The Corrections

was leaning over Anthony and letting him pull on the taupe lapels of her Italian suit and suck on her blouse while, behind his back, she turned the pages of a script that Chip could only pray was not his own. The line-caught Norwegian salmon was soaking through its wrapping, his body heat melting the fats that had given the filet a degree of rigidity. He wanted to escape the Nightmare, but he wasn’t prepared to discuss “The Academy Purple” under the current circumstances. He veered down a frosty aisle where the gelati came in plainwhite cartons with small black lettering. A man in a suit was crouching beside a little girl with hair like copper in sunshine. The girl was Eden’s daughter, April. The man was Eden’s husband, Doug O’Brien.
    “Chip Lambert, what’s happening?” Doug said.
    There seemed to be no ways but girly ways for Chip to hold his grocery basket while he shook Doug’s square hand.
    “April’s picking out her treat for after dinner,” Doug said.
    “Three treats,” April said.
    “Her three treats, right.”
    “What’s that one?” April said, pointing.
    “That is a grenadine-nasturtium sorbetto, sugar bunny.”
    “Do I like it?”
    “That I can’t tell you.”
    Doug, who was younger and shorter than Chip, so persistently claimed to be in awe of Chip’s intellect and so consistently tested free of any irony or condescension that Chip had finally accepted that Doug really did admire him. This admiration was more grueling than belittlement.
    “Eden tells me you finished the script,” Doug said, restacking some gelati that April had upset. “Man, I am psyched. This project sounds phenomenal .”
    April was cradling three rimed cartons against her corduroy jumper.
    “What kind did you get?” Chip asked her.
    April shrugged extremely, a beginner’s shrug.
    “Sugar bunny, run those up to Mommy. I’m going to talk to Chip.”
    As April ran back up the aisle Chip wondered what it would be like to father a child, to always be needed instead of always needing.
    “Something I wanted to ask you,” Doug said. “Do you have a second? Say somebody offered you a new personality: would you take it? Say somebody said to you, I will permanently rewire your mental hardware in whatever way you want . Would you pay to have that done?”
    The salmon paper was sweat-bonded to Chip’s skin and tearing open at the bottom. This was not the ideal time to be providing Doug with the intellectual companionship he seemed to crave, but Chip wanted Doug to keep thinking highly of him and encourage Eden to buy his script. He asked why Doug asked.
    “A lot of crazy stuff crosses my desk,” Doug said. “Especially now with all the money coming home from overseas. All the dot-com issues, of course. We’re still trying our very hardest to persuade the average American to happily engineer his own financial ruin. But the biotech is fascinating. I’ve been reading whole prospectuses about genetically altered squash. Apparently people in this country are eating a lot more squash than I was aware of, and squashes are prone to more diseases than you’d infer from their robust exterior. Either that or … Southern Cucumtech is seriously overvalued at thirty-five a share. Whatever. But Chip, this brain thing, man, it caught my eye. Bizarre fact number one is that I’m allowed to talk about it. It’s all public knowledge. Is this bizarre?”
    Chip was trying to keep his eyes focused on Doug in an interested manner, but his eyes were like children, they wanted to skip up and down the aisles. He was ready, basically, to jump out of his skin. “Yeah. Bizarre.”
    “The idea,” Doug said, “is your basic gut cerebral rehab. Leave the shell and roof, replace the walls and plumbing. Design away that useless dining nook. Put a modern circuit breaker in.”
    “Uh huh.”
    “You get to keep your handsome façade,” Doug said. “You still look serious and intellectual, a little Nordic, on the outside. Sober, bookish. But inside you’re more livable. A big family room with an entertainment console. A kitchenthat’s roomier and handier. You’ve got your In-Sink-Erator, your convection oven. An ice-cube dispenser on the refrigerator door.”
    “Do I still recognize myself?”
    “Do you want to? Everybody else still will—at least, the outside of you.”
    The big glowing tally for TODAY’S GROSS RECEIPTS paused for a moment at $444,447.41 and then went higher.
    “My furnishings are my personality,”