The Corrections: A Novel (48 page)

From there Billy drifted into the radical underground scene in Philly—that Red Crescent of bomb-makers and Xeroxers and zinesters and punks and Bakuninites and minor vegan prophets and orgone-blanket manufacturers and women named Afrika and amateur Engels biographers and Red Army Brigade émigrés that stretched from Fishtown and Kensington in the north, over through Germantown and West Philly (where Mayor Goode had firebombed the good citizens of MOVE), and down into blighted Point Breeze. It was an odd Philly Phact that a non-negligible fraction of the city’s crimes were committed with political consciousness. After Frank Rizzo’s first mayoralty nobody could pretend that the city police force was clean or impartial; and since, in the estimation of Red Crescent denizens, all cops were murderers or, at the very least, ipso facto accessories to murder (witness MOVE!), any crime of violence or wealth redistribution to which a cop might object could be justified as a legitimate action in a long-running dirty war. This logic by and large eluded local judges, however. The young anarchist Billy Passafaro over the years drew ever more severe sentences for his crimes—probation, community service, experimental penal boot camp, and finally the state pen at Graterford. Robin and her father often argued about the justice of these sentences, Nick stroking his Lenin-like goatee and asserting that, although not a violent man himself, he was not opposed to violence in the service of ideals, Robin challenging him to specify what political ideal, exactly, Billy had advanced by stabbing a Penn undergrad with a broken pool cue.

The year before Denise met Robin, Billy was released on parole and attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a Community Computing Center in the poor near-north
neighborhood of Nicetown. One of the many policy coups of Mayor Goode’s popular two-term successor was the commercial exploitation of the city’s public schools. The mayor had shrewdly cast the deplorable neglect of the schools as a business opportunity (“Act Fast, Be Part of Our Message of Hope,” his letters said), and the Ν——Corporation had responded to his pitch by assuming responsibility for the city’s severely underfunded school athletic programs. Now the mayor had midwifed a similar arrangement with the W——Corporation, which was donating to the city of Philadelphia sufficient units of its famous Global Desktop to “empower” every classroom in the city, plus five Community Computing Centers in blighted northern and western neighborhoods. The agreement granted W——the exclusive right to employ for promotional and advertising purposes all classroom activities within the school district of Philadelphia, including but not limited to all Global Desktop applications. Critics of the mayor alternately denounced the “sellout” and complained that W——was donating its slow and crash-prone Version 4.0 Desktops to the schools and its nearly useless Version 3.2 technology to the Community Computing Centers. But the mood in Nicetown on that September afternoon was buoyant. The mayor and W——’s twenty-eight-year-old corporate-image vice president, Rick Flamburg, joined hands on big shears to cut ribbon. Local politicians of color said
children
and
tomorrow
. They said
digital
and
democracy
and
history
.

Outside the white tent, the usual crowd of anarchists, eyed warily by a police detail that was later criticized as having been too small, openly carried banners and placards and privately, in the pockets of their cargo pants, carried powerful bar magnets with which they hoped, amid the cake-eating and punch-drinking and confusion, to erase much data from the center’s new Global Desktops. Their banners said
REFUSE IT AND COMPUTERS ARE THE OPPOSITE OF REVOLUTION
and
THIS HEAVEN GIVES ME MIGRAINE
. Billy Passafaro, neatly shaved and wearing a short-sleeve white button-down, carried a four-foot length of two-by-four on which he’d written
WELCOME TO PHILADELPHIA
!! When the official ceremonies ended and the scene became more appealingly anarchic, Billy edged into the crowd, smiling and holding aloft his message of goodwill, until he was close enough to the dignitaries that he could swing the two-by-four like a baseball bat and break Rick Flamburg’s skull. Three further blows demolished Flamburg’s nose, jaw, collarbone, and most of his teeth before the mayor’s bodyguard tackled Billy and a dozen cops piled on.

Billy was lucky the tent was too crowded for the cops to shoot him. He was also lucky, given the obvious premeditation of his crime and the politically awkward shortage of white inmates on death row, that Rick Flamburg didn’t die. (Less clear was whether Flamburg himself, an unmarried Dartmouth grad whom the attack left palsied, disfigured, slurred of speech, blind in one eye, and prone to incapacitating headaches, felt lucky about this.) Billy was indicted for attempted murder, first-degree assault, and assault with a deadly weapon. He categorically rejected any plea agreement and chose to represent himself in court, dismissing as “accommodationist” both his court-appointed counsel and the old Teamster attorney who offered to bill his family fifty an hour.

To the surprise of nearly everyone but Robin, who had never doubted her brother’s intelligence, Billy mounted an articulate self-defense. He argued that the mayor’s “sale” of the children of Philadelphia into the “technoslavery” of the W——Corporation represented a “clear and present public danger” to which he’d been justified in responding violently. He denounced the “unholy connivance” of American business and American government. He compared himself to the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord. When Robin,
much later, showed Denise the trial transcript, Denise imagined bringing Billy and her brother Chip together over dinner and listening while they compared notes about “the bureaucracy,” but this dinner would have to wait until Billy had served seventy percent of his twelve-to-eighteen-year sentence at Graterford.

Nick Passafaro had taken a leave of absence and loyally attended his son’s trial. Nick went on TV and said everything you’d expect from an old red: “Once a day the victim’s black, and there’s silence; once a year the victim’s white, and there’s an outcry,” and “My son will pay dearly for his crime, but W——will never pay for its crimes, “and” “The Rick Flamburgs of the world have made billions selling phony violence to America’s children.” Nick concurred in most of Billy’s courtroom arguments and was proud of his performance, but after the photos of Flamburg’s injuries were introduced in court, he began to lose his grip. The deep V-shaped indentations in Flamburg’s cranium, nose, jaw, and clavicle spoke to a savagery of exertion, a madness, that didn’t square well with idealism. Nick stopped sleeping as the trial progressed. He stopped shaving and lost his appetite. At Colleen’s insistence, he saw a psychiatrist and came home with medications, but even then he woke her in the night. He shouted, “I won’t apologize!” He shouted, “It’s a war!” Eventually his dosages were upped, and in April the school district retired him.

Because Rick Flamburg had worked for the W——Corporation, Robin felt responsible for all of this.

Robin had become the Passafaro ambassador to Rick Flamburg’s family, showing up at the hospital until Flamburg’s parents had spent their anger and suspicion and recognized that she was not her brother’s keeper. She sat by Flamburg and read
Sports Illustrated
to him. She walked alongside his walker as he shuffled up a corridor. On the night of the second of his reconstructive surgeries, she took
his parents to dinner and listened to their (frankly boring) stories about their son. She told them how quick Billy had been, how in fourth grade he’d already had the spelling and handwriting skills to forge a plausible note excusing him from school, and what a fund of dirty jokes and important reproductive information he was, and how it felt to be a smart girl and see your equally smart brother make himself more stupid by the year, as if specifically to avoid becoming a person like you: how mysterious it all was and how sorry she felt about what he’d done to their son.

On the eve of Billy’s trial, Robin invited her mother to go to church. Colleen had been confirmed as a Catholic, but she hadn’t taken communion in forty years; Robin’s own church experience was confined to weddings and funerals. Nevertheless, on three consecutive Sundays, Colleen agreed to be picked up in Mount Airy and driven to her childhood parish, St. Dymphna’s, in North Philly. Leaving the sanctuary on the third Sunday, Colleen told Robin, in the faint brogue she’d retained all her life, “That’ll do for me, thanks.” After that, Robin went by herself to mass at St. Dymphna’s and, by and by, to confirmation classes.

Robin could afford the time for these good works and acts of devotion because of the W——Corporation. Her husband, Brian Callahan, was the son of a local small-time manufacturer and had grown up comfortably in Bala-Cynwyd, playing lacrosse and developing sophisticated tastes in expectation of inheriting his father’s small specialty-chemical company. (Callahan
père
in his youth had profitably developed a compound that could be thrown into Bessemer converters and patch their cracks and ulcers while their ceramic walls were still hot.) Brian had married the prettiest girl in his college class (in his opinion, this was Robin), and soon after graduation he’d become president of High Temp Products. The company was housed in a yellow-brick building in an industrial park near the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge; by
coincidence, its nearest living commercial neighbor was IBT Document Storage. The cerebral drain of running High Temp Products being minimal, Brian spent his executive afternoons noodling around with computer code and Fourier analysis, blasting on his presidential boom box certain cult California bands to which he was partial (Fibulator, Thinking Fellers Union, the Minutemen, the Nomatics), and writing a piece of software that in the fullness of time he quietly patented, quietly found a VC backer for, and one day, on the advice of this backer, quietly sold to the W——Corporation for $19,500,000.

Brian’s product, called Eigenmelody, processed any piece of recorded music into an eigenvector that distilled the song’s tonal and melodic essence into discrete, manipulable coordinates. An Eigenmelody user could select a favorite Moby song, and Eigenmelody would spectroanalyze her choice, search a recorded-music database for songs with similar eigenvectors, and produce a list of kindred sounds that the user might otherwise have never found: the Au Pairs, Laura Nyro, Thomas Mapfumo, Pokrovsky’s wailing version of
Les Noces
. Eigenmelody was parlor game, musicological tool, and record-sales-enhancer rolled into one. Brian had worked enough kinks out of it that the behemoth of W——, belatedly scrambling for a piece of the online music-distribution action, came running to him with a big wad of monopoly money in its outstretched hand.

It was characteristic of Brian, who hadn’t mentioned the impending sale to Robin, that on the evening of the day the deal went through he didn’t breathe a word of it until the girls were in bed in their modest yuppie row house near the Art Museum and he and she were watching a
Nova
show about sunspots.

“Oh, by the way,” Brian said, “neither of us ever has to work again.”

It was characteristic of Robin—her excitability—that on
receiving this news she laughed until she got the hiccups.

Alas, there was justice in Billy’s old epithet for Robin: Cow Clueless. Robin was under the impression that she already had a good life with Brian. She lived in her town house, grew vegetables and herbs in her little back yard, taught “language arts” to ten-and eleven-year-olds at an experimental school in West Philly, sent her daughter Sinéad to an excellent private elementary school on Fairmount Avenue and her daughter Erin to the preschool program at Friends Select, bought softshell crabs and Jersey tomatoes at the Reading Terminal Market, took weekends and Augusts at Brian’s family’s house at Cape May, socialized with old friends who had children of their own, and burned off enough sexual energy with Brian (she ideally liked it
daily
, she told Denise) to keep her halfway calm.

Cow Clueless was therefore shocked by Brian’s next question. He asked her where she thought they should live. He said he was thinking of Northern California. He was also thinking of Provence, New York, and London.

“We’re happy here,” Robin said. “Why go someplace where we don’t know anybody and everybody’s a millionaire?”

“Climate,” Brian said. “Beauty, safety, culture. Style. None of which are Philly’s long suit. I’m not saying let’s move. I’m just saying tell me if there’s anyplace you’d like to go, even for a summer.”

“I like it here.”

“So we’ll stay here,” he said. “Until you feel like going someplace else.”

She was naive enough, she told Denise, to think this ended the discussion. She had a good marriage, stably founded on childrearing, eating, and sex. It was true that she and Brian had different class backgrounds, but High Temp Products wasn’t exactly E. I. Du Pont de Nemours, and Robin, holding degrees from two elite schools, wasn’t your
typical proletarian. Their few real differences came down to style, and these differences were mostly invisible to Robin, because Brian was a good husband and a nice guy and because, in her cow innocence, Robin couldn’t imagine that style had anything to do with happiness. Her musical tastes ran to John Prine and Etta James, and so Brian played Prine and James at home and saved his Bartók and Defunkt and Flaming Lips and Mission of Burma for blasting on his boom box at High Temp. That Robin dressed like a grad student in white sneakers and a purple nylon shell and oversized round wireframes of a kind last worn by fashionable people in 1978 didn’t altogether disappoint Brian, because he alone among men got to see her naked. That Robin was high-strung and had a penetrating screechy voice and a kookaburra laugh seemed, likewise, a small price to pay for a heart of gold and an eye-popping streak of lechery and a racing metabolism that kept her movie-actress thin. That Robin never shaved her armpits and too seldom washed her glasses—well, she was the mother of Brian’s children, and as long as he could play his music and tinker with his tensors by himself, he didn’t mind indulging in her the anti-style that liberal women of a certain age wore as a badge of feminist identity. This, at any rate, was how Denise imagined Brian had solved the problem of style until the money from W——came rolling in.