Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

Sometimes, when he came down from his ledge, he ran confusedly back and forth along the water, spooking the rats and being spooked by them; sometimes he ran for a block or more and then stopped, whiskers twitching, and looked into the inky, dripping blackness ahead of him and then, as if the blackness were a concrete barrier, turned back.

Tonight he went straight downhill. Street light fell through the small holes and larger slots above him. Paw over paw, he climbed the iron rungs he almost always climbed. Halfway up, he reversed and descended headfirst, then reversed again and climbed to the top and peered out through the slot. Between car bumpers he could see the Post Office. He never went out through this slot. Every night he recollected having been here innumerable times, but recollection was weaker than habit, and so invariably he retraced his steps up and down the iron rungs. These and all the other motions he repeated every night were like a sorrow.

The rats were like a sorrow. There were so many of them and only one of him. In rats the gray, hostile world ramified and mobilized and swirled around him. Superior size and intelligence counted for nothing when he experienced rats; he became clumsy and vulnerable. Although they gave him wide berth in the tunnels, their numbers made them unafraid. If they surprised him, he drew his shoulders up in anger like a cat, huffing impotently as the little evils shimmered away into the darkness. They could swim terribly well.

The raccoon was bigger also than squirrels and rabbits and opossums, and was smarter and more graceful in his proportions, but again there were many of them and only one of him. A squirrel’s world might have been nothing more than trees and nuts, a neurotic hither and thither, but there was an at-homeness — a confidence and oblivion — that came of belonging to a large population doing exactly the same inconsequential things. Solitary and omnivorous, the raccoon had no better reason to climb trees than the pleasure that following an instinct gave him. The high boughs he sought bowed wildly with his weight. And when a squirrel fell it contorted itself at lightning speed and glanced off branches and hit the ground running; but when the raccoon fell he went down with a crash, grasping futilely for purchase, making noises of distress, and landed in an undignified heap. At home in many environments, he was really at home in none.

Reaching the bottom of the tunnel, he surfaced through a grateless drain on the commuter-rail right-of-way. Cars on bridges crossed over the silence that pooled in this low, rubbly part of Somerville. Dozens of food smells mingled in the sea breeze, but few had the pungency of immediate forage. The track signals were green and red in both directions.

Beneath a bridge that saw heavy foot traffic in the daytime, he ate a stale piece of jelly doughnut and the crumbs of other doughnuts in a pink-and-orange box. He ate an apple core and some marshmallows, a novelty. He ate a moth.

Up on Prospect Hill there were good grubs, good crab apple trees, and a lot of organic garbage, but there were also dogs. Sometimes at the least opportune moment a back door would fly open and out would shoot a fanged and curly-haired cannonball, and the raccoon, which like as not had been eating the remains of the dog’s dry Purina dinner, would have to scramble up the nearest vertical surface. He had spent entire nights nervously pacing the crossbar of a swing set or the roof of a recreational vehicle while below him a dog kept the neighborhood awake. Various pets had bitten his hind legs and tail. A cat had laid open one of his cheeks (but the cat had paid for it with an eye). One night a pair of schnauzers trapped him in a free-standing twelve-foot fir tree; spotlights came on, a fat man emerged from the house and children followed, the schnauzers in frenzy all the while, and the red diode of a camcorder winked and the fat man worked the zoom and one of the children lifted a schnauzer as high as she could reach, so that its furiously righteous black German eyes and rose-petal tongue and pointed teeth were within a foot of the terrified and humiliated raccoon, and this confrontation was likewise committed to videotape.

Would a thing like this ever happen to a squirrel? To a rat? To an opossum or a skunk or a rabbit?

The raccoon had had two sisters. One had been killed by cats during a melee in which his mother was also mauled. Later the other sister stopped eating and died. He and his mother saw less and less of each other. Once he passed her in a tunnel and something made him jump on her, but she rebuffed him. Rats hastened through the trickle of water between them as they crouched, panting, on opposite sides of the tunnel. Then she ran uphill and turned back angrily. He didn’t see her again until winter. The streets were white with salt and moonlight when he found her rigid by a curb, her eyes cloudy with ice crystals. It was so cold he had to bury his nose in her fur before he could smell anything.

From Union Square, in the direction of the tall buildings, the right-of-way became narrower and rockier and less rich in edible things, until eventually there came vast tunnels in which diesel winds blew and the ground shook.

To the west there was more wildlife. In his second summer the raccoon had traveled that way for several miles, drawn by the smell of females. He ran into some males and they nosed each other and climbed a roof together, but mainly they were wrapped up in their odd, private behavior, his own as odd as any. He suffered repeated traumas involving automobiles, which in West Cambridge had a way of coming and coming and coming. Meanwhile the scent of females grew fainter. By Labor Day he was back in Union Square.

Seasons changed and came around again; he never did the thing animals most like to do. His fur darkened. Something in his stomach gave him steady pain. Fleas tormented him in cycles. Only once or twice more did he see another animal like himself; and, never fighting, never mating, never interacting with his own kind in any way, he almost ceased to have a nature. He became an individual living in a world that consisted entirely of his sorrowlike compulsions and afflictions and the pleasurable exercise of his abilities. The only real face he ever saw was his own, when he looked in dark water — not when he washed food, because then although he was looking at the food and at his busy paws and at the shrubs and car parts around him, his compulsion made him sightless — but when rain had filled a ditch along the tracks and in stopping to cross it he saw a furry, masked head descend from the urban sky with intense and tender slowness to touch noses with him, like a dream of the mate he had never met, and time folded back on itself, the repeated patterns of his existence lining up the way multiple reflections of a single object come together, so that instead of a succession of days there was just one day that was his life, in fact a single moment: this one.

The signals were red and green in both directions. The air had begun to throb. White beams of light coming from his right and left made his eyes glow yellow. He scampered across two sets of rails, holding in his mouth a fragment of hamburger bun swollen with ketchup like a tampon, and ran halfway up an oil-darkened embankment. An engine blasted its air horn, rocking a little as it trundled forward. The raccoon crossed the rails again, turned in a tight circle with swishing tail, ran up the embankment, and suddenly full of terror as the immense and roaring engines doubled their apparent speed in passing each other, he buried himself as well as he could in ragweed and shut the world out.

Renée watched the trains pass from the Dane Street bridge, the passenger cars flowing below her like the opposing belts of an airport people mover. On the roof of a windowless building, pink plastic letters three feet tall said precisi n motor rebui ding. It was midnight. She walked quickly across Somerville Avenue and past the ancient row houses of northern Little Lisbon. In a manila envelope she had the Caddulo pictures and a copy of the paper that she’d printed out on the way back from Chelsea. She passed a powder-blue toilet, complete with tank but somewhat dirty, on the sidewalk.