Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“Dad?” Chip said.

“I didn’t hear.”

“Dr. Schulman wants to know if you’d prefer ‘Alfred’ or ‘Mr. Lambert.’ What would you rather she called you?”

He grinned painfully. “I’m not following.”

“I think he prefers ‘Mr. Lambert,’” Chip said.

“Mr. Lambert,” said the little girl, “can you tell me where we are?”

He turned again to Chip, whose expression was expectant but unhelpful. He pointed toward the window. “That’s Illinois in that direction,” he said to his son and to the girl. Both were listening with great interest now, and he felt he should say more. “There’s a window,” he said, “which … if you get it open … would be what I want. I couldn’t get the belt undone. And then.”

He was failing and he knew it.

The little girl looked down on him kindly. “Can you tell me who our President is?”

He grinned, it was an easy one.

“Well,” he said. “She’s got so much stuff down there. I doubt she’d even notice. We ought to pitch the whole lot of it.”

The little girl nodded as if this were a reasonable answer. Then she held up both her hands. She was pretty like Enid, but Enid had a wedding ring, Enid didn’t wear glasses, Enid had lately gotten older, and he probably would have recognized Enid, although, being far more familiar to him than Chip, she was that much harder to see.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” the girl asked him.

He considered her fingers. As far as he could tell, the message they were sending was Relax. Unclench. Take it easy.

With a smile he let his bladder empty.

“Mr. Lambert? How many fingers am I holding up?”

The fingers were there. It was a beautiful thing. The relief of irresponsibility. The less he knew, the happier he was. To know nothing at all would be heaven.

“Dad?”

“I should know that,” he said. “Can you believe I’d forget a thing like that?”

The little girl and Chip exchanged a look and then went out into the corridor.

He’d enjoyed unclenching, but after a minute or two he felt clammy. He needed to change his clothes now and he couldn’t. He sat in his mess as it chilled.

“Chip?” he said.

A stillness had fallen on the cellblock. He couldn’t rely on Chip, he was always disappearing. He couldn’t rely on anybody but himself. With no plan in his head and no power in his hands he attempted to loosen the belt so he could take his pants off and dry himself. But the belt was as maddening as ever. Twenty times he ran his hands along its length and twenty times he failed to find a buckle. He was like a person of two dimensions seeking freedom in a third. He could search for all eternity and never find the goddamned buckle.

“Chip!” he called, but not loudly, because the black bastard was lurking out there, and she would punish him severely. “Chip, come and help me.”

He would have liked to remove his legs entirely. They were weak and restless and wet and trapped. He kicked a little and rocked in his unrocking chair. His hands were in a tumult. The less he could do about his legs, the more he swung his arms. The bastards had him now, he’d been betrayed, and he began to cry. If only he’d known! If only he’d known, he could have taken steps, he’d had the gun, he’d had the bottomless cold ocean, if only he’d known.

He swatted a pitcher of water against the wall, and finally somebody came running.

“Dad, Dad, Dad. What’s wrong?”

Alfred looked up at his son and into his eyes. He opened his mouth, but the only word he could produce was “I—”

I—

I have made mistakes—

I am alone—

I am wet—

I want to die—

I am sorry—

I did my best—

I love my children—

I need your help—

I want to die—

“I can’t be here,” he said.

Chip crouched on the floor by the chair. “Listen,” he said. “You have to stay here another week so they can monitor you. We need to find out what’s wrong.”

He shook his head. “No! You have to get me out of here!”

“Dad, I’m sorry,” Chip said, “but I can’t take you home. You have to stay here for another week at least.”

Oh, how his son tried his patience! By now Chip should have understood what he was asking for without being told again.

“I’m saying put an end to it!” He banged on the arms of his captivating chair. “You have to help me put an end to it!”

He looked at the window through which he was ready, at last, to throw himself. Or give him a gun, give him an ax, give him anything, but get him out of here. He had to make Chip understand this.

Chip covered his shaking hands with his own.

“I’ll stay with you, Dad,” he said. “But I can’t do that for you. I can’t put an end to it like that. I’m sorry.”

Like a wife who had died or a house that had burned, the clarity to think and the power to act were still vivid in his memory. Through a window that gave onto the next world, he could still see the clarity and see the power, just out of reach, beyond the window’s thermal panes. He could see the desired outcomes, the drowning at sea, the shotgun blast, the plunge from a height, so near to him still that he refused to believe he’d lost the opportunity to avail himself of their relief.

He wept at the injustice of his sentence. “For God’s sake, Chip,” he said loudly, because he sensed that this might be his last chance to liberate himself before he lost all contact with that clarity and power and it was therefore crucial that Chip understand exactly what he wanted. “I’m asking for your help! You’ve got to get me out of this! You have to put an end to it!”

Even red-eyed, even tear-streaked, Chip’s face was full of power and clarity. Here was a son whom he could trust to understand him as he understood himself; and so Chip’s answer, when it came, was absolute. Chip’s answer told him that this was where the story ended. It ended with Chip shaking his head, it ended with him saying: “I can’t, Dad. I can’t.”

The correction , when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.

It seemed to Enid that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they’d been in her youth. She had memories of the 1930s, she’d seen firsthand what could happen to a country when the world economy took its gloves off; she’d helped her mother pass out leftovers to homeless men in the alley behind their roominghouse. But disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States. Safety features had been put in place, like the squares of rubber that every modern playground was paved with, to soften impacts.

Nevertheless, the markets did collapse, and Enid, who hadn’t dreamed that she would ever be glad that Alfred had locked their assets up in annuities and T-bills, weathered the downturn with less anxiety than her high-flying friends. Orfic Midland did, as threatened, terminate her traditional health insurance and force her into an HMO, but her old neighbor Dean Driblett, with the stroke of a pen, bless his heart, upgraded her and Alfred to DeeDeeCare Choice Plus, which allowed her to keep her favorite doctors. She still had major non-reimbursable monthly nursing-home expenses, but by scrimping she was able to pay the bills with Alfred’s pension and Railroad Retirement benefits, and meanwhile her house, which she owned outright, continued to appreciate. The simple truth was that, although she wasn’t rich, she also wasn’t poor. Somehow this truth had eluded her during the years of her anxiety and uncertainty about Alfred, but as soon as he was out of the house and she’d caught up on her sleep, she saw it clearly.