Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“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.”

“Ask at the desk.”

“Well now.” Like a bully who’d scented a weakling, Stites awakened fully to Louis’s presence. He approached him with the same prowling, intent, and possibly myopic tilting of head that Louis himself assumed when he felt he had a moral edge on someone. “You must be the boyfriend.”

“You can talk,” Louis said. “But I don’t have to listen.”

“You must be the boyfriend she told me about on Monday, and the one she told the world about today.”

Louis blanched a little, but held his ground. “Today,” he said. “You mean — when you guys were calling her a murderer.”

“On Monday,” Stites raising his voice, “when she told me there was a man who’d hurt her so bad she didn’t want to live anymore. And today when she said there was a man she was in love with and wanted to marry and have children with, and I didn’t see any man there with her. And I reckon you’re the so-called man. Aren’t you.”

Louis looked into the minister’s light-soaped, accusing tortoiseshells. “You can’t make me feel guiltier than I already do.”

“Your guilt is your business, Mr. Antichrist. I’m just telling you why I’m here.”

The so-called man whom Renée had been in love with and had wanted to have children with turned away from Stites. Conscious of an impulse to redeem himself in the minister’s eyes, he crouched by Howard. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Howard gave him another red, intimate look and said nothing. Stites had disappeared up the corridor. Louis found him sitting on a sofa in a tiny ICU waiting room with a television mounted on the ceiling. “What did she say about me?” he said from the doorway.

Stites didn’t take his eyes off the television. “I told you what she said.”

“Where’d you see her?”

“Chelsea.”

“She wanted you to call your people off her.”

“That’s what she came for, sure. But that’s not why she stayed.”

“She stayed?”

Stites smiled at the television. “What’s it to you?”

Louis looked at the floor. Not for the first time, he felt he was out of his depth in loving Renée.

“Jody batting.355 over the last eight games,” said the television. “He’s four for his last nine.”

“She stayed, we talked,” Stites said. “Then she left. Where were you?”

“I left her. I hurt her.”

“And now she’s shot and you decide you feel bad about it.”

“That’s not true.”

“What’s your name?”

“Louis.”

“Louis,” Stites spread his arms out on the top of the sofa and put his feet up on a coffee table, “I ain’t your rival. I’ll tell you frankly, I thought a lot of her. But she wasn’t interested in me as a man. She was totally faithful to you. I don’t know about if you didn’t exist. But you do exist, so.”

“If I didn’t exist you’d have to explain to her why one of your people shot her in the back because she had an abortion.”

“That was not a pro-life person,” Stites said positively, to the television screen, where the Red Sox batter was trying to lay down a bunt.

“‘An eye for an eye’?”

“I don’t believe it,” Stites said. “I flat-out don’t believe it. That’s not how we work, even the worst of us. I’d frankly sooner believe it was you.”

“Appreciate it.”

“The only question is, who else is gonna do a thing like that? You got any idea at all?”

Louis didn’t answer. On the TV screen a Volvo sedan was crashing into a cinder-block wall, and a plastic married couple and their bald plastic children, not dead, not even scratched, were settling back comfortably into their seats.

“What’s she like?” Stites asked him. “Day to day?”

“I don’t know. Neurotic, self-absorbed, insecure. Kind of mean. She doesn’t have a great sense of humor.” He frowned. “She’s a good scientist. A good cook. She doesn’t do anything without thinking about it. She’s very sexy too, somehow.”

“A good cook, huh? What kinds of things she cook?”

“Vegetables. Pasta. Fish. She doesn’t eat the higher vertebrates.”

Out in the Sahara, two young men dying of thirst were rescued by a Budweiser truck carrying beautiful girls in swimsuits and tight cutoffs and halter tops. Everybody was drinking product. The girls’ breasts were firm and round and their stomachs flat and hard and their waists narrow in their Silera maillots. Their limbs sweated like cool, intoxicating beer cans. The men flooded sundry cleavages with a fire hose, spanked asses with the hose’s white spray. The cheesecake, drinking product, was losing inhibitions. Forty feet away, on the table in OR #1, a urologist named Dr. Ishimura was sewing up the place in Renée’s body where her right kidney had been, and a surgeon named Dr. Das was vacuuming up her blood.

He was awakened in the morning by the machine by his bed. His amplified mother was shouting at Eileen about some State Farm policy: AND I NEED YOUR WORK NUMBER SO —

“Hello Mom,” he said over a squawk of feedback as he deactivated the machine.

“Louis? Where are you?”

He coughed. “Where do you think?”

“Goodness, yes, that’s a silly question. How — how are you?”

“Well. Apart from the fact that my girlfriend was shot in the back last night and almost died, uh.”

There was a silence. He could hear mid-morning birds chirping on Argilla Road.

“Your girlfriend,” Melanie said.

“You probably saw it on the news. Her name’s Renée. Seitchek. Remember you met her?”