Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“But if the first earthquake is caused by pumping, and then you have a major one. ”

“There’d be a case, yes. But not an airtight case.”

“But anything that happens right where they’re pumping, you’d have a good case there.”

“I think so. For a civil suit. Probably by insurance companies.”

“So the only question is, Do we stick it to ’em right now for breaking the law all these years, or do we maybe wait , and see if something worse happens, and then stick it to ’em for that too.”

“You mean wait and see if some people get killed?”

“Yeah!”

“Well.” Renée gathered up her folders and hugged them to her chest. “You seem to have a grudge against these people, which I of course don’t, although if I’m right about this I agree it’s pretty disgusting. But I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do about it.” The first-person singular spoke for itself. “The Peabody earthquakes are of general interest to the scientific community. I might do some more research and then talk to people at MIT and Boston College. The EPA should also be talked to, maybe the press too. If the company does induce a destructive earthquake I’d just as soon not have it on my conscience.”

“Why would it be on your conscience?”

“Because I might have been able to prevent it.”

Louis’s surprise was genuine. “You actually believe in this stuff? Service to mankind and all that?”

In the calm upper stories of Renée’s face a powerful furnace kicked on suddenly, a bank of white jets of anger. “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it.”

“Yeah, but, like, who’s to say what’s a service to mankind? If we let the company off the hook before anything worse happens, maybe we save a few lives. But if we wait and something worse does happen and then we blow the whistle, then it becomes a message . Then maybe people finally see what kind of sharks we have running the country. Which might really be a service to mankind.”

“All right, Louis.” Her use of his name and her sudden smileyness sent a chill down his spine. This was a person whose disapproval he feared. She was pushing the stack of folders into his hands. “It’s all yours. I think you should show this to a man named Larry Axelrod at MIT; I think you should show it to the EPA. Are you listening? I’m telling you what the right thing to do is, and if you don’t want to do it, that’s your problem, not mine. All right?”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” He laughed defusingly. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“I slept with you, once.”

“And if we go broadcasting the news, what’s the company going to do? It’s going to deny everything. It’ll bulldoze everything over, and probably start doing something even worse with all this waste, and then you won’t have anything, not even the satisfaction of being right.”

“It’s your decision.”

“We make some inquiries. We talk to my good friend Peter. Drive up to Peabody and look around. Take some pictures maybe. Then we’ve got some hard proof to go to whoever with.”

“I did this work myself, you know. I didn’t necessarily mean for you to come over and make yourself an equal partner.”

“I tell you how terrific you are—?”

“Like a dog that’s been good? I can fetch?”

“Oh, all right, well.” He tossed the files into the space between the refrigerator and the wall, where Renée’s extra paper bags were carefully folded. “Keep it. And keep your little haircut too. And your little earrings, and your little smiles, and your neat little apartment. Your little folders. And your theories, and your scruples, and your old roommate, and your former friends. You know, this whole neat little perfect life. Just keep it.”

The hum of the fan in the window was the sound of unhappiness in its rotary progress, always developing and yet always the same, a sound that marked every second of the minutes and hours in which improvement was failing to occur. Time flowed along an axis through the center of the fan, and the tips of the blades traced unending spirals around this axis.

“I don’t even know you,” Renée said. “And you just hurt me. There was no reason to hurt me. I didn’t do a single thing to you, except not call you.”

“And tell me to get lost.”

“And tell you to get lost. That’s true. I did tell you to get lost. Everything you said is true. But it doesn’t mean you’re any better than I am. You’re just less exposed. And I’m so embarrassed.” She kept her shoulders rigid as she walked from the room, tottering slightly and repeating, “I’m so embarrassed.”

Louis drank another beer and listened to the fan. After about half an hour he knocked on the bedroom door. When she didn’t answer, he opened it and followed the wedge of light into the dark, stuffy room. She was nowhere in sight. Only after he’d looked behind her bed and desk and behind the drawn window shades did he see the light behind the closet door, powered by a cord leading over from a socket. He knocked.

“Yeah?”

She was cross-legged on the closet floor, bending over a lamp. The pages of The New York Times Magazine she was reading were strewn with big puckered dots of perspiration from her head. Her eyes rolled up and looked at him. “What do you want?”

Crouching, he took her hot, limp hands in his own. Birds were chirping angrily outside. “I don’t want to go,” he said. His stomach plummeted; he attributed this to the sick-making effort of sincerity. However, the real problem was the floor, which was moving. The panic that flashed through Renée’s face was so cartoonishly pure he almost laughed. Then the left side of the doorframe lurched closer to him, and he tried to rise out of his crouch, like a surfer who’d caught a wave, and the frame abandoned him on the left and the right side body-checked him and knocked him onto his butt. Renée was fighting with the clothes and hangers she’d stood up into. She stepped on Louis, who was not good footing, and stumbled free of the closet. Things had been falling during the interval, and now pencils and pens were rolling across the floor, roaming and vibrating and bouncing like drops of water in hot oil. There was also a deep sound that was less sound than an idea of sound, a drowning of the human in the physical. And then only the miniature rumble, clear and strangely personal, of a beer bottle crossing the kitchen floor.

“I’m sorry I stepped on you,” Renée said.

“Did you step on me?”

They wandered around the disturbed apartment, oblivious to each other. The baby downstairs was crying, but the Dobermans on the first floor were either silent or out for the evening, eating prime rib somewhere. Louis picked up two beer bottles and, forgetting he’d meant to set them on the kitchen table, carried them from room to room and finally left them on the cushion of an armchair. He was dazed and without dignity, as if in the wake of a first kiss. Renée had a jar of pencils in her hand when he bumped into her in the hallway. “It’s like I’ve been tickled,” she said, dodging his encircling arm, “to the point where if you touch me—” she fought him off with her elbow—

The jar sailed down the hallway and the glass popped and the pencils bounced tunefully. Louis tickled her convulsing belly, and she slugged away at his arms and ribs, not hurting him at all and shouting pretty much constantly. Clothes were partially removed, body parts exposed, necks bent, the hard floor cursed. They kissed with their entire heads, like mountain goats. What was happening wasn’t so much sex as a kind of banging together, a clapping and clenching of hands the size of bodies, a re-creation of strong motion; something other than satisfaction wanted out. Louis came violently and hardly noticed, he was so intent on the way she pitched beneath him. It seemed like she was trying to shed him even as they kept colliding, and finally they collided so hard they did separate and, still vibrating like bells, sat up against opposing walls in obscene disarray, shackled at the ankles by twisted jeans and underpants. Farther up the hallway there was broken glass and a swollen tampon at the end of a bloody skid mark.