The Corrections

can make.”
    “Grandmother’s little helper, I think they call it.”
    “But even in your big quiet house you feel crowded if there’s a big quiet house at the antipodes and every point in between.”
    “All I ask is a little privacy,” Alfred said.
    “No beach between Greenland and the Falklands that isn’t threatened with development. No acre uncleared.”
    “Oh dear, what time is it?” Enid said. “We don’t want to miss that lecture.”
    “Sylvia’s different. She likes the hubbub at the docks.”
    “I do like the hubbub,” Sylvia said.
    “Gangways, portholes, stevedores. She likes the blast of the horn. To me this is a floating theme park.”
    “You have to put up with a certain amount of fantasy,” Alfred said. “It can’t be helped.”
    “Uzbekistan didn’t agree with my stomach,” Sylvia said.
    “I like all the waste up here,” said Dr. Roth. “Good to see such vast useless mileage.”
    “You romanticize poverty.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “We’ve traveled in Bulgaria,” Alfred said. “I don’t knowabout Uzbekistan, but we’ve traveled in China. Everything, as far as you could see from the railroad—if it were up to me, I’d tear it all down. Tear it down and start over. The houses don’t have to be pretty, just make them solid. Get the plumbing indoors. A good concrete wall and a roof that doesn’t leak—that’s what these people need. Sewers. Look at the Germans, what they did to rebuild. There’s a model of a country.”
    “Wouldn’t want to eat a fish out of the Rhine, though. If I could even find a fish in it.”
    “That’s a lot of environmentalist nonsense.”
    “Alfred, you’re too smart a man to call it nonsense.”
    “I am in need of a bathroom.”
    “Al, when you’re done, why don’t you take a book outside and read for a while. Sylvia and I are going to the investment lecture. You just sit. In the sun. And relax relax relax.”

    He had good days and bad days. It was as if when he lay in bed for a night certain humors pooled in the right or wrong places, like marinade around a flank steak, and in the morning his nerve endings either had enough of what they needed or did not; as if his mental clarity might depend on something as simple as whether he’d lain on his side or on his back the night before; or as if, more disturbingly, he were a damaged transistor radio which after a vigorous shaking might function loud and clear or spew nothing but a static laced with unconnected phrases, the odd strain of music.
    Still, even the worst morning was better than the best night. In the morning every process quickened , speeding his meds to their destinations: the canary-yellow spansule for incontinence, the small pink Tums-like thing for the shakes, the white oblong to discourage nausea, the wan blue tablet to squelch hallucinations from the small pink Tums-like thing. In the morning the blood was crowded with commuters, theglucose peons, lactic and ureic sanitation workers, hemo-globinous deliverymen carrying loads of freshly brewed oxygen in their dented vans, the stern foremen like insulin, the enzymic middle managers and executive epinephrine, leukocyte cops and EMS workers, expensive consultants arriving in their pink and white and canary-yellow limos, everyone riding the aortal elevator and dispersing through the arteries. Before noon the rate of worker accidents was tiny. The world was newborn.
    He had energy. From the Kierkegaard Room he lopingly careened through a red-carpeted hallway that had previously vouchsafed him a comfort station but this morning seemed all business, no Μ or W in sight, just salons and boutiques and the Ingmar Bergman Cinema. The problem was that his nervous system could no longer be relied on for an accurate assessment of his need to go. At night his solution was to wear protection. By day his solution was to visit a bathroom hourly and always to carry his old black raincoat in case he had an accident to hide. The raincoat had the added virtue of offending Enid’s romantic sensibilities, and his hourly stops the added virtue of lending structure to his life. Simply holding things together—simply keeping the ocean of night terrors from breaching the last bulkhead—was his ambition now.
    Throngs of women were streaming toward the Longstocking Ballroom. A strong eddy in their current swept Alfred into a hallway lined with the staterooms of onboard lecturers and entertainers. At the end of this hall a men’s room