Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“Originally conceived as a therapy for sufferers of PD and AD and other degenerative neurological diseases,” Eberle said, “Corecktall has proved so powerful and versatile that its promise extends not only to therapy but to an outright cure , and to a cure not only of these terrible degenerative afflictions but also of a host of ailments typically considered psychiatric or even psychological. Simply put, Corecktall offers for the first time the possibility of renewing and improving the hard wiring of an adult human brain.”

“Ew,” Denise said, wrinkling her nose.

Gary by now was quite familiar with the Corecktall Process. He’d scrutinized Axon’s red-herring prospectus and read every analysis of the company he could find on the Internet and through the private services that CenTrust subscribed to. Bearish analysts, mindful of recent gut-wrenching corrections in the biotech sector, were cautioning against investing in an untested medical technology that was at least six years from market. Certainly a bank like CenTrust, with its fiduciary duty to be conservative, wasn’t going to touch this IPO. But Axon’s fundamentals were a lot healthier than those of most biotech startups, and to Gary the fact that the company had bothered to buy his father’s patent at such an early stage in Corecktall’s development was a sign of great corporate confidence. He saw an opportunity here to make some money and avenge Axon’s screwing of his father and, more generally, be bold where Alfred had been timid .

It happened that in June, as the first dominoes of the overseas currency crises were toppling, Gary had pulled most of his playing-around money out of Euro and Far Eastern growth funds. This money was available now for investment in Axon; and since the IPO was still three months away, and since the big sales push for it had not begun, and since the red herring contained such dubieties as give non-insiders pause, Gary should have had no trouble getting a commitment for five thousand shares. But trouble was pretty much all he’d had.

His own (discount) broker, who had barely heard of Axon, belatedly did his homework and called Gary back with the news that his firm’s allocation was a token 2,500 shares. Normally a brokerage wouldn’t commit more than five percent of its allocation to a single customer this early in the game, but since Gary had been the first to call, his man was willing to set aside 500 shares. Gary pushed for more, but the sad fact was that he was not a big-time customer. He typically invested in multiples of a hundred, and to save on commissions he executed smaller trades himself online.

Now, Caroline was a big investor. With Gary’s guidance she often bought in multiples of a thousand. Her broker worked for the largest house in Philadelphia, and there was no doubt that 4,500 shares of Axon’s new issue could be found for a truly valued customer; this was how the game was played. Unfortunately, since the Sunday afternoon when she’d hurt her back, Gary and Caroline had been as close to not speaking as a couple could be and still function as parents. Gary was keen to get his full five thousand shares of Axon, but he refused to sacrifice his principles and crawl back to his wife and beg her to invest for him.

So instead he’d phoned his large-cap contact at Hevy & Hodapp, a man named Pudge Portleigh, and asked to be put down for five thousand shares of the offering on his own account. Over the years, in his fiduciary role at CenTrust, Gary had bought a lot of stock from Portleigh, including some certifiable turkeys. Gary hinted now to Portleigh that CenTrust might give him an even larger portion of its business in the future. But Portleigh, with weird hedginess, had agreed only to pass along Gary’s request to Daffy Anderson, who was Hevy & Hodapp’s deal manager for the IPO.

There had then ensued two maddening weeks during which Pudge Portleigh failed to call Gary back and confirm an allocation. Online buzz about Axon was building from a whisper to a roar. Two related major papers by Earl Eberle’s team—“Reverse-Tomographic Stimulation of Synapto-genesis in Selected Neural Pathways” and “Transitory Positive Reinforcement in Dopamine-Deprived Limbic Circuits: Recent Clinical Progress”—appeared in Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine within days of each other. The two papers received heavy coverage in the financial press, including a front-page notice in the Wall Street Journal . Analyst after analyst began to flash strong Buys for Axon, and still Portleigh did not return Gary’s messages, and Gary could feel the advantages of his insiderly head start disappearing hour by hour…

1. HAVE A COCKTAIL!

“… Of ferrocitrates and ferroacetates specially formulated to cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate interstitially!”

Said the unseen pitchman whose voice had joined Earl Eberle’s on the video sound track.

“We also stir in a mild, non-habit-forming sedative and a. generous squirt of Hazelnut Moccacino syrup, courtesy of the country’s most popular chain of coffee bars!”

A female extra from the earlier lecture scene, a girl with whose neurological functions there was clearly nothing in the slightest wrong, drank with great relish and sexily pulsing throat muscles a tall, frosty glass of Corecktall electrolytes.

“What was Dad’s patent?” Denise whispered to Gary. “Ferroacetate gel something-something?”

Gary nodded grimly. “Electropolymerization.”

From his correspondence files at home, which contained, among other things, every letter he’d ever received from either of his parents, Gary had dug out an old copy of Alfred’s patent. He wasn’t sure he’d ever really looked at it, so impressed was he now by the old man’s clear account of “electrical anisotropy” in “certain ferro-organic gels” and his proposal that these gels be used to “minutely image” living human tissues and create “direct electrical contact” with “fine morphologic structures.” Comparing the wording of the patent with the description of Corecktall at Axon’s newly renovated Web site, Gary was struck by the depth of similarity. Evidently Alfred’s five-thousand-dollar process was at the center of a process for which Axon now hoped to raise upward of $200 million: as if a man didn’t have enough in his life to lie awake at night and fume about!

“Yo, Kelsey, yuh, Kelsey, get me twelve thousand Exxon at one-oh-four max,” the young man sitting to Gary’s left said suddenly and too loudly. The kid had a palmtop stock-quoter, a wire in his ear, and the schizophrenic eyes of the cellularly occupied. “Twelve thousand Exxon, upper limit one zero four,” he said.

Exxon, Axon, better be careful, Gary thought. 2. PUT ON A HEADSET & TURN ON THE RADIO!

“You won’t hear a thing — not unless your dental fillings pick up ball games on the AM dial,” the pitchman joked as the smiling girl lowered onto her camera-friendly head a metal dome reminiscent of a hair dryer, “but radio waves are penetrating the innermost recesses of your skull. Imagine a kind of global positioning system for the brain: RF radiation pinpointing and selectively stimulating the neural pathways associated with particular skills. Like signing your name. Climbing stairs. Remembering your anniversary. Thinking positively! Clinically tested at scores of hospitals across America, Dr. Eberle’s reverse-tomographic methods have now been further refined to make this stage of the Corecktall process as simple and painless as a visit to your hairstylist.”

“Until recently,” Eberle broke in (he and his chair still drifting through a sea of simulated blood and gray matter), “my process required overnight hospitalization and the physical screwing of a calibrated steel ring into the patient’s cranium. Many patients found this inconvenient; some also experienced discomfort. Now, however, enormous increases in computing power have made possible a process that is instantaneously self-correcting as to the location of the individual neural pathways under stimulation …”