The Corrections

throw rocks at the Stomper as Jonas and Chip roared through the open gate. They drove south out of the city center on a street lined with forbidding gas stations and brown-walled, traffic-scarred buildings that seemed happiest and most themselves on days, like this one, when the weather was raw and the light was poor. Jonas spoke very little English but managed to exude tolerance toward Chip, if not friendliness, while keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror. Traffic was extremely sparse this morning, and sport-utility vehicles, those workhorses of the warlord class, attracted unhealthy attention in times of instability.
    The little airport was mobbed with young people speaking the languages of the West. Since the Quad Cities Fundhad liquidated Lietuvos Avialinijos, other airlines had taken over some of the routes, but the curtailed flight schedule (fourteen departures a day for a capital of Europe) wasn’t equipped to handle loads like today’s. Hundreds of British, German, and American students and entrepreneurs, many of their faces familiar to Chip from his pub-crawling with Gitanas, had converged on the reservation counters of Finnair and Lufthansa, Aeroflot and LOT Polish Airlines.
    Doughty city buses were arriving with fresh loads of foreign nationals. As far as Chip could see, none of the counter lines were moving at all. He tallied the flights on the Outbound board and chose the airline, Finnair, with the most departures.
    At the end of the very long Finnair line were two American college girls in bell-bottom jeans and other Sixties Revival wear. The names on their luggage were Tiffany and Cheryl.
    “Do you have tickets?” Chip asked.
    “For tomorrow,” Tiffany said. “But things looked kinda nasty, so.”
    “Is this line moving?”
    “I don’t know. We’ve only been here ten minutes.”
    “It hasn’t moved in ten minutes?”
    “There’s only one person at the counter,” Tiffany said. “But it’s not like there’s some other, better Finnair counter someplace else, so.”
    Chip was feeling disoriented and had to steel himself not to hail a cab and return to Gitanas.
    Cheryl said to Tiffany: “So my dad’s like, you’ve got to sublet if you’re going to Europe, and I’m like, I promised Anna she could stay there weekends when there’s home games so she can sleep with Jason, right? I can’t take a promise back —right? But my dad’s getting like all bottom-line, and I’m like, hello, it’s my condominium, right? You bought it for me , right? I didn’t know I was going to have somestranger, you know, who, like, fries things on the stove, and sleeps in my bed?”
    Tiffany said: “That is so-gross.”
    Cheryl said: “And uses my pillows?”
    Two more non-Lithuanians, a pair of Belgians, joined the line behind Chip. Simply not to be the last in line brought some relief. Chip, in French, asked the Belgians to watch his bag and hold his place. He went to the men’s room, locked himself in a stall, and counted the money Gitanas had given him.
    It was $29,250.
    It upset him somehow. It made him afraid.
    A voice on a bathroom speaker announced, in Lithuanian and then Russian and then English, that LOT Polish Airlines Flight #331 from Warsaw had been canceled.
    Chip put twenty hundreds in his T-shirt pocket, twenty hundreds in his left boot, and returned the rest of the money to the envelope, which he hid inside his T-shirt, against his belly. He wished that Gitanas hadn’t given him the money. Without money, he’d had a good reason to stay in Vilnius. Now that he had no good reason, a simple fact which the previous twelve weeks had kept hidden was stripped naked in the fecal, uric bathroom stall. The simple fact was that he was afraid to go home.
    No man likes to see his cowardice as clearly as Chip could see his now. He was angry at the money and angry at Gitanas for giving it to him and angry at Lithuania for falling apart, but the fact remained that he was afraid to go home, and this was nobody’s fault but his.
    He reclaimed his place in the Finnair line, which hadn’t moved at all. Airport speakers were announcing the cancellation of Flight #1048 from Helsinki. A collective groan went up, and bodies surged forward, the head of the line blunting itself against the counter like a delta.
    Cheryl and Tiffany kicked their bags forward. Chipkicked his bag forward. He felt returned to the world and he didn’t like it. A kind of hospital light, a light of seriousness and