Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

As if sustained and too-direct contact with time’s raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.

As if too-intimate knowledge of any interior were necessarily harmful knowledge. Were knowledge that could never be washed off.

(How weary, how worn, a house lived in to excess.)

Chipper heard things and saw things but they were all in his head. After three hours, the objects surrounding him were as drained of flavor as old bubble gum. His mental states were strong by comparison and overwhelmed them. It would have taken an effort of will, a reawakening, to summon the term “place mat” and apply it to the visual field that he had observed so intensely that its reality had dissolved in the observing, or to apply the word “furnace” to the rustle in the ducts which in its recurrence had assumed the character of an emotional state or an actor in his imagination, an embodiment of Evil Time. The faint fluctuations in the light as someone ironed and someone played and someone experimented and the refrigerator cycled on and off had been part of the dream. This changefulness, though barely noticeable, had been a torment. But it had stopped now.

Now only Alfred remained in the basement. He probed a gel of ferroacetates with the electrodes of an ammeter.

A late frontier in metallurgy: custom-formation of metals at room temperature. The Grail was a substance which could be poured or molded but which after treatment (perhaps with an electrical current) had steel’s superior strength and conductivity and resistance to fatigue. A substance easy like plastic and hard like metal.

The problem was urgent. A cultural war was being waged, and the forces of plastic were winning. Alfred had seen jam and jelly jars with plastic lids. Cars with plastic roofs.

Unfortunately, metal in its free state — a nice steel stake or a solid brass candlestick — represented a high level of order, and Nature was slatternly and preferred disorder. The crumble of rust. The promiscuity of molecules in solution. The chaos of warm things. States of disorder were vastly more likely to arise spontaneously than were cubes of perfect iron. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, much work was required to resist this tyranny of the probable — to force the atoms of a metal to behave themselves.

Alfred was sure that electricity was equal to this work. The current that came through the grid amounted to a borrowing of order from a distance. At power plants an organized piece of coal became a flatulence of useless warm gases; an elevated and self-possessed reservoir of water became entropic runoff wandering toward a delta. Such sacrifices of order produced the useful segregation of electrical charges that he put to work at home.

He was seeking a material that could, in effect, electroplate itself. He was growing crystals in unusual materials in the presence of electric currents.

It wasn’t hard science but the brute probabilism of trial and error, a groping for accidents that he might profit from. One college classmate of his had already made his first million with the results of a chance discovery.

That he might someday not have to worry about money: it was a dream identical to the dream of being comforted by a woman, truly comforted, when the misery overcame him.

The dream of radical transformation: of one day waking up and finding himself a wholly different (more confident, more serene) kind of person, of escaping that prison of the given, of feeling divinely capable.

He had clays and gels of silicate. He had silicone putties. He had slushy ferric salts succumbing to their own deliquescence. Ambivalent acetylacetonates and tetracarbonyls with low melting points. A chunk of gallium the size of a damson plum.

The head chemist at the Midland Pacific, a Swiss Ph.D. bored into melancholy by a million measurements of engine-oil viscosity and Brinell hardness, kept Alfred in supplies. Their superiors were aware of the arrangement — Alfred would never have risked getting caught in something underhanded — and it was informally understood that if he ever came up with a patentable process, the Midpac would get a share of any proceeds.

Tonight something unusual was happening in the ferro-acetate gel. His conductivity readings varied wildly, depending on where exactly he stuck the ammeter’s probe. Thinking the probe might be dirty, he switched to a narrow needle with which he again poked the gel. He got a reading of no conductivity at all. Then he stuck the gel in a different place and got a high reading.

What was going on?

The question absorbed and comforted him and held the taskmaster at bay until, at ten o’clock, he extinguished the microscope’s illuminator and wrote in his notebook: STAIN BLUE CHROMATE 2 %. VERY VERY INTERESTING.

The moment he stepped from the lab, exhaustion hammered him. He fumbled to secure the lock, his analytic fingers suddenly thick and stupid. He had boundless energy for work, but as soon as he quit he could barely stand up.

His exhaustion deepened when he went upstairs. The kitchen and dining room were ablaze in light, and there appeared to be a small boy slumped over the dining-room table, his face on his place mat. The scene was so wrong, so sick with Revenge, that for a moment Alfred honestly thought the boy at the table was a ghost from his own childhood.

He groped for switches as if the light were a poison gas he had to stop the flow of.

In less hazardous dimness he gathered the boy in his arms and carried him upstairs. The boy had the weave of the place mat engraved on one cheek. He murmured nonsense. He was half — awake but resisting full consciousness, keeping his head down as Alfred undressed him and found pajamas in the closet.

Once the boy was in bed, in receipt of a kiss and fast asleep, an unguessable amount of time trickled through the legs of the bedside chair in which Alfred sat conscious of little but the misery between his temples. His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.

Or maybe he did sleep, for suddenly he was standing up and feeling marginally refreshed. He left Chipper’s room and went to check on Gary.

Just inside Gary’s door, reeking of Elmer’s glue, was a jail of Popsicle sticks. The jail bore no relation to the elaborate house of correction that Alfred had imagined. It was a crude roofless square, crudely bisected. Its floor plan, in fact, was exactly the binomial square he’d evoked before dinner.

And this, this here in the jail’s largest room, this bollixed knot of semisoft glue and broken Popsicle sticks was a — doll’s wheelbarrow? Miniature step stool?

Electric chair.

In a mind-altering haze of exhaustion Alfred knelt and examined it. He found himself susceptible to the poignancy of the chair’s having been made — to the pathos of Gary’s impulse to fashion an object and seek his father’s approval — and more disturbingly to the impossibility of squaring this crude object with the precise mental picture of an electric chair that he had formed at the dinner table. Like an illogical woman in a dream who was both Enid and not Enid, the chair he’d pictured had been at once completely an electric chair and completely Popsicle sticks. It came to him now, more forcefully than ever, that maybe every “real” thing in the world was as shabbily protean, underneath, as this electric chair. Maybe his mind was even now doing to the seemingly real hardwood floor on which he knelt exactly what it had done, hours earlier, to the unseen chair. Maybe a floor became truly a floor only in his mental reconstruction of it. The floor’s nature was to some extent inarguable, of course; the wood definitely existed and had measurable properties. But there was a second floor, the floor as mirrored in his head, and he worried that the beleaguered “reality” that he championed was not the reality of an actual floor in an actual bedroom but the reality of a floor in his head which was idealized and no more worthy, therefore, than one of Enid’s silly fantasies.