Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“You’ve read all these things.”

“I’ve been stuck in the library.”

“And you underline them and put them in folders even when you’re not going to get graded on them.”

“That’s right.”

“Why do you do this?”

“Why?” The question seemed almost to offend her. “Because I’m curious.”

“You’re curious. You do all this stuff because you’re curious.”

“Yes.”

“There’s nothing else in it for you.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Just simple curiosity.”

“How many times do I have to say it?”

Louis blew out air. He tapped on the tabletop. Blew out more air. “You’ve been talking to my mother again.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Only that she has a large financial interest in Sweeting-Aldren.”

“I didn’t know that. That’s actually very interesting. But I haven’t been talking to her, and I definitely did not know that.” She shuddered a little, trying to rid herself of his vague imputations.

“So go on,” he said.

“There’s nothing else, really. It’s just — You know. It’s just like you say. My little presentation.”

“I’m sorry . I want to hear the rest. Drink some beer. Tell me the rest.”

She took a deep breath and started speaking to the tabletop, full of body English, as though engaging him directly; but it was clearly beyond her power to sustain both articulateness and eye contact.

“In 1969 Sweeting-Aldren’s swimming in cash, mainly because of Vietnam. They have a bunch of scientists on the payroll, and this person Krasner comes up with a theory that Massachusetts is sitting on an ocean of crude oil. The company decides to fund a hole to see if he’s right, except something happens to make them change their mind about where to put it. Who knows what. Maybe they figure that if there’s a huge pool of crude oil under western Mass, it must be under eastern Mass too, where they own property. The only reason to drill at the site in western Mass is because the site’s geology is supposedly incompatible with petroleum deposits. But what do they care about Krasner’s theory? They’re worried about getting some money out of the hole, if it happens not to be a gusher. And one thing is in 1969 people are also starting to get nervous about the environment, especially water pollution, and what I think they decide is that if the deep well comes up dry, they’re going to pump industrial waste down it. And meanwhile Krasner retires, or dies, or opens an antiques store. Or was just a pseudonym to begin with.”

“And pump industrial waste down it. ”

“And then what your sister’s boyfriend was saying”—the sound of Louis’s voice caused her to concentrate all the more on the tabletop—“is that even now the company is dumping a million gallons of effluents every year. But in the paper, basically every day for the last two weeks”—she opened another folder, which he could see was full of clippings from the Globe —“both the company and the EPA say the company puts nothing in the Danvers River except clean, slightly oily hot water. The plant’s a model nonpolluter.”

He thought: And pump industrial waste down it.

“So where did they drill? Obviously they drilled within a couple miles of the plant in Peabody. And the thing is you can pump liquid into a hole for a long time before anything happens. It takes a lot of liquid to bring what’s called the pore pressure to the critical level where the rock starts to relieve its internal stresses by rupturing seismically. It’s not implausible that Sweeting-Aldren was injecting effluents from the early seventies all the way into the mideighties without anything happening. But suddenly they reach the critical level, say in January ’87, and they start having little earthquakes. The swarm goes on for four months and then stops, which to me suggests the company got scared and stopped pumping. And for a couple of years everything’s quiet, and then about two weeks after the first Ipswich event there suddenly start being these earthquakes in Peabody again — the papers talk about Lynn too, but the epicentral area is the same as in the ’87 series — which nobody can relate to the Ipswich events as anything but a low-probability coincidence. But what’s been happening to all these wastes that the company normally would have been pumping underground? They had to stop pumping in ’87, and so presumably they’ve had to store the liquid somewhere, which I’m sure they’re not happy about. And maybe what they’ve been waiting for is some good-sized local earthquake, so they could start pumping in Peabody again, full speed ahead, with the idea that any new earthquakes would be associated with the Ipswich events. Maybe what spilled on Easter was some of the backlog they’d been storing up since ’87. Maybe they decided they had to try to get as much of that stuff underground as soon as possible, no matter what happened. And sure enough, within a week or two, we start getting more tremors in Peabody.”

Finished at last, Renée pushed her hair off her forehead and took another long pull on her beer, withdrawing into herself, taking care not to expect any response. Louis was staring at the bottle of Joy by the faucet of her deep, white sink. The kitchen had grown brighter and smaller. He leaned back in his chair, filling the sweet spot of his field of vision with her image. “The thing about the stuff in 1987, how it can’t be from a well. Can you read that again?” Obediently she opened the proper folder. “‘However, the relatively great depth’?”

“Yes! Yes! That proves it, doesn’t it?”

“‘. (i.e., on average 3 kilometers deeper than the deepest commercial waste-disposal wells) would appear to rule out such a mechanism. Furthermore there are no licensed injection wells operating—.”

“Those slimes! Those slimes! This is great ” Louis leaned over the table and put his hands on her ears and kissed her on the mouth. Then he started pacing the room, socking the palm of his hand.

“Do you know something about these people?” she said.

“They’re slimes!”

“You’ve met them.”

“I told you, my mom’s like this major stockholder all of a sudden. I met them at my grandmother’s funeral. They’re these totally classic corporate pigs.” He lifted Renée out of her chair by the armpits so he could squeeze her and kiss her again. “You’re amazing. I can’t believe you just sat down and figured this all out. You’re terrific.”

He lifted her off the floor and set her down. She looked at him as if she hoped he wouldn’t do this again.

“It’s illegal, right?” He pushed his glasses back up his sweaty nose. “To pump waste underground without a license?”

“I assume. Otherwise why have licenses?”

“Ha! And if these earthquakes cause damage, the company’s liable, right?”

“I don’t know. In theory, yes. At least for any damage near Peabody. It’s pretty gross negligence on their part. It would be a harder thing to prove, though, if it’s a matter of a large earthquake some distance away and you had to speculate about whether what they’d done in Peabody had triggered a more general release of strain.”

“You mean that’s possible? That can happen? You can trigger things like that? Boston gets wiped out and the company has to pay for it?” Louis was getting more euphoric by the second.

“It’s very unlikely that Boston’s going to get wiped out,” Renée said. “And although there’s a lot of talk about trigger events, it’s very hard to demonstrate strict causality. You can talk about the April 6 event in Ipswich having ‘triggered’ the Easter event, but if you don’t know what causes earthquakes to occur at the particular times they do, and we don’t know this, you might as well say ‘precede’ instead of ‘trigger. ”