The Corrections: A Novel (28 page)

“Did you tell the boys that I’m depressed?” Gary asked her in
the darkness, from the far margin of their quarter– acre bed.
“Caroline? Did you lie to them about my mental
state? Is that why everybody’s suddenly being so
agreeable?”

“Gary,” she said. “They’re being agreeable because they
want you to take them mountain-biking in the Poconos.”

“Something about this doesn’t smell right.”

“You know, you are getting seriously paranoid.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“Gary, this is frightening.”

“You’re fucking with my head! And there is no lower trick than that.
There’s no meaner trick in the book.”

“Please, please, listen to yourself.”

“Answer my question,” he said. “Did you tell them I’m
‘depressed’? ‘Having a hard time’?”

“Well—aren’t you?”

“Answer my question!”

She didn’t answer his question. She said nothing more at all that night,
although he repeated his question for half an hour, pausing for a minute or two
each time so that she could answer, but she didn’t answer.

By the morning of the bike trip, he was so destroyed by lack of sleep that his
ambition was simply to function physically. He loaded three bikes onto
Caroline’s extremely large and safe Ford Stomper vehicle and drove for two
hours, unloaded the bikes, and pedaled mile after mile on rutted trails. The
boys raced on far ahead. By the time he caught up with them, they’d taken
their rest and were ready to move again. They volunteered nothing but wore
expressions of friendly expectation, as if Gary might have a confession to make.
His situation was neurochemically somewhat dire, however; he had nothing to say
except “Let’s eat our sandwiches” and “One more ridge
and then we turn around.” At dusk he loaded the bikes back onto the
Stomper, drove two hours, and unloaded them in an access of anhedonia.

Caroline came out of the house and told the older boys what great fun she and
Jonah had had. She declared herself a convert to the Narnia books. All evening,
then, she and

Jonah chattered about “Aslan” and “Cair
Paravel” and “Reepicheep,” and the online kids-only Narnia
chat room that she’d located on the Internet, and the C. S. Lewis Web site
that had cool online games to play and tons of cool Narnian products to
order.

“There’s a
Prince Caspian
CD-ROM,” Jonah told Gary,
“that I’m very much looking forward to playing with.”

“It looks like a really interesting and well-designed game,” Caroline
said. “I showed Jonah how to order it.”

“There’s a Wardrobe?” Jonah said. “And you point and
click and go through the Wardrobe into Narnia? And then there’s all this
cool stuff inside?”

Profound was Gary’s relief the next morning as he bumped and glided, like a
storm-battered yacht, into the safe harbor of his work week. There was nothing
to do but patch himself up as well as he could, stay the course,
not be
depressed
. Despite serious losses, he remained confident of victory.
Since his very first fight with Caroline, twenty years earlier, when he’d
sat alone in his apartment and watched an eleven-inning Phillies game and
listened to his phone ring every ten minutes, every five minutes, every two
minutes, he’d understood that at the ticking heart of Caroline was a
desperate insecurity. Sooner or later, if he withheld his love, she came
knocking on his chest with her little fist and let him have his way.

Caroline showed no sign of weakening, however. Late at night, when Gary was too
freaked out and angry to shut his eyes, let alone sleep, she politely but firmly
declined to fight with him. She was particularly adamant in her refusal to
discuss Christmas; she said that listening to Gary on the topic was like
watching an alcoholic drink.

“What do you need from me?” Gary asked her. “Tell me what you
need to hear from me.”

“I need you to take responsibility for your mental health.”

“Jesus, Caroline. Wrong, wrong, wrong answer.”

Meanwhile Discordia, the goddess of marital strife, had
pulled strings with the airline industry. There appeared in the
Inquirer
a full-page ad for a slasheroo sale on Midland Airlines tickets, including a
$198 round-trip fare between Philly and St. Jude. Only four dates in late
December were blacked out; by staying just one extra day at Christmastime Gary
could take the whole family to and from St. Jude (nonstop!) for under a thousand
bucks. He had his travel agent hold five tickets for him, renewing the option
daily. Finally, on Friday morning, with the sale due to end at midnight,
he’d announced to Caroline that he was buying tickets. In accordance with
her strict no-Christmas policy, Caroline turned to Aaron and asked him if
he’d studied for his Spanish test. From his office at Cen Trust, in a
spirit of trench warfare, Gary called his travel agent and authorized the
purchase. Then he called his doctor and requested a sleep aid, a short-term
prescription, something a little more potent than the nonprescription stuff. Dr.
Pierce replied that a sleep aid didn’t sound like such a good idea.
Caroline, Pierce said, had mentioned that Gary might be depressed, and a sleep
aid certainly wasn’t going to help with
that
. Maybe, instead, Gary
would like to come in and talk about how he was feeling?

For a moment, after he hung up, Gary let himself imagine being divorced. But
three glowing and idealized mental portraits of his children, shadowed by a
batlike horde of fears regarding finances, chased the notion from his head.

At a dinner party on Saturday he’d rifled the medicine chest of his friends
Drew and Jamie, hoping to find a bottle of something in the Valium class, but no
such luck.

Yesterday Denise had called him and insisted, with ominous steeliness, that he
have lunch with her. She said she’d seen Enid and Alfred in New York on
Saturday. She said that Chip and his girlfriend had flaked on her and
vanished.

Gary, lying awake last night, had wondered if stunts like
this were what Caroline meant when she described Chip as a man
“honest enough” to say what he could and couldn’t
“tolerate.”

“The cells are genetically reprogrammed to release nerve-growth factor only
when locally activated!” Earl Eberle’s video facsimile said
cheerfully.

A fetching young model, her skull in an Eberle Helmet, was strapped into a
machine that retrained her brain to instruct her legs to walk.

A model wearing a wintry look, a look of misanthropy and sourness, pushed up the
corners of her mouth with her fingers while magnified cutaway animation
revealed, within her brain, the flowering of dendrites, the forging of new
synaptic links. In a moment she was able to smile, tentatively, without using
her fingers. In another moment, her smile was dazzling.

“The Axon Corporation is fortunate to hold five U.S. patents
protecting this powerful platform technology,” Earl Eberle told the
camera. “These patents, and eight others that are pending, form an
insurmountable fire wall protecting the hundred-fifty million dollars that we
have spent to date on research and development. Axon is the recognized world
leader in this field. We have a six-year track record of positive cash flows and
a revenue stream that we expect to top eighty million dollars in the coming
year. Potential investors may rest assured that every penny of every dollar we
raise on December 15 will be spent on developing this marvelous and potentially
historic product.

“Corecktall: It’s the Future!” Eberle said.

“It’s the Future!” intoned the pitchman.

“It’s the Future!” chorused the crowd of really good-looking
students in nerdy glasses.

“I liked the past,” Denise said, uptilting her
complimentary half–liter of imported water.

In Gary’s opinion, too many people were breathing the air in Ballroom B. A
ventilation problem somehow. As the lights came up to full strength, silent
wait-personnel fanned in among the tables bearing luncheon entrées under
chafing lids.

“My first guess is salmon,” Denise said. “No, my only guess is
salmon.”

Rising from talk-show chairs and moving to the front of the dais now were three
figures who reminded Gary, oddly, of his honeymoon in Italy. He and Caroline had
visited a cathedral somewhere in Tuscany, maybe Siena, in the museum of which
were big medieval statues of saints that had once stood on the roof of the
cathedral, each with an arm raised like a waving presidential candidate and each
wearing a saintly grin of
certainty
.

The eldest of the three beatific greeters, a pink-faced man with rimless glasses,
extended a hand as if to bless the crowd.

“All right!” he said. “All right, everybody! My name is Joe
Prager, I’m the lead deal attorney at Bragg Knuter. To my left is Merilee
Finch, CEO of Axon, to my right Daffy Anderson, the all-important deal manager
at Hevy and Hodapp. We were hoping Curly himself might deign to join us today,
but he is the man of the hour, he is being interviewed by CNN as we speak. So
let me do a little caveating here, wink-wink-wink, and then turn the floor over
to Daffy and Merilee.”

“Yo, Kelsey, talk to me, baby, talk to me,” Gary’s young
neighbor shouted.

“Caveat A,” Prager said, “is please everyone take note that
I’m stressing that Curly’s results are extremely preliminary. This
is all Phase One research, folks. Anybody not hear me? Anybody in the
back?” Prager craned his neck and waved both arms at the most distant
tables, including Gary’s.
“Full disclosure:
this is
Phase One
research. Axon does not yet have, in no way is it
representing that it has, FDA approval for Phase Two testing. And what comes
after Phase Two? Phase Three! And after Phase Three? A multistage review process
that can delay the product launch by as much as three more years. Folks, hello,
we are dealing with clinical results that are
extremely interesting
but
extremely pre
liminary
. So caveat emptor. All righty? Wink wink
wink. All righty?”

Prager was struggling to keep his face straight. Merilee Finch and Daffy Anderson
were sucking on smiles as if they, too, had guilty secrets or religion.

“Caveat B,” Prager said. “An inspirational video presentation
is not a prospectus. Daffy’s representations here today, likewise
Merilee’s representations, are impromptu and, again,
not a prospectus
…”

The waitstaff descended on Gary’s table and gave him salmon on a bed of
lentils. Denise waved away her entrée.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Gary whispered.

She shook her head.

“Denise. Really.” He felt inexplicably wounded. “You can surely
have a couple of bites with me.”

Denise looked him square in the face with an unreadable expression.
“I’m a little sick to my stomach.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No. I just don’t want to eat.”

Denise at thirty-two was still beautiful, but long hours at the stove had begun
to cook her youthful skin into a kind of terra-cotta mask that made Gary a
little more anxious each time he saw her. She was his baby sister, after all.
Her years of fertility and marriageability were passing with a swiftness to
which he was attuned and she, he suspected, was not. Her career seemed to him an
evil spell under the influence of which she worked sixteen-hour days and had no
social life. Gary was afraid—he claimed, as her oldest brother, the
right
to be afraid—that by the time Denise awakened from
this spell she would be too old to start a family.

He ate his salmon quickly while she drank her imported water.

On the dais the CEO of Axon, a fortyish blonde with the intelligent pugnacity of
a college dean, was talking about side effects. “Apart from headaches and
nausea, which are to be expected,” said Merilee Finch, “we
haven’t tracked anything yet. Remember, too, that our platform technology
has been widely used for several years now, with no significant deleterious
effects reported.” Finch pointed into the ballroom. “Yes, gray
Armani?”

“Isn’t Corecktall the name of a laxative?”

“Ah, well,” Finch said, nodding violently. “Different spelling,
but yes. Curly and I considered approximately ten thousand different names
before we realized that branding isn’t really an issue for the
Alzheimer’s patient, or the Parkinson’s sufferer, or the massively
depressed individual. We could call it Carcino-Asbesto, they’d still knock
doors down to get it. Curly’s big vision here, though, and the reason
he’s willing to risk the poopy jokes, and so forth, is that twenty years
from now there’s not going to be a prison left standing in the United
States, because of this process. I mean, realistically, we live in the age of
medical breakthroughs. There’s no question we’ll have competing
therapies for AD and PD. Some of these therapies will probably come on line
before Corecktall. So, for most disorders of the brain, our product will be just
one weapon in the arsenal. Clearly the best weapon, but still, just one among
many. On the other hand, when it comes to social disease, the brain of the
criminal, there’s no other option on the horizon. It’s Corecktall or
prison. So it’s a forward-looking name. We’re laying claim to a
whole new hemisphere. We’re planting the Spanish flag right on the beach
here.”

There was a murmur at a distant table where a tweedy,
homely contingent was seated, maybe union fund managers, maybe the
endowment crowd from Penn or Temple. One stork-shaped woman stood up from this
table and shouted, “So, what’s the idea, you reprogram the repeat
offender to enjoy pushing a broom?”

“That is within the realm of the feasible, yes,” Finch said.
“That is one potential fix, although possibly not the best.”

The heckler couldn’t believe it. “Not the
best
? It’s an
ethical
nightmare
.”

“So, free country, go invest in alternative energy,” Finch said, for
a laugh, because most of the guests were on her side. “Buy some geothermal
penny stocks. Solar-electricity futures, very cheap, very righteous. Yes, next,
please? Pink shirt?”