The Corrections

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.

OLD UROLOGISTS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST PETER OUT.