The Corrections

He wanted to rip the camera off the ceiling, and, failing that, he wanted to go upstairs and explain to Caleb the dubious morality of spying, and, failing that, he at least wanted to know how long the camera had been in place; but since he had something to hide now, any action he took against the camera, any objection he made to its presence in his kitchen, was bound to strike Caleb as self-serving.

He dropped the bloody, dusty guest towel in the bucket and approached the back door. The camera reared up in its bracket to keep him centered in its field. He stood directly below it and looked into its eye. He shook his head and mouthed the words No, Caleb. Naturally, the camera made no response. Gary realized, now, that the room was probably miked for sound as well. He could speak to Caleb directly, but he was afraid that if he looked up into Caleb’s proxy eye and heard his own voice and let it be heard in Caleb’s room, the result would be an intolerably strong upsurge in the reality of what was happening. He therefore shook his head again and made a sweeping motion with his left hand, a film director’s Cut! Then he took the bucket from the sink and swabbed the front porch.

Because he was drunk, the problem of the camera and Caleb’s witnessing of his injury and his furtive involvement with the liquor cabinet didn’t stay in Gary’s head as an ensemble of conscious thoughts and anxieties but turned in on itself and became a kind of physical presence inside him, a hard tumorous mass descending through his stomach and coming to rest in his lower gut. The problem wasn’t going anywhere, of course. But, for the moment, it was impervious to thought.

“Dad?” came Jonah’s voice through an upstairs window. “I’m ready to play chess now.”

By the time Gary went inside, having left the hedge half-clipped and the ladder in an ivy bed, his blood had soaked through three layers of toweling and bloomed on the surface as a pinkish spot of plasma filtered of its corpuscles. He was afraid of meeting somebody in the hallway, Caleb or Caroline certainly, but especially Aaron, because Aaron had asked him if he was feeling all right, and Aaron had not been able to lie to him, and these small demonstrations of Aaron’s love were in a way the scariest part of the whole evening.

“Why is there a towel on your hand?” Jonah asked as he removed half of Gary’s forces from the chessboard.

“I cut myself, Jonah. I’m keeping some ice on the cut.”

“You smell like al-co-hol.” Jonah’s voice was lilting.

“Alcohol is a powerful disinfectant,” Gary said.

Jonah moved a pawn to K4. “I’m talking about the al-co-hol you drank, though.”