The Corrections

this.
    There came scintillant pavilions, luminous reindeer, pendants and necklaces of gathered photons, electro-pointillist Santa Claus faces, a glade of towering glowing candy canes.
    “Lot of work involved here,” Alfred commented.
    “Well, I’m sorry Jonah couldn’t come after all,” Gary said, as if, until now, he had not been sorry.
    The spectacle was nothing more than lights in darkness, but Enid was speechless. So often credulity was asked of you, so seldom could you summon it absolutely, but here at Waindell Park she could. Somebody had set out to delight all comers, and Enid was delighted. And tomorrow Denise and Chip came, tomorrow was The Nutcracker , and on Wednesday they would take the Christ baby from its pocketand pin the walnut cradle to the tree: she had so much to look forward to.

    In the morning, Gary drove over to Hospital City, the closein suburb where St. Jude’s big medical centers were concentrated, and held his breath among the eighty-pound men in wheelchairs and the five-hundred-pound women in tentlike dresses who clogged the aisles of Central Discount Medical Supply. Gary hated his mother for sending him here, but he recognized how lucky he was in comparison to her, how free and advantaged, and so he set his jaw and kept maximum distance from the bodies of these locals who were loading up on syringes and rubber gloves, on butterscotch bedside candies, on absorptive pads in every imaginable size and shape, on jumbo 144–packs of get-well cards and CDs of flute music and videos of visualization exercises and disposable plastic hoses and bags that connected to harder plastic interfaces sewn into living flesh.
    Gary’s problem with illness in aggregate, aside from the fact that it involved large quantities of human bodies and that he didn’t like human bodies in large quantities, was that it seemed to him low-class. Poor people smoked, poor people ate Krispy Kreme doughnuts by the dozen. Poor people were made pregnant by close relatives. Poor people practiced poor hygiene and lived in toxic neighborhoods. Poor people with their ailments constituted a subspecies of humanity that thankfully remained invisible to Gary except in hospitals and in places like Central Discount Medical. They were a dumber, sadder, fatter, more resignedly suffering breed. A Diseased underclass that he really, really liked to keep away from.
    However, he’d arrived in St. Jude feeling guilty about several circumstances that he’d concealed from Enid, and he’d vowed to be a good son for three days, and so in spite of his embarrassment he pushed through the crowds of thelame and halt, entered Central Discount Medical’s vast furniture showroom, and looked for a stool for his father to sit on while he showered.
    A full-symphonic version of the most tedious Christmas song ever written, “Little Drummer Boy,” dripped from hidden speakers in the showroom. The morning outside the showroom’s plate-glass windows was brilliant, windy, cold. A sheet of newsprint wrapped itself around a parking meter with erotic-looking desperation. Awnings creaked and automotive mud flaps shivered.
    The wide array of medical stools and the variety of afflictions to which they attested might have upset Gary had he not been able to make aesthetic judgments.
    He wondered, for example, why beige. Medical plastic was usually beige; at best, a sickly gray. Why not red? Why not black? Why not teal?
    Maybe the beige plastic was intended to ensure that the furniture be used for medical purposes only. Maybe the manufacturer was afraid that, if the chairs were too handsome, people would be tempted to buy them for nonmedical purposes.
    There was a problem to avoid, all right: too many people wanting to buy your product!
    Gary shook his head. The idiocy of these manufacturers.
    He picked out a sturdy, low aluminum stool with a wide beige seat. He selected a heavy-duty (beige!) gripping bar for the shower. Marveling at the gouge-level pricing, he took these items to the checkout counter, where a friendly midwestern girl, possibly evangelical (she had a brocade sweater and feather-cut bangs), showed the bar codes to a laser beam and remarked to Gary, in a downstate drawl, that these aluminum chairs were really a super product. “So lahtweight, practically indestructible,” she said. “Is it for your mom or your dad?”
    Gary resented invasions of his privacy and refused the girl the satisfaction of an answer. He did, however, nod.
    “Our