Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “You’re OK?” Eileen said.

  Melanie drained her glass and held it aloft. “I am triumphant.” she said. “Triumphant!”

  . . . structural damage, and the major arteries are jammed. From what I can see here, it appears that fire fighters are making no attempt to enter the installation. There is a . . . choking . . . harsh . . . smoke in the air, and I’m sure the fire chief is concerned for the safety of his men.

  “How is she?” Peter said, also maskless.

  Eileen rolled her eyes and turned away. “Triumphant.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Holland.”

  “Hello, Peter.” Melanie emptied the last drops of champagne into her glass and returned the bottle to the bucket upside down. “Tell me how your family is. Are they all fine?”

  Eileen heard a loud hiccup as she started back up the hill. She couldn’t remember ever missing Louis, but she missed him now.

  “Eileen, honey, there’s more champagne in the refrigerator, you can offer it to Peter’s family. Peter, bring some chairs down. There are snacks there too, Eileen. You’ll see them.”

  Mrs. Stoorhuys was still wearing her mask. She stopped by Eileen on the dew-slicked grass. “How is she?”

  “Oh, she’s great,” Eileen said.

  “Such a lovely woman. Such a lovely house.” Janet tiptoed down the hill and touched Melanie on the shoulder. “Melanie?”

  Melanie looked up at her and screamed. The radio was barking about the fire in Peabody. Eileen lay down on the grass and fell asleep.

  How long it took to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you were living in the black. How long it took even to get from Lynnfield to the Fens of Boston when the expressways were closed and the power was out. Louis figured that he and his Civic were averaging about the speed of a cantering horse as they nosed south through Wakefield, Stoneham, Melrose. He stopped to consult his map, he stopped at damaged bridges and had to circumvent. He stopped and helped a Cambodian man get his rust-blasted Gremlin out of a ditch and on the road to Peabody, where his wife and children were. He gave the man his gas mask when they parted.

  The streets with their curbs and sidewalks and sewer holes were not anchored to the ground. Ten Melrose firemen walked away from an extinguished blaze with the easy gait of people leaving church, their backs to the black timbers that had risen victoriously from the earth. A library building had been incontinent of bricks, and the proximity of strong motion, the radiant and lingering randomness of it all, changed the rubble’s stillness from an elementary quality into a kind of pain, an immanence.

  The eighteenth century haunted the unfathomable side streets, so latent in the darkness that Louis almost expected to hear the thud of horse hooves in the mud. He saw how black the nights must have been in a town center two hundred years ago, before there were gaslights and long before the insomnia of the current age had spread insomniac hallucinations in strips along the edges of its towns and made the outdoors indoors: how the buildings themselves must have rested, as sightless and dead-seeming as the people asleep inside them. How scary and pretty those nights must have been. How they must have made some kind of true repose and true solitude a possibility.

  But that age was only an echo now, dying if you tried to come too close, and wherever he passed people—they weren’t in the business districts or at the malls but on the residential streets—they were glued to automobiles with lights and radios and engines running, and he could not deny that these little tableaux, repeated innumerable times as he proceeded south, were the only things he saw all night that felt bona fide. The stationary headlights drove beams of reality through the supposed fact of the earthquake and lit up patches of the real foliage and real houses that were indifferently surviving the darkness. And the radio, though he kept his own unit mainly off, was the voice of his own age, the one voice in the night he understood. The broken windows and dangling wires and ambulances and injured faces looming up in the night were meaningless. Meaningless because he could look at them and somehow feel no vengefulness, none at all. Not even by the expressway back in Lynnfield, as he’d stood by the first dead person he’d ever seen, had there been any room in his heart for anger. He couldn’t connect the earthquake-killed thing at his feet to any actions within a scheme of right and wrong, couldn’t bring himself to think: the company is responsible for this and they must pay. And yet how could you believe in responsibility if responsibility had limits? How could an earthquake caused by the cupidity and faithlessness of real individual men nonetheless become purely an act of God, with an act of God’s windy inhuman vacuity? Remembering the dead man’s crumpled arms and cradled head, he wasn’t even able to feel horror. The body now seemed like the purse-snatchings he’d witnessed in Chicago, or like the tattered man he’d once seen lying with his pants down jerking off in the bushes of Hermann Park in Houston, an image as unreal as everything else about this earthquake, as unreal as war reportage or assassination footage on television, except that unreality wasn’t quite the word either for what he’d felt there, standing in poison ivy in the last decade of the twentieth century, surrounded by aftermath and wondering why he lived and what a world that encompassed death was really made of. The word was mystery.

  He was traveling a parkway in Everett or Medford (he wasn’t exactly sure which) when lights came on and it became apparent that the city and the inner suburbs were far from fully wrecked. A number of houses had dropped to their knees or lost walls, but even the worst streets looked better than an average ghetto block. Irish youths were milling on the roof of a ball-field dugout, drinking beer. Children were playing in the restored light the way children of the desert play in rainstorms. He let himself relax a little, and immediately felt sick with exhaustion and the abject regret that staying up all night had always caused him.

  The sky was pink and yellow when he reached Back Bay. Unreality still adhered to the various fixtures from which destruction had emanated—to the buckled sidewalk, to the wet crack angling across Marlborough Street, to the loose bricks and cast concrete finials and chunks of masonry that lay on the grass or pavement with pointed, disingenuous motionlessness, as if hoping to pass as fragments of a Roman temple or boulders at the bottom of a cliff, things that hadn’t budged in centuries. Eileen and Peter’s building, however, was standing just the way Louis had left it.

  At Brigham & Women’s a few stragglers, most of them old, sat unmoving outside the emergency room, trying just to be objects until a doctor could turn them back into people with testimony, stories. Broken bottles and fallen tiles had been swept into tidy heaps, and the nurses were brisk and unpanicked. A familiar one sent Louis to the bed where Renée, he saw, was sleeping.

  17

  All Monday, all Tuesday, the earthquake held the country hostage. Giant headlines marching in lockstep like fascist troops booted everything else off the face of front pages, and in the afternoon people trying to watch soap operas were subjected to special reports instead. Major-league baseball canceled two nights’ worth of games in case fans had any ideas of taking refuge from the news in balls and strikes. Even the Vice President was forced to cut short his swing through Central American capitals and fly to Boston.

  It’s not pleasant to be held hostage; it’s not just a figure of speech. In a decadent society people can slowly drift or slowly be drawn by the culture of commerce into yearning for violence. Maybe people have a deep congenital awareness that no civilization lasts forever, that the most peaceful prosperity will someday have to end, or maybe it’s just human nature. But war can begin to seem like a well-earned fireworks display, and a serial killer (as long as he’s in a distant city) like a man to root for. A decadent society teaches people to enjoy advertisements of violence against women, any suggestion of the yanking down of women’s bra straps and the seizing of their breasts, the raping of women, the tying up of women’s limbs with rope, the puncturing of women’s bellies, the hearing of their screams. But then some actual woman they know gets abducted and raped and not only f
ails to enjoy it but becomes angry or injured for a lifetime, and suddenly they are hostages to her experience. They feel sick with constriction, because all those sexy images and hints have long since become bridges to span the emptiness of their days.

  And now the disaster which had been promising to make you feel that you lived in a special time, a real time, a time of the kind you read about in history books, a time of suffering and death and heroism, a time that you’d remember as easily as you’d forget all those years in, which you’d done little but futilely pursue sex and romance through your purchases: now a disaster of these historic proportions had come, and now you knew it wasn’t what you’d wanted either. Not this endless endless televised repetition of clichés and earnest furrowings of reportorial brows, not these nightmare faces of anchorpeople in pancake staring at you hour after hour. Not this footage of the same few bloody bodies on stretchers. Not this sickening proliferation of identical newspaper articles running identical interviews with survivors who said it was scary and identical statements from scientists who said it was not well understood. Not these photos of buildings that were damaged but not obliterated. Not this same vision, over and over, of the smoking ruin in Peabody on which an ordinary morning sun shone because the sun still rose because the world wasn’t changed because your life wasn’t changed. You would have preferred the more honest meaninglessness of a World Series, the entertainment of an event towards which months of expectation and weeks of hype could build, bridging a summer and fall’s emptiness and producing, in conclusion, an entirely portable set of numbers which the media couldn’t rub your face in for more than about an hour. Because you could see now that the earthquake was neither history nor entertainment. It was simply an unusually awful mess. And although the earthquake too could be reduced to a score—injuries 1,300, deaths 71, magnitude 6.1—it was the kind of score that your righteous captors felt justified in repeating until you went insane and dissolved in screams which they, however, behind their microphones and computer monitors, didn’t hear.

  The picture that made Monday evening’s front pages around the world showed the ruins of Sweeting-Aldren’s facilities in Peabody. Twenty-three of the deaths and 110 of the injuries had been suffered by company employees caught in the initial explosion of two process lines and the ensuing general conflagration. The earthquake had disabled various fire-control systems, and balls of combusting ethylene and sheets of flaming benzene had ignited storage tanks. A blast apparently caused by ammonium nitrate leveled process lines that otherwise might not have burned. White clouds rained nitric acid and hydrochloric acid and organic reagents, the hydrocarbons and halogens combining in an environment as high-temperature and low-pH as the surface of Venus, but considerably more toxic. Cooling and drifting, the vapor plume descended on residential neighborhoods and left a whitish, oily residue on everything it touched.

  By Monday afternoon EPA officials in Mylar suits were measuring dioxin levels in the parts-per-hundred-thousand on streets immediately to the north of the installation. Birds littered the ground beneath trees like fallen, mold-cloaked fruit. Cats and squirrels and rabbits lay dead on lawns or convulsing and retching under hedges. The weather was lovely, temperature in the high seventies, humidity low. National Guard units in tear-gas gear worked methodically northward, evacuating recalcitrant homeowners with force when it was necessary, barricading streets with Warning Orange barrels, and encircling the most contaminated area, designated Zone I, with flimsy orange plastic fencing material that had apparently been stockpiled with this very purpose in mind.

  By Tuesday evening, Zone I had been completely isolated. It consisted of five and a half square miles of gravel pits, shabby residential streets, trash-glutted wetlands, and some worn-out factories owned by companies that had long been scaling back. Already several Peabody residents who had been at home when the plume descended were in the hospital, complaining of dizziness or extreme fatigue. The houses they’d left behind, now visitable only by National Guard patrols and news teams, had the aspect of junked sofas—the bad legs, the weakened joints, the skins torn here and there to expose an internal chaos of springs and crumbled stuffing. Earthquake damage was similar in the much larger Zone II to the north, but here the contamination was spotty and ill defined enough that the Guard was letting adult residents return during daylight hours to secure their houses and collect personal belongings.

  News was being gathered in Peabody round the clock. Camera crews skirmished with the Guard, and reporters addressed their audience in gas masks. Some were so affected by what they’d seen, so unexpectedly overwhelmed by the news, that they dropped their pious earnest poses and spoke like the intelligent human beings you’d always figured they had to be. They asked Guardsmen if any looters had been shot. They asked environmental officials if people living just outside the zones were at risk. They asked everyone what their impressions were. But the big question, not only for the press but for the EPA, the thirty thousand traumatized and outraged residents of Zones I and II, the citizens of Boston, and all Americans as well was: What did the management of Sweeting-Aldren have to say? And it was on Monday afternoon, when the question had become inescapable, that the press discovered that there was literally no one around to answer it. Sweeting-Aldren’s corporate headquarters, situated, as it happened, just west of Zone II, had been gutted by a fire which local fire departments, trying to fight it in the hours after the earthquake, said appeared to be a case of arson. The building’s sprinkler system had been shut down manually, and firemen found traces of an “incendiary liquid” near the remains of the ground-floor records center. The wives of the company’s CEO and of its four senior vice presidents either could not be located or else told reporters that they hadn’t seen their men since late Sunday evening, shortly before the earthquake struck.

  At five o’clock on Monday, just in time for a live interview on the local news, Channel 4 tracked down company spokesman Ridgely Holbine at a marina in Marblehead. He was wearing swim trunks and a faded HARVARD CREW T-shirt and was inspecting his sailboat for earthquake damage.

  PENNY SPANGHORN: What is the company’s response to this terrible tragedy?

  HOLBINE: Penny, I can’t give you any official comment at this time.

  SPANGHORN: Can you tell us what caused this terrible tragedy?

  HOLBINE: I’ve received no information on that. I can speculate privately that the earthquake was a factor.

  SPANGHORN: Are you in communication with the company’s management?

  HOLBINE: No, Penny, I’m not.

  SPANGHORN: Is the company prepared to take responsibility for the terrible contamination in Peabody? Will you take a leading role in the cleanup?

  HOLBINE: I can’t give you any official comment.

  SPANGHORN: What is your personal opinion of this terrible tragedy?

  HOLBINE: I feel sorry for the workers who were killed and injured. I feel sorry for their families.

  SPANGHORN: Do you feel personally responsible in any way? For this terrible tragedy?

  HOLBINE: It’s an act of God. There’s no controlling that. We all regret the loss of life, though.

  SPANGHORN: What about the estimated thirty thousand people who are homeless tonight as a result of this tragedy?

  HOLBINE: As I said, I have no authority to speak for the company. But it’s undeniably regrettable.

  SPANGHORN: What do you have to say to those people?

  HOLBINE: Well, they shouldn’t eat any food from their houses. They should shower carefully and try to find other places to stay. Drink bottled water. Get plenty of rest. That’s what I’m doing.

  Tuesday morning brought the news that Sweeting-Aldren CEO Sandy Aldren had spent all of Monday in New York City liquidating the company’s negotiable securities and transferring every dollar the company had in cash to bank accounts in a foreign country. Then, on Monday night, he’d vanished. At first it was assumed that the foreign accounts in question were Swiss, but records showed that all the cash—a
bout $30 million—had in fact flowed to the First Bank of Basseterre in St. Kitts.

  On Tuesday afternoon Aldren’s personal attorney in Boston, Alan Porges, came forward and acknowledged that a “cash reserve” had been set up to cover the “contractually guaranteed severance payments” of the company’s five “ranking officers.” These payments amounted to just over $30 million, and Porges said that to the best of his knowledge all five officers had officially resigned on Monday morning and were therefore entitled to their cash payments effective immediately. He declined to speculate on the men’s whereabouts.

  The networks had rebroadcast excerpts from the interview with Porges no more than five or six times before a new bombshell detonated. Seismologist Larry Axelrod summoned reporters to MIT and announced that he had seen evidence suggesting that Sweeting-Aldren was responsible for nearly all the seismic activity of the last three months, including the main shock on Sunday night. He said the evidence had been provided by Renée Seitchek of Harvard, “an excellent scientist” who was still in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds. A woman from the Globe asked if it was possible that Seitchek had been shot not by pro-life extremists but by a Sweeting-Aldren operative, and Axelrod said Yes.

  Police in Somerville and Boston confirmed that they had indeed widened the scope of their investigation of Seitchek’s shooting in light of this newfound motive, but added that the earthquake had thrown all investigations of this kind into disarray. They said the total breakdown of Sweeting-Aldren’s management structure and the loss of company records to various fires “could pose a problem.”

  Federal and state environmental officials were encountering even bigger obstacles as they attempted to confirm the existence of an injection well at the company’s Peabody facilities. By Wednesday morning the last of the fires there had burned itself out, and what remained was eight hundred acres of scorched and poisoned ruins—an uncharted industrial South Bronx filled with murky, foaming pools, unstable process structures, and pressurized tanks and pipelines suspected to contain not only explosives and flammable gases but some of the most toxic and/or carcinogenic and/or teratogenic substances known to man. The USEPA’s first priority, administrator Susan Carver told ABC News, would be to prevent contamination from spreading into groundwater and nearby estuaries.