. Sunniest petulance ever. “It’s an adventure story. It’s about someone breaking out of prison.”
“Really? You should talk to me. I have a cousin who broke out of prison. I can tell you stories.”
Imagination dies of shame in the face of its blood relation.
“I miss you, Mister Stone. Miss how you are. We should go somewhere together, sometime. See some sights.”
He has to remind himself. It doesn’t mean anything. She would take even the Christians out sightseeing, if there weren’t so many of them.
A buzzer rasps on her end. “Oh my God. More visitors. Wait a moment.” She’s off to the intercom and a short chat. She comes back laughing. “It’s two sweet old women. I can see three more spinning around, down in the street. They want me to autograph some magazine clippings and talk about blessings.”
“Tell them you’re studying for exams.”
“I give them ten minutes. Then I ask if they would like to sacrifice some goats together, out on the balcony. That sometimes speeds them up.” She makes a kissing sound into the phone. “Thank you for everything, Russell. Love you. Bye!”
This mutant Second City is home to a talk show. Lots of world cities and even some non-world ones have talk shows to call their own. The genre dates back to the book of Job, and it has spawned more variants than wolves have spawned dogs. But the world has seen no talk show like the one that has evolved in this particular Chicago.
It’s less a show than a sovereign multinational charter. And its host is, by any measure, the most influential woman in the world. Her own story is a remarkable mix of motifs from American creative fiction, from Alger to Zelazny. Say only that she has grown from an impoverished, abused child into an adult who gives away more money than most industrialized nations. She has the power to create instant celebrities, sell hundreds of millions of books, make or break entire consumer industries, expose frauds, marshal mammoth relief efforts, and change the spoken language. All this by being tough, warm, vulnerable, and empathetic enough to get almost any other human being to disclose the most personal secrets on international television. If she didn’t exist, allegory would have to invent her. Her name is O’Donough and she is the richest Irish American woman in history, but she, her show, her publishing house, and her chain of personal-overhaul boutiques are known the world over simply as Oona.
The guiding principle of her program-the one that has made Oona the most-watched human of the last two decades-is the belief that fortune lies not in our stars but in our changing selves. She has told several thousand guests that blaming any destiny-whether biological or environmental-just isn’t going to cut it. Even in her own much-publicized battles with moods, mother, and metabolism, Oona has always insisted that anyone can escape any fate by a daily application of near-religious will. Every person has at least enough will on tap to overcome any statistically reasonable adversity and to become if not intercontinentally successful, then at least solvent.
So when the national media circulates the discovery of congenital happiness, it catches the attention of Oona’s extensive stable of program developers. A predisposition to disposition: it’s exactly the kind of fatalism the boss is determined not to be determined by. And nothing boosts the viewership like a good fight. When Oona’s staff learn that the Happy Gene Woman lives in a dorm room in the South Loop not sixteen blocks from The Oona Show’s studio, it reads like fate.
Thassa’s name appeared in Weld’s appointments calendar: a half-hour walk-in slot on the Thursday afternoon of finals week. The tidal bore of pre-finals desperation that surged annually through the counseling center had tapered off, and most of Candace’s clients were crawling back home to piece themselves together over summer break. Weld hadn’t spoken with Thassa for longer than she could count. She’d seen the swell of public nonsense, of course. But a student could face worse crises than a momentary deluge of anonymous love.
Yet there Thassa was, her 3:00 p.m. counseling appointment. Weld wondered how she could have let so many days pass without contact. In the seven years that Candace had worked at Mesquakie, she’d made three major miscalculations, one of them resulting in an attempted, thankfully inept suicide. Weld went into therapy herself after that, and Dennis Winfield and other colleagues helped restore her professional confidence. She learned a great deal from these slips, and she battled back from each one to become stronger at what she did and better at who she was. But every so many months a note or news or a surprise name on the appointments calendar grazed her, and she returned to that eroding state where everything was incomprehensible mistake and cascading consequence. The state in which many of her clients permanently resided.
Candace knew what she had to do: Listen carefully for any immediate danger. Sympathize with the disorienting stress Thassa must be under. Then suggest that Thassa make an appointment as soon as possible with one of the other counselors. Friendship and professionalism both demanded the switch.
The knock came promptly at three o’clock. Candace opened the door on the first student ever to enter her office and hug her. Thassa shook Weld’s shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks. “So-you are still alive!”
“I’m sorry,” Candace said. “Things have been so crazy lately, haven’t they?”