The Corrections

Enid’s bodiless voice floated up from the bottom of the stairs. “Gary, help your father.”

“Yeah, Mom. I’m all over it. You just go back to sleep.”

“What does he want?” Enid said.

“Just go back to bed.”

Out in the hall he could smell the Christmas tree and the fireplace. He tapped on the bathroom door and opened it. His father was standing in the bathtub, naked from the waist down, with nothing but psychosis in his face. Until now, Gary had seen faces like this mainly at the bus stops and the Burger King bathrooms of central Philadelphia.

“Gary,” Alfred said, “they’re all over the place.” The old man pointed at the floor with a trembling finger. “Do you see him?”

“Dad, you’re hallucinating.”

“Get him! Get him!”

“You’re hallucinating and it’s time to get out of the tub and go back to bed.”

“Do you see them?”

“You’re hallucinating. Go back to bed.”

This went on for a while, ten or fifteen minutes, before Gary was able to lead Alfred out of the bathroom. A light was burning in the master bedroom, and several unused diapers were spread out on the floor. It seemed to Gary that his father was having a dream while he was awake, a dream as vivid as Gary’s own dream about Denise, and that the awakening that he, Gary, had accomplished in half a second was taking his father half an hour.

“What is ‘hallucinate’?” Alfred said finally.

“It’s like you’re dreaming when you’re awake.”

Alfred winced. “I’m concerned about this.”

“Well. Rightly so.”

“Help me with the diaper.”

“Yes, all right,” Gary said.

“I’m concerned that something is wrong with my thoughts.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“My head doesn’t seem to work right.”

“I know. I know.”

But Gary himself was infected, there in the middle of the night, by his father’s disease. As the two of them collaborated on the problem of the diaper, which his father seemed to regard more as a lunatic conversation piece than as an undergarment to be donned, Gary, too, had a sensation of things dissolving around him, of a night that consisted of creepings and shiftings and metamorphoses. He had the sense that there were many more than two people in the house beyond the bedroom door; he sensed a large population of phantoms that he could glimpse only dimly.

Alfred’s polar hair was hanging in his face when he lay down. Gary pulled the blanket up over his shoulder. It was hard to believe that he’d been fighting with this man, taking him seriously as an adversary, three months ago.

His clock radio showed 2:55 when he returned to his room. The house was quiet again, Denise’s door closed, the only sound an eighteen-wheeler on the expressway half a mile away. Gary wondered why his room smelled—faintly—like somebody’s cigarette breath.

But maybe it wasn’t cigarette breath. Maybe it was that Austrian beer stein full of piss that he’d left on the closet floor!

Tomorrow , he thought, is for me. Tomorrow is Gary’s Recreation Day. And then on Thursday morning we’re going to blow this house wide open. We’re going to put an end to this charade.

After Brian Callahan had fired Denise, she’d carved herself up and put the pieces on the table. She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn’t run away. She told herself a story about a daughter who, in her desperation to escape, had taken refuge in whatever temporary shelters she could find—a career in cooking, a marriage to Emile Berger, an old-person’s life in Philadelphia, an affair with Robin Passafaro. But naturally these refuges, chosen in haste, proved unworkable in the long run. By trying to protect herself from her family’s hunger, the daughter accomplished just the opposite. She ensured that when her family’s hunger reached its peak her life would fall apart and leave her without a spouse, without kids, without a job, without responsibilities, without a defense of any kind. It was as if, all along, she’d been conspiring to make herself available to nurse her parents.