Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

He didn’t understand where Chip was. Chip was an intellectual and had ways of talking sense to these people. Chip had done a good job yesterday, better than he could have done himself. Asked a simple question, got a simple answer, and then explained it in a way that a man could understand. But there was no sign of Chip now. Inmates semaphoring one another, waving their arms like traffic cops. Just try giving a simple order to these people, just try it. They pretended you didn’t exist. That fat bastard black woman had them all scared witless. If she figured out that the prisoners were on his side, if she found out they’d aided him in any way, she’d make them pay. Oh, she had that look. She had that I’m gonna make you hurt look. And he, at this point in his life, he’d had just about enough of this insolent black type of woman, but what could you do? It was a prison. It was a public institution. They’d throw anybody in here. White-haired women semaphoring. Hairless fairies touching toes. But why him , for God’s sake? Why him? It made him weep to be thrown into a place like this. It was hell to get old even without being persecuted by that waddling black so-and-so.

And here she came again.

“Alfred?” Sassy. Insolent. “You gonna let me stretch your legs now?”

“You’re a goddamned bastard!” he told her.

“I is what I is, Alfred. But I know who my parents are. Now why don’t you put your hands down, nice and easy, and let me stretch your legs and help you feel better.”

He lunged as she came at him, but his belt had got stuck in the chair, in the chair somehow, in the chair. Got stuck in the chair and he couldn’t move.

“You keep that up, Alfred,” the mean one said, “and we’re gonna have to take you back to your room.”

“Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!”

She pulled an insolent face and went away, but he knew that she’d be back. They always came back. His only hope was to get his belt free of the chair somehow. Get himself free, make a dash, put an end to it. Bad design to build a prison yard this many stories up. A man could see clear to Illinois. Big window right there. Bad design if they meant to house prisoners here. From the look of the glass it was thermal pane, two layers. If he hit it with his head and pitched forward he could make it. But first he had to get the goddamned belt free.

He struggled with its smooth nylon breadth in the same way over and over. There was a time when he’d encountered obstacles philosophically but that time was past. His fingers were as weak as grass when he tried to work them under the belt so he could pull on it. They bent like soft bananas. Trying to work them under the belt was so obviously and utterly hopeless —the belt had such overwhelming advantages of toughness and tightness — that his efforts soon became merely a pageant of spite and rage and incapacity. He caught his fingernails on the belt and then flung his arms apart, letting his hands bang into the arms of his captivating chair and painfully ricochet this way and that way, because he was so goddamned angry—

“Dad, Dad, Dad, whoa, calm down,” the voice said.

“Get that bastard! Get that bastard!”

“Dad, whoa, it’s me. It’s Chip.”

Indeed, the voice was familiar. He looked up at Chip carefully to make sure the speaker really was his middle child, because the bastards would try to take advantage of you any way they could. Indeed, if the speaker had been anybody in the world but Chip, it wouldn’t have paid to trust him. Too risky. But there was something in Chipper that the bastards couldn’t fake. You looked at Chipper and you knew he’d never lie to you. There was a sweetness to Chipper that nobody else could counterfeit.

As his identification of Chipper deepened toward certainty, his breathing leveled out and something like a smile pushed through the other, warring forces in his face.

“Well!” he said finally.

Chip pulled another chair over and gave him a cup of ice water for which, he realized, he was thirsty. He took a long pull on the straw and gave the water back to Chip.

“Where’s your mother?”

Chip set the cup on the floor. “She woke up with a cold. I told her to stay in bed.”

“Where’s she living now?”

“She’s at home. Exactly where she was two days ago.”

Chip had already explained to him why he had to be here, and the explanation had made sense as long as he could see Chip’s face and hear his voice, but as soon as Chip was gone the explanation fell apart.

The big black bastard was circling the two of them with her evil eye.

“This is a physical-therapy room,” Chip said. “We’re on the eighth floor of St. Luke’s. Mom had her foot operation here, if you remember that.”

“That woman is a bastard,” he said, pointing.

“No, she’s a physical therapist,” Chip said, “and she’s been trying to help you.”

“No, look at her. Do you see the way she’s? Do you see it?”

“She’s a physical therapist, Dad.”

“The what? She’s a?”

On the one hand, he trusted the intelligence and assurance of his intellectual son. On the other hand, the black bastard was giving him the Eye to warn him of the harm she intended to do him at her earliest opportunity; there was a grand malevolence to her manner, plain as day. He couldn’t begin to reconcile this contradiction: his belief that Chip was absolutely right and his conviction that that bastard absolutely wasn’t any physicist.

The contradiction opened into a bottomless chasm. He stared into its depths, his mouth hanging open. A warm thing was crawling down his chin.

And now some bastard’s hand was reaching for him. He tried to slug the bastard and realized, in the nick of time, that the hand belonged to Chip.

“Easy, Dad. I’m just wiping your chin.”

“Ah God.”

“Do you want to sit here a little, or do you want to go back to your room?”

“I leave it to your discretion.”

This handy phrase came to him all ready to be spoken, neat as you please.

“Let’s go back, then.” Chip reached behind the chair and made adjustments. Evidently the chair had casters and levers of enormous complexity.

“See if you can get my belt unhooked,” he said.

“We’ll go back to the room, and then you can walk around.”

Chip wheeled him out of the yard and up the cellblock to his cell. He couldn’t get over how luxurious the appointments were. Like a first-class hotel room except for the bars on the bed and the shackles and the radios, the prisoner-control equipment.

Chip parked him near the window, left the room with a Styrofoam pitcher, and returned a few minutes later in the company of a pretty little girl in a white jacket.

“Mr. Lambert?” she said. She was pretty like Denise, with curly black hair and wire glasses, but smaller. “I’m Dr. Schulman. You may remember we met yesterday.”

“Well!” he said, smiling wide. He remembered a world where there were girls like this, pretty little girls with bright eyes and smart brows, a world of hope.

She placed a hand on his head and bent down as if to kiss him. She scared the hell out of him. He almost hit her.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said. “I just want to look in your eye. Is that all right with you?”

He turned to Chip for reassurance, but Chip himself was staring at the girl.

“Chip!” he said.

Chip took his eyes off her. “Yeah, Dad?”

Well, now that he’d attracted Chip’s attention, he had to say something, and what he said was this: “Tell your mother not to worry about the mess down there. I’ll take care of all that.”

“OK. I’ll tell her.”

The girl’s clever fingers and soft face were all around his head. She asked him to make a fist, she pinched him and prodded him. She was talking like the television in somebody else’s room.