Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “I hate it when women swear,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She stood at the head of the table. “I guess because there’s this idea that it’s sexy, in the popular imagination. The approved male popular imagination. Even when a woman says fuck in anger, even a radical feminist saying fuck, that’s a turn-on. Every time I hear a woman do it I get carried—” She addressed Louis directly. “I get carried to the subway station at Central Square. There’s an angry woman there, with her bags and her papers. It’s like her face is the face of All Women Saying Fuck. This insane anger towards everybody, which to me is especially ugly in a woman, although this is not politically correct of me and therefore makes me wonder what exactly my problem is. And I can’t help mentioning,” she went on, entirely to herself, “something else I forgot the other night, when you asked me what my problem is with Boston, I forgot to mention the way people call the subway the T. The people, I mean the implicating people, don’t say ‘I’m going to take the subway,’ they say ‘I’ll take the T.’ What’s sick—to me; what I consider sick—is that it’s like this code word, which every time I hear I become angry because I can hear the whole history, all these kids learning to say ‘T’ instead of ‘subway.’ They write home to their parents about taking the T. They explain that it’s called the T, which is kind of cute. Oh, listen to me.” She walked away, hitting herself in the head. “You wonder why I didn’t call you.”

  Louis karate-chopped the tabletop impatiently. “Is there any beer or something?”

  “It’s because I can’t control myself.”

  “Or any kind of liquor or drug that we could do together here.”

  The hum of the fan in the window, its quiet, oiled grinding, was the sound of all night hours in a heat wave. The hour of conversation wearing thin. The hour when a reflected piece of streetlight hovers at a certain point the blades pass through. The hour when dawn forces itself through the weary curtains. The hum and the hours all the same, the monotone of humid heat, and the burn patients say Don’t turn it up. Don’t turn it down. Let it stay right like it is.

  “Do you have friends?” Louis asked, opening bottles. “People you can call up?”

  “Sure. I mean, I used to.” Renée, across the table from him, showed no intention of drinking the beer he handed her. “I had a roommate, who I really liked, although she’s married now. I guess I was an improvident gardener. I made friends with people a couple of years older than me at work, people from the tail end of the sixties who didn’t like the front end of the eighties, which I didn’t either. I guess what I have now is an interesting correspondence, and some places to stay in Colorado and California.” With her thumbnails, she bunched up her sweating bottle’s neck wrapper like a cuticle, trying belatedly to gauge the angle of his question. “I see people, if that’s what you mean.” Her eyes followed her right index finger as she ran it along the edge of the table. She called her hand back and placed it palm-down to one side of her full bottle, and placed her other hand palm-down to the other side of the bottle. She sat perfectly still for a moment, staring at the bottle. Then, with violent decision, as though sitting like this had been a physical torment all along, she stood up without even pushing the chair away from the table. She had to stagger for balance on one leg and slide the chair back to extricate herself, and the chair stuck on the humid floor and tipped over.

  She returned from her bedroom with several manila folders. “I’ve been staying in the library,” she said, righting the chair. “Two people came to my office last Friday to be nasty in person. I haven’t gone back since.”

  “That’s what Howard said.”

  She nodded, yawning. “I was thinking about what that boyfriend of your sister’s was saying. I remembered something, or I thought I did. I remembered it was on a right-hand page facing something else I’d looked at. And . . . I was right.” From the top folder she took a stapled sheaf of photocopies. “This is an article from the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, July ’69. You can just read the abstract and what I’ve underlined.”

  “What for?” Louis said.

  “Because it’s interesting.”

  A Theory of Subcrustal Petroleogenesis

  A. F. Krasner

  Research Chemist, Sweeting-Aldren Industries

  Abstract: Significant releases of methane and petroleum in non-fossiliferous regimes (Siljan, Wellingby Hills, Taylorsville) have called into question the assumption that subterranean hydrocarbon deposits derive principally from breakdown of trapped organic matter. Improved estimates of the chemical composition of comets and the major planets suggest levels of carbon within the Earth 102 - 105 times larger than earlier estimates. A laboratory study demonstrates the possibility of synthesizing petroleum from elementary hydrocarbons under pressures approaching those in the Earth’s interior. A model of hydrocarbon capture during planetogenesis predicts the formation and accumulation of methane and more complex hydrocarbons at the upper boundary of the asthenosphere and explains the releases observed at Wellingby Hills. A program of deep drilling to further test the model is proposed.

  The only underlined words Louis could find in the article were in the last paragraph. Renée had done her underlining with a straightedge, a work habit that had always given him the creeps. Advances in deep-well technology have for the first time made feasible narrow-bore holes to depths in excess of 25,000 feet. Two sites in the Berkshire Mountains Synclinorium, including the Brixwold Pluton (in the vicinity of which there is some evidence of slow methane release), have been chosen for a drilling program, initiated by Sweeting-Aldren Industries, which pending final funding will commence in December 1969 and, it is hoped, attain the critical depth of 25,000 feet in Spring of 1971. Significant quantities of methane or petroleum found at this depth, under a heavily metamorphosed granitic pluton overlaying pre-Cambrian schists, would provide strong confirmation of the trapped-layer model.

  “Lot of big words here,” Louis said.

  “Actually a seminal article in its way.” Renée, with unseemly possessiveness, kept a hand extended until he gave her back the article. “The evidence back then was so flimsy the paper should never have been published, but this is an idea that’s still around. That there’s this huge ocean of crude oil and natural gas pooling right below the earth’s crust, and that all this fuel is from the primordial gunk that went into making the planet, and that the total reserves of so-called fossil fuels are just a drop in the bucket compared to all this stuff farther down. The Swedish government fairly recently spent ten million dollars drilling an inconclusive well in this Siljan basin. The idea’s not dead. Not many people take it seriously, though.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “So then there’s this thing from Nature. January ’70.”

  She’d neatly boxed in red ink a one-paragraph note in the News section to the effect that the American chemical concern Sweeting-Aldren had begun to sink a deep well at an undisclosed site in eastern Massachusetts, with a view to testing the hypothesis of chemist A. F. Krasner regarding the non-fossil origin of much of the world’s oil and natural gas. The drilling was proceeding at a rate of 100 feet per day and, allowing for the usual delays and equipment failures, was expected to reach 25,000 feet—“the critical depth, in Krasner’s view”—late the next spring.

  “Do you notice anything there?”

  Louis waved a hand tiredly. “These brain-teaser kind of things—”

  “The Berkshires aren’t in eastern Massachusetts.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “I didn’t know that. So I wouldn’t have gotten it anyway. So it’s good you told me.”

  Renée closed one folder and opened another. The handwriting on the tabs of the folders was as regimented as a draftsman’s. “February 25, 1987,” she said. “Boston Globe: Tremors in Essex County Persist..” She handed Louis a photocopied clipping. “April 12, 1987. Boston Globe, again. ‘Scientists Puzzled by Peabody Earthquake Swarm . . .’” She took out a third article. “Earthquake Not
es, 1988, number 2, The Peabody Microseisms of January-April 1987 and Their Tectonic Environment.’ Penultimate paragraph: ‘The spatial and temporal distribution of the microseisms bears a marked similarity to known instances of induced seismicity in the vicinity of injection wells.’ Emphasis added. ‘However, the relatively great depth of the Peabody tremors (i.e., on average 3 kilometers deeper than the deepest commercial waste-disposal wells) would appear to rule out such a mechanism. Furthermore there are no licensed injection wells operating within a 20-kilometer radius surrounding the site of activity . . .’”

  She looked her beer bottle in the face for a second, and then took a long pull. She was definitely able to control herself now.

  “I remember when this swarm started up in Peabody. It happens in a couple other places in New England with some regularity. You get these tiny earthquakes, for the most part too small to feel. Anywhere from one to several hundred per day for days or weeks or months. Nobody really knows what causes them. The Peabody series was of interest because there’d never been anything like it there before.”

  “Did I understand this right that injection wells cause earthquakes?”

  “Yeah, it’s called induced seismicity. It happens after you’ve been pumping lots of liquid underground, and basically it’s as if the rock down there gets slippery from all the extra liquid. The classic example was in the early sixties, at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, outside Denver. The Army was making chemical weapons and generating millions of gallons of toxic liquid waste and pumping it down a 12,000-foot well. Denver had always been pretty quiet seismically, but about a month after the pumping started they started recording all these earthquakes. On average about one a day, none of them bigger than 4.5 or so. Wheneyer they stopped pumping, the earthquakes stopped too, and when they started again, so did the earthquakes. It was pretty open and shut. The GS did a study—”

  “The what?”

  Renée blinked. “Geological Survey. They pumped water into dry oil wells in western Colorado. Whenever the water pressure in the bedrock got above 3,700 pounds per square inch the earthquakes started up. If you have some kind of pre-existing strain underground, the water in the cracks lubricates things and disturbs the balance of forces. The same thing also happens when you build a dam and form a reservoir. The weight of the new lake forces water into the underlying rock. There was a long series of events in Nevada, behind the Hoover Dam, after it filled up. Same thing in Egypt, behind the Aswan Dam. Same thing in Zambia, and China, and India. I think the one in India was very good-sized. Killed a couple hundred people.”

  “I get the feeling you don’t spend your nights watching baseball on TV.”

  She opened a third folder, disregarding him. “Krasner disappears from the literature after one article. He’s not in any chemistry journal, not in any geophysics journal, and he was never in American Men and Women of Science. One full-length paper, one paragraph in Nature, and that’s it. His theory got reinvented independently in the late seventies by a guy named Gold, at Cornell. Gold cites Krasner once, calls him ‘prescient,’ in the papers I could find. And that’s it.”

  “You’ve read all these things.”

  “I’ve been stuck in the library.”

  “And you underline them and put them in folders even when you’re not going to get graded on them.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why do you do this?”

  “Why?” The question seemed almost to offend her. “Because I’m curious.”

  “You’re curious. You do all this stuff because you’re curious.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s nothing else in it for you.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Just simple curiosity.”

  “How many times do I have to say it?”

  Louis blew out air. He tapped on the tabletop. Blew out more air. “You’ve been talking to my mother again.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Only that she has a large financial interest in Sweeting-Aldren.”

  “I didn’t know that. That’s actually very interesting. But I haven’t been talking to her, and I definitely did not know that.” She shuddered a little, trying to rid herself of his vague imputations.

  “So go on,” he said.

  “There’s nothing else, really. It’s just—You know. It’s just like you say. My little presentation.”

  “I’m sorry. I want to hear the rest. Drink some beer. Tell me the rest.”

  She took a deep breath and started speaking to the tabletop, full of body English, as though engaging him directly; but it was clearly beyond her power to sustain both articulateness and eye contact.

  “In 1969 Sweeting-Aldren’s swimming in cash, mainly because of Vietnam. They have a bunch of scientists on the payroll, and this person Krasner comes up with a theory that Massachusetts is sitting on an ocean of crude oil. The company decides to fund a hole to see if he’s right, except something happens to make them change their mind about where to put it. Who knows what. Maybe they figure that if there’s a huge pool of crude oil under western Mass, it must be under eastern Mass too, where they own property. The only reason to drill at the site in western Mass is because the site’s geology is supposedly incompatible with petroleum deposits. But what do they care about Krasner’s theory? They’re worried about getting some money out of the hole, if it happens not to be a gusher. And one thing is in 1969 people are also starting to get nervous about the environment, especially water pollution, and what I think they decide is that if the deep well comes up dry, they’re going to pump industrial waste down it. And meanwhile Krasner retires, or dies, or opens an antiques store. Or was just a pseudonym to begin with.”

  “And pump industrial waste down it . . .”

  “And then what your sister’s boyfriend was saying”—the sound of Louis’s voice caused her to concentrate all the more on the tabletop—“is that even now the company is dumping a million gallons of effluents every year. But in the paper, basically every day for the last two weeks”—she opened another folder, which he could see was full of clippings from the Globe—“both the company and the EPA say the company puts nothing in the Danvers River except clean, slightly oily hot water. The plant’s a model nonpolluter.”

  He thought: And pump industrial waste down it . . .

  “So where did they drill? Obviously they drilled within a couple miles of the plant in Peabody. And the thing is you can pump liquid into a hole for a long time before anything happens. It takes a lot of liquid to bring what’s called the pore pressure to the critical level where the rock starts to relieve its internal stresses by rupturing seismically. It’s not implausible that Sweeting-Aldren was injecting effluents from the early seventies all the way into the mideighties without anything happening. But suddenly they reach the critical level, say in January ’87, and they start having little earthquakes. The swarm goes on for four months and then stops, which to me suggests the company got scared and stopped pumping. And for a couple of years everything’s quiet, and then about two weeks after the first Ipswich event there suddenly start being these earthquakes in Peabody again—the papers talk about Lynn too, but the epicentral area is the same as in the ’87 series—which nobody can relate to the Ipswich events as anything but a low-probability coincidence. But what’s been happening to all these wastes that the company normally would have been pumping underground? They had to stop pumping in ’87, and so presumably they’ve had to store the liquid somewhere, which I’m sure they’re not happy about. And maybe what they’ve been waiting for is some good-sized local earthquake, so they could start pumping in Peabody again, full speed ahead, with the idea that any new earthquakes would be associated with the Ipswich events. Maybe what spilled on Easter was some of the backlog they’d been storing up since ’87. Maybe they decided they had to try to get as much of that stuff underground as soon as possible, no matter what happened. And sure enough, within a week or two, we start getting more tremors in P
eabody.”

  Finished at last, Renée pushed her hair off her forehead and took another long pull on her beer, withdrawing into herself, taking care not to expect any response. Louis was staring at the bottle of Joy by the faucet of her deep, white sink. The kitchen had grown brighter and smaller. He leaned back in his chair, filling the sweet spot of his field of vision with her image. “The thing about the stuff in 1987, how it can’t be from a well. Can you read that again?” Obediently she opened the proper folder. “‘However, the relatively great depth’?”

  “Yes! Yes! That proves it, doesn’t it?”

  “‘. . . (i.e., on average 3 kilometers deeper than the deepest commercial waste-disposal wells) would appear to rule out such a mechanism. Furthermore there are no licensed injection wells operating—.”

  “Those slimes! Those slimes! This is great” Louis leaned over the table and put his hands on her ears and kissed her on the mouth. Then he started pacing the room, socking the palm of his hand.

  “Do you know something about these people?” she said.

  “They’re slimes!”

  “You’ve met them.”

  “I told you, my mom’s like this major stockholder all of a sudden. I met them at my grandmother’s funeral. They’re these totally classic corporate pigs.” He lifted Renée out of her chair by the armpits so he could squeeze her and kiss her again. “You’re amazing. I can’t believe you just sat down and figured this all out. You’re terrific.”

  He lifted her off the floor and set her down. She looked at him as if she hoped he wouldn’t do this again.