Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Chip put his arms around his friend and squeezed him. He could smell the scalp oils that Gitanas in his agitation had been sniffing. He felt as if he were hugging himself, feeling his own primate shoulder blades, the scratch of his own woolen sweater. He also felt his friend’s gloom — how not-there he was, how distracted or shut down — and it made him, too, feel lost.

Jonas beeped the horn on the gravel drive outside the front door.

“Let’s meet up in New York,” Chip said.

“OK, maybe.” Gitanas pulled away and wandered back to the television.

Only a few stragglers remained to throw rocks at the Stomper as Jonas and Chip roared through the open gate. They drove south out of the city center on a street lined with forbidding gas stations and brown-walled, traffic-scarred buildings that seemed happiest and most themselves on days, like this one, when the weather was raw and the light was poor. Jonas spoke very little English but managed to exude tolerance toward Chip, if not friendliness, while keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror. Traffic was extremely sparse this morning, and sport-utility vehicles, those workhorses of the warlord class, attracted unhealthy attention in times of instability.

The little airport was mobbed with young people speaking the languages of the West. Since the Quad Cities Fund had liquidated Lietuvos Avialinijos, other airlines had taken over some of the routes, but the curtailed flight schedule (fourteen departures a day for a capital of Europe) wasn’t equipped to handle loads like today’s. Hundreds of British, German, and American students and entrepreneurs, many of their faces familiar to Chip from his pub-crawling with Gitanas, had converged on the reservation counters of Finnair and Lufthansa, Aeroflot and LOT Polish Airlines.

Doughty city buses were arriving with fresh loads of foreign nationals. As far as Chip could see, none of the counter lines were moving at all. He tallied the flights on the Outbound board and chose the airline, Finnair, with the most departures.

At the end of the very long Finnair line were two American college girls in bell-bottom jeans and other Sixties Revival wear. The names on their luggage were Tiffany and Cheryl.

“Do you have tickets?” Chip asked.

“For tomorrow,” Tiffany said. “But things looked kinda nasty, so.”

“Is this line moving?”

“I don’t know. We’ve only been here ten minutes.”

“It hasn’t moved in ten minutes?”

“There’s only one person at the counter,” Tiffany said. “But it’s not like there’s some other, better Finnair counter someplace else, so.”

Chip was feeling disoriented and had to steel himself not to hail a cab and return to Gitanas.

Cheryl said to Tiffany: “So my dad’s like, you’ve got to sublet if you’re going to Europe, and I’m like, I promised Anna she could stay there weekends when there’s home games so she can sleep with Jason, right? I can’t take a promise back —right? But my dad’s getting like all bottom-line, and I’m like, hello, it’s my condominium, right? You bought it for me , right? I didn’t know I was going to have some stranger, you know, who, like, fries things on the stove, and sleeps in my bed?”

Tiffany said: “That is so-gross.”

Cheryl said: “And uses my pillows?”

Two more non-Lithuanians, a pair of Belgians, joined the line behind Chip. Simply not to be the last in line brought some relief. Chip, in French, asked the Belgians to watch his bag and hold his place. He went to the men’s room, locked himself in a stall, and counted the money Gitanas had given him.

It was $29,250.

It upset him somehow. It made him afraid.

A voice on a bathroom speaker announced, in Lithuanian and then Russian and then English, that LOT Polish Airlines Flight #331 from Warsaw had been canceled.

Chip put twenty hundreds in his T-shirt pocket, twenty hundreds in his left boot, and returned the rest of the money to the envelope, which he hid inside his T-shirt, against his belly. He wished that Gitanas hadn’t given him the money. Without money, he’d had a good reason to stay in Vilnius. Now that he had no good reason, a simple fact which the previous twelve weeks had kept hidden was stripped naked in the fecal, uric bathroom stall. The simple fact was that he was afraid to go home.

No man likes to see his cowardice as clearly as Chip could see his now. He was angry at the money and angry at Gitanas for giving it to him and angry at Lithuania for falling apart, but the fact remained that he was afraid to go home, and this was nobody’s fault but his.

He reclaimed his place in the Finnair line, which hadn’t moved at all. Airport speakers were announcing the cancellation of Flight #1048 from Helsinki. A collective groan went up, and bodies surged forward, the head of the line blunting itself against the counter like a delta.

Cheryl and Tiffany kicked their bags forward. Chip kicked his bag forward. He felt returned to the world and he didn’t like it. A kind of hospital light, a light of seriousness and inescapability, fell on the girls and the baggage and the Finnair personnel in their uniforms. Chip had nowhere to hide. Everyone around him was reading a novel. He hadn’t read a novel in at least a year. The prospect frightened him nearly as much as the prospect of Christmas in St. Jude. He wanted to go out and hail a cab, but he suspected that Gitanas had already fled the city.

He stood in the hard light until the hour was 2:00 and then 2:30—early morning in St. Jude. While the Belgians watched his bag again, he waited in a different line and made a credit-card phone call.

Enid’s voice was slurred and tiny. “Wello?”

“Hi, Mom, it’s me.”

Her voice trebled instantly in pitch and volume. “Chip? Oh, Chip! Al, it’s Chip! It’s Chip! Chip, where are you?”

“I’m at the airport in Vilnius. I’m on my way home.”

“Oh, wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful! Now, tell me, when do you get here?”

“I don’t have a ticket yet,” he said. “Things are sort of falling apart here. But tomorrow afternoon sometime. Wednesday at the latest.”

“Wonderful!”

He hadn’t been prepared for the joy in his mother’s voice. If he’d ever known that he could bring joy to another person, he’d long since forgotten it. He took care to steady his own voice and keep his word count low. He said that he would call again as soon as he was at a better airport.

“This is wonderful news,” Enid said. “I’m so happy!”

“OK, then, I’ll see you soon.”

Already the great Baltic winter night was shouldering in from the north. Veterans from the front of the Finnair line reported that the rest of the day’s flights were sold out and that at least one of these flights was likely to be canceled, but Chip hoped that by flashing a couple of hundreds he could secure those “bumping privileges” that he’d lampooned on lithuania.com. Failing that, he would buy somebody’s ticket for lots of cash.

Cheryl said: “Oh my God, Tiffany, the StairMaster is so-totally butt - building .”

Tiffany said: “Only if you, like, stick it out.”

Cheryl said: “Everybody sticks it out. You can’t help it. Your legs get tired.”

Tiffany said: “Duh! It’s a StairMaster! Your legs are supposed to get tired.”

Cheryl looked out a window and asked, with withering undergraduate disdain: “Excuse me, why is there a tank in the middle of the runway?”

A minute later the lights went out and the phones went dead.

Down in the basement , at the eastern end of the Ping-Pong table, Alfred was unpacking a Maker’s Mark whiskey carton filled with Christmas-tree lights. He already had prescription drugs and an enema kit on the table. He had a sugar cookie freshly baked by Enid in a shape suggestive of a terrier but meant to be a reindeer. He had a Log Cabin syrup carton containing the large colored lights that he’d formerly hung on the outdoor yews. He had a pump-action shotgun in a zippered canvas case, and a box of twenty-gauge shells. He had rare clarity and the will to use it while it lasted.