The Corrections

to him. She walked alongside his walker as he shuffled up a corridor. On the night of the second of his reconstructive surgeries, she tookhis parents to dinner and listened to their (frankly boring) stories about their son. She told them how quick Billy had been, how in fourth grade he’d already had the spelling and handwriting skills to forge a plausible note excusing him from school, and what a fund of dirty jokes and important reproductive information he was, and how it felt to be a smart girl and see your equally smart brother make himself more stupid by the year, as if specifically to avoid becoming a person like you: how mysterious it all was and how sorry she felt about what he’d done to their son.
    On the eve of Billy’s trial, Robin invited her mother to go to church. Colleen had been confirmed as a Catholic, but she hadn’t taken communion in forty years; Robin’s own church experience was confined to weddings and funerals. Nevertheless, on three consecutive Sundays, Colleen agreed to be picked up in Mount Airy and driven to her childhood parish, St. Dymphna’s, in North Philly. Leaving the sanctuary on the third Sunday, Colleen told Robin, in the faint brogue she’d retained all her life, “That’ll do for me, thanks.” After that, Robin went by herself to mass at St. Dymphna’s and, by and by, to confirmation classes.
    Robin could afford the time for these good works and acts of devotion because of the W——Corporation. Her husband, Brian Callahan, was the son of a local small-time manufacturer and had grown up comfortably in Bala-Cynwyd, playing lacrosse and developing sophisticated tastes in expectation of inheriting his father’s small specialty-chemical company. (Callahan père in his youth had profitably developed a compound that could be thrown into Bessemer converters and patch their cracks and ulcers while their ceramic walls were still hot.) Brian had married the prettiest girl in his college class (in his opinion, this was Robin), and soon after graduation he’d become president of High Temp Products. The company was housed in a yellow-brick building in an industrial park near the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge; bycoincidence, its nearest living commercial neighbor was IBT Document Storage. The cerebral drain of running High Temp Products being minimal, Brian spent his executive afternoons noodling around with computer code and Fourier analysis, blasting on his presidential boom box certain cult California bands to which he was partial (Fibulator, Thinking Fellers Union, the Minutemen, the Nomatics), and writing a piece of software that in the fullness of time he quietly patented, quietly found a VC backer for, and one day, on the advice of this backer, quietly sold to the W——Corporation for $19,500,000.
    Brian’s product, called Eigenmelody, processed any piece of recorded music into an eigenvector that distilled the song’s tonal and melodic essence into discrete, manipulable coordinates. An Eigenmelody user could select a favorite Moby song, and Eigenmelody would spectroanalyze her choice, search a recorded-music database for songs with similar eigenvectors, and produce a list of kindred sounds that the user might otherwise have never found: the Au Pairs, Laura Nyro, Thomas Mapfumo, Pokrovsky’s wailing version of Les Noces . Eigenmelody was parlor game, musicological tool, and record-sales-enhancer rolled into one. Brian had worked enough kinks out of it that the behemoth of W——, belatedly scrambling for a piece of the online music-distribution action, came running to him with a big wad of monopoly money in its outstretched hand.
    It was characteristic of Brian, who hadn’t mentioned the impending sale to Robin, that on the evening of the day the deal went through he didn’t breathe a word of it until the girls were in bed in their modest yuppie row house near the Art Museum and he and she were watching a Nova show about sunspots.
    “Oh, by the way,” Brian said, “neither of us ever has to work again.”
    It was characteristic of Robin—her excitability—that onreceiving this news she laughed until she got the hiccups.
    Alas, there was justice in Billy’s old epithet for Robin: Cow Clueless. Robin was under the impression that she already had a good life with Brian. She lived in her town house, grew vegetables and herbs in her little back yard, taught “language arts” to ten-and eleven-year-olds at an experimental school in West Philly, sent her daughter