The Corrections (25 page)

“Caroline.”

“And when it turns out that Caleb—”

“This is not an honest version.”

“Please, Gary, let me finish, when it turns out that Caleb did the kind of
thing that
any normal boy
might do to a piece of gift-store crap that he
found in the basement—”

“I can’t listen to this.”

“No, no, the problem is not that your eagle-eyed mother is obsessed with
some garbagey piece of Austrian kitsch, no, that’s not the
problem—”

“It was a hundred-dollar hand-carved—”

“I don’t care if it’s a thousand dollars!
Since when do you punish
him
, your
own son
, for your
mother’s craziness? It’s like you’re suddenly trying to make
us act like it’s 1964 and we’re all living in Peoria. ‘Clean
your plate!’ ‘Wear a necktie!’ ‘No TV tonight!’
And you wonder why we’re fighting! You wonder why Aaron rolls his eyes
when your mom walks in the room! It’s like you’re
embarrassed
to let her see us. It’s like, for as long as she’s here,
you’re trying to pretend we live some way that she approves of. But
I’m telling you, Gary, we have
nothing
to be ashamed of. Your
mother’s the one who should be embarrassed. She follows me around the
kitchen scrutinizing me, like, as if I roast a turkey every week, and if I turn
my back for one second she’s going to pour a quart of oil into whatever
I’m making, and as soon as I leave the room she’s going to
root
through the trash
like some fucking Food Police, she’s going to
take food from the trash and
feed it to my children
—”

“The potato was in the sink, not the trash, Caroline.”

“And you defend her! She goes outside to the trash barrels to see what
other dirt she can dig up, and disapprove of, and she’s asking me,
literally every ten minutes, How’s your back? How’s your back?
How’s your back? Is your back any better? How’d you hurt it? Is your
back any better? How’s your back? She goes
looking
for things to
disapprove of, and then she tries to tell
my
children how to dress for
dinner in
my
house, and you don’t back me up! You don’t back
me up, Gary. You start apologizing, and I don’t get it, but I’m not
doing it again. Basically, I think your brother’s got the right idea.
Here’s a sweet, smart, funny man who’s honest enough to say what he
can and can’t tolerate in the way of get-togethers. And your mother acts
like he’s this huge embarrassment and failure! Well, you wanted the truth.
The truth is I cannot stand another Christmas like that. If we absolutely have
to see your parents, we’re doing it on our own turf. Just like you
promised we always would.”

A pillow of blue blackness lay on Gary’s brain.
He’d reached the point on the post-martini evening downslope where a sense
of complication weighed on his cheeks, his forehead, his eyelids, his mouth. He
understood how much his mother infuriated Caroline, and at the same time he
found fault with almost everything that Caroline had said. The rather beautiful
wooden reindeer, for example, had been stored in a well-marked box; Caleb had
broken two of its legs and hammered a roofing nail through its skull; Enid had
taken an uneaten baked potato from the sink and sliced it and fried it for
Jonah; and Caroline hadn’t bothered to wait until her in-laws had left
town before depositing in a trash barrel the pink polyester bathrobe that Enid
had given her for Christmas.

“When I said I wanted the truth,” he said, not opening his eyes,
“I meant I saw you limping before you ran inside.”

“Oh, my God,” Caroline said.

“My mother didn’t hurt your back. You hurt your back.”

“Please, Gary. Do me a favor and call Dr. Pierce.”

“Admit that you’re lying, and I’ll talk about anything you
want. But nothing’s going to change until you admit that.”

“I don’t even recognize your voice.”

“Five days in St. Jude. You can’t do that for a woman who, like you
say, has nothing else in her life?”

“Please come back to me.”

A jolt of rage forced Gary’s eyes open. He kicked the sheet aside and
jumped out of bed. “This is a marriage-ender! I can’t believe
it!”

“Gary, please—”

“We’re going to split up over a trip to St. Jude!”

And then a visionary in a warm-up jacket was lecturing to pretty
college students. Behind the visionary, in a pixilated middle distance, were
sterilizers and chromatography cartridges and tissue stains in weak solution,
long-necked
medicoscientific faucets, pinups of
spread-eagled chromosomes, and diagrams of tuna-red brains sliced up like
sashimi. The visionary was Earl “Curly” Eberle, a small-mouthed
fifty-year-old in dime-store glasses, whom the creators of the Axon
Corporation’s promotional video had done their best to make glamorous. The
camera work was nervous, the lab floor pitched and lurched. Blurry zooms zeroed
in on female student faces aglow with fascination. Curiously obsessive attention
was paid to the back of the visionary head (it was indeed curly).

“Of course, chemistry, too, even brain chemistry,” Eberle was saying,
“is basically just manipulation of electrons in their shells. But compare
this, if you will, to an electronics that consists of little two-and three-pole
switches. The diode, the transistor. The brain, by contrast, has several dozen
kinds of switches. The neuron either fires or it doesn’t; but this
decision is regulated by receptor sites that often have shades of offness and
on-ness between plain Off and plain On. Even if you could build an artificial
neuron out of molecular transistors, the conventional wisdom is that you can
still never translate all that chemistry into the language of yes/no without
running out of space. If we conservatively estimate twenty neuroactive ligands,
of which as many as eight can operate simultaneously, and each of these eight
switches has five different settings—not to bore you with the
combinatorics, but unless you’re living in a world of Mr. Potato Heads,
you’re going to be a pretty funny-looking android.”

Close-up of a turnip-headed male student laughing.

“Now, these are facts so basic,” Eberle said, “that we
ordinarily wouldn’t even bother spelling them out. It’s just the way
things are. The only workable connection we have with the electrophysiology of
cognition and volition is chemical. That’s the received wisdom, part of
the gospel of our science. Nobody in their right mind would try to connect the
world of neurons with the world of printed circuits.”

Eberle paused dramatically.

“Nobody, that is, but the Axon Corporation.”

Ripples of buzz crossed the sea of institutional investors who’d come to
Ballroom Β of the Four Seasons Hotel, in central Philadelphia, for the road
show promoting Axon’s initial public offering. A giant video screen had
been set up on the dais. On each of the twenty round tables in the semi-dark
ballroom were platters of satay and sushi appetizers with the appropriate
dipping sauces.

Gary was sitting with his sister, Denise, at a table near the door. He had hopes
of transacting business at this road show and he would rather have come alone,
but Denise had insisted on having lunch, today being Monday and Monday being her
one day off, and had invited herself along. Gary had figured that she would find
political or moral or aesthetic reasons to deplore the proceedings, and, sure
enough, she was watching the video with her eyes narrowed in suspicion and her
arms crossed tightly. She was wearing a yellow shift with a red floral print,
black sandals, and a pair of Trotskyish round plastic glasses; but what really
set her apart from the other women in Ballroom Β was the bareness of her
legs. Nobody who dealt in money did not wear stockings.

“Corecktall,” said the cutout image of Curly Eberle,
whose young audience had been digitally pureed into a uniform backdrop of
tuna-red brain matter, “is a revolutionary neurobiological
therapy!”

Eberle was seated on an ergonomic desk chair in which, it now developed, he could
float and swerve vertiginously through a graphical space representing the
inner-sea world of the intracranium. Kelpy ganglia and squidlike neurons and
eellike capillaries began to flash by.

“Originally conceived as a therapy for sufferers of PD and
AD and other degenerative neurological diseases,”
Eberle said, “Corecktall has proved so powerful and versatile that its
promise extends not only to therapy but to an outright
cure
, and to a
cure not only of these terrible degenerative afflictions but also of a host of
ailments typically considered psychiatric or even psychological. Simply put,
Corecktall offers for the first time the possibility of renewing and
improving
the hard wiring of an adult human brain.”

“Ew,” Denise said, wrinkling her nose.

Gary by now was quite familiar with the Corecktall Process. He’d
scrutinized Axon’s red-herring prospectus and read every analysis of the
company he could find on the Internet and through the private services that
CenTrust subscribed to. Bearish analysts, mindful of recent gut-wrenching
corrections in the biotech sector, were cautioning against investing in an
untested medical technology that was at least six years from market. Certainly a
bank like CenTrust, with its fiduciary duty to be conservative, wasn’t
going to touch this IPO. But Axon’s fundamentals were a lot healthier than
those of most biotech startups, and to Gary the fact that the company had
bothered to buy his father’s patent at such an early stage in
Corecktall’s development was a sign of great corporate confidence. He saw
an opportunity here to make some money and avenge Axon’s screwing of his
father and, more generally, be
bold
where Alfred had been
timid
.

It happened that in June, as the first dominoes of the overseas currency crises
were toppling, Gary had pulled most of his playing-around money out of Euro and
Far Eastern growth funds. This money was available now for investment in Axon;
and since the IPO was still three months away, and since the big sales push for
it had not begun, and since the red herring contained such dubieties as give
non-insiders pause, Gary should have had no trouble getting a commitment for
five thousand shares. But trouble was pretty much all he’d had.

His own (discount) broker, who had barely heard of Axon,
belatedly did his homework and called Gary back with the news that his
firm’s allocation was a token 2,500 shares. Normally a brokerage
wouldn’t commit more than five percent of its allocation to a single
customer this early in the game, but since Gary had been the first to call, his
man was willing to set aside 500 shares. Gary pushed for more, but the sad fact
was that he was not a big-time customer. He typically invested in multiples of a
hundred, and to save on commissions he executed smaller trades himself
online.

Now, Caroline was a big investor. With Gary’s guidance she often bought in
multiples of a thousand. Her broker worked for the largest house in
Philadelphia, and there was no doubt that 4,500 shares of Axon’s new issue
could be found for a truly valued customer; this was how the game was played.
Unfortunately, since the Sunday afternoon when she’d hurt her back, Gary
and Caroline had been as close to not speaking as a couple could be and still
function as parents. Gary was keen to get his full five thousand shares of Axon,
but he refused to sacrifice his principles and crawl back to his wife and beg
her to invest for him.

So instead he’d phoned his large-cap contact at Hevy & Hodapp, a man
named Pudge Portleigh, and asked to be put down for five thousand shares of the
offering on his own account. Over the years, in his fiduciary role at CenTrust,
Gary had bought a lot of stock from Portleigh, including some certifiable
turkeys. Gary hinted now to Portleigh that CenTrust might give him an even
larger portion of its business in the future. But Portleigh, with weird
hedginess, had agreed only to pass along Gary’s request to Daffy Anderson,
who was Hevy & Hodapp’s deal manager for the IPO.

There had then ensued two maddening weeks during which Pudge Portleigh failed to
call Gary back and confirm an allocation. Online buzz about Axon was building
from a whisper to a roar. Two related major papers by Earl Eberle’s
team—“Reverse-Tomographic Stimulation of
Synapto-genesis in Selected Neural Pathways” and “Transitory
Positive Reinforcement in Dopamine-Deprived Limbic Circuits: Recent Clinical
Progress”—appeared in
Nature
and the
New England Journal
of Medicine
within days of each other. The two papers received heavy
coverage in the financial press, including a front-page notice in the
Wall
Street Journal
. Analyst after analyst began to flash strong Buys for
Axon, and still Portleigh did not return Gary’s messages, and Gary could
feel the advantages of his insiderly head start disappearing hour by
hour…

“… Of ferrocitrates and ferroacetates specially
formulated to cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate
interstitially!”

Said the unseen pitchman whose voice had joined Earl Eberle’s on the video
sound track.

“We also stir in a mild, non-habit-forming sedative
and
a. generous
squirt of Hazelnut Moccacino syrup, courtesy of the country’s most popular
chain of coffee bars!”

A female extra from the earlier lecture scene, a girl with whose neurological
functions there was clearly nothing in the slightest wrong, drank with great
relish and sexily pulsing throat muscles a tall, frosty glass of Corecktall
electrolytes.

“What was Dad’s patent?” Denise whispered to Gary.
“Ferroacetate gel something-something?”

Gary nodded grimly. “Electropolymerization.”

From his correspondence files at home, which contained, among other things, every
letter he’d ever received from either of his parents, Gary had dug out an
old copy of Alfred’s patent. He wasn’t sure he’d ever really
looked at it, so impressed was he now by the old man’s clear account of
“electrical anisotropy” in “certain ferro-organic gels”
and his
proposal that these gels be used to
“minutely image” living human tissues and create “direct
electrical contact” with “fine morphologic structures.”
Comparing the wording of the patent with the description of Corecktall at
Axon’s newly renovated Web site, Gary was struck by the depth of
similarity. Evidently Alfred’s five-thousand-dollar process was at the
center
of a process for which Axon now hoped to raise upward of $200
million: as if a man didn’t have enough in his life to lie awake at night
and fume about!

“Yo, Kelsey, yuh, Kelsey, get me twelve thousand Exxon at one-oh-four
max,” the young man sitting to Gary’s left said suddenly and too
loudly. The kid had a palmtop stock-quoter, a wire in his ear, and the
schizophrenic eyes of the cellularly occupied. “Twelve thousand Exxon,
upper limit one zero four,” he said.

Exxon, Axon, better be careful, Gary thought.

“You won’t hear a thing—not unless your dental
fillings pick up ball games on the AM dial,” the pitchman joked as the
smiling girl lowered onto her camera-friendly head a metal dome reminiscent of a
hair dryer, “but radio waves are penetrating the innermost recesses of
your skull. Imagine a kind of global positioning system for the brain: RF
radiation pinpointing and
selectively stimulating
the neural pathways
associated with particular skills. Like signing your name. Climbing stairs.
Remembering your anniversary. Thinking positively! Clinically tested at scores
of hospitals across America, Dr. Eberle’s reverse-tomographic methods have
now been further refined to make this stage of the Corecktall process as simple
and painless as a visit to your hairstylist.”

“Until recently,” Eberle broke in (he and his chair still
drifting through a sea of simulated blood and gray
matter), “my process required overnight hospitalization and the physical
screwing of a calibrated steel ring into the patient’s cranium. Many
patients found this inconvenient; some also experienced discomfort. Now,
however, enormous increases in computing power have made possible a process that
is
instantaneously self-correcting
as to the location of the individual
neural pathways under stimulation …”

“Kelsey, you da man!” young Mr. Twelve Thousand Shares of Exxon said
loudly.

In the first hours and days following Gary’s big Sunday blowout with
Caroline, three weeks ago, both he and she had made overtures of peace. Very
late on that Sunday night she’d reached across the demilitarized zone of
the mattress and touched his hip. The next night he’d offered an
almost-complete apology in which, although he refused to concede the central
issue, he conveyed sorrow and regret for the collateral damage he’d
caused, the bruised feelings and willful misrepresentations and hurtful
imputations, and thus gave Caroline a foretaste of the rush of tenderness that
awaited her if she would only admit that, regarding the central issue, he was in
the right. On Tuesday morning she’d made an actual breakfast for
him—cinnamon toast, sausage links, and a bowl of oatmeal topped with
raisins arranged to resemble a face with a comically downturned mouth. On
Wednesday morning he’d given her a compliment, a simple statement of fact
(“You’re beautiful”) which, although it fell short of an
outright avowal of love, did serve as a reminder of an objective basis (physical
attraction) on which love could be restored if she would only admit that,
regarding the central issue, he was in the right.

But each hopeful overture, each exploratory sally, came to naught. When he
squeezed the hand she offered him and he whispered that he was sorry that her
back hurt, she was unable to take the next step and allow that possibly (a
simple
“possibly” would have sufficed!) her
two hours of soccer in the rain had contributed to her injury. And when she
thanked him for his compliment and asked him how he’d slept, he was
powerless to ignore a tendentious critical edge in her voice; he understood her
to be saying,
Prolonged distur
bance of sleep is a common symptom of clinical depression, oh, and,
by the way, how did you sleep, dear?
and so he didn’t dare admit
that, as a matter of fact, he’d slept atrociously; he averred that
he’d slept extremely well, thank you, Caroline, extremely well, extremely
well.

Each failed overture of peace made the next overture less likely to succeed.
Before long, what at first glance had seemed to Gary an absurd
possibility—that the till of their marriage no longer contained sufficient
funds of love and goodwill to cover the emotional costs that going to St. Jude
entailed for Caroline or that
not
going to St. Jude entailed for
him—assumed the contours of something terribly actual. He began to hate
Caroline simply for continuing to fight with him. He hated the newfound reserves
of independence she tapped in order to resist him. Especially, devastatingly
hateful was her hatred of
him
. He could have ended the crisis in a minute
if all he’d had to do was forgive her; but to see mirrored in her eyes how
repellent she found him—it made him crazy, it poisoned his hope.

Fortunately, the shadows cast by her accusation of depression, long and dark
though they were, did not yet extend to his corner office at CenTrust and to the
pleasure he took in managing his managers, analysts, and traders. Gary’s
forty hours at the bank had become the only hours he could count on enjoying in
a week. He’d even begun to toy with the idea of working a fifty-hour week;
but this was easier said than done, because at the end of his eight-hour day
there was often literally no work left on his desk, and he was all too aware,
besides, that spending long hours at the office to escape unhappiness at home
was exactly the trap his father
had fallen into; was
undoubtedly how Alfred had begun to self-medicate.

When he married Caroline, Gary had silently vowed never to work later than five
o’clock and never to bring a briefcase home at night. By signing on with a
mid-sized regional bank, he’d chosen one of the least ambitious career
paths that a Wharton School M.B.A. could take. At first his intention was simply
to avoid his father’s mistakes—to give himself time to enjoy life,
cherish his wife, play with his kids—but before long, even as he was
proving to be an outstanding portfolio manager, he became more specifically
allergic to ambition. Colleagues far less capable than he were moving on to work
for mutual funds, to be freelance money managers, or to start their own funds;
but they were also working twelve-or fourteen-hour days, and every single one of
them had the perspiring manic style of a
striver
. Gary, cushioned by
Caroline’s inheritance, was free to cultivate nonambition and to be, as a
boss, the perfect strict and loving father that he could only halfway be at
home. He demanded honesty and excellence from his workers. In return he offered
patient instruction, absolute loyalty, and the assurance that he would never
blame them for his own mistakes. If his large-cap manager, Virginia Lin,
recommended upping the percentage of energy stocks in the bank’s
boilerplate trust portfolio from six percent to nine percent and Gary (as was
his wont) decided to leave the mix alone, and if the energy sector then
proceeded to enjoy a couple of banner quarters, he pulled his big ironic
I’m-a-jerk grimace and publicly apologized to Lin. Fortunately, for each
of his bad decisions he made two or three good ones, and in the history of the
universe there had never been a better six years for equities investment than
the six years he’d run CenTrust’s Equities Division; only a fool or
a crook could have failed. With success guaranteed, Gary could then make a game
of being unawed by his boss, Marvin Koster,
and by
Koster’s boss, Marty Breitenfeld, the chairman of CenTrust. Gary never,
ever kowtowed or flattered. Indeed, both Koster and Breitenfeld had begun to
defer to
him
in matters of taste and protocol, Koster all but asking
Gary’s permission to enroll his eldest daughter in Abington Friends
instead of Friends’ Select, Breitenfeld buttonholing Gary outside the
senior-executive pissoir to inquire if he and Caroline were planning to attend
the Free Library benefit ball or if Gary had spun off his tickets to a secretary
…