The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Tomorrow, OK?”

  “Mom wants somebody here next week,” Denise said. “You could stay a week and help her. That would be a huge relief for me. I’m going to die if I stay past Sunday. I will literally cease to exist.”

  Chip was breathing hard. The door of the cage was closing on him fast. The sensation he’d had in the men’s room at the Vilnius Airport, the feeling that his debt to Denise, far from being a burden, was his last defense, returned to him in the form of dread at the prospect of its being forgiven. He’d lived with the affliction of this debt until it had assumed the character of a neuroblastoma so intricately implicated in his cerebral architecture that he doubted he could survive its removal.

  He wondered if the last flights east had left the airport or whether he might still escape tonight.

  “How about we split the debt in half?” he said. “So I only owe you ten. How about we both stay here till Wednesday?”

  “Nope.”

  “If I said yes,” he said, “would you stop being so weird and lighten up a little?”

  “First say yes.”

  Alfred was calling Chip’s name from upstairs. He was saying, “Chip, can you help me?”

  “He calls your name even when you’re not here,” Denise said.

  The windows shook in the wind. When had it happened that his parents had become the children who went to bed early and called down for help from the top of the stairs? When had this happened?

  “Chip,” Alfred called. “I don’t understand this blanket. CAN YOU HELP ME?”

  The house shook and the storms rattled and the draft from the window nearest Chip intensified; and in a gust of memory he remembered the curtains. He remembered when he’d left St. Jude for college. He remembered packing the hand-carved Austrian chessmen that his parents had given him for his high-school graduation, and the six-volume Sandburg biography of Lincoln that they’d given him for his eighteenth birthday, and his new navy-blue blazer from Brooks Brothers (“It makes you look like a handsome young doctor!” Enid hinted), and great stacks of white T-shirts and white jockey underpants and white long Johns, and a fifth-grade school picture of Denise in a Lucite frame, and the very same Hudson Bay blanket that Alfred had taken as a freshman to the University of Kansas four decades earlier, and a pair of leather-clad wool mittens that likewise dated from Alfred’s deep Kansan past, and a set of heavy-duty thermal curtains that Alfred had bought for him at Sears. Reading Chip’s college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he’d bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. “You’ll appreciate these on a cold night,” he told Chip. “You’ll be surprised how much they cut down drafts.” But Chip’s freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm arid let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted—to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particular brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn’t their fault that they didn’t belong in a dorm room. They’d betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out on the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he’d thought.

  “I don’t understand these blankets,” Alfred said.

  “All right,” Chip told Denise as he started up the stairs. “If it makes you feel better, I won’t pay you back.”

  The question was: How to get out of this prison?

  The big black lady, the mean one, the bastard, was the one he had to keep an eye on. She intended to make his life a hell. She stood at the far end of the prison yard throwing him significant glances to remind him that she hadn’t forgotten him, she was still in hot pursuit of her vendetta. She was a lazy black bastard and he said so at a shout. He cursed the bastards, black and white, all around him. Goddamned sneaky bastards with their pinheaded regulations. EPA bureaucrats, OSHA functionaries, insolent so-and-sos. They were keeping their distance now, sure, because they knew he was onto them, but just let him nod off for one minute, just let him let his guard down, and watch what they would do to him. They could hardly wait to tell him he was nothing. They could hardly wait to show their disrespect. That fat black bastard, that nasty black bitch over there, held his eye and nodded across the white heads of the other prisoners: I’m gonna get you. That’s what her nod said to him. And nobody else could see what she was doing to him. All the rest were timid useless strangers talking nonsense. He’d said hello to one of the fellows, asked him a simple question. The fellow didn’t even understand English. It ought to have been simple enough, ask a simple question, get a simple answer, but evidently not. He was on his own now, he was by himself in a corner; and the bastards were out to get him.

  He didn’t understand where Chip was. Chip was an intellectual and had ways of talking sense to these people. Chip had done a good job yesterday, better than he could have done himself. Asked a simple question, got a simple answer, and then explained it in a way that a man could understand. But there was no sign of Chip now. Inmates semaphoring one another, waving their arms like traffic cops. Just try giving a simple order to these people, just try it. They pretended you didn’t exist. That fat bastard black woman had them all scared witless. If she figured out that the prisoners were on his side, if she found out they’d aided him in any way, she’d make them pay. Oh, she had that look. She had that I’m gonna make you hurt look. And he, at this point in his life, he’d had just about enough of this insolent black type of woman, but what could you do? It was a prison. It was a public institution. They’d throw anybody in here. White-haired women semaphoring. Hairless fairies touching toes. But why him, for God’s sake? Why him? It made him weep to be thrown into a place like this. It was hell to get old even without being persecuted by that waddling black so-and-so.

  And here she came again.

  “Alfred?” Sassy. Insolent. “You gonna let me stretch your legs now?”

  “You’re a goddamned bastard!” he told her.

  “I is what I is, Alfred. But I know who my parents are. Now why don’t you put your hands down, nice and easy, and let me stretch your legs and help you feel better.”

  He lunged as she came at him, but his belt had got stuck in the chair, in the chair somehow, in the chair. Got stuck in the chair and he couldn’t move.

  “You keep that up, Alfred,” the mean one said, “and we’re gonna have to take you back to your room.”

  “Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!”

  She pulled an insolent face and went away, but he knew that she’d be back. They always came back. His only hope was to get his belt free of the chair somehow. Get himself free, make a dash, put an end to it. Bad design to build a prison yard this many stories up. A man could see clear to Illinois. Big window right there. Bad design if they meant to house prisoners here. From the look of the glass it was thermal pane, two layers. If he hit it with his head and pitched forward he could make it. But first he had to get the goddamned belt free.

  He struggled with its smooth nylon breadth in the same way over and over. There was a time
when he’d encountered obstacles philosophically but that time was past. His fingers were as weak as grass when he tried to work them under the belt so he could pull on it. They bent like soft bananas. Trying to work them under the belt was so obviously and utterly hopeless—the belt had such overwhelming advantages of toughness and tightness—that his efforts soon became merely a pageant of spite and rage and incapacity. He caught his fingernails on the belt and then flung his arms apart, letting his hands bang into the arms of his captivating chair and painfully ricochet this way and that way, because he was so goddamned angry—

  “Dad, Dad, Dad, whoa, calm down,” the voice said.

  “Get that bastard! Get that bastard!”

  “Dad, whoa, it’s me. It’s Chip.”

  Indeed, the voice was familiar. He looked up at Chip carefully to make sure the speaker really was his middle child, because the bastards would try to take advantage of you any way they could. Indeed, if the speaker had been anybody in the world but Chip, it wouldn’t have paid to trust him. Too risky. But there was something in Chipper that the bastards couldn’t fake. You looked at Chipper and you knew he’d never lie to you. There was a sweetness to Chipper that nobody else could counterfeit.

  As his identification of Chipper deepened toward certainty, his breathing leveled out and something like a smile pushed through the other, warring forces in his face.

  “Well!” he said finally.

  Chip pulled another chair over and gave him a cup of ice water for which, he realized, he was thirsty. He took a long pull on the straw and gave the water back to Chip.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  Chip set the cup on the floor. “She woke up with a cold. I told her to stay in bed.”

  “Where’s she living now?”

  “She’s at home. Exactly where she was two days ago.”

  Chip had already explained to him why he had to be here, and the explanation had made sense as long as he could see Chip’s face and hear his voice, but as soon as Chip was gone the explanation fell apart.

  The big black bastard was circling the two of them with her evil eye.

  “This is a physical-therapy room,” Chip said. “We’re on the eighth floor of St. Luke’s. Mom had her foot operation here, if you remember that.”

  “That woman is a bastard,” he said, pointing.

  “No, she’s a physical therapist,” Chip said, “and she’s been trying to help you.”

  “No, look at her. Do you see the way she’s? Do you see it?”

  “She’s a physical therapist, Dad.”

  “The what? She’s a?”

  On the one hand, he trusted the intelligence and assurance of his intellectual son. On the other hand, the black bastard was giving him the Eye to warn him of the harm she intended to do him at her earliest opportunity; there was a grand malevolence to her manner, plain as day. He couldn’t begin to reconcile this contradiction: his belief that Chip was absolutely right and his conviction that that bastard absolutely wasn’t any physicist.

  The contradiction opened into a bottomless chasm. He stared into its depths, his mouth hanging open. A warm thing was crawling down his chin.

  And now some bastard’s hand was reaching for him. He tried to slug the bastard and realized, in the nick of time, that the hand belonged to Chip.

  “Easy, Dad. I’m just wiping your chin.”

  “Ah God.”

  “Do you want to sit here a little, or do you want to go back to your room?”

  “I leave it to your discretion.”

  This handy phrase came to him all ready to be spoken, neat as you please.

  “Let’s go back, then.” Chip reached behind the chair and made adjustments. Evidently the chair had casters and levers of enormous complexity.

  “See if you can get my belt unhooked,” he said.

  “We’ll go back to the room, and then you can walk around.”

  Chip wheeled him out of the yard and up the cellblock to his cell. He couldn’t get over how luxurious the appointments were. Like a first-class hotel room except for the bars on the bed and the shackles and the radios, the prisoner-control equipment.

  Chip parked him near the window, left the room with a Styrofoam pitcher, and returned a few minutes later in the company of a pretty little girl in a white jacket.

  “Mr. Lambert?” she said. She was pretty like Denise, with curly black hair and wire glasses, but smaller. “I’m Dr. Schulman. You may remember we met yesterday.”

  “Well!” he said, smiling wide. He remembered a world where there were girls like this, pretty little girls with bright eyes and smart brows, a world of hope.

  She placed a hand on his head and bent down as if to kiss him. She scared the hell out of him. He almost hit her.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said. “I just want to look in your eye. Is that all right with you?”

  He turned to Chip for reassurance, but Chip himself was staring at the girl.

  “Chip!” he said.

  Chip took his eyes off her. “Yeah, Dad?”

  Well, now that he’d attracted Chip’s attention, he had to say something, and what he said was this: “Tell your mother not to worry about the mess down there. I’ll take care of all that.”

  “OK. I’ll tell her.”

  The girl’s clever fingers and soft face were all around his head. She asked him to make a fist, she pinched him and prodded him. She was talking like the television in somebody else’s room.

  “Dad?” Chip said.

  “I didn’t hear.”

  “Dr. Schulman wants to know if you’d prefer ‘Alfred’ or ‘Mr. Lambert.’ What would you rather she called you?”

  He grinned painfully. “I’m not following.”

  “I think he prefers ‘Mr. Lambert,’” Chip said.

  “Mr. Lambert,” said the little girl, “can you tell me where we are?”

  He turned again to Chip, whose expression was expectant but unhelpful. He pointed toward the window. “That’s Illinois in that direction,” he said to his son and to the girl. Both were listening with great interest now, and he felt he should say more. “There’s a window,” he said, “which … if you get it open … would be what I want. I couldn’t get the belt undone. And then.”

  He was failing and he knew it.

  The little girl looked down on him kindly. “Can you tell me who our President is?”

  He grinned, it was an easy one.

  “Well,” he said. “She’s got so much stuff down there. I doubt she’d even notice. We ought to pitch the whole lot of it.”

  The little girl nodded as if this were a reasonable answer. Then she held up both her hands. She was pretty like Enid, but Enid had a wedding ring, Enid didn’t wear glasses, Enid had lately gotten older, and he probably would have recognized Enid, although, being far more familiar to him than Chip, she was that much harder to see.

  “How many fingers am I holding up?” the girl asked him.

  He considered her fingers. As far as he could tell, the message they were sending was Relax. Unclench. Take it easy.

  With a smile he let his bladder empty.

  “Mr. Lambert? How many fingers am I holding up?”

  The fingers were there. It was a beautiful thing. The relief of irresponsibility. The less he knew, the happier he was. To know nothing at all would be heaven.

  “Dad?”

  “I should know that,” he said. “Can you believe I’d forget a thing like that?”

  The little girl and Chip exchanged a look and then went out into the corridor.

  He’d enjoyed unclenching, but after a minute or two he felt clammy. He needed to change his clothes now and he couldn’t. He sat in his mess as it chilled.

  “Chip?” he said.

  A stillness had fallen on the cellblock. He couldn’t rely on Chip, he was always disappearing. He couldn’t rely on anybody but himself. With no plan in his head and no power in his hands he attempted to loosen the belt so he could take his pants off
and dry himself. But the belt was as maddening as ever. Twenty times he ran his hands along its length and twenty times he failed to find a buckle. He was like a person of two dimensions seeking freedom in a third. He could search for all eternity and never find the goddamned buckle.

  “Chip!” he called, but not loudly, because the black bastard was lurking out there, and she would punish him severely. “Chip, come and help me.”

  He would have liked to remove his legs entirely. They were weak and restless and wet and trapped. He kicked a little and rocked in his unrocking chair. His hands were in a tumult. The less he could do about his legs, the more he swung his arms. The bastards had him now, he’d been betrayed, and he began to cry. If only he’d known! If only he’d known, he could have taken steps, he’d had the gun, he’d had the bottomless cold ocean, if only he’d known.

  He swatted a pitcher of water against the wall, and finally somebody came running.

  “Dad, Dad, Dad. What’s wrong?”

  Alfred looked up at his son and into his eyes. He opened his mouth, but the only word he could produce was “I—”

  I—

  I have made mistakes—

  I am alone—

  I am wet—

  I want to die—

  I am sorry—

  I did my best—

  I love my children—

  I need your help—

  I want to die—

  “I can’t be here,” he said.

  Chip crouched on the floor by the chair. “Listen,” he said. “You have to stay here another week so they can monitor you. We need to find out what’s wrong.”

  He shook his head. “No! You have to get me out of here!”

  “Dad, I’m sorry,” Chip said, “but I can’t take you home. You have to stay here for another week at least.”

  Oh, how his son tried his patience! By now Chip should have understood what he was asking for without being told again.

  “I’m saying put an end to it!” He banged on the arms of his captivating chair. “You have to help me put an end to it!”

  He looked at the window through which he was ready, at last, to throw himself. Or give him a gun, give him an ax, give him anything, but get him out of here. He had to make Chip understand this.