Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Denise raised a leather cuff and checked the time. “I’ll come for five days. I don’t think Gary will do it, though. And who knows what’s up with Chip.”

“Denise,” Alfred said impatiently, as if she were speaking nonsense, “please talk to Gary.”

“OK, I will. I will.”

Alfred’s hands bounced in the air. “I don’t know how much time I have! You and your mother need to get along. You and Gary need to get along.”

“Al, you have plenty of—”

“We all need to get along!”

Denise had never been a crier, but her face was crumpling up. “Dad, all right,” she said. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Your mother wants a Christmas in St. Jude.”

“I’ll talk to him. I promise.”

“Well.” He turned abruptly. “That’s enough of that.”

His black raincoat was flapping and whipping in the wind, and still Enid managed to hope that the weather would be perfect for cruising, that the water would be calm.

In dry clothes, with a coat bag and a duffel and cigarettes — smooth lethal Murattis, five bucks a box — Chip rode out to Kennedy with Gitanas Misevičius and boarded the Helsinki flight on which, in violation of his oral contract, Gitanas had bought coach-class, not business-class, tickets. “We can drink tonight, sleep tomorrow,” he said.

Their seats were aisle and window. As Chip sat down, he recalled how Julia had ditched Gitanas. He imagined her walking quickly off the plane and then sprinting down the concourse and throwing herself into the back seat of a good old yellow cab. He felt a spasm of homesickness — terror of the other; love of the familiar — but, unlike Julia, he had no desire to bolt. He’d no sooner buckled his seat belt than he fell asleep. He awoke briefly during takeoff and went under again until the entire population of the plane, as one, lit cigarettes.

Gitanas took a computer from its case and booted up. “So Julia,” he said.

For an alarmed, sleep-clouded moment Chip thought that Gitanas was addressing him as Julia.

“My wife?” Gitanas said.

“Oh. Sure.”

“Yeah, she’s on antidepressants. This was Eden’s idea, I think. Eden kind of runs her life now, I think. You could see she didn’t want me in her office today. Didn’t want me in town! I’m inconvenient now. So, but, OK, so Julia started taking the drug, and suddenly she woke up and she didn’t want to be with men with cigarette burns anymore. That’s what she says. Enough men with cigarette burns. Time to move on. No more men with burns.” Gitanas loaded a CD into the computer’s CD drive. “She wants the flat, though. At least the divorce lawyer wants her to want it. The divorce lawyer that Eden’s paying for. Somebody changed the locks on the flat, I had to pay the super to let me in.”

Chip closed his left hand. “Cigarette burns?”

“Yeah. Oh, yeah, I got a few.” Gitanas craned his neck to see if any neighbors were listening, but all the passengers around them, except for two children with their eyes shut tight, were busy smoking. “Soviet military prison,” he said. “I’ll show you my memento of a pleasant stay there.” He peeled his red leather jacket off one arm and rolled up the sleeve of the yellow T-shirt he was wearing underneath. A poxy interlocking constellation of scar tissue extended from his armpit down the inside of his arm to his elbow. “This was my 1990,” he said. “Eight months in a Red Army barracks in the sovereign state of Lithuania.”

“You were a dissident,” Chip said.

“Yeah! Yeah! Dissident!” He worked his arm back into its sleeve. “It was horrible, great. Very tiring, but it didn’t feel tiring. The tiredness came later.”

Chip’s memories of 1990 were of Tudor dramas, interminable futile fights with Tori Timmelman, a secret unhealthy involvement with certain texts of Tori’s that illustrated the dehumanizing objectifications of pornography, and little else.

“So, I’m kind of scared to look at this,” Gitanas said. On his computer screen was a dusky monochrome image of a bed, viewed from above, with a body beneath the blankets. “The super says she’s got a boyfriend, and I retrieved some data. I had my surveillance in there from the previous owner. Motion detector, infrared, digital stills. You can look if you want. Might be interesting. Might be hot.”

Chip remembered the smoke detector on the ceiling of Julia’s bedroom. Often enough he’d stared up at it until the corners of his mouth were dry and his eyes had rolled back in his head. It had always seemed to him a strangely complicated smoke detector.

He sat up straighter in his seat. “Maybe you don’t want to look at those.”

Gitanas pointed and clicked intricately. “I’ll angle the screen. You don’t have to look.”

Thunderheads of tobacco smoke were gathering in the aisles. Chip decided that he needed to light a Muratti; but the difference between taking a drag and taking a breath proved negligible.

“What I mean,” he said, blocking the computer screen with his hand, “is maybe you want to eject the CD and not look at it.”

Gitanas was genuinely startled. “Why don’t I want to look at it?”

“Well, let’s think about why.”

“Maybe you should tell me.”

“No, well, let’s just think about it.”

For a moment the atmosphere was furiously cheerful. Gitanas considered Chip’s shoulder, his knees, and his wrist, as though deciding where to bite him. Then he ejected the CD and thrust it in Chip’s face. “Fuck you!”

“I know, I know.”

“Take it. Fuck you. I don’t want to see it again. Take it.”

Chip put the CD in his shirt pocket. He felt pretty good. He felt all right. The plane had leveled off in altitude and the noise had the steady vague white burning of dry sinuses, the color of scuffed plastic airliner windows, the taste of cold pale coffee in reusable tray-table cups. The North Atlantic night was dark and lonely, but here, on the plane, were lights in the sky. Here was sociability. It was good to be awake and to feel awakeness all around him.

“So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?” Gitanas said.

Chip showed his palm. “It’s nothing.”

“Self-inflicted. You pathetic American.”

“Different kind of prison,” Chip said.

Gary Lambert’s profitable entanglement with the Axon Corporation had begun three weeks earlier, on a Sunday afternoon that he’d spent in his new color darkroom, trying to enjoy reprinting two old photographs of his parents and, by enjoying it, to reassure himself about his mental health.

Gary had been worrying a lot about his mental health, but on that particular afternoon, as he left his big schist-sheathed house on Seminole Street and crossed his big back yard and climbed the outside stairs of his big garage, the weather in his brain was as warm and bright as the weather in northwest Philadelphia. A September sun was shining through a mix of haze and smallish, gray-keeled clouds, and to the extent that Gary was able to understand and track his neurochemistry (and he was a vice president at CenTrust Bank, not a shrink, let’s remember) his leading indicators all seemed rather healthy.

Although in general Gary applauded the modern trend toward individual self-management of retirement funds and long-distance calling plans and private-schooling options, he was less than thrilled to be given responsibility for his own personal brain chemistry, especially when certain people in his life, notably his father, refused to take any such responsibility. But Gary was nothing if not conscientious. As he entered the darkroom, he estimated that his levels of Neurofactor 3 (i.e., serotonin: a very, very important factor) were posting seven-day or even thirty-day highs, that his Factor 2 and Factor 7 levels were likewise outperforming expectations, and that his Factor 1 had rebounded from an early-morning slump related to the glass of Armagnac he’d drunk at bedtime. He had a spring in his step, an agreeable awareness of his above-average height and his late-summer suntan. His resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained. Declines led advances in key indices of paranoia (e.g., his persistent suspicion that Caroline and his two older sons were mocking him), and his seasonally adjusted assessment of life’s futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy. He was not the least bit clinically depressed.