Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

“You make me feel so rotten,” she insisted. “You make me feel so bad about myself. You always have, all my whole life, my whole, whole life,” she’d begun to cry, “and I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want you to stay here. I want you to find someplace else to stay. I have to go to work every day now. I have to go to this horrible stupid bank every single day with no vacation for ten months, and if I want promotions I have to work at night and Saturdays. And I just don’t want you to make me feel so bad. You can stay here as long as you want, but I wanted you to know.”

  “I’ll leave right now,” he said calmly.

  “No. You have to stay. I’ll feel guilty if you go. But I don’t want you here. I don’t know what I want.” She stamped her foot. “Why am I suddenly so unhappy? Why do you do this to me?”

  “I’ll go.”

  She spun around and, purple-faced, bent over him and cried, “You stay here, you stay here, you’re not going anywhere! You can’t go. You don’t have anyplace to go. You stay here because you’re my brother and I don’t want you to go. If you go I’ll never ever ever forgive you.”

  Then the door slammed and Louis was left alone in the room, squeezing the penny he hadn’t given her.

  For three days they kept out of each other’s way. She left in the morning before Louis was awake, and he returned from a day of what she assumed was job-hunting at eight or nine at night and went straight to his room. By Thursday afternoon she was feeling attractive and remorseful again. She came home with her new French string bag filled with food and was surprised to find Louis in the living room. Was it possible that he’d been spending his days not job-hunting but watching TV? He was wearing his glasses again, and sitting with bowed head and folded hands on the sofa facing the video equipment, which was silent.

  “I hope you haven’t eaten dinner,” she said.

  He gave no sign of having heard her. He stared at the slatefaced TV and rubbed his thumbs together.

  “Is something wrong?” she said, resisting an influx of irritation.

  His mouth opened, but only silence came out.

  “Well, I’m making a nice dinner,” she said. “So I hope you’ll be ready to eat it.”

  As soon as she went to the kitchen she heard the front door open and close. She turned on the kitchen TV and put a Perdue chicken in the oven (in France she’d learned that you could have warm meat in salads—poulet, canard, and the like), and then for a few minutes she forgot where she was and what she was doing, because of the news on Channel 4.

  . . . was tragically gunned down in what police are calling the worst outbreak yet of pro-life violence. Penny Spanghorn is standing by, live, at the scene of this tragic, tragic shooting. Penny?

  Jerry, this afternoon Renée Seitchek went to New Cambridge Health Associates in Cambridge, where the so-called Church of Action in Christ was performing the latest in its series of illegal door-blocking actions. Police arrested twelve demonstrators for attempting to harass Seitchek. At about five o’clock Seitchek came out of the clinic and spoke with reporters in what was said to be a very emotional confrontation. She stated that she’d had a—she had terminated a pregnancy. Tragically, it now appears that she may have paid for this statement with her life. At about five-thirty she returned to her home here on Pleasant Avenue in Somerville, where she was greeted with a hail of gunfire from an unidentified assailant in a parked car across the street. Shortly before six o’clock, Channel 4 News received an anonymous phone call from an extremist group taking credit for the tragic shooting, and I quote: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Somerville police say they received a similar phone call at about the same time . . .

  Eileen stared, stricken, at Penny Spanghorn. She was weeping over the arugula and radicchio in her salad spinner—weeping not just for Renée and Louis but for herself as well—when Peter came home from work. She told him that Renée was in critical condition with severe chest and abdominal injuries.

  “Shit,” he said, paling. “Is that horrible?”

  “It’s so rotten. Everything is so, so rotten.”

  “It is truly horrible all right.”

  The Church of Action in Christ, said Philip Stites, condemns the wicked and cowardly shooting of Renée Seitchek this afternoon. We in the church deplore all forms of human violence, whether it’s violence against an unborn baby or violence against a citizen of the Commonwealth. Renée Seitchek is a woman of conscience and a creature of God. We mourn her injuries, and we extend our deepest sympathy to her family and friends and join them in sending her our prayers and love.

  It was after midnight when Eileen and Peter, watching but not listening to Arsenio Hall in their airconditioned bedroom, heard Louis come in. Eileen went to see him. She was wearing her favorite summer nightshirt, a light cotton Bennington jersey, extra large.

  Louis was sitting on the floor of his room, applying a folded Kleenex to the bleeding, popped blisters that covered both his feet. His sweat-soaked shirt was spattered with blood and clung tightly to his breast. His black oxfords, dusty and exhausted-looking, lay next to him. Apparently he hadn’t been wearing any socks.

  “Are you hurt?” Eileen said.

  “They shot Renée,” he answered in a thin, parched voice.

  “I know. I know. I can’t stop crying.”

  “They shot Renée.”

  “But she’s OK, Louis. They said she’s OK,” although this wasn’t strictly accurate. Channel 4 would only say she hadn’t died yet.

  Louis prodded the raw flesh of his feet, tearing at the ragged skin with his fingers. Eileen, watching, felt as if she’d fallen and no one would help her. Even though they were suffering so much more than she was, it seemed to her that Louis and Renée had teamed up to rob her of an inheritance. She felt a flash of jealousy and anger, and in its light she saw that there was an absolute standard of goodness in the world, an ideal that she was infinitely far from achieving. Louis continued to press his thumbnails into his candy-red sores for no other purpose than the pain it brought him. She knew she had to stay with him and comfort him, but she couldn’t bear to see him do that to his feet, and so she left him and lay down by Peter and let guilt and darkness swallow her.

  He had run down the stairs and out onto Marlborough Street. The twin lines of brick town houses stretching to the west framed a yellow sun whose plasma had condensed in drops on green thunderstorm-soaked shrubs, in steaming beads on car hoods, in brilliant, smoking sheets on asphalt. A boom box in a basement window rang with the clash and assonance of Sonic Youth. Running, he saw the red high-tops and black roller skates of urban students, the white bunny feet of women in their commuter sneakers, the stiletto heels and penny loafers of real-estate agents, the paws of dogs, the laceless half-soled boots of men with no address. Keys jingled and car doors closed. A man (it had to be a man because hardly any women did it) whistled.

  He ran up Mass Ave. and over the river down which a flood might just have roared, flushing all the rental sailboats and waterlogged McDonald’s trash into the sewer of Boston Harbor and leaving in its wake an earthy freshwater pungency. He pushed through the sluggish crowds vented by the subway at Central Square, ran up past the battalion of Volvos and Subarus soon to be carrying free-range chickens and baby zucchini away from Bread & Circus on Prospect Street, and up through the population densities surrounding Inman Square, where Portuguese immigrants and obese native East Cantabrigians mingled with Harvard comparative-lit grad students no more easily than Pastene Brand olive oil mixes with Poland Spring mineral water, and mufflers leaked or scraped on the pavement, and there were suspicious blackish sediments in every puddle, and a blond bearded youth with a lavender bandanna around his neck walked down the middle of the sidewalk singing “Sugar Magnolia” loudly.

  By the time he crossed Union Square the sun had fallen into clouds, leaving a humid dusk that smelled of car exhaust and spoiled fruit. He limped up Walnut Street, neck outstretched, feet barely clearing the sidewalk joints, heart working shallowly, futilely, as thou
gh his blood in its heat had become too thin to pump. Near the summit of the hill he began to pass cars that had slowed to squeeze past or gawk at the Channel 4 and Channel 7 vans parked just short of the corner of Pleasant Avenue. A squad car blocked access to the street. A second squad car and the less overtly marked sedan of Somerville’s police chief stood just beyond number 7’s chain link fence and its burden of honeysuckle and crime-scene tape. Across the street an officer was taking pictures of the gutter, in which, as one bystander explained to another, some shell casings had come to light. A detective was transferring to a form on a clipboard the eager statements of two boys, one pint-sized and one gallon-sized, whom Louis recognized as the male contingent of the twenty-four-hour haunters of the front porch opposite number 7.

  “One-seventy-six D V N, green on white,” the larger boy was saying. “I wrote it down, see, one-seventy-six D V N. See? Right here. One-seventy-six D V N.”

  All of Pleasant Avenue had collected behind the crime-scene tape. There were the endo- and ectomorphic teenaged girls blowing bubbles the size and color of babies’ heads, the silent workingmen with whiskey sunburns and lips pursed in resignation. There were educated mothers holding Alexes and Jessicas in their arms, size-18 heads of household whose uncharitable view of the world the tragic shooting had confirmed, a pair of twin albino Mormons with their briefcases, and a quartet of wiry Africans in shiny shorts and knee-high stockings, the smallest of them carrying a soccer ball. As soon as Louis had caught his breath a little and stilled the quaking of his knees, he pushed his way up to the tape. Through the open gate of number 7 he saw the blood on the drying concrete walk, diluted and smeared by the rain like red watercolor paint. He saw blood darkening the edges of the triangular puddles in the depressed corners of the sidewalk squares. He saw a faint and mottled band of it on the face of the lowermost concrete step. He gave a sharp, brief cry of pain and disbelief. A cop talking to the somber Penny Spanghorn and her camera-headed companion was making dramatic gestures with his arms, aiming his finger like a gun.

  “Where did they take her?” Louis said.

  “Somerville Hospital,” replied several people at once.

  Headlights were coming on among the eastbound cars on Highland Avenue, paired pure white spots seeming to emerge straight from the blood in the sky above the distant Davis Square. Looming above dark side streets and dark trees with moodily shifting branches and streetlights still in the early pink stages of ignition, the hospital projected from the slope of Somerville’s central ridge like a tanker at twilight, the lighted windows and dozen bristling antennas of its bridge-like tower signaling life and vigilance on the dark, deep ocean. In the parking lot outside the emergency room, the hydraulics of a Channel 5 van were purring as it retracted its dish.

  The hospital’s small lobby was furnished with oblongs of foam upholstered in electric blue. Howard Chun was slouched on one of them. There was blood on the knees of his yachting pants and bright smears of it on his thighs, where, like a butcher, he must have wiped his hands.

  “Where is she?” Louis said.

  Howard cocked his head towards the interior of the hospital. “Surgery,” he said. He stood up and began to circle the waiting area, tearing a leaf off a potted plant, doing vertical push-ups against the windows, stopping to drive his bloodstained knees into the foam of various oblongs, and telling Louis what he’d seen. He didn’t sound like someone who loved or liked or knew Renée or was even particularly thinking about her. He was like an adolescent who until now had seen violence only in Hollywood movies and so was driven to recount the dreadful thing he’d just seen the world do, to convey the impact to Louis, to try to impress or harrow or hurt the person who hadn’t been there and who it was obvious did love her and who could imagine whatever details he left out.

  She was lying on her side at the bottom of the stoop of number 7. Her legs were tucked up and her wrists were crossed across her chest and there was blood soaking through her jeans above one knee and blood covering the forearm she had pressed to her stomach. The kids across the street had already called 911 and were standing right behind Howard, giving him conflicting and specious pieces of advice. Renée was producing the lonely, high-pitched, unaffected moans of a really sick child. Her face was the color of cold bacon grease sweating in a humid room. She said Howard and Get somebody and It hurts, it hurts. Then she stopped speaking and her breath rasped loudly in her windpipe and the paramedics came and dislodged Howard, the broad male backs in white shirts dwarfing the little package of dwindling female life as they tried to sort her out. They gave her oxygen through her nose and attached her to a portable monitor. They exchanged data orally, blood pressure 80/50, pulse 120, respirations 36. A lobed tide of blood was spreading across the concrete, seeming to boil as the raindrops fell. Questions: Could she breathe? Did she have feeling in her legs? Where did it hurt? She blinked and winced as the rain fell in her eyes. In a timid voice, as if daring to disturb them only because it seemed important, she asked them if she was going to die. A white shirt said, “You’ll be OK.” He said, “You got the Ringer’s?” While the police took names and addresses from Howard, Renée was strapped into the ambulance with wide-bore IVs in both her arms. Her T-shirt and bra and one pants leg had been cut away, and a thick square of gauze beneath her right breast was soaking up her blood. Howard sat with his knees nearly in his face and his hand on her chilled wet forehead as the siren came on and surged hopefully upward in pitch and volume. The clear plastic tubes wagged with the undulations and irregularities in Highland Avenue. A white shirt said, “Renée, you’re doing great.” But her teeth were chattering and she didn’t answer.

  “You know what they do?” Howard said. He rebounded from a blue oblong and checked Louis for a reaction. “They take a tube, got a sharp point. They stab it through the ribs. She’s awake, they stab it right through. Then they start putting suction. I heard her when they did it. Police was there, we heard it.”

  He checked again for Louis’s reaction. Louis’s face was no longer flushed from the run, but he was sweatier than ever. He panted and followed Howard fearfully with his eyes as if Howard had been physically torturing him. He said, “Do you hate her?”

  “They take her surgery,” Howard said.

  “I asked: Do you hate her?”

  Howard scrunched up his face. “What you think?”

  Louis couldn’t bear to look at him, couldn’t bear to hear another of his short, croaking sentences. “I wish you didn’t exist,” he said.

  “They started six-thirty,” Howard said.

  Louis put his fingers behind his glasses and rubbed his eyes. A repulsive field drove him toward the automatic doors, but when he passed Howard he swung around and shoved both his fists into his ribs, giving him a shove intended to land him on his back. But there was a lot of inertia to Howard. He staggered and caught himself from falling just as Louis charged in and met, quite unexpectedly, a wicked slap across his left cheek followed by another across his right. “Uh!” he said, swinging blindly as his glasses sailed away. Howard had a height advantage. He was able to keep shoving Louis in the head and collarbone and shoulders, knocking him back each time he charged, retreating in a circle around a cluster of blue oblongs. “Stop fighting me,” he said in a crabby, priggish bark. “Stop fighting me.” Louis grabbed his shirt and landed several solid jabs to his gut. Howard whaled away at his cheeks with his open hands, but here Louis’s superior tolerance of pain came into play, as he withstood the increasingly earnest slaps and managed to topple Howard into an oblong and then onto his back and, grunting with exertion, pinned Howard’s arms with his knees and began to pummel his cheeks and nose and ears and eyes but did not pay enough attention to the pinned arms, one of which worked free and delivered a ringing blow to the side of his head, which was followed by a frightening and irresistible loss of breath as a third party, shouting “What the hell are you doing?” got a choke hold on him and dragged him off Howard, raising him onto his toes and threatening t
o raise him higher before he finally went limp.

  “What the hell are you doing? There’s sick people here, there’s hurt people here. Look what you done to this fella. You oughtta die with shame doing a thing like that here.”

  Howard’s nose was like a decanter, well behaved while he was on his back but pouring a stream of blood onto the carpeting as soon as he sat up.

  “You still got that devil in you? Or you gonna leave off now?”

  “It’s OK,” Louis gasped, limp.

  “Sheesh,” said his captor, releasing him and dropping to his knees by Howard. He shook open a handkerchief and applied it to the bleeding nose. “Pinch it, pinch it.”

  Louis straightened the frames of his glasses, which were brand-new and had cost him most of the cash his father had given him when he left Evanston. Putting them on, he confirmed that the man who’d been choking him was Philip Stites. Drops of Howard’s blood had fallen on the minister’s khaki pants. He looked up at Louis reproachfully and then he did a double take, his expression softening as he squinted through his tortoiseshells, trying to place him.

  “News with a Twist?” Louis said.

  “Ah. The Antichrist. You find yourself another job?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’m real sorry to hear that,” Stites said glibly, losing interest. He stood up and smoothed back his corn-silk hair. “Neither of you wouldn’t happen to be here to see how Renée Seitchek’s doing?”

  Neither Louis nor Howard answered. Howard was reclining against an oblong and squeezing his nose as if something stank here. He raised his narrowed, red eyes and looked at Louis with the intimacy shared by lovers and others who grapple on the floor.

  “What’s it to you?” Louis said to Stites.

  “I take it that’s a yes?”

  “Take it however you want,” Louis said. “What’s it to you?”

  “Well. I guess that’s a fair enough question. I can tell you I saw Renée a couple nights back, and I saw her today, and I think it’s a terrible thing what’s happened. And I want to pray for her. And I want to know she’s alive.”