Strong Motion (68 page)

At Brigham & Women’s a few stragglers, most of them old, sat unmoving outside the emergency room, trying just to be objects until a doctor could turn them back into people with testimony, stories. Broken bottles and fallen tiles had been swept into tidy heaps, and the nurses were brisk and unpanicked. A familiar one sent Louis to the bed where Renée, he saw, was sleeping.

17

A
LL MONDAY, ALL TUESDAY
, the earthquake held the country hostage. Giant headlines marching in lockstep like fascist troops booted everything else off the face of front pages, and in the afternoon people trying to watch soap operas were subjected to special reports instead. Major-league baseball canceled two nights’ worth of games in case fans had any ideas of taking refuge from the news in balls and strikes. Even the Vice President was forced to cut short his swing through Central American capitals and fly to Boston.

It’s not pleasant to be held hostage; it’s not just a figure of speech. In a decadent society people can slowly drift or slowly be drawn by the culture of commerce into yearning for violence. Maybe people have a deep congenital awareness that no civilization lasts forever, that the most peaceful prosperity will someday have to end, or maybe it’s just human nature. But war can begin to seem like a well-earned fireworks display, and a serial killer (as long as he’s in a distant city) like a man to root for. A decadent society teaches people to enjoy advertisements of violence against women, any suggestion of the yanking down of women’s bra straps and the seizing of their breasts, the raping of women, the tying up of women’s limbs with rope, the puncturing of women’s bellies, the hearing of their screams. But then some actual woman they know gets abducted and raped and not only fails to enjoy it but becomes angry or injured for a lifetime, and suddenly they are hostages to her experience. They feel sick with constriction, because all those sexy images and hints have long since become bridges to span the emptiness of their days.

And now the disaster which had been promising to make you feel that you lived in a special time, a real time, a time of the kind you read about in history books, a time of suffering and death and heroism, a time that you’d remember as easily as you’d forget all those years in, which you’d done little but futilely pursue sex and romance through your purchases: now a disaster of these historic proportions had come, and now you knew it wasn’t what you’d wanted either. Not this endless endless televised repetition of clichés and earnest furrowings of reportorial brows, not these nightmare faces of anchorpeople in pancake staring at you hour after hour. Not this footage of the same few bloody bodies on stretchers. Not this sickening proliferation of identical newspaper articles running identical interviews with survivors who said it was scary and identical statements from scientists who said it was not well understood. Not these photos of buildings that were damaged but not obliterated. Not this same vision, over and over, of the smoking ruin in Peabody on which an ordinary morning sun shone because the sun still rose because the world wasn’t changed because your life wasn’t changed. You would have preferred the more honest meaninglessness of a World Series, the entertainment of an event towards which months of expectation and weeks of hype could build, bridging a summer and fall’s emptiness and producing, in conclusion, an entirely portable set of numbers which the media couldn’t rub your face in for more than about an hour. Because you could see now that the earthquake was neither history nor entertainment. It was simply an unusually awful mess. And although the earthquake too could be reduced to a score—injuries 1,300, deaths 71, magnitude 6.1—it was the kind of score that your righteous captors felt justified in repeating until you went insane and dissolved in screams which they, however, behind their microphones and computer monitors, didn’t hear.

The picture that made Monday evening’s front pages around the world showed the ruins of Sweeting-Aldren’s facilities in Peabody. Twenty-three of the deaths and 110 of the injuries had been suffered by company employees caught in the initial explosion of two process lines and the ensuing general conflagration. The earthquake had disabled various fire-control systems, and balls of combusting ethylene and sheets of flaming benzene had ignited storage tanks. A blast apparently caused by ammonium nitrate leveled process lines that otherwise might not have burned. White clouds rained nitric acid and hydrochloric acid and organic reagents, the hydrocarbons and halogens combining in an environment as high-temperature and low-pH as the surface of Venus, but considerably more toxic. Cooling and drifting, the vapor plume descended on residential neighborhoods and left a whitish, oily residue on everything it touched.

By Monday afternoon EPA officials in Mylar suits were measuring dioxin levels in the parts-per-hundred-thousand on streets immediately to the north of the installation. Birds littered the ground beneath trees like fallen, mold-cloaked fruit. Cats and squirrels and rabbits lay dead on lawns or convulsing and retching under hedges. The weather was lovely, temperature in the high seventies, humidity low. National Guard units in tear-gas gear worked methodically northward, evacuating recalcitrant homeowners with force when it was necessary, barricading streets with Warning Orange barrels, and encircling the most contaminated area, designated Zone I, with flimsy orange plastic fencing material that had apparently been stockpiled with this very purpose in mind.

By Tuesday evening, Zone I had been completely isolated. It consisted of five and a half square miles of gravel pits, shabby residential streets, trash-glutted wetlands, and some worn-out factories owned by companies that had long been scaling back. Already several Peabody residents who had been at home when the plume descended were in the hospital, complaining of dizziness or extreme fatigue. The houses they’d left behind, now visitable only by National Guard patrols and news teams, had the aspect of junked sofas—the bad legs, the weakened joints, the skins torn here and there to expose an internal chaos of springs and crumbled stuffing. Earthquake damage was similar in the much larger Zone II to the north, but here the contamination was spotty and ill defined enough that the Guard was letting adult residents return during daylight hours to secure their houses and collect personal belongings.

News was being gathered in Peabody round the clock. Camera crews skirmished with the Guard, and reporters addressed their audience in gas masks. Some were so affected by what they’d seen, so unexpectedly overwhelmed by the news, that they dropped their pious earnest poses and spoke like the intelligent human beings you’d always figured they had to be. They asked Guardsmen if any looters had been shot. They asked environmental officials if people living just outside the zones were at risk. They asked everyone what their
impressions
were. But the big question, not only for the press but for the EPA, the thirty thousand traumatized and outraged residents of Zones I and II, the citizens of Boston, and all Americans as well was: What did the management of Sweeting-Aldren have to say? And it was on Monday afternoon, when the question had become inescapable, that the press discovered that there was literally no one around to answer it. Sweeting-Aldren’s corporate headquarters, situated, as it happened, just west of Zone II, had been gutted by a fire which local fire departments, trying to fight it in the hours after the earthquake, said appeared to be a case of arson. The building’s sprinkler system had been shut down manually, and firemen found traces of an “incendiary liquid” near the remains of the ground-floor records center. The wives of the company’s CEO and of its four senior vice presidents either could not be located or else told reporters that they hadn’t seen their men since late Sunday evening, shortly before the earthquake struck.

At five o’clock on Monday, just in time for a live interview on the local news, Channel 4 tracked down company spokesman Ridgely Holbine at a marina in Marblehead. He was wearing swim trunks and a faded
HARVARD CREW
T-shirt and was inspecting his sailboat for earthquake damage.

penny spanghorn: What is the company’s response to this terrible tragedy?

holbine: Penny, I can’t give you any official comment at this time.

spanghorn: Can you tell us what caused this terrible tragedy?

holbine: I’ve received no information on that. I can speculate privately that the earthquake was a factor.

spanghorn: Are you in communication with the company’s management?

holbine: No, Penny, I’m not.

spanghorn: Is the company prepared to take responsibility for the terrible contamination in Peabody? Will you take a leading role in the cleanup?

holbine: I can’t give you any official comment.

spanghorn: What is your personal opinion of this terrible tragedy?

holbine: I feel sorry for the workers who were killed and injured. I feel sorry for their families.

spanghorn: Do you feel personally responsible in any way? For this terrible tragedy?

holbine: It’s an act of God. There’s no controlling that. We all regret the loss of life, though.

spanghorn: What about the estimated thirty thousand people who are homeless tonight as a result of this tragedy?

holbine: As I said, I have no authority to speak for the company. But it’s undeniably regrettable.

spanghorn: What do you have to say to those people?

holbine: Well, they shouldn’t eat any food from their houses. They should shower carefully and try to find other places to stay. Drink bottled water. Get plenty of rest. That’s what I’m doing.

Tuesday morning brought the news that Sweeting-Aldren CEO Sandy Aldren had spent all of Monday in New York City liquidating the company’s negotiable securities and transferring every dollar the company had in cash to bank accounts in a foreign country. Then, on Monday night, he’d vanished. At first it was assumed that the foreign accounts in question were Swiss, but records showed that all the cash—about $30 million—had in fact flowed to the First Bank of Basseterre in St. Kitts.

On Tuesday afternoon Aldren’s personal attorney in Boston, Alan Porges, came forward and acknowledged that a “cash reserve” had been set up to cover the “contractually guaranteed severance payments” of the company’s five “ranking officers.” These payments amounted to just over $30 million, and Porges said that to the best of his knowledge all five officers had officially resigned on Monday morning and were therefore entitled to their cash payments effective immediately. He declined to speculate on the men’s whereabouts.

The networks had rebroadcast excerpts from the interview with Porges no more than five or six times before a new bombshell detonated. Seismologist Larry Axelrod summoned reporters to MIT and announced that he had seen evidence suggesting that Sweeting-Aldren was responsible for nearly all the seismic activity of the last three months, including the main shock on Sunday night. He said the evidence had been provided by Renée Seitchek of Harvard, “an excellent scientist” who was still in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds. A woman from the
Globe
asked if it was possible that Seitchek had been shot not by pro-life extremists but by a Sweeting-Aldren operative, and Axelrod said
Yes
.

Police in Somerville and Boston confirmed that they had indeed widened the scope of their investigation of Seitchek’s shooting in light of this newfound motive, but added that the earthquake had thrown all investigations of this kind into disarray. They said the total breakdown of Sweeting-Aldren’s management structure and the loss of company records to various fires “could pose a problem.”

Federal and state environmental officials were encountering even bigger obstacles as they attempted to confirm the existence of an injection well at the company’s Peabody facilities. By Wednesday morning the last of the fires there had burned itself out, and what remained was eight hundred acres of scorched and poisoned ruins—an uncharted industrial South Bronx filled with murky, foaming pools, unstable process structures, and pressurized tanks and pipelines suspected to contain not only explosives and flammable gases but some of the most toxic and/or carcinogenic and/or teratogenic substances known to man. The USEPA’s first priority, administrator Susan Carver told ABC News, would be to prevent contamination from spreading into groundwater and nearby estuaries.

“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.”