Free Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers

him?”
    “I do now! He’s a beautiful man.”
    The adjective stabs him. He’ll never be able to protect her from her own promiscuous warmth. “A Muslim,” he says, brain-dead. “Like you?”
    “
Me?
” She laughs. “I’m no believer. I’m some kind of half-Christian atheist. My mother’s family have been Catholic for generations. Hey!” She shakes his arm. “Don’t look so surprised! You know that Saint Augustine was
Berbère
?”
    Russell didn’t know. His ignorance is more or less complete.
    “From Annaba. A Kabyle even more famous than Zidane. But my father was so disgusted with religion that he wouldn’t let it in our house. I don’t know, myself. If there is God, he is just laughing at every religion we invent!”
    He’s stunned silent: faith is not the author of her bliss. Blessed are those who do not believe, and yet see.
    She carries on amusing herself. “You know, maybe those jihad suicide people will really get their seventy-two virgins in heaven—except they will be seventy-two American Christian virgins, saving themselves for their Baptist husbands!”
    Her glee is a dance. Stone seizes up even worse than he does in front of the class. He stutters his way through a few gibberish clauses. He’s stunted by this thing she owns, the thing that beautiful people seem to possess but never really do. If only she were merely beautiful . . .
    Her face is small but ursine. Her nose veers hard to the right, and her eyes are slightly askew. She shouldn’t even be pretty, except for the conspiracy of delight rounding her cheeks. A rill of melted skin runs up the outside of her left arm from elbow to shoulder. How could he have missed it until now? She must think the scar too banal to mention in her journal.
    He says some generic pedantries about her entries for class. She nods and scribbles into her notebook, which she safeguards up near her narrow chest. He tries to say things that won’t look ludicrous, copied down. A few more of his clumsy maxims stolen from Harmon, a little more of her laughter and scribbling, and she turns the page to show him: not notes, but a felt-tip cartoon caricature of him, perfect down to his squint of bewilderment. She draws like she breathes—a gull enjoying a gust.
    Happy people must
know something
that no one else does. Some key to being alive, obscure and hard-won, almost out of reach. Otherwise, he would have met a truly happy person or two, long before her.
    “What made you apply to this place?” he asks. “How did you choose Chicago?”
    She declares Mesquakie a great college for her major: film arts, the documentary concentration. “I fell in love with films, in high school, in Montreal. I was making little movies for my brother, to make him feel less, um . . . country sick? Homesick. Come on, Thassa!
Homesick
. I made him funny clips, to get him to laugh. Then, I started . . . splicing? I love film; I just
love
it. I love putting the shots together. I love dubbing the sounds. Anything! I could play with the editing softwares all day long.”
    He’s so nonplussed he can’t even nod.
    “What I would really love—more than anything?—is to get very skilled, then to go home and make beautiful films,
chez nous
.”
    “Of course!” At last it clicks: witness and voice, in the world’s most powerful medium. “Like Pontecorvo . . . Has anyone done something like that for the civil war?”
    She smiles confidentially and touches his wrist. Her skin shocks him. “Not politics! Politics and film?” She tsks and waves her index finger like a windshield wiper. “That’s not my glass of tea. No, I just want to shoot—you know!
Kabylie
. The mountains. The coast. Those peoples. That sky.”
    “Nature?” He can’t keep the bafflement out of his voice. A child of death who’s thrilled about the future. An Algerian who shuns politics. A film lover who chooses the banality of mountains.
    She shakes her head again and pulls a tiny media player out of