The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  “Mrs. Carruthers, it’s funny that this should happen.”

  “Funny in what way?”

  “As you may know, I’ve made it a special part of my life in recent months to reach out to our Middle-Eastern visitors.”

  “Yes, Dean Knightly told me!” Mrs. Carruthers said, her face lighting up. Then a new realization flashed into her mind, and she became stricken all over again.

  Clyde was having to run his stressed and preoccupied brain in overdrive to keep up with all the stray notions running through Mrs. Carruthers’s head. He finally put it all together: not knowing the reason for Clyde’s visit, she had put two and two together and got five: she thought he had come to upbraid her for not having sent the Howdy Brigade around to visit these characters in July.

  Having worked all this out, and seeing signs of an approaching nervous breakdown on Mrs. Carruthers’s face, there was only one option open to him. “Ma’am, I wonder if you might allow me to take these new arrivals under my wing a little bit, and serve as the Howdy Brigade’s representative as far as they are concerned.”

  Mrs. Carruthers was so overwhelmed that she nearly blacked out and appeared to suffer from acute inner-ear malfunction for a few moments. “Would you and Desiree be so kind?” she whispered.

  “Oh, I don’t think of it as kindness, Mrs. Carruthers.”

  She remained skeptical that any human being could be capable of such generosity of spirit and required several minutes of additional convincing. In the end, though, she fell for it; rummaging through her purse for a key chain, she opened a storage closet in the back of the office and invested Clyde with the full insignia of Howdy Brigade authority: a food basket consisting largely of tiny wax-encased cubes of smoked cheese, and the all-important three-W packet. Clyde then had to wait for several minutes as she composed a handwritten letter of apology to the July arrivals for having neglected them for so long; while this was being accomplished, he took Maggie down to the nursery, changed her diaper again, and let her taste all of the toys.

  “You have an address for these fellows by any chance?” he said offhandedly when he got back.

  “I’ve just been on the phone to Mrs. Knightly about that,” she said, and handed him a piece of scratch paper with the crucial data written out in flawless cursive. Clyde could already see the house in his mind’s eye; he’d knocked on the door four months ago as part of his campaign and encountered a family of Indians waiting for the moving truck, milling around in the front hallway amid stacks of boxed VCRs and laundry machines.

  It was a split-level house in a neighborhood of prosperous split-leveldom. Clyde made sure that all the car doors were locked and that Maggie was still sound asleep. Then he hung the food basket over his wrist and stuck the three-W packet under his arm and strode up the walk, trying to manage a welcoming, Howdy Brigade kind of smile.

  He had made it only halfway up the walk before the front door was opened; as he’d suspected, someone had been watching him through the pink gingham curtains in the upstairs bedroom windows. Clyde didn’t want to stop in the middle of the yard, so he kept striding forward, focusing his attention on a squirrel that was bounding awkwardly across the brown grass carrying a hickory nut the size of its head.

  “Yes? Sir? Hello?” said a voice from the door. Clyde covered another couple of strides as he was looking around for the source of these words. “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Howdy!” Clyde finally said, bounding up onto the concrete front porch, which was as bare as it had been during his last visit there. “Mrs. Knightly says we owe you fellas one heck of a big apology! And I’m here to do the apologizing.”

  “Yes, sir, one moment please,” said the man in the doorway, who then retreated inside, closed the door, and shot the dead bolt.

  There followed several minutes of internal discussion, which Clyde could hear only dimly through the house’s walls. During this time he stood there on the porch with a fixed smile that was beginning to wear out his facial muscles, which were rarely exercised so. He looked around and tried to gather useful data, but to all appearances the house might as well have been vacant. He supposed that if he’d been Sherlock, even this absence of data would have been a significant clue. But it didn’t seem to be getting him anywhere at the moment. The tidiness was a positive detriment to clever detective work.

  The door opened wide. “Please come in, sir,” said the man he’d talked to earlier. “Come in.”

  The foyer was paved with bluish-green flagstones and contained no furniture of any kind. Dead ahead was a living room carpeted in sculpted ivory shag with little sparkly things woven into it. Two sofas, a coffee table, and a TV were neatly arranged there, looking as clean and unused as if they had just been delivered from the furniture-rental place. Sitting on one of the sofas was a man in a suit, twiddling the TV’s remote control nervously in his hands, though he kept the channel fixed on CNN.

  The first man was a wrestler; Clyde could tell because, like many Dhonts, he looked as if he had a nylon stocking over his face even when he didn’t, and he had cauliflower ears. He seemed to be paying a lot of unwarranted attention to Clyde’s armpit and waistband, and so, as a confidence-building gesture, Clyde set the food basket down on the floor and shrugged his jacket off. The man leaped forward and took it from him but, rather than turn his back on Clyde to hang it in the closet, simply draped it over one forearm while his eyes traveled over the lines of Clyde’s neatly tucked-in flannel shirt, looking for untoward bulges. “Can’t stay for long anyway,” Clyde said. “My daughter’s out in the station wagon.”

  There was an awkward moment of silence, as if this man couldn’t believe the bit about the daughter.

  “So,” Clyde said, “what’s your major?”

  The man in the living room made a tiny little coughing noise.

  “Please,” said the wrestler, and backed a couple of paces onto the ivory shag, holding out one thick arm toward the living room. “Please.” His hand was decorated with a couple of none too tasteful gold rings.

  “Oh, do you mind?” Clyde said, and stepped forward into the living room. The second man hit the mute button on the remote control and stood up. With some effort this man caused a large, toothy expression to spread across his face, as if he were a thespian-in-training doing strange facial exercises. Clyde responded with a grin that probably looked about as lifelike.

  “Well, howdy!” Clyde said, stepped forward, and extended his hand. “Clyde Banks.”

  “My name is Mohammed,” said the man in the suit, shaking Clyde’s hand. He was wearing a watch that looked to have been hewn from a solid brick of gold bullion.

  “Mohammed. Is that a common name where you are from?” Clyde said, speaking very clearly and distinctly and not using contractions, the way Anita Stonefield always did when addressing foreign students.

  “Yes. Very common,” said the man.

  “Well, Mohammed, I am sure that your studies here at Eastern Iowa University are keeping you very busy, and so I will not waste your time. I am from the Howdy Brigade. It is our duty to be ambassadors of goodwill to our foreign visitors. We would like you to have this food basket and this three-W packet, which contains much useful information about Wapsipinicon.”

  Clyde proffered the two items. Mohammed’s eyes shifted in the direction of the wrestler, who stepped forward briskly, took the basket and the envelope from Clyde, and set them down on the coffee table.

  “It is a great honor,” Mohammed said through clenched, grinning teeth. “Mrs. Knightly is a fine woman, and any friend of hers is a friend of ours.”

  “How are your studies going so far?”

  “Excellent, thank you,” Mohammed said, exchanging a secret look with the wrestler, as if he had just uttered a witticism. Then, forcing the issue: “Can I get you tea? Coffee?”

  “Oh, that is very kind of you, Mohammed, but there are other foreign guests still waiting for a visit from the Howdy Brigade.”

  “Then it would be a bad thing for
me to keep you here one second longer,” Mohammed said, taking a step toward Clyde, and more or less forcing Clyde to step back toward the exit.

  “I hope you enjoy that cheese,” Clyde said, reaching for his jacket. But the wrestler actually held it out for him. Clyde had helped many an old lady on with her coat and knew how the procedure was done on that end, but this was the first time anyone had performed the service for him, and he managed to get his arms all twisted around behind himself before the transaction was finished.

  “Its smoky aroma is most enticing,” Mohammed said flatly. “We will have a rare feast tonight.”

  “Please extend the Howdy Brigade’s greetings to the other fella,” Clyde said. “Is he off at the library studying now?”

  “Yes,” Mohammed said, clenching his fist and making a little punching motion. “Hitting the books.”

  The wrestler opened the door. “Well, it’s been real nice meeting you fellas, and keep in mind that my wife and I are your host family for as long as you are in Wapsipinicon. So if you ever have any questions or problems, give us a jingle.”

  “Your generosity would put a king to shame,” Mohammed said. “Good-bye, my friend.”

  “’Bye now,” Clyde said, stepping out onto the porch. He walked out into the yard, turned around, and looked back; Mohammed was gone, but the wrestler was still watching him through the open door. By the time he got back to the station wagon, the door had been closed; but he thought he could see the wrestler peering through a gap between the kitchen curtains. Clyde waved one more time and the gap disappeared.

  forty-one

  IT WAS 3:33 A.M. on Election Day, and Clyde was already up and alert, sitting in his living-room La-Z-Boy trimming his nose hairs and watching CNN with the sound turned off. Maggie had awakened him for a bottle and a diaper change, and now he could not get back to sleep; the slightest thing kept him awake these days. And wild nose hairs were hardly a slight thing. They had never troubled him until his early thirties, when his nostrils had begun to sprout a new type of hair with the consistency of baling wire. Whenever one of them got long enough to reach the other side of the nostril, paralyzing discomfort resulted. The only solution was to push a rapidly spinning motorized knife up into his nose.

  The first time Clyde had done this, he’d considered it the bravest act he had ever performed. Now it had become almost routine but still gave him a mild thrill of danger. It always made him feel much better. But the freshly cut hairs were square and sharp on the end and would only send him into a worse fit in a few weeks when they got long enough. In that sense the nose-hair trimmer was as addictive as cocaine.

  Clyde’s insomnia had got pretty bad the last few months, for any number of reasons, including the fact that Sheriff Mullowney kept changing his schedule around, always giving him the most inconvenient and unpleasant shifts, never giving his biological clock a chance to settle down. This position—La-Z-Boy, muted CNN, nose-hair clipper—had become common. CNN seemed to show less nonsense at this time of day, concentrating on real news. This morning the news from the Gulf was dominated by images of Saudi women driving around in big Mercedes-Benzes and being arrested. Apparently it was illegal for women to drive there. Clyde shuddered to think of what would ensue if one of his Saudi Arabian counterparts tried to prevent Desiree from operating a motor vehicle. She would end up in the clink in Dhahran, no doubt, sentenced to amputation of her gas-pedal foot, plus twenty years’ hard labor for putting the gendarme in a full nelson and teaching him some manners.

  Clyde had only one thing left to endure before his political career came to a merciful end: the victory party that the Stonefields were throwing for all the county GOP candidates, out at the country club. He had spent enough time with the local Republicans to know their style and could hardly stand to imagine what it would be like this evening, once they all got into the Canadian Club and news began to flow in of how the people of Forks County had rejected their wisdom and leadership yet again. Clyde had tolerated them reasonably well until the UN Day party, when he and Fazoul had seen Anita Stonefield and Professor Larsen making out behind the gazebo. That image had impressed itself as deeply on Clyde’s mind as anything he’d seen all year.

  He stayed up long enough to catch the four A.M. newscast. CNN always made him want to stay in front of the tube for another twenty-five minutes, just to see if anything new had happened in the last half hour. The sparse, ominous drumbeat of the “Crisis in the Gulf” logo had worked its way into his subconscious and triggered as many emotions as the cry of his baby. He forced himself to switch it off.

  The only light in the living room now came from the blinking LED on his answering machine. He turned the volume way down and listened. There was only one message, and it was from Jack Carlson: “Clyde, I’m trying to organize a Clyde Banks defeat celebration at the pub Tuesday night. Wouldn’t be the same without you. Hope you can make it. ’Bye. Oh, and it’s okay if you should happen to win.”

  This was not a difficult decision. None of the Republicans would have anything to do with him after today, anyway, so there was little harm in offending them by not going to the country club.

  So that night, when Maggie’s bedtime approached, he put her in her jammies, drove down to the old brewery with her, set up her Portacrib in Jack’s office where it was dark and quiet, put her to bed, and then came out into the pub. He was received as a conquering hero by a very small audience: Jack Carlson, Ebenezer, Dean Knightly, a sprinkling of mature Dhonts, a few other old family friends from around town, and—to Clyde’s surprise—Marcus Berry. Jack began the proceedings by confiscating Clyde’s car keys. “If I let you have these, Clyde, you’re going to end up being the only person the sheriff’s department arrests for DWI this whole year.” Then a large glass of something brown, bitter, and thick was in Clyde’s hand, and it tasted good.

  A few pints of that and other of Jack’s creations, plus the good company, helped to put some distance between Clyde and the disastrous numbers that soon began rolling in from Dr. Jerry Tompkins’s exit polls. It was almost as if he were not experiencing it in real time but remembering some tragically funny misadventure several years after it had happened. All of the Dhonts came by Clyde’s table to pound him on the back, punch him in the deltoid, or give him crushing handshakes or bone-snapping high fives.

  Marcus Berry didn’t stay for long and didn’t drink anything, but he managed to get Clyde alone in a corner for a few minutes. “Have you given any more thought to filling out one of these?” he said, taking some papers out of his breast pocket. Clyde uncreased them and held them up to the light. It was an FBI job application.

  Clyde felt himself getting very excited and had to take an extra swallow of ale. “Well, I wasn’t sure if you really meant it.”

  “Wouldn’t have said it otherwise,” Berry said.

  “Kind of hard to imagine—me in the FBI,” Clyde said.

  Berry turned around and squinted at the chalkboard on the wall, which usually announced the night’s specials but today held the numbers coming in from the polls. “With a third of the vote in, Mullowney has seventy-two percent, you have twenty-five. Have you given any thought to your future in the Forks County Sheriff’s Department, Clyde?”

  Clyde sucked his teeth. “Would working for the FBI require me to relocate?”

  Berry grinned. “Do I look like a Nishnabotna native to you?”

  “Hard to imagine—us living someplace else.”

  “C’mon, Clyde. I know you’re more cosmopolitan than you let on. And when Desiree gets back from the Gulf, she’ll be an experienced traveler, too. A little change of scenery never hurt anyone.”

  “Well, I don’t see any reason not to fill this thing out,” Clyde allowed. “It’s just that—with the Gulf thing and all—”

  “You can’t make any decisions until things have settled. Of course, Clyde.” Berry reached out and chucked Clyde on the shoulder. “That’s understood. This isn’t a job at McDonald’s we’re talking about here
. You don’t have to start tomorrow. It’s a professional situation, and we are used to making accommodations for people we really want.”

  Berry excused himself and strolled out, leaving Clyde aglow with excitement. An hour later, when his standing in the polls surged to twenty-nine percent, he even experienced a momentary feeling of panic at the thought that he might inadvertently win the election and blow his chances with the FBI.

  “Damn, I need a smoke,” said a Texan at his elbow. “Care to keep me company out there?”

  It was Dean Knightly. Clyde scooped up some chips in his free hand and followed Knightly out the side door into the alley, which was paved with old brick polished satin smooth by a century of traffic. It led straight back toward the grass-covered levee just a stone’s throw away. Knightly stopped just outside the door to light a Camel, then began strolling toward the river. He and Clyde clambered up the steep slope of the levee and stopped at the top, looking down at the river. The black water flowed swiftly but silently, reflecting the lights of Wapsipinicon on the bluff. When the water caught the light this way, and when the surface of the river was not chopped up by wind, you could see all the patterns of turbulence in the flow: ephemeral whirlpools and sudden upwellings that combined with one another and transformed themselves into other shapes and patterns. It was as mesmerizing as staring into a bonfire. Both men watched the river in silence for several minutes.

  “Kind of amazing,” Knightly said, “that your whole life, every minute you’ve been alive, this has been going on. Hell, you could have come here anytime in the last ten thousand years and watched this river and never seen the same thing twice.”

  “Yeah,” Clyde said. “Makes you wonder what all else you’ve been missing.”

  Knightly laughed and took a drag on his Camel. “Yeah,” he said. Then, a minute later, he continued: “As a matter of fact, Clyde, I’ve been wondering the same sorts of things about some of my little foreign scholars right up there in Wapsipinicon.”