Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  She consoled herself with the fact that it made sound financial sense. Sitting down with her calculator, like the banker she had once been, and weighing all the alternatives, she eventually figured out that the most logical way for her to spend her time was to take The Ride downtown twice a week, to this neighborhood. Along with all of its municipal buildings, it included a few big old mainline churches, several of which had gotten together and started up a food bank. Originally it was just to help Mexicans live through the Rocky Mountain winter, but in recent years it had started to attract a more diverse clientele. So while Eleanor was out of the house picking up cheese, powdered milk, oatmeal, and beans, Doreen was keeping an eye on Mother. In return, Eleanor gave Doreen some of the food and watched Doreen’s kids for a couple of hours a day. This was known, among intellectuals, as the barter economy.

  Since the shooting, she had added an additional stop: she would go out and visit Harmon, Jr., at Denver County Hospital. Harmon had learned, from his father, to hold his feelings inside and not complain about things, so sometimes it was hard to tell how he really felt. But he seemed to be doing okay psychologically, much better than Eleanor would have been if she had been shot in the back for no reason. As Harmon, Jr., came out from under the shock and the effects of the drugs, he got his old spark back, plus a little bit of a macho swagger that had not been there before. He had been shot and he had survived. That was one way to get a name for yourself in high school. The macho bit was cute, as long as he didn’t take it too far.

  Thinking of her son made Eleanor smile to herself as she sat on the bench in front of the Boulevard Mall. Across her lap was a large brick of orange cheese encased in a flimsy cardboard box, and several pounds of rolled oats and pinto beans in clear plastic bags. Above her head was a large sign in red metal saying THE RIDE.

  All around her, people were strolling in from the parking lots, converging on the front entrance of the mall. These people had their very own rides, many with licence plates from outlying counties. She got more than one dirty look from these people. This was not unusual in Denver, which now had its ghettos at the outskirts of town, but even for Denver it seemed like she was getting a lot of dirty looks. Then she realized that every other one of these people was wearing a T-shirt or a baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan EARL STRONG COMES ON STRONG.

  Everybody knew that Earl Strong’s real name was Erwin Dudley Strang, but no one seemed to care, and that was just one of the many things about the man that pissed Eleanor Richmond off.

  Not that there was anything wrong with changing your name.

  But political candidates had been crucified in the press for doing far less significant things. Earl Strong/Erwin Dudley Strang seemed to get away with murder.

  He could have picked something a little less obvious than Strong. To change your name, and then use the name’s double meaning as part of a campaign slogan … it was a little much. As if he were nothing more than a new TV series. But even though people knew exactly what Erwin Dudley Strang was doing, they lapped it up like thirsty dogs.

  Maybe one reason Eleanor felt bad when she heard of the man was that she had known of him from way back and she had never taken him seriously.

  The first time she had ever seen the name Erwin Dudley Strang, it had been printed across the laminated face of a photo ID card. She had seen it through the distorting lens of the peephole on the front door of the house in Eldorado Highlands. She was on the inside of the house, by herself, waiting for the cable TV installer to show up; the cable company had promised that an installer would arrive between nine and five, and so she had spent the whole day waiting in an empty house. He had finally rung her doorbell at 4.54 p.m. and stood out on the front doorstep holding up his official cable TV installer’s ID card so that it was the only thing she could see through the peephole when she looked out.

  She could at least pride herself on one thing: she had known, just from that one little gesture, that Erwin Dudley Strang was a creep.

  She opened her front door. Erwin Dudley Strang lowered the badge to reveal a narrow, concave face, cratered like the surface of the moon. He looked Eleanor Richmond in the eye, and his jaw dropped open. He stared at her without saying anything for several seconds. It was the look that white people gave to black people to let the black people know that they didn’t belong there. To remind them, just in case they’d somehow forgotten, that they were on the wrong continent.

  “Can I help you?” Eleanor said.

  “Is the lady of the house in?” he said.

  “I am the owner. I am the lady of the house,” she said.

  Keeping that fixed stare on her face, Erwin Dudley Strang blinked a couple of times and shook his head melodramatically. But he never said anything. It almost wouldn’t have been so bad if he had said, “Shit, I never thought I’d see a black person out here.” But he didn’t do that. He shook his head and blinked, and then he said, “Yes, hello, I’m here to install your cable TV.”

  In the course of installing the cable system he had to go in and out of the house half a dozen times. Each time, he was careful to stare her down while standing in the corner of her peripheral vision so that she would know that he was there. Each time, she felt herself getting hot under the collar and turned squarely toward him, and each time he glanced away just a moment before her eye met his, blinked, shook his head, and continued about his work.

  He walked around the house brandishing a power drill with a preposterously elongated bit, which he used to drill holes all the way through the exterior walls wherever she told him she wanted a cable TV wire. Even the way that he handled this tool raised Eleanor’s hackles; it seemed clear, somehow, that a large portion of Erwin Dudley Strang’s ego was bound up in this tool, and that penetrating the walls of total strangers’ homes was the really swell part of the job as far as he was concerned.

  And consequently he always pushed on the drill a little bit too hard, tried to make it happen a little bit too fast, and ended up shoving the drill bit through the wall with brute force rather than waiting for it to cut cleanly; everywhere he poked a hole through the wall he managed to burst a sizable hole through the drywall, and every time he did it, he came back in and shook his head in astonishment as if this were the first time it had ever happened. As if defective drywall had been used to build the Richmonds’ new house, the Richmonds had been foolish enough not to notice, and there was not a thing he could do about it.

  He ran the cables along the outside of the house, not by stapling them but by tucking them between the pieces of vinyl siding. As a result they all fell out within the first couple of days, leaving gaps in the siding where it no longer interlocked properly. Harmon ended up spending an entire weekend fixing the holes in the drywall and reattaching the cable to the house and getting the siding popped back together. Harmon also noticed that Strang had neglected to ground the cable system properly, which put the whole family at risk of electrocution, and so he rigged up a way to ground it to a cold-water pipe down in the basement.

  All of this was in defiance of Erwin Dudley Strang’s statement, which he repeated to Eleanor several times, that the stuff was cable company property and they were not allowed to mess with it in any way.

  “It’s all hooked up,” he said, at some point when he had arbitrarily decided that he was finished. “Now, if you’ll show me your TV, I’ll hook it up for you.”

  The Richmonds had not moved into the house yet. There was not a stick of furniture in the house, or for that matter in the whole development. Erwin Dudley Strang had passed through every room in the place and must have noticed this. Now he was asking to see their television set, staring at her blankly, with the forced innocent expression of a sixth-grade bad boy who has just nailed the teacher with a spitball.

  She was just completely baffled by the man. Clearly, what he was saying had no relationship to what he was thinking. He was playing some kind of game. She had no idea what it was.

  “It’s not here. We haven’t m
oved in yet,” she finally said. Mother had taught her, when in doubt, to be polite.

  “Well, then I can’t show you how to hook it up.”

  “It’s cable-ready,” she said. “All we have to do is screw the cable in the back and turn it on.”

  “And plug it into the power outlet,” he corrected her, just a hint of a smirk on his face.

  “Yes, and plug it in. Good point,” she said.

  “Now, is it ready for all bands of cable? Because the bands here might be different from the bands there.”

  She had been expecting something like this. Telling Erwin Dudley Strang that their set was cable-ready was tantamount to making fun of his drill bit. He could not let it go unpunished. He would have to one-up her and display his technical mastery.

  “From the bands where?” she asked.

  His eyes darted back and forth. Clearly this was something of a curve ball. “Wherever y’all came from,” he said, putting a long, drawling emphasis on the “y’all.”

  “If you don’t know where we came from, how do you know that the bands are different?”

  “Well, you came from back East, didn’t you? From one of them big cities?”

  “No. We were at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center for a couple of years. Before that we lived in Germany.”

  “Oooh, Germany,” he said. Then, moving so suddenly that he made Eleanor startle, he stood up straight, clicked the heels of his work boots together, and jutted his right arm out in a Nazi salute. “Sieg Heil!” he hollered. He dropped his arm and a smile spread across his face as he watched Eleanor’s reaction. “Lots of those kinds of people there? You know, National Socialists?”

  “You mean Nazis?”

  “Well, that’s kind of a slang term, but yeah, that’s what I mean.”

  “Never saw one there,” Eleanor said. “If you’re finished, you can leave now.”

  Strang raised his eyebrows fastidiously. “Well, technically speaking, I’m not finished with the installation until I have hooked up the TV set and gotten it running to the satisfaction of the owner.”

  “My husband is an engineer. He’ll get it running. If we’re not satisfied, we’ll call the cable company.”

  “But before I leave, I have to get your signature on this docu­ment,” Strang said, holding up an aluminium clipboard, “which states that the installation is complete and you are satisfied with the quality of service.”

  “I’ll sign anything, at this point.”

  “You sure?” Strang said, wiggling the clipboard just out of Eleanor’s reach.

  “Positive.”

  “We could test it right now if you could get a TV set.”

  “For the eight hundredth time, I do not have a TV.”

  “I’ll bet you could get one, though.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Strang looked out the windows of the living room, down the block. “Must be some other houses around here that have TVs. I’ll bet you could figure out a way to get your hands on someone else’s TV set, if you really wanted it.”

  She just stared at him, narrowed her eyes, shook her head in amazement.

  He continued, “Course now that y’all are out here in the nice part of town, I’ll bet you don’t do that kind of thing no more. But I’ll bet you still got the skills. Y’all are just a little rusty.”

  “I’m gong to call the cable TV company and they are going to fire your ass,” she said.

  “They can’t,” he said. “I don’t work for them. I’m an inde­pendent contractor. Just a small-time entrepreneurial businessman struggling to make my way.”

  “Then I’ll make sure they never hire you again.”

  “Your word against mine,” he said, “and even if they believe you, there’s plenty of other cable systems out here in Colorful Colorado that keep my services in high demand.”

  She knew it was crazy for her to be arguing this with him. She should just throw him out of the house. But her parents had raised her to talk things out. They had worked their fingers to the bone paying for an expensive Catholic education so that the nuns could teach her to be a rational, intelligent citizen. She could not get over the impulse to make Erwin Dudley Strang see reason. “Why shouldn’t they believe me?” she said. “Why would I bother to call in such a complaint? It’s not something I would do for fun.”

  “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” he said.

  “What!?”

  “I seen the way you been looking at me,” he said. “If you want a taste, why don’t you just ask for it?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said, “get out of my house. Get out now. Just get out.”

  “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 step, 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 od
d 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.

  19

  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.”