"The Corrections" - читать интересную книгу автора (Franzen Jonathan)

THE MORE HE THOUGHT ABOUT IT, THE ANGRIER HE GOT

GARY LAMBERT’S profitable entanglement with the Axon Corporation had begun three weeks earlier, on a Sunday afternoon that he’d spent in his new color darkroom, trying to enjoy reprinting two old photographs of his parents and, by enjoying it, to reassure himself about his mental health.

Gary had been worrying a lot about his mental health, but on that particular afternoon, as he left his big schist-sheathed house on Seminole Street and crossed his big back yard and climbed the outside stairs of his big garage, the weather in his brain was as warm and bright as the weather in northwest Philadelphia. A September sun was shining through a mix of haze and smallish, gray-keeled clouds, and to the extent that Gary was able to understand and track his neurochemistry (and he was a vice president at CenTrust Bank, not a shrink, let’s remember) his leading indicators all seemed rather healthy.

Although in general Gary applauded the modern trend toward individual self-management of retirement funds and long-distance calling plans and private-schooling options, he was less than thrilled to be given responsibility for his own personal brain chemistry, especially when certain people in his life, notably his father, refused to take any such responsibility. But Gary was nothing if not conscientious. As he entered the darkroom, he estimated that his levels of Neurofactor 3 (i. e., serotonin: a very, very important factor) were posting seven-day or even thirty-day highs, that his Factor 2 and Factor 7 levels were likewise outperforming expectations, and that his Factor 1 had rebounded from an early-morning slump related to the glass of Armagnac he’d drunk at bedtime. He had a spring in his step, an agreeable awareness of his above-average height and his late-summer suntan. His resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained. Declines led advances in key indices of paranoia (e. g., his persistent suspicion that Caroline and his two older sons were mocking him), and his seasonally adjusted assessment of life’s futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy. He was not the least bit clinically depressed.

He drew the velvet blackout curtains and shut the lightproof shutters, took a box of 8x10 paper from the big stainless refrigerator, and fed two strips of celluloid to the motorized negative cleaner—a sexily heavy little gadget.

 He was printing images from his parents’ ill-fated Decade of Connubial Golf. One showed Enid bending over in deep rough, scowling in her sunglasses in the obliterative heartland heat, her left hand squeezing the neck of her long-suffering five-wood, her right arm blurred in the act of underhandedly throwing her ball (a white smear at the image’s margin) into the fairway. (She and Alfred had only ever played on flat, straight, short, cheap public courses.) In the other photo Alfred was wearing tight shorts and a billed Midland Pacific cap, black socks and prehistoric golf shoes, and was addressing a white grapefruit-sized tee marker with his prehistoric wooden driver and grinning at the camera as if to say, A ball this big I could hit!

After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and discovered that both prints were webbed over with peculiar yellow blotches.

He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the photographs as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed a modicum of cooperation from the world of objects.

Outside, the weather was curdling. There was a trickle in the gutters, a rooftop percussion of drops from overhanging trees. Through the walls of the garage, while he shot a second pair of enlargements, Gary could hear Caroline and the boys playing soccer in the back yard. He heard footfalls and punting sounds, less frequent shouts, the seismic whump of ball colliding with garage.

When the second set of prints emerged from the fixer with the same yellow blotches, Gary knew he ought to quit. But there came a tapping on the outside door, and his youngest son, Jonah, slipped through the blackout curtain.

“Are you printing pictures?” Jonah said. Gary hastily folded the failed prints into quarters and buried them in the trash. “Just starting,” he said.

He remixed his solutions and opened a fresh box of paper. Jonah sat down by a safe light and whispered as he turned the pages of one of the Narnia books, Prince Caspian, that Gary’s sister, Denise, had given him. Jonah was in second grade but was already reading at a fifth-grade level. Often he spoke aloud the written words in an articulate whisper that was of a piece with his general Narnian dearness as a person. He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy.

Caroline did not entirely approve of Narnia—C. S. Lewis was a known Catholic propagandist, and the Narnian hero, Aslan, was a furry, four-pawed Christ figure—but Gary had enjoyed reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a boy, and he had not, it was safe to say, grown up to be a religious nut. (In fact he was a strict materialist.)

“So they kill a bear,” Jonah reported, “but it’s not a talking bear, and Aslan comes back, but only Lucy sees him and the others don’t believe her.”

Gary tweezed the prints into the stop bath. “Why don’t they believe her?”

“Because she’s the youngest,” Jonah said.

Outside, in the rain, Caroline laughed and shouted. She had a habit of running herself ragged to keep up with the boys. In the early years of their marriage she’d worked full-time as a lawyer, but after Caleb was born she’d come into family money and now she worked half days only, at a philanthropically low salary, for the Children’s Defense Fund. Her real life centered on the boys. She called them her best friends.

Six months ago, on the eve of Gary’s forty-third birthday, while he and Jonah were visiting his parents in St. Jude, a pair of local contractors had come and rewired, replumbed, and re-outfitted the second floor of the garage as a surprise birthday gift from Caroline. Gary had occasionally spoken of reprinting his favorite old family photos and collecting them in a leather-bound album, an All-Time Lambert Two Hundred. But commercial printing would have sufficed for that, and meanwhile the boys were teaching him computer pixel-processing, and if he’d still needed a lab he could have rented one by the hour. His impulse on his birthday, therefore—after Caroline had led him out to the garage and presented him with a darkroom that he didn’t need or want—was to weep. From certain pop-psychology books on Caroline’s nightstand, however, he’d learned to recognize the Warning Signs of clinical depression, and one of these Warning Signs, the authorities all agreed, was a proclivity to inappropriate weeping, and so he’d swallowed the lump in his throat and bounded around the expensive new darkroom and exclaimed to Caroline (who was experiencing both buyer’s remorse and gift-giver’s anxiety) that he was utterly delighted with the gift! And then, to reassure himself that he wasn’t clinically depressed and to make sure that Caroline never suspected anything of the kind, he’d resolved to work in the darkroom twice a week until the All-Time Lambert Two Hundred album was complete.

The suspicion that Caroline, consciously or not, had tried to exile him from the house by putting the darkroom in the garage was another key index of paranoia.

When the timer pealed, he transferred the third set of prints to the fixer bath and raised the lights again.

“What are those white blobs?” Jonah said, peering into the tray.

“Jonah, I don’t know!”

“They look like clouds,” Jonah said.

The soccer ball slammed into the side of the garage.

Gary left Enid scowling and Alfred grinning in the fixative and opened shutters. His monkey puzzle tree and the bamboo thicket next to it were glossy with rain. In the middle of the back yard, in soaked soiled jerseys that stuck to their shoulder blades, Caroline and Aaron were gulping air while Caleb tied a shoe. Caroline at forty-five had the legs of a college girl. Her hair was nearly as blond as when Gary had first met her, twenty years earlier, at a Bob Seger concert at the Spectrum. Gary was still substantially attracted to his wife, still excited by her effortless good looks and by her Quaker bloodlines. By ancient reflex, he reached for a camera and trained the zoom telephoto on her.

The look on Caroline’s face dismayed him. There was a pinch in her brow, a groove of distress around her mouth. She was limping as she pursued the ball again.

Gary turned the camera on his oldest son, Aaron, who was best photographed unawares, before he could position his head at the self-conscious angle that he believed most flattered him. Aaron’s face was flushed and mud-flecked in the drizzle, and Gary worked the zoom to frame a handsome shot. But resentment of Caroline was overwhelming his neurochemical defenses.

The soccer had stopped now and she was running and limping toward the house.

Lucy buried her head in his mane to hide from his face, Jonah whispered.

There came a screaming from the house.

Caleb and Aaron reacted instantly, galloping across the yard like action-picture heroes and disappearing inside. A moment later Aaron reemerged and shouted, in his newly crack-prone voice, “Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!”

The hysteria of others made Gary methodical and calm. He left the darkroom and descended the rain-slick stairway slowly. In the open space above the commuter-rail tracks, behind the garage, a kind of spring-shower self-improvement of the light was working through the humid air.

“Dad, Grandma’s on the phone!”

Gary ambled across the yard, pausing to examine and regret the injuries that the soccer had visited on the grass. The surrounding neighborhood, Chestnut Hill, was not un-Narnian. Century-old maples and ginkgos and sycamores, many of them mutilated to accommodate power lines, grew in giant riot over patched and repatched city streets bearing the names of decimated tribes. Seminole and Cherokee, Navajo and Shawnee. For miles in every direction, despite high population densities and large household incomes, there were no fast roads and few useful stores. The Land That Time Forgot, Gary called it. Most of the houses here, including his own, were made of a schist that resembled raw tin and was exactly the color of his hair.

“Dad!”

“Thank you, Aaron, I heard you the first time.”

“Grandma’s on the phone!”

“I know that, Aaron. You just told me.”

In the slate-floored kitchen he found Caroline slumped in a chair with both hands pressed to her lower back.

“She called this morning,” Caroline said. “I forgot to tell you. The phone’s been ringing every five minutes, and finally I was running—”

“Thank you, Caroline.”

“I was running—”

“Thank you.” Gary snagged the cordless and held it at arm’s length, as if to keep his mother at bay, while he proceeded into the dining room. Here he was waylaid by Caleb, who had a finger buried in the slick leaves of a catalogue. “Dad, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Not now, Caleb, your grandmother is on the phone.”

“I just want—”

“Not now, I said.”

Caleb shook his head and smiled in disbelief, like a much-televised athlete who’d failed to draw a penalty.

Gary crossed the marble- floored main hall into his very large living room and said hello into the little phone.

“I told Caroline,” Enid said, “that I would call you back if you weren’t near the phone.”

“Your calls cost seven cents a minute,” Gary said.

“Or you could have called me back.”

“Mother, we’re talking about twenty-five cents.”

“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” she said. “The travel agent needs an answer by tomorrow morning at the latest. And, you know, we’re still hoping you’ll come for one last Christmas, like I promised Jonah, so—”

“Hang on a second,” Gary said. “I’ll check with Caroline.”

“Gary, you’ve had months to discuss this. I’m not going to sit here and wait while you—”

“One second.”

He blocked the perforations in the phone’s mouthpiece with his thumb and returned to the kitchen, where Jonah was standing on a chair with a package of Oreos. Caroline, still slumped at the table, was breathing shallowly. “I did something terrible,” she said, “when I ran to catch the phone.”

“You were out there slipping around in the rain for two hours,” Gary said.

“No, I was fine until I ran to get the phone.”

“Caroline, I saw you limping before you—”

“I was fine,” she said, “until I ran to get the phone, which was ringing for the fiftieth time—”

“Good, all right,” Gary said, “it’s my mother’s fault. Now tell me what you want me to say about Christmas.”

“Well, whatever. They’re welcome to come here.”

“We’d talked about the possibility of going there.”

Caroline shook her head thoroughly, as if erasing something. “No. You talked about it. I never talked about it.”

“Caroline—”

“I can’t discuss this when she’s on the phone. Have her call back next week.”

Jonah was realizing that he could take as many cookies as he wanted and neither parent would notice.

“She needs to make arrangements now,” Gary said. “They’re trying to decide if they should stop here next month, after their cruise. It depends on Christmas.”

“It’s like I slipped a disk.”

“If you won’t talk about it,” he said, “I’ll tell her we’re considering coming to St. Jude.”

“No way! That was not the agreement.”

“I’m proposing a one-time exception to the agreement.”

“No! No!” Wet tangles of blond hair lashed and twisted as Caroline registered refusal. “You can’t change the rules like that.”

“A one-time exception isn’t changing the rules.”

“God, I think I need an X-ray,” Caroline said.

Gary could feel the buzzing of his mother’s voice against his thumb. “A yes or a no here?”

Standing up, Caroline leaned into him and buried her face in his sweater. She knocked lightly on his sternum with a little fist. “Please,” she said, nuzzling his collarbone. “Tell her you’ll call her later. Please? I really hurt my back.”

Gary held the phone out to one side, his arm rigid, as she pressed against him. “Caroline. They’ve come here eight years in a row. It’s not extreme of me to propose a one-time exception. Can I at least say we’re considering the possibility?”

Caroline shook her head woefully and sank onto the chair.

“OK, fine,” Gary said. “I’ll make my own decision.”

He strode into the dining room, where Aaron, who’d been listening, stared at him as if he were a monster of spousal cruelty.

“Dad,” Caleb said, “if you’re not talking to Grandma, can I ask you something?”

“No, Caleb, I’m talking to Grandma.”

“Then can I talk to you right afterward?”

“Oh, God, oh, God,” Caroline was saying.

In the living room Jonah had settled onto the larger leather sofa with his tower of cookies and Prince Caspian.

“Mother?”

“I don’t understand this,” Enid said. “If it’s not a good time to talk, all right, call me back, but to make me wait ten minutes—”

“Yes, but here I am.”

“Well, so, and what have you decided?”

Before Gary could answer, there burst from the kitchen a piteous raw feline wailing, a cry such as Caroline had produced during intercourse fifteen years ago, before there were boys to hear her.

“Mom, sorry, one second.”

“This is not right,” Enid said. “This is not polite.”

“Caroline,” Gary called into the kitchen, “do you think we can behave like adults for a few minutes?”

“Ah, ah, uh! Uh!” Caroline cried.

“Nobody ever died of a backache, Caroline.”

“Please,” she cried, “call her later. I tripped on the last step when I was running inside, Gary, it hurts—”

He turned his back on the kitchen. “Sorry, Mom.”

“What on earth is going on there?”

“Caroline hurt her back a little bit playing soccer.”

“You know, I hate to say this,” Enid said, “but aches and pains are a part of getting older. I could talk about pain all day long if I wanted to. My hip is always hurting. As you get older, though, hopefully you get a little more matoor.”

“Oh! Ahh! Ahh!” Caroline cried out voluptuously.

“Yeah, that’s the hope,” Gary said.

“Anyhow, what did you decide?”

“The jury’s still out on Christmas,” he said, “but maybe you should plan on stopping here—”

“Ow! Ow! Ow!”

“It’s getting awfully late to be making Christmas reservations,” Enid said severely. “You know, the Schumperts made their Hawaii reservations back in April, because last year, when they waited until September, they couldn’t get the seats they—”

Aaron came running from the kitchen. “Dad!”

“I’m on the phone, Aaron.”

“Dad!”

“I’m on the telephone, Aaron, as you can see.”

“Dave has a colostomy,” Enid said.

“You’ve got to do something right now,” Aaron said. “Mom is really hurting. She says you have to drive her to the hospital!”

“Actually, Dad,” said Caleb, sidling in with his catalogue, “there’s someplace you can drive me, too.”

“No, Caleb.”

“No, but there’s a store I really actually do need to get to?”

“The affordable seats fill up early,” Enid said.

“Aaron?” Caroline shouted from the kitchen. “Aaron! Where are you? Where’s your father? Where’s Caleb?”

“It certainly is noisy in here for a person trying to concentrate,” Jonah said.

“Mother, sorry,” Gary said, “I’m going someplace quieter.”

“It’s getting very late,” Enid said, in her voice the panic of a woman for whom each passing day, each hour, signified the booking of more seats on late-December flights and thus the particle-by-particle disintegration of any hope that Gary and Caroline would bring their boys to St. Jude for one last Christmas.

“Dad,” Aaron pleaded, following Gary up the stairs to the second floor, “what do I tell her?”

“Tell her to call 911. Use your cell phone, call an ambulance.” Gary raised his voice: “Caroline? Call 911!”

Nine years ago, after a midwestern trip whose particular torments had included ice storms in both Philly and St. Jude, a four-hour runway delay with a whining five-year-old and a screaming two-year-old, a night of wild vomiting by Caleb in reaction (according to Caroline) to the butter and bacon fat in Enid’s holiday cooking, and a nasty spill that Caroline took on her in-laws’ ice-covered driveway (her back trouble dated from her field-hockey days at Friends’ Central, but she now spoke of having “reactivated” the injury on that driveway), Gary had promised his wife that he would never again ask her to go to St. Jude for Christmas. But now his parents had come to Philly eight years in a row, and although he disapproved of his mother’s obsession with Christmas—it seemed to him a symptom of a larger malaise, a painful emptiness in Enid’s life—he could hardly blame his parents for wanting to stay home this year. Gary also calculated that Enid would be more willing to leave St. Jude and move east if she’d had her “one last Christmas.” Basically, he was prepared to make the trip, and he expected a modicum of cooperation from his wife: a mature willingness to consider the special circumstances.

He shut himself inside his study and locked the door against the shouts and whimpers of his family, the barrage of feet on stairs, the pseudo-emergency. He lifted the receiver of his study phone and turned off the cordless.

“This is ridiculous,” Enid said in a defeated voice. “Why don’t you call me back?”

“We haven’t quite decided about December,” he said, “but we may very well come to St. Jude. In which case, I think you should stop here after the cruise.”

Enid was breathing rather loudly. “We’re not making two trips to Philadelphia this fall,” she said. “And I want to see the boys at Christmas, and so as far as I’m concerned this means you’re coming to St. Jude.”

“No, Mother,” he said. “No, no, no. We haven’t decided anything.”

“I promised Jonah—”

“Jonah’s not buying the tickets. Jonah’s not in charge here. So you make your plans, we’ll make ours, and hopefully everything will work out.”

Gary could hear, with strange clarity, the rustle of dissatisfaction from Enid’s nostrils. He could hear the seashore of her respiration, and all at once he realized.

“Caroline?” he said. “Caroline, are you on the line?”

The breathing ceased.

“Caroline, are you eavesdropping? Are you on the line?”

He heard a faint electronic click, a spot of static.

“Mom, sorry—”

Enid: “What on earth?”

Unbelievable! Unfuckingbelievable! Gary dropped the receiver on his desk, unlocked the door, and ran down the hallway past a bedroom in which Aaron was standing at his mirror with his brow wrinkled and his head at the Flattering Angle, past the main staircase on which Caleb was clutching his catalogue like a Jehovah’s Witness with a pamphlet, to the master bedroom where Caroline was curled up fetally on a Persian rug, in her muddy clothes, a frosty gelpack pressed into her lower back.

“Are you eavesdropping on me?”

Caroline shook her head weakly, perhaps hoping to suggest that she was too infirm to have reached the phone by the bed.

“Is that a no? You’re saying no? You weren’t listening?”

“No, Gary,” she said in a tiny voice.

“I heard the click, I heard the breathing—”

“No.”

“Caroline, there are three phones on this line, I’ve got two of them in my study, and the third one’s right here. Hello?”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping. I just picked up the phone—” She inhaled through gritted teeth. “To see if the line was free. That’s all.”

“And sat and listened! You were eavesdropping! Like we’ve talked and talked and talked about not doing!”

“Gary,” she said in a piteous little voice, “I swear to you I wasn’t. My back is killing me. I couldn’t reach to put the phone back for a minute. I put it on the floor. I wasn’t eavesdropping. Please be nice to me.”

That her face was beautiful and that the agony in it was mistakable for ecstasy—that the sight of her doubled-over and mud-spattered and red-cheekgd and vanquished and wild-haired on the Persian rug turned him on; that some part of him believed her denials and was full of tenderness for her—only deepened his feeling of betrayal. He stormed back up the hall to his study and slammed the door. “Mother, hello, I’m sorry.”

But the line was dead. He had to dial St. Jude now at his own expense. Through the window overlooking the back yard he could see sunlit, clamshell-purple rain clouds, steam rising off the monkey puzzle tree.

Because she wasn’t paying for the call, Enid sounded happier. She asked Gary if he’d heard of a company called Axon. “It’s in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania,” she said. “They want to buy Dad’s patent. Here, I’ll read you the letter. I’m a little upset about this.”

At CenTrust Bank, where Gary now ran the Equities Division, he’d long specialized in large-cap securities and never much concerned himself with small fry. The name Axon was not familiar to him. But as he listened to his mother read the letter from Mr. Joseph K. Prager at Bragg Knuter amp; Speigh, he felt he knew these people’s game. It was clear that the lawyer, in drafting a letter and sending it to an old man with a midwestern address, had offered Alfred no more than a tiny percentage of the patent’s actual value. Gary knew the way these shysters worked. In Axon’s position he would have done the same.

“I’m thinking we should ask for ten thousand, not five thousand,” Enid said.

“When does that patent expire?” Gary said.

“In about six years.”

“They must be looking at big money. Otherwise they’d just go ahead and infringe.”

“The letter says it’s experimental and uncertain.”

“Mother, exactly. That’s exactly what they want you to think. But if it’s so experimental, why are they bothering with this at all? Why not just wait six years?”

“Oh, I see.”

“It’s very, very good that you told me about this, Mother. What you need to do now is write back to these guys and ask them for a $200,000 licensing fee up front.”

Enid gasped as she’d done long ago on family car trips, when Alfred swung into oncoming traffic to pass a truck. “ Two hundred thousand! Oh, my, Gary—”

“And a one percent royalty on gross revenues from their process. Tell them you’re fully prepared to defend your legitimate claim in court.”

“But what if they say no?”

“Trust me, these guys have no desire to litigate. There’s no downside to being aggressive here.”

“Well, but it’s Dad’s patent, and you know how he thinks.”

“Put him on the phone,” Gary said.

His parents were cowed by authority of all kinds. When Gary wanted to reassure himself that he’d escaped their fate, when he needed to measure his distance from St. Jude, he considered his own fearlessness in the face of authority—including the authority of his father.

“Yes,” Alfred said.

“Dad,” he said, “I think you should go after these guys. They’re in a very weak position and you could make some real money.”

In St. Jude the old man said nothing.

“You’re not telling me you’re going to take that offer,” Gary said. “Because that’s not even an option. Dad. That’s not even on the menu.”

“I’ve made my decision,” Alfred said. “What I do is not your business.”

“Yes, it is, though. I have a legitimate interest in this.”

“Gary, you do not.”

“I have a legitimate interest,” Gary insisted. If Enid and Alfred ever ran out of money, it would fall to him and Caroline—not to his undercapitalized sister, not to his feckless brother—to pay for their care. But he had enough self-control not to spell this out for Alfred. “Will you at least tell me what you’re going to do? Will you pay me that courtesy?”

“You could pay me the courtesy of not asking,” Alfred said. “However, since you ask, I will tell you. I’m going to take what they offer and give half of the money to Orfic Midland.”

The universe was mechanistic: the father spoke, the son reacted.

“Well, now, Dad,” Gary said in the low, slow voice he reserved for situations in which he was very angry and very certain he was right. “You can’t do that.”

“I can and I will,” Alfred said.

“No, really, Dad, you have to listen to me. There is absolutely no legal or moral reason for you to split the money with Orfic Midland.”

“I was using the railroad’s materials and equipment,” Alfred said. “It was understood that I would share any income from the patents. And Mark Jamborets put me in touch with the patent lawyer. I suspect I was given a courtesy rate.”

“That was fifteen years ago! The company no longer exists. The people you had the understanding with are dead.”

“Not all of them are. Mark Jamborets is not.”

“Dad, it’s a nice sentiment. I understand the feeling, but—”

“I doubt you do.”

“That railroad was raped and eviscerated by the Wroth brothers.”

“I will not discuss it any further.”

“This is sick! This is sick!” Gary said. “You’re being loyal to a corporation that screwed you and the city of St. Jude in every conceivable way. It’s screwing you again, right now, with your health insurance.”

“You have your opinion, I have mine.”

“And I’m saying you’re being irresponsible. You’re being selfish. If you want to eat peanut butter and pinch pennies, that’s your business, but it’s not fair to Mom and it’s not fair to—”

“I don’t give a damn what you and your mother think.”

“It’s not fair to me! Who’s going to pay your bills if you get in trouble?-Who’s your fallback?”

“I will endure what I have to endure,” Alfred said. “Yes, and I’ll eat peanut butter if I have to. I like peanut butter. It’s a good food.”

“And if that’s what Mom has to eat, she’ll eat it, too. Right? She can eat dog food if she has to! Who cares what she wants?”

“Gary, I know what the right thing to do is. I don’t expect you to understand—I don’t understand the decisions you make—but I know what’s fair. So let that be the end of it.”

“I mean, give Orfic Midland twenty-five hundred dollars if you absolutely have to,” Gary said. “But that patent is worth—”

“Let that be the end of it, I said. Your mother wants to talk to you again.”

“Gary,” Enid cried, “the St. Jude Symphony is doing The Nutcracker in December! They do a beautiful job with the regional ballet, and it sells out so fast, tell me, do you think I should get nine tickets for the day of Christmas Eve? They have a two o’clock matinee, or we can go on the night of the twenty-third, if you think that’s better. You decide.”

“Mother, listen to me. Do not let Dad accept that offer. Don’t let him do anything until I’ve seen the letter. I want you to put a copy of it in the mail to me tomorrow.”

“OK, I will, but I’m thinking the important thing right now is The Nutcracker, to get nine tickets all together, because it sells out so fast, Gary, you wouldn’t believe.”

When he finally got off the phone, Gary pressed his hands to his eyes and saw, engraved in false colors on the darkness of his mental movie screen, two images of golf: Enid improving her lie from the rough (cheating was the word for this) and Alfred making light of his badness at the game.

The old man had pulled the same kind of self-defeating stunt fourteen years ago, after the Wroth brothers bought the Midland Pacific. Alfred was a few months shy of his sixty-fifth birthday when Fenton Creel, the Midpac’s new president, took him to lunch at Morelli’s in St. Jude. The top echelon of Midpac executives had been purged by the Wroths for having resisted the takeover, but Alfred, as chief engineer, had not been a part of this palace guard. In the chaos of shutting down the St. Jude office and moving operations to Little Rock, the Wroths needed somebody to keep the railroad running while the new crew, headed by Creel, learned the ropes. Creel offered Alfred a fifty percent raise and a block of Orfic stock if he would stay on for two extra years, oversee the move to Little Rock, and provide continuity.

Alfred hated the Wroths and was inclined to say no, but that night, at home, Enid went to work on him. She pointed out that the Orfic stock alone was worth $78,000, that his pension would be based on his last three full years’ salary, and that here was a chance to increase their retirement income by fifty percent.

These irresistible arguments appeared to sway Alfred, but three nights later he came home and announced to Enid that he’d tendered his resignation that afternoon and that Creel had accepted it. Alfred was then seven weeks short of a full year at his last, largest salary; it made no sense at all to quit. But he gave no explanation, then or ever, to Enid or to anyone else, for his sudden turnabout. He simply said: I have made my decision.

At the Christmas table in St. Jude that year, moments after Enid had sneaked onto baby Aaron’s little plate a bite of hazelnut goose stuffing and Caroline had grabbed the stuffing from the plate and marched into the kitchen and flung it in the trash like a wad of goose crap, saying, “This is pure grease—yuck,” Gary lost his temper and shouted: You couldn’t wait seven weeks? You couldn’t wait till you were sixty-five?

Gary, I worked hard all my life. My retirement is my business, not yours.

And the man so keen to retire that he couldn’t wait those last seven weeks: what had he done with his retirement? He’d sat in his blue chair.

Gary knew nothing of Axon, but Orfic Midland was the sort of conglomerate whose holdings and management structure he was paid to stay abreast of. He happened to know that the Wroth brothers had sold their controlling stake to cover losses in a Canadian gold-mining venture. Orfic Midland had joined the ranks of the indistinguishable bland megafirms whose headquarters dotted the American exurbs; its executives had been replaced like the cells of a living organism or like the letters in a game of Substitution in which SHIT turned to SHOT and SOOT and FOOT and FOOD, so that, by the time Gary had okayed the latest bulk purchase of OrficM for CenTrust’s portfolio, no blamable human trace remained of the company that had shut down St. Jude’s third largest employer and eliminated train service to much of rural Kansas. Orfic Midland was out of the transportation business altogether now. What survived of the Midpac’s trunk lines had been sold off to enable the company to concentrate on prison-building, prison management, gourmet coffee, and financial services; a new 144-strand fiber-optic cable system lay buried in the railroad’s old right-of-way.

This was the company to which Alfred felt loyal?

The more Gary thought about it, the angrier he got. He sat by himself in his study, unable to stem his rising agitation or to slow the steam-locomotive pace at which his breaths were coming. He was blind to the pretty pumpkin-yellow sunset unfolding in the tulip trees beyond the commuter tracks. He saw nothing but the principles at stake.

He might have sat there obsessing indefinitely, marshaling evidence against his father, had he not heard a rustling outside the study door. He jumped to his feet and pulled the door open.

Caleb was cross-legged on the floor, studying his catalogue. “Can I talk to you now?”

“Were you sitting out here listening to me?”

“No,” Caleb said. “You said we could talk when you were done. I had a question. I was wondering what room I could put under surveillance.”

Even upside down Gary could see that the prices for the equipment in Caleb’s catalogue—items with brushed-aluminum cases, color LCD screens—were three-and four-figure.

“It’s my new hobby,” Caleb said. “I want to put a room under surveillance. Mom says I can do the kitchen if it’s OK with you.”

“You want to put the kitchen under surveillance as a hobby?”

“Yeah!”

Gary shook his head. He’d had many hobbies when he was a boy, and for a long time it had pained him that his own boys seemed to have none at all. Eventually Caleb had figured out that if he used the word “hobby,” Gary would green-light expenditures he otherwise might have forbidden Caroline to make. Thus Caleb’s hobby had been photography until Caroline had bought him an autofocus camera, an SLR with a better zoom telephoto lens than Gary’s own, and a digital point-and-shoot camera. His hobby had been computers until Caroline had bought him a palmtop and a notebook. But now Caleb was nearly twelve, and Gary had been around the block one too many times. His guard was up regarding hobbies. He’d extracted from Caroline a promise not to buy Caleb more equipment of any kind without consulting with him first.

“Surveillance is not a hobby,” he said.

“Dad, yes it is! Mom was the one who suggested it. She said I could start with the kitchen.”

It seemed to Gary another Warning Sign of depression that his thought was: The liquor cabinet is in the kitchen.

“Better let me talk about this with Mom, all right?”

“But the store’s only open till six,” Caleb said.

“You can wait a few days. Don’t tell me you can’t.”

“But I’ve been waiting all afternoon. You said you’d talk to me, and now it’s almost night.”

That it was almost night gave Gary clear title to a drink. The liquor cabinet was in the kitchen. He took a step in its direction. “What equipment exactly are we talking about?”

“Just a camera and a microphone and servo controls.” Caleb thrust the catalogue at Gary. “See, I don’t even need the expensive kind. This one’s just six fifty. Mom said it was OK.”

Time and again Gary had the feeling that there was something disagreeable that his family wanted to forget, something only he insisted on remembering; something requiring only his nod, his go-ahead, to be forgotten. This feeling, too, was a Warning Sign.

“Caleb,” he said, “this sounds like something you’re going to get bored with very soon. It sounds expensive and like you won’t stay interested.”

“No! No!” Caleb said, anguished. “I’m totally interested. Dad, it’s a hobby.”

“You’ve gotten bored, though, pretty quickly with some of the other things we’ve gotten you. Things you also said you were ‘very interested in’ at the time.”

“This is different,” Caleb pleaded. “This time I’m really, truly interested.”

Clearly the boy was prepared to spend any amount of devalued verbal currency to buy his father’s acquiescence.

“Do you see what I’m saying, though?” Gary said. “Do you see the pattern? That things look one way before you buy them and another way afterward? Your feelings change after you buy things. Do you see that?”

Caleb opened his mouth, but before he could utter another plea or complaint, a craftiness flickered in his face.

“I guess,” he said with seeming humility. “I guess I see that.”

“Well, do you think it’s going to happen with this new equipment?” Gary said.

Caleb gave every appearance of giving the question serious thought. “I think this is different,” he said finally.

“Well, OK,” Gary said. “But I want you to remember we had this conversation. I don’t want to see this become just another expensive toy you play with for a week or two and then neglect. You’re going to be a teenager pretty soon, and I want to start seeing a little longer attention span—”

“Gary, that isn’t fair!” Caroline said hotly. She was hobbling from the doorway of the master bedroom, one shoulder hunched and her hand behind her back, applying pressure to the soothing gelpack.

“Hello, Caroline. Didn’t realize you were listening.”

“Caleb is not neglecting things.”

“Right, I’m not,” Caleb said.

“What you don’t understand,” Caroline told Gary, “is that everything’s getting used in this new hobby. That’s what’s so brilliant about it. He’s figured out a way to use all that equipment together in one—”

“Good, well, I’m glad to hear it.”

“He does something creative and you make him feel guilty.”

Once, when Gary had wondered aloud if giving Caleb so many gadgets might be stunting his imagination, Caroline had all but accused him of slandering his son. Among her favorite parenting books was The Technological Imagination: What Today’s Children Have to Teach Their Parents, in which Nancy Claymore, Ph.D., contrasting the “tired paradigm” of Gifted Child as Socially Isolated Genius with the “wired paradigm” of Gifted Child as Creatively Connected Consumer, argued that electronic toys would soon be so cheap and widespread that a child’s imagination would no longer be exercised in crayon drawings and made-up stories but in the synthesis and exploitation of existing technologies—an idea that Gary found both persuasive and depressing. When he was a boy not much younger than Caleb, his hobby had been building models with Popsicle sticks.

“Does this mean we can go to the store now?” Caleb said.

“No, Caleb, not tonight, it’s almost six,” Caroline said.

Caleb stamped his foot. “This always happens! I wait and wait, and then it gets too late.”

“We’ll rent a movie,” Caroline said. “We’ll get whatever movie you want.”

“I don’t want a movie. I want to do surveillance.”

“It’s not going to happen,” Gary said. “So start dealing with it.”

Caleb went to his room and slammed the door. Gary followed and flung it open. “That’s enough now,” he said. “We don’t slam doors in this house.”

“You slam doors!”

“I don’t want to hear another word from you.”

“You slam doors!”

“Do you want to spend the whole week in your room?”

Caleb replied by crossing his eyes and sucking his lips into his mouth: not another word.

Gary let his gaze drift into corners of the boy’s room that he ordinarily took care not to look at. Neglected in piles, like the loot in a thief’s apartment, was new photographic and computer and video equipment with an aggregate retail value possibly exceeding the annual salary of Gary’s secretary at CenTrust. Such a riot of luxury in the lair of an eleven-year-old! Various chemicals that molecular floodgates had been holding back all afternoon burst loose and flooded Gary’s neural pathways. A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus: a “sense” that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn’t save you.

The light in the windows was failing rapidly.

“You’re really going to use all this equipment?” he said with a tightness in his chest.

Caleb, his lips still involuted, gave a shrug.

“Nobody should be slamming doors,” Gary said. “Me included. All right?”

“Yeah, Dad. Whatever.”

Emerging from Caleb’s room into the shadowed hallway, he nearly collided with Caroline, who was hurrying on tiptoe, in her stockinged feet, back in the direction of their bedroom.

“Again? Again? I say don’t eavesdrop, and what do you do?”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping. I’ve got to go lie down.” And she hurried, limping, into the bedroom.

“You can run but you can’t hide,” Gary said, following her. “I want to know why you’re eavesdropping on me.”

“It is your paranoia, not my eavesdropping.”

“My paranoia?”

Caroline slumped on the oaken king-size bed. After she and Gary were married, she’d undergone five years of twice-weekly therapy which the therapist, at the final session, had declared “an unqualified success” and which had given her a lifelong advantage over Gary in the race for mental health.

“You seem to think everybody except you has a problem,” she said. “Which is what your mother thinks, too. Without ever—”

“Caroline. Answer me one question. Look me in the eye and answer me one question. This afternoon, when you were—”

“God, Gary, not this again. Listen to yourself.”

“When you were horsing around in the rain, running yourself ragged, trying to keep up with an eleven-year-old and a fourteen-year-old—”

“You’re obsessed! You’re obsessed with that!”

“Running and sliding and kicking in the rain—”

“You talk to your parents and then you take your anger out on us.”

“Were you limping before you came inside?” Gary shook his finger in his wife’s face. “Look me in the eye, Caroline, look me right in the eye. Come on! Do it! Look me in the eye and tell me you weren’t already limping.”

Caroline was rocking in pain. “You’re on the phone with them for the better part of an hour—”

“You can’t do it!” Gary crowed in bitter triumph. “You’re lying to me and you will not admit you’re lying!”

“Dad! Dad!” came a cry outside the door. Gary turned and saw Aaron shaking his head wildly, beside himself, his beautiful face twisted and tear-slick. “Stop shouting at her!”

The remorse neurofactor (Factor 26) flooded the sites in Gary’s brain specially tailored by evolution to respond to it.

“Aaron, all right,” he said.

Aaron turned away and turned back and marched in place, taking big steps nowhere, as though trying to force the shameful tears out of his eyes and into his body, down through his legs, and stamp them out. “God, please, Dad, do—not—shout—at her.”

“OK, Aaron,” Gary said. “Shouting’s over.”

He reached to touch his son’s shoulder, but Aaron fled back up the hall. Gary left Caroline and followed him, his sense of isolation deepened by this demonstration that his wife had strong allies in the house. Her sons would protect her from her husband. Her husband who was a shouter. Like his father before him. His father before him who was now depressed. But who, in his prime, as a shouter, had so frightened young Gary that it never occurred to him to intercede on his mother’s behalf.

Aaron was lying face down on his bed. In the tornado aftermath of laundry and magazines on the floor of his room, the two nodes of order were his Bundy trumpet (with mutes and a music stand) and his enormous alphabetized collection of compact discs, including boxed-set complete editions of Dizzy and Satchmo and Miles Davis, plus great miscellaneous quantities of Chet Baker and Wynton Marsalis and Chuck Mangione and Herb Alpert and Al Hirt, all of which Gary had given him to encourage his interest in music.

Gary perched on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry I upset you,” he said. “As you know, I can be a mean old judgmental bastard. And sometimes your mother has trouble admitting she’s wrong. Especially when—”

“Her. Back. Is. Hurt,” came Aaron’s voice, muffled by a Ralph Lauren duvet. “She is not lying.”

“I know her back hurts, Aaron. I love your mother very much.”

“Then don’t shout at her.”

“OK. Shouting’s over. Let’s have some dinner.” Gary lightly judochopped Aaron’s shoulder. “What do you say?”

Aaron didn’t move. Further cheering words appeared to be called for, but Gary couldn’t think of any. He was experiencing a critical shortage of Factors 1 and 3. He’d had the sense, moments earlier, that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being “depressed,” and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument.

It was therefore all the more important now to resist depression—to fight it with the truth.

“Listen,” he said. “You were out there with Mom, playing soccer. Tell me if I’m right about this. Was she limping before she went inside?”

For a moment, as Aaron roused himself from the bed, Gary believed that the truth would prevail. But the face Aaron showed him was a reddish-white raisin of revulsion and disbelief.

“You’re horrible!” he said. “You’re horrible!” And he ran from the room.

Ordinarily Gary wouldn’t have let Aaron get away with this. Ordinarily he would have battled his son all evening if that was what it took to extract an apology from him. But his mental markets—glycemic, endocrine, over-the-synapse—were crashing. He was feeling ugly, and to battle Aaron now would only make him uglier, and the sensation of ugliness was perhaps the leading Warning Sign.

He saw that he’d made two critical mistakes. He should never have promised Caroline that there would be no more Christmases in St. Jude. And today, when she was limping and grimacing in the back yard, he should have snapped at least one picture of her. He mourned the moral advantages these mistakes had cost him.

“I am not clinically depressed,” he told his reflection in the nearly dark bedroom window. With a great, marrow-taxing exertion of will, he stood up from Aaron’s bed and sallied forth to prove himself capable of having an ordinary evening.

Jonah was climbing the dark stairs with Prince Caspian. “I finished the book,” he said.

“Did you like it?”

“I loved it,” Jonah said. “This is outstanding children’s literature. Aslan made a door in the air that people walked through and disappeared. They went out of Narnia and back into the real world.”

Gary dropped into a crouch. “Give me a hug.”

Jonah draped his arms on him. Gary could feel the looseness of his youthful joints, the cublike pliancy, the heat radiating through his scalp and cheeks. He would have slit his own throat if the boy had needed blood; his love was immense in that way; and yet he wondered if it was only love he wanted now or whether he was also coalition-building. Securing a tactical ally for his team.

What this stagnating economy needs, thought Federal Reserve Board Chairman Gary R. Lambert, is a massive infusion of Bombay Sapphire gin.

In the kitchen Caroline and Caleb were slouched at the table drinking Coke and eating potato chips. Caroline had her feet up on another chair and pillows beneath her knees.

“What should we do for dinner?” Gary said.

His wife and middle son traded glances as if this were the stick-in-the-mud sort of question he was famous for. From the density of potato-chip crumbs he could see they were well on their way to spoiled appetites.

“Mixed grill, I guess,” said Caroline.

“Oh, yeah, Dad, do a mixed grill!” Caleb said in a tone mistakable for either irony or enthusiasm.

Gary asked if there was meat.

Caroline stuffed chips into her mouth and shrugged.

Jonah asked permission to build a fire.

Gary, taking ice from the freezer, granted it.

Ordinary evening. Ordinary evening.

“If I put the camera over the table,” Caleb said, “I’ll get part of the dining room, too.”

“You miss the whole nook, though,” Caroline said. “If it’s over the back door, you can sweep both ways.”

Gary shielded himself with the door of the liquor cabinet while he poured four ounces of gin onto ice.

“‘Alt. eighty-five’?” Caleb read from his catalogue.

“That means the camera can look almost straight down.”

Still shielded by the cabinet door, Gary took a hefty warmish gulp. Then, closing the cabinet, he held up the glass in case anyone cared to see what a relatively modest drink he’d poured himself.

“Hate to break it to you,” he said, “but surveillance is out. It’s not appropriate as a hobby.”

“Dad, you said it was OK as long as I stayed interested.”

“I said I would think about it.”

Caleb shook his head vehemently. “No! You didn’t! You said I could do it as long as I didn’t get bored.”

“That is exactly what you said,” Caroline confirmed with an unpleasant smile.

“Yes, Caroline, I’m sure you heard every word. But we’re not putting this kitchen under surveillance. Caleb, you do not have my permission to make those purchases.”

“Dad!”

“That’s my decision, it’s final.”

“Caleb, it doesn’t matter, though,” Caroline said. “Gary, it doesn’t matter, because he’s got his own money. He can spend it however he wants. Right, Caleb?”

Out of Gary’s sight, below the level of the table, she gave Caleb some kind of hand signal.

“Right, I’ve got my own savings!” Caleb’s tone again ironic or enthusiastic or, somehow, both.

“You and I will talk about this later, Caro,” Gary said. Warmth and perversion and stupidity, all deriving from the gin, were descending from behind his ears and down his arms and torso.

Jonah came back inside smelling like mesquite.

Caroline had opened a second large bag of potato chips.

“Don’t spoil your appetite, guys,” Gary said in a strained voice, taking food from plastic compartments.

Again mother and son traded glances.

“Yeah, right,” Caleb said. “Gotta save room for mixed grill!”

Gary energetically sliced meats and skewered vegetables. Jonah set the table, spacing the flatware with the precision that he liked. The rain had stopped, but the deck was still slippery when Gary went outside.

It had started as a family joke: Dad always orders the mixed grill in restaurants, Dad only wants to go to restaurants with mixed grill on the menu. To Gary there was indeed something endlessly delicious, something irresistibly luxurious, about a bit of lamb, a bit of pork, a bit of veal, and a lean and tender modern-style sausage or two—a classic mixed grill, in short. It was such a treat that he began to do his own mixed grills at home. Along with pizza and Chinese takeout and onepot pasta meals, mixed grill became a family staple. Caroline helped out by bringing home multiple heavy blood-damp bags of meat and sausage every Saturday, and before long Gary was doing mixed grill two or even three times a week, braving all but the foulest weather on the deck, and loving it. He did partridge breasts, chicken livers, filets mignons, and Mexican-flavored turkey sausage. He did zucchini and red peppers. He did eggplant, yellow peppers, baby lamb chops, Italian sausage. He came up with a wonderful bratwurst – rib eye–bok choy combo. He loved it and loved it and loved it and then all at once he didn’t.

The clinical term, ANHEDONIA, had introduced itself to him in a nightstand book of Caroline’s called Feeling GREAT! (Ashley Tralpis, M.D., Ph.D.). He’d read the dictionary entry for ANHEDONIA with a shiver of recognition, a kind of malignant yes, yes: “a psychological condition characterized by inability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts.” ANHEDONIA was more than a Warning Sign, it was an out-and-out symptom. A dry rot spreading from pleasure to pleasure, a fungus spoiling the delight in luxury and joy in leisure which for so many years had fueled Gary’s resistance to the poorthink of his parents.

The previous March, in St. Jude, Enid had observed that, for a bank vice president married to a woman who worked only part-time, pro bono, for the Children’s Defense Fund, Gary seemed to do an awful lot of cooking. Gary had shut his mother up easily enough; she was married to a man who couldn’t boil an egg, and obviously she was jealous. But on Gary’s birthday, after he’d flown back from St. Jude with Jonah and received the expensive surprise of a color photo lab, after he’d mustered the will to exclaim, A darkroom, fantastic, I love it, I love it, Caroline handed him a platter of raw prawns and brutal sword fish steaks to grill, and he wondered if his mother had a point. On the deck, in the radiant heat, as he blackened the prawns and seared the swordfish, a weariness overtook him. The aspects of his life not related to grilling now seemed like mere blips of extraneity between the poundingly recurrent moments when he ignited the mesquite and paced the deck, avoiding smoke. Shutting his eyes, he saw twisted boogers of browning meats on a grille of chrome and hellish coals. The eternal broiling, broiling of the damned. The parching torments of compulsive repetition. On the inner walls of the grill a deep-pile carpet of phenolic black greases had accumulated. The ground behind the garage where he dumped the ashes resembled a moonscape or the yard of a cement plant. He was very, very, very sick of mixed grill, and the next morning he told Caroline: “I’m doing too much cooking.”

“So do less,” she said. “We’ll eat out.”

“I want to eat at home and I want to do less cooking.”

“So order in,” she said.

“It’s not the same.”

“You’re the one who’s bent on having these sit-down dinners. The boys couldn’t care less.”

“ I care about it. It’s important to me.”

“Fine, but, Gary: it’s not important to me, it’s not important to the boys, and we’re supposed to cook for you?”

He couldn’t entirely blame Caroline. In the years when she’d worked full-time, he’d never complained about frozen or takeout or pre-prepared dinners. To Caroline it probably seemed that he was changing the rules on her. But to Gary it seemed that the nature of family life itself was changing—that togetherness and filiality and fraternity weren’t valued the way they were when he was young.

And so here he was, still grilling. Through the kitchen windows he could see Caroline thumb-wrestling Jonah. He could see her taking Aaron’s headphones to listen to music, could see her nodding to the beat. It sure looked like family life. Was there really anything amiss here but the clinical depression of the man peering in?

Caroline seemed to have forgotten how much her back hurt, but she remembered as soon as he went inside with the steaming, smoking platter of vulcanized animal protein. She seated herself sideways at the table, nudged her food with a fork, and whimpered softly. Caleb and Aaron regarded her with grave concern.

“Doesn’t anyone else want to know how Prince Caspian ends?” Jonah said. “Isn’t anyone curious at all?”

Caroline’s eyelids were fluttering, her mouth hanging open miserably to let air trickle in and out. Gary struggled to think of something undepressed to say, something reasonably unhostile, but he was rather drunk.

“Jesus, Caroline,” he said, “we know your back hurts, we know you’re miserable, but if you can’t even sit up straight at the table—”

Without a word she slid off her chair, hobbled to the sink with her plate, scraped her dinner into the garbage grinder, and hobbled upstairs. Caleb and Aaron excused themselves and ground up their own dinners and followed her. Altogether maybe thirty dollars’ worth of meat went into the sewer, but Gary, trying to keep his Factor 3 levels off the floor, succeeded pretty well in forgetting about the animals that had died for this purpose. He sat in the leaden twilight of his buzz, ate without tasting, and listened to Jonah’s impervious bright chatter.

“This is an excellent skirt steak, Dad, and I would love another piece of that grilled zucchini, please.”

From the entertainment room upstairs came the woofing of prime time. Gary felt briefly sorry for Aaron and Caleb. It was a burden to have a mother need you so extremely, to be responsible for her bliss, Gary knew this. He also understood that Caroline was more alone in the world than he was. Her father had been a handsome, charismatic anthropologist who died in a plane crash in Mali when she was eleven. Her father’s parents, old Quakers who intermittently said “thee,” had left her half of their estate, including a well-regarded Andrew Wyeth, three Winslow Homer watercolors, and forty sylvan acres near Kennett Square for which a developer had paid an incredible sum. Caroline’s mother, now seventy-six and in scarily good health, lived with her second husband in Laguna Beach and was a major benefactor of the California Democratic Party; she came east every April and bragged about not being “one of those old women” who were obsessed with their grandkids. Caroline’s only sibling, a brother named Philip, was a patronizing, pocket-protected bachelor and solid-state physicist on whom her mother doted somewhat creepily. Gary hadn’t known this kind of family in St. Jude. From the start, he’d loved and pitied Caroline for the misfortune and neglect she’d suffered growing up. He’d undertaken to provide a better family for her.

But after dinner, while he and Jonah were loading the dishwasher, he began to hear female laughter upstairs, actual loud laughter, and he decided that Caroline was doing something very bad to him. He was tempted to go up and crash the party. As the buzzing of the gin faded from his head, however, the clanging of an earlier anxiety was becoming audible. An Axon-related anxiety.

He wondered why a small company with a highly experimental process was bothering to offer his father money.

That the letter to Alfred had come from Bragg Knuter amp; Speigh, a firm that often worked closely with investment bankers, suggested due diligence—a dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s on the eve of something big.

“Do you want to go and be with your brothers?” Gary said to Jonah. “It sounds like fun up there.”

“No, thank you,” Jonah said. “I’m going to read the next Narnia book, and I thought I might go to the basement, where it’s quiet. Will you come with me?”

The old playroom in the basement, still dehumidified and carpeted and pine-paneled, still nice, was afflicted with the necrosis of clutter that sooner or later kills a living space: stereo boxes, geometric Styrofoam packing solids, outdated ski and beach gear in random drifts. Aaron and Caleb’s old toys were in five big bins and a dozen smaller bins. Nobody but Jonah ever touched them, and in the face of such a glut even Jonah, alone or with a play-date pal, took an essentially archaeological approach. He might devote an afternoon to unpacking half of one large bin, patiently sorting action figures and related props, vehicles, and model buildings by scale and manufacturer (toys that matched nothing he flung behind the sofa), but he rarely reached the bottom of even one bin before his play date ended or dinner was served and he reburied everything he’d excavated, and so the toys whose profusion ought to have been a seven-year-old’s heaven went basically unplayed with, another lesson in ANHEDONIA for Gary to ignore as well as he could.

While Jonah settled down to read, Gary booted up Caleb’s “old” laptop and went online. He typed the words axon and schwenksville in the Search field. One of the two resulting site matches was the Axon Corporation Home Page, but this site, when Gary tried to reach it, turned out to be UNDER RENOVATION. The other match led him to a deeply nested page in the Web site of Westportfolio Biofunds, whose listing of Privately Held Corporations to Watch was a cyberbackwater of drab graphics and misspellings. The Axon page had last been updated a year earlier.

Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA, a Limited Liability Corporation registered in the state of Delaware, holds wordwide rights to the Eberle Process of Directed Neurochemotaxis. The Eberle Process is profected by United States Patents 5,101,239, 5,101,599, 5,103,628, 5,103,629, and 5,105,996, for which the Axon Corporation is the sole and exclusive grantor of license. Axon engages in refinement, marketing and sales of the Eberle Process to hospitals and clinics worldwide, and in research and development of related technologies. Its founder and chairman is Dr. Earl H. Eberle, former Distinguished Lecturer in Applied Neurobiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The Eberle Process of Directed Neurochemotaxis, also known as Eberle Reverse-Tomographic Chemotherapy, hav4 revolutionized the treatment of inoperable neuroblastomas and a variety of other morphologic defects of the brain.

The Eberle Process utilizes computer-orchestrated RF radiation to direct powerful carcinocdies, mutagens, and certain nonspecific toxins to diseased cerebral tissues and locally activate them without harm to surrounding healthy tissue.

At present, due to limitations in computing power, the Eberle Process requires sedating and immobilizing the patient in an Eberle Cylinder for up to thirfy-six hours while minutely orchestrated fields direct therapeutically active ligands and their inert “piggyback” carriers to the sight of disase. The next generation of Eberle Cylinders is expected to reduce maximum total treatment time to less two hours.

The Eberle Process received full FDA approval as a “safe and effective” therapy in October 1996. Widespread clincial use throughout the world in the years since then, as detailed in the numerous publications listed below, hav4 only confirmed its safety and effectiveness.

Gary’s hopes of extracting quick megabucks from Axon were withering in the absence of online hype. Feeling a bit e-weary, fighting an e-headache, he ran a word search for earl eberle. The several hundred matches included articles with titles like NEW HOPE FOR NEUROBLASTOMA and A GIANT LEAP FORWARD and THIS CURE REALLY MAY BE A MIRACLE. Eberle and collaborators were also represented in professional journals with “Remote Computer-Aided Stimulation of Receptor Sites 14, 16A and 21: A Practical Demonstration,” “Four Low-Toxicity Ferroacetate Complexes That Cross the BBB,” “In-Vitro RF Stimulation of Colloidal Microtubules,” and a dozen other papers. The reference that most interested Gary, however, had appeared in Forbes ASAP six months earlier:

Some of these developments, such as the Fogarty balloon catheter and Lasik corneal surgery, are cash cows for their respective corporate patent holders. Others, with esoteric names like the Eberle Process of Directed Neurochemotaxis, enrich their inventors the old-fashioned way: one man, one fortune. The Eberle Process, which as late as 1996 lacked regulatory approval but today is recognized as the gold standard for the treatment of a large class of cerebral tumors and lesions, is estimated to net its inventor, Johns Hopkins neurobiologist Earl H. (“Curly”) Eberle, as much as $40 million annually in licensing fees and other revenues worldwide.

Forty million dollars annually was more like it. Forty million dollars annually restored Gary’s hopes and pissed him off all over again. Earl Eberle earned forty million dollars annually while Alfred Lambert, also an inventor but (let’s face it) a loser by temperament—one of the meek of the earth—was offered five thousand for his trouble. And planned to split this pea with Orfic Midland!

“I’m loving this book,” Jonah reported. “This may be my favorite book yet.”

So why, Gary wondered, why the rush-rush to get Dad’s patent, eh, Curly? Why the big push-push? Financial intuition, a warm tingling in his loins, told him that perhaps, after all, a piece of inside information had fallen into his lap. A piece of inside information from an accidental (and therefore perfectly lawful) source. A juicy piece of private meat.

“It’s like they’re on a luxury cruise,” Jonah said, “except they’re trying to sail to the end of the world. See, that’s where Aslan lives, at the end of the world.”

In the SEC’s Edgar Database Gary found an unapproved prospectus, a so-called red-herring prospectus, for an initial public offering of Axon stock. The offering was scheduled for December 15, three-plus months away. The lead underwriter was Hevy amp; Hodapp, one of the elite investment banks. Gary checked certain vital signs—cash flow, size of issue, size of float—and, loins tingling, hit the Download Later button.

“Jonah, nine o’clock,” he said. “Run up and take your bath.”

“I would love to go on a luxury cruise, Dad,” Jonah said, climbing the stairs, “if that could ever be arranged.”

In a different Search field, his hands a little parkinsonian, Gary entered the words beautiful, nude, and blond.

“Shut the door, please, Jonah.”

On the screen an image of a beautiful nude blonde appeared. Gary pointed and clicked, and a nude tan man, photographed mainly from the rear but also in close-up from his knees to his navel, could be seen giving his fully tumid attention to the beautiful nude blonde. There was something of the assembly line in these images. The beautiful nude blonde was like fresh raw material that the nude tan man was extremely keen to process with his tool. First the material’s colorful fabric casing was removed, then the material was placed on its knees and the semiskilled worker fitted his tool into its mouth, then the material was placed on its back while the worker orally calibrated it, then the worker clamped the material into a series of horizontal and vertical positions, crimping and bending the material as necessary, and very vigorously processed it with his tool …

The pictures were softening rather than hardening Gary. He wondered if he’d reached the age where money excited him more than a beautiful nude blonde engaging in sex acts, or whether ANHEDONIA, the solitary father’s depression in a basement, might be encroaching even here.

Upstairs the doorbell rang. Adolescent feet came pounding down from the second floor to answer it.

Gary hastily cleansed the computer screen and went upstairs in time to see Caleb returning to the second floor with a large pizza box. Gary followed him and stood for a moment outside the entertainment room, smelling pepperoni and listening to the wordless munching of his sons and wife. On TV something military, a tank or a truck, was roaring to the accompaniment of war-movie music.

“Ve increase ze pressure, Lieutenant. Now you vill talk? Now?”

In Hands-Off Parenting: Skills for the Next Millennium, Dr. Harriet L. Schachtman warned: All too often, today’s anxious parents “protect” their children from the so-called “ravages” of TV and computer games, only to expose them to the far more damaging ravages of social ostracization by their peers.

To Gary, who as a boy had been allowed half an hour of TV a day and had not felt ostracized, Schachtman’s theory seemed a recipe for letting a community’s most permissive parents set standards that other parents were forced to lower their own to meet. But Caroline subscribed to the theory wholeheartedly, and since she was the sole trustee of Gary’s ambition not to be like his father, and since she believed that kids learned more from peer interaction than from parental instruction, Gary deferred to her judgment and let the boys watch nearly unlimited TV.

What he hadn’t foreseen was that he himself would be the ostracized.

He retreated to his study and dialed St. Jude again. The kitchen cordless was still on his desk, a reminder of earlier unpleasantnessgs and of fights still to come.

He was hoping to speak to Enid, but Alfred answered the telephone and said that she was over at the Roots’ house, socializing. “We had a street-association meeting tonight,” he said.

Gary considered calling back later, but he refused to be cowed by his father. “Dad,” he said, “I’ve done some research on Axon. We’re looking at a company with a lot of money.”

“Gary, I said I didn’t want you monkeying with this,” Alfred replied. “It is moot now anyway.”

“What do you mean, ‘moot’?”

“I mean moot. It’s taken care of. The documents are notarized. I’m recouping my lawyer’s fees and that’s the end of it.”

Gary pressed two fingers into his forehead. “My God. Dad. You had it notarized? On a Sunday?”

“I will tell your mother that you called.”

“Do not put those documents in the mail. Do you hear me?”

“Gary, I’ve had about enough of this.”

“Well, too bad, because I’m just getting started!”

“I’ve asked you not to speak of it. If you will not behave like a decent, civilized person, then I have no choice—”

“Your decency is bullshit. Your civilization is bullshit. It’s weakness! It’s fear! It’s bullshit!”

“I have no wish to discuss this.”

“Then forget it.”

“I intend to. We’ll not speak of it again. Your mother and I will visit for two days next month, and we will hope to see you here in December. It’s my wish that we can all be civil.”

“Never mind what’s going on underneath. As long as we’re all ‘civil.’ ”

“That is the essence of my philosophy, yes.”

“Well, it ain’t mine,” Gary said.

“I’m aware of that. And that’s why we will spend forty-eight hours and no more.”

Gary hung up angrier than ever. He’d hoped his parents would stay for an entire week in October. He’d wanted them to eat pie in Lancaster County, see a production at the Annenberg Center, drive in the Poconos, pick apples in West Chester, hear Aaron play the trumpet, watch Caleb play soccer, take delight in Jonah’s company, and generally see how good Gary’s life was, how worthy of their admiration and respect; and forty-eight hours was not enough time.

He left his study and kissed Jonah good night. Then he took a shower and lay down on the big oaken bed and tried to interest himself in the latest Inc. But he couldn’t stop arguing with Alfred in his head.

During his visit home in March he’d been appalled by how much his father had deteriorated in the few weeks since Christmas. Alfred seemed forever on the verge of derailing as he lurched down hallways or half slid down stairs or wolfed at a sandwich from which lettuce and meat loaf rained; checking his watch incessantly, his eyes wandering whenever a conversation didn’t engage him directly, the old iron horse was careering toward a crash, and Gary could hardly stand to look. Because who else, if not Gary, was going to take responsibility? Enid was hysterical and moralizing, Denise lived in a fantasyland, and Chip hadn’t been to St. Jude in three years. Who else but Gary was going to say: This train should not be running on these tracks?

The first order of business, as Gary saw it, was to sell the house. Get top dollar for it, move his parents into someplace smaller, newer, safer, cheaper, and invest the difference aggressively. The house was Enid and Alfred’s only large asset, and Gary took a morning to inspect the whole property slowly, inside and out. He found cracks in the grouting, rust lines in the bathroom sinks, and a softness in the master bedroom ceiling. He noticed rain stains on the inner wall of the back porch, a beard of dried suds on the chin of the old dishwasher, an alarming thump in the forced-air blower, pustules and ridges in the driveway’s asphalt, termites in the woodpile, a Damoclean oak limb dangling above a dormer, finger-wide cracks in the foundation, retaining walls that listed, whitecaps of peeling paint on window jambs, big emboldened spiders in the basement, fields of dried sow bug and cricket husks, unfamiliar fungal and enteric smells, everywhere he looked the sag of entropy. Even in a rising market, the house was beginning to lose value, and Gary thought: We’ve got to sell this fucker now, we can’t lose another day.

On the last morning of his visit, while Jonah helped Enid bake a birthday cake, Gary took Alfred to the hardware store. As soon as they were on the road, Gary said it was time to put the house on the market.

Alfred, in the passenger seat of the gerontic Olds, stared straight ahead. “Why?”

“If you miss the spring season,” Gary said, “you’ll have to wait another year. And you can’t afford another year. You can’t count on good health, and the house is losing value.”

Alfred shook his head. “I’ve agitated for a long time. One bedroom and a kitchen is all we need. Somewhere your mother can cook and we have a place to sit. But it’s no use. She doesn’t want to leave.”

“Dad, if you don’t put yourself someplace manageable, you’re going to hurt yourself. You’re going to wind up in a nursing home.”

“I have no intention of going to a nursing home. So.”

“Just because you don’t intend to doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

Alfred looked, in passing, at Gary’s old elementary school. “Where are we going?”

“You fall down the stairs, you slip on the ice and break your hip, you’re going to end up in a nursing home. Caroline’s grandmother—”

“I didn’t hear where we were going.”

“We’re going to the hardware store,” Gary said. “Mom wants a dimmer switch for the kitchen.”

Alfred shook his head."“She and her romantic lighting.”

“She gets pleasure from it,” Gary said. “What do you get pleasure from?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’ve just about worn her out.”

Alfred’s active hands, on his lap, were gathering nothing—raking in a poker pot that did not exist. “I’ll ask you again not to meddle,” he said.

The midmorning light of a late-winter thaw, the stillness of a weekday nonhour in St. Jude, Gary wondered how his parents stood it. The oak trees were the same oily black as the crows perching in them. The sky was the same color as the salt-white pavement on which elderly St. Judean drivers obeying barbiturate speed limits were crawling to their destinations: to malls with pools of meltwater on their papered roofs, to the arterial that overlooked puddled steel yards and the state mental hospital and transmission towers feeding soaps and game shows to the ether; to the beltways and, beyond them, to a million acres of thawing hinterland where pickups were axle-deep in clay and .22s were fired in the woods and only gospel and pedal steel guitars were on the radio; to residential blocks with the same pallid glare in every window, besquirreled yellow lawns with a random plastic toy or two embedded in the dirt, a mailman whistling something Celtic and slamming mailboxes harder than he had to, because the deadness of these streets, at such a nonhour, in such a nonseason, could honestly kill you.

“Are you happy with your life?” Gary said, waiting for a left-turn arrow. “Can you say you’re ever happy?”

“Gary, I have an affliction—”

“A lot of people have afflictions. If that’s your excuse, fine, if you want to feel sorry for yourself, fine, but why drag Mom down?”

“Well. You’ll be leaving tomorrow.”

“Meaning what,” Gary said. “That you’ll sit in your chair and Mom will cook and clean for you?”

“There are things in life that simply have to be endured.”

“Why bother staying alive, if that’s your attitude? What do you have to look forward to?”

“I ask myself that question every day.”

“Well, and what’s your answer?” Gary said.

“What’s your answer? What do you think I should look forward to?”

“Travel.”

“I’ve traveled enough. I spent thirty years traveling.”

“Time with family. Time with people you love.”

“No comment.”

“What do you mean, ‘no comment’?”

“Just that: no comment.”

“You’re still sore about Christmas.”

“You may interpret it however you like.”

“If you’re sore about Christmas, you might have the consideration to say so—”

“No comment.”

“Instead of insinuating.”

“We should have come two days later and left two days earlier,” Alfred said. “That’s all I have to say on the topic of Christmas. We should have stayed forty-eight hours.”

“It’s because you’re depressed, Dad. You are clinically depressed—”

“And so are you.”

“And the responsible thing would be to get some treatment.”

“Did you hear me? I said so are you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Figure it out.”

“Dad, really, no, what are you talking about? I’m not the one who sits in a chair all day and sleeps.”

“Underneath, you are,” Alfred pronounced.

“That’s simply false.”

“One day you will see.”

“I will not!” Gary said. “My life is on a fundamentally different basis than yours.”

“Mark my words. I look at your marriage, I see what I see. Someday you’ll see it, too.”

“That’s empty talk and you know it. You’re just pissed off with me, and you have no way to deal with it.”

“I’ve told you I don’t want to discuss this.”

“And I have no respect for that.”

“Well, there are things in your life that I have no respect for either.” It shouldn’t have hurt to hear that Alfred, who was wrong about almost everything, did not respect things in Gary’s life; and yet it did hurt.

At the hardware store he let Alfred pay for the dimmer switch. The old man’s careful plucking of bills from his slender wallet and his faint hesitation before he offered them were signs of his respect for adollar—of his maddening belief that each one mattered.

Back at the house, while Gary and Jonah kicked a soccer ball, Alfred gathered tools and killed the power to the kitchen and set about installing the dimmer. Even at this late date it didn’t occur to Gary not to let Alfred handle wiring. But when he came inside for lunch he found that his father had done no more than remove the old switch plate. He was holding the dimmer switch like a detonator that made him shake with fear.

“My affliction makes this difficult,” he explained.

“You’ve got to sell this house,” Gary said.

After lunch he took his mother and his son to the St. Jude Museum of Transport. While Jonah climbed into old locomotives and toured the dry-docked submarine and Enid sat and nursed her sore hip, Gary compiled a mental list of the museum’s exhibits, hoping the list would give him a feeling of accomplishment. He couldn’t deal with the exhibits themselves, their exhausting informativeness, their cheerful prose-for-the-masses. THE GOLDEN AGE OF STEAM POWER. THE DAWN OF FLIGHT. A CENTURY OF AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY. Block after block of taxing text. What Gary hated most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt in it. St. Jude in its optimistic egalitarianism consistently failed to accord him the respect to which his gifts and attainments entitled him. Oh, the sadness of this place! The earnest St. Judean rubes all around him seemed curious and undepressed. Happily filling their misshapen heads with facts. As if facts were going to save them! Not one woman half as pretty or as well dressed as Caroline. Not one other man with a decent haircut or an abdomen as flat as Gary’s. But, like Alfred, like Enid, they were all extremely deferential. They didn’t jostle Gary or cut in front of him but waited until he’d drifted to the next exhibit. Then they gathered round and read and learned. God, he hated the Midwest! He could hardly breathe or hold his head up. He thought he might be getting sick. He took refuge in the museum’s gift shop and bought a silver belt buckle, two engravings of old Midland Pacific trestles, and a pewter hip flask (all for himself), a deerskin wallet (for Aaron), and a CD-ROM Civil War game (for Caleb).

“Dad,” Jonah said, “Grandma says she’ll buy me two books that cost less than ten dollars each or one book for less than twenty dollars, is that OK?”

Enid and Jonah were a lovefest. Enid had always preferred little kids to big kids, and Jonah’s adaptive niche in the family ecosystem was to be the perfect grandchild, eager to scramble up on laps, unafraid of bitter vegetables, underexcited by television and computer games, and skilled at cheerfully answering questions like “Are you loving school?” In St. Jude he was luxuriating in the undivided attention of three adults. He declared St. Jude the nicest place he’d ever been. From the back seat of the Oldfolksmobile, his elfin eyes wide, he marveled at everything Enid showed him.

“It’s so easy to park here!”

“No traffic!”

“The Transport Museum is better than any museums we have, Dad, don’t you agree?”

“I love the legroom in this car. I think this is the nicest car I’ve ever ridden in.”

“All the stores are so close and handy!”

That night, after they’d returned from the museum and Gary had gone out and done more shopping, Enid served stuffed pork chops and a chocolate birthday cake. Jonah was dreamily eating ice cream when she asked him if he might like to come and have Christmas in St. Jude.

“I would love that,” Jonah said, his eyelids drooping with satiety.

“You could have sugar cookies, and eggnog, and help us decorate the tree,” Enid said. “It’ll probably snow, so you can go sledding. And, Jonah, there’s a wonderful light show every year at Waindell Park, it’s called Christmasland, they have the whole park lit up—”

“Mother, it’s March,” Gary said.

“Can we come at Christmas?” Jonah asked him.

“We’ll come again very soon,” Gary said. “I don’t know about Christmas.”

“I think Jonah would love it,” Enid said.

“I would completely love it,” Jonah said, hoisting another spoonload of ice cream. “I think it might turn out to be the best Christmas I ever had.”

“I think so, too,” Enid said.

“It’s March,” Gary said. “We don’t talk about Christmas in March. Remember? We don’t talk about it in June or August, either. Remember?”

“Well,” Alfred said, standing up from the table. “I am going to bed.”

“St. Jude gets my vote for Christmas,” Jonah said.

Enlisting Jonah directly in her campaign, exploiting a little boy for leverage, seemed to Gary a low trick on Enid’s part. After he’d put Jonah to bed, he told his mother that Christmas ought to be the last of her worries.

“Dad can’t even install a light switch,” he said. “And now you’ve got a leak upstairs, you’ve got water coming in around the chimney—”

“I love this house,” Enid said from the kitchen sink, where she was scrubbing the pork-chop pan. “Dad just needs to work a little on his attitude.”

“He needs shock treatments or medication,” Gary said. “And if you want to dedicate your life to being his servant, that’s your choice. If you want to live in an old house with a lot of problems, and try to keep everything just the way you like it, that’s fine, too. If you want to wear yourself out trying to do both, be my guest. Just don’t ask me to make Christmas plans in March so you can feel OK about it all.”

Enid upended the pork-chop pan on the counter beside the overloaded drainer. Gary knew he ought to pick up a towel, but the jumble of wet pans and platters and utensils from his birthday dinner made him weary; to dry them seemed a task as Sisyphean as to repair the things wrong with his parents’ house. The only way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all.

He poured a smallish brandy nightcap while Enid, with unhappy stabbing motions, scraped waterlogged food scraps from the bottom of the sink.

“What do you think I should do?” she said.

“Sell the house,” Gary said. “Call a realtor tomorrow.”

“And move into some cramped, modern condominium?” Enid shook the repulsive wet scraps from her hand into the trash. “When I have to go out for the day, Dave and Mary Beth invite Dad over for lunch. He loves that, and I feel so comfortable knowing he’s with them. Last fall he was out planting a new yew, and he couldn’t get the old stump out, and Joe Person came over with a pickax and the two of them worked all afternoon together.”

“He shouldn’t be planting yews,” Gary said, regretting already the smallness of his initial pour. “He shouldn’t be using a pickax. The man can hardly stand up.”

“Gary, I know we can’t be here forever. But I want to have one last really nice family Christmas here. And I want—”

“Would you consider moving if we had that Christmas?”

New hope sweetened Enid’s expression. “Would you and Caroline consider coming?”

“I can’t make any promises,” Gary said. “But if you’d feel more comfortable about putting the house on the market, we would certainly consider—”

“I would adore it if you came. Adore it.”

“Mother, though, you have to be realistic.”

“Let’s get through this year,” Enid said, “let’s think about having Christmas here, like Jonah wants, and then we’ll see!”

Gary’s ANHEDONIA had worsened when he returned to Chestnut Hill. As a winter project, he’d been distilling hundreds of hours of home videos into a watchable two-hour Greatest Lambert Hits compilation that he could make quality copies of and maybe send out as a “video Christmas card.” In the final edit, as he repeatedly reviewed his favorite family scenes and re-cued his favorite songs (“Wild Horses,” “Time After Time,” etc.), he began to hate these scenes and hate these songs. And when, in the new darkroom, he turned his attention to the All-Time Lambert Two Hundred, he found that he no longer enjoyed looking at still photographs, either. For years he’d mentally tinkered with the All-Time Two Hundred, as with an ideally balanced mutual fund, listing with great satisfaction the images that he was sure belonged in it. Now he wondered whom, besides himself, he was trying to impress with these pictures. Whom was he trying to persuade, and of what? He had a weird impulse to burn his old favorites. But his entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life, and he and Caroline had long agreed that Alfred was clinically depressed, and clinical depression was known to have genetic bases and to be substantially heritable, and so Gary had no choice but to keep resisting ANHEDONIA, keep gritting his teeth, keep doing his best to have fun …

He came awake with an itching hard-on and Caroline beside him in the sheets.

His nightstand light was still burning, but otherwise the room was dark. Caroline lay in sarcophagal posture, her back flat on the mattress and a pillow beneath her knees. Through the screens on the bedroom windows came seeping the coolish, humid air of a summer grown tired. No wind stirred the leaves of the sycamore whose lowest branches hung outside the windows.

On Caroline’s nightstand was a hardcover copy of Middle Ground: How to Spare Your Child the Adolescence YOU Had (Caren Tamkin, Ph.D., 1998).

She seemed to be asleep. Her long arm, kept flabless by thrice-weekly swims at the Cricket Club, rested at her side. Gary gazed at her little nose, her wide red mouth, the blond down and the dull sheen of sweat on her upper lip, the tapering strip of exposed blond skin between the hem of her T-shirt and the elastic of her old Swarthmore College gym shorts. Her nearer breast pushed out against the inside of the T-shirt, the carmine definition of its nipple faintly visible through the fabric’s stretched weave …

When he reached out and smoothed her hair, her entire body jerked as if the hand were a defibrillator paddle.

“What’s going on here?” he said.

“My back is killing me.”

“An hour ago you were laughing and feeling great. Now you’re sore again?”

“The Motrin’s wearing off.”

“The mysterious resurgence of the pain.”

“You haven’t said a sympathetic word since I hurt my back.”

“Because you’re lying about how you hurt it,” Gary said.

“My God. Again?”

“Two hours of soccer and horseplay in the rain, that’s not the problem. It’s the ringing phone.”

“Yes,” Caroline said. “Because your mother won’t spend ten cents to leave a message. She has to let it ring three times and then hang up, ring three times and then hang up—”

“It has nothing to do with anything you did,” Gary said. “It’s my mom! She magically flew here and kicked you in the back because she wants to hurt you!”

“After listening to it ring and stop and ring and stop all afternoon, I’m a nervous wreck.”

“Caroline, I saw you limping before you ran inside. I saw the look on your face. Don’t tell me you weren’t in pain already.”

She shook her head. “You know what this is?”

“And then the eavesdropping!”

“Do you know what this is?”

“You’re listening on the only other free phone in the house, and you have the gall to tell me—”

“Gary, you’re depressed. Do you realize that?”

He laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re brooding, and suspicious, and obsessive. You walk around with a black look on your face. You don’t sleep well. You don’t seem to get pleasure out of anything.”

“You’re changing the subject,” he said. “My mother called because she had a reasonable request regarding Christmas.”

“Reasonable?” Now Caroline laughed. “Gary, she is bonkers on the topic of Christmas. She is a lunatic.”

“Oh, Caroline. Really.”

“I mean it!”

“Really. Caroline. They’re going to be selling that house soon, they want us all to visit one more time before they die, Caroline, before my parents die—”

“We’ve always agreed about this. We agreed that five people with busy lives should not have to fly at the peak holiday season so that two people with nothing in their lives wouldn’t have to come here. And I’ve been more than happy to have them—”

“The hell you have.”

“Until suddenly the rules change!”

“You have not been happy to have them here. Caroline. They’re at the point where they won’t even stay for more than forty-eight hours.”

“And this is my fault?” She was directing her gestures and facial expressions, somewhat eerily, at the ceiling. “What you don’t understand, Gary, is that this is an emotionally healthy family. I am a loving and deeply involved mother. I have three intelligent, creative, and emotionally healthy children. If you think there’s a problem in this house, you better take a look at yourself.”

“I’m making a reasonable proposal,” Gary said. “And you’re calling me ‘depressed.’ ”

“So it’s never occurred to you?”

“The minute I bring up Christmas, I’m ‘depressed.’ ”

“Seriously, are you telling me it’s never occurred to you, in the last six months, that you might have a clinical problem?”

“It is extremely hostile, Caroline, to call another person crazy.”

“Not if the person potentially has a clinical problem.”

“I’m proposing that we go to St. Jude,” he said. “If you won’t talk about it like an adult, I’ll make my own decision.”

“Oh, yeah?” Caroline made a contemptuous noise. “I guess Jonah might go with you. But see if you can get Aaron and Caleb on the plane with you. Just ask them where they’d rather be for Christmas.”

Just ask them whose team they’re on .

“I was under the impression that we’re a family,” Gary said, “and that we do things together.”

“You’re the one deciding unilaterally.”

“Tell me this is not a marriage-ending problem.”

“You’re the one who’s changed.”

“Because, no, Caroline, that is, no, that is ridiculous. There are good reasons to make a one-time exception this year.”

“You’re depressed,” she said, “and I want you back. I’m tired of living with a depressed old man.”

Gary for his part wanted back the Caroline who just a few nights ago had clutched him in bed when there was heavy thunder. The Caroline who came skipping toward him when he walked into a room. The semi-orphaned girl whose most fervent wish was to be on his team.

But he’d also always loved how tough she was, how unlike a Lambert, how fundamentally unsympathetic to his family. Over the years he’d collected certain remarks of hers into a kind of personal Decalogue, an All-Time Caroline Ten to which he privately referred for strength and sustenance:

   1. You’re nothing at all like your father.

   2. You don’t have to apologize for buying the BMW.

   3. Your dad emotionally abuses your mom.

   4. I love the taste of your come.

   5. Work was the drug that ruined your father’s life.

   6. Let’s buy both!

   7. Your family has a diseased relationship with food.

   8. You’re an incredibly good-looking man.

   9. Denise is jealous of what you have.

  10. here’s absolutely nothing useful about suffering.

He’d subscribed to this credo for years and years—had felt deeply indebted to Caroline for each remark—and now he wondered how much of it was true. Maybe none of it.

“I’m calling the travel agent tomorrow morning,” he said.

“And I’m telling you,” Caroline replied immediately, “call Dr. Pierce instead. You need to talk to somebody.”

“I need somebody who tells the truth.”

“You want the truth? You want me to tell you why I’m not going?” Caroline sat up and leaned forward at the funny angle that her backache dictated. “You really want to know?” 

Gary’s eyes fell shut. The crickets outside sounded like water running interminably in pipes. From the distance came a rhythmic canine barking like the downthrusts of a handsaw. 

“The truth,” Caroline said, “is that forty-eight hours sounds just about right to me. I don’t want my children looking back on Christmas as the time when everybody screamed at each other. Which basically seems to be unavoidable now. Your mother walks in the door with three hundred sixty days’ worth of Christmas mania, she’s been obsessing since the previous January, and then, of course, Where’s that Austrian reindeer figurine—don’t you like it? Don’t you use it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is the Austrian reindeer figurine? She’s got her food obsessions, her money obsessions, her clothes obsessions, she’s got the whole ten-piece set of baggage which my husband used to agree is kind of a problem, but now suddenly, out of the blue, he’s taking her side. We’re going to turn the house inside out looking for a piece of thirteen-dollar gift-store kitsch because it has sentimental value to your mother—”

“Caroline.”

“And when it turns out that Caleb—”

“This is not an honest version.”

“Please, Gary, let me finish, when it turns out that Caleb did the kind of thing that any normal boy might do to a piece of gift-store crap that he found in the basement—”

“I can’t listen to this.”

“No, no, the problem is not that your eagle-eyed mother is obsessed with some garbagey piece of Austrian kitsch, no, that’s not the problem—”

“It was a hundred-dollar hand-carved—”

“I don’t care if it’s a thousand dollars! Since when do you punish him, your own son, for your mother’s craziness? It’s like you’re suddenly trying to make us act like it’s 1964 and we’re all living in Peoria. ‘Clean your plate!’ ‘Wear a necktie!’ ‘No TV tonight!’ And you wonder why we’re fighting! You wonder why Aaron rolls his eyes when your mom walks in the room! It’s like you’re embarrassed to let her see us. It’s like, for as long as she’s here, you’re trying to pretend we live some way that she approves of. But I’m telling you, Gary, we have nothing to be ashamed of. Your mother’s the one who should be embarrassed. She follows me around the kitchen scrutinizing me, like, as if I roast a turkey every week, and if I turn my back for one second she’s going to pour a quart of oil into whatever I’m making, and as soon as I leave the room she’s going to root through the trash like some fucking Food Police, she’s going to take food from the trash and feed it to my children—”

“The potato was in the sink, not the trash, Caroline.”

“And you defend her! She goes outside to the trash barrels to see what other dirt she can dig up, and disapprove of, and she’s asking me, literally every ten minutes, How’s your back? How’s your back? How’s your back? Is your back any better? How’d you hurt it? Is your back any better? How’s your back? She goes looking for things to disapprove of, and then she tries to tell my children how to dress for dinner in my house, and you don’t back me up! You don’t back me up, Gary. You start apologizing, and I don’t get it, but I’m not doing it again. Basically, I think your brother’s got the right idea. Here’s a sweet, smart, funny man who’s honest enough to say what he can and can’t tolerate in the way of get-togethers. And your mother acts like he’s this huge embarrassment and failure! Well, you wanted the truth. The truth is I cannot stand another Christmas like that. If we absolutely have to see your parents, we’re doing it on our own turf. Just like you promised we always would.”

A pillow of blue blackness lay on Gary’s brain. He’d reached the point on the post-martini evening downslope where a sense of complication weighed on his cheeks, his forehead, his eyelids, his mouth. He understood how much his mother infuriated Caroline, and at the same time he found fault with almost everything that Caroline had said. The rather beautiful wooden reindeer, for example, had been stored in a well-marked box; Caleb had broken two of its legs and hammered a roofing nail through its skull; Enid had taken an uneaten baked potato from the sink and sliced it and fried it for Jonah; and Caroline hadn’t bothered to wait until her in-laws had left town before depositing in a trash barrel the pink polyester bathrobe that Enid had given her for Christmas.

“When I said I wanted the truth,” he said, not opening his eyes, “I meant I saw you limping before you ran inside.”

“Oh, my God,” Caroline said.

“My mother didn’t hurt your back. You hurt your back.”

“Please, Gary. Do me a favor and call Dr. Pierce.”

“Admit that you’re lying, and I’ll talk about anything you want. But nothing’s going to change until you admit that.”

“I don’t even recognize your voice.”

“Five days in St. Jude. You can’t do that for a woman who, like you say, has nothing else in her life?”

“Please come back to me.”

A jolt of rage forced Gary’s eyes open. He kicked the sheet aside and jumped out of bed. “This is a marriage-ender! I can’t believe it!”

“Gary, please—”

“We’re going to split up over a trip to St. Jude!”

And then a visionary in a warm-up jacket was lecturing to pretty college students. Behind the visionary, in a pixilated middle distance, were sterilizers and chromatography cartridges and tissue stains in weak solution, long-necked medicoscientific faucets, pinups of spread-eagled chromosomes, and diagrams of tuna-red brains sliced up like sashimi. The visionary was Earl “Curly” Eberle, a small-mouthed fifty-year-old in dime-store glasses, whom the creators of the Axon Corporation’s promotional video had done their best to make glamorous. The camera work was nervous, the lab floor pitched and lurched. Blurry zooms zeroed in on female student faces aglow with fascination. Curiously obsessive attention was paid to the back of the visionary head (it was indeed curly).

“Of course, chemistry, too, even brain chemistry,” Eberle was saying, “is basically just manipulation of electrons in their shells. But compare this, if you will, to an electronics that consists of little two- and three-pole switches. The diode, the transistor. The brain, by contrast, has several dozen kinds of switches. The neuron either fires or it doesn’t; but this decision is regulated by receptor sites that often have shades of offness and on-ness between plain Off and plain On. Even if you could build an artificial neuron out of molecular transistors, the conventional wisdom is that you can still never translate all that chemistry into the language of yes/no without running out of space. If we conservatively estimate twenty neuroactive ligands, of which as many as eight can operate simultaneously, and each of these eight switches has five different settings—not to bore you with the combinatorics, but unless you’re living in a world of Mr. Potato Heads, you’re going to be a pretty funny-looking android.”

Close-up of a turnip-headed male student laughing.

“Now, these are facts so basic,” Eberle said, “that we ordinarily wouldn’t even bother spelling them out. It’s just the way things are. The only workable connection we have with the electrophysiology of cognition and volition is chemical. That’s the received wisdom, part of the gospel of our science. Nobody in their right mind would try to connect the world of neurons with the world of printed circuits.”

Eberle paused dramatically.

“Nobody, that is, but the Axon Corporation.”

Ripples of buzz crossed the sea of institutional investors who’d come to Ballroom B of the Four Seasons Hotel, in central Philadelphia, for the road show promoting Axon’s initial public offering. A giant video screen had been set up on the dais. On each of the twenty round tables in the semidark ballroom were platters of satay and sushi appetizers with the appropriate dipping sauces.

Gary was sitting with his sister, Denise, at a table near the door. He had hopes of transacting business at this road show and he would rather have come alone, but Denise had insisted on having lunch, today being Monday and Monday being her one day off, and had invited herself along. Gary had figured that she would find political or moral or aesthetic reasons to deplore the proceedings, and, sure enough, she was watching the video with her eyes narrowed in suspicion and her arms crossed tightly. She was wearing a yellow shift with a red floral print, black sandals, and a pair of Trotskyish round plastic glasses; but what really set her apart from the other women in Ballroom B was the bareness of her legs. Nobody who dealt in money did not wear stockings.

WHAT IS THE CORECKTALL PROCESS?

“Corecktall,” said the cutout image of Curly Eberle, whose young audience had been digitally pureed into a uniform backdrop of tuna-red brain matter, “is a revolutionary neurobiological therapy!”

Eberle was seated on an ergonomic desk chair in which, it now developed, he could float and swerve vertiginously through a graphical space representing the inner-sea world of the intracranium. Kelpy ganglia and squidlike neurons and eellike capillaries began to flash by. 

“Originally conceived as a therapy for sufferers of PD and AD and other degenerative neurological diseases,” Eberle said, “Corecktall has proved so powerful and versatile that its promise extends not only to therapy but to an outright cure, and to a cure not only of these terrible degenerative afflictions but also of a host of ailments typically considered psychiatric or even psychological. Simply put, Corecktall offers for the first time the possibility of renewing and improving the hard wiring of an adult human brain.”

“Ew,” Denise said, wrinkling her nose.

Gary by now was quite familiar with the Corecktall Process. He’d scrutinized Axon’s red-herring prospectus and read every analysis of the company he could find on the Internet and through the private services that CenTrust subscribed to. Bearish analysts, mindful of recent gut-wrenching corrections in the biotech sector, were cautioning against investing in an untested medical technology that was at least six years from market. Certainly a bank like CenTrust, with its fiduciary duty to be conservative, wasn’t going to touch this IPO. But Axon’s fundamentals were a lot healthier than those of most biotech startups, and to Gary the fact that the company had bothered to buy his father’s patent at such an early stage in Corecktall’s development was a sign of great corporate confidence. He saw an opportunity here to make some money and avenge Axon’s screwing of his father and, more generally, be bold where Alfred had been timid.

It happened that in June, as the first dominoes of the overseas currency crises were toppling, Gary had pulled most of his playing-around money out of Euro and Far Eastern growth funds. This money was available now for investment in Axon; and since the IPO was still three months away, and since the big sales push for it had not begun, and since the red herring contained such dubieties as give non-insiders pause, Gary should have had no trouble getting a commitment for five thousand shares. But trouble was pretty much all he’d had.

His own (discount) broker, who had barely heard of Axon, belatedly did his homework and called Gary back with the news that his firm’s allocation was a token 2,500 shares. Normally a brokerage wouldn’t commit more than five percent of its allocation to a single customer this early in the game, but since Gary had been the first to call, his man was willing to set aside 500 shares. Gary pushed for more, but the sad fact was that he was not a big-time customer. He typically invested in multiples of a hundred, and to save on commissions he executed smaller trades himself online.

Now, Caroline was a big investor. With Gary’s guidance she often bought in multiples of a thousand. Her broker worked for the largest house in Philadelphia, and there was no doubt that 4,500 shares of Axon’s new issue could be found for a truly valued customer; this was how the game was played. Unfortunately, since the Sunday afternoon when she’d hurt her back, Gary and Caroline had been as close to not speaking as a couple could be and still function as parents. Gary was keen to get his full five thousand shares of Axon, but he refused to sacrifice his principles and crawl back to his wife and beg her to invest for him.

So instead he’d phoned his large-cap contact at Hevy amp; Hodapp, a man named Pudge Portleigh, and asked to be put down for five thousand shares of the offering on his own account. Over the years, in his duciary role at CenTrust, Gary had bought a lot of stock from Portleigh, including some certifiable turkeys. Gary hinted now to Portleigh that CenTrust might give him an even larger portion of its business in the future. But Portleigh, with weird hedginess, had agreed only to pass along Gary’s request to Daffy Anderson, who was Hevy amp; Hodapp’s deal manager for the IPO.

There had then ensued two maddening weeks during which Pudge Portleigh failed to call Gary back and confirm an allocation. Online buzz about Axon was building from a whisper to a roar. Two related major papers by Earl Eberle’s team—“Reverse-Tomographic Stimulation of Synaptogenesis in Selected Neural Pathways” and “Transitory Positive Reinforcement in Dopamine-Deprived Limbic Circuits: Recent Clinical Progress”—appeared in Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine within days of each other. The two papers received heavy coverage in the financial press, including a front-page notice in the Wall Street Journal. Analyst after analyst began to flash strong Buys for Axon, and still Portleigh did not return Gary’s messages, and Gary could feel the advantages of his insiderly head start disappearing hour by hour …

1. HAVE A COCKTAIL!

“…Of ferrocitrates and ferroacetates specially formulated to cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate interstitially!”

Said the unseen pitchman whose voice had joined Earl Eberle’s on the video sound track.

“We also stir in a mild, non-habit-forming sedative and a generous squirt of Hazelnut Moccacino syrup, courtesy of the country’s most popular chain of coffee bars!”

A female extra from the earlier lecture scene, a girl with whose neurological functions there was clearly nothing in the slightest wrong, drank with great relish and sexily pulsing throat muscles a tall, frosty glass of Corecktall electrolytes.

“What was Dad’s patent?” Denise whispered to Gary. “Ferroacetate gel something-something?”

Gary nodded grimly. “Electropolymerization.”

From his correspondence files at home, which contained, among other things, every letter he’d ever received from either of his parents, Gary had dug out an old copy of Alfred’s patent. He wasn’t sure he’d ever really looked at it, so impressed was he now by the old man’s clear account of “electrical anisotropy” in “certain ferro-organic gels” and his proposal that these gels be used to “minutely image” living human tissues and create “direct electrical contact” with “fine morphologic structures.” Comparing the wording of the patent with the description of Corecktall at Axon’s newly renovated Web site, Gary was struck by the depth of similarity. Evidently Alfred’s five-thousand-dollar process was at the center of a process for which Axon now hoped to raise upward of $200 million: as if a man didn’t have enough in his life to lie awake at night and fume about!

“Yo, Kelsey, yuh, Kelsey, get me twelve thousand Exxon at one-oh-four max,” the young man sitting to Gary’s left said suddenly and too loudly. The kid had a palmtop stock-quoter, a wire in his ear, and the schizophrenic eyes of the cellularly occupied. “Twelve thousand Exxon, upper limit one zero four,” he said.

Exxon, Axon, better be careful, Gary thought.

2. PUT ON A HEADSET amp; TURN ON THE RADIO!

“You won’t hear a thing—not unless your dental fillings pick up ball games on the AM dial,” the pitchman joked as the smiling girl lowered onto her camera-friendly head a metal dome reminiscent of a hair dryer, “but radio waves are penetrating the innermost recesses of your skull. Imagine a kind of global positioning system for the brain: RF radiation pinpointing and selectively stimulating the neural pathways associated with particular skills. Like signing your name. Climbing stairs. Remembering your anniversary. Thinking positively! Clinically tested at scores of hospitals across America, Dr. Eberle’s reverse-tomographic methods have now been further refined to make this stage of the Corecktall process as simple and painless as a visit to your hairstylist.”

“Until recently,” Eberle broke in (he and his chair still drifting through a sea of simulated blood and gray matter), “my process required overnight hospitalization and the physical screwing of a calibrated steel ring into the patient’s cranium. Many patients found this inconvenient; some also experienced discomfort. Now, however, enormous increases in computing power have made possible a process that is instantaneously self-correcting as to the location of the individual neural pathways under stimulation …”

“Kelsey, you da man!” young Mr. Twelve Thousand Shares of Exxon said loudly.

In the first hours and days following Gary’s big Sunday blowout with Caroline, three weeks ago, both he and she had made overtures of peace. Very late on that Sunday night she’d reached across the demilitarized zone of the mattress and touched his hip. The next night he’d offered an almost-complete apology in which, although he refused to concede the central issue, he conveyed sorrow and regret for the collateral damage he’d caused, the bruised feelings and willful misrepresentations and hurtful imputations, and thus gave Caroline a foretaste of the rush of tenderness that awaited her if she would only admit that, regarding the central issue, he was in the right. On Tuesday morning she’d made an actual breakfast for him—cinnamon toast, sausage links, and a bowl of oatmeal topped with raisins arranged to resemble a face with a comically downturned mouth. On Wednesday morning he’d given her a compliment, a simple statement of fact (“You’re beautiful”) which, although it fell short of an outright avowal of love, did serve as a reminder of an objective basis (physical attraction) on which love could be restored if she would only admit that, regarding the central issue, he was in the right.

But each hopeful overture, each exploratory sally, came to naught. When he squeezed the hand she offered him and he whispered that he was sorry that her back hurt, she was unable to take the next step and allow that possibly (a simple “possibly” would have sufficed!) her two hours of soccer in the rain had contributed to her injury. And when she thanked him for his compliment and asked him how he’d slept, he was powerless to ignore a tendentious critical edge in her voice; he understood her to be saying, Prolonged disturbance of sleep is a common symptom of clinical depression, oh, and, by the way, how did you sleep, dear? and so he didn’t dare admit that, as a matter of fact, he’d slept atrociously; he averred that he’d slept extremely well, thank you, Caroline, extremely well, extremely well.

Each failed overture of peace made the next overture less likely to succeed. Before long, what at first glance had seemed to Gary an absurd possibility—that the till of their marriage no longer contained sufficient funds of love and goodwill to cover the emotional costs that going to St. Jude entailed for Caroline or that not going to St. Jude entailed for him—assumed the contours of something terribly actual. He began to hate Caroline simply for continuing to fight with him. He hated the newfound reserves of independence she tapped in order to resist him. Especially, devastatingly hateful was her hatred of him. He could have ended the crisis in a minute if all he’d had to do was forgive her; but to see mirrored in her eyes how repellent she found him—it made him crazy, it poisoned his hope.

Fortunately, the shadows cast by her accusation of depression, long and dark though they were, did not yet extend to his corner office at CenTrust and to the pleasure he took in managing his managers, analysts, and traders. Gary’s forty hours at the bank had become the only hours he could count on enjoying in a week. He’d even begun to toy with the idea of working a fifty-hour week; but this was easier said than done, because at the end of his eight-hour day there was often literally no work left on his desk, and he was all too aware, besides, that spending long hours at the office to escape unhappiness at home was exactly the trap his father had fallen into; was undoubtedly how Alfred had begun to self-medicate.

When he married Caroline, Gary had silently vowed never to work later than five o’clock and never to bring a briefcase home at night. By signing on with a mid-sized regional bank, he’d chosen one of the least ambitious career paths that a Wharton School M.B.A. could take. At first his intention was simply to avoid his father’s mistakes—to give himself time to enjoy life, cherish his wife, play with his kids—but before long, even as he was proving to be an outstanding portfolio manager, he became more specifically allergic to ambition. Colleagues far less capable than he were moving on to work for mutual funds, to be freelance money managers, or to start their own funds; but they were also working twelve-or fourteen-hour days, and every single one of them had the perspiring manic style of a striver. Gary, cushioned by Caroline’s inheritance, was free to cultivate nonambition and to be, as a boss, the perfect strict and loving father that he could only halfway be at home. He demanded honesty and excellence from his workers. In return he offered patient instruction, absolute loyalty, and the assurance that he would never blame them for his own mistakes. If his large-cap manager, Virginia Lin, recommended upping the percentage of energy stocks in the bank’s boilerplate trust portfolio from six percent to nine percent and Gary (as was his wont) decided to leave the mix alone, and if the energy sector then proceeded to enjoy a couple of banner quarters, he pulled his big ironic I’m-a-jerk grimace and publicly apologized to Lin. Fortunately, for each of his bad decisions he made two or three good ones, and in the history of the universe there had never been a better six years for equities investment than the six years he’d run CenTrust’s Equities Division; only a fool or a crook could have failed. With success guaranteed, Gary could then make a game of being unawed by his boss, Marvin Koster, and by Koster’s boss, Marty Breitenfeld, the chairman of CenTrust. Gary never, ever kowtowed or flattered. Indeed, both Koster and Breitenfeld had begun to defer to him in matters of taste and protocol, Koster all but asking Gary’s permission to enroll his eldest daughter in Abington Friends instead of Friends’ Select, Breitenfeld buttonholing Gary outside the senior-executive pissoir to inquire if he and Caroline were planning to attend the Free Library benefit ball or if Gary had spun off his tickets to a secretary…

3. RELAX—IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD!

Curly Eberle had reappeared in his intracranial desk chair with a plastic model of an electrolyte molecule in each hand. “A remarkable property of ferrocitrate/ferroacetate gels,” he said, “is that under low-level radio stimulation at certain resonant frequencies the molecules may spontaneously polymerize. More remarkably yet, these polymers turn out to be fine conductors of electrical impulses.”

The virtual Eberle looked on with a benign smile as, in the bloody animated moil around him, eager waveforms came squiggling through. As if these waves were the opening strains of a minuet or reel, all the ferrous molecules paired off and arranged themselves in long, twinned lines.

“These transient conductive microtubules,” Eberle said, “make thinkable the previously unthinkable: direct, quasi-real-time digital-chemical interface.”

“But this is good,” Denise whispered to Gary. “This is what Dad’s always wanted.”

“What, to screw himself out of a fortune?”

“To help other people,” Denise said. “To make a difference.”

Gary could have pointed out that, if the old man really felt like helping somebody, he might start with his wife. But Denise had bizarre and unshakable notions of Alfred. There was no point in rising to her bait.

4. THE RICH GET RICHER!

“Yes, an idle corner of the brain may be the Devil’s workshop,” the pitchman said, “but every idle neural pathway gets ignored by the Corecktall process. Wherever there’s action, though, Corecktall is there to make it stronger! To help the rich get richer!”

From all over Ballroom B came laughter and applause and whoops of appreciation. Gary sensed that his grinning, clapping left-hand neighbor, Mr. Twelve Thousand Shares of Exxon, was looking in his direction. Possibly the guy was wondering why Gary wasn’t clapping. Or possibly he was intimidated by the casual elegance of Gary’s clothes.

For Gary a key element of not being a striver, a perspirer, was to dress as if he didn’t have to work at all: as if he were a gentleman who just happened to enjoy coming to the office and helping other people. As if noblesse oblige.

Today he was wearing a caper-green half-silk sport coat, an ecru linen button-down, and pleatless black dress pants; his own cell phone was turned off, deaf to all incoming calls. He tipped his chair back and scanned the ballroom to confirm that, indeed, he was the only male guest without a necktie, but the contrast between self and crowd today left much to be desired. Just a few years ago the room would have been a jungle of blue pinstripe, ventless Mafiawear, two-tone power shirts, and tasseled loafers. But now, in the late maturing years of the long, long boom, even young suburban galoots from New Jersey were buying hand-tailored Italian suits and high-end eyewear. So much money had flooded the system that twenty-six-year-olds who thought Andrew Wyeth was a furniture company and Winslow Homer a cartoon character were able to dress like Hollywood aristocracy …

Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary—of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?

Well, there was still the citizenry of America’s heartland: St. Judean minivan drivers thirty and forty pounds overweight and sporting pastel sweats, pro-life bumper stickers, Prussian hair. But Gary in recent years had observed, with plate-tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts. (He was part of this exodus himself, of course, but he’d made his escape early, and, frankly, priority had its privileges.) At the same time, all the restaurants in St. Jude were suddenly coming up to European speed (suddenly cleaning ladies knew from sun-dried tomatoes, suddenly hog farmers knew from crème brûlée), and shoppers at the mall near his parents’ house had an air of entitlement offputtingly similar to his own, and the electronic consumer goods for sale in St. Jude were every bit as powerful and cool as those in Chestnut Hill. Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity—

But enough, he told himself. A too-annihilating will to specialness, a wish to reign supreme in his superiority, was yet another Warning Sign of clinical D.

And Mr. Twelve Thousand Shares of Exxon wasn’t looking at him anyway. He was looking at Denise’s naked legs.

“The polymer strands,” Eberle explained, “chemotactically associate with active neural pathways and so facilitate the discharge of electrical potential. We don’t yet fully understand the mechanism, but the effect is to make any action the patient is performing easier and more enjoyable to repeat and to sustain. Producing this effect even transiently would be an exciting clinical achievement. Here at Axon, however, we have found a way to render that effect permanent.”

“Just watch,” the pitchman purred.

5. NOW IT’S YOUR TURN TO WORK A LITTLE!

As a cartoon human figure shakily raised a teacup to its mouth, certain shaky neural pathways lit up inside its cartoon head. Then the figure drank Corecktall electrolytes, donned an Eberle helmet, and raised the cup again. Little glowing microtubules hued to the active pathways, which began to blaze with light and strength. Steady as a rock the cartoon hand that lowered the teacup to its saucer.

“We’ve got to get Dad signed up for testing,” Denise whispered.

“What do you mean?” Gary said.

“Well, this is for Parkinson’s. It could help him.”

Gary sighed like a tire losing air. How could it be that such an incredibly obvious idea had never occurred to him? He felt ashamed of himself and, at the same time, obscurely resentful of Denise. He aimed a bland smile at the video screen as if he hadn’t heard her.

“Once the pathways have been identified and stimulated,” Eberle said, “we are only a short step away from actual morphologic correction. And here, as everywhere in medicine today, the secret is in the genes.”

6. REMEMBER THOSE PILLS YOU TOOK LAST MONTH?

Three days ago, on Friday afternoon, Gary had finally got through to Pudge Portleigh at Hevy amp; Hodapp. Portleigh had sounded harried in the extreme.

“Gare, sorry, it’s a rave scene here,” Portleigh said, “but listen, my friend, I did talk to Daffy Anderson per your request. Daffy says, sure, no problem, we will definitely allocate five hundred shares for a good customer at CenTrust. So, are we OK, my friend? Are we good?”

“No,” Gary said. “We said five thousand, not five hundred.”

Portleigh was silent for a moment. “Shit, Gare. Big mix-up. I thought you said five hundred.”

“You repeated it back to me. You said five thousand. You said you were writing it down.”

“Remind me—this is on your own account or CenTrust’s?”

“My account.”

“Look, Gare, here’s what you do. Call Daffy yourself, explain the situation, explain the mix-up, and see if he can rustle up another five hundred. I can back you up that far. I mean, it was my mistake, I had no idea how hot this thing would be. But you gotta realize, Daffy’s taking food from somebody else’s mouth to feed you. It’s the Nature Channel, Gare. All the little birdies with their beaks open wide. Me! Me! Me! I can back you up for another five hundred, but you gotta do your own squawking. All right, my friend? Are we good?”

“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 ofconsideration 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 nothing. Zero. Nada. Niente.

“Synaptogenesis!” Axon’s video pitchman exulted.

7. NO, IT’S NOT A BOOK OF THE BIBLE!

The professional investors in Ballroom B 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 the 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 CenTrust, 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.

8. 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.”

There was a murmur at a distant table where a tweedy, homely contingent was seated, maybe union fund managers, maybe the endowment crowd from Penn or Temple. One stork-shaped woman stood up from this table and shouted, “So, what’s the idea, you reprogram the repeat offender to enjoy pushing a broom?”

“That is within the realm of the feasible, yes,” Finch said. “That is one potential fix, although possibly not the best.”

The heckler couldn’t believe it. “Not the best? It’s an ethical nightmare.”

“So, free country, go invest in alternative energy,” Finch said, for a laugh, because most of the guests were on her side. “Buy some geothermal penny stocks. Solar-electricity futures, very cheap, very righteous. Yes, next, please? Pink shirt?”

“You guys are dreaming,” the heckler persisted at a shout, “if you think the American people—”

“Honey,” Finch interrupted with the advantage of her lapel mike and amplification, “the American people support the death penalty. Do you think they’ll have a problem with a socially constructive alternative like this? Ten years from now we’ll see which of us is dreaming. Yes, pink shirt at Table Three, yes?”

“Excuse me,” the heckler persisted, “I’m trying to remind your potential investors of the Eighth Amendment—”

“Thank you. Thank you very much,” Finch said, her emcee’s smile tightening. “Since you bring up cruel and unusual punishment, let me suggest that you walk a few blocks north of here to Fairmount Avenue. Go take a look at the Eastern State Penitentiary. World’s first modern prison, opened in 1829, solitary confinement for up to twenty years, astonishing suicide rate, zero corrective benefit, and, just to keep this in mind, still the basic model for corrections in the United States today. Curly’s not talking about this on CNN, folks. He’s talking about the million Americans with Parkinson’s and the four million with Alzheimer’s. What I’m telling you now is not for general consumption. But the fact is, a one-hundred-percent voluntary alternative to incarceration is the opposite of cruel and unusual. Of all the potential applications of Corecktall, this is the most humane. This is the liberal vision: genuine, permanent, voluntary self-melioration.”

The heckler, shaking her head with the emphasis of the unconvinceable, was already exiting the ballroom. Mr. Twelve Thousand Shares of Exxon, at Gary’s left shoulder, cupped his hands to his mouth and booed her.

Young men at other tables followed suit, booing and smirking, having their sports-fan fun and lending support, Gary feared, to Denise’s disdain for the world he moved in. Denise had leaned forward and was staring at Twelve Thousand Shares of Exxon in open-mouthed amazement.

Daffy Anderson, a linebacker type with thick glossy sideburns and a texturally distinct stubblefield of hair higher up, had stepped forward to answer money questions. He spoke of being gratifyingly oversubscribed. He compared the heat of this IPO to Vindaloo curry and Dallas in July. He refused to divulge the price that Hevy amp; Hodapp planned to ask for a share of Axon. He spoke of pricing it fairly and—wink, wink—letting the market do its job.

Denise touched Gary’s shoulder and pointed to a table behind the dais, where Merilee Finch was standing by herself and putting salmon in her mouth. “Our prey is feeding. I say we pounce.”

“What for?” Gary said.

“To get Dad signed up for testing.”

Nothing about the idea of Alfred’s participation in a Phase II study appealed to Gary, but it occurred to him that by letting Denise broach the topic of Alfred’s affliction, by letting her create sympathy for the Lamberts and establish their moral claim on Axon’s favors, he could increase his chances of getting his five thousand shares.

“You do the talking,” he said, standing up. “Then I’ll have a question for her, too.”

As he and Denise moved toward the dais, heads turned to admire Denise’s legs.

“What part of ‘no comment’ didn’t you understand?” Daffy Anderson asked a questioner for a laugh.

The cheeks of Axon’s CEO were puffed out like a squirrel’s. Merilee Finch put a napkin to her mouth and regarded the accosting Lamberts warily. “I’m so starving,” she said. It was a thin woman’s apology for being corporeal. “We’ll be setting up some tables in a couple of minutes, if you don’t mind waiting.”

“This is a semi-private question,” Denise said.

Finch swallowed with difficulty—maybe self-consciousness, maybe insufficient chewing. “Yeah?”

Denise and Gary introduced themselves and Denise mentioned the letter that Alfred had been sent.

“I had to eat something,” Finch explained, shoveling up lentils. “I think Joe was the one who wrote to your father. I’m assuming we’re all square there now. He’d be happy to talk to you if you still had questions.”

“Our question is more for you,” Denise said.

“Sorry. One more bite here.” Finch chewed her salmon with labored jawstrokes, swallowed again, and dropped her napkin on the plate. “As far as that patent goes, I’ll tell you frankly, we considered just infringing. That’s what everybody else does. But Curly’s an inventor himself. He wanted to do the right thing.”

“Frankly,” Gary said, “the right thing might have been to offer more.”

Finch’s tongue was probing beneath her upper lip like a cat beneath blankets. “You may have a somewhat inflated idea of your father’s achievement,” she said. “A lot of researchers were studying those gels in the sixties. The discovery of electrical anisotropy is generally, I believe, credited to a team at Cornell. Plus I understand from Joe that the wording of that patent is unspecific. It doesn’t even refer to the brain; it’s just ‘human tissues.’ Justice is the right of the stronger, when it comes to patent law. I think our offer was rather generous.”

Gary made his I’m-a-jerk face and looked at the dais, where Daffy Anderson was being mobbed by well-wishers and supplicants.

“Our father was fine with the offer,” Denise assured Finch. “And he’ll be happy to know what you guys are doing.”

Female bonding, the making of nice, faintly nauseated Gary.

“I forget which hospital he’s with,” Finch said.

“He’s not,” Denise said. “He was a railroad engineer. He had a lab in our basement.”

Finch was surprised. “He did that work as an amateur?”

Gary didn’t know which version of Alfred made him angrier: the spiteful old tyrant who’d made a brilliant discovery in the basement and cheated himself out of a fortune, or the clueless basement amateur who’d unwittingly replicated the work of real chemists, spent scarce family money to file and maintain a vaguely worded patent, and was now being tossed a scrap from the table of Earl Eberle. Both versions incensed him.

Perhaps it was best, after all, that the old man had ignored Gary’s advice and taken the money.

“My dad has Parkinson’s,” Denise said.

“Oh, I’m very sorry.”

“Well, and we were wondering if you might include him in the testing of your—product.”

“Conceivably,” Finch said. “We’d have to ask Curly. I do like the human-interest aspect. Does your dad live around here?”

“He’s in St. Jude.”

Finch frowned. “It won’t work if you can’t get him to Schwenksville twice a week for at least six months.”

“Not a problem,” Denise said, turning to Gary. “Right?”

Gary was hating everything about this conversation. Health health, female female, nice nice, easy easy. He didn’t answer.

“How is he mentally?” Finch said.

Denise opened her mouth, but at first no words came out.

“He’s fine,” she said, rallying. “Just— fine.”

“No dementia?”

Denise pursed her lips and shook her head. “No. He gets a little confused sometimes, but—no.”

“The confusion could be from his meds,” Finch said, “in which case it’s fixable. But Lewy-body dementia is beyond the purview of Phase Two testing. So is Alzheimer’s.”

“He’s pretty sharp,” Denise said.

“Well, if he’s able to follow basic instructions, and he’s willing to travel east in January, Curly might try to include him. It would make a good story.”

Finch produced a business card, warmly shook Denise’s hand, less warmly shook Gary’s, and moved into the mob surrounding Daffy Anderson.

Gary followed her and caught her by the elbow. She turned around, startled.

“Listen, Merilee,” he said in a low voice, as if to say, Let’s be realistic now, we adults can dispense with the nicey-nice crap. “I’m glad you think my dad’s a ‘good story.’ And it’s very generous of you to give him five thousand dollars. But I believe you need us more than we need you.”

Finch waved to somebody and held up one finger; she would be there in one second. “Actually,” she said to Gary, “we don’t need you at all. So I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

“My family wants to buy five thousand shares of your offering.”

Finch laughed like an executive with an eighty-hour work week. “So does everybody in this room,” she said. “That’s why we have investment bankers. If you’ll excuse me—”

She broke free and got away. Gary, in the crush of bodies, was having trouble breathing. He was furious with himself for having begged, furious for having let Denise attend this road show, furious for being a Lambert. He strode toward the nearest exit without waiting for Denise, who hurried after him.

Between the Four Seasons and the neighboring office tower was a corporate courtyard so lavishly planted and flawlessly maintained that it might have been pixels in a cybershopping paradise. The two Lamberts were crossing the courtyard when Gary’s anger found a fault through which to vent itself. He said, “I don’t know where the hell you think Dad’s going to stay if he comes out here.”

“Partly with you, partly with me,” Denise said.

“You’re never home,” he said. “And Dad’s on record as not wanting to be at my house for more than forty-eight hours.”

“This wouldn’t be like last Christmas,” Denise said. “Trust me. The impression I got on Saturday—”

“Plus how’s he going to get out to Schwenksville twice a week?”

“Gary, what are you saying? Do you not want this to happen?”

Two office workers, seeing angry parties bearing down, stood up and vacated a marble bench. Denise perched on the bench and folded her arms intransigently. Gary paced in a tight circle, his hands on his hips.

“For the last ten years,” he said, “Dad has done nothing to take care of himself. He’s sat in that fucking blue chair and wallowed in self-pity. I don’t know why you think he’s suddenly going to start—”

“Well, but if he thought there might actually be a cure—”

“What, so he can be depressed for an extra five years and die miserable at eighty-five instead of eighty? That’s going to make all the difference?”

“Maybe he’s depressed because he’s sick.”

“I’m sorry, but that is bullshit, Denise. That is a crock. The man has been depressed since before he even retired. He was depressed when he was still in perfect health.”

A low fountain was murmuring nearby, generating medium-strength privacy. A small unaffiliated cloud had wandered into the quadrant of private-sphere sky defined by the encompassing rooflines. The light was coastal and diffuse.

“What would you do,” Denise said, “if you had Mom nagging you seven days a week, telling you to get out of the house, watching every move you make, and acting like the kind of chair you sit in is a moral issue? The more she tells him to get up, the more he sits there. The more he sits there, the more she—”

“Denise, you’re living in fantasyland.”

She looked at Gary with hatred. “Don’t patronize me. It’s just as much a fantasy to act like Dad’s some worn-out old machine. He’s a person, Gary. He has an interior life. And he’s nice to me, at least—”

“Well, he ain’t so nice to me,” Gary said. “And he’s an abusive selfish bully to Mom. And I say if he wants to sit in that chair and sleep his life away, that’s just fine. I love that idea. I’m one-thousand-percent a fan of that idea. But first let’s yank that chair out of a three-floor house that’s falling apart and losing value. Let’s get Mom some kind of quality of life. Just do that, and he can sit in his chair and feel sorry for himself until the cows come home.”

“She loves that house. That house is her quality of life.”

“Well, she’s in a fantasyland, too! A lot of good it does her to love the house when she’s got to keep an eye on the old man twenty-four hours a day.”

Denise crossed her eyes and blew a wisp of hair off her forehead. “You’re the one in a fantasy,” she said. “You seem to think they’re going to be happy living in a two-room apartment in a city where the only people they know are you and me. And do you know who that’s convenient for? For you.”

He threw his hands in the air. “So it’s convenient for me! I’m sick of worrying about that house in St. Jude. I’m sick of making trips out there. I’m sick of hearing how miserable Mom is. A situation that’s convenient for you and me is better than a situation that’s convenient for nobody. Mom’s living with a guy who’s a physical wreck. He’s had it, he’s through, finito, end of story, take a charge against earnings. And still she’s got this idea that if he would only try harder, everything would be fine and life would be just like it used to be. Well, I got news for everybody: it ain’t ever gonna be the way it used to be.”

“You don’t even want him to get better.”

“Denise.” Gary clutched his eyes. “They had five years before he even got sick. And what did he do? He watched the local news and waited for Mom to cook his meals. This is the real world we’re living in. And I want them out of that house—”

“Gary.”

“I want them in a retirement community out here, and I’m not afraid to say it.”

“Gary, listen to me.” Denise leaned forward with an urgent goodwill that only irritated him the more. “Dad can come and stay with me for six months. They can both come and stay, I can bring home meals, it’s not that big a deal. If he gets better, they’ll go back home. If he doesn’t get better, they’ll have had six months to decide if they like living in Philly. I mean, what is wrong with this?”

Gary didn’t know what was wrong with it. But he could already hear Enid’s invidious descants on the topic of Denise’s wonderfulness. And since it was impossible to imagine Caroline and Enid amicably sharing a house for six days (never mind six weeks, never mind six months), Gary could not, even ceremonially, offer to put his parents up himself.

He raised his eyes to the intensity of whiteness that marked the sun’s proximity to a corner of the office tower. The beds of mums and begonias and liriope all around him were like bikinied extras in a music video, planted in full blush of perfection and fated to be yanked again before they had a chance to lose petals, acquire brown spots, drop leaves. Gary had always enjoyed corporate gardens as backdrops for the pageant of privilege, as metonymies of pamperment, but it was vital not to ask too much of them. It was vital not to come to them in need.

“You know, I don’t even care,” he said. “It’s a great plan. And if you want to do the legwork, that would be great.”

“OK, I’ll do the ‘legwork,’ ” Denise said quickly. “Now what about Christmas? Dad really wants you guys to come.”

Gary laughed. “So he’s involved now, too.”

“He wants it for Mom’s sake. And she really, really wants it.”

“Of course she wants it. She’s Enid Lambert. What does Enid Lambert want if not Christmas in St. Jude?”

“Well, I’m going to go there,” Denise said, “and I’m going to try to get Chip to go, and I think the five of you should go. I think we should all just get together and do that for them.”

The faint tremor of virtue in her voice set Gary’s teeth on edge. A lecture about Christmas was the last thing he needed on this October afternoon, with the needle of his Factor 3 gauge bumping on the bright red E.

“Dad said a strange thing on Saturday,” Denise continued. “He said, ‘I don’t know how much time I have.’ Both of them were talking like this was their last chance for a Christmas. It was kind of intense.”

“Well, count on Mom,” Gary said a little wildly, “to phrase the thing for maximum emotional coercion!”

“Right. But I also think she means it.”

“I’m sure she means it!” Gary said. “And I will give it some thought! But, Denise, it is not so easy getting all five of us out there. It is not so easy! Not when it makes so much sense for us all to be here! Right? Right?”

“I know, I agree,” Denise persisted quietly. “But remember, this would be a strictly one-time-only thing.”

“I said I’d think about it. That’s all I can do, right? I’ll think about it! I’ll think about it! All right?”

Denise seemed puzzled by his outburst. “OK. Good. Thank you. But the thing is—”

“Yeah, what’s the thing,” Gary said, taking three steps away from her and suddenly turning back. “Tell me what the thing is.”

“Well, I was just thinking—”

“You know, I’m half an hour late already. I really need to get back to the office.”

Denise rolled her eyes up at him and let her mouth hang open in mid-sentence.

“Let’s just finish this conversation,” Gary said.

“OK, well, not to sound like Mom, but—”

“A little too late for that! Huh? Huh?” he found himself shouting with crazy joviality, his hands in the air.

“Not to sound like Mom, but—you don’t want to wait too long before you decide to buy tickets. There, I said it.”

Gary began to laugh but checked the laugh before it got away from him. “Good plan!” he said. “You’re right! Gotta decide soon! Gotta buy those tickets! Good plan!” He clapped his hands like a coach.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, you’re right. We should all go to St. Jude for one last Christmas before they sell the house or Dad falls apart or somebody dies. It’s a no-brainer. We should all be there. It is so obvious. You’re absolutely right.”

“Then I don’t understand what you’re upset about.”

“Nothing! Not upset about anything!”

“OK. Good.” Denise gazed up at him levelly. “Then let me ask you one other thing. I want to know why Mom is under the impression that I’m having an affair with a married man.”

A pulse of guilt, a shock wave, passed through Gary. “No idea,” he said.

“Did you tell her I’m involved with a married man?”

“How could I tell her that? I don’t know the first thing about your private life.”

“Well, did you suggest it to her? Did you drop a hint?”

“Denise. Really.” Gary was regaining his parental composure, his aura of big-brotherly indulgence. “You’re the most reticent person I know. On the basis of what could I say anything?”

“Did you drop a hint?” she said. “Because somebody did. Somebody put that idea in her head. And it occurs to me that I said one little thing to you, once, which you might have misinterpreted and passed on to her. And, Gary, she and I have enough problems without your giving her ideas.”

“You know, if you weren’t so mysterious—”

“I’m not ‘mysterious.’ ”

“If you weren’t so secretive,” Gary said, “maybe you wouldn’t have this problem. It’s almost like you want people whispering about you.”

“It’s pretty interesting that you’re not answering my question.”

He exhaled slowly through his teeth. “I have no idea where Mom got that idea. I didn’t tell her anything.”

“All right,” Denise said, standing up. “So I’ll do that ‘legwork.’ You think about Christmas. And we’ll get together when Mom and Dad are in town. I’ll see you later.”

With breathtaking decision she headed toward the nearest exit, not moving so fast as to betray anger but fast enough that Gary couldn’t have caught up with her without running. He waited for a minute to see if she would return. When she didn’t, he left the courtyard and bent his steps toward his office.

Gary had been flattered when his little sister had chosen a college in the very city where he and Caroline had lately bought their dream house. He’d looked forward to introducing Denise (showing her off, really) to all his friends and colleagues. He’d imagined that she would come to Seminole Street for dinner every month and that she and Caroline would be like sisters. He’d imagined that his whole family, even Chip, would eventually settle in Philadelphia. He’d imagined nieces and nephews, house parties and parlor games, long snowy Christmases on Seminole Street. And now he and Denise had lived in the same city for fifteen years, and he felt as if he hardly knew her. She never asked him for anything. No matter how tired she was, she never came to Seminole Street without flowers or dessert for Caroline, sharks’ teeth or comic books for the boys, a lawyer joke or a lightbulb joke for Gary. There was no way around her properness, no way to convey to her the depth of his disappointment that, of the rich family-filled future that he’d imagined, almost nothing had come to pass.

A year ago, over lunch, Gary had told her about a married “friend” of his (actually a colleague, Jay Pascoe) who was having an affair with his daughters’ piano teacher. Gary said that he could understand his friend’s recreational interest in the affair (Pascoe had no intention of leaving his wife) but that he didn’t see why the piano teacher was bothering.

“So you can’t imagine,” Denise said, “why a woman would want to have an affair with you?”

“I’m not talking about me,” Gary said.

“But you’re married and you have kids.”

“I’m saying I don’t understand what the woman sees in a guy she knows to be a liar and a sneak.”

“Probably she disapproves of liars and sneaks in general,” Denise said. “But she makes an exception for the guy she’s in love with.”

“So it’s a kind of self-deception.”

“No, Gary, it’s the way love works.”

“Well, and I guess there’s always a chance she’ll get lucky and marry into instant money.”

This puncturing of Denise’s liberal innocence with a sharp economic truth seemed to sadden her.

“You see a person with kids,” she said, “and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you’re attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.”

“You sound like you know something about it,” Gary said.

“Emile is the only man I’ve ever been attracted to who didn’t have kids.”

This interested Gary. Under cover of fraternal obtuseness, he risked asking: “So, and who are you seeing now?”

“Nobody.”

“You’re not into some married guy,” he joked.

Denise’s face went a shade paler and two shades redder as she reached for her water glass. “I’m seeing nobody,” she said. “I’m working very hard.”

“Well, just remember,” Gary said, “there’s more to life than cooking. You’re at a stage now where you need to start thinking about what you really want and how you’re going to get it.”

Denise twisted in her seat and signaled to the waiter for the check. “Maybe I’ll marry into instant money,” she said.

The more Gary thought about his sister’s involvement with married men, the angrier he got. Nevertheless, he should never have mentioned the matter to Enid. The disclosure had come of drinking gin on an empty stomach while listening to his mother sing Denise’s praises at Christmastime, a few hours after the mutilated Austrian reindeer had come to light and Enid’s gift to Caroline had turned up in a trash can like a murdered baby. Enid extolled the generous multimillionaire who was bankrolling Denise’s new restaurant and had sent her on a luxury two-month tasting tour of France and Central Europe, she extolled Denise’s long hours and her dedication and her thrift, and in her backhandedly comparative way she carped about Gary’s “materialism” and “ostentation” and “obsession with money”—as if she herself weren’t dollar-sign-headed! As if she herself, given the opportunity, wouldn’t have bought a house like Gary’s and furnished it very much the same way he had! He wanted to say to her: Of your three children, my life looks by far the most like yours! I have what you taught me to want! And now that I have it, you disapprove of it!

But what he actually said, when the juniper spirits finally boiled over, was: “Why don’t you ask Denise who she’s sleeping with? Ask her if the guy’s married and if he has any kids.”

“I don’t think she’s dating anybody,” Enid said.

“I’m telling you,” the juniper spirits said, “ask her if she’s ever been involved with somebody married. I think honesty compels you to ask that question before you hold her up as a paragon of midwestern values.”

Enid covered her ears. “I don’t want to know about this!”

“Fine, go ahead, stick your head in the sand!” the sloppy spirits raged. “I just don’t want to hear any more crap about what an angel she is.”

Gary knew that he’d broken the sibling code of honor. But he was glad he’d broken it. He was glad Denise was taking heat again from Enid. He felt surrounded, imprisoned, by disapproving women.

There was, of course, one obvious way of breaking free: he could say yes instead of no to one of the dozen secretaries and female pedestrians and sales clerks who in any given week took note of his height and his schist-gray hair, his calfskin jacket and his French mountaineering pants, and looked him in the eye as if to say The key’s under the doormat. But there was still no pussy on earth he’d rather lick, no hair he’d rather gather in his fist like a golden silk bellpull, no gaze with which he’d rather lock his own at climax, than Caroline’s. The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.

In the lobby of the CenTrust Tower, on Market Street, he joined a crowd of human beings by the elevators. Clerical staff and software specialists, auditors and keypunch engineers, returning from late lunches.

“The lion he ascendant now,” said the woman standing closest to Gary. “Very good time to shop now. The lion he often preside over bargains in the store.”

“Where is our Savior in this?” asked the woman to whom the woman had spoken.

“This also a good time to remember the Savior,” the first woman answered calmly. “Time of the lion very good time for that.”

“Lutetium supplements combined with megadoses of partially hydrogenated Vitamin E!” a third person said.

“He’s programmed his clock radio,” a fourth person said, “which it says something about something I don’t know that you can even do this, but he’s programmed it to wake him up to WMIA at eleven past the hour every hour. Whole night through.”

Finally an elevator came. As the mass of humanity moved onto it, Gary considered waiting for a less populated car, a ride less pullulating with mediocrity and body smells. But coming in from Market Street now was a young female estate planner who in recent months had been giving him talk-to-me smiles, touch-me smiles. To avoid contact with her, he darted through the elevator’s closing doors. But the doors bumped his trailing foot and reopened. The young estate planner crowded on next to him.

“The prophet Jeremiah, girl, he speak of the lion. It tell about it in the pamphlet here.”

“Like it’s 3:11 in the morning and the Clippers lead the Grizzlies 146 – 145 with twelve seconds left in triple overtime.”

Absolutely no reverb on a full elevator. Every sound was deadened by clothes and flesh and hairdos. The air prebreathed. The crypt overwarm.

“This pamphlet is the Devil’s work.”

“Read it over coffeebreak, girl. What the harm in that?”

“Both last-place teams looking to improve their odds in the college draft lottery by losing this otherwise meaningless late-season game.”

“Lutetium is a rare-earth element, very rare and from the earth, and it’s pure because it’s elemental!”

“Like and if he set the clock for 4:11 he could hear all the late scores and only have to wake up once. But there’s Davis Cup action in Sydney and it’s updated hourly. Can’t miss that.”

The young estate planner was short and had a pretty face and hennaed hair. She smiled up at Gary as if inviting him to speak. She looked midwestern and happy to be standing next to him.

Gary fixed his gaze on nothing and attempted not to breathe. He was chronically bothered by the T erupting in the middle of the word CenTrust. He wanted to push the T down hard, like a nipple, but when he pushed it down he got no satisfaction. He got cent-rust: a corroded penny.

“Girl, this ain’t replacement faith. This supplemental. Isaiah mention that lion, too. Call it the lion of Judah.”

“A pro-am thing in Malaysia with an early leader in the clubhouse, but that could change between 2:11 and 3:11. Can’t miss that.”

“My faith don’t need no replacing.”

“Sheri, girl, you got a wax deposit in your ear? Listen what I saying. This. Ain’t. No. Replacement. Faith. This supplemental.”

“It guarantees silky vibrant skin plus an eighteen percent reduction in panic attacks!”

“Like I’m wondering how Samantha feels about the alarm clock going off next to her pillow eight times a night every night.”

“All I saying is now’s the time to shop is all I saying.”

It occurred to Gary, as the young estate planner leaned into him to let a raft of sweltering humanity leave the elevator, as she pressed her hennaed head against his ribs more intimately than seemed strictly necessary, that another reason he’d remained faithful to Caroline through twenty years of marriage was his steadily growing aversion to physical contact with other human beings. Certainly he was in love with fidelity; certainly he got an erotic kick out of adhering to principle; but somewhere between his brain and his balls a wire was also perhaps coming loose, because when he mentally undressed and violated this little red-haired girl his main thought was how stuffy and undisinfected he would find the site of his infidelity—a coliform-bacterial supply closet, a Courtyard by Marriott with dried semen on the walls and bedspreads, the cat-scratch-feverish back seat of whatever adorable VW or Plymouth she no doubt drove, the spore-laden wall-to-wall of her boxlike starter apartment in Montgomeryville or Conshohocken, each site overwarm and underventilated and suggestive of genital warts and chlamydia in its own unpleasant way—and what a struggle it would be to breathe, how smothering her flesh, how squalid and foredoomed his efforts not to condescend …

He bounded out of the elevator on sixteen, taking big cool lungfuls of centrally processed air.

“Your wife’s been calling,” said his secretary, Maggie. “She wants you to call her right away.”

Gary retrieved a stack of messages from his box on Maggie’s desk. “Did she say what it is?”

“No, but she sounds upset. Even when I told her you weren’t here, she kept calling.”

Gary shut himself inside his office and flipped through the messages. Caroline had called at 1:35, 1:40, 1:50, 1:55, and 2:10; it was now 2:25. He pumped his fist in triumph. Finally, finally, some evidence of desperation.

He dialed home and said, “What’s up?”

Caroline’s voice was shaking. “Gary, something’s wrong with your cell phone. I’ve been trying your cell phone and it doesn’t answer. What’s wrong with it?”

“I turned it off.”

“How long has it been off? I’ve been trying you for an hour, and now I’ve got to go get the boys but I don’t want to leave the house! I don’t know what to do!”

“Caro. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“There’s somebody across the street.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know. Somebody in a car, I don’t know. They’ve been sitting there for an hour.”

The tip of Gary’s dick was melting like the flame end of a candle. “Well,” he said, “did you go see who it is?”

“I’m afraid to,” Caroline said. “And the cops say it’s a city street.”

“They’re right. It is a city street.”

“Gary, somebody stole the Neverest sign again!” She was practically sobbing. “I came home at noon and it was gone. And then I looked out and this car was there, and there’s somebody in the front seat right now.”

“What kind of car?”

“Big station wagon. It’s old. I’ve never seen it before.”

“Was it there when you came home?”

“I don’t know! But now I’ve got to go get Jonah and I don’t want to leave the house, with the sign missing and the car out there—”

“The alarm system is working, though, right?”

“But if I come home and they’re still in the house and I surprise them—”

“Caroline, honey, calm down. You’d hear the alarm—”

“Broken glass, an alarm going off, somebody cornered, these people have guns—”

“Look, look, look. Caroline? Here’s what you do. Caroline?” The fear in her voice and the need the fear suggested were making him so hot that he had to give himself a squeeze through the fabric of his pants, a pinch of reality. “Call me back on your cell phone,” he said. “Keep me on the line, go out and get in the Stomper, and drive down the driveway. You can talk to whoever through the window. I’ll be there with you the whole time. All right?”

“OK. OK. I’m calling you right back.”

As Gary waited, he thought of the heat and the saltiness and the peach-bruise softness of Caroline’s face when she’d been crying, the sound of her swallowing her lachrymal mucus, and the wide-open readiness of her mouth, then, for his. To feel nothing, not the feeblest pulse in the dead mouse from which his urine issued, for three weeks, to believe that she would never again need him and that he would never again want her, and then, on a moment’s notice, to become light-headed with lust: this was marriage as he knew it. His telephone rang.

“I’m in the car,” Caroline said from the cockpit-like aural space of mobile phoning. “I’m backing up.”

“You can get his license number, too. Write it down before you pull up next to him. Let him see you getting it.”

“OK. OK.”

In tinny miniature he heard the big-animal breathing of her SUV, the rising om of its automatic transmission.

“Oh, fuck, Gary,” she wailed, “he’s gone! I don’t see him! He must have seen me coming and driven away!”

“Good, though, that’s good, that’s what you wanted.”

“No, because he’ll circle the block and come back when I’m not here!”

Gary calmed her down and told her how to approach the house safely when she returned with the boys. He promised to keep his cell phone on and come home early. He refrained from comparing her mental health with his.

Depressed? He was not depressed. Vital signs of the rambunctious American economy streamed numerically across his many-windowed television screen. Orfic Midland up a point and three-eighths for the day. The U. S. dollar laughing at the euro, buggering the yen. Virginia Lin dropped in and proposed selling a block of Exxon at 104. Gary could see out across the river to the floodplain landscape of Camden, New Jersey, whose deep ruination, from this height and distance, gave the impression of a kitchen floor with the linoleum scraped off. The sun was"rroud in the south, a source of relief; Gary couldn’t stand it when his parents came east and the eastern seaboard’s weather stank. The same sun was shining on their cruise ship now, somewhere north of Maine. In a corner of his TV screen was the talking head of Curly Eberle. Gary upsized the picture and raised the sound as Eberle concluded: “A body-building machine for the brain, that’s not a bad image, Cindy.” The all-business-all-the-time anchors, for whom financial risk was merely the boon companion of upside potential, nodded sagely in response. “Body-building machine for the brain, ho-kay,” the female anchor segued, “and coming up, then, a toy that’s all the rage in Belgium (!) and its maker says this product could be bigger than the Beanie Babies!” Jay Pascoe dropped in to kvetch about the bond market. Jay’s little girls had a new piano teacher now and the same old mother. Gary caught about one word of every three Jay spoke. His nerves were jangling as on the long-ago afternoon before his fifth date with Caroline, when they were so ready to finally be unchaste that each intervening hour was like a granite block to be broken by a shackled prisoner…

He left work at 4:30. In his Swedish sedan he wound his way up Kelly Drive and Lincoln Drive, out of the valley of the Schuylkill and its haze and expressway, its bright flat realities, up through tunnels of shadow and gothic arches of early-autumn leaves along the Wissahickon Creek, and back into the enchanted arboreality of Chestnut Hill.

Caroline’s fevered imaginings notwithstanding, the house appeared to be intact. Gary eased the car up the driveway past the bed of hostas and euonymus from which, just as she’d said, another SECURITY BY NEVEREST sign had been stolen. Since the beginning of the year, Gary had planted and lost five SECURITY BY NEVEREST signs. It galled him to be flooding the market with worthless signage, thereby diluting the value of SECURITY BY NEVEREST as a burglary deterrent. Here in the heart of Chestnut Hill, needless to say, the sheet-metal currency of the Neverest and Western Civil Defense and ProPhilaTex signs in every front yard was backed by the full faith and credit of floodlights and retinal scanners, emergency batteries, buried hot lines, and remotely securable doors; but elsewhere in northwest Philly, down through Mount Airy into Germantown and Nicetown where the sociopaths had their dealings and their dwellings, there existed a class of bleeding-heart homeowners who hated what it might say about their “values” to buy their own home-security systems but whose liberal “values” did not preclude stealing Gary’s SECURITY BY NEVEREST signs on an almost weekly basis and planting them in their own front yards …

In the garage he was overcome by an Alfred-like urge to recline in the car seat and shut his eyes. Turning off the engine, he seemed to switch off something in his brain as well. Where had his lust and energy disappeared to? This, too, was marriage as he knew it.

He made himself leave the car. A constrictive band of tiredness ran from his eyes and sinuses to his brain stem. Even if Caroline was ready to forgive him, even if he and she could somehow slip away from the kids and fool around (and, realistically, there was no way that they could do this), he was probably too tired to perform now anyway. Stretching out ahead of him were five kid-filled hours before he could be alone with her in bed. Simply to regain the energy he’d had until five minutes ago would require sleep—eight hours of it, maybe ten.

The back door was locked and chained. He gave it the firmest, merriest knock he could manage. Through the window he saw Jonah come trotting over in flip-flops and a swimsuit, enter security code, and unbolt and unchain the door.

“Hello there, Dad, I’m making a sauna in the bathroom,” Jonah said as he trotted away again.

The object of Gary’s desire, the tear-softened blond female whom he’d reassured on the phone, was sitting next to Caleb and watching a galactic rerun on the kitchen TV. Earnest humanoids in unisex pajamas.

“Hello!” Gary said. “Looks like everything’s OK here.”

Caroline and Caleb nodded, their eyes on a different planet.

“I guess I’ll go put another sign out,” Gary said.

“You should nail it to a tree,” Caroline said. “Take it off its stick and nail it to a tree.”

Nearly unmanned by disappointed expectation, Gary filled his chest with air and coughed. “The idea, Caroline, is that there be a certain classiness and subtlety to the message we’re projecting? A certain word-to-the-wise quality? When you have to chain your sign to a tree to keep it from getting stolen—”

“I said nail.”

“It’s like announcing to the sociopaths: We’re whipped! Come and get us! Come and get us!”

“I didn’t say chain. I said nail.”

Caleb reached for the remote and raised the TV volume.

Gary went to the basement and from a flat cardboard carton took the last of the six signs that a Neverest representative had sold to him in bulk. Considering the cost of a Neverest home-security system, the signs were unbelievably shoddy. The placards were unevenly painted and attached by fragile aluminum rivets to posts of rolled sheet metal too thin to be hammered into the ground (you had to dig a hole).

Caroline didn’t look up when he returned to the kitchen. He might have wondered if he’d hallucinated her panicked calls to him if there were not a lingering humidity in his boxer shorts and if, during his thirty seconds in the basement, she hadn’t thrown the dead bolt on the back door, engaged the chain, and reset the alarm.

He, of course, was mentally ill, whereas she! She!

“Good Christ,” he said as he punched their wedding date into the numeric keypad.

Leaving the door wide open, he went to the front yard and planted the new Neverest sign in the old sterile hole. When he came back a minute later, the door was locked again. He took his keys out and turned the dead bolt and pushed the door open to the extent the chain permitted, triggering the excuse-me-please alarm inside. He shoved on the door, stressing its hinges. He considered putting his shoulder to it and ripping out the chain. With a grimace and a shout Caroline jumped up and clutched her back and stumbled over to enter code within the thirty-second limit. “Gary,” she said, “just knock.”

“I was in the front yard,” he said. “I was fifty feet away. Why are you setting the alarm?”

“You don’t understand what it was like here today,” she muttered as, limping, she returned to interstellar space. “I’m feeling pretty alone here, Gary. Pretty alone.”

“Here I am, though. Right? I’m home now.”

“Yes. You’re home.”

“Hey, Dad, what’s for dinner?” Caleb said. “Can we have mixed grill?”

“Yes,” Gary said. “I will make dinner and I will do the dishes and I may also trim the hedge, because I, for one, am feeling good! All right, Caroline? Does that sound OK to you?”

“Yes, please, sure, make dinner,” she murmured, staring at the TV.

“Good. I will make dinner.” Gary clapped his hands and coughed. He felt as if, in his chest and his head, worn-out gears were falling off their axles, chewing into other parts of his internal machinery, as he demanded of his body a bravado, an undepressed energy, that it was simply not equipped to give.

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.”

Gary went. He stormed outside and crossed the back yard. All the foliage near the house was chalky now with outpouring indoor light, but there was still enough twilight in the western trees to make them silhouettes. In the garage he took the eight-foot stepladder down from its brackets and danced and spun with it, nearly knocking out the windshield of the Stomper before he got control. He hauled the ladder around to the front of the house, turned on lights, and came back for the electric trimmer and the hundred-foot extension cord. To keep the dirty cord from contact with his expensive linen shirt, which he belatedly realized he was still wearing, he let the cord drag behind him and get destructively tangled up in flowers. He stripped down to his T-shirt but didn’t stop to change his pants for fear of losing momentum and lying down on the dayheat-radiating lawn and listening to the crickets and the ratcheting cicadas and nodding off. Sustained physical exertion cleared his head to some extent. He mounted the ladder and lopped the lime-green lolling tops off yews, leaning out as far as he dared. Probably, finding himself unable to reach the twelve inches of hedge nearest the house, he should have turned off the clipper and come down and moved the ladder closer, but since it was a matter of twelve inches and he didn’t have infinite reserves of energy and patience, he tried to walk the ladder toward the house, to kind of swing its legs and hop with it, while continuing to grip, in his left hand, the running clipper.

The gentle blow, the almost stingless brush or bump, that he then delivered to the meaty palm part of his right thumb proved, on inspection, to have made a deep and heavily bleeding hole that in the best of all possible worlds an emergency physician would have looked at. But Gary was nothing if not conscientious. He knew he was too drunk to drive himself to Chestnut Hill Hospital, and he couldn’t ask Caroline to drive him there without raising awkward questions regarding his decision to climb a ladder and operate a power tool while intoxicated, which would collaterally entail admitting how much vodka he’d drunk before dinner and in general paint the opposite of the picture of Good Mental Health that he’d intended to create by coming out to trim the hedge. So while a swarm of skin-biting and fabric-eating insects attracted by the porch lights flew into the house through the front door that Gary, as he hurried inside with his strangely cool blood pooling in the cup of both hands, had neglected to kick shut behind him, he closeted himself in the downstairs bathroom and released the blood into the sink, seeing pomegranate juice, or chocolate syrup, or dirty motor oil, in its ferric swirls. He ran cold water on the gash. From outside the unlocked bathroom door, Jonah asked if he had hurt himself. Gary assembled with his left hand an absorptive pad of toilet paper and pressed it to the wound and one-handedly applied plastic surgical tape that the blood and water immediately made unsticky. There was blood on the toilet seat, blood on the floor, blood on the door.

“Dad, bugs are coming in,” Jonah said.

“Yes, Jonah, why don’t you shut the door and then go up and take a bath. I’ll come up soon and play checkers.”

“Can we play chess instead?”

“Yes.”

“You have to give me a queen, a bishop, a horse, and a rook, though.”

“Yes, go take a bath!”

“Will you come up soon?”

“Yes!”

Gary tore fresh tape from the fanged dispenser and laughed at himself in the mirror to be sure he could still do it. Blood was soaking through the toilet paper, trickling down around his wrist, and loosening the tape. He wrapped the hand in a guest towel, and with a second guest towel, well dampened, he wiped the bathroom clean of blood. He opened the door a crack and listened to Caroline’s voice upstairs, to the dishwasher in the kitchen, to Jonah’s bathwater running. A trail of blood receded up the central hall toward the front door. Crouching and moving sideways in crab fashion, with his injured hand pressed to his belly, Gary swabbed up the blood with the guest towel. Further blood was spattered on the gray wooden floor of the front porch. Gary walked on the sides of his feet for quiet. He went to the kitchen for a bucket and a mop, and there, in the kitchen, was the liquor cabinet.

Well, he opened it. By holding the vodka bottle in his right armpit he was able to unscrew the cap with his left hand. And as he was raising the bottle, as he was tilting his head to make a late small withdrawal from the rather tiny balance that remained, his gaze drifted over the top of the cabinet door and he saw the camera.

The camera was the size of a deck of cards. It was mounted on an altazimuth bracket above the back door. Its casing was of brushed aluminum. It had a purplish gleam in its eye.

Gary returned the bottle to the cabinet, moved to the sink, and ran water in a bucket. The camera swept thirty degrees to follow him.

He wanted to rip the camera off the ceiling, and, failing that, he wanted to go upstairs and explain to Caleb the dubious morality of spying, and, failing that, he at least wanted to know how long the camera had been in place; but since he had something to hide now, any action he took against the camera, any objection he made to its presence in his kitchen, was bound to strike Caleb as self-serving.

He dropped the bloody, dusty guest towel in the bucket and approached the back door. The camera reared up in its bracket to keep him centered in its field. He stood directly below it and looked into its eye. He shook his head and mouthed the words No, Caleb. Naturally, the camera made no response. Gary realized, now, that the room was probably miked for sound as well. He could speak to Caleb directly, but he was afraid that if he looked up into Caleb’s proxy eye and heard his own voice and let it be heard in Caleb’s room, the result would be an intolerably strong upsurge in the reality of what was happening. He therefore shook his head again and made a sweeping motion with his left hand, a film director’s Cut! Then he took the bucket from the sink and swabbed the front porch.

Because he was drunk, the problem of the camera and Caleb’s witnessing of his injury and his furtive involvement with the liquor cabinet didn’t stay in Gary’s head as an ensemble of conscious thoughts and anxieties but turned in on itself and became a kind of physical presence inside him, a hard tumorous mass descending through his stomach and coming to rest in his lower gut. The problem wasn’t going anywhere, of course. But, for the moment, it was impervious to thought.

“Dad?” came Jonah’s voice through an upstairs window. “I’m ready to play chess now.”

By the time Gary went inside, having left the hedge half-clipped and the ladder in an ivy bed, his blood had soaked through three layers of toweling and bloomed on the surface as a pinkish spot of plasma filtered of its corpuscles. He was afraid of meeting somebody in the hallway, Caleb or Caroline certainly, but especially Aaron, because Aaron had asked him if he was feeling all right, and Aaron had not been able to lie to him, and these small demonstrations of Aaron’s love were in a way the scariest part of the whole evening.

“Why is there a towel on your hand?” Jonah asked as he removed half of Gary’s forces from the chessboard.

“I cut myself, Jonah. I’m keeping some ice on the cut.”

“You smell like al-co-hol.” Jonah’s voice was lilting.

“Alcohol is a powerful disinfectant,” Gary said.

Jonah moved a pawn to K4. “I’m talking about the al-co-hol you drank, though.”

By ten o’clock Gary was in bed and thus arguably still in compliance with his original plan, arguably still on track to—what? Well, he didn’t exactly know. But if he got some sleep he might be able to see his way forward. In order not to bleed on the sheets he’d put his injured hand, towel and all, inside a Bran’nola bread bag. He turned out the nightstand light and faced the wall, his bagged hand cradled against his chest, the sheet and the summer blanket pulled up over his shoulder. He slept hard for a while and was awakened in the darkened room by the throbbing of his hand. The flesh on either side of the gash was twitching as if it had worms in it, pain fanning out along five carpi. Caroline breathed evenly, asleep. Gary got up to empty his bladder and take four Advils. When he returned to bed, his last, pathetic plan fell apart, because he could not get back to sleep. He had the sensation that blood was running out of the Bran’nola bag. He considered getting up and sneaking out to the garage and driving to the emergency room. He added up the hours this would take him and the amount of wakefulness he would have to burn off upon returning, and he subtracted the total from the hours of night remaining until he had to get up and go to work, and he concluded that he was better off just sleeping until six and then, if need be, stopping at the ER on his way to work; but this was all contingent on his ability to fall back asleep, and since he couldn’t do this, he reconsidered and recalculated, but now there were fewer minutes remaining of the night than when he’d first considered getting up and sneaking out. The calculus was cruel in its regression. He got up again to piss. The problem of Caleb’s surveillance lay, indigestible, in his gut. He was mad to wake up Caroline and fuck her. His hurt hand pulsed. It felt elephantine; he had a hand the size and weight of an armchair, each finger a soft log of exquisite sensitivity. And Denise kept looking at him with hatred. And his mother kept yearning for her Christmas. And he slipped briefly into a room in which his father had been strapped into an electric chair and fitted with a metal helmet, and Gary’s own hand was on the old-fashioned stirrup-like power switch, which he’d evidently already thrown, because Alfred came leaping from the chair fantastically galvanized, horribly smiling, a travesty of enthusiasm, dancing around with rigid jerking limbs and circling the room at double-speed and then falling hard, face down, wham, like a ladder with its legs together, and lying prone there on the execution-room floor with every muscle in his body galvanically twitching and boiling—

Gray light was in the windows when Gary got up to piss for the fourth or fifth time. The morning’s humidity and warmth felt more like July than October. A haze or fog on Seminole Street confused—or disembodied—or refracted—the cawing of crows as they worked their way up the Hill, over Navajo Road and Shawnee Street, like local teenagers heading to the Wawa Food Market parking lot (“Club Wa” they called it, according to Aaron) to smoke their cigarettes.

He lay down again and waited for sleep.

“—day the fifth of October, among the top news stories we’re following this morning, with his execution now less than twenty-four hours away, lawyers for Khellye—” said Caroline’s clock radio before she swatted it silent.

In the next hour, while he listened to the rising of his sons and the sound of their breakfasts and the blowing of a trumpet line by John Philip Sousa, courtesy of Aaron, a radical new plan took shape in Gary’s brain. He lay fetally on his side, very still, facing the wall, with his Bran’nola-bagged hand against his chest. His radical new plan was to do absolutely nothing.

“Gary, are you awake?” Caroline said from a medium distance, the doorway presumably. “Gary?”

He did nothing; didn’t answer.

“Gary?”

He wondered if she might be curious about why he was doing nothing, but already her footsteps were receding up the hall and she was calling, “Jonah, come on, you’re going to be late.”

“Where’s Dad?” Jonah said.

“He’s still in bed, let’s go.”

There was a patter of little feet, and now came the first real challenge to Gary’s radical new plan. From somewhere closer than the doorway Jonah spoke. “Dad? We’re leaving now. Dad?” And Gary had to do nothing. He had to pretend he couldn’t hear or wouldn’t hear, he had to inflict his general strike, his clinical depression, on the one creature he wished he could have spared. If Jonah came any closer—if, for example, he came and gave him a hug—Gary doubted he would be able to stay silent and unmoving. But Caroline was calling from downstairs again, and Jonah hurried out.

Distantly Gary heard the beeping of his anniversary date being entered to arm the perimeter. Then the toast-smelling house was silent and he shaped his face into the expression of bottomless suffering and self-pity that Caroline wore when her back was hurting. He understood, as he never had before, how much comfort this expression yielded.

He thought about getting up, but he didn’t need anything. He didn’t know when Caroline was coming back; if she was working at the CDF today, she might not return until three. It didn’t matter. He would be here.

As it happened, Caroline came back in half an hour. The sounds of her departure were reversed. He heard the approaching Stomper, the disarming code, the footsteps on the stairs. He sensed his wife in the doorway, silent, watching him.

“Gary?” she said in a lower, more tender voice.

He did nothing. He lay. She came over to him and knelt by the bed. “What is it? Are you sick?”

He didn’t answer.

“What is this bag for? My God. What did you do?”

He said nothing.

“Gary, say something. Are you depressed?”

“Yes.”

She sighed then. Weeks of accumulated tension were draining from the room.

“I surrender,” Gary said.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t have to go to St. Jude,” he said. “Nobody who doesn’t want to go has to go.”

It cost him a lot to say this, but there was a reward. He felt Caroline’s warmth approaching, its radiance, before she touched him. The sun rising, the first brush of her hair on his neck as she leaned over him, the approach of her breath, the gentle touching-down of her lips on his cheek. She said, “Thank you.”

“I may have to go for Christmas Eve but I’ll come back for Christmas.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m extremely depressed.”

“Thank you.”

“I surrender,” Gary said.

An irony, of course, was that as soon as he’d surrendered—possibly as soon as he’d confessed to his depression, almost certainly by the time he showed her his hand and she put a proper bandage on it, and absolutely no later than the moment at which, with a locomotive as long and hard and heavy as an O-gauge model railroad engine, he tunneled up into wet and gently corrugated recesses that even after twenty years of traveling through them still felt unexplored (his approach was spoon-style, from behind, so that Caroline could keep her lower back arched outward and he could harmlessly drape his bandaged hand across her flank; the screwing wounded, the two of them were)—he not only no longer felt depressed, he felt euphoric.

The thought came to him—inappropriately, perhaps, considering the tender conjugal act that he was now engaged in; but he was who he was, he was Gary Lambert, he had inappropriate thoughts and he was sick of apologizing!—that he could now safely ask Caroline to buy him 4,500 shares of Axon and that she would gladly do it.

She rose and dipped like a top on a tiny point of contact, her entire, sexual being almost weightless on the moistened tip of his middle finger.

He spent himself gloriously. Spent and spent and spent.

They were still lying naked at the hooky-playing hour of nine-thirty on a Tuesday when the phone on Caroline’s nightstand rang. Gary, answering, was shocked to hear his mother’s voice. He was shocked by the reality of her existence.

“I’m calling from the ship,” Enid said.

For one guilty instant, before it registered with him that phoning from a ship was expensive and that his mother’s news could therefore not be good, Gary believed that she was calling because she knew that he’d betrayed her.