Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  “Howdy, Miz Cozzano,” the man said, “I’m Cy Ogle.”

  “Oh, hello,” she said, shaking his hand. “Did you just get here?”

  “Nah, I nailed down a table for us,” he said. “But I figured that since I dug you out of work like this on such an ugly day, least I could do was come out and say hi.”

  “Well, that’s very nice,” she said noncommitally.

  So far, he didn’t seem like the cynical, media-manipulating son of a bitch that he was supposed to be. But it was way, way too early to be jumping to conclusions.

  Another guy in a suit, who clearly did work here, nearly killed himself bursting out the front door of the place, and met her halfway up the sidewalk, holding out one hand, bending his knees as he approached so that by the time he reached Mary Catherine he was practically duck-walking. Mary Catherine could see in his whole face and affect that he was Italian.

  He was crying, for god’s sake. He pumped her hand and grabbed her upper arm with his left, as if only all the willpower in his body prevented him from violently embracing her. He said nothing but merely shook his head. He was so overcome with emotion that he couldn’t speak.

  “We were just watching CNN over the bar,” Ogle explained. “It was incredible.”

  Some kind of a huge commotion was going on inside the place. It got louder as Mary Catherine moved toward the door, led by the crying Italian and followed by Ogle, and as she crossed the threshold, it exploded.

  The back of the restaurant was all quiet little tables, but the front of the place was a sizable bar, currently packed with bodies. They were all men in suits. This was an expensive place where people in the commodities business, and the lawyers and bankers who fed off them, gathered to fortify themselves with martinis and five-dollar mineral water.

  And right now they were all on their feet, howling, applauding, stamping their feet, whistling, as if the Bears had just run back an interception for a touchdown. They were going nuts.

  And they were all looking at Mary Catherine.

  She came to a dead stop, shocked and intimidated by the noise. Ogle nearly rear-ended her. He put one hand lightly on top of her shoulder and bent toward her. “Pretend they don’t exist,” Ogle said, not shouting but projecting a deep actor’s voice that cut through the noise. “You’re the Queen of England and they’re drunks in the gutter.”

  Mary Catherine stopped looking at them. She stopped making eye contact with any of them. She focused on the back of the rnaître d’, who was plunging through the crowd of pinstripes, making an avenue for her, and she followed him straight through the thick of it and into the restaurant proper. The people at the bar were chanting now: Cozzano! Cozzano! Cozzano!

  Half of the people dining in the restaurant area stood up as she came through. Nearly all of them applauded. The maître d’ led them straight to a table at the very back of the place, behind a partition. At last, they had privacy. Just Mary Catherine and Ogle.

  “I’m really, really sorry about that,” Ogle said, after they had been seated, menued, watered, and breadsticked by a swirl of efficient, white-aproned young Italian men. “I should have arranged to bring you in the rear entrance.”

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Well, I’m embarrassed,” Ogle said. “This is my business, you see. It was unprofessional on my part. But they had CNN going above the bar, and I didn’t reckon on that footage being shown just before you got here.”

  “Powerful stuff,” she said.

  “It was unbelievable,” Ogle said. He stared off into space. His face went slack and his eyes went out of focus. He sat motionless for a few seconds, moving his lips ever so slightly, gradually beginning to shake his head from side to side, playing the whole thing back on the videotape recorder of his mind.

  Finally he blinked, came awake, and looked at her. “The kicker was Pete Ledger getting choked up. I never thought I’d see that in a million years.”

  “Me neither,” she said. “He’s usually too smart for that kind of thing.”

  “Well,” Ogle said, “this is some powerful stuff that’s going on right now.”

  That led them into small talk about the primary campaign, the misguided petition drives that were trying to put her father’s name on the ballots in several states, and eventually into a discussion of Dad’s stroke and its aftermath. Mary Catherine kept the whole thing quite vague, and Ogle seemed content with that; whenever the conversation wandered close to Dad’s medical condition, or his political prospects, his face reddened slightly and he grew visibly uncomfortable, as if these topics were way beyond the bounds of southern gentility and he didn’t know how to handle it.

  She had only rarely gotten a chance to watch Dad doing business. But she knew that this was how Dad operated: lots of small talk. It was an Italian thing. It meshed pretty well with Ogle’s low-key southern approach.

  In fact, Ogle seemed to have no desire to talk business at all, as if the near riot at the bar had embarrassed him so deeply that he couldn’t bring himself to return to that subject. So, after an opportune pause in the conversation, Mary Catherine decided to open fire. “You manage political campaigns for a living. My dad’s not running for anything and neither am I. Why are you buying me lunch?”

  Ogle folded his hands in his lap, broke eye contact, and glanced around at the food on the table for a few moments, as if this were the first time he’d ever thought about it. “There’s a bunch of people in my business. Most of the important ones are busy running primary campaigns, for various candidates, right now. But not me. So far I have not committed my resources to any one candidate.”

  “Is that a deliberate strategy?”

  “Sort of,” Ogle said, shrugging. “Sometimes it pays not to commit too early. You may end up backing some loser. In the process, you antagonize the guy who ends up being the nominee, and then you can’t get any work during the general election, which is where the big money gets spent.”

  “So you’re holding back until you find out who’s likely to get nominated. Then you try to get them as a client.”

  Ogle frowned and stared at the ceiling as if something was not quite right. “Well, there’s more to it. I have been doing this for a number of years now. And frankly, I’m getting tired of it.”

  “You’re getting tired of your business?”

  “Certain aspects of it, yeah.”

  “Which aspects?”

  “Dealing with campaigns.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mary Catherine said. “I thought you were the campaign.”

  “I would like to be the campaign. Instead, I’m the media consultant to the campaign.”

  “Oh.”

  “The campaign proper consists of the party’s national committee and all of its hierarchy; the individual candidate’s campaign manager and all of his hierarchy; and all of the pressure groups to which they are beholden, and their hierarchies.”

  “Sounds like a mess.”

  “It’s a hell of a mess. If I can just make an analogy to your business, Ms. Cozzano, running a campaign is like doing a heart-lung transplant on the body politic. It is a massively difficult and complicated process that requires great precision. It cannot be done by a committee, much less by a committee of committees, most of whom hate and fear each other. The political nonsense that I have to go through in order to produce a single thirty-second advertising spot makes the succession of the average Byzantine emperor seem simple and elegant by comparison.”

  “I find that kind of surprising,” Mary Catherine said. “People have known about the value of media since the Kennedy-Nixon debate.”

  “Long before that,” Ogle said. “Teddy Roosevelt staged the charge up San Juan Hill so it would look good for the newsreel cameras.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. And FDR manipulated the media like crazy. He was even better at it than Reagan. So media’s been important for a long time.”

  “Well, you’d think that the major political parti
es would have figured out how to deal with it more efficiently by now.”

  Ogle shrugged. “Dukakis riding in the tank.”

  Mary Catherine grinned, remembering the ludicrous image from 1988.

  “The Democratic candidates in the ‘92 debate, sitting in those little desks like game show contestants while Brokaw strode around on his feet, like a hero.”

  “Yeah, that was pretty silly looking.”

  “The fact is,” Ogle said, “the major parties haven’t learned how to handle media yet. And they never will.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of their constitution. The parties were formed in the days when media didn’t matter, and formed wrong. Now they are like big old dinosaurs after the comet struck, thrashing around weakly on the ground. Big and powerful but pathetic and doomed at the same time.”

  “You think the parties are doomed?”

  “Sure they are,” Ogle said. “Look at Ross Perot. If Bush’s psy-ops people hadn’t figured out how to push his buttons and make him act loony, he’d be president now. Your father has everything going for him that Perot did - but none of the negatives.”

  “You really think so?”

  “After the reception you got when you came through that door,” Cy Ogle said, nodding toward the entrance, “I’m surprised you would even ask me such a question. Heck, you dad’s already on the ballot in Washington state.”

  She was appalled. “Are you joking?”

  “Not at all. That’s just about the easiest state to do it in. Only takes a few thousand people.”

  Mary Catherine didn’t answer, just sat there silently, staring across the restaurant. She had been watching this political business for a while, but she still couldn’t believe that a few thousand total strangers in Seattle had taken it upon themselves to put her father on the ballot.

  “This is kind of interesting, as an abstract discussion,” Mary Catherine said. “I mean, I’m enjoying it and I guess I’m learning something. But how it relates to my dad isn’t clear to me.”

  “You’re going to be hearing from a certain major political party,” Ogle said. “Medical situation permitting, they’re going to try to draft your father at the convention.”

  “And if that happens, you want me to use whatever influence I’ve got to get them to hire you?”

  Ogle shook his head. “They won’t hire me. They don’t work that way. They always form their own in-house agency so that the political hacks, with all their little ambitions and intrigues, can exert more control over the ad people, whom they see as unprincipled vermin.”

  “So beyond having interesting conversations, what use are you to me? And what use am I to you?”

  Once again, Ogle broke eye contact, put his silverware down, stared off into the distance, thinking.

  “Let me just state one ground rule first,” he said. “This conver­sation is not a business thing.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Nope. But it’s not a social thing either, because we are total strangers.”

  “So what is it, Mr. Ogle?”

  “Two people talking to each other.”

  “And what exactly are we talking about?”

  “Surfing.”

  “Surfing?”

  “Media is like a wave,” Ogle said. “It’s powerful and uncon­trollable. If you’re good, you can surf on it for a little bit, get a boost from it. Gary Hart surfed on that wave for a few weeks in 1984, after he won New Hampshire from Mondale. But by the time the Illinois primary came around, he had fallen off the surfboard. The wave broke over him and swamped him. He tried again in 1988 but that time he just plain drowned. Perot rode the wave for a month or two in ‘92, then he lost his nerve.”

  Ogle turned in his chair and focused in on Mary Catherine now. “You and your family, you’ve been having a day at the beach. You’ve been out wading in the shallow waters where everything is warm and safe. But the currents are tricky and suddenly you find that you have been swept far out into the deep black water by a mysterious undertow. And now, great waves are cresting over your heads. You can get up and ride those waves wherever they take you, or you can pretend it’s not happening. You can keep treading water, in which case the tsunami will break on top of you and slam you down on to the bottom.”

  Mary Catherine just kept her mouth shut and stared into her water glass. She was feeling several powerful emotions at once and she knew that if she opened her mouth she’d probably regret it.

  There was fear. Fear because she knew that Ogle was exactly right. Resentment because this total stranger was presuming to give her advice. And there was a frightening sense of exhilaration, wild thrilling danger, almost sexual in its power.

  Fear, resentment, and exhilaration. She knew that her brother, James, was experiencing the same feelings. And she knew that he was ignoring the fear, swallowing the resentment, and giving in to the exhilaration. Holding up his hand in the V sign, egging on the crowd. It was unforgivable. A hundred million people were going to see that.

  She looked at Ogle. Ogle was looking back at her, a little bit sideways, not wanting to confront her directly.

  “There’s a third outcome you didn’t mention,” she said.

  “What’s that?” Ogle said, startled.

  “You start riding the wave because you enjoy the thrill of it. But you don’t know what you’re doing. And you end up getting slammed into the rocks.”

  Ogle nodded. “Yes, the world is full of bad surfers.”

  “My brother, James, is a bad surfer. He’s a really bad surfer,” Mary Catherine said, “but he thinks he’s good. And he seems to have located a really big wave.”

  Ogle nodded.

  “Now, I have no idea, still, what it is that you want, or what you are proposing, or what you think you’re going to get out of it,” Mary Catherine said. “But I can tell you this. James is a problem. My father and our lawyer Mel and I would all agree on that. And without committing myself or my family to anything financial, let me say that if you can provide some advice in dealing with this problem, it would not be forgotten.”

  “You did what!?” Mel said.

  She knew he was going to say it. “I asked him for advice,” Mary

  Catherine said. She was in the back of the limousine, riding back to the hospital.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Mel said. “You shouldn’t even have met with the guy without my being there.”

  “I was very good. I’m not the sap you think I am, Mel. I didn’t make any kind of financial commitment. It was just a couple of people having lunch together, talking. And I asked him for advice.”

  “About what?”

  “About James.”

  Mel sounded disappointed, wounded. “Mary Catherine. Why would you ask a total stranger for advice in dealing with your own flesh and blood?”

  “Because half of my family is dead, or nearly dead, you’re away on business, and James is being a complete asshole.”

  “What do you mean? What’s James doing?”

  She explained it all to him: the wave, the V sign, the cheers of the crowd, the hysterical reaction of the businessmen inside the bar.

  But Mel didn’t get it. He listened, he understood, but he hadn’t seen it. He hadn’t seen the emotion on people’s faces. He didn’t understand the power of what was going on here. To him it was all TV, it was all Smurfs, and he couldn’t bring himself to take it seriously. He didn’t get it.

  She was glad she had talked to Cy Ogle, who definitely did get it.

  “What did this guy say?” Mel said.

  “His name is Cy Ogle,” Mary Catherine said, “and he said that he would think about it.”

  “What kind of a name is Ogle?”

  “That’s beside the point. But he said that it was originally Oglethorpe, which is a big name in Georgia. But somewhere along the line someone had a bastard child, who ended up with the name Ogle, and he’s descended from that person.”

  “So he comes from a long l
ine of bastards.”

  “Mel!”

  “Don’t Mel me. He charmed you with some kind of southern shit, didn’t he? I can smell it from New York. Told you a bunch of wacky tales about his picturesque family down in the land of cotton, seemed like the nicest guy in the world.”

  “Mel. Be honest. You don’t know anything about handling the media. Do you?”

  “I happen to know a lot about it.”

  “Then how did that happen today? That thing with James? If you’re so good at handling the media, then why is it that everyone in the country has the impression, today, that Dad is running for president?”

  Mel didn’t say anything. She knew she had him.

  “Because of what happened today, we have to have a media person,” Mary Catherine said. “It doesn’t have to be Cy Ogle. But depending on what he does with James, it might very well be.”

  Mel sounded glum. “I hate the media.”

  “I know you do, Mel,” she said. “That’s why we’re in deep shit now. We need someone who loves the media. And I can tell you that whatever imperfections Cy Ogle might have, he definitely loves his work.”

  22

  William A. Cozzano was a lousy patient. mary catherine had never understood this until she became a doctor in her own right, and got into the habit of judging people’s ability to receive medical treatment.

  Good patients were as close as possible to being laboratory rats. They were meek, docile, cooperative, and not very intelligent. The intelligent ones gave you fits because they were always asking questions. They knew full well that they were as smart as the doctor was. That if they were to go off and enroll in a medical school, they’d know as much as the doctor did within a few years.

  William A. Cozzano was one of those patients who disputed everything the doctor said. Who forgot to take his medicine - deliberately. Who pushed his recovery schedule into the realm of the absurd. Partly it was a holdover from the war, where you had to keep going even when you were wounded, and partly it came from football, where the standard treatment for broken bones was a layer of athletic tape.