Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

He might have sat there obsessing indefinitely, marshaling evidence against his father, had he not heard a rustling outside the study door. He jumped to his feet and pulled the door open.

Caleb was cross-legged on the floor, studying his catalogue. “Can I talk to you now?”

“Were you sitting out here listening to me?”

“No,” Caleb said. “You said we could talk when you were done. I had a question. I was wondering what room I could put under surveillance.”

Even upside down Gary could see that the prices for the equipment in Caleb’s catalogue — items with brushed-aluminum cases, color LCD screens — were three-and four-figure.

“It’s my new hobby,” Caleb said. “I want to put a room under surveillance. Mom says I can do the kitchen if it’s OK with you.”

“You want to put the kitchen under surveillance as a hobby?”

“Yeah!”

Gary shook his head. He’d had many hobbies when he was a boy, and for a long time it had pained him that his own boys seemed to have none at all. Eventually Caleb had figured out that if he used the word “hobby,” Gary wobby,” Garuld green-light expenditures he otherwise might have forbidden Caroline to make. Thus Caleb’s hobby had been photography until Caroline had bought him an autofocus camera, an SLR with a better zoom telephoto lens than Gary’s own, and a digital point-and-shoot camera. His hobby had been computers until Caroline had bought him a palmtop and a notebook. But now Caleb was nearly twelve, and Gary had been around the block one too many times. His guard was up regarding hobbies. He’d extracted from Caroline a promise not to buy Caleb more equipment of any kind without consulting with him first.

“Surveillance is not a hobby,” he said.

“Dad, yes it is! Mom was the one who suggested it. She said I could start with the kitchen.”

It seemed to Gary another Warning Sign of depression that his thought was: The liquor cabinet is in the kitchen .

“Better let me talk about this with Mom, all right?”

“But the store’s only open till six,” Caleb said.

“You can wait a few days. Don’t tell me you can’t.”

“But I’ve been waiting all afternoon. You said you’d talk to me, and now it’s almost night.”

That it was almost night gave Gary clear title to a drink. The liquor cabinet was in the kitchen. He took a step in its direction. “What equipment exactly are we talking about?”

“Just a camera and a microphone and servo controls.” Caleb thrust the catalogue at Gary. “See, I don’t even need the expensive kind. This one’s just six fifty. Mom said it was OK.”

Time and again Gary had the feeling that there was something disagreeable that his family wanted to forget, something only he insisted on remembering; something requiring only his nod, his go-ahead, to be forgotten. This feeling, too, was a Warning Sign.

“Caleb,” he said, “this sounds like something you’re going to get bored with very soon. It sounds expensive and like you won’t stay interested.”

“No! No!” Caleb said, anguished. “I’m totally interested. Dad, it’s a hobby .”

“You’ve gotten bored, though, pretty quickly with some of the other things we’ve gotten you. Things you also said you were ‘very interested in’ at the time.”

“This is different,” Caleb pleaded. “This time I’m really, truly interested.”

Clearly the boy was prepared to spend any amount of devalued verbal currency to buy his father’s acquiescence.

“Do you see what I’m saying, though?” Gary said. “Do you see the pattern? That things look one way before you buy them and another way afterward? Your feelings change after you buy things. Do you see that?”

Caleb opened his mouth, but before he could utter another plea or complaint, a craftiness flickered in his face.

“I guess,” he said with seeming humility. “I guess I see that.”

“Well, do you think it’s going to happen with this new equipment?” Gary said.

Caleb gave every appearance of giving the question serious thought. “I think this is different,” he said finally.

“Well, OK,” Gary said. “But I want you to remember we had this conversation. I don’t want to see this become just another expensive toy you play with for a week or two and then neglect. You’re going to be a teenager pretty soon, and I want to start seeing a little longer attention span—”

“Gary, that isn’t fair!” Caroline said hotly. She was hobbling from the doorway of the master bedroom, one shoulder hunched and her hand behind her back, applying pressure to the soothing gelpack.

“Hello, Caroline. Didn’t realize you were listening.”

“Caleb is not neglecting things.”

“Right, I’m not,” Caleb said.

“What you don’t understand,” Caroline told Gary, “is that everything’s getting used in this new hobby. That’s what’s so brilliant about it. He’s figured out a way to use all that equipment together in one—”

“Good, well, I’m glad to hear it.”

“He does something creative and you make him feel guilty .”

Once, when Gary had wondered aloud if giving Caleb so many gadgets might be stunting his imagination, Caroline had all but accused him of slandering his son. Among her favorite parenting books was The Technological Imagination: What Today’s Children Have to Teach Their Parents , in which Nancy Claymore, Ph.D., contrasting the “tired paradigm” of Gifted Child as Socially Isolated Genius with the “wired paradigm” of Gifted Child as Creatively Connected Consumer, argued that electronic toys would soon be so cheap and widespread that a child’s imagination would no longer be exercised in crayon drawings and made-up stories but in the synthesis and exploitation of existing technologies — an idea that Gary found both persuasive and depressing. When he was a boy not much younger than Caleb, his hobby had been building models with Popsicle sticks.

“Does this mean we can go to the store now?” Caleb said.

“No, Caleb, not tonight, it’s almost six,” Caroline said.

Caleb stamped his foot. “This always happens! I wait and wait, and then it gets too late.”

“We’ll rent a movie,” Caroline said. “We’ll get whatever movie you want.”

“I don’t want a movie. I want to do surveillance.”

“It’s not going to happen,” Gary said. “So start dealing with it.”

Caleb went to his room and slammed the door. Gary followed and flung it open. “That’s enough now,” he said. “We don’t slam doors in this house.”

“You slam doors!”

“I don’t want to hear another word from you.”

“You slam doors!”

“Do you want to spend the whole week in your room?”

Caleb replied by crossing his eyes and sucking his lips into his mouth: not another word.

Gary let his gaze drift into corners of the boy’s room that he ordinarily took care not to look at. Neglected in piles, like the loot in a thief’s apartment, was new photographic and computer and video equipment with an aggregate retail value possibly exceeding the annual salary of Gary’s secretary at CenTrust. Such a riot of luxury in the lair of an eleven-year-old! Various chemicals that molecular floodgates had been holding back all afternoon burst loose and flooded Gary’s neural pathways. A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus: a “sense” that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn’t save you.

The light in the windows was failing rapidly.