The Corrections

He needed to sleep well tonight for at least six hours. To accomplish this, he planned to drink two vodka martinis and hit the sack before ten. He upended the vodka bottle over a shaker of ice and brazenly let it glug and glug, because he, a veep at CenTrust, had nothing to be ashamed of in relaxing after a hard day’s work. He started a mesquite fire and drank the martini down. Like a thrown coin in a wide, teetering orbit of decay, he circled back into the kitchen and managed to get the meat ready, but he felt too tired to cook it. Because Caroline and Caleb had paid no attention to him when he made the first martini, he now made a second, for energy and general bolsterment, and officially considered it his first. Battling the vitreous lensing effects of a vodka buzz, he went out and threw meat on the grill. Again the weariness, again the deficit of every friendly neurofactor overtook him. In plain view of his entire family he made a third (officially: a second) martini and drank it down. Through the window he observed that the grill was in flames.

He filled a Teflon skillet with water and spilled only some of it as he rushed out to pour it on the fire. A cloud of steam and smoke and aerosol grease went up. He flipped all the meat scraps, exposing their charred, glossy undersides. There was a smell of wet burnedness such as firemen leave behind. Not enough life remained in the coals to do more than faintly color the raw sides of the meat scraps, though he left them on for another ten minutes.

His miraculously considerate son Jonah had meanwhile set the table and put out bread and butter. Gary served the less burned and less raw bits of meat to his wife and children. Wielding his knife and fork clumsily, he filled his mouth with cinders and bloody chicken that he was too tired to chew and swallow and also too tired to get up and spit out. He sat with the unchewed bird-flesh in his mouth until he realized that saliva was trickling down his chin—a poor way indeed to demonstrate good mental health. He swallowed the bolus whole. It felt like a tennis ball going down. His family was looking at him.

“Dad, are you feeling OK?” Aaron said.

Gary wiped his chin. “Fine, Aaron, thank you. Ticken’s a little chuff. A little tough.” He coughed, his esophagus a column of flame.

“Maybe you want to go lie down,” Caroline said, as to a child.

“I think I’ll trim that hedge,” Gary said.

“You seem pretty tired,” Caroline said. “Maybe you should lie down instead.”

“Not tired, Caroline. Just got some smoke in my eyes.”

“Gary—”

“I know you’re telling everybody I’m depressed, but, as it happens, I’m not.”

“Gary.”

“Right, Aaron? Am I right? She told you I’m clinically depressed—right?”

Aaron, caught off guard, looked to Caroline, who shook her head at him slowly and significantly.

“Well? Did she?” Gary said.

Aaron lowered his eyes to his plate, blushing. The spasm of love that Gary felt then for his oldest son, his sweet honest vain blushing son, was intimately connected to the rage that was now propelling him, before he understood what was happening, away from the table. He was cursing in front of his kids. He was saying, “ Fuck this, Caroline! Fuck your whispering! I’m going to fucking go trim that fucking hedge!”

Jonah and Caleb lowered their heads, ducking as if under fire. Aaron seemed to be reading the story of his life, in particular his future, on his grease-smeared dinner plate.

Caroline spoke in the calm, low, quavering voice of the patently abused. “OK, Gary, good,” she said, “just please then let us enjoy our dinner. Please just go.”