Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“We’d like to have you stay on, Anna. But if, ah, you insist. ”

Kernaghan finds her in her lab, angrily emptying her desk. “Scholarly journals accept my paper,” she says. “And you won’t drill!”

“Five-million-dollar checks don’t grow on trees.”

“La, la, who cares? My pearls aren’t worthy of you.”

“Be reasonable,” he says. “You’ve got vanishingly minimal academic credentials, and you’re never going to work for anybody as flush as we are. Anywhere else you go they’re going to make you study vulcanized rubber. Stay with us, play your cards right, you might just get your hole drilled.”

She snorts. “You are a swine.”

He laughs agreeably, leaves her office, goes and confers with Aldren Sr. and Tabscott.

“Oh, sure, Jack,” they say, “we’re going to spend five mill to help you get in Krasner’s skirt.”

“Gentlemen,” grinning, “I resent the imputation. The fact is, it’s an interesting theory. And the fact is also, if she’s right about the gas and oil in the Berkshires, there’s probably gas and oil right under our feet here in Peabody. More important, though, I sense a wind shift, and I ask you, have I been right about wind shifts in the past? Possibly even so right that five million dollars seems a paltry sum? I see a problem with our waste stream, say in the next three or four years. A new problem, a regulatory problem. I’m thinking of the M Line, the dioxins, in particular. It won’t surprise me if M Line disposal costs triple in the next five years.”

“Matter of opinion, Jack.”

“We’re going to drill this hole. I don’t rule out coming up with commercial quantities of gas and oil, maybe even at ordinary depths. But if we don’t, and if we’ve drilled it here, you know what we get as a consolation prize? An injection well. One that goes so far below the water table that we can direct the waste stream down it from now till kingdom come and still be good neighbors.”

“Legality?”

“I know of no statute,” he says smoothly, “that would interfere.”

So a feasibility study is performed. The more management thinks about Kernaghan’s plan, the more it likes it. Certain workers on the M Line are developing chloracne, a disfiguring and irreversible rotting of the skin caused by exposure to dioxins, and there are disquieting reports coming out of Vietnam about soldiers using Sweeting-Aldren herbicides and turning up with tender livers and intestinal sarcomas and other, more nameless dreads. Half the guinea pigs in a delivery truck unwisely parked for an hour by the M Line’s evaporation pond go into convulsions; the other half are dead. Since the only way to reduce dioxins in the waste stream is to double the reaction temperature, the cost of electricity to pump the waste underground begins to seem reasonable. And when management looks at the effluents from all its other process lines, and feels the winds of regulation and public opinion shifting, the decision is clinched.

Kernaghan pays another visit to Anna, who has been cooking up ever more nasty-smelling synthetic crude in her oven; she looks like a Swiss chambermaid in her white chemist’s apron. He shows her the rental contract for equipment to drill a five-mile-deep hole — the work orders, the authorizations for energy use. She shrugs. “What took you so long?”

“You’re in charge of the drilling. We’re adding ten K to your salary.”

“La, la, la.”

“You have exclusive publication rights. Exclusive rights to the core samples from the deepest hole in eastern North America.”

“Of course. I thank you, Mr. Jack Kernaghan. Really. Was there something else?”

He smiles, unsurprised. “I don’t think you understand that I spent twenty-five years’ worth of leverage to get you this piece of paper. Twenty-five years’ worth of service to the company.”

“This is boring.”

“Boring?” He holds up the rental contract and begins to tear it down the middle.

She can’t stop herself from grabbing his hand. She says, “You think you can buy me.”

“Say I’m proving my love.”

“You tear up rental contract to prove your love?”

“If there’s no hope for my love?”

She takes the contract and reads it carefully. “My Berkshires. What happened to my Berkshires?”

“I did my best.”

She has a beaker of synthetic crude on her desk. She dips a Pyrex stirring rod in it, dribbling the black, viscous stuff from the tip. She lets herself fall backward and her chair catches her, rolling into a wall with the impact. “You want to drill my hole? Good! You want to touch me? Good! You can touch me. But you’ll never touch me.”

“We’ll see about that.”

She stands up and walks in a circle around him, her mouth open as wide as she can stretch it, saying, “La, la, la, la, la.” She laughs. He seizes her, works one knee between her legs, turns on the urgency that has served him so well in the past.

“So, OK,” pulling away from him, “walking filth has smart knees.”

He stands, panting, maddened. “Don’t think I wouldn’t kill you.”

“La, la, la,” tongue wagging. “You’ll never touch me!”

Which was how things stood in the fall of ’69. Bob Holland of course couldn’t understand why Anna had only two modes with Kernaghan — the contemptuous and the vampish — and why Kernaghan would put up with even a minute of being ignored by her as she plied Bob with throaty questions about his work. The “lovers” exchanged brief, cutting phrases and then held long competitions for Bob’s regard which Anna invariably won, Kernaghan receding into his chair to stare at her, his eyes a pair of hate beams, minute after minute, while Bob talked about the country’s history and Anna talked about her personal history, in Paris as a baby, in upstate New York as a girl and adolescent. She turned her face away from the cigarette she held vertically at mouth level, narrowing her eyes and twisting her lips as she blew the smoke straight up. She told Bob that she was like him in loving knowledge for its own sake, that the corporate mind was grotesque and soulless, that she would quit her job in a flash if she weren’t allowed to pursue knowledge with total freedom. She said young people had life and energy and ideals. Old men were drained of their juices and loved money more than beauty, more than anything. And Kernaghan was a sly enough dissembler that when he abruptly left the dinner table, as though hating Anna for flirting — as though powerless to stop her — Bob believed that he was being a bad guest and hastened after his father-in-law, unwilling to be the instrument with which she tormented him. When he turned around, Anna had her silver fox on and her car keys in her hand.

An hour later, when he was in his room typing up notes, he heard her cries, loud enough to have awakened him if he’d been sleeping. He hadn’t heard her car return.

In the morning he found them smoking breakfast ciggies in the east room, thick as thieves, holding hands. They looked at him as if he were the devil they’d been speaking of.

It being a Sunday, all the archives closed, they took him for a drive. Armed guards waved the car through the gates of Sweeting-Aldren’s main installation, and Kernaghan drove the avenues winding among the various process lines at screeching speeds.

“You’re giving me a headache,” Anna said.

“I’m showing Bob what it’s all about.”

The three of them put on hard hats and toured the process structure on the brand-new AB Line, into the maws of which went ethylene and chlorine and out of the anus of which came white prills of polyvinyl chloride. The structure was an orgy of metal forms, twenty cottage-sized modules straddling and abutting and embracing one another tightly, each with its own voice of thermodynamic ecstasy and all with their fat appendages rammed deep into steel-collared orifices; but a rigid orgy, full of power and purpose, never ending. In these plants, chemists transformed the verbs of their imaginations into the nouns of their achievement by adding — er or — or or — r. There were 5,000-gallon double-arm mixers, paddle blenders with carbon-steel shredder blades, a triple-wall main reactor built like Charles Atlas, an 80-ton two-stage chiller, a jacketed continuous turbulizer, a shuddering particulate-transfer screw feeder, nozzle concentrators, triple-effect evaporators, intensifier bars, a 400-cubic-foot cone dryer, a cylindrical concrete priller, a heat exchanger with stainless tubes and a carbon-steel shell, a 6,250-square-foot vertical condenser, a twin-cone classifier, and a dozen centrifugal compressors. The scary thing was smelling so many smells that reminded you of nothing in the world. They were like alien ideas impinging directly on your consciousness, unmediated by a flavor. This was how it would feel when space invaders came and took control of your brain, some insidious something neither spirit nor flesh filling your sinuses and clouding your eyes.