Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“I was told to talk to you about being taken for a ride.”

“Where to?”

“Just around the neighborhood.”

He came promptly down the ladder, leading her to think they’d be airborne in a matter of minutes, but in fact she had to breathe exhaust gases and fuel gases for nearly an hour. She handed over money and filled out and signed an insurance waiver. Kevin disappeared for a while and came back minus his coveralls, spent ten minutes determining that he didn’t like something about the oddly upside-down-looking plane he tried first, fiddled and diddled with an ordinary plane, a Cessna, and finally parked it outside the mouth of the hangar. He’d put dark shades on. “Where we going?”

“Just around Peabody a couple times. There are some things I’d like to look at.”

He brought the mike to his lips and muttered nothings into its plastic grooves. There was a small spiral notepad in a pocket below the instrument panel. He flipped the laminated pages one by one, raising and lowering flaps, feeding the engine until the propellers became invisible, muttering into the mike again, flipping switches. Cabin temperature rose twenty or thirty degrees. The engine noise reached screaming heights as they bounced along softened asphalt and firm concrete and swung out onto the runway, neatly astride the center-line stripe. Heated air and the scaly heads of weeds were the only things moving in the acres of vacancy around them.

They swung right and left and bounced on the air like a jeep on a hillside.

“There’s a control space right southeast here,” Kevin shouted. “I’m going to swing north of Danvers if that’s all right with you.”

“Sure.”

No noise in particular stood out, but it was hard to hear. Kevin kissed the mike and hung it up. “You can turn that lever there now, get a little air.”

It was an ugly day for flying, the rivers an evil turbid yellow, the glare inescapable. The atmospheric soup extended far above the altitude they were maintaining, and everything on the ground dissolved in blue unless she looked straight down. Lakes and rivers were like spills of shiny lead on the blue-black land, stretching towards a blue-brown horizon. Each time they flew over water the plane dropped like a yo-yo. Each plummet was followed by an upward rebound that could be expected but not prepared for. Kevin set a paper bag on Renée’s bare knee.

“You’re cute,” she essayed, at a shout.

“So are you. Not as cute as my wife, though.”

She nodded judiciously. “What’s your job?”

“I fly for a tool company in Lynn. They’ve got a jet and a couple planes. I’m number two, I don’t fly the jet much. I take the president to Maine a lot. Vacation house. His guests too. How about you?”

“I’m a photographer.”

“For—?” He pointed at the label on her camera. “Harvard Geophysics?”

“Yeah.”

“You interested in earthquakes?”

“No,” she shouted. “Land forms.”

“I thought you might be looking for faults or whatever. Lot of seismologists around here. Guy I know took one up last month, all up and down the coast.”

“Can I show you where I want to go?” She held up a map on which she’d circled in red the main Sweeting-Aldren property and the two smaller plots she hadn’t seen yet. Kevin put it on his lap, studied it a moment, and then looked straight ahead through the windshield. The plane leaped drastically into another thermal. The sound of the engine changed and stayed changed.

“Is this OK?” she shouted.

It was a while before he answered. “What do you want to look at Sweeting-Aldren for?”

She craned her neck, pretending to check the map. “Oh, is that what those are?”

“You got some special reason?”

“I’m looking at land forms.”

“I can’t take you any lower than three thousand feet.”

“How high are we now?”

“Three thousand feet.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause they don’t like it. They’re a company. They’ve got secrets.”

“What if I see something I want to see?”

“About half the corporate business at Beverly Municipal is Sweeting-Aldren. They’ve got six jets there. You know what I’m saying?”

“No.”

“I’m saying that’s where I work.”

“You work for Sweeting-Aldren?”

“I work for Barnett Die. But I’m at the airport. You know what I’m saying?”

He pointed out the two small properties, a pair of fields split by dirt roads. They hit another bump. The engine coughed as they banked, sun spilling crazily across Renée’s lap and out the other window. A hillside vomited smashed cars and clots of rusted waste. Proud mansions spread their green velvet skirts on land wedged between the old brick phalluses of industry and the newer plants — flat rectangles with gravel on the roof and trailers crowding to feed at troughs in back. The most permeable of membranes separated a country club from acres of bone-colored slag piles streaked with sulfuric yellow, like the pissings of a four-story dog. Low-rise condos with brand-new parking lots and BayBank branches were perched above algae-filled sinkholes littered with indestructibles. Everywhere wealth and filth were cheek by jowl. Before it gave way to Sweeting-Aldren’s property, the landscape seemed to hesitate, real-estate development dwindling to undernourished neighborhoods of flat, small houses, some mobile homes, lone taverns, and unpaved streets skirting woods and dying in front of a futile house or two, half-finished, with refuse cascading down embankments. On the company side of the woods, pipes and rails on low piers made beelines across wetlands, passing through industrial suburbs of identical circular pods, crossing over beltways of tangled pipes, plunging into downtown and then out along spokes to satellite developments. Vehicles crept through the ranks of ten thousand color-coded barrels; steam dribbled from the tops of silver tiparillos. There was an impression of good management, a logic to the coding and the movement. The black ocean sparkled just beyond.

Kevin dipped a wing so Renée could snap some pictures. “Seen enough?”

“No,” she shouted. “You have to take me lower.”

“You’re looking kind of gray.”

“You have to take me lower.”

“I’ll give you one pass at fifteen hundred. Then we go back.”

“Two passes at a thousand.”

He shook his head. The plane shot upward like a helium balloon.

“What can I give you?” She did her best to smile nicely. The plane fell so hard her teeth clicked.

“You don’t understand,” Kevin said. “They’re very, very touchy.”

“I’ll give you more money.”

He shook his head. “One pass at fifteen hundred. And I want to see your driver’s license or student ID or whatever. Something with a picture.”

He took her license and verified her name and image as they circled counterclockwise. “You’re thirty,” he said.

She nodded, lowering her head between her knees. She got her bag open just before a wave of motion ran up her back and shook her shoulders. The bag stiffened with the new weight inside it. Kevin handed her a fresh one.

“Throw that in the back seat. We’ll go up the western side, cut around east, and head back. It’ll all be out your window. Sun behind you. You gonna survive?”

The only thing that kept her upright was leaning on the camera with the lens against her window. She shot at everything, working the zoom. They were already past the central installation when she realized that she wasn’t seeing anything, that she should have just been looking.

They had to circle Wenham while a jet landed ahead of them and another one took off. She kept her eyes shut and her face pressed to the air vent. Each bump, even the smallest, deepened her misery. It appalled her that Kevin continued to give her information to digest. Facts were as unwelcome as a tuna salad sandwich.