Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

Towards three o’clock Howard Chun and a Pekingese friend of his returned from lunch, exhaling garlic. Howard in his dripping nylon parka parked himself behind a Tectronix plotter. Renée had last seen him sprawled across her bed, snoring brokenly, when she left her apartment after breakfast.

“Why is this machine so slow,” she said to her screen.

“Disk B’s full,” said the Pekingese, furrowing his broad and remarkably expressive forehead. He was a good scientist and Renée liked him.

“Disk B is full. I see. Disk B that I spent half a night backing up four days ago.”

She entered the Operator directory, became SUPERUSER, and saw that in less than a week, users by the name of TERRY, TS, TBS, NBD1, and NBD2 had backed 375 megabytes onto Disk B and another 65 megabytes onto Disk A. All of these users were Terry Snall. His thesis topic was Non-Brittle Deformation. NBD1, an account feared and hated in the system rooms, single-handedly occupied 261 megabytes; this was four times the space taken up by any other student’s files; it was nearly half a disk.

SUPERUSER became SUPEROP. “Do you know what Terry did?” she said.

In the Tectronix corner, behind partitions, Howard’s keyboard clicked obliviously. The room was becoming murky with garlic vapors. SUPEROP addressed the Pekingese. “He brought back every single one of his program files. There are seventy megabytes of program files on this disk. It’s taking me twenty minutes to run a one-minute program and he has seventy megabytes of program files.”

“Cancel ’em,” the Pekingese recommended.

“I’m going to do just that.”

Program files were needed only when a program was actually being run, and could be re-created in minutes. SUPEROP zapped every one of Terry’s.

“Oh, much better,” the Pekingese said.

“Eight megabytes free on a 600-meg disk. Doesn’t he know? Doesn’t he understand? ”

Howard stepped out of his corner and moved from console to console, logging onto each. Even when he was working for just a few minutes he didn’t feel comfortable if he wasn’t logged on from at least three or four. Some late nights he logged on from ten of them. All but the one he was using automatically went dim to save wear on the pixels.

In a new log-on announcement, SUPEROP stressed that files not needed immediately should not be backed onto the disk. Everyone knew who wrote these announcements, so she didn’t sign it. She became RS again.

“You get your message?” the Pekingese asked her.

“Somebody actually took a message for me?”

“Charles.”

“Oh.”

Across the hall, beneath her shoulder bag and damp jean jacket, she found a number and the message: mrs. Holland called. YOU MAY CALL COLLECT.

She dropped the message in the trash and returned to her console. The Pekingese had left the room. “Howard?” she said.

A parka rustled, but Howard didn’t answer. Behind the partition, she found him slouching and staring at a bright green seismic spectrum, his ankles crossed on a bed of cables, the keyboard on his lap.

“Do you still know somebody with a pilot’s license?” she said.

He shook his head and worked the keyboard.

“Didn’t you have a friend who used to take you up?”

A new spectrum blossomed on the screen. He shook his head. Renée frowned. “Are you mad at me?”

He shook his head.

She threw a cautious glance through the hall doorway. “Come on,” she whispered. “Don’t be mad at me. I really need you not to be mad at me.”

He blinked at the screen, resolutely ignoring her. With another glance into the hall, she knelt and put her hands on his chest. “Come on. Please. Don’t be mad at me now. Please.”

He tried to roll his chair away from her.

She took his hand and put her cheek against his chest. It was the first time she’d ever touched him inside the lab, and as soon as she did it she heard a rustle of clothing right behind her. A sense of inevitability enveloped her like dread as she turned and saw Terry Snall spinning around and heading back up the hallway.

She jumped to her feet. “Shit!” She began to follow Terry but came back to the Tectronix. “Shit! Shit!” She pulled on her hair. “What did I do to you?”

Howard typed casually on his keyboard.

“Oh God, this is going to finish me. This is really going to push me over.” She crouched by Howard again. “Just tell me what I did to you.”

He made a hideous face, all gums and stretched nostrils. “What I do to you?” he mocked. “What I do to you? What I do to you?”

“I let you sleep with me,” she whispered fiercely. “I let you sleep with me a lot .”

“I let you seep with me I let you seep with me.”

She stared at him, mouth trembling.

“Rouis, Rouis,” he said. “A rill bit pinch me hit me hit me.”

“Oh God.” She backed away from him and looked for a place to run but there was no place. Rounding the corner into the hall, she almost collided with Charles, one of the department secretaries. He was tall and balding and was writing a novel in his off hours. He wore suspenders instead of belts. “Melanie Holland,” he said. “She’s on the phone again.”

“Tell her I’m gone.”

“She wants to know where she can reach you.”

“Tell her to try me at home.”

“She already has been.”

“Tell her I’m out of town.”

“Oh, Renée.” Charles shook his head. “I’m not paid to lie for people. If you don’t want to talk to her, the honest thing is to tell her that. Then she won’t keep calling here and interrupting me and I won’t have to keep coming down two flights of stairs and bothering you.”

Renée pointed at the street door. “I’m leaving.”

“Oh, Renée. I advise you not to. Not if you ever want to use my copier again or have me take messages from other institutions or borrow my paper cutter. Are you interested in ever borrowing my paper cutter again?”

Without a word, she stalked up the hall towards the stairwell. “Don’t think I’m blackmailing you,” Charles said, following her. “This is a matter of courtesy and professionalism. I let you use my paper cutter as a courtesy. I’m not required to let you use it, you know.”

Her voice reverberated in the concrete-clad stairwell. “You are so.”

He followed her up the stairs. “You used to be so courteous, Renée. You used to be the most courteous person in this building. Do you know how many clicks I’ve given you on the copy counter? The copy counter that’s for department business only? Renée? Are you listening to me? Sixty-five hundred clicks!”

She stepped into the office of the absent department chairman and closed the door in Charles’s face. The office was dark and cool and agreeably odorless. She always enjoyed being here. The shelves held bound volumes of all the major journals dating back to the forties. There were file cabinets bursting with reprints, softcover proposals for interesting and useful multinational research initiatives, whole unbroken packages of colored pens and other scarce office supplies. In a few years she too would have an office like this, and some young fool like herself would run a computer system for her, and people would have to include her whenever major seismological doings were discussed. It would matter that she’d studied with X, Y and Z at Harvard — a university which, as she always remembered when she entered this office, could boast of a small but outstanding program in geophysics. Bad memories of the system rooms would fade. Trees would sway outside her window.

“Renée? Melanie Holland. Listen, I don’t want to take up your time while you’re at work, but I’m very interested in talking to you again and I wonder if you’d let me take you to lunch tomorrow. It being a Saturday. There’s a lovely restaurant in the Four Seasons, I’d love to take you there.”