The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  For a man who all his life had fought off extracurricular napping like any other unwholesome delight, the discovery was life-altering—no less momentous in its way than his discovery, hours earlier, of electrical anisotropism in a gel of networked ferroacetates. More than thirty years would pass before the discovery in the basement bore financial fruit; the discovery in the bedroom made existence chez Lambert more bearable immediately.

  A Pax Somnis is descended on the household. Alfred’s new lover soothed whatever beast was left in him. How much easier than raging or sulking he found it to simply close his eyes. Soon everybody understood that he had an invisible mistress whom he entertained in the family room on Saturday afternoon when his work week at the Midpac ended, a mistress he took along with him on every business trip and fell into the arms of in beds that no longer seemed uncomfortable in motel rooms that no longer seemed so noisy, a mistress he never failed to visit in the course of an evening’s paperwork, a mistress with whom he shared a travel pillow after lunch on family summer trips while Enid lurchingly piloted the car and the kids in the back seat hushed. Sleep was the ideally work-compatible girl he ought to have married in the first place. Perfectly submissive, infinitely forgiving, and so respectable you could take her to church and the symphony and the St. Jude Repertory Theater. She never kept him awake with her tears. She demanded nothing and in return for nothing gave him everything he needed to do a long day’s work. There was no mess in their affair, no romantic osculation, no leakages or secretions, no shame. He could cheat on Enid in Enid’s own bed without giving her a shred of legally admissible proof, and as long as he kept the affair private to the extent of not dozing at dinner parties Enid tolerated it, as sensible wives had always done, and so it was an infidelity for which as the decades passed there never seemed to come a reckoning …

  “Psst! Asshole!”

  With a jolt Alfred awakened to the tremor and slow pitching of the Gunnar Myrdal. Someone else was in the stateroom?

  “Asshole!”

  “Who’s there?” he asked half in challenge, half in fear.

  Thin Scandinavian blankets fell away as he sat up and peered into the semidarkness, straining to hear past the boundaries of his self. The partially deaf know like cellmates the frequencies at which their heads ring. His oldest companion was a contralto like a pipe organ’s middle A, a clarion blare vaguely localized in his left ear. He’d known this tone, at growing volumes, for thirty years; it was such a fixture that it seemed it should outlive him. It had the pristine meaninglessness of eternal or infinite things. Was as real as a heartbeat but corresponded to no real thing outside him. Was a sound that nothing made.

  Underneath it the fainter and more fugitive tones were active. Cirrus-like clusterings of very high frequencies off in deep stratosphere behind his ears. Meandering notes of almost ghostly faintness, as from a remote calliope. A jangly set of mid-range tones that waxed and waned like crickets in the center of his skull. A low, almost rumbling drone like a dilution of a diesel engine’s blanket alldeafeningness, a sound he’d never quite believed was real—i.e., unreal—until he’d retired from the Midpac and lost touch with locomotives. These were the sounds his brain both created and listened to, was friendly with.

  Outside of himself he could hear the psh, psh of two hands gently swinging on their hinges in the sheets.

  And the mysterious rush of water all around him, in the Gunnar Myrdal’s secret capillaries.

  And someone snickering down in the dubious space below the horizon of the bedding.

  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 headfirst.

  “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 hot-pussyness? 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.

  The turd was somewhere in the neighborhood of his upper thighs. Struggling to bend his rigid legs and hook his semifunctional thumbs on the waistband, he pulled the pajamas down to trap the turd inside the fabric. He suddenly understood that the turd was an escaped convict, a piece of human refuse that belonged in jail. That this was what jail was for: people who believed that they, rather than society, made the rules. And if jail did not deter them, they deserved death! Death! Drawing strength from his rage, Alfred succeeded in pulling the ball of pajamas from his feet, and with oscillating arms he wrestled the ball to the carpeting, hammering it with his forearms, and then wedged it deep between the firm Nordic mattress and the Nordic box spring.

  He knelt, catching his breath, in his pajama top and adult diaper.

  Enid continued to sleep. Something distinctly fairy-tale-like in her attitude tonight.

  “Phlblaaatth!” the turd taunted. It had reappeared on the wall above Alfred’s bed and hung precariously, as if flung there, beside a framed etching of the Oslo waterfront.

  “God damn you!” Alfred said. “You belong in jail!”

  The turd wheezed with laughter as it slid very slowly down the wall, its viscous pseudopods threatening to drip on the sheets below. “Seems to me,” it said, “you anal retentive type personalities want everything in jail. Like, little kids, bad news, man, they pull your tchotchkes off your shelves, they drop food on the carpet, they cry in theaters, they miss the pot. Put ’em in the slammer! And Polynesians, man, they track sand in the house, get fish juice on the furniture, and all those pubescent chickies with their honkers exposed? Jail ‘em! And how about ten to twenty, while we’re at it, for every horny little teenager, I mean talk about insolence, talk about no restraint. And Negroes (sore topic, Fred?), I’m hearing rambunctious shouting and interesting grammar, I’m smelling liquor of the malt variety and sweat that’s very rich and scalpy, and all that dancing and whoopee-making and singers that coo like body parts wetted with saliva and special jellies: what’s a jail for if not to toss a Negro in it? And your Caribbeans with their spliffs and their potbelly toddlers and their like daily barbecues and ratborne hanta viruses and sugary drinks with pig blood at the bottom? Slam the cell door, eat the key. And the Chinese, man, those creepy-ass weird-name vegetables like homegrown dildos somebody forgot to wash after using, one-dollah, one-dollah, and those slimy carps and skinned-alive songbirds, and come on, like, puppy-dog soup and pooty-tat dumplings and female infants are national delicacies, and pork bung, by which we’re referring here to the anus of a swine, presumably a sort of chewy and bristly type item, pork bung’s a thing Chinks pay money for to eat? What say we just nuke all billion point two of ’em, hey? Clean that part of the world up already. And let’s not forget about women generally, nothing but a trail of Kleenexes and Tampaxes everywhere they go. And your fairies with their doctor’s-office lubricants, and your Mediterraneans with their whiskers and their garlic, and your French with their garter belts and raunchy cheeses, and your blue-collar ball-scratchers with their hot rods and beer belches, and your Jews with their circumcised putzes and gefilte fish like pickled turds, and your Wasps with their Cigarette boats and runny-assed polo horses and go-to-hell cigars? Hey, funny thing, Fred, the only people that don’t belong in your jail are upper-middle-class northern European men. And you’re on my case for wanting things my way?”

  “What will it take to make you leave this room?” Alfred said.

  “Loosen up the old sphincter, fella. Let it fly.”

  “I will never!”

  “In that case I might pay a visit to your shaving kit. Have me a little episode o’ diarrhea on your toothbrush. Drop a couple nice globbets in your shave cream and tomorrow a.m. you can lather up a rich brown foam—”

  “Enid,” Alfred said in a strained voice, not taking his eyes off the crafty turd, “I am having difficulties. I would appreciate your assistance.”

  His voice ought to have awakened her, but her sleep was Snow White–like in its depth.

  “Enid dahling,” the turd mocked in a David Niven accent, “I should most appreciate some assistance at your earliest possible convenience.”

  Unconfirmed reports from nerves in the small of Alfred’s back and behind his knees indicated that additional turd units were in the vicinity. Turdish rebels snuffling stealthily about, spending themselves in trails of fetor.

  “Food and pussy, fella,” said the leader of the turds, now barely clinging to the wall by one pseudopod of fecal mousse, “is what it all comes down to. Everything else, and I say this in all modesty, is pure shit.”

  Then the pseudopod ruptured and the leader of the turds —leaving behind on the wall a small clump of putrescence—plunged with a cry of glee onto a bed that belonged to Nordic Pleasurelines and was due to be made in a few hours by a lovely young Finnish woman. Imagining this clean, pleasant housekeeper finding lumps of personal excrement spattered on the bedspread was almost more than Alfred could bear.

  His peripheral vision was alive with writhing stool now. He had to hold things together, hold things together. Suspecting that a leak in the toilet might be the source of his trouble, he made his way on hands and knees into the bathroom and kicked the door shut behind him. Rotated with relative ease on the smooth tiles. Braced his back against the door and pushed his feet against the sink opposite him. He laughed for a moment at the absurdity of his situation. Here he was, an American executive sitting in diapers on the floor of a floating bathroom under siege by a squadron of feces. A person got the strangest notions late at night.

  The light was better in the bathroom. There was a science of cleanliness, a science of looks, a science even of excretion as evidenced by the outsized Swiss porcelain eggcup of a toilet, a regally pedestaled thing with finely knurled levers of control. In these more congenial surroundings Alfred was able to collect himself to the point of understanding that the turdish rebels were figments, that to some extent he had been dreaming, and that the source of his anxiety was simply a drainage problem.

  Unfortunately, operations were shut down for the night. There was no way to have a look personally at the rupture, nor any way to put a plumber’s snake or video cam down there. Highly unlikely as well that a contractor could get a rig out to the site under conditions like these. Alfred wasn’t even sure he could pinpoint his location on a map himself.

  There was nothing for it but to wait until morning. Absent a full solution, two half-solutions were better than no solution at all. You tackled the problem with whatever you had in hand.

  Couple of extra diapers: that ought to hold for a few hours. And here were the diapers, right by the toilet in a bag.

  It was nearly four o’clock. There would be hell to pay if the district manager wasn’t at his desk by seven. Alfred couldn’t recollect the fellow’s exact name, not that it mattered. Just call the office and whoever picked up the phone.

  It was characteristic of the modern world, though, wasn’t it, how slippery they made the goddamned tape on the diapers.

  “Would you look at that,” he said, hoping to pass off as philosophical amusement his rage with a treacherous modernity. The adhesive strips might as well have been covered with Teflon. Between his dry skin and his shakes, peeling the backing off a strip was like picking up a marble with two peacock feathers.

  “Well, for goodness’ sake.”

  He persisted in the attempt for five minutes and another five minutes. He simply couldn’t get the backing off.

  “Well, for goodnes
s’ sake.”

  Grinning at his own incapacity. Grinning in frustration and the overwhelming sense of being watched.

  “Well, for goodness’ sake,” he said once more. This phrase often proved useful in dissipating the shame of small failures.

  How changeful a room was in the night! By the time Alfred had given up on the adhesive strips and simply yanked a third diaper up his thigh as far as it would go, which regrettably wasn’t far, he was no longer in the same bathroom. The light had a new clinical intensity; he felt the heavy hand of a more extremely late hour.

  “Enid!” he called. “Can you help me?”

  With fifty years of experience as an engineer he could see at a glance that the emergency contractor had botched the job. One of the diapers was twisted nearly inside out and a second had a mildly spastic leg sticking through two of its plies, leaving most of its absorptive capacity unrealized in a folded mass, its adhesive stickers adhering to nothing. Alfred shook his head. He couldn’t blame the contractor. The fault was his own. Never should have undertaken a job like this under conditions like these. Poor judgment on his part. Trying to do damage control, blundering around in the dark, often created more problems than it solved.

  “Yes, now we are in a fine mess,” he said with a bitter smile.

  And could this be liquid on the floor. Oh my Lord, there appeared to be some liquid on the floor.

  Also liquid running in the Gunnar Myrdal’s myriad pipes.

  “Enid, please, for God’s sake. I am asking you for help.”

  No answer from the district office. Some kind of vacation everybody was on. Something about the color of a fall.

  Liquid on the floor! Liquid on the floor!

  So all right, though, they paid him to take responsibility. They paid him to make the hard calls.

  He took a deep, bolstering breath.