The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  “No, Pudge, we aren’t good,” Gary said. “Do you remember I took twenty thousand shares of refinanced Adelson Lee off your hands? We also took—”

  “Gare, Gare, don’t do this to me,” Pudge said. “I’m aware. Have I forgotten Adelson Lee? Christ, please, it haunts my every waking hour. All I’m trying to say to you is that five hundred shares of Axon, it may sound like a dis, but it’s not a dis. It’s the best Daffy’s going to do for you.”

  “A refreshing breath of honesty,” Gary said. “Now tell me again if you forgot I said five thousand.”

  “OK, I’m an asshole. Thank you for letting me know. But I can’t get you more than a thousand total without going all the way upstairs. If you want five thousand, Daffy needs a direct order from Dick Hevy. And since you mention Adelson Lee, Dick’s going to point out to me that CoreStates took forty thousand, First Delaware took thirty thousand, TIAA-CREF took fifty, and so on down the line. The calculus is that crude, Gare. You helped us to the tune of twenty, we help you to the tune of five hundred. I mean, I’ll try Dick if you want. I can also probably get another five hundred out of Daffy just by telling him you’d never guess he used to be shiny on top, to see him now. Whuff, the miracle of Rogaine. But basically this is the kind of deal where Daffy gets to play Santa Claus. He knows if you’ve been bad or good. In particular, he knows for whom you work. To be honest, for the kind of consideration you’re looking for, what you really need to do is triple the size of your institution.”

  Size, oh, did it matter. Short of promising to buy some arrant turkeys with CenTrust money at a later date (and he could lose his job for this), Gary had no further leverage with Pudge Portleigh. However, he still had moral leverage in the form of Axon’s underpayment for Alfred’s patent. Lying awake last night, he’d honed the wording of the clear, measured lecture that he intended to deliver to Axon’s brass this afternoon: I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that your offer to my father was reasonable and fair. My father had personal reasons for accepting that offer; but I know what you did to him. Do you understand me? I’m not an old man in the Midwest. I know what you did. And I think you realize that it is not an option for me to leave this room without a firm commitment for five thousand shares. I could also insist on an apology. But I’m simply proposing a straightforward transaction between adults. Which, by the way, costs you n o t h i n g. Zero. Nada. Niente.

  “Synaptogenesis!” Axon’s video pitchman exulted.

  7. NO, ITS NOT A BOOK OF THE BIBLE!

  The professional investors in Ballroom Β laughed and laughed.

  “Could this possibly be a hoax?” Denise asked Gary.

  “Why license Dad’s patent for a hoax?” Gary said.

  She shook her head. “This makes me want to, like, go back to bed.”

  Gary understood the feeling. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in three weeks. His circadian schedule was 180 degrees out of phase, he was revved all night and sandy-eyed all day, and he found it ever more arduous to believe that his problem wasn’t neurochemical but personal.

  How right he’d been, all those months, to conceal the many Warning Signs from Caroline! How accurate his intuition that a putative deficit of Neurofactor 3 would sap the legitimacy of his moral arguments! Caroline was now able to camouflage her animosity toward him as “concern” about his “health.” His lumbering forces of conventional domestic warfare were no match for this biological weaponry. He cruelly attacked her person; she heroically attacked his disease.

  Building on this strategic advantage, Caroline had then made a series of brilliant tactical moves. When Gary drew up his battle plans for the first full weekend of hostilities, he assumed that Caroline would circle the wagons as she’d done on the previous weekend—would adolescently pal around with Aaron and Caleb and incite them to make fun of Clueless Old Dad. Therefore on Thursday night he ambushed her. He proposed, out of the blue, that he and Aaron and Caleb go mountain-biking in the Poconos on Sunday, leaving at dawn for a long day of older-male bonding in which Caroline could not participate because her back hurt.

  Caroline’s countermove was to endorse his proposal enthusiastically. She urged Caleb and Aaron to go and enjoy the time with their father. She laid curious stress on this phrase, causing Aaron and Caleb to pipe up, as if on cue, “Mountain-biking, yeah, Dad, great!” And all at once Gary realized what was going on. He realized why, on Monday night, Aaron had come and unilaterally apologized for having called him “horrible,” and why Caleb on Tuesday, for the first time in months, had invited him to play foosball, and why Jonah, on Wednesday, had brought him, unbidden, on a cork-lined tray, a second martini that Caroline had poured. He saw why his children had turned agreeable and solicitous: because Caroline had told them that their father was struggling with clinical depression. What a brilliant gambit! And not for a second did he doubt that a gambit was what it was—that Caroline’s “concern” was purely bogus, a wartime tactic, a way to avoid spending Christmas in St. Jude—because there continued to be no warmth or fondness for him, not the faintest ember, in her eyes.

  “Did you tell the boys that I’m depressed?” Gary asked her in the darkness, from the far margin of their quarter– acre bed. “Caroline? Did you lie to them about my mental state? Is that why everybody’s suddenly being so agreeable?”

  “Gary,” she said. “They’re being agreeable because they want you to take them mountain-biking in the Poconos.”

  “Something about this doesn’t smell right.”

  “You know, you are getting seriously paranoid.”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  “Gary, this is frightening.”

  “You’re fucking with my head! And there is no lower trick than that. There’s no meaner trick in the book.”

  “Please, please, listen to yourself.”

  “Answer my question,” he said. “Did you tell them I’m ‘depressed’? ‘Having a hard time’?”

  “Well—aren’t you?”

  “Answer my question!”

  She didn’t answer his question. She said nothing more at all that night, although he repeated his question for half an hour, pausing for a minute or two each time so that she could answer, but she didn’t answer.

  By the morning of the bike trip, he was so destroyed by lack of sleep that his ambition was simply to function physically. He loaded three bikes onto Caroline’s extremely large and safe Ford Stomper vehicle and drove for two hours, unloaded the bikes, and pedaled mile after mile on rutted trails. The boys raced on far ahead. By the time he caught up with them, they’d taken their rest and were ready to move again. They volunteered nothing but wore expressions of friendly expectation, as if Gary might have a confession to make. His situation was neurochemically somewhat dire, however; he had nothing to say except “Let’s eat our sandwiches” and “One more ridge and then we turn around.” At dusk he loaded the bikes back onto the Stomper, drove two hours, and unloaded them in an access of anhedonia.

  Caroline came out of the house and told the older boys what great fun she and Jonah had had. She declared herself a convert to the Narnia books. All evening, then, she and

  Jonah chattered about “Aslan” and “Cair Paravel” and “Reepicheep,” and the online kids-only Narnia chat room that she’d located on the Internet, and the C. S. Lewis Web site that had cool online games to play and tons of cool Narnian products to order.

  “There’s a Prince Caspian CD-ROM,” Jonah told Gary, “that I’m very much looking forward to playing with.”

  “It looks like a really interesting and well-designed game,” Caroline said. “I showed Jonah how to order it.”

  “There’s a Wardrobe?” Jonah said. “And you point and click and go through the Wardrobe into Narnia? And then there’s all this cool stuff inside?”

  Profound was Gary’s relief the next morning as he bumped and glided, like a storm-battered yacht, into the safe harbor of his work week. There was nothing to do but patch himself up as well as he could, stay th
e course, not be depressed. Despite serious losses, he remained confident of victory. Since his very first fight with Caroline, twenty years earlier, when he’d sat alone in his apartment and watched an eleven-inning Phillies game and listened to his phone ring every ten minutes, every five minutes, every two minutes, he’d understood that at the ticking heart of Caroline was a desperate insecurity. Sooner or later, if he withheld his love, she came knocking on his chest with her little fist and let him have his way.

  Caroline showed no sign of weakening, however. Late at night, when Gary was too freaked out and angry to shut his eyes, let alone sleep, she politely but firmly declined to fight with him. She was particularly adamant in her refusal to discuss Christmas; she said that listening to Gary on the topic was like watching an alcoholic drink.

  “What do you need from me?” Gary asked her. “Tell me what you need to hear from me.”

  “I need you to take responsibility for your mental health.”

  “Jesus, Caroline. Wrong, wrong, wrong answer.”

  Meanwhile Discordia, the goddess of marital strife, had pulled strings with the airline industry. There appeared in the Inquirer a full-page ad for a slasheroo sale on Midland Airlines tickets, including a $198 round-trip fare between Philly and St. Jude. Only four dates in late December were blacked out; by staying just one extra day at Christmastime Gary could take the whole family to and from St. Jude (nonstop!) for under a thousand bucks. He had his travel agent hold five tickets for him, renewing the option daily. Finally, on Friday morning, with the sale due to end at midnight, he’d announced to Caroline that he was buying tickets. In accordance with her strict no-Christmas policy, Caroline turned to Aaron and asked him if he’d studied for his Spanish test. From his office at Cen Trust, in a spirit of trench warfare, Gary called his travel agent and authorized the purchase. Then he called his doctor and requested a sleep aid, a short-term prescription, something a little more potent than the nonprescription stuff. Dr. Pierce replied that a sleep aid didn’t sound like such a good idea. Caroline, Pierce said, had mentioned that Gary might be depressed, and a sleep aid certainly wasn’t going to help with that. Maybe, instead, Gary would like to come in and talk about how he was feeling?

  For a moment, after he hung up, Gary let himself imagine being divorced. But three glowing and idealized mental portraits of his children, shadowed by a batlike horde of fears regarding finances, chased the notion from his head.

  At a dinner party on Saturday he’d rifled the medicine chest of his friends Drew and Jamie, hoping to find a bottle of something in the Valium class, but no such luck.

  Yesterday Denise had called him and insisted, with ominous steeliness, that he have lunch with her. She said she’d seen Enid and Alfred in New York on Saturday. She said that Chip and his girlfriend had flaked on her and vanished.

  Gary, lying awake last night, had wondered if stunts like this were what Caroline meant when she described Chip as a man “honest enough” to say what he could and couldn’t “tolerate.”

  “The cells are genetically reprogrammed to release nerve-growth factor only when locally activated!” Earl Eberle’s video facsimile said cheerfully.

  A fetching young model, her skull in an Eberle Helmet, was strapped into a machine that retrained her brain to instruct her legs to walk.

  A model wearing a wintry look, a look of misanthropy and sourness, pushed up the corners of her mouth with her fingers while magnified cutaway animation revealed, within her brain, the flowering of dendrites, the forging of new synaptic links. In a moment she was able to smile, tentatively, without using her fingers. In another moment, her smile was dazzling.

  CORECKTALL: IT’S THE FUTURE!

  “The Axon Corporation is fortunate to hold five U.S. patents protecting this powerful platform technology,” Earl Eberle told the camera. “These patents, and eight others that are pending, form an insurmountable fire wall protecting the hundred-fifty million dollars that we have spent to date on research and development. Axon is the recognized world leader in this field. We have a six-year track record of positive cash flows and a revenue stream that we expect to top eighty million dollars in the coming year. Potential investors may rest assured that every penny of every dollar we raise on December 15 will be spent on developing this marvelous and potentially historic product.

  “Corecktall: It’s the Future!” Eberle said.

  “It’s the Future!” intoned the pitchman.

  “It’s the Future!” chorused the crowd of really good-looking students in nerdy glasses.

  “I liked the past,” Denise said, uptilting her complimentary half–liter of imported water.

  In Gary’s opinion, too many people were breathing the air in Ballroom B. A ventilation problem somehow. As the lights came up to full strength, silent wait-personnel fanned in among the tables bearing luncheon entrées under chafing lids.

  “My first guess is salmon,” Denise said. “No, my only guess is salmon.”

  Rising from talk-show chairs and moving to the front of the dais now were three figures who reminded Gary, oddly, of his honeymoon in Italy. He and Caroline had visited a cathedral somewhere in Tuscany, maybe Siena, in the museum of which were big medieval statues of saints that had once stood on the roof of the cathedral, each with an arm raised like a waving presidential candidate and each wearing a saintly grin of certainty.

  The eldest of the three beatific greeters, a pink-faced man with rimless glasses, extended a hand as if to bless the crowd.

  “All right!” he said. “All right, everybody! My name is Joe Prager, I’m the lead deal attorney at Bragg Knuter. To my left is Merilee Finch, CEO of Axon, to my right Daffy Anderson, the all-important deal manager at Hevy and Hodapp. We were hoping Curly himself might deign to join us today, but he is the man of the hour, he is being interviewed by CNN as we speak. So let me do a little caveating here, wink-wink-wink, and then turn the floor over to Daffy and Merilee.”

  “Yo, Kelsey, talk to me, baby, talk to me,” Gary’s young neighbor shouted.

  “Caveat A,” Prager said, “is please everyone take note that I’m stressing that Curly’s results are extremely preliminary. This is all Phase One research, folks. Anybody not hear me? Anybody in the back?” Prager craned his neck and waved both arms at the most distant tables, including Gary’s. “Full disclosure: this is Phase One research. Axon does not yet have, in no way is it representing that it has, FDA approval for Phase Two testing. And what comes after Phase Two? Phase Three! And after Phase Three? A multistage review process that can delay the product launch by as much as three more years. Folks, hello, we are dealing with clinical results that are extremely interesting but extremely preliminary. So caveat emptor. All righty? Wink wink wink. All righty?”

  Prager was struggling to keep his face straight. Merilee Finch and Daffy Anderson were sucking on smiles as if they, too, had guilty secrets or religion.

  “Caveat B,” Prager said. “An inspirational video presentation is not a prospectus. Daffy’s representations here today, likewise Merilee’s representations, are impromptu and, again, not a prospectus …”

  The waitstaff descended on Gary’s table and gave him salmon on a bed of lentils. Denise waved away her entrée.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” Gary whispered.

  She shook her head.

  “Denise. Really.” He felt inexplicably wounded. “You can surely have a couple of bites with me.”

  Denise looked him square in the face with an unreadable expression. “I’m a little sick to my stomach.”

  “Do you want to leave?”

  “No. I just don’t want to eat.”

  Denise at thirty-two was still beautiful, but long hours at the stove had begun to cook her youthful skin into a kind of terra-cotta mask that made Gary a little more anxious each time he saw her. She was his baby sister, after all. Her years of fertility and marriageability were passing with a swiftness to which he was attuned and she, he suspected, was not. Her career seemed to him an evil
spell under the influence of which she worked sixteen-hour days and had no social life. Gary was afraid—he claimed, as her oldest brother, the right to be afraid—that by the time Denise awakened from this spell she would be too old to start a family.

  He ate his salmon quickly while she drank her imported water.

  On the dais the CEO of Axon, a fortyish blonde with the intelligent pugnacity of a college dean, was talking about side effects. “Apart from headaches and nausea, which are to be expected,” said Merilee Finch, “we haven’t tracked anything yet. Remember, too, that our platform technology has been widely used for several years now, with no significant deleterious effects reported.” Finch pointed into the ballroom. “Yes, gray Armani?”

  “Isn’t Corecktall the name of a laxative?”

  “Ah, well,” Finch said, nodding violently. “Different spelling, but yes. Curly and I considered approximately ten thousand different names before we realized that branding isn’t really an issue for the Alzheimer’s patient, or the Parkinson’s sufferer, or the massively depressed individual. We could call it Carcino-Asbesto, they’d still knock doors down to get it. Curly’s big vision here, though, and the reason he’s willing to risk the poopy jokes, and so forth, is that twenty years from now there’s not going to be a prison left standing in the United States, because of this process. I mean, realistically, we live in the age of medical breakthroughs. There’s no question we’ll have competing therapies for AD and PD. Some of these therapies will probably come on line before Corecktall. So, for most disorders of the brain, our product will be just one weapon in the arsenal. Clearly the best weapon, but still, just one among many. On the other hand, when it comes to social disease, the brain of the criminal, there’s no other option on the horizon. It’s Corecktall or prison. So it’s a forward-looking name. We’re laying claim to a whole new hemisphere. We’re planting the Spanish flag right on the beach here.”