The Corrections: A Novel (32 page)

“You don’t understand what it was like here today,” she
muttered as, limping, she returned to interstellar space. “I’m
feeling pretty alone here, Gary. Pretty alone.”

“Here I am, though. Right? I’m home now.”

“Yes. You’re home.”

“Hey, Dad, what’s for dinner?” Caleb said. “Can we have
mixed grill?”

“Yes,” Gary said. “I will make dinner
and
I will do the
dishes
and
I may also trim the hedge, because I, for one, am feeling
good! All right, Caroline? Does that sound OK to you?”

“Yes, please, sure, make dinner,” she murmured, staring at the
TV.

“Good. I will make dinner.” Gary clapped his hands and coughed. He
felt as if, in his chest and his head, worn-out gears were falling off their
axles, chewing into other parts of his internal machinery, as he demanded of his
body a bravado, an undepressed energy, that it was simply not equipped to
give.

He needed to sleep well tonight for at least six hours. To accomplish this, he
planned to drink two vodka martinis and hit the sack before ten. He upended the
vodka bottle over a shaker of ice and brazenly let it glug and glug, because he,
a veep at CenTrust, had nothing to be ashamed of in relaxing after a hard
day’s work. He started a mesquite fire and drank the martini down. Like a
thrown coin in a wide, teetering orbit of decay, he circled back into the
kitchen and managed to get the meat ready, but he felt too tired to cook it.
Because Caroline and Caleb had paid no attention to him when he made the first
martini, he now made a second, for energy and general bolsterment, and
officially considered
it his first. Battling the vitreous
lensing effects of a vodka buzz, he went out and threw meat on the grill. Again
the weariness, again the deficit of every friendly neurofactor overtook him. In
plain view of his entire family he made a third (officially: a second) martini
and drank it down. Through the window he observed that the grill was in
flames.

He filled a Teflon skillet with water and spilled only some of it as he rushed
out to pour it on the fire. A cloud of steam and smoke and aerosol grease went
up. He flipped all the meat scraps, exposing their charred, glossy undersides.
There was a smell of wet burnedness such as firemen leave behind. Not enough
life remained in the coals to do more than faintly color the raw sides of the
meat scraps, though he left them on for another ten minutes.

His miraculously considerate son Jonah had meanwhile set the table and put out
bread and butter. Gary served the less burned and less raw bits of meat to his
wife and children. Wielding his knife and fork clumsily, he filled his mouth
with cinders and bloody chicken that he was too tired to chew and swallow and
also too tired to get up and spit out. He sat with the unchewed bird-flesh in
his mouth until he realized that saliva was trickling down his chin—a poor
way indeed to demonstrate good mental health. He swallowed the bolus whole. It
felt like a tennis ball going down. His family was looking at him.

“Dad, are you feeling OK?” Aaron said.

Gary wiped his chin. “Fine, Aaron, thank you. Ticken’s a little
chuff. A little tough.” He coughed, his esophagus a column of flame.

“Maybe you want to go lie down,” Caroline said, as to a child.

“I think I’ll trim that hedge,” Gary said.

“You seem pretty tired,” Caroline said. “Maybe you should lie
down instead.”

“Not tired, Caroline. Just got some smoke in my
eyes.”

“Gary—”

“I know you’re telling everybody I’m depressed, but, as it
happens, I’m not.”

“Gary.”

“Right, Aaron? Am I right? She told you I’m clinically
depressed—right?”

Aaron, caught off guard, looked to Caroline, who shook her head at him slowly and
significantly.

“Well? Did she?” Gary said.

Aaron lowered his eyes to his plate, blushing. The spasm of love that Gary felt
then for his oldest son, his sweet honest vain blushing son, was intimately
connected to the rage that was now propelling him, before he understood what was
happening, away from the table. He was cursing in front of his kids. He was
saying, “
Fuck
this, Caroline!
Fuck
your whispering!
I’m going to fucking go trim that fucking hedge!”

Jonah and Caleb lowered their heads, ducking as if under fire. Aaron seemed to be
reading the story of his life, in particular his future, on his grease-smeared
dinner plate.

Caroline spoke in the calm, low, quavering voice of the patently abused.
“OK, Gary, good,” she said, “just please then let us enjoy our
dinner. Please just go.”

Gary went. He stormed outside and crossed the back yard. All the foliage near the
house was chalky now with outpouring indoor light, but there was still enough
twilight in the western trees to make them silhouettes. In the garage he took
the eight-foot stepladder down from its brackets and danced and spun with it,
nearly knocking out the windshield of the Stomper before he got control. He
hauled the ladder around to the front of the house, turned on lights, and came
back for the electric trimmer and the hundred-foot extension cord. To keep the
dirty cord from contact with his expensive linen shirt, which he belatedly
realized he was still wearing,
he let the cord drag behind
him and get destructively tangled up in flowers. He stripped down to his T-shirt
but didn’t stop to change his pants for fear of losing momentum and lying
down on the dayheat-radiating lawn and listening to the crickets and the
ratcheting cicadas and nodding off. Sustained physical exertion cleared his head
to some extent. He mounted the ladder and lopped the lime-green lolling tops off
yews, leaning out as far as he dared. Probably, finding himself unable to reach
the twelve inches of hedge nearest the house, he should have turned off the
clipper and come down and moved the ladder closer, but since it was a matter of
twelve inches and he didn’t have infinite reserves of energy and patience,
he tried to
walk
the ladder toward the house, to kind of swing its legs
and
hop
with it, while continuing to grip, in his left hand, the running
clipper.

The gentle blow, the almost stingless brush or bump, that he then delivered to
the meaty palm part of his right thumb proved, on inspection, to have made a
deep and heavily bleeding hole that in the best of all possible worlds an
emergency physician would have looked at. But Gary was nothing if not
conscientious. He knew he was too drunk to drive himself to Chestnut Hill
Hospital, and he couldn’t ask Caroline to drive him there without raising
awkward questions regarding his decision to climb a ladder and operate a power
tool while intoxicated, which would collaterally entail admitting how much vodka
he’d drunk before dinner and in general paint the opposite of the picture
of Good Mental Health that he’d intended to create by coming out to trim
the hedge. So while a swarm of skin-biting and fabriceating insects attracted by
the porch lights flew into the house through the front door that Gary, as he
hurried inside with his strangely cool blood pooling in the cup of both hands,
had neglected to kick shut behind him, he closeted himself in the downstairs
bathroom and released the blood into the sink, seeing pomegranate juice, or
chocolate syrup,
or dirty motor oil, in its ferric swirls.
He ran cold water on the gash. From outside the unlocked bathroom door, Jonah
asked if he had hurt himself. Gary assembled with his left hand an absorptive
pad of toilet paper and pressed it to the wound and one-handedly applied plastic
surgical tape that the blood and water immediately made unsticky. There was
blood on the toilet seat, blood on the floor, blood on the door.

“Dad, bugs are coming in,” Jonah said.

“Yes, Jonah, why don’t you shut the door and then go up and take a
bath. I’ll come up soon and play checkers.”

“Can we play chess instead?”

“Yes.”

“You have to give me a queen, a bishop, a horse, and a rook,
though.”

“Yes, go take a bath!”

“Will you come up soon?”

“Yes!”

Gary tore fresh tape from the fanged dispenser and laughed at himself in the
mirror to be sure he could still do it. Blood was soaking through the toilet
paper, trickling down around his wrist, and loosening the tape. He wrapped the
hand in a guest towel, and with a second guest towel, well dampened, he wiped
the bathroom clean of blood. He opened the door a crack and listened to
Caroline’s voice upstairs, to the dishwasher in the kitchen, to
Jonah’s bathwater running. A trail of blood receded up the central hall
toward the front door. Crouching and moving sideways in crab fashion, with his
injured hand pressed to his belly, Gary swabbed up the blood with the guest
towel. Further blood was spattered on the gray wooden floor of the front porch.
Gary walked on the sides of his feet for quiet. He went to the kitchen for a
bucket and a mop, and there, in the kitchen, was the liquor cabinet.

Well, he opened it. By holding the vodka bottle in his
right armpit he was able to unscrew the cap with his left hand. And as he
was raising the bottle, as he was tilting his head to make a late small
withdrawal from the rather tiny balance that remained, his gaze drifted over the
top of the cabinet door and he saw the camera.

The camera was the size of a deck of cards. It was mounted on an altazimuth
bracket above the back door. Its casing was of brushed aluminum. It had a
purplish gleam in its eye.

Gary returned the bottle to the cabinet, moved to the sink, and ran water in a
bucket. The camera swept thirty degrees to follow him.

He wanted to rip the camera off the ceiling, and, failing that, he wanted to go
upstairs and explain to Caleb the dubious morality of spying, and, failing that,
he at least wanted to know how long the camera had been in place; but since he
had something to hide now, any action he took against the camera, any objection
he made to its presence in his kitchen, was bound to strike Caleb as
self-serving.

He dropped the bloody, dusty guest towel in the bucket and approached the back
door. The camera reared up in its bracket to keep him centered in its field. He
stood directly below it and looked into its eye. He shook his head and mouthed
the words
No, Caleb
. Naturally, the camera made no response. Gary
realized, now, that the room was probably miked for sound as well. He could
speak to Caleb directly, but he was afraid that if he looked up into
Caleb’s proxy eye and heard his own voice and let it be heard in
Caleb’s room, the result would be an intolerably strong upsurge in the
reality of what was happening. He therefore shook his head again and made a
sweeping motion with his left hand, a film director’s Cut! Then he took
the bucket from the sink and swabbed the front porch.

Because he was drunk, the problem of the camera and Caleb’s witnessing of
his injury and his furtive involvement
with the liquor
cabinet didn’t stay in Gary’s head as an ensemble of conscious
thoughts and anxieties but turned in on itself and became a kind of physical
presence inside him, a hard tumorous mass descending through his stomach and
coming to rest in his lower gut. The problem wasn’t going anywhere, of
course. But, for the moment, it was impervious to thought.

“Dad?” came Jonah’s voice through an upstairs window.
“I’m ready to play chess now.”

By the time Gary went inside, having left the hedge half-clipped and the ladder
in an ivy bed, his blood had soaked through three layers of toweling and bloomed
on the surface as a pinkish spot of plasma filtered of its corpuscles. He was
afraid of meeting somebody in the hallway, Caleb or Caroline certainly, but
especially Aaron, because Aaron had asked him if he was feeling all right, and
Aaron had not been able to lie to him, and these small demonstrations of
Aaron’s love were in a way the scariest part of the whole evening.

“Why is there a towel on your hand?” Jonah asked as he removed half
of Gary’s forces from the chessboard.

“I cut myself, Jonah. I’m keeping some ice on the cut.”

“You smell like al-co-hol.” Jonah’s voice was lilting.

“Alcohol is a powerful disinfectant,” Gary said.

Jonah moved a pawn to K4. “I’m talking about the al-co-hol you drank,
though.”

By ten o’clock Gary was in bed and thus arguably still in compliance with
his original plan, arguably still on track to—what? Well, he didn’t
exactly know. But if he got some sleep he might be able to see his way forward.
In order not to bleed on the sheets he’d put his injured hand, towel and
all, inside a Bran’nola bread bag. He turned out the nightstand light and
faced the wall, his bagged hand cradled against his chest, the sheet and the
summer blanket pulled up over his shoulder. He slept hard for a while and was
awakened in the darkened room by the throbbing of his hand. The flesh on either
side
of the gash was twitching as if it had worms in it,
pain fanning out along five carpi. Caroline breathed evenly, asleep. Gary got up
to empty his bladder and take four Advils. When he returned to bed, his last,
pathetic plan fell apart, because he could not get back to sleep. He had the
sensation that blood was running out of the Bran’nola bag. He considered
getting up and sneaking out to the garage and driving to the emergency room. He
added up the hours this would take him and the amount of wakefulness he would
have to burn off upon returning, and he subtracted the total from the hours of
night remaining until he had to get up and go to work, and he concluded that he
was better off just sleeping until six and then, if need be, stopping at the ER
on his way to work; but this was all contingent on his ability to fall back
asleep, and since he couldn’t do this, he reconsidered and recalculated,
but now there were fewer minutes remaining of the night than when he’d
first considered getting up and sneaking out. The calculus was cruel in its
regression. He got up again to piss. The problem of Caleb’s surveillance
lay, indigestible, in his gut. He was mad to wake up Caroline and fuck her. His
hurt hand pulsed. It felt elephantine; he had a hand the size and weight of an
armchair, each finger a soft log of exquisite sensitivity. And Denise kept
looking at him with hatred. And his mother kept yearning for her Christmas. And
he slipped briefly into a room in which his father had been strapped into an
electric chair and fitted with a metal helmet, and Gary’s own hand was on
the old-fashioned stirrup-like power switch, which he’d evidently already
thrown, because Alfred came leaping from the chair fantastically galvanized,
horribly smiling, a travesty of enthusiasm, dancing around with rigid jerking
limbs and circling the room at double-speed and then falling hard, face down,
wham, like a ladder with its legs together, and lying prone there on the
execution-room floor with every muscle in his body galvanically twitching and
boiling—