The Corrections

Fortunately, the shadows cast by her accusation of depression, long and dark though they were, did not yet extend to his corner office at CenTrust and to the pleasure he took in managing his managers, analysts, and traders. Gary’s forty hours at the bank had become the only hours he could count on enjoying in a week. He’d even begun to toy with the idea of working a fifty-hour week; but this was easier said than done, because at the end of his eight-hour day there was often literally no work left on his desk, and he was all too aware, besides, that spending long hours at the office to escape unhappiness at home was exactly the trap his father had fallen into; was undoubtedly how Alfred had begun to self-medicate.

When he married Caroline, Gary had silently vowed never to work later than five o’clock and never to bring a briefcase home at night. By signing on with a mid-sized regional bank, he’d chosen one of the least ambitious career paths that a Wharton School M.B.A. could take. At first his intention was simply to avoid his father’s mistakes—to give himself time to enjoy life, cherish his wife, play with his kids—but before long, even as he was proving to be an outstanding portfolio manager, he became more specifically allergic to ambition. Colleagues far less capable than he were moving on to work for mutual funds, to be freelance money managers, or to start their own funds; but they were also working twelve-or fourteen-hour days, and every single one of them had the perspiring manic style of a striver. Gary, cushioned by Caroline’s inheritance, was free to cultivate nonambition and to be, as a boss, the perfect strict and loving father that he could only halfway be at home. He demanded honesty and excellence from his workers. In return he offered patient instruction, absolute loyalty, and the assurance that he would never blame them for his own mistakes. If his large-cap manager, Virginia Lin, recommended upping the percentage of energy stocks in the bank’s boilerplate trust portfolio from six percent to nine percent and Gary (as was his wont) decided to leave the mix alone, and if the energy sector then proceeded to enjoy a couple of banner quarters, he pulled his big ironic I’m-a-jerk grimace and publicly apologized to Lin. Fortunately, for each of his bad decisions he made two or three good ones, and in the history of the universe there had never been a better six years for equities investment than the six years he’d run CenTrust’s Equities Division; only a fool or a crook could have failed. With success guaranteed, Gary could then make a game of being unawed by his boss, Marvin Koster, and by Koster’s boss, Marty Breitenfeld, the chairman of CenTrust. Gary never, ever kowtowed or flattered. Indeed, both Koster and Breitenfeld had begun to defer to him in matters of taste and protocol, Koster all but asking Gary’s permission to enroll his eldest daughter in Abington Friends instead of Friends’ Select, Breitenfeld buttonholing Gary outside the senior-executive pissoir to inquire if he and Caroline were planning to attend the Free Library benefit ball or if Gary had spun off his tickets to a secretary …

3. RELAX—IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD!

Curly Eberle had reappeared in his intracranial desk chair with a plastic model of an electrolyte molecule in each hand. “A remarkable property of ferrocitrate/ferroacetate gels,” he said, “is that under low-level radio stimulation at certain resonant frequencies the molecules may spontaneously polymerize. More remarkably yet, these polymers turn out to be fine conductors of electrical impulses.”

The virtual Eberle looked on with a benign smile as, in the bloody animated moil around him, eager waveforms came squiggling through. As if these waves were the opening strains of a minuet or reel, all the ferrous molecules paired off and arranged themselves in long, twinned lines.

“These transient conductive microtubules,” Eberle said, “make thinkable the previously unthinkable: direct, quasi-real-time digital-chemical interface.”

“But this is good,” Denise whispered to Gary. “This is what Dad’s always wanted.”

“What, to screw himself out of a fortune?”

“To help other people,” Denise said. “To make a difference.”

Gary could have pointed out that, if the old man really felt like helping somebody, he might start with his wife. But Denise had bizarre and unshakable notions of Alfred. There was no point in rising to her bait.

4. THE RICH GET RICHER!

“Yes, an idle corner of the brain may be the Devil’s workshop,” the pitchman said, “but every idle neural pathway gets ignored by the Corecktall process. Wherever there’s action, though, Corecktall is there to make it stronger! To help the rich get richer!”