Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

It began so gradually, as such a gentle cradling of himself in immense and invisible hands, that he couldn’t have said where the line was, where no-motion had given way to the welling spreading deepening feeling that enveloped them. For one moment, it really was like coming; it felt like the best thing he could ever feel.

Then something extremely serious happened, comparable in his experience only to the high-speed collision he’d witnessed on Lake Forest Road on one of his radio-parts-buying expeditions in high school, when the monotonous afternoon to-and-fro of suburban traffic jumped the track of the ordinary, and even a quarter mile away he could feel the impact in his bones, the noise of instant death filling the sky like a flash of lightning, the squealings, the screechings, the subsidiary bangs each more major than a fender bender, and ever) person in sight began to run, terrified, in all directions: it was with the same kind of impact, the same awful sense of the world’s derailment, the same strident and thundering protest of rigid materials deforming that the earth now shuddered and erupted and windows exploded and flowerpots flew.

Peter was tossed into the water splayed bizarrely, like a thrown cat. A wind that Louis couldn’t feel whipped the trees. He fell down and two pieces of deck furniture roughed him up, stepping on his fingers with their metal feet, jabbing his ribs with metal elbows. He heard himself shouting Oh, come on, STUPID STUPID and heard Eileen screaming like some shipwreck victim far below him, in the thundering surf at the base of cliffs. The back yard seemed to be sinking into the earth’s adipose layer of humus and glacial till, the encircling treetops lurching towards a meeting as the country’s skin dimpled in upon itself. Birds filled the air, wheeling frantically, spreading chaos. The lights went out and the stars turned blurry. The ground hit Louis like the hard bed of a truck with no brakes on a rutted downhill road. He was scared, but mostly he was mad at the ground, at its meanness. He wanted it to stop, and when it did stop, finally, he got up and kicked it furiously.

Eileen and Peter were standing in the shallow end of the pool, mouths hanging open to facilitate rapid air intake. They stared at him as if they barely recognized him. He kicked the ground again and looked at the dark house and transformed yard and muttered, “What a mess.”

Mrs. Stoorhuys was handing out gas masks in the kitchen. She wore duck boots and a raincoat.

The kitchen appeared to have been ransacked by a burglar in search of hidden sterling. Sarah kept a trembling flashlight beam on the carton of emergency equipment while another daughter, a somewhat younger one, ran her beam over the mounds of broken floral-print dishes, the yawning cabinets, and the gleaming barf the refrigerator had spewed — a dirty surf of ketchup and cocktail cherries and applesauce breaking on reefs of pointed glass. Few colors withstood the whiteness of the flashlight.

“Peter, help your sisters with their masks.”

“He’s shutting off the gas,” Sarah reminded her.

“We don’t need any help,” her sister added.

“Uh, are these really necessary?” Louis said.

Mrs. Stoorhuys handed him a mask. “It says, masks are to be used if the earthquake is big enough to throw most objects from kitchen cabinets.” She was reading from a typewritten list of instructions in the carton. “When in doubt, use the masks. — Here’s a flashlight for you too. There’s eight of everything.”

The mask was a shiny black plastic affair whose heavy nose made it flop animately. Peter’s sisters had put theirs on now and looked like evil hockey goalies or Satan’s henchgirls. Goya had drawn heads like these, towards the end.

“Now, which way is the wind blowing?” Mrs. Stoorhuys said.

“There isn’t any wind,” Louis said.

“Oh, huh.” She consulted a chart in her instructions. “Nighttime. summer. calm. Yes, here. Proceed north to Haverhill or beyond.”

Peter came inside with a big crescent wrench, limping as he picked his way through stricken appliances and furniture. He’d twisted his hip. Nobody else was complaining of more than scrapes and bruises. “Peter, here’s your gas mask,” his mother said.

“Gas mask?”

“Gas mask,” Louis confirmed.

“Your father left instructions in the earthquake box.”

Peter looked at Louis, and they nodded significantly.

“Now, somewhere there’s supposed to be a gun. ”

“Ma, did you know there were gas masks in this box?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Didn’t it kind of make you wonder what was going on over there in Peabody? I mean, that we’ve got to have these? Didn’t it make you worry?”

“He said it’s just in case the worst thing happens, which it probably won’t. You know how ultra-safe he likes to be.”

“No way I’m going to wear this thing,” Peter said.

“Think of it as a fashion,” Louis said.

“I can’t seem to find the gun,” said Mrs. Stoorhuys, rooting. Again Peter and Louis looked at each other and nodded. “Where do you suppose it is?”

“Better not to ask, Ma.”

“Bottom of a river is my guess,” Louis said.

Eileen stumbled in through the skewed back door in the jeans and snow boots Peter had found for her to wear. She was breathing heavily. “There’s fires,” she said. “I can smell the smoke.”

“Try one of these,” Louis said. “You won’t smell a thing. — Or kind of a pleasant, plastic smell.”

Her eyes widened. “Yuck! What for?”

“Company orders. Put it on.”

She took it in two fingers and held it up like some contaminated fish or hideous accessory.

“It snaps in back,” Louis said.

“I was wondering about Mom,” she said. “I think we should go up there.”

“No, we’re going to Haverhill,” said Mrs. Stoorhuys, burying her face in black plastic.

“We’ll go through Ipswich,” Peter said.

“Not to be a wet blanket,” Louis said, “but isn’t there like a nuclear power plant in that direction?”

“Oh, Seabrook,” Eileen said, her face falling.

“Let’s get to Ipswich and see what the radio says,” Peter said.

Mrs. Stoorhuys distributed more supplies to her troops — hard hats, jerry cans of water, Saltines, cans of Spam, a transistor radio, a heavy-duty first-aid kit. At the bottom of the carton were a pair of large self-adhesive placards with the words looters beware! and a skull and crossbones. Louis was dispatched to post one of them on the front door.

Despite the glass and fallen paintings and general mayhem, the front of the house retained an air of comfort. It was a matter, perhaps, of the deep-pile carpeting. Europe was in ruins, however, palaces crazily tilted, empty streets dumped rudely onto sofa cushions.

An enormous truck rumbled by. Debris pelted Louis and he heard shouts and screams so clear and automatic they sounded canned. He stumbled under the impact of a good-sized chunk of plaster that landed squarely on his hard hat, but the floor was already regaining its composure, and he thought, well, it was nice of David Stoorhuys to provide him with a hard hat.

In his haste, an hour earlier, Stoorhuys had also left the garage door open. It had fallen on the remaining station wagon, denting the roof but breaking only the rear window. Peter was able to back the car out while everyone else held one side of the heavy door aloft. Communication was impaired by the plastic of their masks.

At first glance, the Stoorhuyses’ street looked like any suburban street in the middle of a warm moonless night, the trees and shrubbery and lawns and pavement all undisturbed and the houses still standing. It took a while for the subtler alterations to register, the slight forward pitch of a house seemingly frozen in a sudden lurch of nausea, the semi-imploded outline of a screen porch that wanted to collapse but couldn’t, the buckled aluminum siding, the glimmer of glass in the mulch and euonymus beneath windows. The triple-door garage silently bleeding a sheet of water down a driveway to the street. The swamp-gas flickerings in rooms where unseen families were using flashlights. It was as if the land were still healthy but the houses had all suddenly died of some internal sickness.