Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion

At the beginning of his second week of work, Libby appeared at the door of his cubicle and beckoned to him with a single index finger. “Come to my office?”

He followed her up the corridor. In her office there were multiple photos of two blondes in their late teens; they were awfully old to be her daughters, but they looked just like her.

She handed Louis a dog-eared stack of printouts. “There’s an uncollected ninety-five thousand here. It’s only people who don’t do business with us anymore. How would you feel about trying to collect some of it?”

“Love to.”

“I’d do it myself, but it’s really more of a man’s job.”

“Oh.”

“It’s easy. You just call them up and say, ‘You owe us money, pay it.’ Will you do that for me?”

He took the printouts, and Libby smiled. “Thanks, Louis. One other thing, if you don’t mind—I’d like this to be our secret. Just you and me. All right?”

In radio, especially in a tough market like Boston, there is no such thing as an exciting or rewarding entrylevel job. Even at a place like WSNE, Louis knew he’d have to do shit work for several years before he could hope to get any meaningful air time, and so he was grateful to Libby for asking him to do collections. The work was more fun by far than anything he’d done at KILT in Houston. It allowed him to be as obnoxious as he dared. He devoted every spare minute to it.

A few days after Easter, Alec Bressler dropped into his cubicle while he was generating threatening letters on his printer. The station owner frowned at the output through his generic eyeglasses. “What’s this?”

“Delinquent accounts,” Louis said.

Alec’s curiosity deepened into concern. “You’re trying to collect?”

“Trying, yes.”

“You’re not put-ting— pressure on them?”

“Actually, yes, I am.”

“Oh, don’t do that.”

“Libby’s orders.”

“You mustn’t do that.”

“I tried to keep it from you.”

Just then Libby herself passed by the cubicle. Alec arrested her. “Louis tells me he’s doing collections using pressure . I thought we didn’t do this.”

Libby lowered her chin contritely. “I’m sorry, Alec.”

“I thought we didn’t do this. Really, am I wrong?”

“No, of course, you’re right.” She gave Louis a conspirator’s wink. “We’ll have to stop.”

“If I can interject something,” Louis said. “It’s netted us like forty-five hundred dollars in the last ten days.”

“You men discuss it,” Libby said. “I’m on the air in ninety seconds.”

“What’s this? Where’s Bud?”

“Bud has a little problem with his paycheck, Alec, if you’ll excuse me.”

“A little problem? What? What?” Alec followed her into the hall. “What problem? What problem?” The studio door at the far end of the corridor was heard closing. Alec pushed all his fingers into his hair, rapidly achieving frenzy. “I pay this woman! And she won’t tell me what problem!”

He continued to stare down the empty corridor. Louis watched him locate and make sooty and finally ignite a Benson & Hedges entirely by feel. “So, yes,” he went on, capturing wayward pennants of smoke with deft, sharp inhalations, “you don’t do this with the pressure anymore. Why burn the bridges, eh? Put things away. Did you grade contest entries? Inez has hundreds. Think of it— hundreds!”

In Somerville, meanwhile, it was springtime. In one sunny day, while no one was looking, fully grown grass had appeared all over the seven hills, shaggy patches of it suddenly occupying every lawn and traffic island. It was like some garish chlorophyll-colored trash that had been dumped on top of the town’s more indigenous ground cover, which, around the time the last snow melted, reached its peak of richness and variety. As always, there were black leaves, cigarette butts, and dog logs. But on any blocklong stretch of parking strip even the casual hiker could also expect to spot fabric-softener squares; snow-emergency cinders; Christmas pine needles and tinsel; solo mittens; bluish glass dice from vandalized car windows; compacted flyers from Johnny’s Foodmaster and the Assembly Square Mall; marvelously large wads of gum; non-returnable wine-cooler and premixed-cocktail bottles; sheets of gray ruled paper on which were copied crudely in pencil simple sentences containing backwards P’s and h’s; rotten Kleenexes resembling cottage cheese; rubber blades and choked filters; exhausted lighters; foody leakages from trash bags torn in transfer to garbage trucks, orange peels and tuna cans and ketchup-bottle lids set down on the ground by dwindling snowbanks; and maybe, if the hiker was lucky, some of Somerville’s more singular specimens as well, such as the magnificent wall unit that for many months had been lying face down on an island in the Alewife Brook Parkway, or the supply of Monopoly money that was spreading up side streets from its release point on College Avenue—yellow tens, blue fifties. This was the kind of congenial and ever-changing profusion of objects which Nature, “the great litterer,” had once again trashed up with stunted weeds and plastickylooking daffodils and finally, in a moment when people’s backs were turned, a thousand cells of alien green grass. No foreign power could have been more sly and zealous than spring in its overnight infiltration of the city. The new plants stood out with a brazenness akin to that of the agent who, when his life is at stake, acts even more native than his native interrogators.

When Louis got home he found his neighbor John Mullins swabbing his car with a large brown bath sponge. The car never seemed to get driven past the end of the driveway, where Mullins washed it. It also never seemed dirty. Fleshy tulips now filled the bed below the porch of the triple-decker the old man lived in; their heavy purple and yellow heads leaned aside at various casual angles, as if specifically avoiding Louis’s eyes.

“Hey there, Louie boy,” Mullins said, leaving the sponge on the windshield and intercepting him. “How are things? You likin’ it here? You likin’ Somerville? What do you think of this weather? I don’t think it’s gonna last. I just listened to the weather, always listen at 5:35. Tell me something. You feel the earthquake there on Sunday?”

Louis had been shaking his head to this question for several days.

“Golly it scared me. You think we’re gonna get any more of these? I hope to God we don’t. I’ve got a little heart condition—a little heart condition. Little heart condition.” Mullins patted himself rapidly on the breast, calling Louis’s attention to the heart in there. “I’m not supposed to get scared like that.” He laughed hollowly, real fear in his eyes. “I tried to get outside and would you believe it I fell down right on my bum. I couldn’t get up! God if I wasn’t scared. Girl upstairs here, the one that sings—nice girl. She told me she didn’t even feel it.”

“If there’s another earthquake,” Louis said, “you should try to stand in a doorway.”

The old man grimaced deafly. “What’s that?”

“I said you should try to stand in an interior doorway, or get under a table. They say it’s the safest place to be.”

“Oh yeah, huh. All right, Louie boy.” Mullins tottered back to his sponge. “Allll right, Louie boy.”

There was an envelope in the mailbox from the law firm of Arger, Kummer & Rudman. It contained two Red Sox tickets and Henry Rudman’s business card. In the rear window of Louis’s room a flowering white bush had appeared and was startlingly ablaze with sunlight, the ecliptic having swung around far to the north since the sun’s last appearance at dinnertime. He made a fried-egg sandwich and watched Hogan’s Heroes. He made another fried-egg sandwich and watched the network news. Midway through this informative half hour, NBC took a trip to Boston and discovered, to its astonishment, that a pair of earthquakes had occurred outside the city. Footage was run of broken plate glass and of supermarket aisles where solitary employees mopped up juice and jelly from fallen bottles. The correspondent related facts that were actually consistent with what Louis had been hearing hourly at WSNE: the Easter earthquake, which had measured 5.2 on the Richter scale and had been followed by several small aftershocks, had caused an estimated $12 million damage in three counties and resulted in fourteen injuries. (Almost all the injuries, as Louis had noted in the Globe , were due to panic, a surprising number of people having seriously bruised or cut themselves while fleeing their shaking homes, and one angler on a causeway north of Ipswich having put a fishhook in his eyelid during a dash to solid ground, and one motorist having steered his car into a ditch.) NBC viewers were then treated to a taste of history (“earthquakes are not unheard of in New England”) and an aerial glimpse of the nuclear power plant in Seabrook, followed by reassuring words from a power-company spokesman, an angry statement from a wine merchant (for him, apparently, nature was just another local with no appreciation of fine vintages), and finally a heartwarmingly inarticulate account of the earthquake from an Ipswich teenager, delivered with much incredulous head-shaking: “It started slow. Then bam!” The correspondent earned the right to say his own name in a low and earnest voice by first saying, in a low and earnest voice, that this earthquake “may not have been the last.” There was a brief, medium-distance shot of the NBC anchorman wearing a wry smirk (he was paid $34,000 a week not to yawn during these shots) before the scene changed to an old-time drugstore with an avuncular pharmacist behind the counter. America watched helplessly as the promotional drama unfolded. Not long ago, on late-night TV, Louis had seen this variety of commercial made fun of. The worried consumer returned to the drugstore and, instead of thanking the avuncular pharmacist for his advice, listed the grotesque disorders and hormonal imbalances induced by the recommended preparation, and ended up (a bit predictably maybe?) murdering him with a gun. This hard-hitting NBC satire had been followed by a real ad, for condoms.