Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

On the other side of the fence, a coalition of local pro-choice groups was promising to flood Boston Common with a hundred thousand protesters during a rally on July 14. One of the organizers had written to Renée for permission to include her in a list of public figures supporting the rally. Renée had called the organizer and asked her, “Why do you want me on your list?”

“You’re the geologist. You were on TV.”

“A lot of people were on TV.”

“Are you saying you don’t want to be on the list?”

“No, no, go ahead. Put me on it.”

“All right.” The organizer had sounded annoyed. “We’ll put you on it.”

The regional administrative offices of the Environmental Protection Agency were on the eighth floor of a prewar granite block across from the Federal Courthouse, in the old part of downtown where if you studied the tops of the buildings and then looked at the street again you expected to see all the men wearing fedoras and dark narrow ties and Buddy Holly-style glasses.

Outside the courthouse, six female protesters in knitted mittens had wound Saran Wrap around their photographs of fetuses. Sheets of cold water were sliding over themselves on the slopes leading down into the combat zone, rain streaking the city’s gray-green windows and soaking the handcards advertising sex by telephone that were lodged under every wiper blade that wasn’t moving. It was a trick Renée had seen New England summers play many times before: a high of 53° today and more of the same expected on the weekend.

The hard plastic chairs in the vestibule of the EPA offices discouraged sitting. Some were grouped in a half circle that suggested clubbiness even though they were empty; the rest stood isolated at odd angles to the walls. When the deputy regional administrator, Susan Carver, came out to meet her, Renée left rain marks on the floor by the notice of equal employment opportunity she’d been reading.

Carver was a tall and heavy person with fleshy white cheeks and thick eyebrows. Her glasses had round cranberry-colored rims and lenses soaped by the federal lighting. She was like a brainy white rabbit stuffed into a size 14 suit. She was leading Renée back to her office when a balled-up piece of paper sailed out of an open door and glanced off her massive shoulder. She caught it on the fly, with surprising deftness, and stopped in the doorway. Four middle-aged male administrators wearing colors such as rust brown and silver-blue looked up from their desks with a guilt that was more like a bated delight. Wordlessly, Carver tossed the ball of paper through an orange hoop attached to the wall and returned to Renée while the men cheered.

“You wanted to talk to me about Sweeting-Aldren.”

“Yes.”

“This is in regard to the earthquakes in Peabody.”

“Yes.”

Obviously pleased with herself for making the basket, Carver sat down behind her desk and joined her white paws on the desk top, stretching the pinstripes at her elbows and shoulders. On the windowsill behind her stood framed photographs of her family: a chunky teenaged girl with a small nose and a flat, eager face who looked like she was good at computers, a doughy boy of eight or ten, and a skinny, grinning husband. There was a water pistol, a.38 revolver, by her Rolodex. With an amused maternal wariness, as if the company were another of her children, she said, “What has Sweeting-Aldren done, in your opinion?”

Renée reached for the shoulder bag that held her documents but slowly drew her hand back without having touched it. “There’s some evidence,” she said, “that they’ve been pumping liquids down a very deep well for a number of years, if not decades, and that they may have induced the earthquakes we’ve seen in Peabody.”

Carver’s eyebrows rose and fell almost imperceptibly. “Go on.”

Renée opened her bag and gave a poised and cautious presentation. She didn’t look up from her documents until she’d finished. Carver was wearing a faint, abstracted smile, as if continuing to savor the basket she’d made.

“Let me see if I’ve understood your chronology,” she said. “First Sweeting-Aldren begins to drill a deep well somewhere, in the late sixties. Then in 1987 there’s a swarm of small earthquakes near Peabody that lasts three months—”

“And tails off with unusual abruptness.”

“And tails off rapidly. Then there’s a spill in Peabody, not particularly large — at most a couple of years’ worth of undumpable effluents. And finally, not long after the spill is discovered, the Peabody earthquakes start up again, apparently in connection with the Ipswich earthquakes but actually not, according to you.”

“Not just me. Nobody in seismology has a persuasive model for linking Ipswich and Peabody.”

Carver nodded. She’d picked up her water pistol and was nibbling on the sight blade. “I understand. Although the impression I get is that there’s a lot that seismologists don’t know about what makes earthquakes happen when and where they do, especially earthquakes on the east coast.”

“A model of induced seismicity explains the Peabody swarm perfectly.”

“Yes, I understand. Although again it all depends on your assumption that a hole was actually drilled and drilled near Peabody. Since there may be other ‘models’ that are equally persuasive.”

“Such as?”

Carver shrugged. “Maybe a natural source of earthquakes in Peabody, and then a ‘model’ of cyclical demand that explains April’s spill there. You see, I’m not sure how well you understand the chemical industry. Short-term stockpiling of both raw materials and unprocessed wastes is very commonplace. Sweeting-Aldren stores incinerable wastes until demand improves for the products they make in their high-temperature reactors. And in the meantime, last month, an earthquake ruptured one of their storage tanks.”

Renée nodded. She’d expected — in fact, hoped — that Carver would play devil’s advocate. “Can I ask if you guys, the EPA, have actually been inside the Peabody plant to make sure they’re treating all these wastes the way they say they are?”

“Certainly you may ask. The answer is no. We have not been lowering probes into their tanks. We have not been watchdogging their internal processes. We have neither the staff nor the legal right to go checking every pipe and every valve in every factory in America.”

“Although of course this is kind of a suspicious case.”

“Ah, yes. A suspicious case.” Carver pushed on the arms of her chair and with considerable exertion repositioned herself. “Let me explain something to you, Renée. As a survivor of the eighties who’s still working for EPA. The reason we’re doing a minimally acceptable job of protecting this country’s environment is that we’re realistic, and we have priorities. This is the real world we’re dealing with, and in the real world you can’t acid-test every conceivable hypothesis. You have to focus on what’s coming out of the drainpipes and the smokestacks, and that means taking some things on faith occasionally. If a company like Sweeting-Aldren isn’t polluting the air or water—”

“Until the spill last month.”

Carver smiled. The smile meant: Will you let me finish? “Sweeting-Aldren is a responsibly managed company. Maybe if I had nobody else to worry about, I might go in there and doublecheck all this stuff. But I’m dealing with companies pouring half a ton of cadmium and mercury salts per hour into estuaries. I’m dealing with waste-management contractors taking oil with PCB levels in the parts per thousand and toluene and vinyl chloride levels in the parts per ten and dumping them in fifty-year-old tanks beneath abandoned gas stations. I’m dealing with landfills that are on the brink of contaminating groundwater pretty much statewide from here to Springfield. I’m dealing with companies who”—Carver counted the strikes on her fingertips—“ignore our regulations, ignore the fines we levy, ignore court orders, and finally go bankrupt and leave behind hundred-acre sites contaminated for eternity. On the other side we have a public prone to panic, and presidents who make it a point of pride every couple of years not to cut our funding any further.”