Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“Dad, are you feeling OK?” Aaron said.

Gary wiped his chin. “Fine, Aaron, thank you. Ticken’s a little chuff. A little tough.” He coughed, his esophagus a column of flame.

“Maybe you want to go lie down,” Caroline said, as to a child.

“I think I’ll trim that hedge,” Gary said.

“You seem pretty tired,” Caroline said. “Maybe you should lie down instead.”

“Not tired, Caroline. Just got some smoke in my eyes.”

“Gary—”

“I know you’re telling everybody I’m depressed, but, as it happens, I’m not.”

“Gary.”

“Right, Aaron? Am I right? She told you I’m clinically depressed — right?”

Aaron, caught off guard, looked to Caroline, who shook her head at him slowly and significantly.

“Well? Did she?” Gary said.

Aaron lowered his eyes to his plate, blushing. The spasm of love that Gary felt then for his oldest son, his sweet honest vain blushing son, was intimately connected to the rage that was now propelling him, before he understood what was happening, away from the table. He was cursing in front of his kids. He was saying, “ Fuck this, Caroline! Fuck your whispering! I’m going to fucking go trim that fucking hedge!”

Jonah and Caleb lowered their heads, ducking as if under fire. Aaron seemed to be reading the story of his life, in particular his future, on his grease-smeared dinner plate.

Caroline spoke in the calm, low, quavering voice of the patently abused. “OK, Gary, good,” she said, “just please then let us enjoy our dinner. Please just go.”

Gary went. He stormed outside and crossed the back yard. All the foliage near the house was chalky now with outpouring indoor light, but there was still enough twilight in the western trees to make them silhouettes. In the garage he took the eight-foot stepladder down from its brackets and danced and spun with it, nearly knocking out the windshield of the Stomper before he got control. He hauled the ladder around to the front of the house, turned on lights, and came back for the electric trimmer and the hundred-foot extension cord. To keep the dirty cord from contact with his expensive linen shirt, which he belatedly realized he was still wearing, he let the cord drag behind him and get destructively tangled up in flowers. He stripped down to his T-shirt but didn’t stop to change his pants for fear of losing momentum and lying down on the dayheat-radiating lawn and listening to the crickets and the ratcheting cicadas and nodding off. Sustained physical exertion cleared his head to some extent. He mounted the ladder and lopped the lime-green lolling tops off yews, leaning out as far as he dared. Probably, finding himself unable to reach the twelve inches of hedge nearest the house, he should have turned off the clipper and come down and moved the ladder closer, but since it was a matter of twelve inches and he didn’t have infinite reserves of energy and patience, he tried to walk the ladder toward the house, to kind of swing its legs and hop with it, while continuing to grip, in his left hand, the running clipper.

The gentle blow, the almost stingless brush or bump, that he then delivered to the meaty palm part of his right thumb proved, on inspection, to have made a deep and heavily bleeding hole that in the best of all possible worlds an emergency physician would have looked at. But Gary was nothing if not conscientious. He knew he was too drunk to drive himself to Chestnut Hill Hospital, and he couldn’t ask Caroline to drive him there without raising awkward questions regarding his decision to climb a ladder and operate a power tool while intoxicated, which would collaterally entail admitting how much vodka he’d drunk before dinner and in general paint the opposite of the picture of Good Mental Health that he’d intended to create by coming out to trim the hedge. So while a swarm of skin-biting and fabriceating insects attracted by the porch lights flew into the house through the front door that Gary, as he hurried inside with his strangely cool blood pooling in the cup of both hands, had neglected to kick shut behind him, he closeted himself in the downstairs bathroom and released the blood into the sink, seeing pomegranate juice, or chocolate syrup, or dirty motor oil, in its ferric swirls. He ran cold water on the gash. From outside the unlocked bathroom door, Jonah asked if he had hurt himself. Gary assembled with his left hand an absorptive pad of toilet paper and pressed it to the wound and one-handedly applied plastic surgical tape that the blood and water immediately made unsticky. There was blood on the toilet seat, blood on the floor, blood on the door.

“Dad, bugs are coming in,” Jonah said.

“Yes, Jonah, why don’t you shut the door and then go up and take a bath. I’ll come up soon and play checkers.”

“Can we play chess instead?”

“Yes.”

“You have to give me a queen, a bishop, a horse, and a rook, though.”

“Yes, go take a bath!”

“Will you come up soon?”

“Yes!”

Gary tore fresh tape from the fanged dispenser and laughed at himself in the mirror to be sure he could still do it. Blood was soaking through the toilet paper, trickling down around his wrist, and loosening the tape. He wrapped the hand in a guest towel, and with a second guest towel, well dampened, he wiped the bathroom clean of blood. He opened the door a crack and listened to Caroline’s voice upstairs, to the dishwasher in the kitchen, to Jonah’s bathwater running. A trail of blood receded up the central hall toward the front door. Crouching and moving sideways in crab fashion, with his injured hand pressed to his belly, Gary swabbed up the blood with the guest towel. Further blood was spattered on the gray wooden floor of the front porch. Gary walked on the sides of his feet for quiet. He went to the kitchen for a bucket and a mop, and there, in the kitchen, was the liquor cabinet.

Well, he opened it. By holding the vodka bottle in his right armpit he was able to unscrew the cap with his left hand. And as he was raising the bottle, as he was tilting his head to make a late small withdrawal from the rather tiny balance that remained, his gaze drifted over the top of the cabinet door and he saw the camera.

The camera was the size of a deck of cards. It was mounted on an altazimuth bracket above the back door. Its casing was of brushed aluminum. It had a purplish gleam in its eye.

Gary returned the bottle to the cabinet, moved to the sink, and ran water in a bucket. The camera swept thirty degrees to follow him.

He wanted to rip the camera off the ceiling, and, failing that, he wanted to go upstairs and explain to Caleb the dubious morality of spying, and, failing that, he at least wanted to know how long the camera had been in place; but since he had something to hide now, any action he took against the camera, any objection he made to its presence in his kitchen, was bound to strike Caleb as self-serving.

He dropped the bloody, dusty guest towel in the bucket and approached the back door. The camera reared up in its bracket to keep him centered in its field. He stood directly below it and looked into its eye. He shook his head and mouthed the words No, Caleb . Naturally, the camera made no response. Gary realized, now, that the room was probably miked for sound as well. He could speak to Caleb directly, but he was afraid that if he looked up into Caleb’s proxy eye and heard his own voice and let it be heard in Caleb’s room, the result would be an intolerably strong upsurge in the reality of what was happening. He therefore shook his head again and made a sweeping motion with his left hand, a film director’s Cut! Then he took the bucket from the sink and swabbed the front porch.

Because he was drunk, the problem of the camera and Caleb’s witnessing of his injury and his furtive involvement with the liquor cabinet didn’t stay in Gary’s head as an ensemble of conscious thoughts and anxieties but turned in on itself and became a kind of physical presence inside him, a hard tumorous mass descending through his stomach and coming to rest in his lower gut. The problem wasn’t going anywhere, of course. But, for the moment, it was impervious to thought.