She films the tiny courtyard, lingering on the Latin tablets and tomb inscriptions. She tries to decipher the inflections and conjugations, the ordered grammar of a dead language she learned in a Brussels high school, forgot all up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and revives now in this flyspeck town on the edge of the old empire, as vendors in the nearby streets call out fruit and vegetable names in Arabic. No place like home. Glued to one pillar is a worn poster for a local band, Rien à Dyr.
Tonia will spend an hour in the church, until an attendant asks her to stop filming. When she rolls out again, the comic-book sky will have tilted toward turquoise. She tracks through the half-excavated Roman baths alongside the spring that has kept the town alive for millennia. She strolls back to the esplanade-pristine, wide, and beautiful-through the heart of the old town that Bourguiba bulldozed in the sixties, in a ruthless improvement to touristic spec. Even this, she preserves in digital video.
On toward noon, she turns down a side alley and is stunned to find herself back near her hotel. She has gotten so twisted around in the maze of streets that for a minute, she can’t shake the feeling that there are two hotels, twin squares absolutely identical, parallel universes occupying identical colonial quartiers on opposite ends of the same hillside town.
She runs back up to her room and gets the two books that she has toted with her all the way from the States. She slips them into her shoulder bag. Her cheap attempt at emotional blackmaiclass="underline" gifts from the irrecoverable past. Secrets of the personal genome.
She debates whether to risk bringing the video camera. She has promised no film, no recording of any kind-absolute concessions required to get the interview at all. But she has banked this whole visit on a change of heart, a softening, once they begin to talk. She has come all this way, at greater expense than the project’s budget allows, in the hopes that she can elicit what no one in two years has been able to obtain. But any chance she has will vanish, if she angers her subject. Fortunately, the camera is no bigger than a family Bible. She drops it into her bag alongside the two books, where it discreetly disappears. She locks her room and trots down two flights of stairs, back into the blazing day.
She wanted to meet in Algiers, of course. Better yet, Bône, Sétif-anyplace in Kabylia. But two months ago, an unnamed terrorist group attached a bomb to the undercarriage of a personnel carrier near the Hassi Messaoud oil field in east-central Algeria, killing nineteen people and wounding twelve. The attack would have been routine, in a country that suffers such strikes as often as North America suffers sports championships. But among the dead this time were three U.S. “advisers,” all of them in uniform.
Schiff didn’t even know her country had military personnel in Algeria. Nor did most of the world, gauging from the fallout on six continents. The State Department immediately issued a travel ban, and the chance of a visa vanished into fiction. A town just over the Tunisian border is as close as she will get-a compromise solution with narrative possibilities all its own.
Schiff will find herself sitting in the designated café, forty-five minutes early. She has no trouble finding the place. The Café de la Liberté, just behind the Association de Sauvegarde de la Médina. She has checked it on maps for a week. She made sure it was truly there, earlier that morning. You’re a Western woman; no one will trouble you.
She has been denied further phone contact on the thinnest of fatalisms. “I will be there, Ms. Schiff. And if I’m not, a phone won’t help. We both just have to trust.” Schiff sits nursing what is surely the worst tea she has ever encountered anywhere in the world, served in a beautiful enameled glass. The liquid has been repeatedly boiled down to something the consistency and sweetness of a hot Popsicle, served with a jaunty sprig of mint on top. She wants to film it, but she’s afraid to take the DV camera out of the bag. Every ten minutes a waiter turns up to scowl at her for being a single woman sitting in a café, for thinking taboo thoughts, and for not making any more headway on the innocuous beverage. But Tonia has bought her right to sit in silence, and no one shoos her away.
She sits and does what she’s done now for three days: reads Thassa’s beaten-up copy of Make Your Writing Come Alive. At 12:48 local time, she opens it and points to a passage at random, divining by scripture. Harmon says:
Everywhere in the world, for almost all of human history, most people would have mocked the thought that a person might beat fate.
Several lifetimes later, at 12:53, she goes to the well again:
Some characters seem to be born with a blazing red X on their forehead.
The author seems to be getting shrewder, the longer that Schiff spends away from home. At 12:57, Harmon decides:
The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.
She can’t decide whether this is profound or portentous commonplace. All she knows is that the author isn’t helping her nerves. She periscopes the streets, jerking in recognition at every moving figure of approximately the right size and age. She goes on checking her watch every forty seconds until five minutes after the appointed hour. The whole idea is absurd: two people on opposite sides of the planet arranging to meet at a café on the edge of nowhere, at exactly 1:00 p.m. local time on a Thursday afternoon at the end of the age of chance.
The midday muezzins sing longingly to her, promises scattered evenly around the horizon. Long after all the root causes of such needs have been found and addressed, people will still answer the nomadic call to prayer. For centuries after the transgenics have pulled up stakes and gone elsewhere, many will still seek the cure this world cannot give.
At exactly 1:20, Schiff comes to the conclusion that she’s been stood up. She has blown a week out of her life, spent $3,000, and journeyed 5,000 miles just to sit in a café and sip the most cloying tea known to mankind. Her film will never get made. No chance to redeem herself. The race will blunder into the age of choice without so much as a proxy vote from her.
She’ll flip open Harmon again, but she won’t like the passage she lands on. She’ll try again, and once more after that-as many times as I say-until she hits upon a divination destined for her:
A great amount of ink has been spilled in the belief that when every other peace fails us, we still have words.
She’ll look up from the page, trying to decide if the words give her any consolation to write home about. And there, working toward her down the sloping street, still two hundred meters away, will be the leisurely, reconciled, unmistakable silhouette of the figure she has come halfway around the world to learn from.
Kurton descends from his coastal cabin and returns to work. His first public act is an injunction against the Houston clinic that wins the bidding for a dozen of Thassa’s sex cells. News of a deal has spread like a contagion from biotech newsletters to tacky bio sites: the happiness woman has signed away her eggs for $32,000.
Kurton files to stop the deal. His argument is simple, and similar to those upheld for decades in America’s courts. Whatever they mean to use the eggs for, this clinic is buying a genome whose increased bio-value results directly from the association studies performed by Truecyte. Truecyte’s intellectual efforts have established a correlation, and the company has filed for the appropriate patents. So if this fertility clinic means to profit from the probability of increased emotional health inherent in Thassadit Amzwar’s genome, then they owe Truecyte a licensing fee.