The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  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.

  According to Ted Roth, holes in the ozone layer started at the poles. It was during the long Arctic night that the earth’s shell first weakened, but once the shell was punctured the damage spread outward, encroaching even on the sunny tropics—even the equator—and soon no spot on the globe was safe.

  Meanwhile an observatory in the far nether regions had sent out a feeble signal, an ambiguous message.

  Alfred received the signal and wondered what to do about it. He felt shy of bathrooms now, but he couldn’t very well drop his trousers out here in the open. The three men might return at any moment.

  Beyond a protective railing to his right was a collection of thickly painted planes and cylinders, two navigational spheres, an inverted cone. Since he was not afraid of heights, nothing prevented him from ignoring the strongly worded warning in four languages, squeezing past the railing, and stepping out onto the sandpapery metal surface to seek, as it were, a tree to pee behind. He was high above everything and invisible.

  But too late.

  Both legs of his trousers were very soaked, the left leg nearly to his ankle. Warm-cold wetness all over everything.

  And where a town should have appeared on the coast, the land instead was dropping away. Gray waves marched across strange waters, and the tremor of the engines became more labored, less easy to ignore. The ship either had not reached the Gaspé Peninsula or had already passed it. The data he’d transmitted to the men in parkas was faulty. He was lost.

  And from the deck immediately below him came a windborne giggle. It came again, a trilling squeal, a northern lark.

  He edged away from the spheres and cylinders and leaned out past the outer railing. A few yards farther astern was a small “Nordic” sunbathing area, sequestered behind cedar fencing, and a man standing where no passenger was permitted to stand could see right over the fencing and behold Signe Söderblad, her chill-stippled arms and thighs and belly, the plump twin cloudberries into which a suddenly gray winter sky had drawn her nipples, the quaking ginger fur between her legs.

  The day world floated on the night world and the night world tried to swamp the day world and he worked and worked to keep the day world watertight. But there had been a grievous breach.

  Came another cloud then, larger, denser, that turned the gulf below it to a greenish black. Ship and shadow in collision.

  And shame and despair—

  Or was it the wind catching the sail of his raincoat?

  Or was it the ship’s pitching?

  Or the tremor in his legs?

  Or the corresponding tremor of the engines?

  Or a fainting spell?

  Or vertigo’s standing invitation?

  Or the relative warmth of open water’s invitation to someone soaked and freezing in the wind?

  Or was he leaning, deliberately, to glimpse again the gingery mons?

  “How fitting it is,” said internationally noted investment counselor Jim Crolius, “to be talking money on a Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise. Folks, it’s a beautiful sunny morning, isn’t it?”

  Crolius was speaking from a lectern beside an easel on which the title of his talk—“Surviving the Corrections”—was written in purple ink. His question brought murmurs of assent from the first few rows in front of him, the people who’d arrived early for good seats. Someone up there even said: “Yes, Jim!”

  Enid felt ever so much better this morning, but a few atmospheric disturbances still lingered in her head, for example a squall now consisting of (a) resentment of the women who’d come to the Longstocking Ballroom absurdly early, as if the potential lucrativeness of Jim Crolius’s advice might somehow decline with one’s distance from him, and (b) particular resentment of the pushy New York kind of woman who elbowed in ahead of everyone to establish a first-name relationship with a lecturer (she was sure that Jim Crolius could see right through their presumption and hollow flattery, but he might be too polite to ignore them and focus on less pushy and more deserving midwestern women such as Enid), and (c) intense irritation with Alfred for having stopped in a bathroom twice on the way to breakfast, which had prevented her from leaving the Kierkegaard Room early and securing a good front-row seat herself.

  Almost as soon as the squall had gathered it disappeared, however, and the sun shone strongly again.

  “Well, I hate to break it to you folks in the back,” Jim Crolius was saying, “but from where I stand, up here by the windows, I can see some clouds on the horizon. Those could be friendly little white clouds. Or they could be dark rain clouds. Appearances can be deceiving! From where I stand I may think I see a safe course ahead, but I’m no expert. I may be piloting the ship straight into a reef. Now, you wouldn’t want to sail on a ship without a captain, would you? A captain who’s got all the maps and gadgets, all the bells and whistles, the whole nine yards. Right? You got your radar, you got your sonar, you got your Global Positioning System,” Jim Crolius was counting off each instrument on his fingers. “You got your satellites up in outer space! It’s all pretty technical. But somebody’s got to have that information, or we could all be in big trouble. Right? This is a deep ocean. This is your life. So what I’m saying is you may not want to master all that technical stuff personally, all the bells and whistles, the whole nine yards. But you better hope you’ve got a good captain when you go cruising the high seas of high finance.”

  There was applause from the front rows.

  “He must literally think we’re eight years old,” Sylvia Roth whispered to Enid.

  “This is just his introduction,” Enid whispered back.

  “Now, another way this is fitting,” Jim Crolius continued, “is that we’re here to see the changing leaves. The year has its rhythms—winter, spring, summer, fall. The whole thing is cyclical. You got your upswings in the spring, you got your downturns in the fall. It’s just like the market. Cyclical business, right? You can have a bull market for five, ten, even fifteen years. We’ve seen it in our lifetime. But we’ve also seen corrections. I may look like I’m just a kid, but I’ve even seen a genuine market break in my lifetime. Scary stuff. Cyclical business. People, we’ve got a lot of green out there right now. It’s been a long, glorious summer. In fact, let me see a show of hands here, how many of you are paying for this cruise, either entirely or in part, on the strength of your investments?”

  Forest of raised hands.

  Jim Crolius nodded with satisfaction. “Well, folks, I hate to break it to you, but those leaves are starting to turn. No matter how green things are for you right now, it’s not going to survive the winter. Of course, every year is different, every cycle’s different. You never know exactly when that green is going to turn. But we’re here, every one of us, because we’re foresighted people. Every person in this room has proved to me she’s a smart investor, just by virtue of being here. You know why? Because it was still summer when you left home. Every person in this room had the foresight to know that something was going to change on this cruise. And the question we all have—I’m speaking in metaphors here—the question is: Will all that glorious green out there turn to glorious gold? Or will it all just wither on the branch in the winter of our discontent?”

  The Longstocking Ballroom was electric with excitement now. There were murmurs of “Marvelous! Marvelous!”

  “More matter and less art,” Sylvia Roth said dryly.

  Death, Enid thought. He was talking about death. And all the people clapping were so old.

  But where was the sting of this realization? Asian had taken it away.

  Jim Crolius turned now to the easel and flipped over the fir
st of its big newsprint pages. The second page was headed WHEN THE CLIMATE CHANGES, and the categories—Funds, Bonds, Common Stock, etc.—drew a gasp from the front row out of all proportion to the informational content. For an instant it seemed to Enid as if Jim Crolius were doing a technical market analysis of the kind that her broker in St. Jude had told her never to pay attention to. Discounting the minimal effects of wind drag at low velocities, something “plummeting” (a thing of value “plunging” in a “free fall”) experienced an acceleration due to gravity of 32 feet per second squared, and, acceleration being the second-order derivative of distance, the analyst could integrate once over the distance the object had fallen (roughly 30 feet) to calculate its velocity (42 feet per second) as it passed the center of a window 8 feet tall, and assuming a 6-foot-long object, and also assuming for simplicity’s sake a constant velocity over the interval, derive a figure of approximately four-tenths of a second of full or partial visibility. Four-tenths of a second wasn’t much. If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, all that registered was something dark flashing by. But if you happened to be gazing directly at the window in question and you happened as well to be feeling unprece-dentedly calm, four-tenths of a second was more than enough time to identify the falling object as your husband of forty-seven years; to notice that he was wearing the awful black raincoat which had lost its shape and should never have been worn in public but which he’d willfully packed for the trip and willfully carried with him everywhere; to experience not only the certainty that something terrible had happened but also a peculiar sense of intrusion, as if you were witnessing an event that nature had never intended you to witness, like the impact of a meteorite or the copulation of whales; and even to observe the expression on your husband’s face, to register its almost youthful beauty, its peculiar serenity, for who could have anticipated the grace with which the raging man would fall?

  He was remembering the nights he’d sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with his girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath-smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them from Black Beauty or The Chronicles of Narnia. How his voice alone, its palpable resonance, had made them drowsy. These were evenings, and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, when nothing traumatic enough to leave a scar had befallen the nuclear unit. Evenings of plain vanilla closeness in his black leather chair; sweet evenings of doubt between the nights of bleak certainty. They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.

  THE GENERATOR

  Robin Passafaro was a Philadelphian from a family of troublemakers and true believers. Robin’s grandfather and her uncles Jimmy and Johnny were all unreconstructed Teamsters; the grandfather, Fazio, had served under the Teamsters boss Frank Fitzsimmons as a national vice president and had run the biggest Philly local and mishandled the dues of its 3,200 members for twenty years. Fazio had survived two racketeering indictments, a coronary, a laryngectomy, and nine months of chemotherapy before retiring to Sea Isle City on the Jersey coast, where he still hobbled out onto a pier every morning and baited his crab traps with raw chicken.

  Uncle Johnny, Fazio’s eldest son, got along well on two kinds of disability (“chronic and severe lumbar pain,” the claim forms stated), his seasonal cash-only house-painting business, and his luck or talent as an online day trader. Johnny lived near Veterans Stadium with his wife and their youngest daughter in a vinyl-sided row house that they’d expanded until it filled their tiny lot, from the sidewalk to the rear property line; a flower garden and a square of Astro turf were on the roof.

  Uncle Jimmy (“Baby Jimmy”) was a bachelor and the site manager for IBT Document Storage, a cinder-block mausoleum that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, in more optimistic times, had built on the industrial banks of the Delaware and later, because only three (3) loyal Teamsters had ever opted for interment in its thousand fireproof vaults, converted into a long-term repository for corporate and legal paper. Baby Jimmy was famous in local NA circles for having hooked himself on methadone without ever trying heroin.

  Robin’s father, Nick, was Fazio’s middle child and the only Passafaro of his generation who never got with the Teamster program. Nick was the family brain and a committed Socialist; the Teamsters with their Nixonian and Sinatran allegiances were anathema to him. Nick married an Irish girl and pointedly moved out to racially integrated Mount Airy and embarked on a career of teaching high-school social studies in the city district, daring principals to fire him for his ebullient Trotskyism.

  Nick and his wife, Colleen, had been told that they were infertile. They adopted a year-old boy, Billy, a few months before Colleen became pregnant with Robin—the first of three daughters. Robin was a teenager before she learned that Billy was adopted, but her earliest emotional memories from childhood, she told Denise, were of feeling helplessly privileged.

  There was probably a good diagnostic label for Billy, corresponding to abnormal EEG waveforms or troubled red nodules or black lacunae on his CAT scan and to hypothetical causes like severe neglect or cerebral trauma in his preadoptive infancy; but his sisters, Robin especially, knew him simply as a terror. Billy soon figured out that no matter how cruel he was to Robin, she would always blame herself. If she lent him five dollars, he made fun of her for thinking he would pay it back. (If she complained to her father, Nick just gave her another five.) Billy chased her with the grasshoppers whose legs he’d clipped the ends off, the frogs he’d bathed in Clorox, and he told her—he meant it as a joke—“I hurt them because of you.” He put turds of mud in Robin’s dolls’ underpants. He called her Cow Clueless and Robin No-Breast. He stuck her forearm with a pencil and broke the lead off deep. The day after a new bicycle of hers disappeared from the garage, he turned up with a good pair of black roller skates that he said he’d found on Germantown Avenue and that he used to rocket around the neighborhood in the months while she was waiting for another bike.

  Their father, Nick, had eyes for every injustice in the First and Third Worlds except those of which Billy was the author. By the time Robin started high school, Billy’s delinquency had driven her to padlock her closet, stuff Kleenex in the keyhole of her bedroom door, and sleep with her wallet beneath her pillow; but even these measures she took more sadly than angrily. She had little to complain of and she knew it. She and her sisters were poor and happy in their big falling-down house on Phil-Ellena Street, and she went to a good Quaker high school and then to an excellent Quaker college, both on full scholarships, and she married her college boyfriend and had two baby girls, while Billy was going down the tubes.

  Nick had taught Billy to love politics, and Billy had repaid him by taunting him with the epithet bourgeois liberal, bourgeois liberal. When this failed to incense Nick sufficiently, Billy befriended the other Passafaros, who were predisposed to love any traitor in the family traitor’s family. After Billy was arrested on his second felony charge and Colleen threw him out of the house, his Teamster relatives gave him something of a hero’s welcome. It was a while before he fully wore it out.

  He lived for a year with his Uncle Jimmy, who well into his fifties felt happiest among like-minded adolescents with whom he could share his large collections of guns and knives, Chasey Lain videos, and Warlords III and Dungeonmaster paraphernalia. But Jimmy also worshipped Elvis Presley at a shrine in one corner of his bedroom, and Billy, who never got it through his head that Jimmy wasn’t joking about Elvis, finally desecrated the shrine in some grievous and irreversible manner that Jimmy afterward refused to talk about, and was put out on the street.

  From there Billy drifted into the radical underground scene in Philly—that Red Crescent of bomb-makers and Xeroxers and zinesters and punks and Bakuninites and minor vegan prophets and orgone-blanket manufacturers and women named Afrika and amateur Engels biographers and Red Army Brigade émigrés that stret
ched from Fishtown and Kensington in the north, over through Germantown and West Philly (where Mayor Goode had firebombed the good citizens of MOVE), and down into blighted Point Breeze. It was an odd Philly Phact that a non-negligible fraction of the city’s crimes were committed with political consciousness. After Frank Rizzo’s first mayoralty nobody could pretend that the city police force was clean or impartial; and since, in the estimation of Red Crescent denizens, all cops were murderers or, at the very least, ipso facto accessories to murder (witness MOVE!), any crime of violence or wealth redistribution to which a cop might object could be justified as a legitimate action in a long-running dirty war. This logic by and large eluded local judges, however. The young anarchist Billy Passafaro over the years drew ever more severe sentences for his crimes—probation, community service, experimental penal boot camp, and finally the state pen at Graterford. Robin and her father often argued about the justice of these sentences, Nick stroking his Lenin-like goatee and asserting that, although not a violent man himself, he was not opposed to violence in the service of ideals, Robin challenging him to specify what political ideal, exactly, Billy had advanced by stabbing a Penn undergrad with a broken pool cue.

  The year before Denise met Robin, Billy was released on parole and attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a Community Computing Center in the poor near-north neighborhood of Nicetown. One of the many policy coups of Mayor Goode’s popular two-term successor was the commercial exploitation of the city’s public schools. The mayor had shrewdly cast the deplorable neglect of the schools as a business opportunity (“Act Fast, Be Part of Our Message of Hope,” his letters said), and the Ν——Corporation had responded to his pitch by assuming responsibility for the city’s severely underfunded school athletic programs. Now the mayor had midwifed a similar arrangement with the W——Corporation, which was donating to the city of Philadelphia sufficient units of its famous Global Desktop to “empower” every classroom in the city, plus five Community Computing Centers in blighted northern and western neighborhoods. The agreement granted W——the exclusive right to employ for promotional and advertising purposes all classroom activities within the school district of Philadelphia, including but not limited to all Global Desktop applications. Critics of the mayor alternately denounced the “sellout” and complained that W——was donating its slow and crash-prone Version 4.0 Desktops to the schools and its nearly useless Version 3.2 technology to the Community Computing Centers. But the mood in Nicetown on that September afternoon was buoyant. The mayor and W——’s twenty-eight-year-old corporate-image vice president, Rick Flamburg, joined hands on big shears to cut ribbon. Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.