The Corrections

Tiffany said: “Duh! It’s a StairMaster! Your legs are supposed to get tired.”

Cheryl looked out a window and asked, with withering undergraduate disdain: “Excuse me, why is there a tank in the middle of the runway?”

A minute later the lights went out and the phones went dead.

DOWN IN THE BASEMENT, at the eastern end of the Ping-Pong table, Alfred was unpacking a Maker’s Mark whiskey carton filled with Christmas-tree lights. He already had prescription drugs and an enema kit on the table. He had a sugar cookie freshly baked by Enid in a shape suggestive of a terrier but meant to be a reindeer. He had a Log Cabin syrup carton containing the large colored lights that he’d formerly hung on the outdoor yews. He had a pump-action shotgun in a zippered canvas case, and a box of twenty-gauge shells. He had rare clarity and the will to use it while it lasted.

A shadowy light of late afternoon was captive in the window wells. The furnace was cycling on often, the house leaking heat. Alfred’s red sweater hung on him in skewed folds and bulges, as if he were a log or a chair. His gray wool slacks were afflicted with stains that he had no choice but to tolerate, because the only other option was to take leave of his senses, and he wasn’t quite ready to do that.

Uppermost in the Maker’s Mark carton was a very long string of white Christmas lights coiled bulkily around a wand of cardboard. The string stank of mildew from the storeroom beneath the porch, and when he put the plug into an outlet he could see right away that all was not well. Most of the lights were burning brightly, but near the center of the spool was a patch of unlit bulbs—a substantia nigra deep inside the tangle. He unwound the spool with veering hands, paying the string out on the Ping-Pong table. At the very end of it was an unsightly stretch of dead bulbs.

He understood what modernity expected of him now. Modernity expected him to drive to a big discount store and replace the damaged string. But the discount stores were mobbed at this time of year; he’d be in line for twenty minutes. He didn’t mind waiting, but Enid wouldn’t let him drive the car now, and Enid did mind waiting. She was upstairs flogging herself through the home stretch of Christmas prep.

Much better, Alfred thought, to stay out of sight in the basement, to work with what he had. It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally: to willfully designate as trash an object that you knew wasn’t trash.

Modernity expected this designation and Alfred resisted it.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to fix the lights. He didn’t understand how a stretch of fifteen bulbs could go dead. He examined the transition from light to darkness and saw no change in the wiring pattern between the last burning bulb and the first dead one. He couldn’t follow the three constituent wires through all their twists and braidings. The circuit was semiparallel in some complex way he didn’t see the point of.

In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season’s rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn’t work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn’t affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement. . .

Alfred’s hands were rotating on his wrists like the twin heads of an eggbeater. As well as he could, he advanced his fingers along the string, squeezing and twisting the wires as he went—and the dark stretch reignited! The string was complete!

What had he done?

He smoothed out the string on the Ping-Pong table. Almost immediately, the faulty segment went dark again. He tried to revive it by squeezing it and patting it, but this time he had no luck.

(You fitted the barrel of the shotgun into your mouth and you reached for the switch.)