Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  Ogle was still laughing at Shane Schram. “When our FGI people come out of the room, they feel like they’ve been on the rack. Shane is the Savonarola of focus groups.”

  “I see, that’s great,” Aaron mumbled.

  “And this is my old pal Myron Morris, who once said that the single most important political development of the last quarter century was the zoom lens. Myron’s a filmmaker, in case you hadn’t guessed. He did those cinema verité flood-damage spots for Representative Dixon down in Texas.”

  Aaron shook the hand of Myron Morris, who was a wide-faced, jolly but cynical type in his early fifties, wearing bits and pieces of a fairly nice suit.

  “I just caught his off CNN,” Ogle said, waggling a thick, three-quarter-inch video cassette in the air, “and I thought y’all might like to see it.”

  “Was this on Prime News?” Tricia Gordon said.

  “It was indeed,” Ogle said, shoving the cassette into a big professional videotape recorder. The VTR clunked loudly, like a big truck shifting into gear, and an image materialized on the screen above it.

  The anchorman was introducing a segment; over his shoulder was a small head shot of Earl Strong, the scary populist who had been making waves in Colorado. Aaron couldn’t hear much, because the sound was turned down. They cut to a shot of a shopping mall with the words DENVER, COLORADO supered across the bottom.

  Everyone except Aaron laughed.

  “Original choice of venue,” Myron Morris said, apparently being facetious.

  Reverse angle: as seen from near the entrance to the mall, a white limousine pulled up, festooned with flags and slogans, and a number of people climbed out, including Earl Strong.

  “Jesus, what a putz,” Myron Morris said. “It’s deserted. What a waste.”

  Ogle must have noticed that Aaron looked confused. “They probably have a million supporters inside the mall, but none positioned outside to greet him. So he looks like a nobody,” Ogle explained.

  “They should have pulled a bus or something up as a backdrop. Something. Anything,” Morris said.

  “See, the parking lot behind is full of glare,” Ogle explained. “Reflections of windshields and so on. But the entrance to the mall is in shade. So we can’t see the guy’s face at all-

  “Now watch! He’s just going to disappear here,” Morris said.

  On the TV, Earl Strong crossed into the shadow of the mall and became a featureless silhouette. The camera zoomed in on his face, trying to compensate for the high contrast between the glare out in the parking lot and the dim light on Strong’s face, but it looked terrible either way.

  “He tried,” Ogle said.

  “Who tried?” Aaron said.

  “The cameraman,” Morris snapped.

  On the TV, Earl Strong approached the doors of the mall and then there was another cut. Aaron still couldn’t hear anything, but it sounded like a reporter was delivering a voiceover during all of this.

  “Master race in skimmers,” Morris said.

  As if on cue, the screen was filled with a couple of big fat middle-aged white ladies in COME ON STRONG Tshirts and EARL STRONG skimmers, clapping their hands to the beat of a campaign song.

  “Good rhythm for Aryans,” Shane Schram said.

  “UFOs Ate My Brain,” Tricia Gordon said.

  “Now we’ll go to some stumpage,” Morris said.

  Again, perfectly on cue, Earl Strong appeared on screen, delivering some prepared remarks.

  “Have you seen this footage before?” Aaron asked Morris.

  “Get out of here,” Morris said.

  “Nice lighting, huh?” Tricia Gordon said.

  “I love it,” Morris said.

  Earl Strong was standing on a platform. The camera shooting this footage was down below him, aimed upward so that, as backdrop, Earl Strong had mostly the ceiling of the mall. But part of the ceiling consisted of skylights, and where it didn’t have skylights, it had brilliant mercury-vapor lamps. The skylights made great patches of glare and the lamps made long wavy streaks across Earl Strong’s face.

  “Jesus. Television cameras should be outlawed in the Sun Belt,” Morris said. “Film only. How many times do I have to say it?”

  Everyone in the room was laughing at Morris. But Morris had eyes only for the TV set. “Whoa! Whoa! Hold up here! We have some real-life campaign drama!”

  Everyone was suddenly totally silent, crowding in closer to the screen.

  The camera was now aimed at a black woman who was apparently standing down below Earl Strong. She was slender, with high cheekbones, and at first glance she looked as if she might be in her late twenties. But on second thought, early forties was more like it. For a woman in her early forties she was a knockout. Not in an overtly sexy way. She had a nice face, with big eyes. She was wearing an overcoat that was too big, but its bulk contrasted well with her relatively sharp and slender build, and its navy-blue color suited her skin tones. Her backdrop was a wall of Earl Strong supporters wearing colorful Tshirts, all of whom were hastily backing away from her; she stood in the center of an arena of fat, vivid Aryans, all facing inward, emphasizing her importance. As she spoke, she inclined her face up into the even, omnidirectional light streaming down from above; the same light that cast Earl Strong into shadow served as perfect illumination for her.

  “The choreography blows my mind,” Ogle said.

  “I love her,” Tricia Gordon said. “And she lights well.”

  “She’s telling the truth,” Schram said. “Whatever she’s saying, I believe her.”

  “The drama of this thing is unreal,” Myron Morris said. “One woman standing alone, all these trailer-park Nazis shrinking away like rats.”

  Cut back to Earl Strong, now looking straight down at her so that his face was completely obscured by a sinister shadow.

  Myron Morris suddenly went nuts! He fell out of his chair, dropping to his knees below the television set, and clasped his hands together as if in prayer.

  “Zoom in! Zoom in! Zoom in and his career is over!” he screamed.

  The camera began to zoom. Earl Strong’s face grew to fill the screen, grew into a devastating extreme closeup.

  “Yes! Yes! Yesss!” Morris was screaming. “Slit the bastard’s throat!”

  Once the backlighting had been removed by zooming in tight, the camera’s electronics were able to pick up every nuance of Earl Strong’s face in clinical detail. A storm front of perspiration had burst through the powder and pancake on his forehead; individual drops of it began to run down. One of them made a beeline for the corner of his eye and that eye began to blink spastically. Earl Strong’s mouth was half open and his tongue had come forward, sticking half out of his mouth as he tried to think of what to do next. A huge Caucasian blur burst up through the bottom of the frame: his hand, brushing the sweat away from his stricken eyeball, stopping on the way down to shove one thumb into a nostril and pick out something that had been troubling him there.

  Morris suddenly jumped to his feet and thrust an accusing finger directly into Earl Strong’s face on the screen. “Yes! You are dead! You are dead! You are dead! You are dead and buried, you inbred booger picking little shit! We gotta find the cameraman who did that and give him a medal.”

  “And a decent job,” Ogle said.

  Back to the black woman, still standing there. Her face was alert, her jaw set, her eyes burning, but she remained solid and still, a perfect subject for the camera. The camera zoomed in a little closer but still found no imperfections. There were a few wrinkles around the eyes. It just made her look even wiser than she already did, standing next to Earl Strong.

  “Ronald Reagan eat your fucking heart out,” Shane Schram said.

  “There’s something about her face, too,” Ogle said.

  “She’s been through some heavy shit, you can tell. An American Pietá,” Tricia Gordon said.

  “Let’s go down there and represent her,” Shane Schram said.

  “What’s she running fo
r?” Morris said.

  “Nothing. She’s a bag lady,” Ogle said.

  A look of ecstatic fulfillment came over Morris’s face.

  “No!” he said.

  “Yes,” Ogle said.

  “It can’t be. It’s too perfect,” Morris said. “It is just too fucking ideal.”

  “She’s a bag lady, and according to our polls, she knocked twenty-five points off of Earl Strong’s standings today.”

  Morris threw up his hands. “I quit,” he said. “There’s no need for me. Real life is too good.”

  “We have to run her for something,” Tricia Gordon said, staring fixedly at the TV screen.

  “Excuse me,” Aaron said, “but aren’t you all forgetting something?”

  “What’s that?” Ogle said. They were all staring at him, suddenly quiet.

  “We haven’t heard a word the woman’s said,” Aaron said. “I mean, she could be a raving lunatic.”

  They all burst into dismissive scoffing noises. “Screw that,” Shane Schram said. “Look at her face. She’s solid.”

  “Fuck that shit,” Morris said. “That’s what writers are for.”

  21

  Mary Catherine was expecting a car, not a limousine, so she didn’t know that the shiny black behemoth was hers until the driver got out, walked around, and opened the door for her. By that time, the sight of the limousine was already drawing a crowd; not many of these showed up in this particular neighborhood of Chicago.

  Her lunch date had told her that he would send a car around to pick her up at the hospital. Instead, he had dispatched a limousine. Which didn’t make a lot of difference to Mary Catherine. Both of them were just vehicles to her, just ways of getting around town. She had been around enough not to be bowled over by the gesture. It was just another exercise in being William Cozzano’s daughter and trying to keep things in perspective.

  The limousine had a TV and a little bar inside of it. The driver offered to give her a hand mixing a drink. She laughed and shook her head no. She was going to have to come back from this lunch and keep working.

  She knew that there was a certain kind of person - a certain kind of man, to be specific - for whom the back of this limousine was like a natural habitat, who felt as comfortable sitting on those leather seats and drinking Chivas in the middle of the day as Mary Catherine felt behind the wheel of her beat-up old car. During the time that Dad had been Governor, she had run into a lot of those people, gotten to know their peculiar rhythms and their particular view of life. They had always seemed completely alien to her, like cosmonauts or Eskimos.

  Then Dad had proclaimed her the quarterback. As if her regular job wasn’t enough responsibility. Now, she had to dash out of the neurology war, filled with gunshot-paralyzed drug dealers and demented AIDS patients, and dash down the stairs and jump into the back of a limousine where the decisions were all different: what kind of drink to mix, what channel to view on the TV.

  She had club soda and watched CNN, which was what the TV set was already showing when she climbed in. The timing was fortuitous: it was high noon, the beginning of a fresh news broadcast. The Illinois primary was tomorrow. The elections were still very much up in the air, not much else was happening in the world, and so the campaign was being covered pretty heavily.

  The out-of-power party had their frontrunner (Norman Fowler, Jr.), their runner-up (Nimrod T. [“Tip”] McLane), and their plucky underdog (the Reverend Doctor Billy Joe Sweigel). And just to make things interesting, they also had a popular favourite: Governor William A. Cozzano, who wasn’t even running. But wildcat Cozzano petition drives were popping up all over the place and so the media had to treat him as a serious candidate.

  All three of the legitimate candidates got roughly the same sort of coverage: shots of the great man flying or driving into a prefabricated campaign event, a rally at a high school or whatever. They shook hands, they smiled, and they all did something just a little bit wacky, hoping that it would gain them just a little more recognition among TV viewers.

  Mary Catherine was tired and stressed and she quickly zoned out, found herself watching all of this stuff without really processing it. She had slumped way down in the soft leather seat of the limo, displaying posture that would have driven her late mother to hysterics, and was gazing through heavy lids at the colorful images on the screen, letting them pass directly into her brain without hindrance. Which was exactly the way you were supposed to watch TV.

  As if on cue, there was her father.

  CNN was showing her a wall of glass windows. The camera was aimed upward at the outside of a building. Ceiling light could be seen in a few rooms, and many of the windows were festooned with mylar balloons, flowers, and children’s artwork. Mary Catherine saw an IV bottle hanging from a rack and realized that she was looking at a hospital. The camera zoomed in on a particular window with lots of expensive flower arrangements. A man in a wheelchair was dimly visible peeking out between the bouquets.

  Then it all snapped into place. This was Burke Hospital in Champaign, and they were zooming in on her father’s private room. The TV crew must have gone to the roof of the parking ramp directly across the street, five stories high, and aimed the camera up and across to his window.

  Dad was nothing more than a silhouette. The windows were all metallic and reflective; you could only see into them when it was dark outside. But sometimes when the sky was profoundly overcast in the middle of the day, it was possible to look in those windows and see dim shapes underneath the silvery reflections. And that was what some enterprising cameraman had captured on videotape: Dad, sitting in a wheelchair, looking out his window.

  The image was gray and indistinct and so you couldn’t tell that Dad was, in fact, strapped into the wheelchair to keep him from slumping over. He had been turned squarely toward the window and so you couldn’t see the support that rose up behind his head to keep it from flopping around. He was lit from behind so you couldn’t see the drool coming out of his mouth and the moronic expression on his paralyzed face.

  A couple of standing silhouettes were visible behind him: a nurse and a slender young man. James. James pushed the wheelchair closer to the window so that Dad could see out. Then he left Dad alone there and disappeared from the frame. The camera panned 180 degrees.

  The parking ramp covered about half a square block. Parking was not hard to find in the area, so few cars ever made it all the way up to the rooftop level. Right now, half a dozen vehicles were scattered around. Most of the remainder of the roof was covered with people. Hundreds of them. They were carrying signs and banners. They were all looking straight up in the air. Straight up toward Dad. And now that he had appeared in the window, they were all rising to their feet, reaching into the air, shoving their signs and banners up into space as if Dad could reach down and pluck them out of their hands. But it was a strangely silent demonstration.

  Of course it was - they were in front of a hospital. They had to be quiet.

  The camera zoomed in on a long, crudely fashioned banner, like the ones that fans hold up at football games: WE LOVE YOU WILLY! Others could be seen in the background: FIRST AND TEN FOR Cozzano! GET WELL SOON - THEN GET ELECTED!

  There were a couple of shots of other hospital patients, in their flannel jammies and their walkers, looking out windows and pointing. Then back to the shot of Dad’s silhouette, just visible from the chest up, in front of his window.

  He waved out the window.

  Which wasn’t possible. Most of his body was paralyzed after the second stroke. But he was doing it. He was waving vigorously to the crowd.

  Something looked funny: his hand and arm weren’t big enough.

  It was James. He must be down on his knees next to Dad, concealed behind the windowsill, holding up his hand and waving for him.

  Cut back to the crowd, waving their banners hysterically, going nuts.

  Cut back to the window. James was till waving, pretending to be Dad. Then his hand stopped waving and became a f
ist. Two fingers extended from the fist in a V sign.

  Mary Catherine shot upright and spilled her club soda on the limousine’s wool carpet. “You bastard,” she said.

  Back to the crowd. Finally they lost it, forgot they were in front of a hospital, started screaming and cheering. Hospital security cops jumped forward, waving their arms, telling them to keep it down. And then they cut back to network headquarters, where all of this was being watched by their afternoon anchorman. Pete Ledger. Former pro football player, turned sportscaster, turned newscaster.

  A well-respected, middle-aged black guy with a sharp, fast tongue who’d probably end up having his own talk show one of these days.

  His eyes were red. He reached up with one hand just for an instant and wiped his runny nose with the back of one finger, sniffled audibly, took a big deep breath, forced himself to smile into the camera, and announced, in a cracking voice, that they were going to break for a commercial.

  “My God,” Mary Catherine said out loud to no one. “We’re in deep shit.”

  She flinched as the door of the limousine came open, letting in bright unfiltered light. The car had stopped.

  She’d lost track, but something about the light told her they were near downtown, hemmed in by skyscrapers. They were in a crowded little side street, just south and west of the Board of Trade, stopped in front of a brownstone with a first-floor restaurant. An awning extended from the front door, across the sidewalk, to a loading zone along the curb. An uniformed doorman had opened the door for her.

  He reached in with one hand and helped her out, which was a nice, if superfluous, gesture. He was an older guy, a kindly white-haired doorman type, and as he was helping her out on to the sidewalk, he gave her hand an extra squeeze, nodded at her, looking at her in a way that was almost worshipful.

  There was another man, a guy in a plain old dark suit, standing under the awning waiting for her. Dad had once told her that you could gauge the quality of a restaurant according to how many people you spoke to before you actually got around to ordering food. She wasn’t even into the door of this place yet and she had already encountered two people.