Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

As a matter of law, his pacifism required that when he left Taipei, at the age of eighteen, he could not return for at least seventeen years. Any regrets he had about this did not survive his first bus ride in America. One glimpse of girls in cowboy boots, one glance at a billboard-freckled hillside, one eyeful of U.S. 36 north of Denver — the Denny’ses and Arby’ses and Wendy’ses, the tall man’s cars in the big man’s lanes — sufficed to set his mind at rest: This was the place for him. He reclined in his seat to the maximum degree permitted and dozed until the bus arrived in Boulder.

Nobody could have loved life in America more than Howard Chun. Within a month of his arrival he had a MasterCard; within a semester he had a car. Everywhere he went his freshman year the Bee Gees were in the air, and he was among the first to catch the fever and the last to sweat it out. He loved to say “disco.” He loved to dance it. He loved to freeze in a strobe and stretch his arm out with his fist clenched. With regard to dating, he was a fair success; certainly he wasn’t so choosy as to often have to do without a girl. He liked fast food not because it was fast but because it tasted good. Various governments funded his education, and what ever else he needed to keep his charge accounts in trim came his way by serendipity, which often took the form of an export or an import or a trade, since he was always traveling and there were always friends and relatives willing to pay a premium on portable commodities. He regularly took $300 worth of new records and cassette tapes to the post office, wrote "‘records, tapes” on the customs slip, and six weeks later received a cashier’s check for $600 U.S. from an older cousin in Taipei. Nightlifewise, these checks were enabling and sustaining. What he was doing was perhaps not very legal, but he never got caught and so never knew for sure.

All in all he had so much fun in Colorado that it took him five years and constant threats from the financial aid office to get his B.A. But just as his financial debts never stopped him from being a sharer of pizzas and stander-to of beers and offerer of rides, so his stints in the academic doghouse in no way interfered with his role as a selfless helper of younger students (especially blond female students) and as a central cog in the geology department’s social life. In the spring of his fourth year, he had the good fortune to break both his legs on a ski slope. The senior thesis he wrote while he was on his back was fine enough to win him an aid package from Harvard.

At Harvard he decided to protect himself academically by mastering the ins and outs of the departmental computer. This way, the machine could do his work for him and he would only have to drop by the lab once a day, on his way to the squash courts or after a movie in the Square, and pick up the completed work and give the computer fresh instructions. Being a computer expert entitled him to skip the occasional class or seminar and discuss the material with his professors at times that didn’t interfere with his sleep or social schedule. The only professor who objected to this mode of operation was Howard’s adviser, who, in the spring of Howard’s third year in Cambridge, raised his voice to new heights and said he considered it improbable that Howard would pass his orals. He was also tactless enough to wonder aloud how Howard could have accomplished so much less in three years than Renée Seitchek, for example, had accomplished in two. Renée Seitchek had effortlessly passed her own orals and was expanding her second-year project into a dissertation.

Though officially a year behind him, Seitchek was Howard’s age or slightly older. Unlike him, she worked all summer and attended just one convention a year. When scientists from other institutions called the lab, they asked to speak to her even when their questions pertained to Howard’s field. She went to dinners and parties thrown by faculty and other students; she only refused to go to the dinners and parties Howard threw. During her first year, he’d frequently proposed that she play squash or have a meal with him, and she was so polite and smiling in her refusals that it had taken him a whole semester to get the message.

Whenever he stopped by the lab to check on his work (he did this standing up, leaning over a keyboard, without removing his coat or unwinding his scarf), he could see Seitchek working implacably on her projects, her arm muscles losing their youthful tone from month to month, white strands appearing in her hair, her complexion picking up the gray of the fluorescent lighting while he, who played lots of squash and frequently vacationed, remained fit and rosy-cheeked. It was Seitchek who noticed that his programs were consuming too much CPU time and swamping the array processor every morning (while he was sleeping). She raised her voice and took the same Howard-you-have-been-told-and-told-and-told tone with him as his adviser did. When further funding proved unavailable, he had to abandon his work on strong motion, though everyone agreed that his inversions of acceleration records might eventually have shown interesting results if he’d had his own private supercomputer. He was forced to beat the bushes for a new project even as Seitchek homed in on her Ph.D.

Then one summer — it was the summer before the local earthquakes started — everyone stopped liking her. Maybe it was because the last of her older friends had left the department, or maybe because her new thesis adviser, the department chairman, had gone on leave for a year, but in a matter of weeks she managed to alienate practically every student and post-doc who remained. Terry Snall reported that he’d overheard her using an offensive word in reference to his manner; the word was rumored to be “faggy.” One morning computer users found that valuable documents of theirs had been dumped in the trash for no worse sin than being part of the foot-deep drifts of paper engulfing the consoles in the system rooms. There soon followed an ugly scene when various students discovered that Seitchek was lowering the priorities of their jobs so that her programs would run fast while theirs stalled. She made one young woman cry and one immature petrologist so angry that he threw a wastebasket at the telephone and broke a table lamp. When Terry Snall stuck up for the petrologist, she became a pillar of rage. She said that 70 percent of the computer’s funding came from her adviser’s grants. She said that for three years she had personally done more than half the daily maintenance of the system, and if anyone wanted to argue with her they should begin by calling the chairman in California and see whose judgment he trusted, and ask him what he thought, whether he thought she had no right to lower the priorities, whether he thought that the petrologists who contributed nothing to the system or its upkeep had any rights here whatsoever. Howard strolled into the lab to check on his programs just as Seitchek was storming up the hall. He found Snall inciting the petrologist to lower her priority, now that she was out of the room.

His own turn came a few days later, right before he flew to London for a cousin’s wedding and a week’s vacation in Ireland. He’d stopped by the lab to set in motion a few hundred twenty-minute batch jobs to run while he was gone, and to collect his messages. Without really meaning to, he’d gotten involved with a Chinese-American engineer named Sally Go, who seemed to think he’d promised her something and burst into tears whenever he tried to find out what. He was pretty sure she thought he’d promised to marry her the following spring, but since she refused to say so, insisting instead on weeping and repeating, “You know what you promised,” he in turn felt justified in barking, “What? What? What I promise? What?” He had now managed not to see Sally for some three and a half weeks, and the daily notes she left on his desk had begun to treat themes like “cowardice” and “skunkiness” and “disgrace.” He was reading her latest, his nose scrunched up in displeasure, when he heard Seitchek across the hall in the system rooms.