The Corrections

Gary said. “Doyou see the pattern? That things look one way before you buy them and another way afterward? Your feelings change after you buy things. Do you see that?”
    Caleb opened his mouth, but before he could utter another plea or complaint, a craftiness flickered in his face.
    “I guess,” he said with seeming humility. “I guess I see that.”
    “Well, do you think it’s going to happen with this new equipment?” Gary said.
    Caleb gave every appearance of giving the question serious thought. “I think this is different,” he said finally.
    “Well, OK,” Gary said. “But I want you to remember we had this conversation. I don’t want to see this become just another expensive toy you play with for a week or two and then neglect. You’re going to be a teenager pretty soon, and I want to start seeing a little longer attention span—”
    “Gary, that isn’t fair!” Caroline said hotly. She was hobbling from the doorway of the master bedroom, one shoulder hunched and her hand behind her back, applying pressure to the soothing gelpack.
    “Hello, Caroline. Didn’t realize you were listening.”
    “Caleb is not neglecting things.”
    “Right, I’m not,” Caleb said.
    “What you don’t understand,” Caroline told Gary, “is that everything’s getting used in this new hobby. That’s what’s so brilliant about it. He’s figured out a way to use all that equipment together in one—”
    “Good, well, I’m glad to hear it.”
    “He does something creative and you make him feel guilty .”
    Once, when Gary had wondered aloud if giving Caleb so many gadgets might be stunting his imagination, Caroline had all but accused him of slandering his son. Among her favorite parenting books was The Technological Imagination: What Today’s Children Have to Teach Their Parents , in whichNancy Claymore, Ph.D., contrasting the “tired paradigm” of Gifted Child as Socially Isolated Genius with the “wired paradigm” of Gifted Child as Creatively Connected Consumer, argued that electronic toys would soon be so cheap and widespread that a child’s imagination would no longer be exercised in crayon drawings and made-up stories but in the synthesis and exploitation of existing technologies—an idea that Gary found both persuasive and depressing. When he was a boy not much younger than Caleb, his hobby had been building models with Popsicle sticks.
    “Does this mean we can go to the store now?” Caleb said.
    “No, Caleb, not tonight, it’s almost six,” Caroline said.
    Caleb stamped his foot. “This always happens! I wait and wait, and then it gets too late.”
    “We’ll rent a movie,” Caroline said. “We’ll get whatever movie you want.”
    “I don’t want a movie. I want to do surveillance.”
    “It’s not going to happen,” Gary said. “So start dealing with it.”
    Caleb went to his room and slammed the door. Gary followed and flung it open. “That’s enough now,” he said. “We don’t slam doors in this house.”
    “You slam doors!”
    “I don’t want to hear another word from you.”
    “You slam doors!”
    “Do you want to spend the whole week in your room?”
    Caleb replied by crossing his eyes and sucking his lips into his mouth: not another word.
    Gary let his gaze drift into corners of the boy’s room that he ordinarily took care not to look at. Neglected in piles, like the loot in a thief’s apartment, was new photographic and computer and video equipment with an aggregate retail value possibly exceeding the annual salary of Gary’s secretary at CenTrust. Such a riot of luxury in the lair of an eleven-year-old!Various chemicals that molecular floodgates had been holding back all afternoon burst loose and flooded Gary’s neural pathways. A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus: a “sense” that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn’t save you.
    The light in the windows was failing rapidly.
    “You’re really going to use all this equipment?” he said with a tightness in his chest.
    Caleb, his lips still involuted, gave a shrug.
    “Nobody should be slamming doors,” Gary said. “Me included. All right?”
    “Yeah, Dad. Whatever.”
    Emerging from Caleb’s room into the shadowed hallway, he nearly collided with