Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“You didn’t tell me you were fired .”

“Actually, I did.”

“Gee that’s tough, I can’t believe it. Seems like everybody’s getting laid off these days.”

“Yeah, although that obviously can’t be the case.”

“What I don’t understand is why would anybody want to fire a nice kid like you.”

“Well, because I don’t believe that Jesus Christ is my personal savior. I don’t believe in the literal truth of the Bible.”

Mullins frowned. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“The place where I worked was taken over by fundamentalist anti-abortionists and all non-Christians had to go.”

“Aw Lou. Aw Lou . You shouldn’t of done that.” Mullins shook his head. “Now you’re, whataya, whataya, lookin’ for a new job?”

“Right now I’m looking for a woman I saw ten days ago and want to see again.”

“You’re not married, are you.”

“No.”

“You gotta have a job, Lou.”

On Pleasant Avenue a ten-speed chained to a parking sign had been wrestled to the ground without relinquishing its hold on the signpost. The bumblebees bouncing off the honeysuckle were like coalescences of the day’s yellow, angry heat. The noise of hardwinged insects like the buzz of high-voltage transformers damaged, overloaded, by this heat; like the monotonous, depersonalized spirits of exterminated Indians made volatile by this heat.

Inside the front door, in a chamber filled with incredibly powerful and hot canine body odor and dog-food breath, Louis saw orange flowers bloom and had to fight his way up the stairs like a diver close to not making it. His glasses slid off his sweating head. No one answered his knocking, although Renée’s apartment was traitorous and welcomed his mind’s eye.

It was a twenty-five-minute walk to Harvard. With the help of some friendly strangers he managed to locate the Hoffman Laboratory of Geological Sciences, which was a quintuple-decker sandwich of brick and window on white concrete slabs. The interior was airconditioned and smelled like the sterile insides of computers. The office of Dr. Seitchek was situated on the ground floor, across from a computer room, and contained two desks. Howard Chun was sitting with his feet up on the one closer to the door, energetically firing a rubber band at the wall in front of him and shagging it on the fly. The other desk, by the window, was bare except for a stack of unopened mail.

“She’s not here.”

“Do you know where she is?”

Howard lurched forward to catch the rubber band before it fell between his sneakers. “What you want her for?”

“She’s a friend of mine.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“Think she’s at home.”

“I was just there.”

Howard began to snap the rubber band viciously against his own fingers, frowning at the reddening skin. Suddenly he peered over an armrest at the floor. “Wanna see something?” He shot the rubber band at a piece of paper on the wall. “That’s the earthquakes we got since March.”

The circles appeared to be epicenters, scaled linearly to magnitude. “What are the dotted lines?” Louis said.

“Mapped faults near Ipswich. Dashed line, big aeromagnetic feature, may be old suture, may be nothing. Six miles deep, maybe four or five. Mapped faults are shallow. Only problem is, Ipswich cluster’s deep, more like five, six miles.”

“Meaning what?”

“Probably there’s other faults. Or faults aren’t mapped right. Doesn’t look right. Two unrelated swarms, so close in time and space. That’s low probability.”

“Like how low?”

Howard crossed his arms and wrinkled his nose. “Like really low. Never see it.”

“Huh.” Louis looked again at the pile of mail on Renée’s desk. Outside the window Japanese tourists were filing up an asphalt-topped path between oak trees.

Howard leaned dangerously far back in his swivel chair and retrieved his rubber band with outstretched fingers. “Wanna see something else?” Feet still on his desk, he rolled back and opened his top drawer and handed Louis a photograph, a 5 X 7 on yellowing, once-glossy paper. It was a picture of an adolescent girl in a marching-band uniform. She was clutching a clarinet to her chest. The jacket was Prussian blue with cream-colored trim and gold buttons; the cap had a black plastic bill and gold braid on the band. Long limp hair, mid-seventies hair, framed her face and did its best to conceal (but actually in effect extended and accentuated) the zones of acne on her cheeks and forehead. She was wearing the rigid, self-defeating smirk of teens who hate their face and for whom being photographed is an unspeakable cruelty, and was staring at an infinity somewhere to her left, as if by not meeting the camera’s eye she could make it overlook her. Pentagonal yellow leaves lay on the lawn between her and an out-of-focus station wagon and a double-door garage.

“You know who it is?”

“Where’d you get this?”

“It’s Renée.”

“Where’d you get it?”

Howard slammed his back into the vinyl backrest of his chair several times. Then he shoved off the desk with his feet and rolled halfway across the room. “Found it.”

“Where?”

“Just got it.”

Louis tried to give it back.

“Take it,” Howard said. “You want it?”

“Why are you giving it to me?”

Howard shrugged. He’d made his last offer.

“Did you steal it?”

“Just got it. You want it, take it. I don’t want it.”

In the twilight, through his open window, he heard John Mullins tell the soprano and her husband that that nice-looking fella next door here — just moved in, nice-looking kid — had gotten fired from his job. He told ’em he didn’t believe in Jesus, and they fired him.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” Louis said.

Renée was eating seedless red grapes at her kitchen table. She held the glass bowl at chest level and used only her wrist, bending it back and forth efficiently, to convey them to her mouth. “Very bad week for that.”

“I got what’s-his-face, Terry, once, and he hung up on me.”

“People are a little angry with me, through no fault of my own.” Quiet in bare feet, she got up and put the grape bones in the sink. Sweat stuck her hair to her neck and forehead in narrow, curving blades. In the window behind Louis, a box fan hummed on Lo, dispensing comfort with its sound, not its draft. (While their dressings are being changed, burn patients would rather listen to white noise than to music.)

“I’ll just give you an idea of what things have been like.” She showed him the jack of her disconnected telephone, then plugged it in and upended a paper shopping bag from DeMoula’s Market Basket, dumping maybe sixty or eighty envelopes onto the kitchen table. “Here’s a nice one.” She handed him an envelope without a return address. It contained a typewritten note:

Dear Bitch,

I hope you die of aids.

Sincerely,

“Gets right to the point,” she said brightly. “Here’s another nice one.”

Dear “Ms” Seichek,

I saw you on TV and your attitude makes me sick. Your attitude is have sex then kill the baby. What’s the difference between abortion and infancitide? One. Abortion is legal in Mass and infancitide is murder. You explain it to me. You said abortion on demand is o.k. for 14-years-olds. What about the parents. Another thing is you never mention adoption or homes. In this poor world there is no such thing as an unwanted baby. Maybe you want to have babies someday but your sterile. I think abortion stance should be taken into account for adoption. You don’t get any. Have you ever held a baby in your arms? Maybe you won’t have a chance now because of what you said. Maybe God is Merciful if you pray. Do you know how to pray? I can not pray for you.