Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “It’s now apparent,” Carver said, “that this company’s immense profitability was achieved through razor-thin safety margins and the systematic deception of the agencies responsible for oversight. I’m afraid there’s a very real risk of this personal and economic tragedy becoming a true environmental catastrophe, and right now I’m more worried about protecting public safety than assigning responsibility in the abstract. For us to locate a single wellhead at the site, assuming the well even exists, is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack that we know is full of rattlesnakes.”

  By and large the press and public bought the Axelrod/Seitchek theory wholesale. Seismologists, however, reacted with their usual caution. They wanted to inspect the data. They needed time to model and construe. They said the rich and swarmy seismicity of April and May could plausibly have been induced by Sweeting-Aldren, but the main shock on Sunday night was another matter.

  This shock, it was shown, had resulted from the rupture of rock along a deep fault running northeast from Peabody to a point in the neighborhood of April’s Ipswich epicenters. Howard Chun of Harvard deconvolved some short-period digital seismograms and demonstrated, fairly conclusively, that the rupture had spread from the northern end of the fault to the southern—in other words, that the event had “begun” near Ipswich. A Sweeting-Aldren injection well could therefore not have “caused” the earthquake; at most it could have destabilized the fault, or provided a general instability with a path of least resistance. But the entire subject of rupture propagation was not at all well understood.

  What was certain was that the Eastern United States had suffered its largest earthquake since Charleston, South Carolina, was crunched in 1886. The contamination of Peabody and the scandal of corporate culpability naturally received the most press in the early going—every big American disaster seems to produce one particularly grim spectacle—but as the situation there stabilized, attention shifted to the serious wounds that the rest of north suburban Boston and the city itself had suffered. Rescue workers digging in the rubble of a children’s home in Salem had exhumed eight small bodies. Heart attacks had killed at least ten Hub men and women; Channel 7 interviewed neighbors of a West Somerville man named John Mullins who had staggered from his house and fallen dead in the street with his arms outstretched “like he’d been shot.” Perchloroethylene pouring out of dry-cleaning establishments had put six people in the hospital. Librarians in every town from Gloucester to Cambridge were wading into hip-deep swamps of unshelved books. Shawmut Bank’s mainframe had crashed and an electrical fire had wiped out hundreds of magnetic tapes containing account information; the bank closed its doors for a week, and its customers, finding that their ATM cards wouldn’t work at other banks either, had to barter and beg and borrow just to get food and bottled water. Many people complained of lingering seasickness. After Sunday night, only three minor aftershocks were felt, but each of them caused hundreds of people to stop whatever they were doing and sob uncontrollably. Everything was a mess—houses, factories, highways, courts. On Friday morning federal relief coordinators estimated that the total cost of the earthquake, including property damage and the interruption of economic activity, but not including the contamination in Zones I and II, would come to between four and five billion dollars. Editorialists called this figure staggering; it was roughly what it had cost Americans to service the national debt over the Memorial Day weekend.

  Probably the most notorious casualty of the earthquake was Philip Stites’s Church of Action in Christ. In much the same way as they composed obituaries for the living, local news organizations had prepared for the church’s destruction with pre-written triumphant editorials and pre-allocated news teams. As soon as the seismic waves had rolled over Chelsea, four independent minicam vans raced through the blacked-out, fissured streets and reached the church within a minute of each other. Devastation appeared to be satisfactory, though not extreme. Strong motion had split the tenement down the middle, entirely flattening the ground floor on one side of the clerestory, reducing the clerestory itself to a tangle of reinforcing rods caging chunks of concrete, and turning doors and windows into nasty rhomboids. Smoke was surging furiously, impatiently, from the rear of the building, and Philip Stites looked as if a blood-yoked egg had been cracked open on his head. He ran up the street shouting, “Help us. Put the cameras down. Help us,” because the news crews were in fact the only people there to help, and it would be another twenty minutes before anyone else arrived.

  Later in the week, Stites claimed that a true miracle had occurred on that dark, humid night: all of the newspeople, every one of them, had put their cameras and recorders down and followed him into the stricken building. They had kicked open jammed doors, releasing herds of screaming, bloodied women. They had braved falling plaster and clouds of black smoke to drag church members with broken limbs from the path of the fire. They had caught men and women jumping out of windows and had cleared equipment from their vans in order to rush them to the hospital. They had saved, Stites said, at least twenty lives. But it reflected a new and uncharacteristic bitterness on the minister’s part that he chose to call the newspeople’s heroism a miracle. He did not, for example, see a miracle in the fact that no one in his church had perished. He did not say that God had protected His faithful from His earthquake. He took no pleasure whatsoever in God’s mercy, because when the smoke had cleared and the sun had risen, he found that he no longer had a church.

  He set up a tent in the tenement courtyard and promised to get other tents for the three hundred members of his congregation, but all but a handful declined his offer. Most of them simply left Boston, went home to Missouri, Kansas, Georgia. The rest quietly defected to a rival anti-abortion group called We Love Life whose trademark “action” was to harass clinics with recordings of newborn babies wailing at a hundred decibels. One of these defectors looked a Channel 4 news camera dead in the eye and said, “I don’t believe anymore that Mr. Stites is guided by divine Providence, not after that night of terror. I thank the Lord I escaped with life and limb. Not everybody did, you know, I have a dear friend in the hospital paralyzed with a broken back. I believe Mr. Stites is a great teacher and moral leader led astray by too much pride and we should never of been in that building.”

  Another defector, Mrs. Jack Wittleder, was more succinct: “The Reverend Stites let a sinful woman tempt him. We have all now paid the price.” The Channel 4 reporter said: Woman? What woman?? But Mrs. Wittleder declined to elaborate.

  Stites himself spoke to Channel 4. “What I really believe in my heart? I believe that God brought down our building for a purpose. I believe the destruction was a test of faith and we flat-out failed it. I thought—I fervently hoped—we had a church that was stronger than any building, and a faith that no earthquake would ever shake. And I still have that faith in my own heart, but I don’t have a church, and I am deeply humbled and disappointed.”

  Stites soon also achieved the distinction of being the first defendant named in a lawsuit arising from the earthquake. The family of the church member whose back was broken accused him of fraud and willful negligence in persuading her to stay in an unsafe building; they sought ten million dollars in real and punitive damages. Stites’s lawyer told the press that his client’s entire worldly possessions consisted of one army-surplus tent, one sleeping bag, a Bible, one suitcase of clothes, a car, and one financially troubled radio station. This didn’t stop four other injured church members from filing suit on July 11.

  It became a season of lawsuits. Lawsuits salved the raw nerves of the million survivors and held out hope to the bereft. They eased the transition back to normalcy when the networks and newspapers released their hostages; they provided the grist for follow-up reports. They bottled the terrible dread and emptiness back into people’s unconscious, where they belonged. By the end of July the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had been named in eleven different suits accusing it of such creative torts as failure to establish adequate plans f
or evacuation in the event of toxic chemical dispersal, lethargy in providing shelter for families from Zones I and II, and calculated deception in its assessments of local seismic risk. The Commonwealth in turn was suing the federal government and the builders of various failed highways and public buildings. It was also, like nearly everyone else in Boston, suing Sweeting-Aldren. As of August 1 total claims against the company exceeded ten billion dollars and were rising daily. To pay these claims, the company had few uncontaminated current assets, a long-term debt of fifty million dollars, and little prospect of ever selling anything again. It was taken for granted that the federal government would ultimately foot the cleanup bill.

  Renée Seitchek was released from Brigham & Women’s Hospital on July 27. A ten-second clip on the evening news showed her being wheeled from the hospital towards a dented Honda Civic, but by this point the press had soured on her story, because she refused to be interviewed. The investigation of her shooting was stalled (“probably a lost cause,” detectives conceded privately), but authorities were still hoping to bring Sweeting-Aldren’s management home to face a variety of other criminal charges. The FBI had tracked the five men—Aldren, Tabscott, Stoorhuys, the corporation counsel, and the chief financial officer—to a tiny island south of St. Kitts, where the corporation had long maintained three beach houses for business entertaining and executive vacations. Aldren’s twenty-three-year-old wife, Kim, and Tabscott’s twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, Sondra, had joined the party a few days after the earthquake, the corporation counsel’s family had visited on the Fourth of July, and seafaring paparazzi had managed to photograph a beach picnic that resembled a beer commercial in all the particulars. (The Globe ran one of these pictures on its front page alongside a shot of Mylar-suited men shoveling birds and mammals into an incinerator.) Unfortunately the government of St. Kitts-Nevis showed no intention of delivering the executives up to justice, and the Administration in Washington, perhaps mindful of Aldren and Tabscott’s longtime financial support for the Republican Party, said there was little the United States could do about it.

  Big chemical concerns like Dow and Monsanto and Du Pont, on the other hand, seemed almost to relish the opportunity to decry a fellow corporation’s misdeeds. They immediately expanded their production of the textiles, pigments, and pesticides that had been Sweeting-Aldren’s mainstay—products for which demand was only increasing in America—and took the lead in demonizing Sweeting-Aldren’s management. Du Pont called the Peabody tragedy the work of “a bunch of devils.” (Du Pont’s own managers were family men, not devils; they welcomed the EPA’s intelligent regulation.) Monsanto solemnly swore that it had never employed injection wells and never would. Dow took pride in its foresight in locating its headquarters in one of the most geologically stable places in the world. By August, sales and stock prices were up at all three companies.

  In the public imagination, “Sweeting-Aldren” joined the ranks of “Saddam Hussein” and “Manuel Noriega” and “the Medellin cartels.” These were the guys with hats as black as the tabloid headlines screaming of their villainy, the men who made the good world bad. The United States bore the responsibility for punishing them, and if they couldn’t be punished, the United States bore the responsibility for cleaning up after them; and if the cleanup proved painfully expensive, it could be argued that the United States bore the responsibility for having allowed them to become villains in the first place. But in no case did the American people themselves feel responsible.

  As the weeks went by, visitors from out of town occasionally ventured north from Boston to see the fences around Zone I. They had seen these fences countless times on television, and still it amazed them that Peabody could be reached by car in half an hour—that this land belonged to the earth as surely as the land in their own hometowns, that the weather and light didn’t change as they approached the fences. They took photographs which, when they were developed back in Los Angeles or Kansas City, showed a scene that they again could not believe was real.

  Bostonians, meanwhile, had more important things to think about. Low-interest federal loans had reignited the local economy. The window frames of downtown buildings had again been filled with greenish glass. Fenway Park had passed its safety inspections. And the Red Sox were still in first place.

  In Harvard Square the season came when the sun lost the angle it needed to reach the narrower streets before noon, and the overnight chill and its smell of impending winter lingered in the pissed-on alleyways and the cast-concrete chess tables by Au Bon Pain. Along the river and in the Yard, the Great Litterer was at work again, discarding worn-out leaves on footpaths. Damaged buildings were reopening, the scaffolds coming down. Impeccably put-together students trailed scents of shampoo and deodorant in the Canadian air. They were young and wealthy sexual beings being educated. They were like the unblemished cars that bunched in their egress from the Square, windows shut now that summer was over, fully functional emission-control systems expelling exhaust that smelled good. It was literally incomprehensible that in Zone I, a mere fifteen miles away, squads of bulldozers were even now destroying bungalows in which lamps and chairs lay exactly where strong motion had thrown them on the twenty-fourth of June.

  Louis had come to the Square on errands. Though he was no fan of the Square, he came here often now, did his business efficiently, and went home again feeling unimplicated and anonymous. On this particular morning, however, he was crossing the street outside Wordsworth when a silver Mercedes sedan braked sharply on the cobbled apron of a traffic island and a familiar-looking person leaned out the front passenger window and beckoned to him. It was Alec Bressler.

  “Alec. How’s it going?”

  Alec ducked in his affirmative way. “No complaints.”

  Of the driver of the car, Louis could see only female legs in hose and pumps. Alec was sucking a nicotine lozenge with what appeared to be particular amusement. He had new glasses and wore a very smart-looking blazer. “Yourself?” he said. “You find a good job?”

  “No. Not— No.”

  Alec frowned. “No job at all?”

  “Well, for the last couple of months I’ve been taking care of my girlfriend. You probably heard about her. Her name’s Renée Seitchek?”

  Here the driver of the car leaned across Alec’s lap and showed her face to Louis. She was a handsome woman in her early fifties, with a strong nose and wiry gray hair and black eyebrows. “You know Renée Seitchek?”

  Louis had heard these exact words a lot in recent weeks. “Yeah, I do.”

  The woman took his hand. “I’m Joyce Edelstein. I’m very interested in Renée, from afar. Can you tell me how she is?”

  “She’s . . . OK.”

  “Listen, why don’t you come up to my office and have some coffee with us. If you have a minute. I’m right up the street here. You want to come?”

  Louis looked uncertainly at Alec, who simply raised his eyebrows and sucked his entertaining lozenge.

  “Come on,” Joyce said, popping the lock on the rear door. Louis obeyed her. His vagueness was no longer something he turned on to foil people; it was the way he really was. When he walked, nowadays, he kept his eyes on the ground in front of him. He always felt tired and was frequently short of breath. He wore clothes that had belonged to Peter Stoorhuys, a red sweatshirt and some gray jeans that he put on morning after morning and, objectively speaking, looked bad in. When he saw his own old blacks and whites or even thought about them, he squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could.

  The office he was taken to occupied the third floor of a clapboard building on Brattle Street that maybe a hundred years ago had been a private residence. The brass doorplate said The Joyce Edelstein Foundation. A receptionist and an assistant said “Good morning, Mrs. Edelstein.” Joyce left her visitors in a private office decorated in harmony with the large Monet pondscape that hung on one wall. Alec made himself at home on a white leather sofa. His skin was no longer the gray that Louis remembered; even his hair
seemed thicker. He’d pretty clearly quit smoking. “Joyce is a phil-an-thropist,” he said, making her sound like some curiosity of nature.

  “Uh huh.”

  “Renée is kind of a hero of mine,” Joyce said, matter-of-factly, as she returned with a tray of coffee, cream, and sugar. “I’m involved in funding a variety of organizations, and if there’s any kind of unifying theme to my concerns it would probably be reproductive rights and the environment. For me both those things came together this summer with the earthquake and what happened to Renée. I actually wrote her a letter, I don’t know if she got it, I—didn’t particularly expect a reply.”

  Louis did not say: A lot of people wrote her letters.

  “So how’s she doing?” Joyce said.

  “She’s all right. She’s got a bone infection in her leg, it started after she left the hospital. She’s still sort of sick.”

  “It’s been how long?”

  “Three months.”

  “That’s really hard. And you— You’re—?”

  “I live with her.”

  “In—”

  “In Somerville.”

  “Forgive me, are you not feeling well? If this is hard for you to talk about . . .”

  “No. I just gave blood, that’s all.”

  “Gave blood? Good grief, why didn’t you say so? Here, sit down. Please.”

  Louis sat in the indicated chair and lowered his head over his coffee cup. Joyce looked at him with compassion and concern. She also looked at her watch. Alec was slurping and spectating from his distant sofa.