The Corrections

Still, even the worst morning was better than the best night. In the morning every process quickened, speeding his meds to their destinations: the canary-yellow spansule for incontinence, the small pink Tums-like thing for the shakes, the white oblong to discourage nausea, the wan blue tablet to squelch hallucinations from the small pink Tums-like thing. In the morning the blood was crowded with commuters, the glucose peons, lactic and ureic sanitation workers, hemoglobinous deliverymen carrying loads of freshly brewed oxygen in their dented vans, the stern foremen like insulin, the enzymic middle managers and executive epinephrine, leukocyte cops and EMS workers, expensive consultants arriving in their pink and white and canary-yellow limos, everyone riding the aortal elevator and dispersing through the arteries. Before noon the rate of worker accidents was tiny. The world was newborn.

He had energy. From the Kierkegaard Room he lopingly careened through a red-carpeted hallway that had previously vouchsafed him a comfort station but this morning seemed all business, no M or W in sight, just salons and boutiques and the Ingmar Bergman Cinema. The problem was that his nervous system could no longer be relied on for an accurate assessment of his need to go. At night his solution was to wear protection. By day his solution was to visit a bathroom hourly and always to carry his old black raincoat in case he had an accident to hide. The raincoat had the added virtue of offending Enid’s romantic sensibilities, and his hourly stops the added virtue of lending structure to his life. Simply holding things together—simply keeping the ocean of night terrors from breaching the last bulkhead—was his ambition now.

Throngs of women were streaming toward the Longstocking Ballroom. A strong eddy in their current swept Alfred into a hallway lined with the staterooms of onboard lecturers and entertainers. At the end of this hall a men’s room beckoned.

An officer in epaulets was using one of the two urinals. Afraid of failing to perform under scrutiny, Alfred entered a stall and slid the bolt and found himself face to face with an ordure-strafed toilet which fortunately said nothing, merely stank. He exited and tried the next stall, but here something did scurry on the floor—a mobile turd, ducking for cover—and he didn’t dare enter. In the meantime the officer had flushed, and as he turned from his urinal Alfred recognized his blue cheeks and rose-tinted eyeglasses, his pudenda-pink lips. Hanging from his still-open zipper was twelve inches or more of limp tan tubing. A yellow grin opened between his blue cheeks. He said, “I left a little treasure in your bed, Mr. Lambert. To replace the one I took.”

Alfred reeled out of the bathroom and fled up a staircase, higher and higher, up seven flights to the open air of the Sports Deck. Here he found a bench in hot sunlight. From the pocket of his raincoat he took a map of Canada’s maritime provinces and tried to fix himself within a grid, identify some landmarks.

Three old men in Gore-Tex parkas were standing at the rail. Their voices were inaudible one moment and fully distinct the next. Apparently the wind had pockets in its fluid mass, small spaces of stillness through which a sentence or two might find a way.

“Here’s a fellow with a map,” a man said. He came over to Alfred looking happy in the way of all men in the world except Alfred. “Excuse me, sir. What do you reckon we’re looking at up here on the left?”

“That is the Gaspé Peninsula,” Alfred answered firmly. “There should be a large town coming up around the bend.”

“Thank you very much.”

The man returned to his companions. As if the ship’s location mattered to them greatly, as if only the quest for this information had brought them to the Sports Deck to begin with, all three immediately departed for a lower deck, leaving Alfred alone on top of the world.

The protective sky was thinner in this country of northern water. Clouds ran in packs resembling furrows in a field, gliding along beneath the sky’s enclosing dome, which was noticeably low. One approached Ultima Thule here. Green objects had red coronas. In the forests that stretched west to the limit of visibility, as in the purposeless rushing of the clouds, as in the air’s supernal clarity, there was nothing local.

Odd to glimpse infinity precisely in a finite curve, eternity precisely in the seasonal.

Alfred had recognized the blue-cheeked man in the bathroom as the man from Signals, as betrayal personified. But the blue-cheeked man from Signals couldn’t possibly afford a luxury cruise, and this worried him. The blue-cheeked man came from the distant past but was walking and talking in the present, and the turd was a creature from the night but was afoot in broad daylight, and this worried him a lot.