Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

She called again: “Dad?”

There was no answer.

Her fear, as she descended the stairs, was like a fear from the unhappy year of her childhood when she’d begged for a pet and received a cage containing two hamsters. A dog or a cat might have harmed Enid’s fabrics, but these young hamsters, a pair of siblings from a litter at the Driblett residence, were permitted in the house. Every morning, when Denise went to the basement to give them pellets and change their water, she dreaded to discover what new deviltry they’d hatched in the night for her private spectation — maybe a nest of blind, wriggling, incest-crimson offspring, maybe a desperate pointless wholesale rearrangement of cedar shavings into a single great drift beside which the two parents were trembling on the bare metal of the cage’s floor, looking bloated and evasive after eating all their children, which couldn’t have left an agreeable aftertaste, even in a hamster’s mouth.

The door to Alfred’s workshop was shut. She tapped on it. “Dad?”

Alfred’s reply came immediately in a strained, strangled bark: “Don’t come in!”

Behind the door something hard scraped on concrete.

“Dad? What are you doing?”

“I said don’t come in!”

Well, she’d seen the gun and she was thinking: Of course it’s me down here. She was thinking: And I have no idea what to do.

“Dad, I have to come in.”

“Denise—”

“I’m coming in,” she said.

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.