Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“It was time to move on,” Sylvia said to Enid. “I saw it all of a sudden. That whether I liked it or not, the survivor and the artist was me, not her. We’re all conditioned to think of our children as more important than us, you know, and to live vicariously through them. All of a sudden I was sick of that kind of thinking. I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but I’m alive now. And I can live deliberately. I’ve paid the price, I’ve done the work, and I have nothing to be ashamed of.

“And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight — isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you’re seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.”

“Maybe one more?” Enid said to the dwarf, raising her glass. She was almost wholly not listening to Sylvia, but shaking her head and murmuring “Uh!” and “Oh!” while her consciousness stumbled through clouds of alcohol into such absurd realms of speculation as how the dwarf might feel against her hips and belly, embracing her. Sylvia turned out to be very intellectual, and Enid felt befriended under somewhat false pretenses, but while not listening she also had to listen, because she was missing certain key facts, such as whether Khellye Withers was black and whether Jordan had been brutally raped.

From her studio Sylvia had gone straight to a Wawa Food Market and bought one of every dirty magazine it had in stock. Nothing she found in the magazines was sufficiently hardcore, however. She needed to see the actual plumbing, the literal act. She returned to Chadds Ford and switched on the computer that her younger son had given her to foster closeness in their time of loss. Her e-mailbox contained a month’s backlog of filial greetings that she ignored. In less than five minutes she located the goods she wanted — all it took was a credit card — and she moused through thumbnail views until she found the necessary angle on the necessary act with the necessary actors: black man performing oral sex on white man, camera shooting over left hip sixty degrees behind full profile, crescent of high values curving over buttock, knuckles of black fingers duskily visible in their probing on the dark side of this moon. She downloaded the image and viewed it at high resolution.

She was sixty-five years old and she’d never seen a scene like this. She’d fashioned images all her life and she’d never appreciated their mystery. Now here it was. All this commerce in bits and bytes, these ones and zeros streaming through servers at some midwestern university. So much evident trafficking in so much evident nothing. A population glued to screens and magazines.

She wondered: How could people respond to these images if images didn’t secretly enjoy the same status as real things? Not that images were so powerful, but that the world was so weak. It could be vivid, certainly, in its weakness, as on days when the sun baked fallen apples in orchards and the valley smelled like cider, and cold nights when Jordan had driven to Chadds Ford for dinner and the tires of her Cabriolet had crunched on the gravel driveway; but the world was fungible only as images. Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

And yet Sylvia was struck by the contrast between the online porn and her unfinished drawing of Withers. Unlike ordinary lust, which could be appeased by pictures or by pure imagination, the lust for revenge could not be tricked. The most graphic image couldn’t satisfy it. This lust required the death of a specific individual, the termination of a specific history. As the menus said: no SUBSTITUTIONS. She could draw her desire but not its fulfillment. And so she finally told herself the truth: she wanted Khellye Withers dead.

She wanted him dead despite her recent interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer in which she’d avowed that killing someone else’s child wouldn’t bring back her own. She wanted him dead despite the religious fervor with which her M.D./Ph.D. had forbidden her to interpret Jordan’s death religiously — for example, as a divine judgment on her own liberal politics or liberal parenting or senseless affluence. She wanted him dead despite believing that Jordan’s death had been a random tragedy and that redemption lay not in vengeance but in reducing the incidence of random tragedies nationwide. She wanted him dead despite imagining a society that provided jobs at a decent wage for young men like him (so that he would not have had to bind the wrists and ankles of his former art therapist and bully out of her the passwords for her bank card and credit cards), a society that stanched the flow of illegal drugs into urban neighborhoods (so that Withers could not have spent the stolen money on crack, and would have had more mental clarity when he returned to the apartment of his former art therapist, and would not have proceeded to smoke the rock and torture her, on and off, for thirty hours), a society in which young men had more to believe in than brand-name consumer goods (so that Withers would have fixated less insanely on his former art therapist’s Cabriolet, and would have believed her when she insisted she’d lent the car to a friend for the weekend, and would have set less store by her possession of two sets of keys (“Couldn’t get around that,” he explained in his partially coerced but still legally admissible confession, “all the keys right there on the kitchen table, you know what I’m saying? Couldn’t get my ass around that fact”), and would not have repeatedly applied the victim’s Light ’n Easy iron to her bare skin and advanced the temperature setting from Rayon up through Cotton/Linen while demanding to know where she’d parked the Cabriolet, and would not have cut her throat in a panic when her friend came by on Sunday evening to return the car and her third set of keys), a society that once and for all put an end to the physical abuse of children (so that it would have been absurd for a convicted murderer to claim, in the sentencing phase of his trial, that his stepfather had burned him with an electric iron when he was little — though in the case of Withers, who had no burn scars to exhibit, such testimony seemed mainly to underscore the convict’s own lack of imagination as a liar). She wanted him dead despite even her realization, in therapy, that his smirk had been a protective mask donned by a lonely boy surrounded by people who hated him, and that if she’d only smiled at him like a forgiving mother he might have laid aside his mask and wept with honest remorse. She wanted him dead despite knowing her desire would please conservatives for whom the phrase “personal responsibility” constituted permission to ignore social injustice. She wanted him dead despite being unable, for these political reasons, to attend the execution and to see with her own eyes the thing for which no image could substitute.

“But none of this,” she said, “is why we’re on this cruise.”

“No?” Enid said as if awakening.

“No. We’re here because Ted won’t admit that Jordan was murdered.”

“Is he …?”

“Oh, he knows it,” Sylvia said. “He just won’t talk about it. He was very close to Jordan, closer in a lot of ways than he’s ever been to me. And he grieved, I’ll grant him that. He did grieve. He wept so much he could hardly move. But then one morning he was over it. He said that Jordan was gone and he wasn’t going to live in the past. He said that starting on Labor Day he was going to forget she was a victim. And every day, as it got later in August, he reminded me that beginning after Labor Day he wouldn’t admit that she was murdered. Ted’s a very rational man. His view was that human beings have been losing children forever and that too much grieving is stupid and self-indulgent. He didn’t care what happened to Withers, either. He said that following the trial was just another way of not getting over the murder.