Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  The stroke had been hell for him because it left him unable to argue with his doctors. Mary Catherine had seen it in his face. A doctor would come in and tell him to turn off CNN and get some rest, because he needed sleep. Dad would get a certain look on his face, the look that signaled the beginning of intellectual combat, the look that he got when he was marshaling his arguments and preparing to demolish an opponent. Then he would open his mouth and gibberish would come out. The doctor would turn off the TV, turn off the lights, and leave him there in the dark.

  He had been much the same way during his four-day stay at the Radhakrishnan Institute in California. But there it wasn’t quite so bad. It was a cross between a research institute and an exclusive private hospital. From the very first contacts the Cozzanos had with the Institute, it was made plain to them that here, the patient wasn’t just a laboratory rat. Here, the patient was a partner in his own treatment and recovery. He was consulted on a number of major decisions. He sat in on the meetings where recovery strategy was discussed. These people weren’t afraid of intelligent, questioning patients. They welcomed them. They preferred them.

  “Neurology is a fascinating science, full of riddles and mysteries,” Dr. Radhakrishnan had said during their first meeting, in the conference room on the high bluff over the Pacific Ocean.

  Mary Catherine had stifled a smile. Radhakrishnan was a neuro­surgeon, and uncharacteristically, he was talking about what a wonderful discipline neurology was. She wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that the patient’s daughter was a neurologist.

  “In your therapy,” Radhakrishnan continued, “we will be exploring realms that have never been entered. We will watch the data streaming out of your biochip like the astronomers viewing the images from the Voyager spacecraft on its journey to the outer planets. Every day and every hour, we will see new and unexpected things. Enough new data will be generated to write a thousand articles and a hundred Ph.D. dissertations.

  “But the information that we receive from the implanted biochip will be reaching us through a narrow bottleneck. You, the patient, will have access to a far broader spectrum of information and experience. This is why we welcome the opportunity to pursue this therapy with a highly intelligent and perceptive patient. We need your help, Governor Cozzano. We need your partnership in this scientific venture.”

  Dad hadn’t spoken a word, just gazed out the big windows at the pounding surf. But Mary Catherine knew that he was hearing and understanding every word. He knew exactly what was going on. And she knew he was excited about it. Two months of being treated like a child by Patricia had left him ravenous for this kind of thing.

  She had gone over every inch of the Radhakrishnan Institute. Reviewed the records of their baboon experiments and of their work on an Indian truck driver named Monhinder Singh, who had been miraculously cured using the same therapy. Viewed many hours of videotapes of Singh, taken before the implant and over the course of his subsequent therapy. The results would have been impressive to anyone; to a professional neurologist, they were uncanny.

  She had interviewed Dr. Radhakrishnan and some of his top staff members for hours, asking them a lot of hard questions about what could go wrong with this procedure and what steps they had taken to avoid it. She always got good answers to her questions. Answers that seemed to have been prepared in advance, as though they had anticipated all of her thoughts.

  But this was a paranoid attitude. She couldn’t find anything wrong. The only bad thing that could be said about the Radhakrishnan Institute was that they had made the transition from baboons to humans rather hastily. They had taken big chances. If it had failed, it would have meant that they were rash and foolish. But it had worked, so they were brilliant and daring.

  It would have been better - a lot better - if they could have trotted out a dozen or so Mohinder Singhs, at various stages of recovery. Because this one Punjabi truck driver did not make for a track record. He was not a trend. He might just be a fluke.

  But William A. Cozzano had taught his daughter to be scrupulously egalitarian, and so at this point in the argument she always caught herself short. Because it wasn’t fair to adopt that attitude. The only way to test this thing was by doing it on humans. Sure it would be nice to see a dozen Mohinder Singhs. It’d be nice for the Cozzanos. But what about the second Singh, and the third? They’d be taking a big chance with not much to go on. And their lives were worth just as much as William Cozzano’s.

  It wasn’t fair. That’s what Dad would say. It wasn’t fair to have other people take all the risk, then reap the benefits after it had become a sure thing.

  Besides, this way it was more of an adventure. And she just knew that he’d be thrilled by that idea. Dad was a wild man at heart; he’d always wanted to go out and do crazy things. But his position as the head of the Cozzano clan had forced him to behave conservatively all his life. The stroke had freed him of that oppressive respon­sibility. He had nothing to lose now.

  So she signed the papers. Since the stroke, Mary Catherine had been in charge of her father’s body. She sent him into that operating room with many doubts about the operation - but in the full confidence that it was what he wanted.

  They shaved his head and rolled him into the operating theater at 7:45 a.m. on the morning of March 25, a little more than two months after his initial stroke. Mary Catherine gave him a last kiss on his burnished scalp before they scrubbed him for surgery. Then she pulled on a jacket and went for a long walk along the edge of the bluff, letting the pure Pacific wind blow through her hair. They had said that she could watch the operation if she wanted, but if it turned out to be fatal, she didn’t want that to be the last memory of her father.

  She found a high rocky outcropping, climbed to the top, and sat down. Below her, half a mile out to sea, a huge, beautiful ketch was tacking upwind. Farther out, she could barely make out the silhouettes of big freighters cruising up and down the California coast.

  God, I need a vacation, she thought. Then she thought: this is it. This is my vacation. So she enjoyed her vacation for a few minutes.

  Then, hearing a noise behind her, she looked over to see James approaching, fresh from the airport, a big grin on his face.

  So much for the vacation. Dealing with James had developed into business.

  “You’re right,” Cy Ogle had said to her on the telephone the day of the Illinois primary. “Your brother’s a terrible surfer.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “Remember that lunch you and I had?”

  “Sure.”

  “I did the same thing with your brother. Brought him in from

  South Bend on a chopper. Bought him lunch at the same place.”

  “And?”

  “The way he handled it was totally different.”

  “Different how?”

  Ogle had chuckled. “You weren’t impressed. You weren’t impressed by any old limousine. You weren’t impressed by a fancy lunch or by my reputation, or by people cheering at you because your last name’s Cozzano.”

  “And he was impressed?”

  “Oh, yes. Profoundly impressed. You could see it in his face.”

  “Stop,” she had said. “Don’t even describe it to me. I know exactly how he must have looked.”

  “Well, we had a nice little chat, anyway.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  Ogle had laughed. “Not anything even remotely similar to what you and I talked about. See, you are interested in relationships. James is interested in power. So we talked about power for a while.”

  This had left Mary Catherine feeling slightly queasy, because she knew that Ogle was exactly right.

  It was a testosterone thing. She knew it was. James had been suppressed by Dad. James was small, weak, had a low pain thres­hold, couldn’t throw or catch a football, didn’t like getting dirty. Dad had been enough of a good father to swallow his dis­appointment. But everyone knew it was present, just under the surface. Jame
s just hadn’t developed. And as soon as Dad had been removed from the picture, all those pent-up hormones had come flooding out and he had started developing too fast. Developing in the wrong direction, without any guidance from Dad.

  He needed a trellis to grow on. He needed it now, before he started any more trouble for the family. But Mary Catherine knew there wasn’t a damn thing she could do; in James’s current state of testerone overdrive, he was incapable of taking direction, or even advice, from a big sister.

  Mel couldn’t do it either. Mel and James had never had much to say to each other, they had never had the simpatico that Mel and Mary Catherine did. Mel was a street fighter and James was coddled and naive, despite all of Dad’s efforts to toughen him up. The two of them just didn’t connect on any level.

  This was a case in point. Dad had gone under the knife an hour and a half ago. James should have been there to kiss him goodbye. Mary Catherine knew damn well that people died in surgery and that you had to be there when they went under, because they might never open their eyes again. And she had explained all of this to James. Stated, over and over again, the importance of his being there before the surgery. And he had missed the boat.

  “Hey, sis. How you doing?”

  He didn’t even realize that he had screwed up. That was the frightening part. No self-awareness.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  He was shocked, shocked to find that she was mad at him. He shrugged and held his palms up. “My flight was delayed. You know how O’Hare is.”

  “So do you,” Mary Catherine said, “and a Ph.D. candidate at Notre Dame should have the brains to allow for it.”

  “Jesus,” he said, now sounding wounded, “this whole thing has turned you into quite the dragon lady.”

  “You can say ‘bitch’ if you want.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  She turned away from him and looked out over the ocean again, watching the big ketch come about. Its booms swung across the deck, its jibs went limp and fluttered for a moment, then reinflated and snapped tight again as the boat settled into a new course.

  It didn’t bother her at all. They were dealing with some heavy-duty shit here. And now, all of a sudden, she understood a lot of things about Dad that she hadn’t understood before. Why he was such a tough guy. Why he could be so calculating.

  “There’s plenty of flights. I thought maybe you would come out last night,” Mary Catherine said, trying not to sound quite so harsh.

  “I was busy. I had business to take care of.”

  These words terrified her. She looked into his face. “What kind of business?”

  “Take it easy,” he said reassuringly. “I’m not running around doing stuff behind your back.”

  “I’ve never accused you of doing so,” she said. “This is the first time that notion’s come up.”

  He blushed, looked away, got real clumsy for a few seconds. “Well, this thing is my own gig,” he said. “Nothing to do with you or the family.”

  “What thing?”

  “I got a job,” he said, beaming with pride.

  “Well, that’s great,” she said, “but isn’t that going to interfere with your Ph.D. work?”

  “No, that’s just the thing,” he said. “It’s part of my Ph.D. work. I’m double clipping. I get paid to do this job, and I get my regular stipend as a grad student, and I’ll probably get a book contract out of it too.” James had a devilish look on his face, as if he had just outmaneuvered Satan himself.

  “Well, James, that’s wonderful!” she said. “What kind of job is this?”

  “I’m doing a study of the presidential campaign. All of the politicking that’s been going on during the primary season. With emphasis on media strategy. And if I play my cards right, I’m pretty sure this could turn into a book eventually.”

  “That’s great. How’d you get on to this idea?”

  “It just hit me the other day. I was talking to this guy. He’s a big-time campaign media consultant. You might not have heard of him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Cy. Cyrus Rutherford Ogle.”

  “Oh. How’d you get hooked up with him?”

  “He just invited me out to lunch,” James said nonchalantly. “I’m not sure exactly why. But I think that, obviously, because of my family connections, combined with my poli sci expertise, he thought maybe I’d be a good person to know.”

  “Yes, I should think so,” Mary Catherine said, sounding terribly impressed.

  “We engaged in small talk for a while, nothing specific. Then he started asking me a lot of questions about my dissertation. He seemed to be fascinated with the topic.”

  “I’ll bet he was.”

  “I was asking him about some of the work he does and it occurred to me that, since he seemed to be so interested in my work, a mutual back-scratching arrangement might be possible so we hammered this whole thing out, right there at the lunch table. He’s giving me access to a number of campaigns - he has friends and proteges working in virtually every important campaign right now. So I get lots of material I wouldn’t otherwise have access to.”

  “Well,” Mary Catherine said, “it sounds like you just made a brilliant career move.” It was taking a lot of effort to keep from smiling at her brother. He had the same proud, beaming look on his face that he’d had at the age of six, when he caught a big toad in the backyard.

  James shrugged. “Yeah. But Jesus, it’s a lot of work.”

  “It is?”

  “Oh, yeah. Suddenly I’ve got all these contacts. Dozens of major sources. All these people to keep track of. I’ve spent the last few days just talking to people on the phone, setting up a database to keep track of all the information I’ll be taking in. I’m going to be running flat-out until Election Day.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But if there’s one thing that I learned from Dad, it’s that when you see an opportunity you have to go for it in a big way.”

  “Well,” Mary Catherine said, “I hope you’re not biting off too much.”

  This was manipulation in its purest form. He would have found it patronizing to be congratulated. Better to fret and worry about what a big, manly job James was undertaking.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said. He was irked, and rapidly getting more so, building up a nice crescendo of self-important rage. “You think I can’t handle a big job?”

  Mary Catherine shrugged. “I have a lot of respect for you, James,” she said noncommitally.

  “No, you don’t. You still think I’m a little kid. But I’m not. I’m

  an adult. And maybe you don’t want to admit that fact, now that you’ve become the self-appointed capo of this family and you think you know what’s best for everyone.”

  “Fine. It’s your choice,” she said.

  “I’ve done big jobs before. And I’m going to do this one. I’m going to succeed.”

  “Good. I wish you the best of luck.”

  James shut up for a moment, calming himself down. “It’s been hard, being the son of the Great Man.”

  “I know it has been,” she said. “I know it’s been really rough.”

  “There’ve been a lot of times when I felt like the idiot son, you know. A lot of Dad’s old cronies treat me like a little kid.”

  By this, Mary Catherine knew that he was referring to Mel.

  “But Cy is totally different,” he continued. “He treated me with respect. As an equal. He had no doubts whatsoever that I could handle this job. And I’m grateful to him for that.”

  So am I, Mary Catherine thought.

  “You should meet this guy sometime,” James said.

  “Maybe I should.”

  An interesting thought had occurred to Mary Catherine. Maybe Cy Ogle had manipulated her just as brilliantly as he had James.

  Or maybe not. She had handed him something close to a quid pro quo: help me out with James, this loose cannon on the deck of the good ship Cozzano, and then w
e’ll talk some more. And he had delivered. He had done it in less than a week. He had solved a big problem for them.

  Cy Ogle might be a person that they could use.

  23

  Eleanor’s first hint that anything funny was going on was when she heard Doreen, in the next trailer over, going, “Whoo-ee! Look at this, baby!” in the singsong falsetto that she used to attract the attention of her children. Meanwhile, Eleanor could hear the sound of tires grinding and popping on gravel, right outside of her trailer.

  Eleanor looked out the window. Mobile homes, like jet airplanes, offered great views off to the sides but you couldn’t see what was directly in front or behind. All she could see was the side of Doreen’s trailer, and Doreen’s big hairdo in one of the windows, flanked by the faces of her three kids, their eyes and mouths wide open to accept new input. They were all looking at something that was going on in front of Eleanor’s trailer.

  It must be the Nazis. They were coming to get her. Eleanor ran up to the front of the trailer, slapping the chain on to her door as she went by it. She got up to the front where two tiny little windows looked forward, and she peeled the windowshade back just a little.

  It was a big old Lincoln Town Car, navy blue, freshly polished, the cleanest and prettiest car within several miles of this trailer park. You could back it into an empty slot here and make it pass for a mobile home.

  All the doors were open. Several men were getting out. They were all young men. They were all wearing sunglasses. At least two of them had walkie-talkies as well, and they were using them. And they were looking around, scanning all points of the compass through their dark glasses, swiveling their heads back and forth like

  searchlights on a guard tower. One of them went up to the Datsun, put his face up close to the silvered glass, and cupped his hands around his eyes.

  For the first few moments, Eleanor was convinced that they were Nazi hit men who had come to blow her away. But that was just paranoia. The followers of Earl Dudley Strang were not affluent men in suits and Lincoln Town Cars. And if they wished to do away with her, they would come in the middle of the night like the jackals they were. Not in broad daylight, in a big car, like this.