The Corrections

like the market. Cyclical business, right? You can have a bull market for five, ten, even fifteen years. We’ve seen it in our lifetime. But we’ve also seen corrections. I may look like I’m just a kid, but I’ve even seen a genuine market break in my lifetime. Scary stuff. Cyclical business. People, we’ve got a lot of green out there right now. It’s been a long, glorious summer. In fact, let me see a show of hands here, how many of you are paying for this cruise, either entirely or in part, on the strength of your investments?”
    Forest of raised hands.
    Jim Crolius nodded with satisfaction. “Well, folks, I hate to break it to you, but those leaves are starting to turn. No matter how green things are for you right now, it’s not going to survive the winter. Of course, every year is different, every cycle’s different. You never know exactly when that green is going to turn. But we’re here, every one of us, because we’re foresighted people. Every person in this room has proved to me she’s a smart investor, just by virtue of being here. You know why? Because it was still summer when you left home . Every person in this room had the foresight to know that something was going to change on this cruise. And the question we all have—I’m speaking in metaphors here—the question is: Will all that glorious green out there turn to glorious gold? Or will it all just wither on the branch in the winter of our discontent?”
    The Longstocking Ballroom was electric with excitement now. There were murmurs of “Marvelous! Marvelous!”
    “More matter and less art,” Sylvia Roth said dryly.
    Death, Enid thought. He was talking about death. And all the people clapping were so old .
    But where was the sting of this realization? Asian had taken it away.
    Jim Crolius turned now to the easel and flipped over the first of its big newsprint pages. The second page was headed WHEN THE CLIMATE CHANGES , and the categories—Funds, Bonds, Common Stock, etc.—drew a gasp from the front row out of all proportion to the informational content. For an instant it seemed to Enid as if Jim Crolius were doing a technical market analysis of the kind that her broker in St. Jude had told her never to pay attention to. Discounting the minimal effects of wind drag at low velocities, something “plummeting” (a thing of value “plunging” in a “free fall”) experienced an acceleration due to gravity of 32 feet per second squared, and, acceleration being the second-order derivative of distance, the analyst could integrate onceover the distance the object had fallen (roughly 30 feet) to calculate its velocity (42 feet per second) as it passed the center of a window 8 feet tall, and assuming a 6-foot-long object, and also assuming for simplicity’s sake a constant velocity over the interval, derive a figure of approximately four-tenths of a second of full or partial visibility. Four-tenths of a second wasn’t much. If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, all that registered was something dark flashing by. But if you happened to be gazing directly at the window in question and you happened as well to be feeling unprece-dentedly calm, four-tenths of a second was more than enough time to identify the falling object as your husband of forty-seven years; to notice that he was wearing the awful black raincoat which had lost its shape and should never have been worn in public but which he’d willfully packed for the trip and willfully carried with him everywhere; to experience not only the certainty that something terrible had happened but also a peculiar sense of intrusion, as if you were witnessing an event that nature had never intended you to witness, like the impact of a meteorite or the copulation of whales; and even to observe the expression on your husband’s face, to register its almost youthful beauty, its peculiar serenity, for who could have anticipated the grace with which the raging man would fall?

    He was remembering the nights he’d sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with his girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath-smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them from Black Beauty or The Chronicles of Narnia . How his voice alone, its palpable resonance, had made them drowsy. These were evenings, and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, when nothing traumatic enough to leave a scar had befallen the nuclear unit.