Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Sure, if you’re a bank. But what about the social value of what she’s doing as opposed to what I’m doing? She’s going to help the grotesquely rich get grotesquely richer. You think she really needs your help? I’m trying to save a good radio station from some fanatics.”

“And what a polite way you have of asking. Walking on my sofa.”

“Oh, I get it. You would have come across if only I hadn’t walked on your sofa.”

Melanie spun around to face him. Her uncombed hair hung in the shape of a kaffiyeh. “The answer is no, Louis. No. I am not giving any more money to anyone, including Eileen. You can hate me, but I can’t . I am incapable of it. Do you understand? Please don’t make it any worse.”

She left him standing beneath the spot where his grandfather’s portrait had hung. He heard a door close upstairs. He covered his face with his hands and breathed in the smell of Renée Seitchek’s vagina.

On Monday morning Alec Bressler sold WSNE-AM to the Reverend Philip Stites’s Church of Action in Christ for a sum undisclosed by either party but rumored, in light of the station’s crippling debts, to be in the neighborhood of forty thousand dollars.

Louis was emptying his desk when Stites and his lawyers, a leather-faced duo with nice manicures, stopped in the doorway to assess his cubicle. Stites was roughly Louis’s height and no more than a couple of years older. He had one of those handsome, chubby Southern faces, round tortoiseshell glasses, and the lank, ultra-fine blond hair of a young child. He was wearing khaki slacks, a blue blazer, and a striped tie knotted in a four-in-hand. “How’re you doin’?” he said to Louis in a warm Carolinian accent.

“Not bad, for the Antichrist.”

The young minister chuckled affably. “You already quit, did you.” He returned to the hallway. “Hi there, Libby, you got a second to show us around here? You met Mr. Hambree already. This here’s Mr. Niebling. This pretty lady’s name is Libby Quinn.”

Louis would sooner have not been paid for his last two weeks of work than go and bother Alec this morning. Fortunately for his finances, the ex-owner came to him. He had a sheaf of twenties and briskly counted out twenty-five of them.

“This is more than you owe me.”

“Is a gift from Social Security. You need a recommendation? I send it to you.”

“I can’t believe this happened.”

“Yes, I know, is a bad sing for you. You need a job. But the free market decides: not enough listeners. Meanwhile I broadcast 425 editorials. I have letters to show people listened. Maybe one person changes his mind because of me. Eight years to change one mind. But you can’t sink about results. You do what you have to do, regardless of results. Is a matter of faith.”

“Stites has the faith,” Louis said in an ugly voice.

“So other people live with nasty faith. This means you live without faith yourself? No hope for any sing? If everyone’s faith is same as yours, you don’t need faith.”

Louis drummed his fingers on his desk. “What are you going to do now?”

“Same as twenty years ago,” Alec said. “Make lots of money.”

Sometime between one and two in the afternoon he began to wait for an earthquake. He’d been sitting in his room doing nothing anyway; waiting didn’t take much extra effort. He tried to make himself as ready to feel the next tremor, should it come, as he wan to hear thunder when he’d seen a flash of lightning: to be on the edge, to have his consciousness flush with the instant. Unfortunately this involved keeping his eyes open, and his eyes kept sliding off smooth surfaces and catching on irregularities, for example the sheet of wallpaper whose edges had lifted away from the plaster, exposing some of the underlying streaks of glue. Eventually thin glue gave his optic nerve a kind of blister, and the blister tore open and began to bleed, and yet there was nothing else on the wall for his eyes to hold on to.

Just looking at his unopened cartons of radio equipment exhausted him. The cartons might all have been stacked on his chest, raising his gorge and stifling his breath.

The ceiling was covered with off-white tiles made of some sad paper product. He ascertained that all the tiles bore the identical pattern of little holes, the seeming differences due only to differing orientations. From five to roughly six in the afternoon he made perfectly sure that the offset between the rows of squares at one end of each row was the same as the offset at the other end. It occurred to him that if a team of people in the Boston area would do what he was doing, at all hours of the day and night, that is, if there were always at least one good guy waiting in full consciousness for the ground to shake, then there might never be another earthquake, so shy of human consciousness are the random events of nature. (This is the fundamental axiom of superstition.) But maybe nature, in her great need to relieve those underground stresses, would be driven to the radical, Old Testament — style expedient of bringing a supernatural sleep to the particular consciousness on duty when the moment came and the rupture could no longer be postponed. The boy whose finger had been in the dike later speaking of a golden and irresistible drowsiness? Obviously this fatal moment had not arrived yet, because Louis held off the seisms in perfect wakefulness until the Red Sox came on the air.

Tuesday was hot, the solar and convective furnaces already stoked and roaring at nine o’clock. The duct tape made a sound like tearing clothes as Louis unpacked his boxes. He handled everything. He took the top off the twelve-band receiver he’d built at fifteen and could hardly believe how well he’d soldered then. He had to look hard to find those spatters and botched cuts and crooked screws that at the time had caused him such self-hatred.

In the afternoon he listened to music on the FM band, spinning the dial to dodge commercials. When night fell on all the spectrums, visible and radio, he switched to shortwave. He heard the chirping of radio-teletype, rapid and cool and neutral in tone, as unstressed as spoken Swedish. The code sent by hand he got most of — in high school he’d been a twenty-four-word-a-minute man — but it was mainly numbers and abbreviations, more pleasing as noise than as communication. There was emphatic and tireless tooting from freighters and beacons in the Atlantic night. Birdies and blaring mystery tones the color of back pain. An inflamed Slavic commentator inveighing above heavy sonic surf and going under, seeming to protest more stridently that he was not going under, and going under for good.

The Voice of South Africa, calling from Johannesburg. Radio Habana. Radio Korea, the overseas service of the Korean Broadcast System, coming to you in English from Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea. Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale. Adventist World Radio offering program notes to far-flung believers, whistles faintly modulating through, like flies circling the pulpit. Injā Tehrān ast, sedā-ye jomhūri-ye eslāmi-ye Irān. The East is Red, the East is Red. Radio Baghdad reported that Zionist occupying forces had today murdered three Palestinian youths in south Lebanon; despite her Kensingtonian phonetics, this Voice of the Iraqi People’s Republic seemed not to understand what she was saying. “Reuters reported that on Sun. Day in the aftermath of the abor. Tive coup. Attempt in Mali three senior officers of the national air. Force had been executed in the square outside the.” But then the strings began to wail, and in her own tongue now the Voice, the same apprised female Voice, sang a ballad with a sexy and ironic slackness to the chorus, as though we all Know-ho-ho-ho ho-ho-ho this story well and have heard it many tiyee-yimes, and the strings agreed. Already the sun was rising on Islam. Jeeps and bundled women in the streets, another day’s devotions and atrocities under way. In Somerville, a night wind broke the dark shadow of a branch into several less dark shadows that bowed and crossed and canceled in the rhomboids of streetlight on the wallpaper.