The Corrections (67 page)

Gary opened the box of shells on the bench and saw that none were missing. He wished that someone else, not he, had noticed that Alfred had moved the gun. But his decision, when it came, was so clear in his mind that he did speak it out loud. Into the dusty, uric, non-reverberative silence of the laboratory he said: “If that’s what you want, be my guest. I ain’t gonna stop you.”

Before he could drill holes in the shower, he had to clear the shelves of the little bathroom closet. This in itself was a substantial job. Enid had saved, in a shoe box, every cotton ball she’d ever taken from a bottle of aspirin or prescription medication. There were five hundred or a thousand cotton balls. There were petrified half-squeezed tubes of ointment. There were plastic pitchers and utensils (in colors even worse, if possible, than beige) from Enid’s admissions to the hospital for foot surgery, knee surgery, and phlebitis. There
were dear little bottles of Mercurochrome and Anbesol that had dried up sometime in the 1960s. There was a paper bag that Gary quickly, for the sake of his composure, threw to the back of a high shelf because it appeared to contain ancient menstrual belts and pads.

The daylight was fading by the time he had the closet empty and was ready to drill six holes. It was then that he discovered that the old masonry bits were as dull as rivets. He leaned into the drill with all his weight, the tip of the bit turned bluish-black and lost its temper, and the old drill began to smoke. Sweat came pouring down his face and chest.

Alfred chose this moment to step into the bathroom. “Well, look at this,” he said.

“You got some pretty dull masonry bits here,” Gary said, breathing heavily. “I should have bought some new ones while I was at the store.”

“Let me see,” Alfred said.

It hadn’t been Gary’s intention to attract the old man and the agitated twin fingered animals that were his advance guard. He shied from the incapacity and greedy openness of these hands, but Alfred’s eyes were fixed on the drill now, his face bright with the possibility of solving a problem. Gary relinquished the drill. He wondered how his father could even see what he was holding, the drill shook so violently. The old man’s fingers crawled around its tarnished surface, groping like eyeless worms.

“You got it on Reverse,” he said.

With the ridged yellow nail of his thumb, Alfred pushed the polarity switch to Forward and handed the drill back to Gary, and for the first time since his arrival, their eyes met. The chill that ran through Gary was only partly from his cooling sweat. The old man, he thought, still had a few lights on upstairs. Alfred, indeed, looked downright happy: happy to have fixed a thing and even happier, Gary suspected, to
have proved that he was smarter, in this tiny instance, than his son.

“We can see why I’m not an engineer,” Gary said.

“What’s the project?”

“I’m putting in this bar to hold on to. Are you going to use the shower if we put a stool and a bar in here?”

“I don’t know what they have planned for me,” Alfred said as he was leaving.

That was your Christmas present
, Gary told him silently.
Flipping that switch was your present from me
.

An hour later he had the bathroom back together and was in a fully nasty mood again. Enid had second-guessed his siting of the bar, and Alfred, when Gary invited him to try the new stool, had announced that he preferred a bath.

“I’ve done my part and now I’m done,” Gary said in the kitchen, pouring liquor. “Tomorrow I have a few things that
I
want to do.”

“It’s a wonderful improvement in the bathroom,” Enid said.

Gary poured heavily. Poured and poured.

“Oh, Gary,” she said, “I thought we might open that champagne Bea brought us.”

“Oh, let’s not,” said Denise, who had baked a stollen, a coffee cake, and two loaves of cheese bread and was preparing, if Gary was not mistaken, a dinner of polenta and braised rabbit. Safe to say it was the first time this kitchen had ever seen a rabbit.

Enid returned to hovering by the dining-room windows. “I’m worried that he isn’t calling,” she said.

Gary joined her by the window, his glial cells purring with the first sweet lubrication of his drink. He asked if she was familiar with Occam’s razor.

“Occam’s razor,” he said with cocktail sententiousness, “invites us to choose the simpler of two explanations for a phenomenon.”

“Well, what’s your point,” Enid said.

“My point,” he said, “is that it’s possible that Chip hasn’t called you because of something complicated that we know nothing about. Or it could be because of something very simple and well known to us, namely, his incredible irresponsibility.”

“He
said
he was coming and he
said
he would call,” Enid answered flatly. “He said, I’m coming
home
.”

“All right. Fine. Stand at the window. It’s your choice.”

Because he was expected to drive to
The
Nutcracker
, Gary couldn’t do as much drinking as he might have wished before dinner. He therefore did quite a bit more as soon as the family came home from the ballet and Alfred headed upstairs, practically at a run, and Enid bedded down in the den with the intention of letting her children handle any problems in the night. Gary drank scotch and checked in with Caroline. He drank scotch and searched the house for Denise and found no sign of her. From his own room he fetched his Christmas packages and arranged them under the tree. He was giving everybody the same gift: a leather-bound copy of the All-Time Lambert Two Hundred album. He’d pushed hard to get all the printing done in time for the holiday, and now that the album was complete, he planned to dismantle the darkroom, spend some of his Axon profits, and build a model-railroad setup on the second floor of the garage. It was a hobby that he’d chosen for himself, rather than having it chosen for him, and as he laid his scotchy head on the cold pillow and turned out the light in his old St. Judean bedroom, he was gripped by an ancient excitement at the prospect of running trains through mountains of papier-mâché, across high Popsicle-stick trestles …

He dreamed ten Christmases in the house. He dreamed of rooms and people, rooms and people. He dreamed that Denise was not his sister and was going to murder him. His only hope was the shotgun in the basement. He was examining
this shotgun, making sure that it was loaded, when he felt an evil presence behind him in the workshop. He turned around and didn’t recognize Denise. The woman he saw was some other woman whom he had to kill or be killed by. And there was no resistance in the shotgun’s trigger; it dangled, limp and futile. The gun was on Reverse, and by the time he got it on Forward, she was coming to kill him—

He woke up needing to pee.

The darkness in his room was relieved only by the glow of the digital clock radio, whose face he didn’t check because he didn’t want to know how early it still was. He could dimly see the loaf of Chip’s old bed by the opposite wall. The silence of the house felt momentary and unpeace-ful. Recently fallen.

Honoring this silence, Gary eased himself out of bed and crept toward the door; and here the terror struck him.

He was afraid to open the door.

He strained to hear what was happening outside it. He thought he could hear vague shiftings and creepings, faraway voices.

He was afraid to go to the bathroom because he didn’t know what he would find there. He was afraid that if he left his room he would find the wrong person, his mother maybe, or his sister or his father, in his bed when he came back.

He was convinced that people were moving in the hallway. In his clouded, imperfect wakefulness, he connected the Denise who’d disappeared before he went to bed to the Denise-like phantom who was trying to kill him in his dream.

The possibility that this phantom killer was even now lurking in the hall seemed only ninety percent fantastical.

It was safer all around, he thought, to stay in his room and pee into one of the decorative Austrian beer steins on his dresser.

But what if his tinkling attracted the attention of whoever was creeping around outside his door?

Moving on tiptoe, he took a beer stein into the closet that he’d shared with Chip ever since Denise was given the smaller bedroom and the boys were put together. He pulled the closet door shut after him, crowded up against the dry-cleaned garments and the bursting Nordstrom bags of miscellany that Enid had taken to storing here, and relieved himself into the beer stein. He lipped a fingertip over the rim so that he could feel if he was going to overflow it. Just when the warmth of rising urine had reached this fingertip, his bladder finally emptied. He lowered the stein to the closet floor, took an envelope from a Nordstrom bag, and covered the mouth of the receptacle.

Quietly, quietly, then, he left the closet and returned to his bed. As he was swinging his legs off the floor, he heard Denise’s voice. It was so distinct and conversational that she might have been in the room with him. She said, “Gary?”

He tried not to move, but the bedsprings creaked.

“Gary? Sorry to bother you. Are you awake?”

He had little choice now but to get up and open the door. Denise was right outside it, wearing white flannel pajamas and standing in a shaft of light from her own bedroom. “Sorry,” she said. “Dad’s been calling for you.”

“Gary!” came Alfred’s voice from the bathroom by her room.

Gary, heart thudding, asked what time it was.

“I have no idea,” she said. “He woke me up calling Chip’s name. Then he started calling yours. But not mine. I think he’s more comfortable with you.”

Cigarettes on her breath again.

“Gary? Gary!” came the call from the bathroom.

“Fuck this,” Gary said.

“It could be his medication.”

“Bullshit.”

From the bathroom: “Gary!”

“Yeah, Dad, OK, I’m coming.”

Enid’s bodiless voice floated up from the bottom of the stairs. “Gary, help your father.”

“Yeah, Mom. I’m all over it. You just go back to sleep.”

“What does he want?” Enid said.

“Just go back to bed.”

Out in the hall he could smell the Christmas tree and the fireplace. He tapped on the bathroom door and opened it. His father was standing in the bathtub, naked from the waist down, with nothing but psychosis in his face. Until now, Gary had seen faces like this mainly at the bus stops and the Burger King bathrooms of central Philadelphia.

“Gary,” Alfred said, “they’re all over the place.” The old man pointed at the floor with a trembling finger. “Do you see him?”

“Dad, you’re hallucinating.”

“Get him! Get him!”

“You’re hallucinating and it’s time to get out of the tub and go back to bed.”

“Do you see them?”

“You’re hallucinating. Go back to bed.”

This went on for a while, ten or fifteen minutes, before Gary was able to lead Alfred out of the bathroom. A light was burning in the master bedroom, and several unused diapers were spread out on the floor. It seemed to Gary that his father was having a dream while he was awake, a dream as vivid as Gary’s own dream about Denise, and that the awakening that he, Gary, had accomplished in half a second was taking his father half an hour.

“What is ‘hallucinate’?” Alfred said finally.

“It’s like you’re dreaming when you’re awake.”

Alfred winced. “I’m concerned about this.”

“Well. Rightly so.”

“Help me with the diaper.”

“Yes, all right,” Gary said.

“I’m concerned that something is wrong with my thoughts.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“My head doesn’t seem to work right.”

“I know. I know.”

But Gary himself was infected, there in the middle of the night, by his father’s disease. As the two of them collaborated on the problem of the diaper, which his father seemed to regard more as a lunatic conversation piece than as an undergarment to be donned, Gary, too, had a sensation of things dissolving around him, of a night that consisted of creepings and shiftings and metamorphoses. He had the sense that there were many more than two people in the house beyond the bedroom door; he sensed a large population of phantoms that he could glimpse only dimly.

Alfred’s polar hair was hanging in his face when he lay down. Gary pulled the blanket up over his shoulder. It was hard to believe that he’d been fighting with this man, taking him seriously as an adversary, three months ago.

His clock radio showed 2:55 when he returned to his room. The house was quiet again, Denise’s door closed, the only sound an eighteen-wheeler on the expressway half a mile away. Gary wondered why his room smelled—faintly—like somebody’s cigarette breath.

But maybe it wasn’t cigarette breath. Maybe it was that Austrian beer stein full of piss that he’d left on the closet floor!

Tomorrow
, he thought,
is for me. Tomorrow is Gary’s Recre
ation Day. And then on Thursday morning we’re going to blow this
house wide open. We’re going to put an end to this charade
.

After Brian Callahan had fired Denise, she’d carved herself up and put the pieces on the table. She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would
have eaten her alive if she hadn’t run away. She told herself a story about a daughter who, in her desperation to escape, had taken refuge in whatever temporary shelters she could find—a career in cooking, a marriage to Emile Berger, an old-person’s life in Philadelphia, an affair with Robin Passafaro. But naturally these refuges, chosen in haste, proved unworkable in the long run. By trying to protect herself from her family’s hunger, the daughter accomplished just the opposite. She ensured that when her family’s hunger reached its peak her life would fall apart and leave her without a spouse, without kids, without a job, without responsibilities, without a defense of any kind. It was as if, all along, she’d been conspiring to make herself available to nurse her parents.

Meanwhile her brothers had conspired to make themselves unavailable. Chip had fled to Eastern Europe and Gary had placed himself under Caroline’s thumb. Gary, it was true, did “take responsibility” for his parents, but his idea of responsibility was to bully and give orders. The burden of listening to Enid and Alfred and being patient and understanding fell squarely on the daughter’s shoulders. Already Denise could see that she would be the only child in St. Jude for Christmas dinner and the only child on duty in the weeks and months and years after that. Her parents had better manners than to ask her to come and live with them, but she knew that this was what they wanted. As soon as she’d enrolled her father in Phase II testing of Corecktall and offered to house him, Enid had unilaterally ceased hostilities with her. Enid had never again mentioned her adulterous friend Norma Greene. She’d never asked Denise why she’d “quit” her job at the Generator. Enid was in trouble, her daughter was offering to help, and so she could no longer afford the luxury of finding fault. And now the time had come, according to the story that Denise told herself about herself, for the chef to carve herself up and feed the pieces to her hungry parents.