The Corrections

And the alarm clock pinching off each tick. It was three in the morning and his mistress had abandoned him. Now, when he needed her comforts more than ever, she went off whoring with younger sleepers. For thirty years she’d obliged him, spread her arms and opened her legs every night at ten-fifteen. She’d been the nook he sought, the womb. He could still find her in the afternoon or early evening, but not in a bed at night. As soon as he lay down he groped in the sheets and sometimes for a few hours found some bony extremity of hers to clutch. But reliably at one or two or three she vanished beyond any pretending that she still belonged to him.

He peered fearfully across the rust-orange carpeting to the Nordic blond wood lines of Enid’s bed. Enid appeared to be dead.

The rushing water in the million pipes.

And the tremor, he had a guess about this tremor. That it came from the engines, that when you built a luxury cruise ship you damped or masked every sound the engines made, one after another, right down to the lowest audible frequency and even lower, but you couldn’t go all the way to zero. You were left with this subaudible two-hertz shaking, the irreducible remainder and reminder of a silence imposed on something powerful.

A small animal, a mouse, scurried in the layered shadows at the foot of Enid’s bed. For a moment it seemed to Alfred that the whole floor consisted of scurrying corpuscles. Then the mice resolved themselves into a single more forward mouse, horrible mouse, squishable pellets of excreta, habits of gnawing, heedless peeings—

“Asshole, asshole!” the visitor taunted, stepping from the darkness into a bedside dusk.

With dismay Alfred recognized the visitor. First he saw the dropping’s slumped outline and then he caught a whiff of bacterial decay. This was not a mouse. This was the turd.

“Urine trouble now, he he!” the turd said.

It was a sociopathic turd, a loose stool, a motormouth. It had introduced itself to Alfred the night before and so agitated him that only Enid’s ministrations, a blaze of electric light and Enid’s soothing touch on his shoulder, had saved the night.

“Leave!” Alfred commanded sternly.

But the turd scurried up the side of the clean Nordic bed and relaxed like a Brie, or a leafy and manure-smelling Cabrales, on the covers. “Splat chance of that, fella.” And dissolved, literally, in a gale of hilarious fart sounds.

To fear encountering the turd on his pillow was to summon the turd to the pillow, where it flopped in postures of glistening well-being.

“Get away, get away,” Alfred said, planting an elbow in the carpeting as he exited the bed head first.

“No way, José,” the turd said. “First I’m gonna get in your clothes.”

“No!”

“Sure am, fella. Gonna get in your clothes and touch the upholstery. Gonna smear and leave a trail. Gonna stink so bad.”

“Why? Why? Why would you do such a thing?”

“Because it’s right for me,” the turd croaked. “It’s who I am. Put somebody else’s comfort ahead of my own? Go hop in a toilet to spare somebody else’s feelings? That’s the kinda thing you do, fella. You got everything bass ackwards. And look where it’s landed you.”

“Other people ought to have more consideration.”

“You oughtta have less. Me personally, I am opposed to all strictures. If you feel it, let it rip. If you want it, go for it. Dude’s gotta put his own interests first.”

“Civilization depends upon restraint,” Alfred said.

“Civilization? Overrated. I ask you what’s it ever done for me? Flushed me down the toilet! Treated me like shit!”

“But that’s what you are,” Alfred pleaded, hoping the turd might see the logic. “That’s what a toilet is for.”

“Who you calling shit here, asshole? I got the same rights as everybody else, don’t I? Life, liberty, the pussuit of hotpussyness? That’s what it says in the Constitution of the You Nighted—”

“That’s not right,” Alfred said. “You’re thinking of the Declaration of Independence.”

“Some old yellow piece a paper somewhere, what the ratass fuck do I care what exact paper? Tightasses like you been correcting every fucking word outta my mouth since I was yay big. You and all the constipated fascist schoolteachers and Nazi cops. For all I care the words are printed on a piece of fucking toilet paper. I say it’s a free country, I am in the majority, and you, fella, are a minority. And so fuck you.”

The turd had an attitude, a tone of voice, that Alfred found eerily familiar but couldn’t quite place. It began to roll and tumble on his pillow, spreading a shiny greenish-brown film with little lumps and fibers in it, leaving white creases and hollows where the fabric was bunched. Alfred, on the floor by the bed, covered his nose and mouth with his hands to mitigate the stench and horror.

Then the turd ran up the leg of his pajamas. He felt its tickling mouselike feet.

“Enid!” he called with all the strength he had.