Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“It was a hundred-dollar hand-carved—”

“I don’t care if it’s a thousand dollars! Since when do you punish him , your own son , for your mother’s craziness? It’s like you’re suddenly trying to make us act like it’s 1964 and we’re all living in Peoria. ‘Clean your plate!’ ‘Wear a necktie!’ ‘No TV tonight!’ And you wonder why we’re fighting! You wonder why Aaron rolls his eyes when your mom walks in the room! It’s like you’re embarrassed to let her see us. It’s like, for as long as she’s here, you’re trying to pretend we live some way that she approves of. But I’m telling you, Gary, we have nothing to be ashamed of. Your mother’s the one who should be embarrassed. She follows me around the kitchen scrutinizing me, like, as if I roast a turkey every week, and if I turn my back for one second she’s going to pour a quart of oil into whatever I’m making, and as soon as I leave the room she’s going to root through the trash like some fucking Food Police, she’s going to take food from the trash and feed it to my children —”

“The potato was in the sink, not the trash, Caroline.”

“And you defend her! She goes outside to the trash barrels to see what other dirt she can dig up, and disapprove of, and she’s asking me, literally every ten minutes, How’s your back? How’s your back? How’s your back? Is your back any better? How’d you hurt it? Is your back any better? How’s your back? She goes looking for things to disapprove of, and then she tries to tell my children how to dress for dinner in my house, and you don’t back me up! You don’t back me up, Gary. You start apologizing, and I don’t get it, but I’m not doing it again. Basically, I think your brother’s got the right idea. Here’s a sweet, smart, funny man who’s honest enough to say what he can and can’t tolerate in the way of get-togethers. And your mother acts like he’s this huge embarrassment and failure! Well, you wanted the truth. The truth is I cannot stand another Christmas like that. If we absolutely have to see your parents, we’re doing it on our own turf. Just like you promised we always would.”

A pillow of blue blackness lay on Gary’s brain. He’d reached the point on the post-martini evening downslope where a sense of complication weighed on his cheeks, his forehead, his eyelids, his mouth. He understood how much his mother infuriated Caroline, and at the same time he found fault with almost everything that Caroline had said. The rather beautiful wooden reindeer, for example, had been stored in a well-marked box; Caleb had broken two of its legs and hammered a roofing nail through its skull; Enid had taken an uneaten baked potato from the sink and sliced it and fried it for Jonah; and Caroline hadn’t bothered to wait until her in-laws had left town before depositing in a trash barrel the pink polyester bathrobe that Enid had given her for Christmas.

“When I said I wanted the truth,” he said, not opening his eyes, “I meant I saw you limping before you ran inside.”

“Oh, my God,” Caroline said.

“My mother didn’t hurt your back. You hurt your back.”

“Please, Gary. Do me a favor and call Dr. Pierce.”

“Admit that you’re lying, and I’ll talk about anything you want. But nothing’s going to change until you admit that.”

“I don’t even recognize your voice.”

“Five days in St. Jude. You can’t do that for a woman who, like you say, has nothing else in her life?”

“Please come back to me.”

A jolt of rage forced Gary’s eyes open. He kicked the sheet aside and jumped out of bed. “This is a marriage-ender! I can’t believe it!”

“Gary, please—”

“We’re going to split up over a trip to St. Jude!”

And then a visionary in a warm-up jacket was lecturing to pretty college students. Behind the visionary, in a pixilated middle distance, were sterilizers and chromatography cartridges and tissue stains in weak solution, long-necked medicoscientific faucets, pinups of spread-eagled chromosomes, and diagrams of tuna-red brains sliced up like sashimi. The visionary was Earl “Curly” Eberle, a small-mouthed fifty-year-old in dime-store glasses, whom the creators of the Axon Corporation’s promotional video had done their best to make glamorous. The camera work was nervous, the lab floor pitched and lurched. Blurry zooms zeroed in on female student faces aglow with fascination. Curiously obsessive attention was paid to the back of the visionary head (it was indeed curly).

“Of course, chemistry, too, even brain chemistry,” Eberle was saying, “is basically just manipulation of electrons in their shells. But compare this, if you will, to an electronics that consists of little two-and three-pole switches. The diode, the transistor. The brain, by contrast, has several dozen kinds of switches. The neuron either fires or it doesn’t; but this decision is regulated by receptor sites that often have shades of offness and on-ness between plain Off and plain On. Even if you could build an artificial neuron out of molecular transistors, the conventional wisdom is that you can still never translate all that chemistry into the language of yes/no without running out of space. If we conservatively estimate twenty neuroactive ligands, of which as many as eight can operate simultaneously, and each of these eight switches has five different settings — not to bore you with the combinatorics, but unless you’re living in a world of Mr. Potato Heads, you’re going to be a pretty funny-looking android.”

Close-up of a turnip-headed male student laughing.

“Now, these are facts so basic,” Eberle said, “that we ordinarily wouldn’t even bother spelling them out. It’s just the way things are. The only workable connection we have with the electrophysiology of cognition and volition is chemical. That’s the received wisdom, part of the gospel of our science. Nobody in their right mind would try to connect the world of neurons with the world of printed circuits.”

Eberle paused dramatically.

“Nobody, that is, but the Axon Corporation.”

Ripples of buzz crossed the sea of institutional investors who’d come to Ballroom Β of the Four Seasons Hotel, in central Philadelphia, for the road show promoting Axon’s initial public offering. A giant video screen had been set up on the dais. On each of the twenty round tables in the semi-dark ballroom were platters of satay and sushi appetizers with the appropriate dipping sauces.

Gary was sitting with his sister, Denise, at a table near the door. He had hopes of transacting business at this road show and he would rather have come alone, but Denise had insisted on having lunch, today being Monday and Monday being her one day off, and had invited herself along. Gary had figured that she would find political or moral or aesthetic reasons to deplore the proceedings, and, sure enough, she was watching the video with her eyes narrowed in suspicion and her arms crossed tightly. She was wearing a yellow shift with a red floral print, black sandals, and a pair of Trotskyish round plastic glasses; but what really set her apart from the other women in Ballroom Β was the bareness of her legs. Nobody who dealt in money did not wear stockings.

“Corecktall,” said the cutout image of Curly Eberle, whose young audience had been digitally pureed into a uniform backdrop of tuna-red brain matter, “is a revolutionary neurobiological therapy!”

Eberle was seated on an ergonomic desk chair in which, it now developed, he could float and swerve vertiginously through a graphical space representing the inner-sea world of the intracranium. Kelpy ganglia and squidlike neurons and eellike capillaries began to flash by.