The Corrections

According to Ted Roth, holes in the ozone layer started at the poles. It was during the long Arctic night that the earth’s shell first weakened, but once the shell was punctured the damage spread outward, encroaching even on the sunny tropics—even the equator—and soon no spot on the globe was safe.

Meanwhile an observatory in the far nether regions had sent out a feeble signal, an ambiguous message.

Alfred received the signal and wondered what to do about it. He felt shy of bathrooms now, but he couldn’t very well drop his trousers out here in the open. The three men might return at any moment.

Beyond a protective railing to his right was a collection of thickly painted planes and cylinders, two navigational spheres, an inverted cone. Since he was not afraid of heights, nothing prevented him from ignoring the strongly worded warning in four languages, squeezing past the railing, and stepping out onto the sandpapery metal surface to seek, as it were, a tree to pee behind. He was high above everything and invisible.

But too late.

Both legs of his trousers were very soaked, the left leg nearly to his ankle. Warm-cold wetness all over everything.

And where a town should have appeared on the coast, the land instead was dropping away. Gray waves marched across strange waters, and the tremor of the engines became more labored, less easy to ignore. The ship either had not reached the Gaspé Peninsula or had already passed it. The data he’d transmitted to the men in parkas was faulty. He was lost.

And from the deck immediately below him came a windborne giggle. It came again, a trilling squeal, a northern lark.

He edged away from the spheres and cylinders and leaned out past the outer railing. A few yards farther astern was a small “Nordic” sunbathing area, sequestered behind cedar fencing, and a man standing where no passenger was permitted to stand could see right over the fencing and behold Signe Söderblad, her chill-stippled arms and thighs and belly, the plump twin cloudberries into which a suddenly gray winter sky had drawn her nipples, the quaking ginger fur between her legs.

The day world floated on the night world and the night world tried to swamp the day world and he worked and worked to keep the day world watertight. But there had been a grievous breach.

Came another cloud then, larger, denser, that turned the gulf below it to a greenish black. Ship and shadow in collision.

And shame and despair—

Or was it the wind catching the sail of his raincoat?

Or was it the ship’s pitching?

Or the tremor in his legs?

Or the corresponding tremor of the engines?

Or a fainting spell?

Or vertigo’s standing invitation?

Or the relative warmth of open water’s invitation to someone soaked and freezing in the wind?

Or was he leaning, deliberately, to glimpse again the gingery mons?

“How fitting it is,” said internationally noted investment counselor Jim Crolius, “to be talking money on a Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise. Folks, it’s a beautiful sunny morning, isn’t it?”

Crolius was speaking from a lectern beside an easel on which the title of his talk—“Surviving the Corrections”—was written in purple ink. His question brought murmurs of assent from the first few rows in front of him, the people who’d arrived early for good seats. Someone up there even said: “Yes, Jim!”

Enid felt ever so much better this morning, but a few atmospheric disturbances still lingered in her head, for example a squall now consisting of (a) resentment of the women who’d come to the Longstocking Ballroom absurdly early, as if the potential lucrativeness of Jim Crolius’s advice might somehow decline with one’s distance from him, and (b) particular resentment of the pushy New York kind of woman who elbowed in ahead of everyone to establish a first-name relationship with a lecturer (she was sure that Jim Crolius could see right through their presumption and hollow flattery, but he might be too polite to ignore them and focus on less pushy and more deserving midwestern women such as Enid), and (c) intense irritation with Alfred for having stopped in a bathroom twice on the way to breakfast, which had prevented her from leaving the Kierkegaard Room early and securing a good front-row seat herself.

Almost as soon as the squall had gathered it disappeared, however, and the sun shone strongly again.