The Corrections

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 a 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.

The suspicion that everything was relative. That the “real” and “authentic” might not be simply doomed but fictive to begin with. That his feeling of righteousness, of uniquely championing the real, was just a feeling. These were the suspicions that had lain in ambush in all those motel rooms. These were the deep terrors beneath the flimsy beds.

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it.

He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.

He returned the pitiful, unbalanced electric chair to the floor of the prison’s largest room. As soon as he let go of the chair, it fell on its side. Images of hammering the jail to bits passed through his head, flashes of hiked-up skirts and torn-down underpants, images of shredded bras and outthrust hips, but came to nothing.

Gary was sleeping in perfect silence, the way his mother did. There was no hope that he’d forgotten his father’s implicit promise to look at the jail after dinner. Gary never forgot anything.

Still, I am doing my best, Alfred thought.

Returning to the dining room, he noticed the change in the food on Chipper’s plate. The well-browned margins of the liver had been carefully pared off and eaten, as had every scrap of crust. There was evidence as well that rutabaga had been swallowed; the small speck that remained was scored with tiny tine marks. And several beet greens had been dissected, the softer leaves removed and eaten, the woody reddish stems laid aside. It appeared that Chipper had taken the contractual one bite of each food after all, presumably at great personal cost, and had been put to bed without being given the dessert he’d earned.

On a November morning thirty-five years earlier Alfred had found a coyote’s bloody foreleg in the teeth of a steel trap, evidence of certain desperate hours in the previous night.

There came an upwelling of pain so intense that he had to clench his jaw and refer to his philosophy to prevent its turning into tears.

(Schopenhauer: Only one consideration may serve to explain the sufferings of animals: that the will to live, which underlies the entire world of phenomena, must in their case satisfy its cravings by feeding upon itself.)

He turned off the last lights downstairs, visited the bathroom, and put on fresh pajamas. He had to open his suitcase to retrieve his toothbrush.

Into the bed, the museum of antique transports, he slipped beside Enid, settling as close to the far edge as he could. She was asleep in her sleep-feigning way. He looked once at the alarm clock, the radium jewelry on its two pointing hands—closer to twelve now than to eleven—and shut his eyes.

Came the question in a voice like noon: “What were you talking about with Chuck?”

His exhaustion redoubled. With his closed eyes he saw beakers and probes and the trembling needle of the ammeter.

“It sounded like the Erie Belt,” Enid said. “Does Chuck know about that? Did you tell him?”

“Enid, I am very tired.”

“I’m just surprised, that’s all. Considering.”

“It was an accident and I regret it.”

“I just think it’s interesting,” Enid said, “that Chuck is allowed to make an investment that we’re not allowed to make.”

“If Chuck chooses to take unfair advantage of other investors, that’s his business.”

“A lot of Erie Belt shareholders would be happy to get five and three-quarters tomorrow. What’s unfair about that?”

Her words had the sound of an argument rehearsed for hours, a grievance nursed in darkness.