The Corrections

what’s wrong.”
    He shook his head. “No! You have to get me out of here!”
    “Dad, I’m sorry,” Chip said, “but I can’t take you home. You have to stay here for another week at least.”
    Oh, how his son tried his patience! By now Chip should have understood what he was asking for without being told again.
    “I’m saying put an end to it!” He banged on the arms of his captivating chair. “You have to help me put an end to it!”
    He looked at the window through which he was ready, at last, to throw himself. Or give him a gun, give him an ax, give him anything, but get him out of here. He had to make Chip understand this.
    Chip covered his shaking hands with his own.
    “I’ll stay with you, Dad,” he said. “But I can’t do that for you. I can’t put an end to it like that. I’m sorry.”
    Like a wife who had died or a house that had burned, theclarity to think and the power to act were still vivid in his memory. Through a window that gave onto the next world, he could still see the clarity and see the power, just out of reach, beyond the window’s thermal panes. He could see the desired outcomes, the drowning at sea, the shotgun blast, the plunge from a height, so near to him still that he refused to believe he’d lost the opportunity to avail himself of their relief.
    He wept at the injustice of his sentence. “For God’s sake, Chip,” he said loudly, because he sensed that this might be his last chance to liberate himself before he lost all contact with that clarity and power and it was therefore crucial that Chip understand exactly what he wanted. “I’m asking for your help! You’ve got to get me out of this! You have to put an end to it!”
    Even red-eyed, even tear-streaked, Chip’s face was full of power and clarity. Here was a son whom he could trust to understand him as he understood himself; and so Chip’s answer, when it came, was absolute. Chip’s answer told him that this was where the story ended. It ended with Chip shaking his head, it ended with him saying: “I can’t, Dad. I can’t.”

The correction , when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.
    It seemed to Enid that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they’d been in her youth. She had memories of the 1930s, she’d seen firsthand what could happen to a country when the world economy took its gloves off; she’d helped her mother pass out leftovers to homeless men in the alley behind their roominghouse. But disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States. Safety features had been put in place, like the squares of rubber that every modern playground was paved with, to soften impacts.
    Nevertheless, the markets did collapse, and Enid, who hadn’t dreamed that she would ever be glad that Alfred had locked their assets up in annuities and T-bills, weathered the downturn with less anxiety than her high-flying friends. Orfic Midland did, as threatened, terminate her traditional health insurance and force her into an HMO, but her old neighbor Dean Driblett, with the stroke of a pen, bless his heart, upgraded her and Alfred to DeeDeeCare Choice Plus, which allowed her to keep her favorite doctors. She still had major non-reimbursable monthly nursing-home expenses,but by scrimping she was able to pay the bills with Alfred’s pension and Railroad Retirement benefits, and meanwhile her house, which she owned outright, continued to appreciate. The simple truth was that, although she wasn’t rich, she also wasn’t poor. Somehow this truth had eluded her during the years of her anxiety and uncertainty about Alfred, but as soon as he was out of the house and she’d caught up on her sleep, she saw it clearly.
    She saw everything more clearly now, her children in particular. When Gary returned to St. Jude with Jonah a few months after the catastrophic Christmas, she had nothing but fun with them. Gary still wanted her to sell the house, but he could no longer argue that Alfred was going to fall down the stairs and kill himself, and by then Chip had done many of the jobs (wicker-painting, waterproofing, gutter-cleaning, crack-patching) which, as long as they’d been neglected, had been Gary’s other good argument for selling the