Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  Eileen and Peter were standing in the shallow end of the pool, mouths hanging open to facilitate rapid air intake. They stared at him as if they barely recognized him. He kicked the ground again and looked at the dark house and transformed yard and muttered, “What a mess.”

  16

  Mrs. Stoorhuys was handing out gas masks in the kitchen. She wore duck boots and a raincoat.

  The kitchen appeared to have been ransacked by a burglar in search of hidden sterling. Sarah kept a trembling flashlight beam on the carton of emergency equipment while another daughter, a somewhat younger one, ran her beam over the mounds of broken floral-print dishes, the yawning cabinets, and the gleaming barf the refrigerator had spewed—a dirty surf of ketchup and cocktail cherries and applesauce breaking on reefs of pointed glass. Few colors withstood the whiteness of the flashlight.

  “Peter, help your sisters with their masks.”

  “He’s shutting off the gas,” Sarah reminded her.

  “We don’t need any help,” her sister added.

  “Uh, are these really necessary?” Louis said.

  Mrs. Stoorhuys handed him a mask. “It says, masks are to be used if the earthquake is big enough to throw most objects from kitchen cabinets.” She was reading from a typewritten list of instructions in the carton. “When in doubt, use the masks. —Here’s a flashlight for you too. There’s eight of everything.”

  The mask was a shiny black plastic affair whose heavy nose made it flop animately. Peter’s sisters had put theirs on now and looked like evil hockey goalies or Satan’s henchgirls. Goya had drawn heads like these, towards the end.

  “Now, which way is the wind blowing?” Mrs. Stoorhuys said.

  “There isn’t any wind,” Louis said.

  “Oh, huh.” She consulted a chart in her instructions. “Nighttime . . . summer . . . calm . . . Yes, here. Proceed north to Haverhill or beyond.”

  Peter came inside with a big crescent wrench, limping as he picked his way through stricken appliances and furniture. He’d twisted his hip. Nobody else was complaining of more than scrapes and bruises. “Peter, here’s your gas mask,” his mother said.

  “Gas mask?”

  “Gas mask,” Louis confirmed.

  “Your father left instructions in the earthquake box.”

  Peter looked at Louis, and they nodded significantly.

  “Now, somewhere there’s supposed to be a gun . . .”

  “Ma, did you know there were gas masks in this box?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Didn’t it kind of make you wonder what was going on over there in Peabody? I mean, that we’ve got to have these? Didn’t it make you worry?”

  “He said it’s just in case the worst thing happens, which it probably won’t. You know how ultra-safe he likes to be.”

  “No way I’m going to wear this thing,” Peter said.

  “Think of it as a fashion,” Louis said.

  “I can’t seem to find the gun,” said Mrs. Stoorhuys, rooting. Again Peter and Louis looked at each other and nodded. “Where do you suppose it is?”

  “Better not to ask, Ma.”

  “Bottom of a river is my guess,” Louis said.

  Eileen stumbled in through the skewed back door in the jeans and snow boots Peter had found for her to wear. She was breathing heavily. “There’s fires,” she said. “I can smell the smoke.”

  “Try one of these,” Louis said. “You won’t smell a thing. —Or kind of a pleasant, plastic smell.”

  Her eyes widened. “Yuck! What for?”

  “Company orders. Put it on.”

  She took it in two fingers and held it up like some contaminated fish or hideous accessory.

  “It snaps in back,” Louis said.

  “I was wondering about Mom,” she said. “I think we should go up there.”

  “No, we’re going to Haverhill,” said Mrs. Stoorhuys, burying her face in black plastic.

  “We’ll go through Ipswich,” Peter said.

  “Not to be a wet blanket,” Louis said, “but isn’t there like a nuclear power plant in that direction?”

  “Oh, Seabrook,” Eileen said, her face falling.

  “Let’s get to Ipswich and see what the radio says,” Peter said.

  Mrs. Stoorhuys distributed more supplies to her troops—hard hats, jerry cans of water, Saltines, cans of Spam, a transistor radio, a heavy-duty first-aid kit. At the bottom of the carton were a pair of large self-adhesive placards with the words LOOTERS BEWARE! and a skull and crossbones. Louis was dispatched to post one of them on the front door.

  Despite the glass and fallen paintings and general mayhem, the front of the house retained an air of comfort. It was a matter, perhaps, of the deep-pile carpeting. Europe was in ruins, however, palaces crazily tilted, empty streets dumped rudely onto sofa cushions.

  An enormous truck rumbled by. Debris pelted Louis and he heard shouts and screams so clear and automatic they sounded canned. He stumbled under the impact of a good-sized chunk of plaster that landed squarely on his hard hat, but the floor was already regaining its composure, and he thought, well, it was nice of David Stoorhuys to provide him with a hard hat.

  In his haste, an hour earlier, Stoorhuys had also left the garage door open. It had fallen on the remaining station wagon, denting the roof but breaking only the rear window. Peter was able to back the car out while everyone else held one side of the heavy door aloft. Communication was impaired by the plastic of their masks.

  At first glance, the Stoorhuyses’ street looked like any suburban street in the middle of a warm moonless night, the trees and shrubbery and lawns and pavement all undisturbed and the houses still standing. It took a while for the subtler alterations to register, the slight forward pitch of a house seemingly frozen in a sudden lurch of nausea, the semi-imploded outline of a screen porch that wanted to collapse but couldn’t, the buckled aluminum siding, the glimmer of glass in the mulch and euonymus beneath windows. The triple-door garage silently bleeding a sheet of water down a driveway to the street. The swamp-gas flickerings in rooms where unseen families were using flashlights. It was as if the land were still healthy but the houses had all suddenly died of some internal sickness.

  Meanwhile the smell of car exhaust which was the smell of life in America was the reassurance that nothing too serious had happened. Four Stoorhuyses sat patiently in their wagon in their hard hats and expressionless masks while Eileen hugged Louis and said be careful. He hadn’t had to tell her that he was going back to the hospital in Boston; she’d assumed it.

  In his car, when they were gone, he turned on the radio. There was dead air on the frequency where WRKO had been, and he spun the dial until he found a signal, a faint one.

  . . . his first three at-bats and had a chance to tie or break the major-league record of four homers in a game, but instead wound up on the disabled list with a strained right knee he suffered making a diving catch in the fifth inning. Was he disappointed? ‘Sure, you know, I would have liked two more shots at the record book, who wouldn’t. But the important thing is the team, we haven’t been playing too good the last couple months. I just want to go out there and contribute every day.’ Over in the National League today the Cubs did it again, 7 to 5 over the Reds in ten innings, Atlanta edged Pittsburgh 3-2, Houston blanked the Cards 8-zip, Dodgers 4 to 2 over the Phillies, Mets 6 Giants 1, and out in San Diego the Pods and Expos are having a wild one, they’re now in the bottom of the eighteenth! inning, all even at thirteen. WGN News time is twenty-five minutes past eleven. Men, are you at the age where you’re afraid to comb your hair because more hair stays in the comb than on your head?”

  WGN was Chicago. Chicago, place of stable ground. Louis started the engine and eased the car down the empty street, moving his head constantly to compensate for his limited peripheral vision.

  “We’re going to begin continuous live coverage of the earthquake just as soon as we’ve established links with one of our affiliates. The quake was felt throughout the N
ortheast, with no reports of damage or injury as of yet. The epicenter was apparently near Boston, and much of eastern Massachusetts is currently without electricity or telephone service, but we are in communication with our network affiliate in Boston and will be hearing from them in just a few moments. First a message from Schaumburg Honda. . .”

  The dial was alive with distant stations, Buffalo, St. Louis, Miami, Lincoln. They emerged like the stars when the city lights go out and the universe can suddenly pull rank. In Quebec the talk was of le tremblement de terre, which everyone there had evidently felt. There was cracked plaster in Hartford, station switchboards lighting up in Manhattan, an unconfirmed report of injuries in Worcester. Boston’s WEEI, broadcasting at less than full strength, said damage was comparatively light in the center city. A fire was raging in South Boston and a reporter on the scene said at least a dozen people had been injured, but Dorchester and Roxbury and other areas farther south still had electricity and phone service. In the suburbs well to the north of Boston, an ominous silence prevailed. A teenaged amateur radio operator in Salem said that several brick buildings had collapsed in her neighborhood, and that water pressure was very low. She could see the light of what appeared to be a major fire to the northwest, in Peabody or Danvers. At the same time, all the houses on her own street were standing and no one appeared to have been seriously hurt. The National Earthquake Information Center had released a preliminary magnitude estimate of 6.0 with an epicenter in eastern Essex County. The pilot of a private jet had spotted a large fire on the western bank of the Danvers River and smaller blazes in downtown Beverly. There was an unconfirmed report from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that an emergency shutdown of the Seabrook nuclear power plant was proceeding normally, which the WEEI anchor said could not be right because Seabrook had been closed since mid-May for safety improvements . . .

  He turned off the radio. The lawns and woods on either side of him were dark, dark. A flashing ambulance appeared in his mirrors and expanded, its tires throwing up a spray of sandy water as it passed him. He had to close his window, and for a moment, in the sudden hush, he couldn’t remember the season or the hour; whether it was maybe early on an autumn evening? An ambulance passing him on a chilly, rain-soaked road? It felt like autumn and there was little in his head to persuade him otherwise. If only the road were less dark, or less straight, or if he could see a little better . . .

  Sweeting-Aldren had manufactured the Warning Orange pigment in the hazard cones blocking the entrance ramps to Route 128 and in the jackets of the patrolmen standing on the overpass, where apparently one of the spans had lost its footing. A Highway Department truck’s butterscotch-colored lights were pulsing in the humid air. “What a mess,” Louis said as he turned down a dark street that paralleled the expressway. His mask was beginning to make his face itch.

  He had followed the street for maybe half a mile, past cavities of blackness that he took to be front lawns, when his headlights caught a flash of something wrong in the underbrush to his left—the exposed white flesh of trees with freshly broken limbs, and a car-like shape in an uncar-like position. He slowed and made a U-turn, angling his high-beams to light the scene.

  The something was indeed a car. Its tires were pointed at the sky and the passenger compartment was flattened and buried in mud and shrubs and tree litter at the foot of Route 128’s elevated grade. Broken scrub maples and torn earth marked the trajectory the car had taken in its plunge from the expressway. Louis left his engine running and pushed his way through weeds and branches to the wreck. Only the parts of the car lit by his headlights, the creased metal and contorted chassis, made any sense; there was a pregnant, dark confusion at his feet, and in the middle of it, dimly, he saw the figure of a man. The body was intact but had flowed halfway out the open driver-side window, hands first, hands bending as the arms flowed onto them, arms bending as head and torso came to rest on them. The body’s angles were like a dancer’s when the dancer touches his limp curled hands to his face and hugs his elbows to his chest and bends his head to evoke tenderness or mourning or submission. The man had a thick neck and wore a cheap pink dress shirt and had possibly never once been so expressive with his body while he lived, his posture never so eloquent of anything as it was now of death; because it was totally evident that he was dead.

  There was no traffic on the highway above. Louis stumbled around to the other side of the car, moaning a little with self-pity, and made sure there’d been no passengers. Now that he couldn’t see the man he didn’t believe so absolutely that he was dead. He returned to him and knelt and touched his neck. The skin was cool. He shoved gently and the head twisted forward. He took his hand away. He could hear voices, male and female, from the lawns across the road, and he ran to say what he had to say, which was that a man was dead.

  Peter’s sisters were complaining about their gas masks. They said they felt stupid wearing them. They pointed out that nobody else, none of the cops and bystanders they’d passed in Lynnfield Center and Middleton, was wearing a mask.

  “Keep them on,” said Peter, driving. “Your livers will thank you for it.”

  Eileen had leaned her tired, laden head against her back-seat window and was letting her eyes open and close on the dark blur of exurb they were passing through. She could have slept if Peter hadn’t kept braking for real or suspected hazards—snapped power lines, flooded low spots in the road, and curves that looked at first like fault scarps. She let her body swing however it wanted to, let her masked face press into the glass as the car bounced and banked. It had always been comforting for her to keep on riding and riding without stopping, and it was especially comforting now to be rocked very long and very gently, to have it be the car and not the ground. She watched the alternating woods and settlements and fields. There was a vapor plume on the southern horizon, rising from a point many miles away. She saw it and then she didn’t for a long time, and then another southern vista opened up and she saw it again, a fist of gray gas punching the black belly of the sky, its billowy knuckles glowing orange. It evolved like a normal cloud in a normal sky, appearing stationary if she stared but changing if she didn’t. At first it was a puffy exclamation point listing to the left, and then more trees blocked her view, and then it had buckled and sagged into a question mark. Her eyes kept falling shut as motion lulled her. She recognized the sounds in the car as words spoken by Peter and his family and the radio announcer, but even the minimal effort of understanding them was beyond her. The plume stayed the same size, growing larger as the road carried her away from it. She didn’t say anything. She was almost asleep now and she was afraid that if the others saw the plume it would stop being just a thing in her head and become real.

  A family was clustered around a pickup truck, listening to the radio in the light of a Coleman lantern on the hood. There were two young couples, an older couple, and a baby. The older woman saw Louis coming in his gas mask and gaped at him. He said there was a dead person across the street.

  Now everyone was gaping at him. “Is . . . something wrong?”

  “Uh, yeah,” he said. “I guess there’s some concern about the chemical plant in Peabody.”

  He’d known he had to tell them, but he wasn’t sure if it was a mistake. The family began to shout questions at him two and three at a time. He tried to bring the discussion back to the dead man across the street, but before he knew it he was left standing alone in the driveway while people hurried away in all directions, some disappearing into the house, others running off to tell the neighbors.

  The radio said: There are reports now of at least eighteen people dead, most of them in Essex County. This figure is certain to rise, and it’s a good guess that there have been scores if not hundreds of injuries in what is clearly the worst natural tragedy ever to strike the Boston area.

  “Do you need a ride?” the older woman asked Louis. She and her husband were stowing plastic Star Market bags of food and bottles of water in the bay of the truck.

  “
No . . .” Louis gestured vaguely. “Thanks anyway.”

  “Might as well get going, huh?”

  “Yeah, although . . .” He nodded at the street.

  “Forget about him.”

  He trudged down the driveway and pushed through the brush and poison ivy and stood quietly by the overturned car, looking down at this faceless victim who had become his. Word of a possible chemical leak was leaking up and down the street. More and more engines were starting, and again the earth was trembling.

  Eileen woke up when the car stopped on the gravel drive in front of her mother’s house. She took off her mask and followed Peter as he limped towards the front door. An emergency light in the living room, installed to foil burglars, lit the smithereens of a major trashing—the shuffled furniture, the cratered walls. The sky’s darkness had grown waxy, as if night had grown tired of being night and was reconsidering. Peter knocked on the door. Eileen heard a radio voice outside somewhere and went around the side of the house.

  Her mother was sitting in an Adirondack chair halfway down the wide lawn that sloped away from the eastern wing. On the grass beside her were a silver ice bucket and a boom box playing news. She was drinking champagne from a fluted glass.

  “Are you OK?” Eileen said.

  “Eileen.” Melanie swung her head around loosely. “You’re fine. I knew you would be fine. Everything is fine.”

  . . . raging unchecked at this hour at their facility in Peabody. We have no official word yet, but residents who have not already left the surrounding communities should consider staying indoors with their windows shut tightly and their airconditioners off.