Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“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 to raise him higher before he finally went limp.