Читаем The Corrections полностью

And the man so keen to retire that he couldn’t wait those last seven weeks: what had he done with his retirement? He’d sat in his blue chair.

Gary knew nothing of Axon, but Orfic Midland was the sort of conglomerate whose holdings and management structure he was paid to stay abreast of. He happened to know that the Wroth brothers had sold their controlling stake to cover losses in a Canadian gold-mining venture. Orfic Midland had joined the ranks of the indistinguishable bland megafirms whose headquarters dotted the American exurbs; its executives had been replaced like the cells of a living organism or like the letters in a game of Substitution in which SHIT turned to SHOT and SOOT and FOOT and FOOD, so that, by the time Gary had okayed the latest bulk purchase of OrficM for CenTrust’s portfolio, no blamable human trace remained of the company that had shut down St. Jude’s third largest employer and eliminated train service to much of rural Kansas. Orfic Midland was out of the transportation business altogether now. What survived of the Midpac’s trunk lines had been sold off to enable the company to concentrate on prison-building, prison management, gourmet coffee, and financial services; a new 144-strand fiber-optic cable system lay buried in the railroad’s old right-of-way.

This was the company to which Alfred felt loyal?

The more Gary thought about it, the angrier he got. He sat by himself in his study, unable to stem his rising agitation or to slow the steam-locomotive pace at which his breaths were coming. He was blind to the pretty pumpkin-yellow sunset unfolding in the tulip trees beyond the commuter tracks. He saw nothing but the principles at stake.

He might have sat there obsessing indefinitely, marshaling evidence against his father, had he not heard a rustling outside the study door. He jumped to his feet and pulled the door open.

Caleb was cross-legged on the floor, studying his catalogue. “Can I talk to you now?”

“Were you sitting out here listening to me?”

“No,” Caleb said. “You said we could talk when you were done. I had a question. I was wondering what room I could put under surveillance.”

Even upside down Gary could see that the prices for the equipment in Caleb’s catalogue—items with brushed-aluminum cases, color LCD screens—were three-and four-figure.

“It’s my new hobby,” Caleb said. “I want to put a room under surveillance. Mom says I can do the kitchen if it’s OK with you.”

“You want to put the kitchen under surveillance as a hobby?”

“Yeah!”

Gary shook his head. He’d had many hobbies when he was a boy, and for a long time it had pained him that his own boys seemed to have none at all. Eventually Caleb had figured out that if he used the word “hobby,” Gary would green-light expenditures he otherwise might have forbidden Caroline to make. Thus Caleb’s hobby had been photography until Caroline had bought him an autofocus camera, an SLR with a better zoom telephoto lens than Gary’s own, and a digital point-and-shoot camera. His hobby had been computers until Caroline had bought him a palmtop and a notebook. But now Caleb was nearly twelve, and Gary had been around the block one too many times. His guard was up regarding hobbies. He’d extracted from Caroline a promise not to buy Caleb more equipment of any kind without consulting with him first.

“Surveillance is not a hobby,” he said.

“Dad, yes it is! Mom was the one who suggested it. She said I could start with the kitchen.”

It seemed to Gary another Warning Sign of depression that his thought was: The liquor cabinet is in the kitchen.

“Better let me talk about this with Mom, all right?”

“But the store’s only open till six,” Caleb said.

“You can wait a few days. Don’t tell me you can’t.”

“But I’ve been waiting all afternoon. You said you’d talk to me, and now it’s almost night.”

That it was almost night gave Gary clear title to a drink. The liquor cabinet was in the kitchen. He took a step in its direction. “What equipment exactly are we talking about?”

“Just a camera and a microphone and servo controls.” Caleb thrust the catalogue at Gary. “See, I don’t even need the expensive kind. This one’s just six fifty. Mom said it was OK.”

Time and again Gary had the feeling that there was something disagreeable that his family wanted to forget, something only he insisted on remembering; something requiring only his nod, his go-ahead, to be forgotten. This feeling, too, was a Warning Sign.

“Caleb,” he said, “this sounds like something you’re going to get bored with very soon. It sounds expensive and like you won’t stay interested.”

“No! No!” Caleb said, anguished. “I’m totally interested. Dad, it’s a hobby.”

“You’ve gotten bored, though, pretty quickly with some of the other things we’ve gotten you. Things you also said you were ‘very interested in’ at the time.”

“This is different,” Caleb pleaded. “This time I’m really, truly interested.”

Clearly the boy was prepared to spend any amount of devalued verbal currency to buy his father’s acquiescence.