Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Breathe deeply?” the nurse said.

Renée breathed. Her face was drawn and heavily broken out and creased by the pain that existence in general and breathing in particular caused her. Her hair was matted and full of dandruff. She was hooked up to IV tubes but was breathing on her own. Her ears were naked.

“A little deeper?”

The effort was made.

“Let me hear you cough.”

She coughed.

“You can lie back now.” The nurse checked the bag of urine hanging from the bed and left her alone with Louis. Immediately he dropped to his knees and pressed her free hand, the hand without a tube in it, to his eyes. But Renée came straight to the point, in a weak, precise voice. “Mom says you think they did this to me.”

He released her hand and pulled a chair over. “How are you?”

“Everything hurts.” She frowned as if she didn’t welcome the distraction of his question. “Why do you think it was them?”

“Because I couldn’t find any of our papers in your apartment or your office.”

“You were in my apartment.”

“Uh, yeah.”

She continued to frown unhappily. “It’s in a big envelope,” she said. “Manila envelope. In the big drawer in my desk.”

“It’s not. It’s not there.”

She devoted some attention to merely breathing. Thick bundles of unopened envelopes were stacked on the stand beside her pillows. “It was there,” she said. “I know it was there.”

“They knew you were interested?”

“It was so stupid of me. I didn’t even care anymore.”

“Did you tell anyone else?”

“No. But the computer at work. There’s a letter and a paper.”

“I don’t think so. Howard and I checked.”

Now she smiled with pain, all her teeth showing. “Oh boy.”

“You’ll have to tell the police.”

“Oh boy, boy, will I tell them.”

“Did you have a copy of the paper?”

She nodded. “On a little tape. A five-inch tape, in a drawer in the airconditioned room. The gray desk there.”

“Is it labeled?”

“It’s a tape I use. It says ‘Do Not Erase.’ Have Howard print it out for you. You can send it to the press. Larry Axelrod.”

There was a silence. Her shallow breathing barely disturbed the sheet on her. “I really miss you,” Louis said. “I really love you.”

She stared at the ceiling; she still hadn’t looked at him. He touched her hair, and the feel of it and the warmth of her scalp led him irresistibly to lean over her and kiss her mouth. Her lips were puffy and unmoving. They released a strong smell of medicine, an unRenée-like smell both harsh and cloying, akin to formaldehyde: the smell of the possibility, suddenly real, that she simply might never forgive him.

The white Matador lumbered into the Hoffman parking lot at one o’clock and ejected Howard from the driver’s side. His hair was wet and he was obviously irritated. He’d been asleep when Louis called him, a little after noon.

“Her paper’s on a tape,” Louis said. “You have to help me print it out.”

Howard let him into the building with an angry huff. “What tape.”

“It says ‘Do Not Erase..”

Howard went to the system room and picked up a tape from the table with the consoles. “This tape?”

The label said Do Not Erase in Renée’s handwriting. Howard huffed and threaded the tape onto a drive in the gelid inner sanctum and gave instructions from a console. He huffed some more. “Not it,” he said. “This is Terry.”

They searched both rooms for another five-inch tape that said Do Not Erase . Terry Snall came in and asked what they were looking for. “‘Do Not Erase’?” Alarm flickered in his face, very briefly, before he caught himself. “Oh, yeah. I just used it myself.”

“Renée had something on it,” Louis said.

“Well, not anymore,” Terry answered with a little laugh.

“You mean you erased it?”

“And I’m not going to feel guilty.”

“You erased the tape?”

“I’m not going to feel guilty,” Terry said. “It didn’t have a write-protect ring, it didn’t have a name on it, and I know everybody’s feeling sorry for Renée now, and it’s a terrible thing, but the fact is that if she wants to go deleting other people’s files without telling them she can hardly complain about me using an unmarked tape.”

“You erased that tape? And then you go to the hospital and act like you’re her boyfriend?”

“Don’t wait for me to feel guilty,” Terry said. “Because I’m not gonna.”

Eileen and Peter’s big bed had by this point in the weekend assumed the aspect of a houseboat. In addition to Eileen’s banking texts and notebooks, it was stocked with Esquire s and GQs for Peter, the remote-control box for their TV, a Walkman and scattered tapes, rumpled garments, Pepperidge Farm cookies, a big diet Coke bottle, and a quart-sized yogurt carton with carrot sticks floating in it. Louis declined Eileen’s invitation to come aboard, preferring to sit by the door, next to Milton Friedman’s cage, as he told his story.

At first, though Eileen listened with open-minded raptness, Peter continued to devote much of his attention to the Wimbledon highlights on the screen in front of him. But soon Eileen grew dull-eyed with confusion and information overload, and it was Peter whose interest quickened. He turned the sound of tennis down and asked Louis questions in a sharp, impatient voice. Then he turned the TV off altogether and stared at the curtained window. The color had drained from his face.

“What is it?” Eileen said.

Peter turned to Louis. “The million gallons. When you guys came over that night and she was asking me about that. You already knew about the well then?”

“Yeah, we did.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Um. It was sort of my idea. I guess we didn’t want your dad getting wind of it.”

“My dad? ” Peter plunged his hands into his hair. “Oh, that’s great. That’s just really fucking great.”

“It seemed to make sense at the time,” Louis said.

“I can’t believe it. All you had to do was tell me, and none of this would have happened. Remember in January,” Peter said to Eileen, “when Rita called me and I went out there?” He turned to Louis. “I hadn’t seen her in about a year.”

“She had that drinking problem,” Eileen said.

“Anyway, she wanted to see me. She told me she was scared. And so I go out there, and the first thing I see is that two of her front windows are broken. And she shows me this bullet hole in her ceiling.”

Eileen gaped at him. “What? ”

Peter nodded, avoiding her eyes now. “Needless to say, she’d had a few too many. She was grabbing the furniture for balance. But the thing she wanted to tell me was that if anything ‘happened’ to her, I was supposed to tell the police it was the company. She gave me this spiel about how she’s not happy with her pension plan, she’s short on money, she’s been trying to talk the company into giving her a better deal. Meaning blackmail. Because it just so happens that she knows what those guys are doing with all their nasty toxic waste. She says, ‘They’re not burning it, Peter. They say they are, but they’re not. It’s a million gallons a year, and they’re not burning it.’ And so I ask her what they are doing with it, but she won’t tell me. She says, ‘If I tell you, and he finds out, he’s going to kill me.’ That is exactly what she said. Exactly. And I say, Who’s this ‘he’? And she tells me it’s my dad. ”

Eileen’s lips formed a silent What?

“My own dad. She’s telling me my own fucking dad shot the hell out of her living-room windows. And I don’t even know whether to believe her. I mean, I’m willing to believe just about anything about the old man. But last I’d heard, she and I were sworn enemies because I wouldn’t work for her anymore. So I said, you know, my dad may be a fascist pig, but he’s not stupid. You can’t tell me it was actually him that fired the gun. But she says, ‘Thérèse saw the car. It was his car.’ And I’m like, well, I don’t really believe this, and so I tell her she’d better call the police. And she says, ‘He’s going to kill me if I go to the police.’ Her exact words. And she says she doesn’t want to die, because old Jack had told her what she was coming back in her next life as. He’d told her she was coming back as a cactus. And she didn’t want to be a cactus and so she didn’t want to die. You know, and she’s crying and she can hardly stand up, and what can I do? I get the hell out of there. You know, file and forget.”