Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“I need you to take responsibility for your mental health.”

“Jesus, Caroline. Wrong, wrong, wrong answer.”

Meanwhile Discordia, the goddess of marital strife, had pulled strings with the airline industry. There appeared in the Inquirer a full-page ad for a slasheroo sale on Midland Airlines tickets, including a $198 round-trip fare between Philly and St. Jude. Only four dates in late December were blacked out; by staying just one extra day at Christmastime Gary could take the whole family to and from St. Jude (nonstop!) for under a thousand bucks. He had his travel agent hold five tickets for him, renewing the option daily. Finally, on Friday morning, with the sale due to end at midnight, he’d announced to Caroline that he was buying tickets. In accordance with her strict no-Christmas policy, Caroline turned to Aaron and asked him if he’d studied for his Spanish test. From his office at Cen Trust, in a spirit of trench warfare, Gary called his travel agent and authorized the purchase. Then he called his doctor and requested a sleep aid, a short-term prescription, something a little more potent than the nonprescription stuff. Dr. Pierce replied that a sleep aid didn’t sound like such a good idea. Caroline, Pierce said, had mentioned that Gary might be depressed, and a sleep aid certainly wasn’t going to help with that . Maybe, instead, Gary would like to come in and talk about how he was feeling?

For a moment, after he hung up, Gary let himself imagine being divorced. But three glowing and idealized mental portraits of his children, shadowed by a batlike horde of fears regarding finances, chased the notion from his head.

At a dinner party on Saturday he’d rifled the medicine chest of his friends Drew and Jamie, hoping to find a bottle of something in the Valium class, but no such luck.

Yesterday Denise had called him and insisted, with ominous steeliness, that he have lunch with her. She said she’d seen Enid and Alfred in New York on Saturday. She said that Chip and his girlfriend had flaked on her and vanished.

Gary, lying awake last night, had wondered if stunts like this were what Caroline meant when she described Chip as a man “honest enough” to say what he could and couldn’t “tolerate.”

“The cells are genetically reprogrammed to release nerve-growth factor only when locally activated!” Earl Eberle’s video facsimile said cheerfully.

A fetching young model, her skull in an Eberle Helmet, was strapped into a machine that retrained her brain to instruct her legs to walk.

A model wearing a wintry look, a look of misanthropy and sourness, pushed up the corners of her mouth with her fingers while magnified cutaway animation revealed, within her brain, the flowering of dendrites, the forging of new synaptic links. In a moment she was able to smile, tentatively, without using her fingers. In another moment, her smile was dazzling. CORECKTALL: IT’S THE FUTURE!

“The Axon Corporation is fortunate to hold five U.S. patents protecting this powerful platform technology,” Earl Eberle told the camera. “These patents, and eight others that are pending, form an insurmountable fire wall protecting the hundred-fifty million dollars that we have spent to date on research and development. Axon is the recognized world leader in this field. We have a six-year track record of positive cash flows and a revenue stream that we expect to top eighty million dollars in the coming year. Potential investors may rest assured that every penny of every dollar we raise on December 15 will be spent on developing this marvelous and potentially historic product.

“Corecktall: It’s the Future!” Eberle said.

“It’s the Future!” intoned the pitchman.

“It’s the Future!” chorused the crowd of really good-looking students in nerdy glasses.

“I liked the past,” Denise said, uptilting her complimentary half — liter of imported water.

In Gary’s opinion, too many people were breathing the air in Ballroom B. A ventilation problem somehow. As the lights came up to full strength, silent wait-personnel fanned in among the tables bearing luncheon entrées under chafing lids.

“My first guess is salmon,” Denise said. “No, my only guess is salmon.”

Rising from talk-show chairs and moving to the front of the dais now were three figures who reminded Gary, oddly, of his honeymoon in Italy. He and Caroline had visited a cathedral somewhere in Tuscany, maybe Siena, in the museum of which were big medieval statues of saints that had once stood on the roof of the cathedral, each with an arm raised like a waving presidential candidate and each wearing a saintly grin of certainty .

The eldest of the three beatific greeters, a pink-faced man with rimless glasses, extended a hand as if to bless the crowd.

“All right!” he said. “All right, everybody! My name is Joe Prager, I’m the lead deal attorney at Bragg Knuter. To my left is Merilee Finch, CEO of Axon, to my right Daffy Anderson, the all-important deal manager at Hevy and Hodapp. We were hoping Curly himself might deign to join us today, but he is the man of the hour, he is being interviewed by CNN as we speak. So let me do a little caveating here, wink-wink-wink, and then turn the floor over to Daffy and Merilee.”

“Yo, Kelsey, talk to me, baby, talk to me,” Gary’s young neighbor shouted.

“Caveat A,” Prager said, “is please everyone take note that I’m stressing that Curly’s results are extremely preliminary. This is all Phase One research, folks. Anybody not hear me? Anybody in the back?” Prager craned his neck and waved both arms at the most distant tables, including Gary’s. “Full disclosure: this is Phase One research. Axon does not yet have, in no way is it representing that it has, FDA approval for Phase Two testing. And what comes after Phase Two? Phase Three! And after Phase Three? A multistage review process that can delay the product launch by as much as three more years. Folks, hello, we are dealing with clinical results that are extremely interesting but extremely preliminary . So caveat emptor. All righty? Wink wink wink. All righty?”

Prager was struggling to keep his face straight. Merilee Finch and Daffy Anderson were sucking on smiles as if they, too, had guilty secrets or religion.

“Caveat B,” Prager said. “An inspirational video presentation is not a prospectus. Daffy’s representations here today, likewise Merilee’s representations, are impromptu and, again, not a prospectus …”

The waitstaff descended on Gary’s table and gave him salmon on a bed of lentils. Denise waved away her entrée.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Gary whispered.

She shook her head.

“Denise. Really.” He felt inexplicably wounded. “You can surely have a couple of bites with me.”

Denise looked him square in the face with an unreadable expression. “I’m a little sick to my stomach.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No. I just don’t want to eat.”

Denise at thirty-two was still beautiful, but long hours at the stove had begun to cook her youthful skin into a kind of terra-cotta mask that made Gary a little more anxious each time he saw her. She was his baby sister, after all. Her years of fertility and marriageability were passing with a swiftness to which he was attuned and she, he suspected, was not. Her career seemed to him an evil spell under the influence of which she worked sixteen-hour days and had no social life. Gary was afraid — he claimed, as her oldest brother, the right to be afraid — that by the time Denise awakened from this spell she would be too old to start a family.

He ate his salmon quickly while she drank her imported water.

On the dais the CEO of Axon, a fortyish blonde with the intelligent pugnacity of a college dean, was talking about side effects. “Apart from headaches and nausea, which are to be expected,” said Merilee Finch, “we haven’t tracked anything yet. Remember, too, that our platform technology has been widely used for several years now, with no significant deleterious effects reported.” Finch pointed into the ballroom. “Yes, gray Armani?”