Later, Schiff spent hours hunting down the proliferating performances, which had by then become one of the most popular amateur theatricals on the Net.
“Oona, listen,” a pretty Vancouver Eurasian lip-synchs, in her own shot-perfect re-creation of the segment. “I promise you: This is easy. Nothing is more obvious.”
A stocky blond high school junior wearing a Berber blouse in her Orlando bedroom recites for the lens, “People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful.”
Atlanta: “Even a minute is more than we deserve.” Spokane, Allentown: “No one should be anything but dead.” San Diego, Concord, Moline: “Instead, we get honey out of rocks. Miracles from nothing.”
“It’s easy,” all the Thassa Amzwars across the globe swear to anyone who’ll listen. “We don’t need to get better. We’re already us. And everything that is, is ours.”
Stone and Weld snatch her from the clamoring studio audience and whisk her off to a hidden soft-serve ice cream dive somewhere west of Greek Town. Neither of Thassa’s foster guardians has the courage to ask anything but whether she’s all right.
Her all-rightness extends to being ravenous. She wolfs down nine hundred calories while wondering out loud, “What exactly is my crime, do you think? I simply enjoy this world. Why do they treat me as some kind of threat to civilization?” She says nothing about her teetering in front of the camera, that brittle moment when she seemed half in love with nihilism. But she confesses to thinking she’d never escape the post-show crush alive.
When she comes up for air two waffle cones later, she mentions, a little embarrassed, her pre-show meeting with Tonia Schiff. “You remember her? The funny narrator from the genomes program? Of course you do!”
Stone and Weld nod, red.
“She wants to make another film. The other side of this so-called destiny story. She thinks there’s much more to tell about my feeling well. She thinks I’m being made into some kind of prophecy. She wants to help, I think.”
Stone checks with Candace, who chooses this precise moment to clam up. He sees in her face exactly how it is: too scrupulous to give the advice she wants to, too committed to trust to intervene. He pleads with her: Don’t leave me here alone. But Candace’s eyes blink with a first little ten-dollar dose of fear.
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” he asks Thassa. If Weld won’t be herself, he’ll have to be her. “With all this exposure right now ”
Thassa pets his shoulder with her paper cup. “You’re right, Russell. Of course you are. But this is the woman who I want to be when I grow up. She can teach me a lot about film. Maybe more than school can.”
With a glance, she implores Candace. All the psychologist can do is raise an eyebrow.
Methodically, Thassa shreds her napkin. She murmurs a few Tamazight words of encouragement to herself. “It’s a funny thing. I’m Kabyle. We’re supposed to be so private by nature. Ach-nature! It’s meaningless, isn’t it? I know what you think. But maybe another show can finish all this nonsense. Jen must disappear. Maybe Miss Schiff can help kill her.”
She looks to her friends for their approval. She’s forgotten, in the moment’s stress, how no one needs to decide more than God. And God decides at just that minute to send through the door of the ice cream joint a pair of retired women who instantly recognize the foreign creature they just saw on television an hour ago. It takes the trio twenty minutes to escape from Thassa’s admirers.
They say goodbye to one another back in the South Loop. Thassa is restless again, her eyes casting in all directions for the sequel that might extricate her. They drop her off at her dorm, where a cluster of superchurch Christians and Mesquakie Oona Show fans already gather for autographs. Thassa goes stoically to her fate. “Russell, Candace: you are wonderful. Let’s meet again, on a calmer day.”
They watch the recorded show again that night, in Edgewater. Gabe watches with them. The boy is so excited he almost levitates. “We know her, Mom. She’s my friend. This is like six stars. Seven!” He’s a little upset by that moment when Thassa threatens to implode. But he knows how a good ending needs a brush with disaster in order for it to mean anything. When the strong finish comes, it’s like he’s willed it into being.
On his way off to bed, the happy boy asks Russell, “You staying over again tonight? Whatever. My dad says he’s cool with it.”
In bed, Russell and Candace reprise the argument they’ve been rehearsing all day. “The stress is getting to her,” he says. A second look at the show convinces him. “I’ve never seen her like that. She was this close to losing it.”
Candace, meanwhile, has recovered. Her own little worm of fear has put out wings and become some beautiful gadfly. “Russell. It’s over. She won’t have to do it again. So she hit a shaky patch. Rough edges, same as anyone. I don’t think she was in real trouble, even for a minute. Look how she ended!”
But all he can think about are those thirty seconds when Miss Generosity lay pinned under a boulder as heavy as any that has ever crushed him. He sees something new in her, something better than he ever expected.
“Leave it,” the woman in bed next to him says. “Stop worrying. She was fine.”
He rolls over and straddles her. He presses his body down across her length, cupping her shoulders, pressing his mouth between her breasts. How wrong can this counselor be? The girl wasn’t fine, not by a long shot. She was susceptible. Desperate. Magnificent. Exhilarating.
The note from Dennis Winfield reached Weld two days later. A note, not a visit: trouble. Weld knew what it had to be about. The only mystery was why it took so long in coming. Perhaps the counseling center needed time to make an airtight case.
At least Dennis showed the decency to reprimand her privately before convening the whole tribunal. She could work with Dennis one-on-one. He had a thing about her. She didn’t even need to play him; he played himself, whenever the two of them sat in a room together.
She came to his office at the appointed time, all sails trim and ready to navigate any accusation.
Dennis opened conventionally enough. “You’re in a relationship with this man? Sleeping together?” He sounded more than professionally hurt.
Weld reminded Dennis that she’d consulted him. Both he and Christa Kreuz had green-lighted her dating Russell Stone.
“We did not give you license to violate ethics.”
She fell back in her chair. “Violate ” Dennis fended off her glance with his chin. She no longer recognized him. She tried to slow her heartbeat and take stock. “I have never violated professional ethics in my life.”
She’d blurred a boundary once or twice. Let clients need her more than was good. But that was early on, before she graduated from her own temperamental weaknesses. “How dare you, Dennis. I’ve done nothing that you and your morals policewoman didn’t sign off on. Just what are you accusing me of?”
“Inappropriate emotional intimacy with a client.”
She jerked forward, indignant. “He’s not a client. We’ve been all over this-”
“Not your boyfriend,” Dennis said. “Your boyfriend’s girlfriend.”
Candace slumped back into her chair. Panic plumed through her chest. Someone held her head underwater. Even before Dennis spelled out the accusation, she saw it, complete. And indisputable. She sobered horribly, like she’d been on a jag with some wild, five-minute party drug and she was just now coming to, witnessing her sluttish behavior from a distance.