Interface

by Neal Stephenson

She wanted to talk to her mother. She wished Mom was here. This would be a good time to have a mother.

  But Mom wasn’t here. She forced herself to open her eyes and stare at him.

  He was looking right back at her with the frightening, soul-penetrating glare that made people want to leave the room.

  Then it went away and was replaced by an idiotic grin. Mary Catherine had seen this grin a million times while examining neurology patients, and she had seen it on Dad’s face a few times since the stroke, usually when it seemed like he was giving up. It was the drooling, clownlike, sheepish grin of a near vegetable. It was a lot more frightening than his intense glare.

  “You are the quarterback now, peanut,” he said. His eyes rolled back into his head and he went completely limp, as if his bones had turned to water. Mary Catherine let him down to the floor as gently as she could; Mel stepped in to support his head.

  “He’s just had another stroke,” Mary Catherine said. “Forget about the phone, Tuscola doesn’t have 911. Let’s get him into that fast little car of yours. And then you need to drive it like a bat out of hell.”

  18

  The South Platte River looked big and important on maps of Denver. It approached the city from the north-northeast. Its valley and flood plain were several miles wide and served as a corridor for a bundle of major transportation routes: state highways, an interstate, natural gas pipelines, major railways, and high-tension power lines. The first time Eleanor had seen it was shortly after she and Harmon had arrived in Denver and they were driving around looking for places to live. Harmon drove and Eleanor navigated, and she got them lost. She got them lost because she was trying to use the mighty South Platte as a landmark, and instead they kept crossing back and forth over a paltry creek or drainage ditch out in the middle of nowhere. Not until she actually saw the name of the thing on a sign by a bridge could she believe that this dried-up rill was all there was to it.

  They had crossed the Platte again a couple of years ago on their way to the Commerce Vista Motel and Mobile Home Haven. In retrospect, Eleanor knew that Harmon had craftily plotted their trajectory so that they could reach the place without having to pass through any part of Commerce City proper. They’d come in from the northwest, from the middle-class suburbs where they had raised their family, past brand-new strip malls sitting totally empty with weathered FOR LEASE banners stretched across their fronts, across open grassland that was too close to the flood plain or too far from the highway to develop. At the edge of Commerce City they had passed quickly through a brief unpleasant flurry of franchise development and then come upon the Commerce Vista. Somehow Eleanor had failed to notice the WEEKLY RATES sign on the motel’s marquee, and she hadn’t even bothered to look across the highway, off to the eastern edge of the mobile home park. She hadn’t looked that way because it was nothing but empty grassland stretching vastly under a white sky, and Eleanor didn’t like to look east across that territory because it told her exactly how far she was from home. But if she had looked she would have seen that it was surrounded by tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, with signs every few yards reading U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS - NO TRESPASSING. Tangles of plumbing stuck mysteriously out of the ground from place to place, and every few hundred yards was a white wooden box with a peaked roof, like an oversized birdhouse, containing instruments to monitor the air.

  Prairie grass was the only thing that would grow in the yellow rock flour that passed for soil at the Commerce Vista. But the vegetation was all gone and so now it was just a hardpan mixed with broken glass so that it sparkled when the sun hit it right. There were no particular roads or streets, only the tracks left by the last vehicle. The only thing that kept it all from blowing away was the tamping action of car and truck tires, and the little waist-high fences that partitioned the land into tiny lots and gave each trailer a yard to call its own.

  On their first visit to the place, Eleanor had noticed that the neighbor’s gate had a little decoration on it. One of Doreen’s kids had put it up. It was a jack-o-lantern: a circle of orange con­struction paper with three black triangles in it, one for each eye and one at the bottom that was apparently supposed to be the mouth. It hadn’t struck her as odd that they had Halloween decorations up in June. Not until they’d moved in did Doreen explain that the symbol was, in fact, a copy of the radiation symbols that their kids saw across the highway at the arsenal.

  She remembered all of these things one night as she reclined in the front seat of her old Datsun, trying to get some sleep. Eleanor tried not to think of the old Datsun as a car. She tried to think of it as a highly compact mobile home. She called it the Annex.

  She could still remember walking down the street in D.C. with her mother when she was a kid and encountering dirty men who slept in parked cars. She could remember how frightened she was of those men and of the way they lived. She didn’t want to be like that.

  It was not really such a big deal, when you thought about it logically. She was living in a mobile-home park, for god’s sake. What was a mobile home but a big boxy car without an engine? Her old beat-up Datsun, parked on four flat tires in front of the mobile home, was like a little annex, a motherin-law apartment.

  The seats did not exactly recline all the way, but they reclined quite a bit. The only hard part was trying to find a comfortable place to lay her head, because it tended to roll back and forth on the hard surface of the headrest as she relaxed. After a couple of hard nights she finally worked out an arrangement of pillows that held her head in place comfortably. That and a sleeping bag and she was all set. She knew that she might be sleeping this way for a while, so she safety-pinned clean sheets into the inside of the sleeping bag and took them out every week and laundered them.

  The car’s battery was run down but it still had enough juice to run the radio, so it could be said that the Annex had a home entertainment system. Sometimes Eleanor would sit there and listen to a little music, or to news of the presidential candidates. Looking out the windshield, she could see into her neighbor Doreen’s trailer and see the candidates running around on Doreen’s TV set on top of the fridge. When she watched TV in this way, from a great distance, through layers of dirty glass, unable to hear the sound, it had a weird, pixilated look to it. There were so many politicians going so many places, doing so many cute things to get the attention of the cameras. It was like a nursery school, she thought, full of lonely kids who were always punching each other, running with sharp objects, and sticking pencils up their noses - anything to draw attention to themselves. The TV producers, like overburdened nursery-school teachers, cut frantically from one three-second shot to another, trying to keep track of them, and all their little activities. Each cut made the image on Doreen’s TV set jump, startling Eleanor a bit and making her eyes jerk involuntarily toward the screen.

  So that was why kids couldn’t stop watching television.

  The candidates did not seem to have much of an attention span. As the weeks went on, most of them ran into trouble of one kind or another - a poor showing in a state primary, a scandal, or money woes - and dropped out. It always seemed momentous at the time of the actual announcement, and when Eleanor saw a candidate standing somberly in front of some blue curtains, she would turn on the Annex’s radio and listen for news of his withdrawal. But a few days later she would realize that she could hardly even remember the candidate’s name or what he stood for. And it got to the point that whenever one of the candidates made his little withdrawal speech, she would say, “Good riddance,” and snap off the radio.

  Eleanor Richmond was sleeping in her car because there was no room left in the mobile home. It only had two bedrooms. Until recently, she and Harmon had slept in one and their children Clarice and Harmon Jr., had slept in the other.

  Now everything was discombobulated. Harmon had killed himself. Harmon, Jr., had taken to staying out late. Clarice had remained stable and reliable, a good girl, for a few weeks following the suicide, and then one night she
had not come home at all.

  And then Eleanor’s mother had moved back in with them. Eleanor spent about half of one night trying to sleep in the same bed with her mother before going out into the living room, where she found Harmon, Jr., sacked out on the couch. From there she had gone straight to the car.

  Eleanor loved her mother, but her mother had died a long time ago. Only the body lived on. The Alzheimer’s had started when she was in the first retirement community. The nice one. The expensive one. By the time they were forced to move her into the not-so-nice one, she had deteriorated to the point where she had no idea what was going on, which was a blessing for all concerned.

  Now she was home with Eleanor. She was back in diapers. Mother didn’t mind, but Eleanor certainly did - and the children couldn’t handle it at all. Eleanor hadn’t seen much of her children since Mother had moved in.

  With other kids, that would have been worrisome. But Eleanor’s kids weren’t like that. She had raised them the way Mother had raised her. They had their heads on straight. Even when Clarice stayed out all night, Eleanor felt confident that she was using her head and not doing any of that stupid underclass behaviour.

  Harmon Jr., was a case in point. He had been horrified that first morning when he found his mother sleeping in a car. He had tried to insist that he be the one to sleep outside. Eleanor had put her foot down. She was still a parent; Harmon, Jr., was still her child. It was the parent’s duty to look out for her children. No son of hers was going to sleep outside, not while she could help it. Harmon, Jr., eventually backed down. But the next day he came home with some sheets of silvery plastic stuff that he had brought at an auto parts store. He went out to the Datsun and stuck this material up on the insides of all the windows, turning them into one-way mirrors. From inside the car, it just tinted the windows a little bit. But from, the outside, no one could see in.

  Eleanor really liked it. She liked to come out here and snuggle into her sleeping bag, lock the doors, and He for a while, gazing out the windows. Usually when you went to bed, you were blind. If you heard a mysterious noise outside the window or in the house, you felt scared and helpless. You had to get out of bed and turn on all the lights to find out what was happening. Here in her silvered bubble she could see everything, but no one could see her. If she heard a noise, all she had to do was open her eyes, and she could see that it was a cat scratching in the dirt, or Doreen coming back from her evening shift at the 7-Eleven. And if it was anything more than that, she had Harmon’s old officer’s .45 sitting in the glove compartment right in front of her, practically in her lap. Eleanor had spent a few years in the Army herself and she knew how to use it. She knew exactly how to use it.

  When money got short and times got hard, you stopped worrying about all the superficial nonsense of modern life and you got down to basics. The basic thing that a parent did was to protect her family. That is why Eleanor Richmond felt more comfortable, and slept much more soundly, in her silverized glass bubble with a loaded gun six inches away. Whatever else was going wrong, she knew that if anyone tried to get into her house and hurt her family, she would kill them. She had that one base covered. Everything else was details.

  Her eyes came open in the middle of the night and she knew that something was wrong without even turning her head.

  The Commerce Vista ran right up to the edge of the highway, and it didn’t have any of this exit-ramp nonsense. One minute you were going sixty miles an hour and the next minute you were skidding across yellow dust and broken glass, trying to kill speed. Whenever someone performed this maneuver, Eleanor heard it and opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was always the white aluminium front of the mobile home. If the car then turned on to her particular lane, its headlights would sweep across the surface.

  It had just happened a few seconds ago. And now she heard footsteps crunching in the gravel, right outside of the car.

  She lifted her head slowly and quietly. A man was walking in front of her car. A beefy, bearded white man, young-looking but with the bulk of middle age, dressed in jeans and a dark windbreaker, wearing a baseball cap. He moved confidently, as if he belonged in her front yard, as if he belonged on her front step.

  Which he definitely did not.

  Eleanor had practiced this; she had been ready for it since the first night in the Annex. As the man was mounting the steps to their front door, his back turned to her, she rolled out the front door of the car, dropping to her knees, pulling the gun out of the glove compartment, and took cover behind the corner of the mobile home, sighting down the side of the house, drawing a bead on the center of the man’s windbreaker. From here he looked exactly like a silhouette target at the firing range.

  He hadn’t heard her yet. She raised her head for a second and looked at his car. It was a beat-up old sedan with no one else in it. The man had come alone. His mistake.

  “Freeze! I’m covering you with a .45,” she said. “I’m an Army veteran and I have fired hundreds of rounds into targets that were a lot smaller and farther away than you are.”

  “Okay,” the man said. “Can you see my hands? I’m holding them up.”

  “I see ‘em. Why don’t you lace them together on top of your head and then turn around to face me.”

  “Okay, I’ll do that,” the man said. He did.

  “What are you doing here?” Eleanor said.

  “My job.”

  “You a robber?”

  “No. I’m a cop. Detective Larsen of the Commerce City Police Department.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “I can prove it by showing you my ID,” Detective Larsen said. “But in order to do that, ma’am, I’ll have to take it out of my pocket, and it would be a shame if you misinterpreted that as reaching for a gun. So let’s talk about this for just a second and see if we can negotiate a way for me to extract the ID from my pocket without giving you the wrong idea.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Eleanor said, pointing the gun up at the sky and coming out from behind her cover. “Only a cop would talk like that.”

  “Well, let me show you my ID anyway,” Larsen said. He turned sideways so that she could see his butt. He slowly reached around into his back pocket and took out a black wallet. He underhanded it twenty feet to Eleanor, then left his hands well away from his sides while she opened it up and looked at it.

  “Okay,” she said, tossing it back. “Sorry if I spooked you.”

  “Normally I’d be real pissed,” he admitted. “But under the circumstances, ma’am, it’s all right. You Eleanor Richmond?”

  Larsen’s face went all fuzzy and out of focus. Eleanor’s eyes were filling up with tears. She didn’t even know why, yet. “I got the feeling something real bad happened,” she said.

  “You’re right. But it’s going to be okay, considering.”

  “What happened?”

  “You son is in the hospital in serious but stable condition. He’s going to be all right.”

  “Car crash?”

  “No, ma’am. He was shot.”

  “Shot!?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Shot in the back by a suspected gang member, in downtown Denver. But he’s going to be okay. He was very lucky.”

  Suddenly Eleanor was seeing clearly again. The tears had gone away. It was so shocking that just for a minute, curiosity over­whelmed everything else.

  This was terrible. She should have been freaking out and panicking. Instead, she felt eerily calm and alert, like a person who had just been sucked out of an airliner into a cold, scintillating blue sky. Her life was completely falling apart now. She felt the complete abandon of a person in free fall.

  “My son was shot and you’re saying he’s lucky?”

  “Yes, I am, Mrs. Richmond. I’ve seen a lot of people shot. I ought to know.”

  “Detective Larsen, is my son in a gang and I don’t even know about it?”

  “Not as far as we can tell.”

  “Then why did they shoot him?”

 
; “He was using a pay telephone downtown. And they wanted to use it.”

  “They shot him over a pay phone?”

  “As far as we can tell.”

  “What, my son wouldn’t let them use it?”

  “Well, no one uses a pay phone forever. But he didn’t give it up as quickly as they wanted him to. They didn’t want to wait. So they shot him.”

  She frowned. “Well, what kind of a person would do something like that?”

  Detective Larsen shrugged. “There’s a lot of people like that nowadays.”

  “Well, why are our presidential candidates running around having sex with bimbos and sticking pencils up their noses when we have people growing up in Denver, Colorado with no values?” Detective Larsen was looking progressively more bewildered.

  “Presidential politics aren’t my speciality, ma’am.” “Well, maybe they ought to be.”

  A few weeks later, Eleanor found herself sitting on a rather nice, brand-new wrought-iron bench in front of the Boulevard Mall in downtown Denver. She was in no mood to be at a mall, but circumstances put her here a couple of times a day.

  Her son was convalescing, and taking his sweet time about it, at Denver County Hospital, which was a mile or so down south of the state capitol and the high-rise district. This part of town included the hospital, various schools, and museums - all of the municipal stuff. It also included the old downtown shopping district, which had been badly in need of some really devastating urban renewal for quite some time.

  Just recently the urban renewal had come in the form of the Boulevard Mall, a brand-new pseudoadobe structure built on the bulldozed graves of more traditional retail outlets. It was near Speer Boulevard, only a few blocks from the hospital. A lot of bus lines converged there. Denver had hired some publicity genius who had come up with a catch phrase for the bus system: The Ride. This being the automotive West, where only tramps and criminals were thought to take public transit, the buses were slow, few, and far between, and so Eleanor had been spending a lot of time taking The Ride lately, or waiting for it, which was even more humiliating.