Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  A few moments after he went into the mall, a big cheer rose up from inside. They were holding some kind of 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 sniffed, 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 laugh 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 laugher 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 supports were stepping away from her as if she was 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 father 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 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 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.”

  A high, enthusiastic screeching arose from the predominantly female shoppers gathered around the edge, whose numbers had now swelled to exceed the Strong supporters. They rattled their shopping bags, waved their fists in the air, and stomped the floor with their stylish pumps.

  20

  There were lots of empty offices on the upper floors of Cy Ogle’s old Cadillac dealership. When the PIPER project got underway, Aaron requested some place for the West Coast head­quarters of Green Biophysical Associates. Ogle just shrugged and told him to go upstairs and stake a claim. Aaron picked out an office on the third floor. As far as he could tell, he was the only other person in the whole building, which was kind of surprising in an election year.

  But he was hardly the first. The building had the eroded, overused character of a subway station, with depressions worn into the thresholds and steps. Every time Aaron stepped through a doorway, through the sole of his tennis shoe he felt a gentle concavity in the floor, burnished down through several stacked layers of linoleum that left concentric ovals that looked like lines on a topographic map.

  The offices were furnished with old steel desks and chairs done up in the colorless hues and unconvincing wood grain reserved for office furniture, but the walls were virtually papered with brightly colored bumper stickers and posters. Giant multiline telephone cables hung from rude holes in the plaster. Ogle was just in the process of computerizing his whole operation, buying big high-powered Calyx workstations from Pacific Netware, and those unsightly holes in the plaster made installation a snap. The vendor would haul the boxes into an office, uncrate the computers, and feed cables into the holes. They would emerge from ragged holes in other offices and plug into other workstations.

  Aaron could only identify about 10 percent of the candidates hyped on the bumper stickers and posters that covered the walls, ceilings, doors, and even toilets. Most of them seemed to be for senatorial and gubernatorial races in states he wasn’t familiar with. Many seemed to be from other countries. There were a few in Cyrillic and other alphabets that Aaron couldn’t even recognize, much less read.

  Aaron’s life in the PIPER project was hectic but comfortable. He had discarded all pretense of being a serious businessman and gone back to basic R&D, and he was surprised to find how much happier he was. This was his natural way of life. He would meet with the Pacific Netware people, either here in Oakland or in Marin County, and identify a set of problems to work on. He would fly to Boston and solve those problems with his partners, then fly back here and repeat the cycle. He left his nice suit in Boston on his first trip and then returned to Oakland on the red-eye, checking a duffel bag stuffed with Tshirts and flannel shirts. He slept on the floor of the new office in Oakland, ate pizza, and was happy.

  On many occasions he ran into people in the empty hallways or the empty stairwells, carrying sheafs of paper or videotapes from one bleak, empty office to another. So far he had not seen anyone twice. He did not know anyone well enough to say hello to them. A lot of people worked for Ogle, it seemed, but they didn’t stay in one place for very long. So he was a little startled one evening when Ogle abruptly stuck his head into the doorway and said, “You want to see a hell of a thing?”

  “What is it?” Aaron said.

  “The first female president of the United States,” Ogle said.

  “I didn’t realize they had held an election.”

  “Mark my words. I will lay money on it,” Ogle said. “C’mon.”

  Aaron got up and followed Ogle down the stairs. He needed to stretch his legs anyway.

  Ogle had a video edi
ting studio set up on the first floor, back behind the “Oval Office” and all the other sets. Half a dozen small but good color monitors were mounted on racks, each hooked up to a different videotape machine, and all the machines were hooked up to each other, and to a Calyx workstation, with an incomprehensible web of thick black cables.

  Two men and a woman were in the room, draped over the furniture in poses that suggested they had been there for quite a while. Aaron had seen a couple of them, here and there, around the building from time to time.

  Ogle was a goofball. He was loose enough to seem positively loopy to most people. He spent a lot of time staring off into space with his rosebud mouth twisted in kind of an incredulous, sneering grin. But he was also a southerner and could suddenly turn on full charm-school etiquette when it was the appropriate thing to do. So as he led Aaron into the room, he pirouetted and held one hand out to gesture at these three people and properly introduce them.

  “This is Aaron Green of Green Biophysical systems, our head genius on PIPER,” he said. “Aaron, I would like you to meet Tricia Gordon, who is the most talented time buyer on earth; she did the buying on the big Coke campaign last year.”

  Aaron did not have the slightest idea what Ogle was talking about. He smiled at Tricia Gordon, she held out her hand, he shook it. She was wearing a relatively formal blue knit dress, largish abstract jewelry, and had red hair that was done up in a fairly ambitious style. She was confident and pleasant.

  “And this is Shane Schram, a clinical psychologist from Duke by way of Harvard. He does our FGIs, and can he ever dig down beneath the surface on an FGI!”

  Aaron still had no idea what was happening. He shook the hand of Shane Schram, who did not stand up or say anything, just dropped the chopsticks he was using to eat with and held his hand up in the air for Aaron to shake. He was broad-shouldered, prematurely bald, rumpled, and smart.