Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “You’ve helped me enough already,” she said. “You’ve helped me incredibly.”

  11

  The raccoon woke up hungry and unrefreshed. There was hardly a glimmer of light on the still water beneath the ledge he’d slept on. Rats were waddling along the walls and through the filth on the narrow, rock-strewn mud flats, migrating as they did every evening from City Hall to the dumpsters of Union Square. The raccoon rose and yawned and stretched, chin low to the ground, like a Moslem praying.

  Sometimes, when he came down from his ledge, he ran confusedly back and forth along the water, spooking the rats and being spooked by them; sometimes he ran for a block or more and then stopped, whiskers twitching, and looked into the inky, dripping blackness ahead of him and then, as if the blackness were a concrete barrier, turned back.

  Tonight he went straight downhill. Street light fell through the small holes and larger slots above him. Paw over paw, he climbed the iron rungs he almost always climbed. Halfway up, he reversed and descended headfirst, then reversed again and climbed to the top and peered out through the slot. Between car bumpers he could see the Post Office. He never went out through this slot. Every night he recollected having been here innumerable times, but recollection was weaker than habit, and so invariably he retraced his steps up and down the iron rungs. These and all the other motions he repeated every night were like a sorrow.

  The rats were like a sorrow. There were so many of them and only one of him. In rats the gray, hostile world ramified and mobilized and swirled around him. Superior size and intelligence counted for nothing when he experienced rats; he became clumsy and vulnerable. Although they gave him wide berth in the tunnels, their numbers made them unafraid. If they surprised him, he drew his shoulders up in anger like a cat, huffing impotently as the little evils shimmered away into the darkness. They could swim terribly well.

  The raccoon was bigger also than squirrels and rabbits and opossums, and was smarter and more graceful in his proportions, but again there were many of them and only one of him. A squirrel’s world might have been nothing more than trees and nuts, a neurotic hither and thither, but there was an at-homeness—a confidence and oblivion—that came of belonging to a large population doing exactly the same inconsequential things. Solitary and omnivorous, the raccoon had no better reason to climb trees than the pleasure that following an instinct gave him. The high boughs he sought bowed wildly with his weight. And when a squirrel fell it contorted itself at lightning speed and glanced off branches and hit the ground running; but when the raccoon fell he went down with a crash, grasping futilely for purchase, making noises of distress, and landed in an undignified heap. At home in many environments, he was really at home in none.

  Reaching the bottom of the tunnel, he surfaced through a grateless drain on the commuter-rail right-of-way. Cars on bridges crossed over the silence that pooled in this low, rubbly part of Somerville. Dozens of food smells mingled in the sea breeze, but few had the pungency of immediate forage. The track signals were green and red in both directions.

  Beneath a bridge that saw heavy foot traffic in the daytime, he ate a stale piece of jelly doughnut and the crumbs of other doughnuts in a pink-and-orange box. He ate an apple core and some marshmallows, a novelty. He ate a moth.

  Up on Prospect Hill there were good grubs, good crab apple trees, and a lot of organic garbage, but there were also dogs. Sometimes at the least opportune moment a back door would fly open and out would shoot a fanged and curly-haired cannonball, and the raccoon, which like as not had been eating the remains of the dog’s dry Purina dinner, would have to scramble up the nearest vertical surface. He had spent entire nights nervously pacing the crossbar of a swing set or the roof of a recreational vehicle while below him a dog kept the neighborhood awake. Various pets had bitten his hind legs and tail. A cat had laid open one of his cheeks (but the cat had paid for it with an eye). One night a pair of schnauzers trapped him in a free-standing twelve-foot fir tree; spotlights came on, a fat man emerged from the house and children followed, the schnauzers in frenzy all the while, and the red diode of a camcorder winked and the fat man worked the zoom and one of the children lifted a schnauzer as high as she could reach, so that its furiously righteous black German eyes and rose-petal tongue and pointed teeth were within a foot of the terrified and humiliated raccoon, and this confrontation was likewise committed to videotape.

  Would a thing like this ever happen to a squirrel? To a rat? To an opossum or a skunk or a rabbit?

  The raccoon had had two sisters. One had been killed by cats during a melee in which his mother was also mauled. Later the other sister stopped eating and died. He and his mother saw less and less of each other. Once he passed her in a tunnel and something made him jump on her, but she rebuffed him. Rats hastened through the trickle of water between them as they crouched, panting, on opposite sides of the tunnel. Then she ran uphill and turned back angrily. He didn’t see her again until winter. The streets were white with salt and moonlight when he found her rigid by a curb, her eyes cloudy with ice crystals. It was so cold he had to bury his nose in her fur before he could smell anything.

  From Union Square, in the direction of the tall buildings, the right-of-way became narrower and rockier and less rich in edible things, until eventually there came vast tunnels in which diesel winds blew and the ground shook.

  To the west there was more wildlife. In his second summer the raccoon had traveled that way for several miles, drawn by the smell of females. He ran into some males and they nosed each other and climbed a roof together, but mainly they were wrapped up in their odd, private behavior, his own as odd as any. He suffered repeated traumas involving automobiles, which in West Cambridge had a way of coming and coming and coming. Meanwhile the scent of females grew fainter. By Labor Day he was back in Union Square.

  Seasons changed and came around again; he never did the thing animals most like to do. His fur darkened. Something in his stomach gave him steady pain. Fleas tormented him in cycles. Only once or twice more did he see another animal like himself; and, never fighting, never mating, never interacting with his own kind in any way, he almost ceased to have a nature. He became an individual living in a world that consisted entirely of his sorrowlike compulsions and afflictions and the pleasurable exercise of his abilities. The only real face he ever saw was his own, when he looked in dark water—not when he washed food, because then although he was looking at the food and at his busy paws and at the shrubs and car parts around him, his compulsion made him sightless—but when rain had filled a ditch along the tracks and in stopping to cross it he saw a furry, masked head descend from the urban sky with intense and tender slowness to touch noses with him, like a dream of the mate he had never met, and time folded back on itself, the repeated patterns of his existence lining up the way multiple reflections of a single object come together, so that instead of a succession of days there was just one day that was his life, in fact a single moment: this one.

  The signals were red and green in both directions. The air had begun to throb. White beams of light coming from his right and left made his eyes glow yellow. He scampered across two sets of rails, holding in his mouth a fragment of hamburger bun swollen with ketchup like a tampon, and ran halfway up an oil-darkened embankment. An engine blasted its air horn, rocking a little as it trundled forward. The raccoon crossed the rails again, turned in a tight circle with swishing tail, ran up the embankment, and suddenly full of terror as the immense and roaring engines doubled their apparent speed in passing each other, he buried himself as well as he could in ragweed and shut the world out.

  Renée watched the trains pass from the Dane Street bridge, the passenger cars flowing below her like the opposing belts of an airport people mover. On the roof of a windowless building, pink plastic letters three feet tall said PRECISI N MOTOR REBUI DING. It was midnight. She walked quickly across Somerville Avenue and past the ancient row houses of northern Little Lisbon. In a manila envelope she had the Caddulo
pictures and a copy of the paper that she’d printed out on the way back from Chelsea. She passed a powder-blue toilet, complete with tank but somewhat dirty, on the sidewalk.

  In her house, a Doberman whined pleadingly behind the hallway door. One floor up, the baby was crying and its parents were yelling at each other, as they’d done so often before the baby came. They had Ph.D.s and quarreled, for example, about the comparative labor value of keeping the refrigerator stocked and keeping the car running. Renée had heard the husband shout, “You want to switch? You want to switch? You want to do the car and I’ll do the shopping?” They were in their mid-thirties.

  There was an open package of whole-wheat bread on her kitchen table. In the sink an eggy frying pan and stacks of plates and glasses. Wine bottles and fruit peels on the counter. Clothes in the hallway, clothes in piles in both main rooms, a brown ring and splashed barf in the toilet, towels on the floor by the sink. Shoes and newspapers and dust mice everywhere. Withered strands of spaghetti near the burners of the stove.

  She took the cassette tape marked DANCE in her fingers and bent it until the plastic shattered in a shock whose pulse of high-frequency vibrations stung her skin. She did the same to her other tape, the one with the single song on it. Suddenly there was a new silence in the apartment, as if until this moment music had been playing for so long that she’d ceased to be aware of it, and heard it only after it had stopped.

  She took off her clothes and lay face down on the kitchen floor, which was sticky and hot to the touch. Fragments of cassette dug into her elbows and ribs. She cried for a long time.

  In her jeans again, she swept the whole apartment and washed and dried all the dishes and put them away. Every thing she’d bought in the previous week, even the leather jacket, she stuffed into Hefties which she carried down to the sidewalk. She kept stopping to cry, but eventually she got the apartment as clean and bare as it was the night she first slept with Louis Holland.

  She opened the manila envelope and looked at her paper, wondering why she’d written it. Simply to make money? She sat on her tightly made bed and read the “AGREEMENT, made this 12th day of June” between Melanie Rose Holland of Evanston, Illinois, and Renée Seitchek of Somerville, Massachusetts. The agreement was printed on laser bond paper. She tore it into narrow strips. She tore the strips into squares which she held cupped in her hands for a full minute, as if she’d thrown up into her hands and couldn’t think of an appropriate receptacle. The toilet was where she finally dumped it.

  Again she looked at her paper, trying to gauge its meaning to her now. Her eyes followed the words, but all the reader in her mind would say was You’re tripping on a romance. You’re tripping on a romance. After a while she found that she had put the paper back in its envelope and was holding it against her chest. She hugged it, rocking, grieving. She shivered and didn’t know what to do. She stood up and went to her desk, still cradling the thin envelope in both arms. She stuffed all her related photocopies inside it and began to wind brown plastic wrapping tape around the thick packet. She unrolled more and more tape, until the packet was completely covered, no envelope showing at all. Then she buried it in the bottom drawer of the desk. She looked at the closed drawer and hugged herself, grieving.

  Later in the morning she took a shower and drove to Kendall Square. Her doctor at Harvard had referred her to a clinic called New Cambridge Health Associates, which occupied part of an old red-brick factory recently converted into offices, many of them high-tech MIT offshoots. She’d passed the clinic many times, on the way to seminars at MIT, without ever noticing it for what it was.

  A Japanese noodle place, popular for lunch, blanketed the street with its breath of broth and scallions. In a parking space directly in front of the clinic, behind yellow police tape strung between two parking signs, five COAIC women stood in the strong midday sun holding the usual photographs. Bebe Wittleder looked at Renée. Renée looked at her. Bebe watched, wide-eyed and mute, as Renée pushed open the metal door.

  A handsome counselor, fiftyish, with graying blond hair in a braid, took the envelope her doctor had given her.

  “Renée Seitchek,” she said.

  “I know who you are.”

  “Yeah. So do the people outside.”

  “Oh dear. This is an unfortunate coincidence for you.”

  “Uh huh. I guess I think it isn’t.”

  The counselor leaned back against a chart of reproduction, Fallopian tubes and ovaries framing her too-compassionate face. “Do you want me to ask you what you mean by that?”

  “Well, I wonder . . .” Renée wrinkled her forehead. Her skin was stiff from lack of sleep. “I wonder if the last few months have seemed strange to you.”

  “Which months?”

  “The last two or three. With the earthquakes, and what Stites is doing. To me they’ve been very strange, and all of a piece. But it occurs to me that not everyone feels what I do.”

  The counselor clearly didn’t feel what Renée did. “It’s been . . . very interesting,” she said with a blank smile.

  “Well. Anyway. I got angry. And when you get angry you get sloppy. You know, because men can be sloppy and nothing happens to them. And then I guess I got unlucky. I mean, within the context of my sloppiness. Within the context of my thinking it’s not a matter of luck at all.”

  “You’re talking about contraception.”

  “Yes. My diaphragm.”

  She watched the counselor fill a space on her form with the word “diaphragm.” Somehow she managed to remain polite and humble while the counselor discussed its correct use and told her where she’d fallen short. She knew very well where she’d fallen short.

  “Before we go any further,” the counselor said, “I want you to know we can easily refer you to a facility without picketers. We fully understand the threat to your privacy if you stay with us.”

  “If I’m making things worse for you, I’ll go wherever you want me to.”

  “Never. Never for our sake. But for yours?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Then I’ll need you to fill this out.” She passed a letter of informed consent across her desk. “And we ask that you pay before the procedure. I guess you know we don’t take checks.”

  Renée took three hundreds from her pocket. A technician drew blood from her arm. The counselor led her to a hallway in the basement so that she could leave through a different door.

  All day on Wednesday she thought and wrote about deep seismicity in Tonga. When she came home in the evening she found an envelope from Louis Holland in her mailbox. It had a Boston postmark and no return address. She neither opened it nor threw it away.

  The baseball game she listened to after dinner went into extra innings, the Red Sox finally losing after midnight on a two-base throwing error.

  “Howard,” she said. “Can I see you a second?”

  It was steaming outside. Even in the shade of the big oaks on the lawn of the Peabody Museum the heat had grounded most winged insects. The squirrels were very listless. Howard put his hands in the pockets of his yachting pants and bounced on his toes. “What?”

  “I’m having an abortion today. I want you to pick me up afterwards.”

  “OK.”

  She told him where to be. He nodded, hardly listening. She told him again where to be. She said it was very important that he be there.

  “Yep.”

  “So I’ll see you sometime between four-thirty and five-thirty.”

  “Yep.”

  “You don’t mind doing this?”

  He pursed his lips and shook his head.

  “And you’ll definitely be there,” she said.

  “Yep.”

  “At four-thirty.”

  “Yep.”

  “OK, then.” The shock waves from a helicopter passing overhead made her lungs vibrate. “Thank you.”

  In her office she listened to the radio. Tuning briefly to WSNE, she heard an advertisement for Sunnyvale Farms convenience st
ores, followed by snatches of the Gospel of John. She took the letter from Louis Holland out of her shoulder bag, held it up to the light, and put it back. Outside her window, disappointed tourists were shaking their heads stoically. She didn’t let herself leave Hoffman until one-thirty.

  When she came up from the subway at Kendall Square, she heard the unmistakable blurred, flattened voices of policemen speaking on their radios. Blue flashers fought the whiteness of the afternoon.

  She’d been given a key to the basement door of the clinic, but she’d never planned to use it, and she didn’t now. She passed a foursome of Cambridge cops on the sidewalk and saw what they were waiting for. Fifty members of Stites’s church were standing in front of the clinic, pressed together in their allotted parking space like cows in a cattle car. The cops were waiting for them to cross the yellow tape.

  Across the street, in the shadow of another twenty church members brandishing their placards, two news photographers were taking pictures, and a brassy-looking female reporter was adjusting her audio recording device.

  STOP THE SLAUGHTER. ABORTION IS MURDER. THANKS MOM I LIFE.

  Stites himself was standing at the yellow tape with a megaphone. He must have seen Renée before she saw him, because already, as she left the cops behind her, he was raising the tape. Twelve women ducked under it. In two rows of six they sat down and linked arms in front of the clinic door.

  “We are here to rescue the unborn.” the megaphone said. “We are here to save innocent lives.”

  Traffic was building up in the street. Stites looked straight at Renée. “Everyone here was once no more than a fertilized egg.” his megaphone said. “We are all here by the grace of our Lord and the living love of our parents.”

  Twosomes in blue were taking limp grandmothers and stewardesses by the armpits and dragging them to waiting police vans. The gym teacher dug her heels into sidewalk cracks expertly.