The Corrections

Night after night she lay awake, suffered shame, and pictured the golden caplets. She was ashamed of lusting for these caplets, but she was also convinced that only they could bring relief.

In early November she took Alfred to the Corporate Woods Medical Complex for his bimonthly neurological checkup. Denise, who’d signed Alfred up for Axon’s Phase II testing of Corecktall, had been asking Enid if he seemed “demented.” Enid referred the question to Dr. Hedgpeth during his private interview with her, and Hedgpeth replied that Alfred’s periodic confusion did suggest early Alzheimer’s or Lewybody dementia—at which point Enid interrupted to ask whether possibly Alfred’s dopamine-boosters were causing his “hallucinations.” Hedgpeth couldn’t deny that this was possible. He said the only sure way to rule out dementia would be to put Alfred in the hospital for a ten-day “drug holiday.”

Enid, in her shame, didn’t mention to Hedgpeth that she was leery of hospitals now. She didn’t mention that there had been some raging and some thrashing and some cursing in the Canadian hospital, some overturning of Styrofoam water pitchers and of wheeled IV-drip stands, until Alfred was sedated. She didn’t mention that Alfred had requested that she shoot him before she put him in a place like that again.

Nor, when Hedgpeth asked how she was holding up, did she mention her little Aslan problem. Fearing that Hedgpeth would recognize her as a weak-willed, wild-eyed substance-craver, she didn’t even ask him for an alternative “sleep aid.” However, she did mention that she wasn’t sleeping well. She stressed this, in fact: not sleeping well at all. But Hedgpeth merely suggested that she try a different bed. He suggested Tylenol PM.

It seemed unfair to Enid, as she lay in the dark beside her snoring husband, that a drug legally purchasable in so many other countries should be unavailable to her in America. It seemed unfair that many of her friends had “sleep aids” of the sort that Hedgpeth had failed to offer her. How cruelly scrupulous Hedgpeth was! She could have gone to a different doctor, of course, and asked for a “sleep aid,” but this other doctor would surely wonder why her own doctors weren’t giving her the drugs.

Such was her situation when Bea and Chuck Meisner departed for six weeks of winter family fun in Austria. The day before the Meisners left, Enid had lunch with Bea at Deepmire and asked her to do her a favor in Vienna. She pressed into Bea’s hands a slip of paper on which she’d copied information from an empty SampLpak—ASLAN ‘Cruiser’ (rhadamanthine citrate 88%, 3-methyl-rhadamanthine chloride 12%)—with the annotation Temporarily unavailable in U. S., I need 6 months supply.

“Now, don’t bother if it’s any trouble,” she told Bea, “but if Klaus could write you a prescription, it would be so much easier than my doctor trying to get something from overseas, so, anyway, I hope you have a wonderful time in my favorite country!”

Enid couldn’t have asked such a shameful favor of anyone but Bea. Even Bea she dared to ask only because (a) Bea was a tiny bit dumb, and (b) Bea’s husband had once upon a time made his own shameful insider purchase of Erie Belt stock, and (c) Enid felt that Chuck had never properly thanked or compensated Alfred for that inside information.

No sooner had the Meisners flown away, however, than Enid’s shame mysteriously abated. As if an evil spell had worn off, she began to sleep better and think less about the drug. She brought her powers of selective forgetfulness to bear on the favor she’d asked of Bea. She began to feel like herself again, which was to say: optimistic.

She bought two tickets for a flight to Philadelphia on January 15. She told her friends that the Axon Corporation was testing an exciting new brain therapy called Corecktall and that Alfred, because he’d sold his patent to Axon, was eligible for the tests. She said that Denise was being a doll and offering to let her and Alfred stay in Philadelphia for as long as the testing lasted. She said that, no, Corecktall was not a laxative, it was a revolutionary new treatment for Parkinson’s disease. She said that, yes, the name was confusing, but it was not a laxative.

“Tell the people at Axon,” she told Denise, “that Dad has some mild symptoms of hallucination which his doctor says are probably drug-related. Then, see, if Corecktall helps him, we can take him off the medication, and the hallucinations will probably stop.”