Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

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 them 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.