Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Sure, Hahvahd’s a great school, and maybe you’re a great little grad student, but, uh, three hundred fifty thousand dollars—”

“Before taxes.”

“Aren’t we being a little fucking greedy here? You ever heard of a thing called moderation? Quitting while you’re ahead? Compassion for a lady who’s obviously not all there? I’m sure I don’t need to tell you she’s in there telling me to accept your terms. You know what she just told me? She told me you’re the Devil, Devil with a capital D, I’m telling you she means it literally , sweah to God. With a straight face! That’s the type person you’re putting the screws in. But just between you and me, little girl, you’re not the Devil. You’re a greasy little grad student that God only knows how she got her claws in a fine lady like Mrs. Holland. And you wanna know something else? You’re not getting more than 350 K. I don’t have to tell you we’re dealing with a person who’s lost perspective. She’d give you the whole million, but I’m not going to let her. She can crack in two and go sit in an asylum for all I care, but I’m not going to let her hand over a million bucks to some little sneak that’s selling secrets behind her employer’s back. I’m telling you that’s what I think of you, Ms. Seitchek. I think you are a greasy little piece of dead fish. You hear me?”

She was utterly motionless.

“Yeah, and for your information, guys don’t get much easier-going than me.”

“After taxes,” she said quietly. “Six hundred is 350 after taxes, more or less. And I am leaving if you don’t accept it.”

“Hey, great idea. Why don’t you leave right now? Or do you need me to explain about selling blocks of stock. Maybe a lesson in capital gains? You ever heard of that? Broker’s fees? Nah, what am I saying, you probably got the tax code memorized.”

She jumped up, and before he could stop her she was in the conference room. Melanie was leaning against the oval table, sobbing.

“Six hundred thousand,” Renée said as she wrenched free of Rudman’s grasp. “Six hundred thousand .”

“Shut up! Shut up! ”

Melanie seized Rudman’s hand imploringly. “Henry, do it!”

“Mrs. Holland—”

“Do it. I said do it. Do it and we’re done with it.”

Midnight in the system rooms. The roar of fans and airconditioning fills them tightly, to the very corners, like the breath in an inflated mattress. All the consoles have gone dim. In its private closet, the line printer is drumming numbers onto paper. The day’s New York Times lies by the laser printer. A headline reads:

STUDY REVEALS DEPTH OF RELATIONSHIPS,

NOT QUANTITY, AS KEY TO HAPPINESS

Far away a door has closed, and someone’s footsteps seem to be getting fainter, but suddenly they are louder, echoing in the stairwell, louder and louder in their leisurely descent, impossibly loud by the time they reach the landing outside the system rooms. They don’t so much as pause here. The hallway has counted twenty-four of them when the loading-dock door is opened; the last sound is the sound of the door falling shut.

The diodes on the face of the CPU unit flicker knowingly.

The printer has filled its metal basket, and the oblong scene in the single street-side window has changed to the blue of fifty fathoms, to the green of ten fathoms, to the dripping misty yellows of a summer morning, by the time the first students come in. They carry coffee and move cautiously, as if wading through some waste-deep backwash of night.

In front of the building, outside the Peabody Museum and its collection of glass flowers, there is an unprepossessing dogwood tree. Tourists photograph themselves in front of this tree thirty or forty times a day, roping it into their lives like a bystander accused of imaginary crimes, and shooting it summarily. There are pictures of this tree in albums in Tokyo and Yokohama and Hokkaido, and Stuttgart and Padua, and Riyadh and Malmö.

On the terrace ringing the student lounge, up on the building’s penthouse floor, the sun has yet to burn the dew off the tandem of hemispherical charcoal grills, and the square bottle of lighting fluid, and the jumbo laboratory tongs that students manipulate their coals with. A bag of charcoal is slumped against the railing, exhausted. Inside the lounge, on a table by the elevator, discolored slabs of melon and a chunk of apple with the skin coming loose are floating in a clear plastic bowl. Howard Chun is sleeping on a sofa, a peaceful corpse, hands folded on his chest. Triangular potato chip fragments lie scattered on the brown carpeting.

P-wave residuals, lateral heterogeneity, core-mantle boundary, centroid-moment-tensor, rupture propagation, slab penetration, non-double-couple events, shear-strength coefficients, intraplate seismicity, deconvolution, source-time functions, normal modes, aseismic slip, migration of the poles. One student calls his programs things like “Kelly” and “Diane” and “Martha.” These are the names of women he has pursued or is pursuing. He likes to say his favorite commands aloud: “Do Martha. Run Kelly. Execute Diane.”

The newspaper says: It seems like centuries ago that men said blunt, self-satisfied things to credulous women .

The system can be irritable when overburdened. It may spend eternities on simple tasks. It may send upsetting messages to your console. It may sham dead.

If you forget to tell the system not to keep expecting something, it will keep expecting it. Every few minutes it will spit a message onto the paper in the system console, informing the world that although you have forgotten your appointment, it has not. It will spit these messages hour after hour.

When there is nothing for it to do, the system sleeps. It wakes up knowing the time to within a hundredth of a second.

Sometimes the system becomes irrational, and a young man in a too-tight suit has to come with his aluminum suitcases and bring it down. The CPU unit is opened up and suffers the indignity of having its boards removed, one after another, until the faulty one is found. Then everything is OK again.

The window is dark when Renée appears. The chairs have been herded into clusters, one by the telephone and one in the corner by the Tectronix screen. She rolls them back to where they belong, puts five soft-drink cans in the recycling box, and logs off consoles for the people who haven’t bothered to. Then she goes up the ramp to the inner sanctum and sits angled at the console by the optical-disk jukebox, her legs to one side of the chair. She is so alone and so motionless in the roar of the bright room, so technical in her coloration, that even though she’s plainly visible through the plate-glass window, a passing sedimentologist who sticks his head in the door is sure the room is empty.

An image of the earth beneath Tonga flows onto the color screen. Renée looks at each stationary object in the room, the system console, the storage disks, the walls, the CPU unit, the tape drives, the power supply, the array processor, the digitizer, the racks of tapes, her body, the walls, the jukebox. She feels the watchfulness and the perpetuity. She listens intently to the noise, trying to find sense or pattern or allusion in it, and knowing that she won’t. Beneath the noise there are, however, ghosts of noises — the scurrying, the titter, of calculating electrons.

Howard Chun enters the empty room at midnight carrying a milk shake and his boom box, which is the size of a two-drawer file cabinet. He logs onto the system from six consoles and listens to the Eroica while he works.