Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

— JOHN LOCKE

Not noticing any fresh smoke, Louis tapped on the door and pushed it open. His father was sitting in front of the window, rubbing the fur on Drake’s head and looking into the blades of the box fan blowing air at him. Half the bare floor was hidden by staggering piles of photocopies flagged with sheets of self-adhesive notepaper. On the wall above his Macintosh hung a black-and-white photograph of Eileen. She was about four years old, short-haired and elfin and huge-eyed, and she wore a chain of daisies in her hair.

“Look,” Louis said. “You don’t have to say anything. I just want to say I’m doing my best. I don’t want to hear how bad I am. It’s not really very helpful for me right now. You know, because I already feel like about the biggest jerk on the planet.”

Drake gave him a sated look, tinged with jealousy. Bob spoke to the fan. “I never said you were bad. I of all people have no right to say that. You don’t even know the high regard I have for you.”

Louis winced. “You don’t have to say that either, I mean, let’s quit while we’re ahead.”

“And I suppose my high regard gives rise to unreasonable expectations. I’d hoped that even though you’re upset with your mother, you still might be able to understand what’s going on with her, if I could talk to you. You can’t blame me for trying. I can’t just stand aside while this folly of your grandfather’s destroys the family. I have to do something.”

“Uh huh. Like what.”

“Like tell you that we love you.”

Louis might not have heard him. He turned to a shelf and touched the spines of the library books on it. Then he made a fist and punched the spines. With bent fingers he pulled at his arms and chest as though he were covered with corruption. “ Don’t say that! ” His voice was a strangled shriek, like no sound he’d ever made. “Don’t say that! ”

His father spun his swivel chair around, Drake leaping free of his lap and bolting from the room. “Lou—”

“ Fuck love. Fuck love.” Louis butted his head against the doorframe. He stumbled out the door and slumped on the landing, holding his head and feeling torn between what he was feeling and what he knew to be a still-optional ability to control himself. He opened his eyes and experienced a moment of clear emptiness, a simultaneous zeroing of all the waves in his brain. Then his father knelt and put his arms around him, and his eyes burned and terrible clots of sharp-edged hurt rose from his chest. He was crying, and there was no longer any way back to the self-respect and pride he’d felt before he started crying. He cried because the thought of stopping and seeing that this self that he had liked so much had been crying in his father’s arms was unbearable. It seemed as if there were a specific organ in his brain which under extreme stimulus produced a sensation of love, more intense than any orgasm, but more dangerous too, because it was even less discriminate. A person could find himself loving enemies and homeless beggars and ridiculous parents, people from whom it had been so easy to live at a distance and towards whom, if in a moment of weakness he allowed himself to love them, he then acquired an eternal responsibility.

For no apparent reason, Bob took his arms away from Louis. There was a damned look in his eyes. He went down to the kitchen, cracked the metal seal on a Johnnie Walker bottle, and tilted it back. He had to fellate the bottle, sticking the neck well into his mouth, to keep the plastic spout from dribbling whiskey down his chin. The cats tried to climb his legs, coveting the bottle. He filled their water dish. He could hear his son sobbing two floors above him.

Upstairs, he found him leaning crookedly against the newel post with his glasses off, his eyes small and red, the neck of his T-shirt stretched. He squinted stupidly at his father, who was standing in front of the light.

“You feeling a little better?” Bob kicked him playfully, with one foot and then the other.

“What are you kicking me for? Don’t kick me.”

I’m sorry.

Louis sighed. He felt deadened, as if some long-accumulated strain or poison had been released from his system. That his thinking was in ruins didn’t really bother him. “There’s something I wanted to say.”

“Anything you want.”

“Right. Thanks.” Louis sniffed back a large volume of mucus. “It’s about Mom’s company, Sweeting-Aldren. I just wanted to say they’re causing the earthquakes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they’re literally causing the earthquakes in Boston. This woman I’ve been living with— This woman I was living with— This woman who I just did a really nasty thing to. ” Louis looked straight ahead, tears pooling again in his eyes. “She’s a seismologist. She’s the most wonderful person, who I just really fucked over. Who I just basically lost. I don’t even know why it happened. I mean, I know why, it’s because she’s a lot older than me — it’s because I loved her so much. Dad. Because I loved her so much . And this other person who’s just my age, who I used to be—. This person came in from Houston.”

He looked sorrowfully at his father. Then he squeezed his eyes shut, his face crumpling up.

Bob crouched in front of him. “Call her.”

He shook his head. “It’s complicated. You can’t get her on the phone, and I don’t even know if I want to. I don’t think I can.” He slid sideways, afraid Bob was going to touch him again. “I don’t want to talk about this. I just had one thing to say, which was the company’s causing the earthquakes, and somehow I’m going to stick it to them, and I know Mom has a lot of stock, and I wasn’t going to tell you, but now I have, and you can tell her if you want. That’s all.”

“Causing. You said causing.”

“Yeah.”

“Is she sure?”

“Yeah.”

Then Bob had to know everything. As busy as a boxer’s manager, he brought Louis toilet paper to blow his nose with, took him to the kitchen and sat him down with ice water and Johnnie Walker, and showered him with questions. Trying to explain it without Renée’s help, Louis thought the whole theory sounded fuzzy and unlikely, but Bob was laughing as he chopped up vegetables and beef and stir-fried them, rating every logical step with a “Good!” or an “Excellent!” One could only admire how methodically he set about mastering the argument. At the table, with each bite of food he picked up in his chopsticks (Louis used a fork), he fitted another fact into place.

“Nobody suspects the company,” he said over a piece of carrot, “because the earthquakes are so deep.”

“Right.”

“And the earthquakes in Ipswich are unrelated.” A strip of beef now. “They’re the cover.”

“Right.”

“Just as in New Jersey, when the wind blows out to sea, all the companies double their emissions because no one can catch them at it. The Ipswich earthquakes are the wind blowing east.”

“Right.”

“Marvelous! Terrific!” A snow pea pod. “And how does she prove there’s a deep hole?”

Louis wished his father wouldn’t insist on considering this “her” theory. “She’s — we’ve — been looking for pictures or something. But otherwise, it’s just the two articles.”

From his soy-stained plate, Bob picked up a broccoli floret and held it at eye level, revolving it like a thought and frowning. “There’s a problem there,” he said. “If she can’t prove for certain that the hole was drilled.”

“We’re working on it.”

“No no no. There’s a problem.” Bob turned and frowned at the door to the basement. After a moment he stood up and went downstairs. He returned with an Atlantic Monthly .