He watches her asleep. What could he say about her face, emptied of look, that would make it live for someone a hundred years from now? Or a hundred hundred. A sleeping face forgets every waking technology; sleep at 2020 should be intelligible to the Neolithic. Her eyes start to twitch a little, and then her lips. He could make her say anything at all, in her sleep, in their growing, coauthored volume.
She starts to snore. Small, seersucker, Laura Ashley snores. If he was fighting his love for her at all up until this moment, he now loses. The snores crescendo, and although he holds perfectly still in his joy, her own sound rouses her. She wakes confused, defensive. “I wasn’t!” she says, still asleep. She opens her eyes, turns to look at him. “Was I?”
“Hey,” he tells her, nuzzling her downy neck. “Let’s get engaged, or something.”
She sits up and inspects the room, puzzled. Someone has rearranged all its furniture in her sleep. “Russell? I have to tell you something. We can’t see Thassa anymore.”
The footage of Thassa on The Oona Show made an eerie art film in its own right: her far-focusing eyes, the ecstatic fear, the angelic irritation shaking free of all human markets. Schiff couldn’t get enough. She studied the shots of the genetically blessed woman, already splicing them into a much larger script: a single forty-two-minute hour about how the eons-long pursuit of happiness was at last cutting to the chase.
She and the Over the Limit crew worked from a rough outline: nine minutes on the chemical bases of moods; eight on neurogenetics; eleven on hyperthymia and its now famous mascot, Thassa Amzwar; and ten on the coming ability to manipulate genetic disposition. That left four minutes for transitions and Schiff’s interludes. She’d already done two interviews with key researchers in the biology of contentment. The show interns were busy raiding the archive for usable footage, while the art team set to work on fantastic animation.
The day after The Oona Show, Schiff and Garrett arrived to film Thassa in her dorm. The building had thinned out for the summer break, but a cluster of Jen-spotters loitered in the entrance. They clamored around Garrett’s tripods and lights, bugging him for information. A sallow ectomorph asked Schiff to sign his iPod with a Sharpie. One woman of about thirty, puffy and near tears, tried to force her way into the building alongside them, saying it was absolutely essential that she talk to the happiness girl right away. The lobby security guard turned her away, not for the first time.
Upstairs, in Thassa’s narrow, film-filled efficiency, they found a woman far from ecstatic. She sat holding her elbows on a small, three-colored kilim that stretched across the room. Garrett barely had space to mount the camera and lights, unfurl the reflectors, and still get both women into the shot. As he started filming, Thassa wrapped herself in stoicism. Schiff, stripped of sass, transformed into some kind of acolyte. She asked Thassa about her upbringing. Garrett, nonplussed, kept shooting. But when the two women began to talk about Kabylia, Thassa relaxed and showed the first sparks of a spirit that might be worth filming, let alone engineering.
Schiff asked, “Do Algerians trust happiness?” Garrett almost knocked the tripod over. But Thassa fielded the question on the fly. “We say, Ki nchouf ham el nass nansa hami: ‘When I see someone else’s desolation, I forget mine.’ Every Algerian knows that every other Algerian has seen great miseries. And that is consolation? Do any of my countrymen hope that science will discover a solution to the sorrow of history? Please! How can even Americans believe this?”
Instead of volleying, as she usually would have, Schiff gave one of the lamest follow-ups Garrett ever heard her deliver. “What makes you happy?”
Before Garrett could stop shooting, the Algerian woman smiled for the first time all interview. She lifted one thin, brown finger, and pointed at him. “That. Oh my God! If I could do what this man does, all day long? That would be a life. I love to look at the world through a viewfinder. I just love it. The worst things about life are beautiful on film.”
Garrett killed the camera and asked to talk to Schiff out in the hall. He started in before she could defend. “You aren’t exactly advancing the frontiers of science here.”
Schiff leveled him with her unnerving hazel eyes. “Not my job, Nick.”
“No? What exactly is your job? I thought it was to give me something engrossing to-”
“We’re telling this woman’s story.”
The words slowed him. But only a little. “You’re supposed to interview hyperthymia, not befriend it. This woman is not exactly a bottomless wellspring of cheer.”
“We’re supposed to film whatever is really there.”
“Oh, shit. Don’t get righteous on me. Not the time for philosophy, Ton. We’re on a deadline here.”
“This girl is not what Kurton says she is. I just think our viewers want to see-”
“Our viewers want science. It’s a science show.”
A voice called from inside the apartment. “Everything okay out there?”
When they slunk back into the room, they found Thassa filming Garrett’s camcorder and lighting gear with her own MiniDV. “Someone wants to pay for my eggs,” she told them. She lifted up her camera coolly and filmed their faces as understanding spread across them: Her eggs. Her eggs.
Garrett asked her to repeat the fact on film. Thassa laughed him off. “Interviews must be spontaneous. You can’t tell your subjects what to say. That’s what they teach in film school, en tout cas.”
Russell Stone lies in his beloved’s bed, stilled by her bombshell. I step through his possible choices. Every combination of heritage and upbringing dooms him to keep pulling at the sheets and smiling. “What do you mean?”
Candace tells him, in mature phrases, the law as laid down to her. She explains what her job dictates. She lays it out the way she might tell a client that he needs to undergo certain stringent therapies. She goes down the list of Russell’s possible objections, addressing each one sensitively.
“You can’t be saying this,” he says. “She’s a friend, isn’t she?”
She nods her head, helpful. “I suppose that’s the point. By any responsible standard of behavior, I should never have become Thassa’s friend in the first place.”
He isn’t getting this. “Are you just worried about your job? Because, Jesus: the whole country’s a nut case. It’s a buyer’s market for what you do. You could work anywhere.”
She explains about personnel files, letters of reference, and all the realities of adult life for which he’s never had much innate aptitude.
“I see,” he says. He sees nothing, except the accusation that he doesn’t make.
She trembles and tears up. But her shoulders and torso remain strangely marble. He puts his arm around her and pulls her flush to him. He murmurs up near her ear. “Don’t worry,” he tells her. “It’s all right. Sleep. You need to work tomorrow. We’ll talk about it in daylight.”
In daylight, they say nothing. She gets Gabe off to school while Stone is still clearing his head and trying to decide if she really said, in the middle of the night, what she really said. His best response is the billion-year-old, time-tested method of freezing up. If he does nothing, the whole thing may pass overhead without incident. So he keeps still and waits, like the rodent in a raptor’s shadow with whom he shares so many genes.
He doesn’t have the luxury of waiting long. Three days later, he gets an e-mail from Princess Heavy Hullinger. Half a year ago, he shared a weird intimacy with this woman three nights a week. Now her name in his Inbox seems like a fable. The note is a cruel slash at all the writing conventions he once urged on the woman: