Strong Motion (34 page)

Howard’s mother was a screen actress. She’d lived one of those colorful lives engendered by the union of war and money. She had no great acting talent, but as a girl she’d made a medium-sized splash in Beijing’s bourgeois cinema, most notably in the title role in
Maple-Tree Girl
, an otherwise forgettable film containing one immortal sequence in which Maple-Tree Girl is pursued by a rug merchant with immoral aims through the great Wuhan flood of 1931, eleven stupendous minutes of this chaste beauty staggering through ever deeper and dirtier water and more menacing locales, clutching her rent garment to her throat, her round eyes radiating unmodulated terror and anguish for the entire fifteen thousand frames. In the mid-forties, Miss Chun and a director old enough to be her father lived in fashionable exile in Singapore and ate up the pretty nest egg she’d set aside, making it necessary for her and her three young children to join her relatives in Taipei as soon as the Nationalists were back in the movie business. For a while she was prized by casting directors in need of “the less pretty older sister,” and she subsequently spent many lucrative years playing a wicked stepmother on a soap opera called “Hostages of Love.” At least once in every installment of “Hostages” the camera caught her baring her teeth and rolling her eyes, to remind viewers of her evil, scheming nature. In real life she was vague and good-natured and selfish, and mainly lived for eating sweets. When Howard came home from Queen Victoria on days when she wasn’t filming, he would find her sitting up in bed, chewing in slow motion on some piece of candied fruit, frowning as though the flavor were a message trickling into her head by telegraph, which she had to strain to catch each word of.

Howard was her fifth and youngest child and the only one she’d had by a man of whom nobody in the family, including her, could furnish a satisfactory account. She indicated in a general way that the man was a war hero, “a noble spirit commanding troops in the struggle for freedom,” though by the time Howard heard this, the Nationalists had been out of combat for twenty years. Occasionally he tried to picture his male parent up in the sky someplace, a marshal in the mile-thick tropical clouds above the Yellow Sea, at an altitude where hostilities hadn’t ceased, but the picture was ridiculous and he made himself think about other things.

Howard’s aunts and great-aunts were a philosophical bunch, willing to wink at the lapses in his mother’s personal morality for the sake of the income she provided. They huddled and rustled in hallways, managing income; one was never sure in whose canvas neckbag her savings passbook could be found. Howard much preferred his aunts’ realism to his mother’s reveries, and consequently grew up feeling more like a pampered houseguest than a child. He never really adolesced. After his mother died, he adopted an easy, overfamiliar manner with his elders, hanging around the kitchen with them like a middle-aged man between jobs, the kind of family friend or much-removed relative who dropped in for dinner every day for a year and then was never heard from again. Altogether, though he was the brightest child in the house and no reasonable expense was spared in educating him, he wasted vast amounts of time; and whenever an aunt descanted on the brightness of his future he would leer at her strangely, as if this Hsing-hai of whom she spoke were a pathetic figment who only he, Howard, was privileged to know had no intention of inhabiting the future she foresaw.

One day he announced that he was going to college in America. His eldest half brother was a wing captain in the Nationalist Air Force and could have opened doors for him there, but he saw no reason to donate three years of his life to the military if it could possibly be avoided. He had long legs, and his visions of manned flight focused on nip-sized whiskey bottles, swizzle sticks shaped like propellers, and roomy first-class seats.

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.

“You’d think,” she said, “that in ten years he might have learned to make an
r
sound. I’m going to have a
stroke
if I hear him say ‘compyu pogam’ one more time. Compyu pogam. Compyu pogam.” Her voice was rushed and squeaky with malice. “I’m write me a compyu pogam cacawate weast squares.”

Howard’s eyes filled. He reeled out of his office blinking violently, scowling and jerking his head as if to clear it of an unwelcome hallucination. But it was no hallucination, and he knew it. Ten-plus years in America had done little to correct the crippling his language skills had suffered at the Queen Victoria Academy. The English instructor for the upper forms, Mrs. Hennahant, had taught phonetics on the principle that it was contagious, and she was curiously deaf to the immunity her students displayed. Day after day she repeated sentences like “
Hilary
plays the
clarinet
,” and then nodded sagely to the rhythm of the students’ voices as each in turn reproduced this as “Hirry prays crarenet.” After they’d all spoken she would nod and strut and try once again to hammer the hopelessly bent nail into their heads: “
Hilary
plays the
clarinet Hilary
plays the
clarinet
. The alimentary—
canal
. The
alimentary
—
canal
. Henry?”

Back from London ten days later, Howard had just enough time to stop by the lab before flying on to San Francisco, where a different cousin was getting married. He removed several cubic feet of printouts from the line-printer basket and the counter next to it. Science had grown fifty kilos richer while he was touring Dublin and County Cork, and he added another hundred jobs to the batch queue to ensure that his time in California would be similarly productive.

Seitchek was sitting in their office with her feet up on a suitcase. He asked her if there had been any phone calls for him. Her “no” didn’t faze him. Sometimes she answered no and then, when she’d reconciled herself to being interrupted, changed her mind and reeled off several interesting phone messages.

“Edward’s looking for you,” she said at length. “He heard you were back from London.”

Edward was the name of Howard’s ultra-picky adviser.

“Oh yeah,” he said. The uppermost note from Sally on his desktop said
FORGET IT!