The Corrections

this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.
    There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.
    But to be seen as the finite carcass in a sea of blood and bone chips and gray matter—to inflict that version of himself on other people—was a violation of privacy so profound it seemed it would outlive him.
    He was also afraid that it might hurt.
    And there was a very important question that he still wanted answered. His children were coming, Gary and Denise and maybe even Chip, his intellectual son. It was possible that Chip, if he came, could answer the very important question.
    And the question was:
    The question was:

    Enid hadn’t felt ashamed at all, not the tiniest bit, when the warning horns were sounding and the Gunnar Myrdal was shuddering with the reversal of its thrusters and Sylvia Roth was pulling her through the crowded Pippi Longstocking Ballroom, crying, “Here’s his wife, let us through!” It hadn’t embarrassed Enid to see Dr. Hibbard again as he knelt on the shuffleboard deck and cut the wet clothes off her husband with dainty surgical clippers. Not even when the assistant cruise director who was helping her pack Alfred’s bags found a yellowed diaper in an ice bucket, not even when Alfred cursed the nurses and orderlies on the mainland, not even when the face of Khellye Withers on the TV in Alfred’s hospital room reminded her that she hadn’t said a comfortingword to Sylvia on the eve of Withers’s execution, did she feel shame.
    She returned to St. Jude in such good spirits that she was able to call Gary and confess that, rather than sending Alfred’s notarized patent-licensing agreement to the Axon Corporation, she’d hidden it in the laundry room. After Gary had given her the disappointing news that five thousand dollars was probably a reasonable licensing fee after all, she went to the basement to retrieve the notarized agreement and couldn’t find it in its hiding place. Strangely unembarrassed, she called Schwenksville and asked Axon to send her a duplicate set of contracts. Alfred was puzzled when she presented him with these duplicates, but she waved her hands and said, well, things get lost in the mail. Dave Schumpert again served as notary, and she was feeling quite all right until she ran out of Asian and nearly died of shame.
    Her shame was crippling and atrocious. It mattered to her now, as it hadn’t a week earlier, that a thousand happy travelers on the Gunnar Myrdal had witnessed how peculiar she and Alfred were. Everyone on the ship had understood that the landing at historic Gaspé was being delayed and the side trip to scenic Bonaventure Island was being canceled because the palsied man in the awful raincoat had gone where nobody was supposed to go, because his wife had selfishly enjoyed herself at an investment lecture, because she’d taken a drug so bad that no doctor in America could legally prescribe it, because she didn’t believe in God and she didn’t respect the law, because she was horribly, unspeakably different from other people.
    Night after night she lay awake, suffered shame, and pictured the golden caplets. She was ashamed of lusting for these caplets, but she was also convinced that only they could bring relief.
    In early November she took Alfred to the CorporateWoods Medical Complex for his bimonthly neurological checkup. Denise, who’d signed Alfred up for Axon’s Phase II testing of Corecktall, had been asking Enid if he seemed “demented.” Enid referred the question to Dr. Hedgpeth during his private interview with her, and Hedgpeth replied that Alfred’s periodic confusion did suggest early Alzheimer’s or Lewybody dementia—at which point Enid interrupted to ask whether possibly Alfred’s dopamine-boosters were causing his “hallucinations.” Hedgpeth couldn’t deny that this was possible. He said the only sure way to rule out dementia would be to put Alfred in the hospital for a ten-day “drug holiday.”
    Enid, in her shame, didn’t mention to Hedgpeth that she was leery of hospitals now. She didn’t mention that there had been some raging and some thrashing and some cursing in the Canadian hospital, some overturning of Styrofoam water pitchers