The Corrections

picked up his pace as if hurrying toward a desk at which he could begin to revise the script immediately. He came over a rise and saw the blacked-out Lithuanian town of Eisiskès and, farther in the distance, beyond the frontier, some outdoor lights in Poland. Two dray horses, straining their heads over a barbed-wire fence, nickered at him optimistically.
    He spoke out loud: “Make it ridiculous . Make it ridiculous .”
    Two Lithuanian customs officials and two “policemen” manned the tiny border checkpoint. They handed Chip’s passport back to him without the bulky stack of litai that he’d filled it with. For no discernible reason except petty cruelty, they made him sit in an overheated room for several hours while cement mixers and chicken trucks and bicyclists came and went. It was late morning before they let him walk over into Poland.
    A few kilometers down the road, in Sejny, he bought zlotys and, using the zlotys, lunch. The shops were wellstocked, it was Christmastime. The men of the town were old and looked a lot like the Pope.
    Rides in three trucks and a city taxi got him to the Warsaw airport by noon on Wednesday. The improbably apple-cheeked personnel at the LOT Polish Airlines ticket counter were delighted to see him. LOT had added extra holiday flights to its schedule to accommodate the tens of thousands of Polish guest workers returning to their families from the West, and many of the westbound flights were underbooked. All the red-cheeked counter girls wore little hats like drum majorettes. They took cash from Chip, gave him a ticket, and told him Run .
    He ran to the gate and boarded a 767 that then sat on the runway for four hours while a possibly faulty instrument in the cockpit was examined and finally, reluctantly, replaced.
    The flight plan was a great-circle route to the great Polish city of Chicago, nonstop. Chip kept sleeping in order to forget that he owed Denise $20,500, was maxed out on his credit cards, and now had neither a job nor any prospect of finding one.
    The good news in Chicago, after he’d cleared Customs, was that two rental-car companies were still doing business. The bad news, which he learned after standing in line for half an hour, was that people with maxed-out credit cards could not rent cars.
    He went down the list of airlines in the phone book until he found one—Prairie Hopper, never heard of it—that had a seat on a St. Jude flight at seven the next morning.
    By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay down on it to sleep. He didn’t understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines. He semi-dreamed of disembodied eyes and isolated mouths in skimasks. He’d lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he’d lost track of himself.
    How strange, then, that the old man who opened the front door at nine-thirty in St. Jude the next morning seemed to know exactly who he was.
    A holly wreath was on the door. The front walk was edged with snow and evenly spaced broom marks. The midwestern street struck the traveler as a wonderland of wealth and oak trees and conspicuously useless space. The traveler didn’t see how such a place could exist in a world of Lithuanias and Polands. It was a testament to the insulatory effectiveness of political boundaries that power didn’t simply arc across the gap between such divergent economic voltages. The old street with its oak smoke and snowy flat-topped hedges and icicled eaves seemed precarious. It seemed mirage-like. It seemed like an exceptionally vivid memory of something beloved and dead.
    “Well!” Alfred said, his face blazing with joy, as he took Chip’s hand in both of his. “Look who’s here!”
    Enid tried to elbow her way into the picture, speaking Chip’s name, but Alfred wouldn’t let go of his hand. He said it twice more: “Look who’s here! Look who’s here!”
    “Al, let him come in and close the door,” Enid said.
    Chip was balking at the doorway. The world outside was black and white and gray and swept by fresh, clear air; the enchanted interior was dense with objects and smells and colors, humidity, large personalities. He was afraid to enter.
    “Come in, come in,” Enid squeaked, “and shut the door.”
    To protect himself