Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“Jesus, Caroline,” he said, “we know your back hurts, we know you’re miserable, but if you can’t even sit up straight at the table—”

Without a word she slid off her chair, hobbled to the sink with her plate, scraped her dinner into the garbage grinder, and hobbled upstairs. Caleb and Aaron excused themselves and ground up their own dinners and followed her. Altogether maybe thirty dollars’ worth of meat went into the sewer, but Gary, trying to keep his Factor 3 levels off the floor, succeeded pretty well in forgetting about the animals that had died for this purpose. He sat in the leaden twilight of his buzz, ate without tasting, and listened to Jonah’s impervious bright chatter.

“This is an excellent skirt steak, Dad, and I would love another piece of that grilled zucchini, please.”

From the entertainment room upstairs came the woofing of prime time. Gary felt briefly sorry for Aaron and Caleb. It was a burden to have a mother need you so extremely, to be responsible for her bliss, Gary knew this. He also understood that Caroline was more alone in the world than he was. Her father had been a handsome, charismatic anthropologist who died in a plane crash in Mali when she was eleven. Her father’s parents, old Quakers who intermittently said “thee,” had left her half of their estate, including a well-regarded Andrew Wyeth, three Winslow Homer watercolors, and forty sylvan acres near Kennett Square for which a developer had paid an incredible sum. Caroline’s mother, now seventy-six and in scarily good health, lived with her second husband in Laguna Beach and was a major benefactor of the California Democratic Party; she came east every April and bragged about not being “one of those old women” who were obsessed with their grandkids. Caroline’s only sibling, a brother named Philip, was a patronizing, pocket-protected bachelor and solid-state physicist on whom her mother doted somewhat creepily. Gary hadn’t known this kind of family in St. Jude. From the start, he’d loved and pitied Caroline for the misfortune and neglect she’d suffered growing up. He’d undertaken to provide a better family for her.

But after dinner, while he and Jonah were loading the dishwasher, he began to hear female laughter upstairs, actual loud laughter, and he decided that Caroline was doing something very bad to him. He was tempted to go up and crash the party. As the buzzing of the gin faded from his head, however, the clanging of an earlier anxiety was becoming audible. An Axon-related anxiety.

He wondered why a small company with a highly experimental process was bothering to offer his father money.

That the letter to Alfred had come from Bragg Knuter & Speigh, a firm that often worked closely with investment bankers, suggested due diligence —a dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s on the eve of something big.

“Do you want to go and be with your brothers?” Gary said to Jonah. “It sounds like fun up there.”

“No, thank you,” Jonah said. “I’m going to read the next Narnia book, and I thought I might go to the basement, where it’s quiet. Will you come with me?”

The old playroom in the basement, still dehumidified and carpeted and pine-paneled, still nice , was afflicted with the necrosis of clutter that sooner or later kills a living space: stereo boxes, geometric Styrofoam packing solids, outdated ski and beach gear in random drifts. Aaron and Caleb’s old toys were in five big bins and a dozen smaller bins. Nobody but Jonah ever touched them, and in the face of such a glut even Jonah, alone or with a play-date pal, took an essentially archaeological approach. He might devote an afternoon to unpacking half of one large bin, patiently sorting action figures and related props, vehicles, and model buildings by scale and manufacturer (toys that matched nothing he flung behind the sofa), but he rarely reached the bottom of even one bin before his play date ended or dinner was served and he reburied everything he’d excavated, and so the toys whose profusion ought to have been a seven-year-old’s heaven went basically unplayed with, another lesson in ANHEDONIA for Gary to ignore as well as he could.

While Jonah settled down to read, Gary booted up Caleb’s “old” laptop and went online. He typed the words axon and schwenksville in the Searchfield. One of the two resulting site matches was the Axon Corporation Home Page, but this site, when Gary tried to reach it, turned out to be UNDER RENOVATION. The other match led him to a deeply nested page in the Web site of Westportfolio Biofunds, whose listing of Privately Held Corporations to Watch was a cyberbackwater of drab graphics and misspellings. The Axon page had last been updated a year earlier.

Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA, a Limited Liability Corporation registered in the state of Delaware, holds wordwide rights to the Eberle Process of Directed Neurochemotaxis. The Eberle Process is protected by United States Patents 5,101,239, 5,101,599, 5,103,628, 5,103,629, and 5,105,996,for which the Axon Corporation is the sole and exclusivegrantor of license. Axon engages in refinement, marketing and sales of the Eberle Process to hospitals andclinics worldwide, and in research and development ofrelated technologies. Its founder and chairman is Dr.Earl H. Eberle, former Distinguished Lecturer in AppliedNeurobiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The Eberle Process of Directed Neurochemotaxis, also known as Eberle Reverse-Tomographic Chemotherapy, hav4 revolutionized the treatment of inoperable neuro- blastomas and a variety of other morphologic defects of the brain.

The Eberle Process utilizes computer-orchestrated RF radiation to direct powerful carcinocdies, mutagens, and certain nonspecific toxins to diseased cerebral tissues and locally activate them without harm to surrounding healthy tissue.

At present, due to limitations in computing power, the Eberle Process requires sedating and immobilizing the patient in an Eberle Cylinder for up to thirty-six hours while minutely orchestrated fields direct therapeutically active ligands and their inert “piggyback” carriers to thesight of disase. The next generation of Eberle Cylinders isexpected to reduce maximum total treatment time to lesstwo hours.

The Eberle Process received full FDA approval as a “safe and effective” therapy in October 1996. Widespread clincial use throughout the world in the years since then, as detailed in the numerous publications listed below, hav4 only confirmed its safety and effectiveness.

Gary’s hopes of extracting quick megabucks from Axon were withering in the absence of online hype. Feeling a bit e-weary, fighting an e-headache, he ran a word search for earl eberle. The several hundred matches included articles with titles like NEW HOPE FOR NEUROBLASTOMA and A GIANT LEAP FORWARD AND THIS CURE REALLY MAY BE A MIRACLE. Eberle and collaborators were also represented in professional journals with “Remote Computer-Aided Stimulation of Receptor Sites 14, 16A and 21: A Practical Demonstration,” “Four Low-Toxicity Ferroacetate Complexes That Cross the BBB,” “In-Vitro RF Stimulation of Colloidal Microtubules,” and a dozen other papers. The reference that most interested Gary, however, had appeared in Forbes ASAP six months earlier:

Some of these developments, such as the Fogarty balloon catheter and Lasik corneal surgery, are cash cows for their respective corporate patent holders. thers, with esoteric names like the Eberle Process of Directed Neurochemotaxis, enrich their inventors the old-fashioned way: one man, one fortune. The Eberle Process, which as late as 1996 lacked regulatory approval but today is recognized as the gold standard for the treatment of a large class of cerebral tumors and lesions, is estimated to net its inventor, Johns Hopkins neurobiologist Earl H. (“Curly”) Eberle, as much as $40 million annually in licensing fees and other revenues worldwide.