The Corrections

time for the holiday, and now that the album was complete, he planned to dismantle the darkroom, spend some of his Axon profits, and build a model-railroad setup on the second floor of the garage. It was a hobby that he’d chosen for himself, rather than having it chosen for him, and as he laid his scotchy head on the cold pillow and turned out the light in his old St. Judean bedroom, he was gripped by an ancient excitement at the prospect of running trains through mountains of papier-mâché, across high Popsicle-stick trestles …
    He dreamed ten Christmases in the house. He dreamed of rooms and people, rooms and people. He dreamed that Denise was not his sister and was going to murder him. His only hope was the shotgun in the basement. He was examiningthis shotgun, making sure that it was loaded, when he felt an evil presence behind him in the workshop. He turned around and didn’t recognize Denise. The woman he saw was some other woman whom he had to kill or be killed by. And there was no resistance in the shotgun’s trigger; it dangled, limp and futile. The gun was on Reverse, and by the time he got it on Forward, she was coming to kill him—
    He woke up needing to pee.
    The darkness in his room was relieved only by the glow of the digital clock radio, whose face he didn’t check because he didn’t want to know how early it still was. He could dimly see the loaf of Chip’s old bed by the opposite wall. The silence of the house felt momentary and unpeace-ful. Recently fallen.
    Honoring this silence, Gary eased himself out of bed and crept toward the door; and here the terror struck him.
    He was afraid to open the door.
    He strained to hear what was happening outside it. He thought he could hear vague shiftings and creepings, faraway voices.
    He was afraid to go to the bathroom because he didn’t know what he would find there. He was afraid that if he left his room he would find the wrong person, his mother maybe, or his sister or his father, in his bed when he came back.
    He was convinced that people were moving in the hallway. In his clouded, imperfect wakefulness, he connected the Denise who’d disappeared before he went to bed to the Denise-like phantom who was trying to kill him in his dream.
    The possibility that this phantom killer was even now lurking in the hall seemed only ninety percent fantastical.
    It was safer all around, he thought, to stay in his room and pee into one of the decorative Austrian beer steins on his dresser.
    But what if his tinkling attracted the attention of whoever was creeping around outside his door?
    Moving on tiptoe, he took a beer stein into the closet that he’d shared with Chip ever since Denise was given the smaller bedroom and the boys were put together. He pulled the closet door shut after him, crowded up against the dry-cleaned garments and the bursting Nordstrom bags of miscellany that Enid had taken to storing here, and relieved himself into the beer stein. He lipped a fingertip over the rim so that he could feel if he was going to overflow it. Just when the warmth of rising urine had reached this fingertip, his bladder finally emptied. He lowered the stein to the closet floor, took an envelope from a Nordstrom bag, and covered the mouth of the receptacle.
    Quietly, quietly, then, he left the closet and returned to his bed. As he was swinging his legs off the floor, he heard Denise’s voice. It was so distinct and conversational that she might have been in the room with him. She said, “Gary?”
    He tried not to move, but the bedsprings creaked.
    “Gary? Sorry to bother you. Are you awake?”
    He had little choice now but to get up and open the door. Denise was right outside it, wearing white flannel pajamas and standing in a shaft of light from her own bedroom. “Sorry,” she said. “Dad’s been calling for you.”
    “Gary!” came Alfred’s voice from the bathroom by her room.
    Gary, heart thudding, asked what time it was.
    “I have no idea,” she said. “He woke me up calling Chip’s name. Then he started calling yours. But not mine. I think he’s more comfortable with you.”
    Cigarettes on her breath again.
    “Gary? Gary!” came the call from the bathroom.
    “Fuck this,” Gary said.
    “It could be his medication.”
    “Bullshit.”
    From the bathroom: “Gary!”
    “Yeah, Dad, OK, I’m coming.”
    Enid’s bodiless voice floated up from the bottom of the stairs. “Gary, help your father.”
    “Yeah, Mom. I’m all over it. You