Interface

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  “Upstairs bedroom has some nice carpet in it. Almost as good as a bed.”

  Then she astonished herself by kicking him in the nuts. Hard. A direct hit. His mouth formed into an O shape, his eyes got big, he stuck his arms down between his thighs, sank to the living room floor, and lay down on his side, sucking in quick, short breaths through his puckered lips.

  She went right out to her car, rolled up the windows, locked the doors, and started the engine.

  After a few minutes, Strang came out, walking in little tiny baby steps, climbed gingerly into his van, and after sitting there in the front seat for a few ominous minutes, backed out of the driveway and went away.

  Later they found out that he had forged Eleanor’s signature on the work order form. She didn’t care.

  The next time Eleanor saw Erwin Dudley Strang, he was on television, his name was Earl Strong, and his complexion was frighteningly, unnaturally smooth, as if he had been lovingly spackled, buffed, and polished. The white skin of his cheeks was luminous under the lights of the television studio, and almost fuzzy, like an off-focus beauty shot of an aging movie star. As if the camera could not find any feature or blemish to focus on.

  She saw his face on the local public-access cable TV channel one night when she was flipping through the channels after Harmon and the children had gone to bed. It went without saying that the cable had never worked perfectly ever since Strang installed it. It was always a little snowy, with a bit of fuzz in the audio, and whenever the wind blew, the picture started to jump. But putting up with bad television was preferable to phoning the cable TV company and having them send him back to fix it.

  It was creepy and ironic to be flipping through the channels, cursing the bad reception, cursing the man who had installed it, and suddenly to have him show up on screen, in a full talking head shot, wearing a business suit.

  She looked at him for a moment and flipped on to the next channel. She didn’t want to see the man. So he was wearing a business suit. He had found some other profession to give a bad name to. She didn’t care.

  But a few nights later she saw him again, and this time the letters EARL STRONG were superimposed on the bottom of the screen, and finally she had to stop right there and watch.

  It was some kind of talk show. Not a slick network production by any means. Just a sheet-metal desk in front of a big piece of blue paper with a Goodwill sofa next to it where the guests sat.

  But Earl Strong/Erwin Dudley Strang wasn’t sitting on the sofa. He was sitting behind the desk, in a cheap folding sheet-metal chair that creaked whenever he shifted his weight. He was the host.

  Eleanor had to go and dig up the little channel guide, the little slip of cardboard that Strang had given her years ago, to find out what channel she was watching. It said Ch. 29—Public Access Cablevision.

  Earl Strong was talking politics with an assortment of off-brand philosophers who drifted across his little stage, seemingly following their own cues. The camera angle never varied. Clearly there was only one camera taping this thing, and it was sitting on a tripod, running on autopilot. It was comically inept, just the kind of thing that he would throw together.

  The title of tonight’s broadcast was “The Three-Fifths Compromise: Error or Inspiration?” Eleanor could only listen to about thirty seconds of it before she was overcome by an odd combination of boredom and fury.

  The name of the show was Coming on Strong. Earl Strong kept coming on, week after week, year after year. It seemed that every time she happened to flip past his little program, he looked a little different: he did something about those crooked teeth. Got his chin lengthened. Fixed the nose. Bought a narrower and more conservative set of neckties. Played endlessly with his hairstyle until he found one—close-cropped but carefully sculpted—that worked. Bought himself a chair that did not creak. Moved to a better studio, got a two-camera setup, then a three-camera setup. Got commercial sponsorship from Ty (Buckaroo) Steele, a prominent local purveyor of cut-rate used cars, and made the jump from public-access cable to one of the local commercial stations.

  And at each step of the process, Eleanor laughed and shook her head, remembering him curled up on the floor in her living room, sucking in short little breaths, and she wondered how long it would take for this man to be found out for the shabby little fraud he really was. Each time he attained a little more success, Eleanor was shocked for a moment, even a little frightened. Then she calmed herself down by reminding herself that the higher he got, the harder he would fall in the end.

  Surely someone would take it upon themselves to expose this man.

  But no one ever did.

  And then, all of a sudden, Earl Strong was running for the United States Senate, he was ahead in the polls, and everyone loved him.

  nineteen

  A WHITE limousine pulled into the parking lot of the mall, swung past the line of waiting buses, and came to a stop in front of the main entrance. This limousine was far from elegant; it was a rolling billboard for Ty (Buckaroo) Steele’s Pre-Owned and Remanufactured Vehicles Inc. The only time it ever came out of the garage was during parades, when Buckaroo himself would drive it down the street with some local beauty queen popping out of the sunroof to wave at the crowd and pelt the young ’uns with hard candy.

  But Buckaroo had now found another way to use it. The doors opened up and several men in dark suits climbed out and walked, in a cluster, toward the entrance of the mall. In the middle of the group she could clearly make out the pre-owned and remanufactured face of Earl Strong, who in these parts was invariably described as “the next Senator from Colorado.”

  A few moments after he went into the mall, a big cheer rose up from inside. They were holding some kind of a campaign event inside there.

  She shook her head, staring at a huge COMES ON STRONG poster stuck to the side of a bus directly in front of her.

  Her bus wasn’t due to leave for half an hour. There was really no reason for her to sit outside on this bench when she could go into the mall and kill time. It was just that she felt so trashy, walking through the nice mall in her clothes, rumpled from having been slept in, and her rumpled hair, carrying big hunks of generic bulk food that she had gotten for free.

  Right next to her was a big pseudoadobe litter basket, nearly overflowing, and resting on the top layer, neatly folded and put away, was a thick glossy shopping bag from Nordstrom.

  Eleanor pulled the bag out and unfolded it. It was clean and new.

  She put her cheese and oatmeal inside the Nordstrom bag, got up, and walked toward the entrance of the shopping mall. She wanted to see what Erwin Dudley Strang was up to.

  As she was approaching the entrance, she saw her reflection in the glass doors. She had thought it was a clever trick, hiding her welfare cheese in the Nordstrom bag, but when she saw herself, she recognized something about her silhouette, a shape she’d seen in many cities, on many park benches, and a realization came to her.

  She had become a bag lady.

  It was a spear through her heart. She lost her stride and stumbled to a complete halt. Tears flooded her eyes uncontrollably and her nose began to run. She sniffled, blinked, swallowed, and fought it back.

  The Earl Strong supporters were veering around her, turning back to look at her face. She couldn’t just stand there. She picked up her pace and punched through the glass doors and in so doing, transformed herself from a bag lady into a shopper.

  In the central part of the mall, Earl Strong was standing up on a raised podium, coming on strong.

  “Thank you all for coming today. I wanted to do this in January, but the mall wouldn’t let me have the space because they said it was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. And I said that I certainly wouldn’t want to have my name associated with a man who plagiarized his dissertation and shacked up with women he wasn’t married to.”

  Nervous but exultant laughter ran through the crowd: a lot of heavy middle-aged white men raising their eyebrows at each other to see if they dared l
augh at Martin Luther King. They did.

  “Then I wanted to do it in February, but they said it was President’s Day. And I said that I liked the sound of that, but that I was only running for the Senate, and the presidency would have to wait for a few more years.”

  That line brought a round of applause and a slowly gathering chant of “Run! Run! Run!” from the crowd. Earl Strong, obviously pleased, let the chant build for a few seconds, long enough to be picked up by the TV cameras, then made a big show of quieting it down by waving his hands over the crowd.

  “That left March or April. But in April, we’ve got Easter, when Christ rose from the dead, and that one is a little out of my scope. So I settled on March. March is a plain and simple month, raw and honest, not tricked up with any fancy holidays, and I decided that suited my style best. And another thing about the month of March: it comes on strong!”

  That cued an outburst of cheering and chanting that went on for several minutes.

  Below, Eleanor wandered through the crowd with her shopping bag, watching the Strong supporters cheering and jumping up and down and pumping their fists in the air. She was totally invisible. They had eyes only for Strong. The few who did notice her, got the same shocked look that Erwin Dudley Strang had gotten years ago when he had first seen a black woman standing in the doorway of a suburban house. Then they looked away. Guiltily.

  People were so easy to understand, when you were a mom. Eleanor could see their guilt a mile away, see them trying to delude themselves, like kids who believed that they could make unpleasant things go away just by wishing.

  The only thing they needed, she realized, was a good talking-to. Which was one thing that Earl Strong could never give them.

  Eventually the cheering died away and Earl Strong stopped shaking his clasped hands over his head and returned to the podium, shot his cuffs, adjusted his collar just a bit. Eleanor had wandered rather close to him, was now looking up at him from just a few feet away. His face was thickly plastered with television makeup. In his perfect, stiff suit and his injection-molded haircut and his heavy pancake, he looked like a cardboard cutout.

  “Now you might ask why I went to so much trouble, and waited so long, for the opportunity to speak here at the Boulevard Mall. After all, there are better places to hold a campaign event. But this mall has something that none of those places can provide. As I stand here in the crossroads of this beautiful mall I can look in all directions and see economic prosperity at work.”

  Applause.

  “I don’t see people standing in line for a handout. I don’t see people going to court and suing other people for what they think the world owes them. I don’t see people breaking into other people’s homes and stealing things. I see people working hard in honest businesses, small businesses, and to me that is what makes America the greatest nation on earth.”

  Applause.

  “And I have particular respect for the small businessmen, and women—let’s not forget the women’s libbers!—” laughter “—who built these businesses, because for a number of years, I was a small businessman myself, owning and operating my own enterprise as an independent contractor.”

  Eleanor could not restrain herself; standing now at the base of the podium, she spoke up. “Excuse me! Excuse me?”

  Earl Strong looked down at her with a fixed, glazed smile. He noticed that she was black. Once again, he got that look on his face.

  But he was older and, if not wiser, then smarter. He didn’t let it throw him off. She could see the wheels turning beneath his artificial face. She could see him having an inspiration, making a quick command decision.

  “I don’t usually take questions from the audience at this point in the speech,” he said, “but some people have been saying that I only appeal to one kind of person, and I’m glad to see that a racially diverse group is here today, and I see that one of them has a comment she wants to make, and I’m very interested in hearing what she has to say. Ma’am?”

  Television sound men brandished their boom microphones like fishermen on a dock waving grotesque, furry lures, competing for the attention of the only fish in the pond.

  “You were saying that you were a businessman,” she said, and suddenly her voice was very loud through the amplifiers, and she realized that she didn’t have to shout anymore.

  “That I was,” Strong said. But his voice didn’t come through; Eleanor had the microphones.

  “You were a cable TV installer,” she said, in a normal tone of voice. She sounded good. Everyone had always said she had a good telephone voice.

  “Yes, ma’am, that I was,” Strong said, shouting toward the microphones now, his voice high and strained.

  “Well, a cable TV installer isn’t so much a businessman as he is a burglar with pretensions.”

  Most of the crowd gasped. But a lot of them actually laughed. Not the deep forced belly laughter with which they had responded to Earl Strong’s canned jokes. It was nervous tittering, choked off in the middle, just this side of hysteria.

  Earl Strong was cool. He was good. The smile on his face barely wavered. He was silent and calculating for a few moments, waiting for the laughter to die away, searching her up and down with his eyes.

  “Well,” he said, “I must say that’s quite a disrespectful attitude for a woman who’s carrying a big piece of cheese in her bag that was paid for by my tax dollars.”

  A smattering of belly laughs, and sparse applause. Most of the people were silent, nervously realizing that Earl Strong was verging on dangerous territory. And in the near vicinity of Eleanor, there was violent convection in the crowd. Die-hard Earl Strong supporters were stepping away from her as if she were going to give them AIDS, and minicam crews and news photographers were converging on her as if she were going to make them famous.

  “Well,” Eleanor said, “I would say that even showing yourself in public is pretty cheeky when you are nothing more than a pencil-neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal-Mart.”

  This time, there was utter silence, except for a few sharp intakes of breath.

  Earl Strong had gone bright red under his pancake makeup.

  “Besides,” she added, “this cheese didn’t come from your tax dollars. It was bought by churchgoers who give money to support a public food bank. Have you ever been to church, Mr. Strong? Before you started running for something, that is.”

  “I am a conservative Christian,” he said. “I have no qualms about saying so.”

  “You have no qualms about saying anything that’ll get you elected.”

  Another nervous titter from the crowd. But farther away, around the fringes, a cheer went up; passing shoppers had gathered, attracted by the noise, and now they were cheering her on.

  “I saw you show up just now in that tacky limousine. Most of the people who ride around in that thing are used-car salesmen or silicone beauty queens. Which one are you?” she said.

  “I resent the implication that there’s something wrong with the used-car trade.”

  “It’s not exactly a character reference for you, Erwin Dudley Strang or whatever your name is.”

  “My name is Earl Strong. And it’s an honest business like any other.”

  “Oooh, Erwin Dudley Strang is giving me a lecture about how to be honest,” Eleanor said. “I know you think all black people are dishonest. Well, the only dishonest thing I’ve ever done is tell myself I had a chance to make it in a white society.”

  “There we have it,” Strong said, addressing the crowd again. “The defeatist attitude that is bringing our economy down and brainwashing many minority people into thinking that they have to have affirmative action programs in order to succeed. This is a classic example of the attitude problem that prevents black people from succeeding, even where no real impediments exist.”

  “I don’t have a car,” Eleanor said. “That’s a real impediment. I don’t have a job. My husband’s dead. How many more impediments do I need?”

  “None whatsoever,”
Strong said. “That’s plenty. Why don’t you just shut up now.”

  “I won’t shut up because I’m hurting you on television, and you don’t have the brains or the balls to stop me.”

  A big whooo! went up from the shoppers.

  Strong laughed. “Lady, I represent a political ground swell in this country that is more powerful than you can imagine. And there is nothing you can do, on or off television, to hurt me. All you do is annoy me.”

  “I know that’s what you think. Ever since you took that belt sander to your face you think you’re the second coming of Ronald Reagan. You think you’re made of teflon. Well, it takes more than a simple mind and a synthetic smile to be Ronald Reagan. You also have to be likable. And you aren’t any more likable than you were when you showed up at my door at 4:54 P.M. and installed my cable like some kind of a trained monkey.”

  “Oh, so that’s it,” he said. “This is some kind of a vendetta.” Strong looked up at the crowd, turning his face up into the light again. “This woman is upset because she gets static on her daytime soap operas.”

  “No,” Eleanor said, turning around to face the crowd, “I’m upset because my son just got shot in the back for using a pay phone. And Earl Strong, this juvenile delinquent with a fifty-dollar haircut, is standing up tall and pretty telling me it’s all because I don’t have values. Well, I may be sleeping in a car and eating government surplus cheese but at least I haven’t sunk low enough to become a politician who feeds happy lies to starving children.”

  “I am exactly the opposite of the kind of politician you think I am,” Earl Strong said, “I am a man of the people. A populist.”

  “A populist? To you, a populist is someone who’s popular . . . to you, a homecoming queen is a populist. To me, a populist is someone who serves the needs of the populace. And the only thing you’ve ever done for the populace is show up late, drill holes in their houses, and hand them a big fat bill. Which is exactly what I predict you’ll do for us in the Senate.”