Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

“Is that what happened?” She raised her head from his chest, a god’s face appearing in a cloud above the horizon of his rib cage. “What we did in the hall, after the earthquake. It was just like it’s supposed to be.”

  “Lucky thing I came over, huh?”

  “I love sex. It’s almost the only thing I’m not embarrassed to like.”

  Good effort by Greenwell to hold him to a single.

  “You make me want to be a woman,” Louis said.

  After the weekend the heat gave way to weather from Canada. The air smelled washed and sweet and full of oxygen, and the trees on Pleasant Avenue drooped pregnantly in the sudden overfullness of their foliage. The public library, on the last hill of Somerville, was like the bridge of a sailing ship, the emptiness of ocean sky commencing directly beyond the parking lot; air flavored with the sound of hammers and forklifts flowed up and over Louis’s face as he and his girlfriend looked out over flat roofs and brick warehouses at the sky-blue span of the Tobin Bridge, and beyond it to the dusk-colored haze over Lynn and Peabody, and the prow of Cape Ann.

  The music he’d been happy to eat sandwiches with and the TV he’d been happy to bury evenings under both began to seem shrill and irrelevant. There was a silence on Pleasant Avenue that belonged to Renée, and he wanted to be in it. One morning he borrowed her Harvard ID and for two hours assumed the identity of René Seitchek, visiting Frenchman. He returned from Widener Library with a backpack of Balzac and Gide. He felt like he’d been flung seismically out of a career in radio, a career he might very well have enjoyed and derived a sense of purpose or safety from, into a state where he not only didn’t know what to do with himself but also doubted that it mattered much. Similar upheavals and subsidences were occurring in the landscape of his memory, familiar landmarks dropping out of sight, replaced by remembered scenes of a nature so radically different that he was almost surprised to realize that these things, too, had had a place in his life. A kind, wry Rice alumnus delivering a Commencement address that Louis no less than the other graduates had had to sit through, and reminding the graduates of a thing called social justice. The entire semester he’d spent in Nantes, the couscous he’d eaten with a group of Algerian students there, the students telling him: things are really bad in the country we were born in, and we as French citizens feel torn. His fourteenth birthday, the buck knife in a sheath Eileen had bought and given him. Also Marcel Proust, for whom he’d held a mental door open long enough to be overjoyed by the discovery that Swann was married to Odette and that the wretched painter at the Verdurins’ had grown into the great artist Elstir; the door had fallen shut under the pressure of four five-page papers, each to be written in French, but not before a splinter of joy had slipped through, a splinter that it was evident now was still inside him, like a self-contained and frightening djinn.

  Every evening as he listened to the real Seitchek’s footsteps on the stairs he felt a mounting anticipation and curiosity that were not, however, in any way satisfied by the person who after making some noises in the kitchen came into the room where he’d been reading. He saw her with a dreamlike clarity that was the same as a dreamlike inability to really see her. Instead of a face he saw a mask, a sign grasped directly: the image of the woman he slept with. She looked much the same whether his eyes were closed or open. Strangely or not, his presence in her apartment seemed to disturb her less and less. She listened to his tapes while she made dinner and hypnotized him with the precision and methodicality of her cooking, and afterward, while he washed the dishes, she watched his TV and read the paper and didn’t appear to notice any change in him, not even the way he dried all the dishes and put them away and swept the floor and then for another fifteen or twenty minutes stood in the kitchen doing absolutely nothing but avoiding going in to join her on the bed. It was as if, in nuclear terms, the configuration of forces had changed and he was no longer an oppositely charged particle attracted to her from a great distance but a particle with like charge, a proton repelled by this other proton until they were right next to each other and the strong nuclear force came into its own and bound them together.

  “You can hurt me a little.”

  “What?”

  “You can slap me, or bite me. A little. You can pinch me. It’s something you could do, if you want.”

  She lay on top of him, the field emanating from the large-eyed steadiness of her gaze bearing down. “Would you do it?”

  He twisted his head away. “No!”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think a man should hit a woman.”

  “Not even in bed, if the woman asks?”

  “Better not to.”

  “OK.”

  Her voice was so small only the K was audible. She rolled away and stared at the wall; her shoulder threw his hand back when he touched it. There were silences. Demurrals and qualifications, silences. It took hours to turn the clock back thirty seconds. Long after the last car had driven down Pleasant Avenue, at a time of night when actions and sensations had the moral weightlessness of dreams, he finally let her have her way with him.

  The next night, for the first time, she returned to work after dinner. He was allowed to come along. In the computer room, consoles with bubble-shaped chassis like the busts of moon walkers were arrayed in a double row on a Formica-topped bench swamped by equipment manuals and used paper. A plate-glass window gave into a bright room filled with dryer-sized pieces of hardware and a throbbing, all-night white noise of NORAD-style vigilance. Ocean maps like the one in Renée’s apartment hung on the walls, some with drooping corners tipped with squares of sticky stuff. The telephone, which sat on a radiator, had been unplugged, and the room’s atmosphere of transience or abandonment was heightened by a lack of things to sit on. Renée said she hadn’t been on hand when a shipment of new chairs arrived, and that students and assistant professors from the rest of the building had dropped in and helped themselves, and thrown their old chairs in a dumpster, because she hadn’t been on hand.

  “I did most of my work in this room. The computer’s a Data General. We have a lot of Sims now too. They speak UNIX.”

  Louis stood by a map of the South Atlantic Ocean. “All these dots, all these lines.”

  “The dots are earthquakes.”

  “There are millions.”

  “Thousands every month, yes. The majority at sea.”

  He found a map showing most of North America, a ponderous beige mass between seas teeming colorfully with geological life. Red dots were scattered sparsely down the eastern seaboard, sparsely across the northern Ozarks, more thickly in the Western mountains. There was a red-alert mass of them in California.

  “The crust of the earth,” Renée said, “is broken into a dozen or so gigantic plates which for fairly well understood reasons related to the convection of molten rock beneath the crust are in constant motion. They bump and grind together, they spread apart. In some cases one plunges way down underneath another. Some of them move as much as a couple inches a year, which over the ages adds up. Ninety-five or so percent of all earthquakes happen near plate boundaries. You can see 011 the maps.”

  “But in Arkansas, and what’s this, Wyoming? And New England . . . ?”

  “And New York and Quebec and the whole eastern seaboard and out in the middle of the ocean nowhere near plate boundaries? Partly, around here, it’s related to the fact that the Atlantic is getting wider, which puts a strain on the plates to either side of the central ridge. The rock in New England is very old and has a tortured history. There are faults running at all kinds of depths and in all different directions. But if you analyze the earthquakes that occur here—”

  She rooted in the papers between a pair of consoles and found a map like the one Howard had shown Louis, with the addition of more epicenters and four balloons:

  “Beach balls,” she said. “They represent what’s called the focal mechanism of the earthquake, which basically reflects the orientation of the faults and the direction of movement along t
hem when they ruptured. You draw an imaginary sphere around the hypo-center. It’s black in the directions where the earth has been compressed toward an observer on the sphere. It’s white where the earth has been pulled away from an observer. And you can see here, all four of the events big enough to analyze had more or less the same mechanism.”

  “You mean, they’re all black down the middle.”

  “Right. And they’re reasonably consistent with a compressional stress on a fault running southwest to northeast, which is also true of most of the other events that have been analyzed in New England. Which indicates that the plate is being compressed by the spreading of the ocean.”

  “H.C. That’s Howard.”

  She yawned. “Right.”

  “Is he good?”

  “He’s fine. He doesn’t work enough. He also wasted a year playing around with strong motion.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s what you felt on Thursday night. It’s a term for the ground shaking felt near an epicenter. As opposed to the very weak signals normally recorded by seismic instruments. You can make recordings of strong motion, though unfortunately everything’s so complicated by the local geological context that it’s hard to extract much information about the earthquake itself.” She yawned again. “Howard tried nobly.”

  In the periphery of Louis’s vision, teeth sparkled in a beard; Terry Snall, quiet as a hunting brave, had appeared in the doorway and halted in his tracks. He looked at Louis. He looked at Renée. He looked at Louis.

  “Oh,” he said loudly, as though everything were clear to him now. “Don’t let me disturb you.”

  “No problem,” Renée said.

  “I’m waiting for a print job.” Terry shook his head in total and radical self-exculpation. “I’m just going to be one second.”

  “You can be five hours for all I care.”

  “Just one second,” patting the top of the laser printer impatiently. “I’ll be right out of here.”

  He waited pointedly for the printer to divulge his job. He inspected the feed end, inspected the excretory end, tapped on the feed tray, sighed hugely, put his hands on his hips, sighed hugely again, and surveyed the entire machine and shook his head. “Just one second,” he said. “Don’t want to disturb you guys.”

  Louis had to catch up with Renée as she stalked up a ramp into the sanctum of the heavy machinery. It was refrigerated and was tiled with off-white squares, the absence of one of which, near the main unit, revealed a snake’s nest of cables underneath. On the long wall were racks holding thousands of rolls of magnetic tape. There were red-eyed modems, big tape drives loaded with tapes twitching anxiously, and several graphics screens.

  “He is such a jerk,” Renée said, taking a pair of wire-frame glasses from her shirt pocket and sitting down at a console.

  “He’s jealous,” Louis said.

  “Maybe.”

  “No, it’s obvious.”

  “Well. If it’s true, it’s incredibly humiliating to me. It’s also a little strange, considering he seems to have decided it’s his mission in life to inform me that I’m full of myself.” She frowned at the screen and typed rapidly, by touch. Louis thought her glasses were very poignant and pretty-making. “He’s been involved with this local girl for about four years. You saw the window by the door? This woman is constantly appearing there and knocking on it, and if Terry’s around, he runs into the hall and out the outside door. He’s afraid somebody’s going to let her inside. He thinks we can’t see this.” On the graphics screen to her right a color image was forming. She glanced through the picture window to make sure Terry wasn’t somehow eavesdropping despite the noise. “Two years ago he got a new car and totaled it almost immediately. He wouldn’t talk about how it happened. His girlfriend came by here one night and Howard let her in. He asked her how the accident happened, and apparently what it was was Terry was driving by this store that had sold him a window airconditioner that he didn’t like and they’d been bad about, and he leaned across the passenger seat to give the store—the building—the finger, and while he was doing this he ran up over the curb and hit a tree. The girlfriend was amused, as were we—she’s actually kind of sweet. And ever since then Terry won’t let her anywhere near the computer room. Which makes you wonder what else she has to say about him.”

  “Who takes care of all this equipment?”

  “It’s supposed to be shared among everybody using it, but in practice—” Renée didn’t like what she saw on the color screen. Her fingers flew across the keyboard and a new color image began to form. “We’re missing two professors this semester, to begin with. And some people, like Terry, are conscientious objectors. He did a lot of work on the system in ’88, which he thinks absolves him from all further responsibility; he gets very righteous about this although as far as I can tell, all the work he was doing was to install things that would help him with his own projects. And then there are the people who strategically absent themselves when it becomes absolutely necessary to do something like a system dump, which takes all night, and finally also I guess some people I simply don’t trust—”

  “Not to fuck it up.”

  “That’s right.”

  “People must dislike you.”

  “Almost everybody, yes, to some extent. But I make up for it with self-love. Why don’t you pull a chair over.”

  She loaded a camera on a tripod, turned out the lights, and began to shoot images while Terry’s few seconds with the laser printer stretched into an hour at a console just outside the picture window. Like any good chaperon, he pretended to mind his own business. Louis listened gamely to Renée’s explanations of the images, which were in rainbow colors and consisted mainly of reconstructed cross sections of a “slab” of rock 3,000 kilometers long and 650 kilometers wide and maybe 50 kilometers thick that was descending into the earth beneath a chain of islands running south from the Fijis through Tonga and the Kermadecs to a point not far above New Zealand. Earthquakes of all sizes and fault orientations accompanied the slab’s descent at every depth, and her thesis, she told Louis, had “advanced the study” of what happened to the brittle rock as it fell deeper and deeper into the molten, pressurized goo of the mantle, and what finally became of it at the depth of 670 kilometers, below which depth no earthquake had ever been recorded anywhere.

  “Did you get to go to these islands?”

  “I thought geophysics would get me outdoors, compared to math or something. Six years later I’ve hardly left this room.”

  “You’re very lucky.”

  “You think so.” She squeezed the cable release.

  “You’ve got something you’re really good at, and it’s really interesting, and it doesn’t hurt anybody.”

  “When you look at it that way. I guess. It has its frustrations.”

  “I wish I could be an academic.”

  “Who said you can’t?”

  “I wish I could be anything.”

  “Who said you can’t?”

  “I hate this country. I hate the piggishness. Everywhere I look I see pigs.”

  The glance Renée gave Louis in the blue light was tentative, or sad; distanced, like a mother’s. “They’re not all pigs,” she said. “Think about the people who make the subways run. Think about nurses. Mailmen. Lobbyists for good causes. They’re not all pigs.”

  “But I can’t be those people. They just seem pitiful to me. They seem like dupes. Things are so fucked up it seems pathetic to try to be a useful citizen. Like if you’re going to play the game why not go all the way and sell out completely. But if you’re too disgusted to sell out, the only other options are to escape or try to tear things down. And I can’t even escape into academics, because I had to watch my father be a professor. Every marxist I know has a life where it’s think by day and drink by night. How could I choose a thing like that? I watch your fingers and your eyes and I feel so envious. You’re in this position where you’re really good at what you do. But I’m here
and I can’t imagine moving.”

  “We’re going to have to do something about you.”

  “An island. An island.”

  Strong golden light lit the rooftops of Boston and formed a clear, free space in the air above them, an arena enclosed in the east by a shell of evening maritime mist and within which, to a distance of miles, were visible with perfect clarity billboards and green trees and overpasses on fire with the hour, and minor clouds the color and shape of moles. Jets above Nahant hung with no discernible movement in the blue-gray firmament to which their own engines bled contributions. On Lansdowne Street the faithful were entering the shadow of the temple, marching in a hush past carts selling icons and inspirational literature, past the worn façades of the shrines along the way, with their pre-game specials, their big dollar signs and tiny .95s.

  Inside the gate Renée made a small green offering to the Jimmy Fund and its fight against cancer in children and showed no embarrassment when her more cynical companion reacted with a double take. A white charge of light was visible through the portal above them, and as they walked up the stairs the whiteness grew into a green field and thirty thousand fans, all with the skin tones of actors. Suited men were raking dirt. Royals and Red Sox in their dugouts. Keen smells of cigarettes and mustard. Henry Rudman’s seats, halfway up the third-base line and ten rows back, were more than adequate. On either side of them, Rudmanesque individuals exuding pleasure were folding back their scorecards. At seven-thirty, when everyone in Fenway stood, Renée’s eyes darted warily, and Louis, unable for once to change the channel, gritted his teeth and suffered through the hymn.

  Few things bring happiness like good seats do. The Somervillians sat with their arms around each other’s shoulders, Renée as rapt and radiant as Louis had ever seen her. She’d brought her baseball glove and she kept her hand in it. Earlier in the day they’d played catch, and he’d learned that she could sting his fingers, right through leather, with her throws.

  For five innings the score remained 1-1. There was a fatness, a fullness, a pleasing lack of abstractness to the motion of the ball as it sprang off a bat and hissed through the infield grass, found the center of the third baseman’s glove and received fresh kinetic energy and overtook the runner at first base. Louis later had no trouble understanding why he’d been so slow to see the other thing going on in front of him, the thing three rows down and a few seats to his left.