Strong Motion (27 page)

“Lucky thing I came over, huh?”

“I love sex. It’s almost the only thing I’m not embarrassed to like.”

Good effort by Greenwell to hold him to a single
.

“You make me want to be a woman,” Louis said.

After the weekend the heat gave way to weather from Canada. The air smelled washed and sweet and full of oxygen, and the trees on Pleasant Avenue drooped pregnantly in the sudden overfullness of their foliage. The public library, on the last hill of Somerville, was like the bridge of a sailing ship, the emptiness of ocean sky commencing directly beyond the parking lot; air flavored with the sound of hammers and forklifts flowed up and over Louis’s face as he and his girlfriend looked out over flat roofs and brick warehouses at the sky-blue span of the Tobin Bridge, and beyond it to the dusk-colored haze over Lynn and Peabody, and the prow of Cape Ann.

The music he’d been happy to eat sandwiches with and the TV he’d been happy to bury evenings under both began to seem shrill and irrelevant. There was a silence on Pleasant Avenue that belonged to Renée, and he wanted to be in it. One morning he borrowed her Harvard ID and for two hours assumed the identity of René Seitchek, visiting Frenchman. He returned from Widener Library with a backpack of Balzac and Gide. He felt like he’d been flung seismically out of a career in radio, a career he might very well have enjoyed and derived a sense of purpose or safety from, into a state where he not only didn’t know what to do with himself but also doubted that it mattered much. Similar upheavals and subsidences were occurring in the landscape of his memory, familiar landmarks dropping out of sight, replaced by remembered scenes of a nature so radically different that he was almost surprised to realize that these things, too, had had a place in his life. A kind, wry Rice alumnus delivering a Commencement address that Louis no less than the other graduates had had to sit through, and reminding the graduates of a thing called social justice. The entire semester he’d spent in Nantes, the couscous he’d eaten with a group of Algerian students there, the students telling him: things are really bad in the country we were born in, and we as French citizens feel torn. His fourteenth birthday, the buck knife in a sheath Eileen had bought and given him. Also Marcel Proust, for whom he’d held a mental door open long enough to be overjoyed by the discovery that Swann was married to Odette and that the wretched painter at the Verdurins’ had grown into the great artist Elstir; the door had fallen shut under the pressure of four five-page papers, each to be written in French, but not before a splinter of joy had slipped through, a splinter that it was evident now was still inside him, like a self-contained and frightening djinn.

Every evening as he listened to the real Seitchek’s footsteps on the stairs he felt a mounting anticipation and curiosity that were not, however, in any way satisfied by the person who after making some noises in the kitchen came into the room where he’d been reading. He saw her with a dreamlike clarity that was the same as a dreamlike inability to really see her. Instead of a face he saw a mask, a sign grasped directly: the image of the woman he slept with. She looked much the same whether his eyes were closed or open. Strangely or not, his presence in her apartment seemed to disturb her less and less. She listened to his tapes while she made dinner and hypnotized him with the precision and methodicality of her cooking, and afterward, while he washed the dishes, she watched his TV and read the paper and didn’t appear to notice any change in him, not even the way he dried all the dishes and put them away and swept the floor and then for another fifteen or twenty minutes stood in the kitchen doing absolutely nothing but avoiding going in to join her on the bed. It was as if, in nuclear terms, the configuration of forces had changed and he was no longer an oppositely charged particle attracted to her from a great distance but a particle with like charge, a proton repelled by this other proton until they were right next to each other and the strong nuclear force came into its own and bound them together.

“You can hurt me a little.”

“What?”

“You can slap me, or bite me. A little. You can pinch me. It’s something you could do, if you want.”

She lay on top of him, the field emanating from the large-eyed steadiness of her gaze bearing down. “Would you do it?”

He twisted his head away. “No!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think a man should hit a woman.”

“Not even in bed, if the woman asks?”

“Better not to.”

“OK.”

Her voice was so small only the
K
was audible. She rolled away and stared at the wall; her shoulder threw his hand back when he touched it. There were silences. Demurrals and qualifications, silences. It took hours to turn the clock back thirty seconds. Long after the last car had driven down Pleasant Avenue, at a time of night when actions and sensations had the moral weightlessness of dreams, he finally let her have her way with him.

The next night, for the first time, she returned to work after dinner. He was allowed to come along. In the computer room, consoles with bubble-shaped chassis like the busts of moon walkers were arrayed in a double row on a Formica-topped bench swamped by equipment manuals and used paper. A plate-glass window gave into a bright room filled with dryer-sized pieces of hardware and a throbbing, all-night white noise of NORAD-style vigilance. Ocean maps like the one in Renée’s apartment hung on the walls, some with drooping corners tipped with squares of sticky stuff. The telephone, which sat on a radiator, had been unplugged, and the room’s atmosphere of transience or abandonment was heightened by a lack of things to sit on. Renée said she hadn’t been on hand when a shipment of new chairs arrived, and that students and assistant professors from the rest of the building had dropped in and helped themselves, and thrown their old chairs in a dumpster, because she hadn’t been on hand.

“I did most of my work in this room. The computer’s a Data General. We have a lot of Sims now too. They speak UNIX.”

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.”