Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  —JOHN LOCKE

  Not noticing any fresh smoke, Louis tapped on the door and pushed it open. His father was sitting in front of the window, rubbing the fur on Drake’s head and looking into the blades of the box fan blowing air at him. Half the bare floor was hidden by staggering piles of photocopies flagged with sheets of self-adhesive notepaper. On the wall above his Macintosh hung a black-and-white photograph of Eileen. She was about four years old, short-haired and elfin and huge-eyed, and she wore a chain of daisies in her hair.

  “Look,” Louis said. “You don’t have to say anything. I just want to say I’m doing my best. I don’t want to hear how bad I am. It’s not really very helpful for me right now. You know, because I already feel like about the biggest jerk on the planet.”

  Drake gave him a sated look, tinged with jealousy. Bob spoke to the fan. “I never said you were bad. I of all people have no right to say that. You don’t even know the high regard I have for you.”

  Louis winced. “You don’t have to say that either, I mean, let’s quit while we’re ahead.”

  “And I suppose my high regard gives rise to unreasonable expectations. I’d hoped that even though you’re upset with your mother, you still might be able to understand what’s going on with her, if I could talk to you. You can’t blame me for trying. I can’t just stand aside while this folly of your grandfather’s destroys the family. I have to do something.”

  “Uh huh. Like what.”

  “Like tell you that we love you.”

  Louis might not have heard him. He turned to a shelf and touched the spines of the library books on it. Then he made a fist and punched the spines. With bent fingers he pulled at his arms and chest as though he were covered with corruption. “Don’t say that!” His voice was a strangled shriek, like no sound he’d ever made. “Don’t say that!”

  His father spun his swivel chair around, Drake leaping free of his lap and bolting from the room. “Lou—”

  “Fuck love. Fuck love.” Louis butted his head against the doorframe. He stumbled out the door and slumped on the landing, holding his head and feeling torn between what he was feeling and what he knew to be a still-optional ability to control himself. He opened his eyes and experienced a moment of clear emptiness, a simultaneous zeroing of all the waves in his brain. Then his father knelt and put his arms around him, and his eyes burned and terrible clots of sharp-edged hurt rose from his chest. He was crying, and there was no longer any way back to the self-respect and pride he’d felt before he started crying. He cried because the thought of stopping and seeing that this self that he had liked so much had been crying in his father’s arms was unbearable. It seemed as if there were a specific organ in his brain which under extreme stimulus produced a sensation of love, more intense than any orgasm, but more dangerous too, because it was even less discriminate. A person could find himself loving enemies and homeless beggars and ridiculous parents, people from whom it had been so easy to live at a distance and towards whom, if in a moment of weakness he allowed himself to love them, he then acquired an eternal responsibility.

  For no apparent reason, Bob took his arms away from Louis. There was a damned look in his eyes. He went down to the kitchen, cracked the metal seal on a Johnnie Walker bottle, and tilted it back. He had to fellate the bottle, sticking the neck well into his mouth, to keep the plastic spout from dribbling whiskey down his chin. The cats tried to climb his legs, coveting the bottle. He filled their water dish. He could hear his son sobbing two floors above him.

  Upstairs, he found him leaning crookedly against the newel post with his glasses off, his eyes small and red, the neck of his T-shirt stretched. He squinted stupidly at his father, who was standing in front of the light.

  “You feeling a little better?” Bob kicked him playfully, with one foot and then the other.

  “What are you kicking me for? Don’t kick me.”

  I’m sorry.

  Louis sighed. He felt deadened, as if some long-accumulated strain or poison had been released from his system. That his thinking was in ruins didn’t really bother him. “There’s something I wanted to say.”

  “Anything you want.”

  “Right. Thanks.” Louis sniffed back a large volume of mucus. “It’s about Mom’s company, Sweeting-Aldren. I just wanted to say they’re causing the earthquakes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they’re literally causing the earthquakes in Boston. This woman I’ve been living with— This woman I was living with— This woman who I just did a really nasty thing to . . .” Louis looked straight ahead, tears pooling again in his eyes. “She’s a seismologist. She’s the most wonderful person, who I just really fucked over. Who I just basically lost. I don’t even know why it happened. I mean, I know why, it’s because she’s a lot older than me—it’s because I loved her so much. Dad. Because I loved her so much. And this other person who’s just my age, who I used to be—. This person came in from Houston.”

  He looked sorrowfully at his father. Then he squeezed his eyes shut, his face crumpling up.

  Bob crouched in front of him. “Call her.”

  He shook his head. “It’s complicated. You can’t get her on the phone, and I don’t even know if I want to. I don’t think I can.” He slid sideways, afraid Bob was going to touch him again. “I don’t want to talk about this. I just had one thing to say, which was the company’s causing the earthquakes, and somehow I’m going to stick it to them, and I know Mom has a lot of stock, and I wasn’t going to tell you, but now I have, and you can tell her if you want. That’s all.”

  “Causing. You said causing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is she sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  Then Bob had to know everything. As busy as a boxer’s manager, he brought Louis toilet paper to blow his nose with, took him to the kitchen and sat him down with ice water and Johnnie Walker, and showered him with questions. Trying to explain it without Renée’s help, Louis thought the whole theory sounded fuzzy and unlikely, but Bob was laughing as he chopped up vegetables and beef and stir-fried them, rating every logical step with a “Good!” or an “Excellent!” One could only admire how methodically he set about mastering the argument. At the table, with each bite of food he picked up in his chopsticks (Louis used a fork), he fitted another fact into place.

  “Nobody suspects the company,” he said over a piece of carrot, “because the earthquakes are so deep.”

  “Right.”

  “And the earthquakes in Ipswich are unrelated.” A strip of beef now. “They’re the cover.”

  “Right.”

  “Just as in New Jersey, when the wind blows out to sea, all the companies double their emissions because no one can catch them at it. The Ipswich earthquakes are the wind blowing east.”

  “Right.”

  “Marvelous! Terrific!” A snow pea pod. “And how does she prove there’s a deep hole?”

  Louis wished his father wouldn’t insist on considering this “her” theory. “She’s—we’ve—been looking for pictures or something. But otherwise, it’s just the two articles.”

  From his soy-stained plate, Bob picked up a broccoli floret and held it at eye level, revolving it like a thought and frowning. “There’s a problem there,” he said. “If she can’t prove for certain that the hole was drilled.”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “No no no. There’s a problem.” Bob turned and frowned at the door to the basement. After a moment he stood up and went downstairs. He returned with an Atlantic Monthly.

  “Eat, eat,” he said, sitting down. He wiped dust off the magazine and showed Louis the cover: THE ORIGIN OF PETROLEUM. February 1986. “Your mother subscribes,” he said. “And I read.”

  Louis eyed the magazine uneasily. The cover story was about the scientist Renée had mentioned, the one named Gold, who believed that petroleum originated deep inside the planet. It said something unflattering about Louis’s love of truth that he was afraid t
o open the magazine—afraid to risk seeing Renée’s theory contradicted. If she had to be wrong, he was happier not knowing it.

  Bob took the magazine and paged through the cover story, running his finger down the columns. When he came to the end, he shook his head.

  “Nix about Sweeting-Aldren. Which, believe me, I would have noticed when I read it. But—and really, I don’t want you to think I personally am not persuaded, because I am, because I know these people and it makes a lot of sense. But the impression you get from this article is that you don’t just drill the hole anywhere. There has to be a very special geology to collect the petroleum that’s coming up. I’m more than willing to believe the company sank a well to pump waste into, but I don’t think they’d go down any twenty thousand feet if five thousand would do. And unfortunately it sounds like your friend’s theory doesn’t hold up unless the hole is very deep. If the geology was correct in western Massachusetts, any hole that’s there should be deep. But if it’s in Peabody it can only be shallow.”

  Louis was sure that Renée would have had an answer to this. “I guess they thought maybe they’d get oil anyway.”

  “Come on, Lou.” Bob leaned forward challengingly. “It has to make sense in the details. If you send me this stuff as a paper to review, I’m going to jump all over you. Oil’s cheap in ’69. Deep holes are tremendously expensive. A shallow hole will do the trick for waste disposal. Your friend’s theory requires the hole to be deep. The Atlantic—which admittedly is not the Bible, but nevertheless—The Atlantic tells me the theory of deep petroleum wasn’t developed until the late seventies. It’s based on space probes from the early seventies. Even if somebody had a theory in 1969—when nobody cared about oil anyway, and Sweeting-Aldren by the way had earnings of better than four bucks a share annually—it must have been based on bad evidence.”

  “Well, that’s what Renée said. It was a bad paper, but it still sort of anticipated the theory later on.”

  “But a bad paper is a bad paper. How’s the company going to know the theory has a future?”

  Louis squirmed like a failing student. “I don’t know. But everything else makes sense.”

  “Do you remember the author’s name? It wasn’t Gold, was it?”

  “Oh, please.” He pushed away his plate. “I know who Gold is. This was some guy named Krasner. Somebody who, he stopped publishing and we have no idea where he went.” He looked at hit father. “What’s wrong?”

  Bob had risen from his chair. He was staring at the liquor cabinet, gravitating towards it. He was suddenly very pale.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Bob turned around as if responding to the sound of his voice, not the content. He looked at him vacantly. “Krasner.”

  “You’re kidding. You’re going to tell me you know him.”

  “Her.”

  “Her?” A seed of fear sprouted in Louis’s stomach.

  “Anna Krasner. A girlfriend of your grandfather’s.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Bob answered slowly, speaking to himself. “Because old Jack made sure I knew. There wasn’t a possession he had that he didn’t make sure I knew was his.”

  “When was this?”

  “Sixty-nine.”

  “Was he married? I mean, to Rita?”

  Bob shook his head. “Not yet. Not for another three years.” He was reading messages on the wall that Louis couldn’t see—worrisome messages, bitter messages. Then, abruptly, he came to himself and sat down. “You feeling OK?”

  “Yeah, fine, drunk,” Louis said.

  “I think I can find her for you, if you want.”

  “That would be great.”

  “You don’t remember Jack very well, do you?”

  “Zero memories.”

  “He was not your ordinary . . . not your ordinary human being. For example, Anna was a very pretty woman, about forty-five years his junior. When we found out he’d remarried, I was sure it was going to be her. But it turns out to be Rita, who everyone agreed was not a particularly attractive woman. Not to say an outright fright, although that was my opinion. We’d met her when she was at the girlfriend stage, when she was his secretary, but that was years earlier. I’d assumed she was long gone from the picture. And there are a lot of men where you wouldn’t have been surprised, but not Jack. He cared about how a woman looked, that and how old she was, more than anything.”

  “Uh huh.”

  A moth beat against the screen in the back door, unable to follow the smell of prairie that was creeping inside. Some small animal made the tall grass crackle. The cats crossed the kitchen, single file, and pressed their whiskers against the screen. Bob asked what Louis and Renée had planned to do with their information.

  “I guess make sure the company pays,” Louis said. “We disagreed about the timing.”

  “You’ll want to let your mother know in advance.”

  “All right.”

  “Had you thought of that?”

  “I tried not to.”

  Bob nodded. “That’s something else that was peculiar about Jack. Why he put all his money in Sweeting-Aldren stock. Because it wasn’t as if he earned it all in stock and then failed to spread it out. The records show a well-balanced portfolio until the early seventies, when he made his new will—I suppose after he’d married Rita. Then he retired from the company and systematically bought stock in it until that’s all there was. A piece of folly that’s already cost your mother a lot of money.”

  “Boo hoo.”

  “What we can’t figure out is why Jack did it. He was a company man, that’s where he made his fortune, and I don’t know how many times he told me it was the best-run corporation in the country. However many times I saw him in my life. A dozen times. But he loved money as much as he loved women, and he was anything but stupid. I simply can’t see him making emotional decisions. There must have been some greed involved, somewhere that I can’t see. This Canadian a while back, Campeau, the one who owned department stores. He sank all his money in his own company, and all his kids’ money too, to the tune of about five hundred million. Next thing he knew, the shares were nearly worthless. If you’re greedy, and you believe in yourself, I suppose you think, why put any money at all in things that won’t pay the maximum return?”

  “Yeah, why not,” Louis said.

  “Well. I’ll tell you why not. Because he bought shares at any price and any ratio. Every time something of his matured, he converted it to Sweeting-Aldren common, no matter what the price, and this was after he’d retired. Wouldn’t you call that a little irrational?”

  “Sure, maybe, if I understood stocks.”

  Bob leaned forward suddenly, resting his elbows on his knees, and focused his reddened, enthusiastic eyes on Louis.

  “Jack’s girlfriend,” he said, “is a company chemist. The company drills a disposal well three or four times deeper than it has to be. The chemist disappears. Jack marries a fright. He converts all his assets to company stock at any cost. When he dies he leaves them in a trust fund for the fright. You don’t see anything there?” If the question had been put to Louis by anyone else, or at any other time in the last ten years, he would only have been irritated, figuring that if a person had something to say they should just go ahead and say it. What he felt now, though, was embarrassment for not seeing what his father saw. He was embarrassed to have to shake his head.

  “No,” he said. “You have to tell me.”

  13

  The Countrey, according to the first Englishmen to see it, more resembled a boundless green Parke than a Wildernesse. From the rocky shores inland as farre as a man could journey in a week, there stretched a Forrest suche as teemed with Dere, and Elke, and Beares, and Foxes; with Quailes and ruffed Grouse and wilde Turkies so innocent and Plentiful that a man could cast aside his Musket and hunt them with bare hands. There were majestical Pines and Hickeries and Chesnuts and Oakes, towering to heighths beyond the ken of any European, and so widely spaced (as severall
Travellers noted), that an Armie could march through with ease. Beneath the trees and in the Intervalls, were found neither Brambles nor wooddy Undergrowth, but a low, softe Carpet of sweete Grasses and Hearbes that the Dere and Elke did much affect.

  At the dawn of the seventeenth Century of our Lord, the land by Masathulets Bay had been relieved of its trees, by Indians in need of fire-woode. Lush Medowes and shrubby Hills stretched westward from the mouth of the River Charles as farre as the eye could see. Duske might fall at mid-day when a million of wilde Pidgeons filled the sky, and in the spawning Season the waters of fresh Streames congealed into Silver, with Smelts and Sturgions and Basses and Alewives swimming up-stream in suche Multitudes, that it seemed a man might step across them like a Bridge. Oysters in the Bay had foot-long Shells and could not be eaten in one bite. The soyle in many places was black and rich as Caveare.

  Although the first Englishmen to settle in this Parke did nearly starve, yet the Indian men were observed to live more like unto Kings—working little and wanting little, and hunting and fishing at theyre Leisure. It was the Indians who, once or twice in a yeare, set the Fires that spred quickly and harmlessly over vast tracts of Forrest, therebye consuming Briers and much useless Woode, killing Fleas and Mice, and permitting of the growth of sweete Herbage. By the time God created the Sun & the Moone & the Planets, these Indians had called this Land theyre own for three thousand of years; and after another six thousand of years it was yet more like a Garden, than on the day when the first Human Beeing trod upon it.

  In spring and summer, the Indian Women laboured to plant Maze in mounds, and tended it along with Squashes, Pumpkins, Melons, Tabacco, and the Beanes that climed the corne-stalks. Theyre hap-hazard fields were Nurseries for theyre children too. The men paddled to sea in hollow tree trunks, pursuing Seales and Walrosses, and fishing for codde-fish, and harpooning Porpisces and Whales. If theyre tree trunks sank, as was like to happen, they would swim for two hours to reach shore. Everywhere they chanced to look upon the Land, were Blueberries, Strawberries, Goosberries, Rasberries, Cranberries and Currans. Women and children gathered them, and captured the Birds, which came to feed. They trapped Hares and Porpentines and other small beests. Most of the Maze and Beanes which they harvested, was put away for winter, whilst the rest was eaten, along with Chesnuts and Acomes and Ground-nuts and Scallops and Clammes and Crabs and Mussles and Pumpkins, at Revels suche as lasted many weeks. Then, the Dere and Beares beeing fattest, the men went on hunting trips deep into the woods. Women dragged carcases back to the camps, and made Cloathes of the skins, and processed the Meat. When the men had luck, they ate ten Meales a day, sleeping in between them. When they were out of luck, they went hungrie for the nonce; for, the next summer always brought Abundance.