The Corrections (72 page)

She opened the door to brilliant lighting. In a single glance she took in the old paint-spattered bedspread on the floor, the old man on his back with his hips off the ground and his knees trembling, his wide eyes fixed on the underside of the workbench while he struggled with the big plastic enema apparatus that he’d stuck into his rectum.

“Whoops, sorry!” she said, turning away, her hands raised.

Alfred breathed stertorously and said nothing more.

She pulled the door partway shut and filled her lungs with air. Upstairs the doorbell was ringing. Through the walls and the ceiling she could hear footsteps approaching the house.

“That’s him, that’s him!” Enid cried.

A burst of song—“It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas”—punctured her illusion.

Denise joined her mother and brother at the front door. Familiar faces were clustered around the snowy stoop, Dale Driblett, Honey Driblett, Steve and Ashley Driblett, Kirby Root with several daughters and buzz-cut sons-in-law, and the entire Person clan. Enid corralled Denise and Gary and hugged them closer, bouncing on her toes with the spirit of the moment. “Run and get Dad,” she said. “He loves the carolers.”

“Dad’s busy,” Denise said.

For the man who’d taken care to protect her privacy and who had only ever asked that his privacy be respected, too, wasn’t the kindest course to let him suffer by himself and not compound his suffering with the shame of being witnessed? Hadn’t he, with every question that he’d ever failed to ask her, earned the right to relief from any uncomfortable question she might want to ask him now? Like:
What’s with the
enema, Dad?

The carolers seemed to be singing straight at her. Enid was swaying to the tune, Gary had easy tears in his eyes, but Denise felt like the intended audience. She would have liked to stay there with the happier side of her family. She didn’t know what it was about difficulty that made such a powerful claim on her allegiance. But as Kirby Root, who directed the choir at Chiltsville Methodist, led a segue into “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” she began to wonder if respecting Alfred’s privacy wasn’t a little bit too easy. He wanted to be left alone? Well, how nice for her! She could go back to Philadelphia, live her own life, and be doing exactly what he wanted. He was embarrassed to be seen with a plastic squirter up his ass? Well, how convenient! She was pretty goddamned embarrassed herself!

She extricated herself from her mother, waved to the neighbors, and returned to the basement.

The workshop door was ajar, as she’d left it. “Dad?”

“Don’t come in!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I have to come in.”

“I never intended to involve you in this. Not your worry.”

“I know. But I have to come in anyway.”

She found him in much the same position, with an old beach towel wadded up between his legs. Kneeling among the shit smells and piss smells, she rested a hand on his quaking shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said.

His face was covered with sweat. His eyes glittered with
madness. “Find a telephone,” he said, “and call the district manager.”

Chip’s great revelation had come at about six o’clock on Tuesday morning, as he was walking in near-perfect darkness down a road surfaced with Lithuanian gravel, between the tiny hamlets of Neravai and Miškiniai, a few kilometers from the Polish border.

Fifteen hours earlier, he’d reeled out of the airport and had nearly been run over by Jonas, Aidaris, and Gitanas as they veered to the curb in their Ford Stomper. The three men had been on their way out of Vilnius when they’d heard the news of the airport’s closing. Pulling a U-turn on the road to Ignalina, they’d returned to rescue the pathetic American. The Stomper’s rear cargo area was fully constipated with luggage and computers and telephone equipment, but by bungee-cording two suitcases to the roof they made room for Chip and his bag.

“We’ll get you to a small checkpoint,” Gitanas said. “They’re putting roadblocks on all the big roads. They salivate when they see Stompers.”

Jonas had then driven at unsafe speeds on suitably awful roads west of Vilnius, skirting the towns of Jieznas and Alytus. The hours had passed in darkness and jostling. At no point did they see a working streetlight or a law-enforcement vehicle. Jonas and Aidaris listened to Metallica in the front seat while Gitanas pressed buttons on his cell phone in the forlorn hope that Transbaltic Wireless, of which he was still nominally the controlling shareholder, had managed to restore power to its transceiver station in the midst of a national blackout and the mobilization of Lithuania’s armed forces.

“This is a calamity for Vitkunas,” Gitanas said. “Mobilizing just makes him look more Soviet. Troops in the street and no electricity: this will not endear your government to the Lithuanian people.”

“Is anybody actually shooting at people?” Chip asked.

“No, it’s mostly posturing. A tragedy rewritten as a farce.”

Toward midnight the Stomper rounded a sharp curve near Lazdijai, the last sizable town before the Polish frontier, and passed a three-Jeep convoy heading in the opposite direction. Jonas accelerated on the corduroy road and conferred with Gitanas in Lithuanian. The glacial moraine in this region was rolling but unforested. It was possible to look back and see that two of the Jeeps had turned around and commenced pursuit of the Stomper. It was likewise possible, if you were in the Jeeps, to see Jonas making a sharp left onto a gravel road and speeding alongside the whiteness of a frozen lake.

“We’ll outrun ’em,” Gitanas assured Chip approximately two seconds before Jonas, encountering an elbow curve, rolled the Stomper off the road.

We’re having an accident
, Chip thought while the vehicle was airborne. He experienced huge retroactive affection for good traction, low centers of gravity, and non-angular varieties of momentum. There was time for quiet reflection and gritting of teeth and then no time at all, just blow after blow, noise upon noise. The Stomper tried out several versions of the vertical—ninety, two-seventy, three-sixty, one-eighty—and finally came to rest on its left side with its engine dead and its lights still burning.

Chip’s hips and chest felt seriously bruised by his lap and shoulder belts. Otherwise he seemed to be in one piece, as did Jonas and Aidaris.

Gitanas had been thrown around and bludgeoned by loose luggage. He was bleeding from wounds on his chin and forehead. He spoke to Jonas urgently, apparently telling him to cut the lights, but it was too late. There was a sound of great downshifting on the road behind them. The pursuing Jeeps pulled up at the elbow curve, and uniformed men in ski masks piled out.

“Police in ski masks,” Chip said. “I’m struggling to put a positive construction on this.”

The Stomper had crashed in a frozen-over marsh. In the intersecting high beams of two Jeeps, eight or ten masked “officers” surrounded it and ordered everybody out. Chip, pushing open the door above him, felt like a Jack emerging from its box.

Jonas and Aidaris were relieved of their weapons. The contents of the vehicle were methodically dumped on the crusty snow and broken reeds that covered the ground. A “policeman” pressed the muzzle of a rifle into Chip’s cheek, and Chip received a one-word order that Gitanas translated: “He’s inviting you to take your clothes off.”

Death, that overseas relation, that foul-breathed remittance man, had suddenly appeared in the immediate neighborhood. Chip was quite afraid of the gun. His hands shook and lost feeling; it took the entire sum of his will to apply them to the task of unzipping and unbuttoning himself. Apparently he’d been singled out for this humiliation because of the quality of the leather goods he was wearing. Nobody seemed to care about Gitanas’s red motocross jacket or Jonas’s denim. But ski-masked “policemen” gathered round and fingered the fine grain of Chip’s pants and coat. Puffing frost through O-shaped mouth holes with their weirdly decontextualized lips, they tested the flexure of his left boot’s sole.

A cry went up when a wad of U.S. currency fell from the boot. Again the gun muzzle was in Chip’s cheek. Chilly fingers discovered the big envelope of cash under his T-shirt. The “police” examined his wallet as well but didn’t steal his litai or his credit cards. Dollars were all they wanted.

Gitanas, with blood congealing on several quadrants of his head, lodged a protest with the captain of the “police.” The ensuing argument, in which Gitanas and the captain repeatedly gestured at Chip and used the words “dollars”
and “American,” ended when the captain pointed a pistol at Gitanas’s bloody forehead and Gitanas raised his hands to concede that the captain had a point.

Chip’s sphincter had meanwhile dilated nearly to the degree of unconditional surrender. It seemed very important to contain himself, however, and so he stood in his socks and underwear and pressed his butt cheeks together as well as he could with his shaking hands. Pressed and pressed and fought the spasms manually. He didn’t care how ridiculous this looked.

The “police” were finding much to steal from the luggage. Chip’s bag was emptied on the snowy ground and his belongings picked through. He and Gitanas looked on while the “police” shredded the Stomper’s upholstery, tore up its floor, and located Gitanas’s reserves of cash and cigarettes.

“What exactly is the pretext here?” Chip said, still shivering violently but winning the really important battle.

“We’re accused of smuggling currency and tobacco,” Gitanas said.

“And who’s accusing us?”

“I’m afraid they’re what they seem to be,” Gitanas said. “In other words, national police in ski masks. There’s kind of a Mardi Gras atmosphere in the country tonight. Kind of an anything-goes type of spirit.”

It was 1 a.m. when the “police” finally roared away in their Jeeps. Chip and Gitanas and Jonas and Aidaris were left with frozen feet, a smashed-up Stomper, wet clothes, and demolished luggage.

On the plus side, Chip thought, I didn’t shit myself.

He still had his passport and the $2,000 that the “police” had failed to locate in his T-shirt pocket. He also had gym shoes, some loose-fitting jeans, his good tweed sport coat, and his favorite sweater, all of which he hurried to put on.

“This pretty much ends my career as a criminal warlord,” Gitanas commented. “I have no further ambitions in that direction.”

Using cigarette lighters, Jonas and Aidaris were inspecting the Stomper’s undercarriage. Aidaris delivered the verdict in English for Chip’s benefit: “
Truck fucked up
.”

Gitanas offered to walk with Chip to the border crossing on the road to Sejny, fifteen kilometers to the west, but Chip was painfully aware that if his friends hadn’t circled back to the airport they would probably be safe now with their relatives in Ignalina, their vehicle and their cash reserves intact.

“Eh,” Gitanas said with a shrug. “We might have got shot on the road to Ignalina. Maybe you saved our life.”

“Truck fucked up,” Aidaris repeated with spite and delight.

“So I’ll see you in New York,” Chip said.

Gitanas sat down on a seventeen-inch computer monitor with a stove-in screen. He carefully felt his bloody forehead. “Yeah, right. New York.”

“You can stay in my apartment.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Let’s just do it,” Chip said somewhat desperately.

“I’m a Lithuanian,” Gitanas said.

Chip felt more hurt, more disappointed and abandoned, than the situation called for. However, he contained himself. He accepted a road map, a cigarette lighter, an apple, and the Lithuanians’ sincere good wishes and set off in the darkness.

Once he was alone, he felt better. The longer he walked, the more he appreciated the comfort of his jeans and gym shoes as hiking gear, relative to his boots and leather pants. His tread was lighter, his stride freer; he was tempted to start skipping down the road. How pleasant to be out walking in these gym shoes!

But this was not his great revelation. His great revelation
came when he was a few kilometers from the Polish border. He was straining to hear whether any of the homicidal farm dogs in the surrounding darkness might be unleashed, he had his. arms outstretched, he was feeling more than a little ridiculous, when he remembered Gitanas’s remark:
tragedy
rewritten as a farce
. All of a sudden he understood why nobody, including himself, had ever liked his screenplay: he’d written a thriller where he should have written farce.

Faint morning twilight was overtaking him. In New York he’d honed and polished the first thirty pages of “The Academy Purple” until his memory of them was nearly eidetic, and now, as the Baltic sky brightened, he bore down with a mental red pencil on his mental reconstruction of these pages, made a little trim here, added emphasis or hyperbole there, and in his mind the scenes became what they’d wanted to be all along: ridiculous. The tragic bill
QUAINTENCE
became a comic fool.

Chip picked up his pace as if hurrying toward a desk at which he could begin to revise the script immediately. He came over a rise and saw the blacked-out Lithuanian town of Eisiskès and, farther in the distance, beyond the frontier, some outdoor lights in Poland. Two dray horses, straining their heads over a barbed-wire fence, nickered at him optimistically.

He spoke out loud: “Make it
ridiculous
. Make it
ridiculous
.”

Two Lithuanian customs officials and two “policemen” manned the tiny border checkpoint. They handed Chip’s passport back to him without the bulky stack of litai that he’d filled it with. For no discernible reason except petty cruelty, they made him sit in an overheated room for several hours while cement mixers and chicken trucks and bicyclists came and went. It was late morning before they let him walk over into Poland.

A few kilometers down the road, in Sejny, he bought zlotys and, using the zlotys, lunch. The shops were well
stocked, it was Christmastime. The men of the town were old and looked a lot like the Pope.

Rides in three trucks and a city taxi got him to the Warsaw airport by noon on Wednesday. The improbably apple-cheeked personnel at the LOT Polish Airlines ticket counter were delighted to see him. LOT had added extra holiday flights to its schedule to accommodate the tens of thousands of Polish guest workers returning to their families from the West, and many of the westbound flights were underbooked. All the red-cheeked counter girls wore little hats like drum majorettes. They took cash from Chip, gave him a ticket, and told him
Run
.