The Corrections

pristine meaninglessness of eternal or infinite things. Was as real as a heartbeat but corresponded to no real thing outside him. Was a sound that nothing made.
    Underneath it the fainter and more fugitive tones were active. Cirrus-like clusterings of very high frequencies off in deep stratosphere behind his ears. Meandering notes of almost ghostly faintness, as from a remote calliope. A jangly set of mid-range tones that waxed and waned like crickets in the center of his skull. A low, almost rumbling drone like a dilution of a diesel engine’s blanket alldeafeningness, a sound he’d never quite believed was real—i.e., unreal—until he’d retired from the Midpac and lost touch with locomotives. These were the sounds his brain both created and listened to, was friendly with.
    Outside of himself he could hear the psh, psh of two hands gently swinging on their hinges in the sheets.
    And the mysterious rush of water all around him, in the Gunnar Myrdal ’s secret capillaries.
    And someone snickering down in the dubious space below the horizon of the bedding.
    And the alarm clock pinching off each tick. It was three in the morning and his mistress had abandoned him. Now, when he needed her comforts more than ever, she went off whoring with younger sleepers. For thirty years she’d obliged him, spread her arms and opened her legs every night at ten-fifteen. She’d been the nook he sought, the womb. He could still find her in the afternoon or early evening, but not in a bed at night. As soon as he lay down he groped in the sheets and sometimes for a few hours found some bony extremity of hers to clutch. But reliably at one or two or three she vanished beyond any pretending that she still belonged to him.
    He peered fearfully across the rust-orange carpeting to the Nordic blond wood lines of Enid’s bed. Enid appeared to be dead.
    The rushing water in the million pipes.
    And the tremor, he had a guess about this tremor. That it came from the engines, that when you built a luxury cruise ship you damped or masked every sound the engines made, one after another, right down to the lowest audible frequency and even lower, but you couldn’t go all the way to zero. You were left with this subaudible two-hertz shaking, the irreducible remainder and reminder of a silence imposed on something powerful.
    A small animal, a mouse, scurried in the layered shadows at the foot of Enid’s bed. For a moment it seemed to Alfred that the whole floor consisted of scurrying corpuscles. Then the mice resolved themselves into a single more forward mouse, horrible mouse, squishable pellets of excreta, habits of gnawing, heedless peeings—
    “Asshole, asshole!” the visitor taunted, stepping from the darkness into a bedside dusk.
    With dismay Alfred recognized the visitor. First he saw the dropping’s slumped outline and then he caught a whiff of bacterial decay. This was not a mouse. This was the turd.
    “Urine trouble now, he he!” the turd said.
    It was a sociopathic turd, a loose stool, a motormouth. It had introduced itself to Alfred the night before and so agitated him that only Enid’s ministrations, a blaze of electric light and Enid’s soothing touch on his shoulder, had saved the night.
    “Leave!” Alfred commanded sternly.
    But the turd scurried up the side of the clean Nordic bed and relaxed like a Brie, or a leafy and manure-smelling Cabrales, on the covers. “Splat chance of that, fella.” And dissolved, literally, in a gale of hilarious fart sounds.
    To fear encountering the turd on his pillow was to summon the turd to the pillow, where it flopped in postures of glistening well-being.
    “Get away, get away,” Alfred said, planting an elbow in the carpeting as he exited the bed headfirst.
    “No way, José,” the turd said. “First I’m gonna get in your clothes.”
    “No!”
    “Sure am, fella. Gonna get in your clothes and touch the upholstery. Gonna smear and leave a trail. Gonna stink so bad.”
    “Why? Why? Why would you do such a thing?”
    “Because it’s right for me,” the turd croaked. “It’s who I am. Put somebody else’s comfort ahead of my own? Go hop in a toilet to spare somebody else’s feelings? That’s the kinda thing you do, fella. You got everything bass ackwards. And look where it’s landed you.”
    “Other people ought to have more consideration.”
    “You oughtta have less. Me personally, I am opposed toall strictures. If you feel it, let it rip. If you want it, go for it.