The Corrections

characteristic of the modern world, though, wasn’t it, how slippery they made the goddamned tape on the diapers.
    “Would you look at that,” he said, hoping to pass off as philosophical amusement his rage with a treacherous modernity. The adhesive strips might as well have been covered with Teflon. Between his dry skin and his shakes, peeling the backing off a strip was like picking up a marble with two peacock feathers.
    “Well, for goodness’ sake.”
    He persisted in the attempt for five minutes and another five minutes. He simply couldn’t get the backing off.
    “Well, for goodness’ sake.”
    Grinning at his own incapacity. Grinning in frustration and the overwhelming sense of being watched.
    “Well, for goodness’ sake,” he said once more. This phrase often proved useful in dissipating the shame of small failures.
    How changeful a room was in the night! By the time Alfred had given up on the adhesive strips and simply yanked a third diaper up his thigh as far as it would go, which regrettably wasn’t far, he was no longer in the same bathroom. The light had a new clinical intensity; he felt the heavy hand of a more extremely late hour.
    “Enid!” he called. “Can you help me?”
    With fifty years of experience as an engineer he could see at a glance that the emergency contractor had botched the job. One of the diapers was twisted nearly inside out and a second had a mildly spastic leg sticking through two of its plies, leaving most of its absorptive capacity unrealized in a folded mass, its adhesive stickers adhering to nothing. Alfred shook his head. He couldn’t blame the contractor. The fault was his own. Never should have undertaken a job like this under conditions like these. Poor judgment on his part. Trying to do damage control, blundering around in the dark, often created more problems than it solved.
    “Yes, now we are in a fine mess,” he said with a bitter smile.
    And could this be liquid on the floor. Oh my Lord, there appeared to be some liquid on the floor.
    Also liquid running in the Gunnar Myrdal ’s myriad pipes.
    “Enid, please, for God’s sake. I am asking you for help.”
    No answer from the district office. Some kind of vacation everybody was on. Something about the color of a fall.
    Liquid on the floor! Liquid on the floor!
    So all right, though, they paid him to take responsibility. They paid him to make the hard calls.
    He took a deep, bolstering breath.
    In a crisis like this the first order of business was obviously to clear a path for the runoff. Forget about track repair, first you had to have a gradient or you risked a really major washout.
    He noted grimly that he had nothing like a surveyor’s transit, not even a simple plumb line. He’d have to eyeball it.
    How the hell had he got stranded out here, anyway? Probably not even five in the morning yet.
    “Remind me to call the district manager at seven,” he said.
    Somewhere, of course, a dispatcher had to be on duty. But then the problem was to find a telephone, and here a curious reluctance to raise his eyes above the level of the toilet made itself felt. Conditions in these parts were impossible. It could be midmorning by the time he found a telephone. And by that point.
    “Uh! Such a lot of work,” he said.
    There appeared to be a slight depression in the shower stall. Yes, in fact, a preexisting culvert, maybe some old DOT road-building project that never got off the ground, maybe the Army Corps was involved somehow. One of those midnight serendipities: a real culvert. Still, he was looking at a hell of an engineering problem to relocate the operation to take advantage of the culvert.
    “Not much choice, though, I’m afraid.”
    Might as well get at it. He wasn’t getting any less tired. Think of the Dutch with their Delta Project. Forty years of battling the sea. Put things in perspective a little—one bad night. He’d endured worse.
    Try to build some redundancy into the fix, that was the plan. No way he’d trust one little culvert to handle all the runoff. There could be a backup farther down the line.
    “And then we’re in trouble,” he said. “Then we are in real trouble.”
    Could be a hell of a lot worse, in fact. They were lucky an engineer was right on site when the water broke through. Imagine if he hadn’t been here, what a mess.
    “Could have been a real disaster.”
    First order of business was to slap some sort of temporary patch on the leak, then tackle the logistical