Interface

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  “I’ll bet he was.”

  “I was asking him about some of the work he does and it occurred to me that, since he seemed to be so interested in my work, a mutual back-scratching arrangement might be possible. So we hammered this whole thing out, right there at the lunch table. He’s giving me access to a number of campaigns—he has friends and protégés working in virtually every important campaign right now. So I get lots of material I wouldn’t otherwise have access to.”

  “Well,” Mary Catherine said, “it sounds like you just made a brilliant career move.” It was taking a lot of effort to keep from smiling at her brother. He had the same proud, beaming look on his face that he’d had at the age of six, when he caught a big toad in the backyard.

  James shrugged. “Yeah. But Jesus, it’s a lot of work.”

  “It is?”

  “Oh, yeah. Suddenly I’ve got all these contacts. Dozens of major sources. All these people to keep track of. I’ve spent the last few days just talking to people on the phone, setting up a database to keep track of all the information I’ll be taking in. I’m going to be running flat-out until Election Day.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But if there’s one thing that I learned from Dad, it’s that when you see an opportunity you have to go for it in a big way.”

  “Well,” Mary Catherine said, “I hope you’re not biting off too much.”

  This was manipulation in its purest form. He would have found it patronizing to be congratulated. Better to fret and worry about what a big, manly job James was undertaking.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said. He was irked, and rapidly getting more so, building up a nice crescendo of self-important rage. “You think I can’t handle a big job?”

  Mary Catherine shrugged. “I have a lot of respect for you, James,” she said noncommittally.

  “No, you don’t. You still think I’m a little kid. But I’m not. I’m an adult. And maybe you don’t want to admit that fact, now that you’ve become the self-appointed capo of this family and you think you know what’s best for everyone.”

  “Fine. It’s your choice,” she said.

  “I’ve done big jobs before. And I’m going to do this one. I’m going to succeed.”

  “Good. I wish you the best of luck.”

  James shut up for a moment, calming himself down. “It’s been hard, being the son of the Great Man.”

  “I know it has been,” she said. “I know it’s been really rough.”

  “There’ve been a lot of times when I felt like the idiot son, you know. A lot of Dad’s old cronies treat me like a little kid.”

  By this, Mary Catherine knew that he was referring to Mel.

  “But Cy is totally different,” he continued. “He treated me with respect. As an equal. He had no doubts whatsoever that I could handle this job. And I’m grateful to him for that.”

  So am I, Mary Catherine thought.

  “You should meet this guy sometime,” James said.

  “Maybe I should.”

  An interesting thought had occurred to Mary Catherine. Maybe Cy Ogle had manipulated her just as brilliantly as he had James.

  Or maybe not. She had handed him something close to a quid pro quo: help me out with James, this loose cannon on the deck of the good ship Cozzano, and then we’ll talk some more. And he had delivered. He had done it in less than a week. He had solved a big problem for them.

  Cy Ogle might be a person that they could use.

  twenty-three

  ELEANOR’S FIRST hint that anything funny was going on was when she heard Doreen, in the next trailer over, going, “Whoo-ee! Look at this, baby!” in the singsong falsetto that she used to attract the attention of her children. Meanwhile, Eleanor could hear the sound of tires grinding and popping on gravel, right outside of her trailer.

  Eleanor looked out the window. Mobile homes, like jet airplanes, offered great views off to the sides but you couldn’t see what was directly in front or behind. All she could see was the side of Doreen’s trailer, and Doreen’s big hairdo in one of the windows, flanked by the faces of her three kids, their eyes and mouths wide open to accept new input. They were all looking at something that was going on in front of Eleanor’s trailer.

  It must be the Nazis. They were coming to get her. Eleanor ran up to the front of the trailer, slapping the chain onto her door as she went by it. She got up to the front where two tiny little windows looked forward, and she peeled the windowshade back just a little.

  It was a big old Lincoln Town Car, navy blue, freshly polished, the cleanest and prettiest car within several miles of this trailer park. You could back it into an empty slot here and make it pass for a mobile home.

  All the doors were open. Several men were getting out. They were all young men. They were all wearing sunglasses. At least two of them had walkie-talkies as well, and they were using them. And they were looking around, scanning all points of the compass through their dark glasses, swiveling their heads back and forth like searchlights on a guard tower. One of them went up to the Datsun, put his face up close to the silvered glass, and cupped his hands around his eyes.

  For the first few moments, Eleanor was convinced that they were Nazi hit men who had come to blow her away. But that was just paranoia. The followers of Earl Dudley Strang were not affluent men in suits and Lincoln Town Cars. And if they wished to do away with her, they would come in the middle of the night like the jackals they were. Not in broad daylight, in a big car, like this.

  Besides, they didn’t act like hit men, or how she thought hit men would act. They had gotten out of the car immediately on arrival, but then they just stopped. They made no move to enter Eleanor’s trailer.

  Eleanor raised her windowshade a little more, feeling bolder, and noticed that there was still one man inside the Lincoln Town Car. He was sitting in the middle of the backseat and he was talking on the telephone.

  He finished his conversation, hung up, and scooted down to the end of the seat. He climbed up out of the car, assisted by one of the young men in the dark glasses, and stood up on the gravel. He squinted into the unfiltered sunlight, his face wrinkling up tremendously, like a High Plains arroyo.

  She would have recognized him on the dark side of the moon: it was Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall, Republican of Colorado. He was so old that he was actually named after Teddy, not Franklin, Roosevelt. And he was so conservative that, during the thirties, when a lot of his idealistic young peers were going to Spain to fight on behalf of the revolutionaries there, he had volunteered to fight for the Fascists.

  He had been virulently opposed to America’s participation in World War II. A strong supporter of General MacArthur and a fierce advocate of “nuking the evil Chinks” (his words) in Korea. He had spent most of the fifties rooting out “Comsymps” from Capitol Hill and the media. He had called Goldwater a pinko. He had seen both the Berlin crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis as golden opportunities for a first nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, and had stood side-by-side with Curtis LeMay in the recommendation that North Vietnam be bombed back into the Stone Age.

  He had run abortively for president in four decades, from the fifties through the eighties, whenever he felt that the frontrunning Republican candidate was not gloomy, threatening, and violent enough. Consistently voted against affirmative action. Though Eleanor knew her civil rights history well enough to know that he had astonished just about everyone by voting in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  He was like that: he was fringy enough to teeter on the edge of becoming a one-dimensional stereotype, but once or twice a year he would do something freakish and astonishing. He had gained the grudging affection of some people by consistently hating Richard Nixon’s guts from the very beginning. He had come down on the side of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and delivered a lengthy and profane speech in her defense on the Senate floor, using it as an occasion to lament the total implosion of American values.


  Just when his image seemed on the verge of being rehabilitated, he would do something reactionary. For the last several years, he had celebrated Animal Rights Day by going out to his family ranch in southeastern Colorado and branding a few calves in front of the TV cameras. It got him tons of publicity, reinforced his caveman image, and made him wildly popular among farmers, westerners, and anyone else who made money from animals. The man knew how to get a campaign contribution.

  Now this weathered, deathless, inexplicable gnome was standing in front of her trailer, surrounded by men that, she now realized, were Secret Service agents. She did not know if she should run away and hide, or welcome him.

  Soon enough he was pounding on her front door and she had to make up her mind. She pulled her hair back and wrapped a scrunchie around it, went to the door, and opened it. But it was still chained shut and so it only came open a few inches. She found herself staring through the chain at Caleb Roosevelt Marshall. They were of roughly the same height.

  “Take it easy, woman,” he said, glancing at the chain. “I’m not here to burn a cross on your goddamn lawn.”

  She closed the door, unchained it, and opened it all the way. “Senator Marshall?” she said.

  “Eleanor Boxwood Richmond?”

  “Yes.”

  “Slayer of Erwin Dudley Strang?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Fastest tongue in the West?”

  She laughed.

  “If you would invite me in, I would have a few things to discuss with you.”

  “Come in.”

  “You don’t have to invite any of these people in,” Marshall said. He turned around and slammed the door in the face of an agent.

  “Can I offer you anything to drink?” she said.

  “I am in suspended animation. The only things I am allowed to drink are strange concoctions brewed up by pharmacists. You would not be able to afford them, and I can only do so by taking honoraria,” he said. He talked like a guy who was used to having his voice heard by a million people.

  “Well, then, please sit down anywhere you like.”

  “Whenever I lower myself to a seated or reclining position, it occurs to me that I may never stand on my feet again,” he said. “To a man of my age, even sitting down becomes a morbid thing. So I hope it will not make you feel awkward if I stand up.”

  “Not at all.” Eleanor pulled up a tall bar stool, one of the artifacts that they had salvaged from the wreck of their middle-class lifestyle, and sat down on it without losing any altitude. This way she could still talk to him face-to-face.

  “I know that this conversation has already gotten off on the wrong foot because you think that I am an evil vicious old man who hates persons of your race,” Senator Marshall said.

  “The thought had occurred to me.”

  “But in fact, the only thing I hate is bullshit. I hate bullshit because I grew up on a ranch and I spent the first three decades of my life shoveling it. I went into politics largely because it was a desk job and naturally I thought that in a desk job I would not have to shovel any more bullshit. Of course nothing could have been further from the truth. So you see I have spent my whole life up to my nostrils in bullshit and consequently know more about it, and hate it more, than anyone else on the face of the earth.

  “Now, the reason that a lot of Negroes think I hate them is simple: there is a whole lot of bullshit in racial politics, even more than in other aspects of politics, and when I react against that bullshit, they think I’m reacting against them. But I’m not. I’m just reacting against their bullshit politics. Like affirmative action. That’s bullshit. But civil rights isn’t bullshit at all. I voted for that.”

  “I know you did.”

  “And all these different terms—colored, Negro, black, Afro-American—that’s all bullshit too. They’re always willing to come up with new words for Negroes, but never to actually do something that will help them, and that’s bullshit. The basic fact is that all people should be treated the same, as specified in the goddamn Constitution, and everything else is bullshit.”

  “Well, Senator, I am aware that you are not a totally one-dimensional person, and so I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt as long as you are a guest in my home.”

  “I thought you would. A lot of Negroes hate my guts and start jumping up and down and organizing protest rallies as soon as I come over the horizon, but I figured you would be able to see things a little more clearly. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have a bullshit detector as good as mine, and that is a rare quality.”

  “Well, thank you, Senator.”

  “And you’re not afraid to use it.”

  “Well, that was a somewhat unusual thing for me to do. I was very upset at the time and not thinking clearly.”

  Senator Marshall was peeved and disappointed. “Bullshit! You were thinking as clearly as the human mind has ever thought. What do you mean, you weren’t thinking clearly?”

  “I mean that I was raised to have good manners and be diplomatic, and I would not have violated those standards if I had not been at the end of my rope emotionally.”

  “Well, you and I have different interpretations of this. Shit, I’ve been at the end of my rope emotionally since I was five years old.”

  “This fact has been widely commented upon,” Eleanor said.

  “You were perfectly justified in saying everything you said,” Senator Marshall said. “Do you realize that Earl Strong may never recover, politically, from what you did to him?”

  “I think you are being very optimistic to say that.”

  “Bullshit. This is your polite upbringing talking, isn’t it?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I got a stack of poll results an inch thick. We have been watching this thing. Hell, I wanted to come over here and congratulate you the same night you did it. But instead I waited a few days for the poll results. And lady, you blew that son of a bitch to smithereens. You ripped that little tick’s head off. You deserve a medal.”

  Eleanor laughed. “A medal? I’d rather have a job.”

  Senator Marshall stuck out his right hand and looked at Eleanor expectantly.

  She didn’t know what to do. The man was so weird. He was weird, he knew he was weird, he knew that she knew it, and he didn’t care.

  Finally politeness took over and she reached out and shook his hand. He seized hers, not with the perfunctory squeeze of a politician, but with the powerful grip of a man who has to pull himself up out of chairs and beds. He didn’t let go.

  “Done,” he said, “you’re hired.”

  Eleanor laughed wildly. “You’re crazy!” she said, “what are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So you’re just kidding.”

  “Oh, no. I sure as hell ain’t kidding. You’re definitely hired. I just haven’t worked through all the bullshit yet.”

  “The bullshit?”

  “Job title, GSA level, what kind of desk to get you, what kind of goddamn picture to hang on the wall of your office. See, one of the things you learn, when you’ve hired a lot of people, and then fired most of them, is that when you find a quality person, you hire them right away and work out the details later. And I just hired you.”

  “Just on the strength of the fact that I said some nasty things to Earl Strong.”

  “You said some true things,” Caleb Roosevelt Marshall said, “which is something that few people in Washington are capable of doing. And you said them well, which is just as unusual.”

  He still hadn’t let go of her hand.

  “I would have expected you to like Earl Strong.”

  “Ha! You think I’ll support anyone who comes along and spouts a few positions similar to mine. What do you think I am, a senile old moron?”

  “Isn’t that how it works?”

  “Positions change. People don’t. Earl Strong may or may not always be a so-called conservative populist. But h
e will definitely always be a pencil-neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal-Mart, as you pegged him. I don’t want to serve with him in the Senate. And you may have saved me from that fate. So I owe you a job.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I want to work with you.”

  “Because of my politics?”

  “Well, yes. Because of your politics.”

  “Eleanor Boxwood Richmond,” he said, “you and I got exactly the same politics. Only thing is, you don’t know it yet.”

  “How can you say that? I’ve been a liberal Democrat all my life.”

  Still gripping her hand, Senator Marshall shook his head dismissively. “All that Democrat/Republican stuff is bullshit,” he said. “And as far as liberal versus conservative, well, people are very promiscuous in the way they use those words. They don’t really mean anything. Within those two camps there are very wide divisions. And between those two camps, there is a lot more overlap than you think. None of that bullshit really matters. The only thing that matters is values.”

  “Values?”

  “Values. I’ve got ’em. You’ve got ’em. Earl Strong doesn’t. That means you and I are on the same side. We have to stick together, you and I.”

  “And that means you’re going to give me a job.”

  “I already figured it out. Took me a few minutes, but I figured it out. I need a health and human services liaison for my Denver office. We can start you on Monday. You’ll work your ass off and make forty-five thousand plus full medical. Interested?”

  “What can I say?” Indeed, what could she say? “Sure. I’ll take it. What do I have to do?”

  “Answer irate phone calls from parasites who want to know what became of their welfare checks.”

  “Okay. I can do that.”

  “Done,” the Senator said, and let go of her hand finally.

  “One question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you expect me to blow these people off, or to actually help them? Because if someone calls me wanting to find their welfare check, I intend to help them out.”