Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “It’s illegal, right?” He pushed his glasses back up his sweaty nose. “To pump waste underground without a license?”

  “I assume. Otherwise why have licenses?”

  “Ha! And if these earthquakes cause damage, the company’s liable, right?”

  “I don’t know. In theory, yes. At least for any damage near Peabody. It’s pretty gross negligence on their part. It would be a harder thing to prove, though, if it’s a matter of a large earthquake some distance away and you had to speculate about whether what they’d done in Peabody had triggered a more general release of strain.”

  “You mean that’s possible? That can happen? You can trigger things like that? Boston gets wiped out and the company has to pay for it?” Louis was getting more euphoric by the second.

  “It’s very unlikely that Boston’s going to get wiped out,” Renée said. “And although there’s a lot of talk about trigger events, it’s very hard to demonstrate strict causality. You can talk about the April 6 event in Ipswich having ‘triggered’ the Easter event, but if you don’t know what causes earthquakes to occur at the particular times they do, and we don’t know this, you might as well say ‘precede’ instead of ‘trigger . . .”

  “But if the first earthquake is caused by pumping, and then you have a major one . . .”

  “There’d be a case, yes. But not an airtight case.”

  “But anything that happens right where they’re pumping, you’d have a good case there.”

  “I think so. For a civil suit. Probably by insurance companies.”

  “So the only question is, Do we stick it to ’em right now for breaking the law all these years, or do we maybe wait, and see if something worse happens, and then stick it to ’em for that too.”

  “You mean wait and see if some people get killed?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Well.” Renée gathered up her folders and hugged them to her chest. “You seem to have a grudge against these people, which I of course don’t, although if I’m right about this I agree it’s pretty disgusting. But I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do about it.” The first-person singular spoke for itself. “The Peabody earthquakes are of general interest to the scientific community. I might do some more research and then talk to people at MIT and Boston College. The EPA should also be talked to, maybe the press too. If the company does induce a destructive earthquake I’d just as soon not have it on my conscience.”

  “Why would it be on your conscience?”

  “Because I might have been able to prevent it.”

  Louis’s surprise was genuine. “You actually believe in this stuff? Service to mankind and all that?”

  In the calm upper stories of Renée’s face a powerful furnace kicked on suddenly, a bank of white jets of anger. “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it.”

  “Yeah, but, like, who’s to say what’s a service to mankind? If we let the company off the hook before anything worse happens, maybe we save a few lives. But if we wait and something worse does happen and then we blow the whistle, then it becomes a message. Then maybe people finally see what kind of sharks we have running the country. Which might really be a service to mankind.”

  “All right, Louis.” Her use of his name and her sudden smileyness sent a chill down his spine. This was a person whose disapproval he feared. She was pushing the stack of folders into his hands. “It’s all yours. I think you should show this to a man named Larry Axelrod at MIT; I think you should show it to the EPA. Are you listening? I’m telling you what the right thing to do is, and if you don’t want to do it, that’s your problem, not mine. All right?”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” He laughed defusingly. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  “I slept with you, once.”

  “And if we go broadcasting the news, what’s the company going to do? It’s going to deny everything. It’ll bulldoze everything over, and probably start doing something even worse with all this waste, and then you won’t have anything, not even the satisfaction of being right.”

  “It’s your decision.”

  “We make some inquiries. We talk to my good friend Peter. Drive up to Peabody and look around. Take some pictures maybe. Then we’ve got some hard proof to go to whoever with.”

  “I did this work myself, you know. I didn’t necessarily mean for you to come over and make yourself an equal partner.”

  “I tell you how terrific you are—?”

  “Like a dog that’s been good? I can fetch?”

  “Oh, all right, well.” He tossed the files into the space between the refrigerator and the wall, where Renée’s extra paper bags were carefully folded. “Keep it. And keep your little haircut too. And your little earrings, and your little smiles, and your neat little apartment. Your little folders. And your theories, and your scruples, and your old roommate, and your former friends. You know, this whole neat little perfect life. Just keep it.”

  The hum of the fan in the window was the sound of unhappiness in its rotary progress, always developing and yet always the same, a sound that marked every second of the minutes and hours in which improvement was failing to occur. Time flowed along an axis through the center of the fan, and the tips of the blades traced unending spirals around this axis.

  “I don’t even know you,” Renée said. “And you just hurt me. There was no reason to hurt me. I didn’t do a single thing to you, except not call you.”

  “And tell me to get lost.”

  “And tell you to get lost. That’s true. I did tell you to get lost. Everything you said is true. But it doesn’t mean you’re any better than I am. You’re just less exposed. And I’m so embarrassed.” She kept her shoulders rigid as she walked from the room, tottering slightly and repeating, “I’m so embarrassed.”

  Louis drank another beer and listened to the fan. After about half an hour he knocked on the bedroom door. When she didn’t answer, he opened it and followed the wedge of light into the dark, stuffy room. She was nowhere in sight. Only after he’d looked behind her bed and desk and behind the drawn window shades did he see the light behind the closet door, powered by a cord leading over from a socket. He knocked.

  “Yeah?”

  She was cross-legged on the closet floor, bending over a lamp. The pages of The New York Times Magazine she was reading were strewn with big puckered dots of perspiration from her head. Her eyes rolled up and looked at him. “What do you want?”

  Crouching, he took her hot, limp hands in his own. Birds were chirping angrily outside. “I don’t want to go,” he said. His stomach plummeted; he attributed this to the sick-making effort of sincerity. However, the real problem was the floor, which was moving. The panic that flashed through Renée’s face was so cartoonishly pure he almost laughed. Then the left side of the doorframe lurched closer to him, and he tried to rise out of his crouch, like a surfer who’d caught a wave, and the frame abandoned him on the left and the right side body-checked him and knocked him onto his butt. Renée was fighting with the clothes and hangers she’d stood up into. She stepped on Louis, who was not good footing, and stumbled free of the closet. Things had been falling during the interval, and now pencils and pens were rolling across the floor, roaming and vibrating and bouncing like drops of water in hot oil. There was also a deep sound that was less sound than an idea of sound, a drowning of the human in the physical. And then only the miniature rumble, clear and strangely personal, of a beer bottle crossing the kitchen floor.

  “I’m sorry I stepped on you,” Renée said.

  “Did you step on me?”

  They wandered around the disturbed apartment, oblivious to each other. The baby downstairs was crying, but the Dobermans on the first floor were either silent or out for the evening, eating prime rib somewhere. Louis picked up two beer bottles and, forgetting he’d meant to set them on the kitchen table, carried them from room to room and finally left them on the cushion of an armchair. He was dazed and without dignity, as if in the wake of
a first kiss. Renée had a jar of pencils in her hand when he bumped into her in the hallway. “It’s like I’ve been tickled,” she said, dodging his encircling arm, “to the point where if you touch me—” she fought him off with her elbow—

  The jar sailed down the hallway and the glass popped and the pencils bounced tunefully. Louis tickled her convulsing belly, and she slugged away at his arms and ribs, not hurting him at all and shouting pretty much constantly. Clothes were partially removed, body parts exposed, necks bent, the hard floor cursed. They kissed with their entire heads, like mountain goats. What was happening wasn’t so much sex as a kind of banging together, a clapping and clenching of hands the size of bodies, a re-creation of strong motion; something other than satisfaction wanted out. Louis came violently and hardly noticed, he was so intent on the way she pitched beneath him. It seemed like she was trying to shed him even as they kept colliding, and finally they collided so hard they did separate and, still vibrating like bells, sat up against opposing walls in obscene disarray, shackled at the ankles by twisted jeans and underpants. Farther up the hallway there was broken glass and a swollen tampon at the end of a bloody skid mark.

  Renée frowned. “I cut my hand.”

  Louis found his glasses and crawled over to look. On her palm was a semicircle of loosened skin, a bluish fish scale surrounded by crimson trickles and orange smears. “Does it hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Are you OK otherwise?”

  She looked down at her ankles. “I can’t imagine a more degrading position to be caught in. But otherwise.”

  They took turns washing in the bathroom, which was in antiseptic condition apart from the fact that in patching her hand Renée had unaccountably left a Curad wrapper in the sink. Louis opened her medicine chest and found expensive facial cleansers, the basic drugs, nonoxynol jelly, some dental floss.

  She was opening beers in the kitchen. The fan had fallen from the window, unplugging itself; it was still on the floor. Louis started to turn on the radio. “Don’t,” she said.

  “What do you have for music?”

  “The radio. But I don’t want to hear about the earthquake. Not even—not even anything.”

  “You don’t have any tapes?”

  She leaned against the table and drank. “I have . . . no tapes.”

  “What’s this?” He held up a tape.

  She regarded it soberly. “That’s a tape.”

  “But it’s not music?”

  She tried several times to say something, and stopped each time. “You’re kind of nosy.”

  “Forget I asked.”

  “It’s one song. Which I never listen to. There’s no significance to this, it’s just a song. Do you want me to embarrass myself?”

  “Yes. Yes. More than anything.”

  She sat cross-legged on a chair and hugged herself, covering the nakedness that went through clothes. “It’s only that when I was seventeen . . .”

  “I was ten!”

  “Thank you for pointing that out.”

  Louis wondered what the awful confession would be.

  “I was a punk fan,” she said. “Or should I say new wave? These words.” She hugged herself more tightly. “I can hardly make myself say them. But I was very happy at the time. And I still want people to know I saw Elvis Costello four times in ’78 and ’79. But there’s so much to explain about how he was different and I was different. I want people to be impressed but it’s just not impressive. I was sprayed by David Byrne’s saliva before he got blissy. I was right up against the stage. I got a pick from Graham Parker, I took it right from his hand.”

  “Are you serious? Can I see it?”

  “Exciting. It really was. I saw the Clash and the Buzzcocks and the Gang Of Four. It embarrasses me to even say the names now, but I saw them and I knew their lyrics, and they were all so good until eventually they all got so bad.”

  “They were great,” Louis said. “I was kind of a ham operator, in high school? I used to trade Nick Lowe lyrics with this person in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in Morse code. "She was a winner / That became the doggie’s dinner’? Di-di-dit, di-di-di-dit . . . ?”

  Renée seemed to assume he was joking. “I liked the attitude,” she said. “But I wasn’t really a punk. The real punks scared the hell out of me. They were violent and sexist, and they hardly even listened to the music.”

  “Did you have a biker’s jacket?”

  “Suede,” she said bitterly. “Which I was very happy with then and which is now a source of shame that will never die. A suede jacket sums me up completely. There were a lot of people like me at the concerts, although I think a difference between me and the others was that I thought this was it. I loved the music. I applied it to my life, but in a, what’s the word, hermetic way. The place where it all happened was in dorm rooms, where I had the lyric sheets. It kills me to think about how innocent and happy I was, even though at the time what I thought the whole message was was black humor and anger and apocalypse. You can be very innocent and happy about that stuff too. And it seemed so much safer than sixties and seventies music, because it wasn’t really happy or innocent or hopeful at all. It was tough and simple. I kept all the records, and I liked the records better and better. I kept on dressing the way bands dressed in ’78. The same way I dress now, which is like nothing, you know, jeans and T-shirts. But it got to be 1985, and it started to seem pathetic that the only records I listened to were these old records. But I didn’t like the new music or at least I wasn’t finding out about the good things, because I wasn’t in college anymore.”

  She took the last two beers from the refrigerator. Louis had been observing that every time he drank from his bottle, she drank from hers.

  “Meanwhile I stopped listening to more than a song or two at a time. I guess partly I was trying not to get tired of the things I loved, and partly I was so affected that it was too distracting to play a whole album, I couldn’t do any work, I mean, because the music was designed to rev you up, to make you anxious and angry and excited, and so it was very bad music to move on in life with, because it’s one kind of music that simply won’t function as background. But the biggest thing was just how embarrassed I was to see myself still listening to it.”

  “You like the Kinks?”

  “Never much.”

  “Lou Reed? Roxy Music? Waitresses? XTC? Banshees? Early Bowie? Warren Zevon?”

  “Some of them, yeah. I never really bought that many records, because I stopped taking money from my parents. But—”

  “But so.”

  “I started to pare down. I got rid of the really old stuff, the stuff I had from high school, and I got rid of the records that only had one or two good songs on them. Then I started taping the medium-good records, and keeping the good part. Then I decided it was stupid to have a big stereo, because I could get the same effect from the little tape player—you know, you’re the first person I’ve ever really talked about this with. I just wanted to say that.”

  They looked at each other. The refrigerator shuddered and fell silent. “I like you too,” Louis said.

  She pushed her hair around, doing a good job of seeming not to care. “But so I was left with about twenty tapes which I listened to less and less, just one or two songs every once in a while, when I needed to feel better. It used to make me feel better because it made me feel tough, and angry and lonely in a good way. But then without my even really noticing, it started to make me feel better because it made me feel young, the way ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ makes forty-year-olds feel young. When I finally noticed this I was even less inclined to play the tapes. And did I really ever need to hear ‘Red Shoes’ again?”

  “No argument on that one.”

  “Or any of Give ’Em Enough Rope? Or even any Pretenders?”

  “Fine records. Keep ’em.”

  “I got rid of everything. I pared it down to one song, one more or less arbitrary song, which I haven’t listened to in at least six months, if not mor
e like a year. I don’t listen to it. But I also can’t bring myself to throw it away.”

  “Can I play it?”

  She shook her head. “Sure. Just be decent to me. I know you’re a radio person.”

  Out of the little tape machine came the opening guitar line on Television’s first record.

  “Oh,” Louis said, increasing the volume. “Fine song. You dance?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Me neither.”

  “I could when I was twenty.”

  Iunderstandall . . . ISEENO . . .

  destructiveurges . . . ISEENO . . .

  Itseemssoperfect . . . ISEENO . . .

  I SEE . . . I SEE NO . . . I SEE NO EVIL

  “You can turn it off.”

  “Wait, doesn’t Verlaine have like a perfect riff in here? It would have been good to hear these people before they broke up. Or did you?”

  “No.”

  “I hear they were very fine.”

  “Everything became a competition. I stopped trying to get to concerts because it seemed like I was only trying to build credentials as a concertgoer. Which wasn’t working anyway. I ran into people who went to clubs every weekend. People who’d seen the Clash before I had. People who were friends with Tina Weymouth’s siblings. People who hung around at CBGB and could invest so much more time in being cool. Maybe it was just self-protection, but I started despising these people, and the way they all had to constantly be scrambling to discover something new. I decided this was just pathetic. But I was still afraid of these people. I was afraid they’d find out how much I loved the music I’d grown up with. It seemed like the only way to compete with all their originality, the only way to keep my love safe, was to hate music. Which wasn’t a particularly original solution either, but at least I was protected. And it really is pretty easy to hate rock and roll.”

  “Less so jazz and classical.”

  “No problem, for me. I just think about the personalities of the people who play it for brunch, and even worse the people who really love it. How good it makes them feel about themselves to know who played drums for Charlie Parker in nineteen-whatever, and how the songs in The Magic Flute go. I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes, and be known and defined by them. If you’re not artistic, which I’m not, at all, and you still have to make these aesthetic decisions . . . That’s why punk was so good for me. It was this style I picked up before I got too selfconscious about style. I didn’t have to apologize, in my own mind. But then I got older, and suddenly it started to define me anyway, in a very pathetic way. Plus suddenly everybody under the age of forty had a leather jacket and fifties sunglasses and punky clothes, and they all felt really cool. At which point jazz might have been a good thing to turn to, except it was art, and as soon as something becomes art, you get experts, and do I want to be one of these experts who’re all trying to be more knowledgeable than each other? But if you don’t become an expert, you might play something and like it and then find out it’s considered sentimental or unoriginal or something. And I know from experience that people are so insecure that they never hesitate to let you know that what they like is more original and better than what you like, or that they liked what you like years before you liked it . . . I don’t even have time. And it’s the same with African music, and Latin music. I’m terrified of being implicated by all the smarmy experts. Either that or finding out my tastes aren’t good, or aren’t original. Radio would be the perfect solution, except so much of what they play is bad.”