Interface

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

“Don’t call me that. I’m the coach,” Cozzano said. Then he closed his eyes and shook his head in frustration.

  “Of course you are, William,” she said in a buttery voice, and put the little cup of pills into his right hand. “Now, down the hatch!”

  Cozzano did not want to take the pills, merely because he did not want to give Patricia satisfaction in any way. But at some level he knew that was puerile. So he tossed the pills into his mouth. Patricia took the cup from his hand and gave him the coffee, which was tepid and beige. Cozzano had gotten in the habit of drinking black full-roast coffee, and the only kind available around here was the sour greenish grocery-store variety. He lifted the mug to his lips and forced down a couple of big, awful swallows, feeling the pills crowd together in his throat and stick halfway down his esophagus. He would rather leave them stuck there than drink any more of that small-town coffee.

  “Very good!” Patricia said, “I can see you have a knack for this.”

  Cozzano was accustomed to being a superman and now he was being praised by a Big Hair Girl for his ability to take pills.

  “Would you like to watch a little TV?” Patricia said.

  “Yes,” he said. Anything to get her out of the room.

  “What channel?”

  Why didn’t she just give him the remote control? Cozzano heaved a big sigh. He wanted to watch channel 10, CNBC. In his condition, one of the few things Cozzano could do was manage the family’s investments. And in the economic chaos that had been unleashed by the President’s State of the Union address, they needed a lot of management.

  “Five million,” he said. “No, goddamn it!”

  “Well, sometimes it seems like this cable TV has about five million channels, but I don’t think I can do that!” Patricia said in a high, inflated tone, her I’m-making-a-joke voice. “Did you mean to say channel five?”

  “No!” he said. “Twice that.”

  “Two?”

  “No! Three squared plus one. Six plus four. The square root of one hundred,” he said. Why didn’t she just give him the remote control?

  “Oh, here’s a news program. How’s that?” Patricia said. She had hit one of the network stations. It was a little one-minute news break at the top of the hour, between soap operas.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Here’s the remote control in case you change your mind,” she said, and left it on the table next to him.

  Cozzano sat and watched the little news break. It was totally inconsequential: presidential candidates cavorting around Iowa in a series of staged media events. The caucuses were in a week and a half.

  Cozzano could have won the caucuses without lifting a finger. People in Iowa loved him, they knew he was a small-town boy. Anyone who lived in the eastern part of that state saw him on TV all the time. All he had to do was pick up a phone and get nominated. Looking at the candidates on TV, he was tempted to do just that and put an end to all of this nonsense.

  Senators and governors were out in the snow, picking up baby livestock, milking cows, standing in schoolyards wrapped up in heavy overcoats, tossing footballs to red-faced blond kids. Cozzano chortled as he watched Norman Fowler, Jr., billionaire high-tech twit, walking across the hard-frozen stubble of a cornfield in eight-hundred-dollar shoes. The wind chill was thirty below zero and these guys were standing out on the prairie without hats. That said everything about their fitness to be president.

  Cozzano’s family had always told him he ought to run for president one day. It sounded like a nice idea, bandied across a dinner table after a couple of glasses of wine. In practice it would be ugly and hellish. Knowing this, he had never seriously considered the idea. He had known for some time that Mel had quietly organized a shadow campaign committee and laid the groundwork. That was Mel’s job; as a lawyer, he was supposed to anticipate things.

  Of course, now that Cozzano had had a stroke and couldn’t run, he wanted to be President worse than anything. He could make a phone call and a few hours later a chartered campaign plane would be waiting for him at the airport in Champaign, and suddenly literature and campaign videos would be piled up in heaps all over the United States. Mel could make it happen. And then Patricia would wheel him up onto the plane, drooling for the cameras.

  This was the hardest phase of recovering from the stroke. Cozzano had not yet readjusted his expectations of life. When his high expectations collided with reality, it hurt like hell.

  The news break metamorphosed into a commercial for cold medicine. Then the anchor person came back on to tell America when the next news break would be. And then a new program started up: Candid Video Blind Date.

  Cozzano was so disgusted that he could not change the channel fast enough. It was as if this tawdry program would cause him physical damage if he watched it for more than ten seconds.

  The remote control was on the table to his right, on the good side of his body. He reached over for it, but she had put it a little too far back on the table; the heel of his hand could touch it but his fingers couldn’t. He tried to screw his arm around into a kind of self-induced hammerlock, but in his disgust he was doing it so hastily that he just ended up knocking it farther back on the table. It shot backward, flew off the table, and buried itself in the shag carpet. Now it was stuck between the table and a bin full of old newspapers: a two-week accumulation of the Trib, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, none of which he would ever read.

  He couldn’t reach the damn thing. He would have to ask Patricia for help.

  On the screen, the hysterical applause of the crowd had subsided and the host was warming them up with a few jokes. The humor was crudely sexual, the kind of thing that would embarrass even a ninth grade boy, but the crowd was eating it up: in a series of reaction shots, Big Hair Girls and fat middle-aged women and California surfer types jackknifed in their seats, mouths gaping in narcotic glee. The game show host grinned devilishly into the camera.

  “Goddamn it!” Cozzano said.

  Patricia was washing some dishes in the kitchen and had the water going full blast, she couldn’t hear him.

  He didn’t want Patricia to hear him. He didn’t want to beg Patricia to come into the room and change the channel on the TV for him. He couldn’t stand it.

  He couldn’t stand this TV program either. William A. Cozzano was watching Candid Video Blind Date. Across town, John and Giuseppe and Guillermo were turning over in their graves.

  All of a sudden tears came to his eyes. It happened without warning. He hadn’t cried since the stroke. Suddenly he was sobbing, tears running down his face and dripping from his jaw onto his blanket. He hoped to god that Patricia didn’t come in.

  He had to stop crying. This wouldn’t do. This was too pathetic. Cozzano took a few deep breaths and got it under control. For some reason, the most important thing in the world to him was that Patricia not find out that he had been crying.

  Sitting there in his wheelchair, trying not to look at the television set, Cozzano let his eye wander around the room, trying to concentrate on something else.

  In the far end of the living room, a pair of heavy sliding doors led into a small den. Cozzano had never used it for much. It had a small rolltop desk where he balanced his checkbook. A beautiful antique gun case stood against one wall. Like all of the other furniture in Cozzano’s house it had been made out of hardwood by people who knew what they were doing back in the nineteenth century. There was more solid wood in one piece of this furniture than you would find in a whole house nowadays. The top half of the gun case was a cabinet for long weapons, closed off by a pair of beveled-glass doors with a heavy brass lock. A skeleton key projected from the keyhole. Cozzano had half a dozen shotguns and two rifles in there: all of his father’s and grandfather’s guns, plus a few that he had picked up during his life. There was a pump shotgun that he had used in Vietnam, an ugly, cheap, scarred monstrosity that spoke volumes about the nature of that war. Cozzano kept it in there as a reality check. It made a nice contrast b
etween the fancy guns, the ornate collector’s items that various rich and important sycophants had given him.

  Above and below the long weapons, a few handguns hung on pegs. The bottom half of the gun cabinet consisted entirely of small drawers with ornately carved fronts where he kept his ammunition, oil, rags, and other ballistic miscellanea.

  Sitting in the next room in his wheelchair, Cozzano tried a little experiment. He reached up into the air with his right hand, seeing how high he could get. He was pretty sure that he could reach high enough to turn the skeleton key on the gun cabinet doors. And if not, he could always haul himself up out of his wheelchair for a few moments and carry all his weight on his right leg. The cabinet was massive and stable and he could probably use it to pull himself up.

  So he could probably get the doors open. He could pull out one of the guns. It would probably make the most sense to use one of the handguns, because the long weapons were all enormous and heavy and would be awkward to maneuver with only one hand.

  The .357 Magnum. That was the one to use. He knew he had ammunition for it, stored in the upper right-hand drawer, easy to reach. He would pull the pin that held the cylinder in place and let it fall open into his hand. Then he would drop it into his lap, letting it rest on the blanket between his thighs. He would grope in the drawer and pull out a handful of rounds. He would insert a few of these into the cylinder—one would suffice—and then snap it back into place. He would rotate the cylinder into position to make sure that one of the loaded chambers was next up.

  Then what? Given the power of the weapon, it was likely that the bullet would come flying out the far side of his head and hit something else. There was an elementary school nearby and he could not take any chances.

  The answer was right there: across the den, opposite to the gun case, was a heavy oak bookcase.

  Cozzano couldn’t see it from here. He reached down and hit the joystick attached to the right arm of his wheelchair. A whining noise came out of the little electric motor and he began to move forward. Cozzano had to do a little bit of back-and-forth to get himself free of the living room furniture, then he swung around back of the sofa and into the den. He spun the wheelchair around in the middle of the den and backed himself up to the wall next to the bookcase.

  It was perfect. The bullet would emerge from his head, hit the side of the bookcase, and if it penetrated that inch of hardwood, would go right into the back cover of the first volume in a commemorative edition of the complete works of Mark Twain. No bullet in the world could make it all the way through Mark Twain.

  So freedom was within reach. Now he just had to think it through.

  Suicide would void his life insurance policies. That was a minus. But that didn’t matter so much; his wife was already dead and his kids could support themselves. In fact, his kids didn’t need to work, they had trust funds.

  His body would be discovered by Patricia. That was a plus. He would not want to put a family member through that kind of trauma. It was a good bet that his brains would be splattered all over the room. Patricia was a medical professional who would be psychologically equipped to handle this, and Cozzano felt that the experience would be good for her. It might make her into a little less of a sugary lightweight.

  He wondered if he ought to leave some kind of a note. His rolltop desk was right there. He might be able to scrawl something with his right hand. He decided against it. It would look pathetic, written with his wrong hand. Better for him to be remembered for what he had done before his stroke. For anyone who knew him, Candid Video Blind Date running on his TV set was suicide note enough.

  Besides, Patricia might come in and discover him writing it. Then, he knew, they would take away the guns and anything else that he might use to hurt himself. They would shoot him full of drugs and mess with his brain.

  And maybe they would be right. Maybe suicide was a stupid idea.

  Of course it wasn’t a stupid idea. Suicide was a noble thing when done in the right circumstances. It was the act of a warrior. Cozzano was about to fall on his sword to spare himself further humiliation.

  And now was the best time to do it. Before his spirit was broken by the drool on his chin and by the numbing onslaught of daytime television, before his feeble new image was discovered by the media harpies and broadcast to the world.

  The doctors had said that as time went on, he might have additional strokes. This meant he might become even more pathetic, incapable of taking his own life.

  Cozzano had never been sick. Cozzano had always known that, barring the odd drunk driver or tornado, he was going to live until he was in his eighties.

  Decades. Decades of this hell. Of watching Candid Video Blind Date. Of looking at that horrendous shag carpet and wishing he was man enough to handle a big floor sander. It was unimaginable. Cozzano hit the joystick and rolled across the room to the gun cabinet.

  There was a sharp rapping noise. Someone was knocking on the window.

  Cozzano turned the wheelchair halfway around and looked. It was Mel Meyer, standing out on the porch, waving to him.

  ten

  MEL MEYER saw some boys on the shoulder of the interstate checking the tie-downs on a flatbed truck carrying a piece of farm machinery. He pulled into the left lane to give them a safe berth, and as he shot past them he realized that the boys were about sixty and forty years old respectively. They only looked like boys because, on this cold February day, they were wearing denim jackets that barely came down to their waists. Culture shock again. You’d think he would have gotten used to it by now.

  Mel understood intellectually that these people had to wear short jackets because it gave them greater freedom of movement while they worked, and he also understood that their mall-dwelling females wore pastel workout clothes and running shoes at all times because they were more comfortable than anything else. But to Mel they all looked like children. This was not because Mel was some kind of a snob. It was because he was from Chicago and these people were from the entirely separate cultural, political, and economic entity called downstate.

  To make anything work between two such disjointed places there had to be the equivalent of diplomats—people who, in another context, had once been defined as “men sent abroad to lie for their country—in both senses of the word.” The intra-Illinois diplomats were the old family law firms in the major and minor towns of the state. These professionals lacked the partisanship to have a killer impulse for their clients. Instead they saw life in terms of each side winning, if at all possible.

  In Chicago there were perhaps a hundred families such as the Meyers, ranging through the Polish, Slovak, Irish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, and even WASP sections of town, who kept the lines between the two Illinoises open and flowing, working in enterprises legal and illegal. It was perhaps the purest and most professional group in Illinois, and the Meyers were masters of the guild.

  Shmuel Meierowitz’s son David, even though he was a Conservative Jew, had the skill and honesty to gain the trust of even the most bigoted downstate ambulance chaser. Generations of lawyers from Cairo, Quincy, Macomb, Decatur, and Pekin (home of the Fighting Chinks) knew that the Meyer family’s word was good. It was not particularly surprising, then, that the Cozzanos had encountered the Meyers, and that they had formed an alliance.

  Since then, a lot of Meyers had put a lot of miles on various cars, driving back and forth. Shmuel normally rode the Illinois Central, but David cruised up and down U.S. 45 in the stupendous Cadillacs and Lincolns of the 1950s and 1960s, and Mel scorched the pavement of Interstate 57 in a succession of Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes.

  Mel had defined his very own Checkpoint Charlie, the official dividing line between Chicago and downstate. He drove by it every time he took I-57 south from the heart of the city. It was out in one of the suburbs, Mel had never bothered to find out which, where traffic finally started to open up a little bit. The landmark in question was a water tower, a modern lollipop-shaped one. It was painted bright yellow, and
it had a smiley face on it. When Mel saw the damn smiley face he knew he had passed into hostile territory.

  The flatness of downstate was, in its way, just as stark and awe-inspiring as Grand Canyon or Half Dome. He had been down here a thousand times and it always startled him. The settlers had come here and found an unmarked geometric plane; anything that rose above that plane was the work of human beings. When Mel had first come this way it was mostly grain elevators, water towers, and ranks of bleachers rising up alongside high-school football fields. These artifacts were still there, but nowadays the most prominent structures were microwave relay towers: narrow vertical supports made of steel latticework, sprouting from concrete pads in cornfields, held straight by guy wires, drum-shaped antennas mounted to their tops. Each antenna was pointed several miles across the prairie in the direction of the next microwave relay tower. This was how phone calls got bounced around the country. These things were all over the place, crossing the country with a dense invisible web of high-speed communications, but other places you didn’t see them. In cities they were hidden on the tops of buildings, and in places with hills, they were built into the high places where you couldn’t see them unless you knew where to look. But out here, the buildings and hills had fallen out from under the phone company and their invisible network had been laid bare. It was not merely visible, but the single most obvious thing about the downstate landscape.

  It caused Mel to wonder, as he skimmed across the prairie on I-57, its four lanes straight as banjo strings, paralleling the equally straight Illinois Central railway line, whether downstate had some magical feature that might expose another network, a network that had, so far, so perfectly hidden its workings in the complexity of the modern world that Mel wasn’t even sure it existed.

  Cozzano beckoned Mel into the house and rolled forward into the living room.

  “Hey, Willy, how are you?” Mel said, coming in the front door. He spun a stack of newspapers into Cozzano’s lap: the Financial Times was on top, and Cozzano could see the red corner of the Economist sticking out underneath. Mel pounded Cozzano on the shoulder, peeled off his heavy cashmere overcoat, and, oblivious to the fact that it cost more than a small car, tossed it full-length onto the sofa where it would pick up dog hairs. “What is this shit on the TV?” he said. He went up to the set and punched buttons on the cable box until he got CNBC. Then he turned the volume down so it wouldn’t interfere with the conversation.