The Corrections

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 involvementwith 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 sideof 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