The Corrections

By ten o’clock Gary was in bed and thus arguably still in compliance with his original plan, arguably still on track to—what? Well, he didn’t exactly know. But if he got some sleep he might be able to see his way forward. In order not to bleed on the sheets he’d put his injured hand, towel and all, inside a Bran’nola bread bag. He turned out the nightstand light and faced the wall, his bagged hand cradled against his chest, the sheet and the summer blanket pulled up over his shoulder. He slept hard for a while and was awakened in the darkened room by the throbbing of his hand. The flesh on either side of the gash was twitching as if it had worms in it, pain fanning out along five carpi. Caroline breathed evenly, asleep. Gary got up to empty his bladder and take four Advils. When he returned to bed, his last, pathetic plan fell apart, because he could not get back to sleep. He had the sensation that blood was running out of the Bran’nola bag. He considered getting up and sneaking out to the garage and driving to the emergency room. He added up the hours this would take him and the amount of wakefulness he would have to burn off upon returning, and he subtracted the total from the hours of night remaining until he had to get up and go to work, and he concluded that he was better off just sleeping until six and then, if need be, stopping at the ER on his way to work; but this was all contingent on his ability to fall back asleep, and since he couldn’t do this, he reconsidered and recalculated, but now there were fewer minutes remaining of the night than when he’d first considered getting up and sneaking out. The calculus was cruel in its regression. He got up again to piss. The problem of Caleb’s surveillance lay, indigestible, in his gut. He was mad to wake up Caroline and fuck her. His hurt hand pulsed. It felt elephantine; he had a hand the size and weight of an armchair, each finger a soft log of exquisite sensitivity. And Denise kept looking at him with hatred. And his mother kept yearning for her Christmas. And he slipped briefly into a room in which his father had been strapped into an electric chair and fitted with a metal helmet, and Gary’s own hand was on the old-fashioned stirrup-like power switch, which he’d evidently already thrown, because Alfred came leaping from the chair fantastically galvanized, horribly smiling, a travesty of enthusiasm, dancing around with rigid jerking limbs and circling the room at double-speed and then falling hard, face down, wham, like a ladder with its legs together, and lying prone there on the execution-room floor with every muscle in his body galvanically twitching and boiling—

Gray light was in the windows when Gary got up to piss for the fourth or fifth time. The morning’s humidity and warmth felt more like July than October. A haze or fog on Seminole Street confused—or disembodied—or refracted—the cawing of crows as they worked their way up the Hill, over Navajo Road and Shawnee Street, like local teenagers heading to the Wawa Food Market parking lot (“Club Wa” they called it, according to Aaron) to smoke their cigarettes.

He lay down again and waited for sleep.

“—day the fifth of October, among the top news stories we’re following this morning, with his execution now less than twenty-four hours away, lawyers for Khellye—” said Caroline’s clock radio before she swatted it silent.

In the next hour, while he listened to the rising of his sons and the sound of their breakfasts and the blowing of a trumpet line by John Philip Sousa, courtesy of Aaron, a radical new plan took shape in Gary’s brain. He lay fetally on his side, very still, facing the wall, with his Bran’nola-bagged hand against his chest. His radical new plan was to do absolutely nothing.

“Gary, are you awake?” Caroline said from a medium distance, the doorway presumably. “Gary?”

He did nothing; didn’t answer.

“Gary?”

He wondered if she might be curious about why he was doing nothing, but already her footsteps were receding up the hall and she was calling, “Jonah, come on, you’re going to be late.”

“Where’s Dad?” Jonah said.

“He’s still in bed, let’s go.”

There was a patter of little feet, and now came the first real challenge to Gary’s radical new plan. From somewhere closer than the doorway Jonah spoke. “Dad? We’re leaving now. Dad?” And Gary had to do nothing. He had to pretend he couldn’t hear or wouldn’t hear, he had to inflict his general strike, his clinical depression, on the one creature he wished he could have spared. If Jonah came any closer—if, for example, he came and gave him a hug—Gary doubted he would be able to stay silent and unmoving. But Caroline was calling from downstairs again, and Jonah hurried out.