Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  The alarm clock showed twenty to four. He slipped out of bed and went to the bathroom. When he returned, Renée was kneeling in the center of the bed. He said, “Hi,” and she backed towards the bottom of the bed, dragging the sheet along with her. She looked terrified.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She backed off the bed and fled to the far corner of the room, one hand raised vaguely to ward him off. Standing up showed the complexity of her nakedness, how the legs had to connect with the torso, how peculiarly narrow the female waist, how much more delicate the shoulders than the hips, how detached and attention-demanding a woman’s breasts. “I don’t have it,” she said to him in a loud voice that wasn’t bright or merry.

  He hardly noticed the erection he was rapidly and in full view of her reacquiring. “You’re dreaming,” he said.

  “Leave me ALONE. Leave me ALONE.”

  “Sh-sh-sh.” He sat down on the bed, showing her his empty palms. This seemed to scare her all the more. Without taking her eyes off him, she edged along the wall. Then she made a break for the door but curved towards him as she ran, her hands outstretched as if she were falling, and he saw how just before she reached him she seemed to crash through a sheet of glass or some similar planar discontinuity. She took hold of his shoulders and said, “Oh, I was having such a bad dream.”

  The house swayed in the wind. She sat on his thighs and let herself be held. Strong, low-pH fumes rose from between them. Experimentally, he tried to put his penis back inside her.

  She clutched his shoulders, pain cutting streaks into her face. “This is a little much.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not sore?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Oh, well, in that case.” She used her whole weight to impale herself on him. His nerves were screaming harmful! harmful! She rolled her hips angrily. “Hurt?”

  “Yes!”

  After a while the pain diffused into a large zone of ache, a pool of melted sulfur with little blue flames of pleasure flickering across the surface. Then the flames became scarcer and then disappeared altogether, and the sulfur began to crystallize into a column of hard, dry, sharp chunks. He might have been rubbing against broken bone. Renée’s eyes and cheeks were wet, but she didn’t make any sound.

  When they stopped he was bleeding enough to leave marks on the sheets. Renée sat on the edge of the bed and rocked with her knees pressed together. He just assumed he wouldn’t die because of this, a few years down the line.

  5

  He went to the house with the pyramid on top. The front lawn was a metallic green now and the grass lay down and shivered as if under a running tide, some large-scale flow of invisible matter related to the brilliant wrongness of the light, which was messing up the colors, throwing some of the black of the tree trunks into the blue heaven and some of the white of the clouds into the trees. For the person who hasn’t slept, what makes the new day strange and fills it with foreboding is that the setting sun is in the east and not setting; all day the light is like the light in dreams, which comes from no direction.

  “Louis, my God,” Melanie said, clutching the lapels of her dressing gown and peering out over a new brass door chain. “It’s nine in the morning, I’m not even up. I have to catch a plane.”

  “Unchain the door?”

  “You didn’t call! If you’d come two hours later—”

  “Unchain the door?”

  An alarm-system number pad had been installed in the entryway. In the living and dining rooms the broken plaster had been repaired, and Rita Kernaghan’s books and decorative objects, including the portrait of Melanie’s father, had given way to a more standard opulence, suitable for a luxury hotel suite—Japanese lithographs, sheer curtains, gold brocade.

  “I meant to call you,” Melanie said. “I just flew in on Thursday and there’s been so much to do.”

  “I bet,” Louis said. He walked into the living room and stepped onto a silk-upholstered sofa and stamped from one end to the other, listening to the twangs of its internal injuries.

  “Louis! For God’s sake!”

  He crossed to the coffee table. In good soccer style, using his instep, he penalty-kicked a cut-glass bowl into the fireplace. “I understand you’re handing out money to your children,” he said, stepping back onto the sofa. “I’m here for my share.”

  “Get down off the sofa. That is not your sofa.”

  “You think I’d do this to a sofa that was mine?”

  “I told you. I’m not going to talk about money. If you want to talk about something else, all right, but—”

  “Two million.”

  “But not money. I never expected I would have to—”

  “Two million.”

  Melanie placed her hand on the side of her head she got her headaches on.

  “How much did you give Eileen?”

  “Nothing, Louis. I gave her nothing.”

  “So where’d she get the condo?”

  “It’s a matter of a loan.”

  “Oh, I see. How about you lend me two million?”

  Melanie’s hand slid forward to cover her face, two fingertips pressing on her eyelids.

  “I’ll never bother you again, Mom. Promise. Two million and we’re quits. I’d say that sounds like quite a deal. You know, maybe I’ll even pay you back.”

  “I can no longer consider this a joke.”

  “Who’s joking? I need the money. There’s this radio station I have to buy. Two million’s the figure I had in mind, but I could do a fair amount of good with two hundred thousand. That would stabilize things till you come through with the rest.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Philip Stites. You’ve heard of him, the antiabortion guy. I want to make him a present of two hundred thousand dollars. Just to aid his cause, you know. Ever since we all got so rich I’ve become a very Christian person, Mom, you’re not aware of this, of course, because you never call me or—”

  “And you never call me!”

  “Oh, and Eileen does, and that’s why she gets rewarded with cash gifts?” Louis stepped up onto the shoulders of the sofa and tipped it over backwards, alighting just before the thud. “Why is it that everybody but you can see she only calls you to get money out of you? You think she cares about you? She hates you till you give her money and then she rewards you by not hating you until she needs some more. Haven’t you ever noticed this? It’s called being spoiled.”

  His mother turned away as if the conversation didn’t interest her. The sudden sharp tremor that made her whole body jerk and brought tears to her face seemed to take even her by surprise. She made a coughing, gulping noise. Louis might have had more sympathy if he hadn’t felt that her tears and Eileen’s tears always came at his expense, and if he hadn’t suspected that in his absence they were basically happy.

  “I’m trying to do you a real favor here,” he said. “I mean, just think. You give me two million, and for the rest of your life you can consider me a selfish jerk. You’ll never have to feel guilty again. No more tears, no more evasions. Plus you’ll still have your twenty million to play games with Eileen with.”

  His mother was shaking her head. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand. I’ve lost—” A strong aftershock rocked her shoulders. “I’ve lost—” Another aftershock. “I’ve lost—”

  “Money?”

  She nodded.

  “How much?”

  She shook her head; she couldn’t say.

  “So you’ve lost money. Amazing. Eileen gets to you in time to get an apartment out of this, but I’m a little late. Amazing the way these things work out.”

  Still trembling, Melanie parted a sheer curtain and looked out at the false-color daylight, the fair-weather clouds grazing the top of the last hill before the ocean. “Your request is not reasonable.”

  He tested the heft of a crystal objet from an end table. “You’re saying this place of hers cost s
ubstantially less than two hundred thousand dollars?”

  “Your request,” she repeated, “is not reasonable. Eileen will be starting a very fine job at the Bank of Boston when she graduates in June. She’ll have an excellent income and she’ll pay me interest on the loan. This is not particularly your business, I’m only telling you so you understand. The condominium was a reasonable investment for both of us. There is simply no equating her financial position with yours.”

  “Sure, if you’re a bank. But what about the social value of what she’s doing as opposed to what I’m doing? She’s going to help the grotesquely rich get grotesquely richer. You think she really needs your help? I’m trying to save a good radio station from some fanatics.”

  “And what a polite way you have of asking. Walking on my sofa.”

  “Oh, I get it. You would have come across if only I hadn’t walked on your sofa.”

  Melanie spun around to face him. Her uncombed hair hung in the shape of a kaffiyeh. “The answer is no, Louis. No. I am not giving any more money to anyone, including Eileen. You can hate me, but I can’t. I am incapable of it. Do you understand? Please don’t make it any worse.”

  She left him standing beneath the spot where his grandfather’s portrait had hung. He heard a door close upstairs. He covered his face with his hands and breathed in the smell of Renée Seitchek’s vagina.

  On Monday morning Alec Bressler sold WSNE-AM to the Reverend Philip Stites’s Church of Action in Christ for a sum undisclosed by either party but rumored, in light of the station’s crippling debts, to be in the neighborhood of forty thousand dollars.

  Louis was emptying his desk when Stites and his lawyers, a leather-faced duo with nice manicures, stopped in the doorway to assess his cubicle. Stites was roughly Louis’s height and no more than a couple of years older. He had one of those handsome, chubby Southern faces, round tortoiseshell glasses, and the lank, ultra-fine blond hair of a young child. He was wearing khaki slacks, a blue blazer, and a striped tie knotted in a four-in-hand. “How’re you doin’?” he said to Louis in a warm Carolinian accent.

  “Not bad, for the Antichrist.”

  The young minister chuckled affably. “You already quit, did you.” He returned to the hallway. “Hi there, Libby, you got a second to show us around here? You met Mr. Hambree already. This here’s Mr. Niebling. This pretty lady’s name is Libby Quinn.”

  Louis would sooner have not been paid for his last two weeks of work than go and bother Alec this morning. Fortunately for his finances, the ex-owner came to him. He had a sheaf of twenties and briskly counted out twenty-five of them.

  “This is more than you owe me.”

  “Is a gift from Social Security. You need a recommendation? I send it to you.”

  “I can’t believe this happened.”

  “Yes, I know, is a bad sing for you. You need a job. But the free market decides: not enough listeners. Meanwhile I broadcast 425 editorials. I have letters to show people listened. Maybe one person changes his mind because of me. Eight years to change one mind. But you can’t sink about results. You do what you have to do, regardless of results. Is a matter of faith.”

  “Stites has the faith,” Louis said in an ugly voice.

  “So other people live with nasty faith. This means you live without faith yourself? No hope for any sing? If everyone’s faith is same as yours, you don’t need faith.”

  Louis drummed his fingers on his desk. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Same as twenty years ago,” Alec said. “Make lots of money.”

  Sometime between one and two in the afternoon he began to wait for an earthquake. He’d been sitting in his room doing nothing anyway; waiting didn’t take much extra effort. He tried to make himself as ready to feel the next tremor, should it come, as he wan to hear thunder when he’d seen a flash of lightning: to be on the edge, to have his consciousness flush with the instant. Unfortunately this involved keeping his eyes open, and his eyes kept sliding off smooth surfaces and catching on irregularities, for example the sheet of wallpaper whose edges had lifted away from the plaster, exposing some of the underlying streaks of glue. Eventually thin glue gave his optic nerve a kind of blister, and the blister tore open and began to bleed, and yet there was nothing else on the wall for his eyes to hold on to.

  Just looking at his unopened cartons of radio equipment exhausted him. The cartons might all have been stacked on his chest, raising his gorge and stifling his breath.

  The ceiling was covered with off-white tiles made of some sad paper product. He ascertained that all the tiles bore the identical pattern of little holes, the seeming differences due only to differing orientations. From five to roughly six in the afternoon he made perfectly sure that the offset between the rows of squares at one end of each row was the same as the offset at the other end. It occurred to him that if a team of people in the Boston area would do what he was doing, at all hours of the day and night, that is, if there were always at least one good guy waiting in full consciousness for the ground to shake, then there might never be another earthquake, so shy of human consciousness are the random events of nature. (This is the fundamental axiom of superstition.) But maybe nature, in her great need to relieve those underground stresses, would be driven to the radical, Old Testament—style expedient of bringing a supernatural sleep to the particular consciousness on duty when the moment came and the rupture could no longer be postponed. The boy whose finger had been in the dike later speaking of a golden and irresistible drowsiness? Obviously this fatal moment had not arrived yet, because Louis held off the seisms in perfect wakefulness until the Red Sox came on the air.

  Tuesday was hot, the solar and convective furnaces already stoked and roaring at nine o’clock. The duct tape made a sound like tearing clothes as Louis unpacked his boxes. He handled everything. He took the top off the twelve-band receiver he’d built at fifteen and could hardly believe how well he’d soldered then. He had to look hard to find those spatters and botched cuts and crooked screws that at the time had caused him such self-hatred.

  In the afternoon he listened to music on the FM band, spinning the dial to dodge commercials. When night fell on all the spectrums, visible and radio, he switched to shortwave. He heard the chirping of radio-teletype, rapid and cool and neutral in tone, as unstressed as spoken Swedish. The code sent by hand he got most of—in high school he’d been a twenty-four-word-a-minute man—but it was mainly numbers and abbreviations, more pleasing as noise than as communication. There was emphatic and tireless tooting from freighters and beacons in the Atlantic night. Birdies and blaring mystery tones the color of back pain. An inflamed Slavic commentator inveighing above heavy sonic surf and going under, seeming to protest more stridently that he was not going under, and going under for good.

  The Voice of South Africa, calling from Johannesburg. Radio Habana. Radio Korea, the overseas service of the Korean Broadcast System, coming to you in English from Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea. Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale. Adventist World Radio offering program notes to far-flung believers, whistles faintly modulating through, like flies circling the pulpit. Injā Tehrān ast, sedā-ye jomhūri-ye eslāmi-ye Irān. The East is Red, the East is Red . . . Radio Baghdad reported that Zionist occupying forces had today murdered three Palestinian youths in south Lebanon; despite her Kensingtonian phonetics, this Voice of the Iraqi People’s Republic seemed not to understand what she was saying. “Reuters reported that on Sun. Day in the aftermath of the abor. Tive coup. Attempt in Mali three senior officers of the national air. Force had been executed in the square outside the.” But then the strings began to wail, and in her own tongue now the Voice, the same apprised female Voice, sang a ballad with a sexy and ironic slackness to the chorus, as though we all Know-ho-ho-ho ho-ho-ho this story well and have heard it many tiyee-yimes, and the strings agreed. Already the sun was rising on Islam. Jeeps and bundled women in the streets, another day’s devotions and atrocities under way. In Somervil
le, a night wind broke the dark shadow of a branch into several less dark shadows that bowed and crossed and canceled in the rhomboids of streetlight on the wallpaper.

  “Hey there, Louie boy. Taking the day off?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hall right. Good for you.”

  “I was fired from my job.”

  John Mullins was aghast. “They fired you? What for?”

  “I’m not sufficiently Christian.”

  “You know for a second there I believed you.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Ha. You had me fooled there for a second.”

  By the time the post office closed, Louis was ready with eleven query letters. He had only two copies of his demo tape and he hoped he wouldn’t have to pay for more. His monthly expenses came to about $720, which included rent, food, utilities, car expenses, and payments on a college loan. With the $500 Alec had given him, his life savings came to $1,535.

  In the evening he stood to one side of his window and looked out of it over his shoulder, like a man under siege. Couples in their early thirties were ringing the doorbell next door and emerging in the yellowly lit living room opposite his window. The soprano carried a frosty pitcher of water and wore a jumper with wide shoulder straps. She had auburn hair and matching freckles and fleshy white upper arms. Louis imagined he could see her vaccination mark, deep and annular, unpigmented. At the piano sat her husband, a blond, athletic frog with a crooning mouth. All the male visitors wore short-sleeved shirts with collars; all the females had bare calves and wore sandals or hard shoes. They began to sing hymns. It was like an old-time sing-along except that every voice was trained. They smiled as they sweated, eyes meeting across the room and glinting at each meeting like a distant photo flash or a diamond catching sunlight. Louis shut his window to keep the heat of all these bodies out.