The Corrections: A Novel (40 page)

He knelt, catching his breath, in his pajama top and adult diaper.

Enid continued to sleep. Something distinctly fairy-tale-like in her attitude tonight.

“Phlblaaatth!” the turd taunted. It had reappeared on the wall above Alfred’s bed and hung precariously, as if flung there, beside a framed etching of the Oslo waterfront.

“God damn you!” Alfred said. “You belong in jail!”

The turd wheezed with laughter as it slid very slowly down the wall, its viscous pseudopods threatening to drip on the sheets below. “Seems to me,” it said, “you anal retentive type personalities want
everything
in jail. Like, little kids, bad news, man, they pull your tchotchkes off your shelves, they drop food on the carpet, they cry in theaters, they miss the pot. Put ’em in the slammer! And
Polynesians
, man, they track sand in the house, get fish juice on the furniture, and all those pubescent chickies with their honkers exposed? Jail ‘em! And how about ten to twenty, while we’re at it, for every horny little teenager, I mean talk about insolence, talk about no restraint. And Negroes (sore topic, Fred?), I’m hearing rambunctious shouting and interesting grammar, I’m smelling liquor of the malt variety and sweat that’s very rich and scalpy, and all that dancing and whoopee-making and singers that coo like body parts wetted with saliva and special jellies: what’s a jail
for
if not to toss a Negro in it? And your Caribbeans with their spliffs and their potbelly toddlers and
their like daily barbecues and ratborne hanta viruses and sugary drinks with pig blood at the bottom? Slam the cell door, eat the key. And the Chinese, man, those creepy-ass weird-name vegetables like homegrown dildos somebody forgot to wash after using, one-dollah, one-dollah, and those slimy carps and skinned-alive songbirds, and come on, like, puppy-dog soup and pooty-tat dumplings and female infants are national delicacies, and
pork bung
, by which we’re referring here to the
anus
of a
swine
, presumably a sort of chewy and bristly type item, pork bung’s a thing Chinks pay money for to
eat
? What say we just nuke all billion point two of ’em, hey? Clean that part of the world
up
already. And let’s not forget about women generally, nothing but a trail of Kleenexes and Tampaxes everywhere they go. And your fairies with their doctor’s-office lubricants, and your Mediterraneans with their whiskers and their garlic, and your French with their garter belts and raunchy cheeses, and your blue-collar ball-scratchers with their hot rods and beer belches, and your Jews with their circumcised putzes and gefilte fish like pickled turds, and your Wasps with their Cigarette boats and runny-assed polo horses and go-to-hell cigars? Hey, funny thing, Fred, the only people that don’t belong in your jail are upper-middle-class northern European men. And you’re on
my
case for wanting things
my
way?”

“What will it take to make you leave this room?” Alfred said.

“Loosen up the old sphincter, fella. Let it fly.”

“I will never!”

“In that case I might pay a visit to your shaving kit. Have me a little episode o’ diarrhea on your toothbrush. Drop a couple nice globbets in your shave cream and tomorrow a.m. you can lather up a rich brown foam—”

“Enid,” Alfred said in a strained voice, not taking his eyes off the crafty turd, “I am having difficulties. I would appreciate your assistance.”

His voice ought to have awakened her, but her sleep was Snow White–like in its depth.

“Enid
dahling,
” the turd mocked in a David Niven accent, “I should
most
appreciate some assistance at your earliest
possible
convenience.”

Unconfirmed reports from nerves in the small of Alfred’s back and behind his knees indicated that additional turd units were in the vicinity. Turdish rebels snuffling stealthily about, spending themselves in trails of fetor.

“Food and pussy, fella,” said the leader of the turds, now barely clinging to the wall by one pseudopod of fecal mousse, “is what it all comes down to. Everything else, and I say this in all modesty, is pure shit.”

Then the pseudopod ruptured and the leader of the turds —leaving behind on the wall a small clump of putrescence—plunged with a cry of glee onto a bed that
belonged to Nordic
Pleasurelines
and was due to be made in a few hours by a lovely young Finnish woman. Imagining this clean, pleasant housekeeper finding lumps of personal excrement spattered on the bedspread was almost more than Alfred could bear.

His peripheral vision was alive with writhing stool now. He had to hold things together, hold things together. Suspecting that a leak in the toilet might be the source of his trouble, he made his way on hands and knees into the bathroom and kicked the door shut behind him. Rotated with relative ease on the smooth tiles. Braced his back against the door and pushed his feet against the sink opposite him. He laughed for a moment at the absurdity of his situation. Here he was, an American executive sitting in diapers on the floor of a floating bathroom under siege by a squadron of feces. A person got the strangest notions late at night.

The light was better in the bathroom. There was a science of cleanliness, a science of looks, a science even of excretion as evidenced by the outsized Swiss porcelain eggcup of a toilet, a regally pedestaled thing with finely knurled levers of
control. In these more congenial surroundings Alfred was able to collect himself to the point of understanding that the turdish rebels were figments, that to some extent he had been dreaming, and that the source of his anxiety was simply a drainage problem.

Unfortunately, operations were shut down for the night. There was no way to have a look personally at the rupture, nor any way to put a plumber’s snake or video cam down there. Highly unlikely as well that a contractor could get a rig out to the site under conditions like these. Alfred wasn’t even sure he could pinpoint his location on a map himself.

There was nothing for it but to wait until morning. Absent a full solution, two half-solutions were better than no solution at all. You tackled the problem with whatever you had in hand.

Couple of extra diapers: that ought to hold for a few hours. And here were the diapers, right by the toilet in a bag.

It was nearly four o’clock. There would be hell to pay if the district manager wasn’t at his desk by seven. Alfred couldn’t recollect the fellow’s exact name, not that it mattered. Just call the office and whoever picked up the phone.

It was characteristic of the modern world, though, wasn’t it, how slippery they made the goddamned tape on the diapers.

“Would you look at that,” he said, hoping to pass off as philosophical amusement his rage with a treacherous modernity. The adhesive strips might as well have been covered with Teflon. Between his dry skin and his shakes, peeling the backing off a strip was like picking up a marble with two peacock feathers.

“Well, for goodness’ sake.”

He persisted in the attempt for five minutes and another five minutes. He simply couldn’t get the backing off.

“Well, for goodness’ sake.”

Grinning at his own incapacity. Grinning in frustration and the overwhelming sense of being watched.

“Well, for goodness’ sake,” he said once more. This phrase often proved useful in dissipating the shame of small failures.

How changeful a room was in the night! By the time Alfred had given up on the adhesive strips and simply yanked a third diaper up his thigh as far as it would go, which regrettably wasn’t far, he was no longer in the same bathroom. The light had a new clinical intensity; he felt the heavy hand of a more extremely late hour.

“Enid!” he called. “Can you help me?”

With fifty years of experience as an engineer he could see at a glance that the emergency contractor had botched the job. One of the diapers was twisted nearly inside out and a second had a mildly spastic leg sticking through two of its plies, leaving most of its absorptive capacity unrealized in a folded mass, its adhesive stickers adhering to nothing. Alfred shook his head. He couldn’t blame the contractor. The fault was his own. Never should have undertaken a job like this under conditions like these. Poor judgment on his part. Trying to do damage control, blundering around in the dark, often created more problems than it solved.

“Yes, now we are in a fine mess,” he said with a bitter smile.

And could this be liquid on the floor. Oh my Lord, there appeared to be some liquid on the floor.

Also liquid running in the
Gunnar Myrdal
’s myriad pipes.

“Enid, please, for God’s sake. I am asking you for help.”

No answer from the district office. Some kind of vacation everybody was on. Something about the color of a fall.

Liquid on the floor! Liquid on the floor!

So all right, though, they paid him to take responsibility. They paid him to make the hard calls.

He took a deep, bolstering breath.

In a crisis like this the first order of business was obviously to clear a path for the runoff. Forget about track repair, first you had to have a gradient or you risked a really major washout.

He noted grimly that he had nothing like a surveyor’s transit, not even a simple plumb line. He’d have to eyeball it.

How the hell had he got stranded out here, anyway? Probably not even five in the morning yet.

“Remind me to call the district manager at seven,” he said.

Somewhere, of course, a dispatcher had to be on duty. But then the problem was to find a telephone, and here a curious reluctance to raise his eyes above the level of the toilet made itself felt. Conditions in these parts were impossible. It could be midmorning by the time he found a telephone. And by that point.

“Uh! Such a lot of work,” he said.

There appeared to be a slight depression in the shower stall. Yes, in fact, a preexisting culvert, maybe some old DOT road-building project that never got off the ground, maybe the Army Corps was involved somehow. One of those midnight serendipities: a real culvert. Still, he was looking at a hell of an engineering problem to relocate the operation to take advantage of the culvert.

“Not much choice, though, I’m afraid.”

Might as well get at it. He wasn’t getting any less tired. Think of the Dutch with their Delta Project. Forty years of battling the sea. Put things in perspective a little—one bad night. He’d endured worse.

Try to build some redundancy into the fix, that was the plan. No way he’d trust one little culvert to handle all the runoff. There could be a backup farther down the line.

“And then we’re in trouble,” he said. “Then we are in real trouble.”

Could be a hell of a lot worse, in fact. They were lucky an engineer was right on site when the water broke through. Imagine if he hadn’t been here, what a mess.

“Could have been a real disaster.”

First order of business was to slap some sort of temporary patch on the leak, then tackle the logistical nightmare of rerouting the whole operation over the culvert, and then hope to hold things together until the sun came up.

“And see what we got.”

In the faulty light he saw the liquid running one way across the floor and then reversing itself slowly, as if the horizontal had lost its mind.

“Enid!” he called with little hope as he commenced the sick-making work of stopping the leakage and getting himself back on track, and the ship sailed on.

Thanks to Aslan®—and to young Dr. Hibbard, an outstanding, high-caliber young man—Enid was having her first solid night’s sleep in many months.

There were a thousand things she
wanted
from life, and since few were available at home with Alfred in St. Jude, she had forcibly channeled all her wanting into the numbered days, the mayfly lifetime, that the luxury cruise would last. For months the cruise had been her mind’s safe parking space, the future that made her present bearable, and after her afternoon in New York had proved deficient in the fun department, she boarded the
Gunnar Myrdal
with her hungers redoubled.

Fun was being had buoyantly on every deck by cliques of seniors enjoying their retirement the way she wished Alfred would enjoy his. Although Nordic Pleasurelines was emphatically not a discount line, this cruise had been booked almost entirely by large groups such as the University of Rhode Island Alumni Association, American Hadassah of Chevy Chase (MD), the 85th Airborne (“Sky Devil”) Division
Reunion, and the Dade County (FL) Duplicate Bridge League, Senior Flight. Widows in excellent health guided one another by the elbow to special mustering places where name tags and information packets were distributed and the preferred token of mutual recognition was the glass-shattering scream. Already seniors intent on savoring every minute of precious cruise time were drinking the frozen cocktail du jour, a Lingonberry Lapp Frappe, from schooners that took two hands to handle safely. Others crowded the rails of lower decks, the ones sheltered from the rain, and scanned Manhattan for a face to wave goodbye to. A combo in the Abba Show Lounge was playing heavy-metal polka.

While Alfred had a final pre-dinner session in the bathroom, his third session inside an hour, Enid sat in the “B” Deck lounge and listened to the slow plant-and-drag of someone’s walker-aided progress across the “A” Deck lounge above her.

Apparently the Duplicate League’s cruise uniform was a T-shirt with the text:
OLD BRIDGE PLAYERS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST LOSE THEIR FINESSE
. Enid felt the joke did not bear heavy repetition.

She saw retirees
running
, actually lifting their feet off the ground, in the direction of the Lingonberry Lapp Frappe.

“Of course,” she murmured, reflecting on how old everyone was, “I suppose who else could afford a cruise like this?”

The seeming dachshund that a man was pulling by a leash turned out to be a tank of oxygen mounted on roller-skate wheels and dressed in a pet sweater.

A very fat man walked by in a T-shirt that said
TITANIC: THE BODY
.

You’d spent a lifetime being waited for impatiently and now your impatient husband’s minimum stay in a bathroom was fifteen minutes.