“I’ve been stuck in the library.”
“And you underline them and put them in folders even when you’re not going to get graded on them.”
“That’s right.”
“Why do you do this?”
“Why?” The question seemed almost to offend her. “Because I’m curious.”
“You’re curious. You do all this stuff because you’re curious.”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing else in it for you.”
“Not that I know of.”
“Just simple curiosity.”
“How many times do I have to say it?”
Louis blew out air. He tapped on the tabletop. Blew out more air. “You’ve been talking to my mother again.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Only that she has a large financial interest in Sweeting-Aldren.”
“I didn’t know that. That’s actually very interesting. But I haven’t been talking to her, and I definitely did not know that.” She shuddered a little, trying to rid herself of his vague imputations.
“So go on,” he said.
“There’s nothing else, really. It’s just—You know. It’s just like you say. My little presentation.”
“I’m
sorry
. I want to hear the rest. Drink some beer. Tell me the rest.”
She took a deep breath and started speaking to the tabletop, full of body English, as though engaging him directly; but it was clearly beyond her power to sustain both articulateness and eye contact.
“In 1969 Sweeting-Aldren’s swimming in cash, mainly because of Vietnam. They have a bunch of scientists on the payroll, and this person Krasner comes up with a theory that Massachusetts is sitting on an ocean of crude oil. The company decides to fund a hole to see if he’s right, except something happens to make them change their mind about where to put it. Who knows what. Maybe they figure that if there’s a huge pool of crude oil under western Mass, it must be under eastern Mass too, where they own property. The only reason to drill at the site in western Mass is because the site’s geology is supposedly incompatible with petroleum deposits. But what do they care about Krasner’s theory? They’re worried about getting some money out of the hole, if it happens not to be a gusher. And one thing is in 1969 people are also starting to get nervous about the environment, especially water pollution, and what I think they decide is that if the deep well comes up dry, they’re going to pump industrial waste down it. And meanwhile Krasner retires, or dies, or opens an antiques store. Or was just a pseudonym to begin with.”
“And pump industrial waste down it . . .”
“And then what your sister’s boyfriend was saying”—the sound of Louis’s voice caused her to concentrate all the more on the tabletop—“is that
even now
the company is dumping a million gallons of effluents every year. But in the paper, basically every day for the last two weeks”—she opened another folder, which he could see was full of clippings from the
Globe
—“both the company
and
the EPA say the company puts nothing in the Danvers River except clean, slightly oily hot water. The plant’s a model nonpolluter.”
He thought: And pump industrial waste down it . . .
“So where did they drill? Obviously they drilled within a couple miles of the plant in Peabody. And the thing is you can pump liquid into a hole for a long time before anything happens. It takes a lot of liquid to bring what’s called the pore pressure to the critical level where the rock starts to relieve its internal stresses by rupturing seismically. It’s not implausible that Sweeting-Aldren was injecting effluents from the early seventies all the way into the mideighties without anything happening. But suddenly they reach the critical level, say in January ’87, and they start having little earthquakes. The swarm goes on for four months and then stops, which to me suggests the company got scared and stopped pumping. And for a couple of years everything’s quiet, and then about two weeks after the first Ipswich event there suddenly start being these earthquakes in Peabody again—the papers talk about Lynn too, but the epicentral area is the same as in the ’87 series—which nobody can relate to the Ipswich events as anything but a low-probability coincidence. But what’s been happening to all these wastes that the company normally would have been pumping underground? They had to stop pumping in ’87, and so presumably they’ve had to store the liquid somewhere, which I’m sure they’re not happy about. And maybe what they’ve been waiting for is some good-sized local earthquake, so they could start pumping in Peabody again, full speed ahead, with the idea that any new earthquakes would be associated with the Ipswich events. Maybe what spilled on Easter was some of the backlog they’d been storing up since ’87. Maybe they decided they had to try to get as much of that stuff underground as soon as possible, no matter what happened. And sure enough, within a week or two, we start getting more tremors in Peabody.”
Finished at last, Renée pushed her hair off her forehead and took another long pull on her beer, withdrawing into herself, taking care not to expect any response. Louis was staring at the bottle of Joy by the faucet of her deep, white sink. The kitchen had grown brighter and smaller. He leaned back in his chair, filling the sweet spot of his field of vision with her image. “The thing about the stuff in 1987, how it can’t be from a well. Can you read that again?” Obediently she opened the proper folder. “‘However, the relatively great depth’?”
“Yes! Yes! That proves it, doesn’t it?”
“‘. . . (i.e., on average 3 kilometers deeper than the deepest commercial waste-disposal wells) would appear to rule out such a mechanism. Furthermore there are no licensed injection wells operating—.”
“Those slimes! Those slimes! This is
great
” Louis leaned over the table and put his hands on her ears and kissed her on the mouth. Then he started pacing the room, socking the palm of his hand.
“Do you know something about these people?” she said.
“They’re slimes!”
“You’ve met them.”
“I told you, my mom’s like this major stockholder all of a sudden. I met them at my grandmother’s funeral. They’re these totally classic corporate pigs.” He lifted Renée out of her chair by the armpits so he could squeeze her and kiss her again. “You’re amazing. I can’t believe you just sat down and figured this all out. You’re terrific.”
He lifted her off the floor and set her down. She looked at him as if she hoped he wouldn’t do this again.
“It’s illegal, right?” He pushed his glasses back up his sweaty nose. “To pump waste underground without a license?”
“I assume. Otherwise why have licenses?”
“Ha! And if these earthquakes cause damage, the company’s liable, right?”
“I don’t know. In theory, yes. At least for any damage near Peabody. It’s pretty gross negligence on their part. It would be a harder thing to prove, though, if it’s a matter of a large earthquake some distance away and you had to speculate about whether what they’d done in Peabody had triggered a more general release of strain.”
“You mean that’s possible? That can happen? You can trigger things like that? Boston gets wiped out and the company has to pay for it?” Louis was getting more euphoric by the second.
“It’s very unlikely that Boston’s going to get wiped out,” Renée said. “And although there’s a lot of talk about trigger events, it’s very hard to demonstrate strict causality. You can talk about the April 6 event in Ipswich having ‘triggered’ the Easter event, but if you don’t know what causes earthquakes to occur at the particular times they do, and we don’t know this, you might as well say ‘precede’ instead of ‘trigger . . .”
“But if the first earthquake is caused by pumping, and then you have a major one . . .”
“There’d be a case, yes. But not an airtight case.”
“But anything that happens right where they’re pumping, you’d have a good case there.”
“I think so. For a civil suit. Probably by insurance companies.”
“So the only question is, Do we stick it to ’em right now for breaking the law all these years, or do we maybe
wait
, and see if something worse happens, and then stick it to ’em for that too.”
“You mean wait and see if some people get killed?”
“Yeah!”
“Well.” Renée gathered up her folders and hugged them to her chest. “You seem to have a grudge against these people, which I of course don’t, although if I’m right about this I agree it’s pretty disgusting. But I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do about it.” The first-person singular spoke for itself. “The Peabody earthquakes are of general interest to the scientific community. I might do some more research and then talk to people at MIT and Boston College. The EPA should also be talked to, maybe the press too. If the company does induce a destructive earthquake I’d just as soon not have it on my conscience.”
“Why would it be on your conscience?”
“Because I might have been able to prevent it.”
Louis’s surprise was genuine. “You actually believe in this stuff? Service to mankind and all that?”
In the calm upper stories of Renée’s face a powerful furnace kicked on suddenly, a bank of white jets of anger. “I wouldn’t have
said
it if I didn’t believe it.”
“Yeah, but, like, who’s to say what’s a service to mankind? If we let the company off the hook before anything worse happens, maybe we save a few lives. But if we wait and something worse does happen and
then
we blow the whistle, then it becomes a
message
. Then maybe people finally see what kind of sharks we have running the country. Which might really be a service to mankind.”
“All right, Louis.” Her use of his name and her sudden smileyness sent a chill down his spine. This was a person whose disapproval he feared. She was pushing the stack of folders into his hands. “It’s all yours. I think you should show this to a man named Larry Axelrod at MIT; I think you should show it to the EPA. Are you listening? I’m telling you what the right thing to do is, and if you don’t want to do it, that’s your problem, not mine. All right?”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” He laughed defusingly. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“I slept with you, once.”
“And if we go broadcasting the news, what’s the company going to do? It’s going to deny everything. It’ll bulldoze everything over, and probably start doing something even worse with all this waste, and then you won’t have anything, not even the satisfaction of being right.”
“It’s your decision.”
“We make some inquiries. We talk to my good friend Peter. Drive up to Peabody and look around. Take some pictures maybe. Then we’ve got some hard proof to go to whoever with.”
“I did this work myself, you know. I didn’t necessarily mean for you to come over and make yourself an equal partner.”
“I tell you how terrific you are—?”
“Like a dog that’s been good? I can fetch?”
“Oh, all right, well.” He tossed the files into the space between the refrigerator and the wall, where Renée’s extra paper bags were carefully folded. “Keep it. And keep your little haircut too. And your little earrings, and your little smiles, and your neat little apartment. Your little folders. And your theories, and your scruples, and your old roommate, and your former friends. You know, this whole neat little perfect life. Just keep it.”
The hum of the fan in the window was the sound of unhappiness in its rotary progress, always developing and yet always the same, a sound that marked every second of the minutes and hours in which improvement was failing to occur. Time flowed along an axis through the center of the fan, and the tips of the blades traced unending spirals around this axis.
“I don’t even know you,” Renée said. “And you just hurt me. There was no reason to hurt me. I didn’t do a single thing to you, except not call you.”
“And tell me to get lost.”
“And tell you to get lost. That’s true. I did tell you to get lost. Everything you said is true. But it doesn’t mean you’re any better than I am. You’re just less exposed. And I’m so embarrassed.” She kept her shoulders rigid as she walked from the room, tottering slightly and repeating, “I’m so embarrassed.”
Louis drank another beer and listened to the fan. After about half an hour he knocked on the bedroom door. When she didn’t answer, he opened it and followed the wedge of light into the dark, stuffy room. She was nowhere in sight. Only after he’d looked behind her bed and desk and behind the drawn window shades did he see the light behind the closet door, powered by a cord leading over from a socket. He knocked.
“Yeah?”
She was cross-legged on the closet floor, bending over a lamp. The pages of
The New York Times Magazine
she was reading were strewn with big puckered dots of perspiration from her head. Her eyes rolled up and looked at him. “What do you want?”
Crouching, he took her hot, limp hands in his own. Birds were chirping angrily outside. “I don’t want to go,” he said. His stomach plummeted; he attributed this to the sick-making effort of sincerity. However, the real problem was the floor, which was moving. The panic that flashed through Renée’s face was so cartoonishly pure he almost laughed. Then the left side of the doorframe lurched closer to him, and he tried to rise out of his crouch, like a surfer who’d caught a wave, and the frame abandoned him on the left and the right side body-checked him and knocked him onto his butt. Renée was fighting with the clothes and hangers she’d stood up into. She stepped on Louis, who was not good footing, and stumbled free of the closet. Things had been falling during the interval, and now pencils and pens were rolling across the floor, roaming and vibrating and bouncing like drops of water in hot oil. There was also a deep sound that was less sound than an idea of sound, a drowning of the human in the physical. And then only the miniature rumble, clear and strangely personal, of a beer bottle crossing the kitchen floor.
“I’m sorry I stepped on you,” Renée said.
“Did you step on me?”
They wandered around the disturbed apartment, oblivious to each other. The baby downstairs was crying, but the Dobermans on the first floor were either silent or out for the evening, eating prime rib somewhere. Louis picked up two beer bottles and, forgetting he’d meant to set them on the kitchen table, carried them from room to room and finally left them on the cushion of an armchair. He was dazed and without dignity, as if in the wake of a first kiss. Renée had a jar of pencils in her hand when he bumped into her in the hallway. “It’s like I’ve been tickled,” she said, dodging his encircling arm, “to the point where if you touch me—” she fought him off with her elbow—