The Corrections

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 hisgeneral 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 feltCaroline’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,