Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  “I won’t bullshit you,” he said. “Cy Ogle wants to work for your dad. This is important stuff to him. If anything happens, we’ll need to know where are the best places to shoot. And that’s what I’m finding out. Is that okay?”

  Mary Catherine nodded at the little telescopes. “Do any of those things work with a video camcorder?”

  “Nah. These are all for professional film cameras.”

  “I’m confused,” she said. “In some ways, you guys are taking this thing way too seriously. In other ways, you’re goofing off.”

  “You want to know why we’re using that Kmart special to videotape the Governor.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The whole point here is that these things are supposed to be home movies. If the Governor chooses not to use our services, then you end up with home movies in a format you can use. But if he does hire us, we can make them into ads.”

  “Ads that look like shitty home movies.”

  “A-ha!” Myron Morris said, holding up one finger. “You were expecting something a little slicker.”

  “If there’s one adjective that’s most commonly used in connection with Cy Ogle, it is slick” Mary Catherine said.

  “Which is why we want to go with the opposite of slick.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Imagine it. A television ad showing big moments in the life of William Anthony Cozzano. We see him horsing around this very farm as a child. Scoring a touchdown in the Rose Bowl. We see him in Vietnam. We see him playing for the Bears. Raising his kids. All of this is going to be trashy, grainy, antiquated film stock. Home-movie stuff. And then we see his recovery from the stroke - some private moments at home - and all of a sudden it looks slick. It’s shot on 35-millimeter film stock, the lighting is perfect, he’s wearing makeup, all of a sudden it looks like goddamn Lawrence of Arabia. You think people aren’t going to notice that?”

  Mary Catherine didn’t have an answer for that one.

  “Americans may be undereducated, lazy, and disorganized, but they do one thing better than any people on the face of the earth, and that is watch television. The average eight-year-old American has absorbed more about media technology than a goddamn film student in most other countries. You can tell lies to them and they’ll never know. But if you try to lie to them with the camera, they’ll crucify you. Which is why, when we shoot home movies of your father, we use exactly the same machine that Joe Sixpack uses when he sends a tape of his dancing Dalmation to America’s Funniest Home Videos. And to tell you the truth, we may actually have to go through and process that videotape and make it look worse than it does now.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Reagan did it in ‘80. I believe he made out okay.” “But everyone will know that Ogle’s working for Dad.” Myron shook his head dismissively. “That’s a verbal thing. Nobody gives a shit about that, as long as the ads don’t look slick. Believe me, as long as we stick with half-inch videotape, and as long as we avoid releasing any images of your Dad standing with one arm around Cy Ogle, nobody who matters will think that he’s ever been near a slick media man.”

  28

  As Mary Catherine trudged back across the field to where she had parked her car behind Morris’s Suburban, a third car cruised up the road and pulled on to the shoulder behind hers. It was Mel’s Mercedes.

  Mel set the hand brake, climbed out, waved to her, and then ambled around on the shoulder for a minute or two, squinting off into the distance, taking in the vista. Views in this part of Illinois were not exciting, but they were vast, and a person like Mel, who spent much time pent up in a city, could come out here and stare at the horizon in the same way that a vacationer in New York or L.A. might go to the ocean and gaze off into emptiness.

  Mel had given up cigarettes by the trick of switching to cigars, which were so noxious that, like nuclear weapons, they could not be used except in remote, desolate environments. He did not smoke them in his Mercedes for fear of imparting an eternal reek to the leather and the carpets. Now that he was out on the road, he fished the extinct butt of a fat stogie from the pocket of his trench coat and stoked it into life with a wooden safety match. Bubbles of silver smoke blew out from the corners of his mouth, elongated in the wind, and whipped off across the prairie, picking up almost palpable momentum as they headed for the Indiana border.

  After a minute or so, Mel’s gaze settled on the farmhouse, which he had helped to rebuild. The concept of a Jew learning to use a claw hammer had been considered revolutionary by both the Meyers and the Cozzanos, and had met with some resistance from both groups. But the young Mel enjoyed his trips out of town and had insisted on riding the train down at least once a week during the summers to pound nails. Three volumes of the library of Cozzano family photo albums were devoted to the reconstruction of the house, and Mel showed up in a number of pictures, pale, skinny, and bent as a peeled banana, kneeling on the bare plywood of the new roof among burly, copper-hued Cozzanos, nailing down the shingles one strip at a time.

  Since then, Mel had always felt a proprietary interest in the Cozzano farmhouse. He had only a distant relationship with the Cozzanos who lived there now, but he liked to drive out from time to time and look at it, as he was doing now. Mary Catherine did not know whether he did this from pure nostalgia or from curiosity about the durability of his handiwork or both. She did know that photographs of the completed farmhouse had circulated widely among the Meyer family, as far away as Israel, as evidence of the wonders that a Meyer could achieve if he was not afraid to brave unknown fields of endeavour.

  “When I was pounding in all those damn nails, whack whack whack, day after day, I had this terrible fear that I didn’t really know what I was doing,” Mel said, as Mary Catherine was vaulting the fence again. “I would have nightmares that all of the nails I had pounded in to that house would suddenly pop loose and all of Willy’s nails would hold fast, and everyone would blame me for the house falling down.”

  “Well, it’s still standing,” Mary Catherine said.

  “That it is,” Mel said with satisfaction and finality, as if his sole purpose in driving down from Chicago had been to make sure that the house was still there.

  “Have you seen Dad?”

  “Yeah, Willy and I saw each other,” Mel said. “So the social aspect of today’s visit has been consummated.”

  “Oh. You don’t want to socialize with me?”

  Mel looked around them. A farm truck blasted down the road, kicking up dust and rocks with its windblast, inflating Mel’s trench coat and Mary Catherine’s hair for a moment. The red coal on the end of Mel’s cigar flared bright orange and caught his eye. He stared into it as though mesmerized. “This is no place,” he said, “to socialize with a lady.”

  She smiled. Mel was old enough, and good enough, to talk this way without seeming stilted or weird. “You didn’t come down to socialize with me anyway.”

  Mel took one last draw on his cigar and then examined it regretfully. He pinched it carefully between the ball of his thumb and the nail of his arched forefinger, straightened his arm, aimed it into the ditch, and snapped the butt into a swampy patch. It died with a quick sizzling burst. Mel stood still for a moment, staring at it, and then expelled the last of the smoke from his mouth.

  “Get in,” he said. “Let’s go get some coffee at the Dixie Truckers’ Home.”

  She grinned. The Dixie Truckers’ Home was right out on I-57. Mel had driven by it a million times but never been there; for him it was an object of morbid, sick fascination. Mary Catherine opened the passenger door and climbed in. Normally Mel would have gone all the way around the car and opened the door for her, but his mind was elsewhere today. As he had implied, this was business, not a social visit, and he wasn’t thinking about the niceties.

  The Mercedes was perfect for two, crowded for anyone else. It was ideal for Mel, who was unmarried and childless and presumed by many to be gay. He started up the engine and pulled out on to the roa
d and gave the car a tremendous long burst of acceleration that took it all the way up past a hundred.

  Mary Catherine’s heart melted. Mel had always enjoyed thrilling her and James with the power of his fancy European cars, ever since they had been children. She knew that when he put the pedal down and squealed the tires on this country road, he was evoking a memory, for his own benefit as much as for Mary Catherine’s.

  “You know that the relationship between our families has been strong and will continue to be,” Mel said, “even though, over time, it has gone through a lot of different shapes.”

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  Mel slowed the car down and looked sideways at Mary Catherine for a moment. He seemed a little surprised by her impatience.

  “Just take it easy,” he said, “this is hard for me.”

  “Okay,” she said. Her vision got a little blurry and her nose started to run. She drew a deep silent breath and got the impulse under control.

  “The reason our families have gotten along together is that the leaders - the patriarchs - have always been wise men who took the long view of things. And who were willing to do what made sense in the long run. Other people have looked at the strategies of the Cozzanos and the Meyers and scratched their heads, but we have always had reasons for what we did.”

  “What are we doing now?” Mary Catherine said.

  “Willy doesn’t know this, because I didn’t want to stress him out,” Mel said, “but the shit is finally hitting the fan on what happened in February.”

  “What shit? What fan?”

  Mel cocked his head back and forth from side to side, weighing his thoughts. “Well, you know that we could have just hauled Willy down the front steps of the capitol and the whole thing would have been splashed all over the evening news. Instead we took a more old-fashioned approach. Like when FDR was in a wheelchair, but hardly anyone in America was aware of that fact because his media coverage was manipulated so well.”

  “We concealed the extent of his illness,” Mary Catherine said.

  “Right. We let his organization run the state government for a •while instead of just abdicating and turning things over to that putz, the Lieutenant Governor, as we were technically supposed to do.” Mel spoke the last phrase in a screwed-up, Mickey Mouse tone of voice, as if the question of succession were a finicky bit of fine print, a mere debater’s point. “Well, it might be possible to make the claim that what we did - what I did - was not, strictly speaking, ethical. Or in some cases, even legal. And sooner or later this was bound to come out.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Mary Catherine said. “Did you know, at the time you were doing this, that it might come out?”

  Mel was pained. “Of course I knew it, girl! But it’s like dragging a man out of a burning car. You have to act, you can’t think about the possibility that he’ll later sue you for spraining his shoulder. I did what I had to do. I did it well.” Mel turned and looked at her, a dry grin coming to his lips. “I was awesome, frankly.”

  “Well, what are you getting at?”

  “You know who Markene Caldicott is?”

  “Of course I do!” She was surprised that Mel would even ask this question.

  “Oh, that’s right. You’re probably the type who listens to RNA all the time.”

  Mary Catherine grinned and shook her head. Most people considered Radio North America to be the height of journalistic sophistication, but Mel still had it lumped together with MTV and Arena Football. He got his radio news via shortwave, from the BBC.

  “What about Markene Caldicott?” she said.

  “Well, apparently she’s some hotshot reporter,” Mel said skeptically.

  “You could say that.”

  “She’s after my ass. And I don’t mean that in the sexual sense,” Mel said. “She’s called every single person I’ve ever worked with. I can read this woman’s mind like a fucking cereal box.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “She’d really like to shoot down your father,” Mel said, “but she can’t, because Willy is without flaw, and was incapacitated for the last couple of months besides. So instead, she is going to do a big expose where she makes me out to be this sort of Richelieu with a yarmulke. The shadowy power who pulled the strings while Cozzano drooled down his chin. You know the kind of thing.”

  “Your basic over inflated election-year scandal.”

  “Yeah. She probably figures that Willy is going to get into the race and she wants to be the first to take shots at him. So I’m going to head her off at the pass.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “I’m going to drive back up to Daley,” Mel said. He and Mary Catherine had both fallen into the habit of using Cozzano’s poststroke jargon. “And have dinner with Mark McCabe. A political reporter from the Trib. And I’m going to spill my guts. Going to lay the whole thing out.”

  Mary Catherine was shocked. “You’re going to tell him everything?”

  Mel looked at her with an expression that was somewhere between fatherly disappointment and pity. “Are you nuts? Of course I’m not going to tell him everything. I’m just going to make it look like I’m telling him everything.”

  “Oh.”

  “So McCabe will get a big front-page story. We will release the information in the form most favourable to us. Markene Caldicott will have been scooped, and her story, if she even bothers to air the damn thing, will have virtually no impact. And the Cozzano family and administration will be totally exonerated, because I, the runty Jew lawyer, will take all the heat.”

  “That’s very good of you,” Mary Catherine said.

  Mel laughed and slapped the steering wheel. “Ha! Good of me. I like that. You downstaters just kill me. ‘Very good of you,’” he mimicked her, not unkindly, and laughed again. Mary Catherine could feel her face radiating warmth. “Look, kid, this is not about good. This is not a good and evil thing, this is about being smart and taking our losses in the way that is least disadvantageous to us. That’s what I am trying to set up here.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m going to great lengths to be clever and set this whole thing up the way that is best for us,” Mel continued, now starting to sound almost a little peeved, “and it just kills me when you try to characterize it as some kind of church-social altruism. It’s like you’re failing to see and appreciate the full artistry that is involved here.”

  “Sorry. I think it’s very devious,” she said, now getting a little peeved herself.

  “Thank you. That’s a compliment I can handle. Now we are on the same wavelength.”

  “Good.”

  “We’re both listening to the same station,” Mel said, extending the metaphor. “Both listening to the BBC instead of that RNA crap.” He spoke the final word with a resounding, sardonic whip­lash that made them both laugh, albeit nervously. “So let’s stay away from this weepy sentimental shit and do what is best for our families over the next several generations,” Mel said.

  “Okay.”

  “What is best, for right now, is that I, Mel Meyer, get out of Dodge.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mel sighed, a little defeated, as if he’d been hoping that Mary Catherine would simply get it. “Jesus, girl, I’m going public tonight. Telling the whole world that I did something unethical. I’m going to take the heat for the decisions that I made in January and February. Which were good decisions - but sooner or later, the karma comes back and hits you. Now, once I’ve made myself out to be the evil, scheming homunculus that I am, how can I possibly continue to be a close adviser and confidante of the Cozzano clan? The whole point is that everyone throws shit at me, it all sticks, and then I run away and take all the shit with me. If I stick around you guys, some of it’s bound to rub off.”

  As Mel explained all of this, the whole situation became clear to Mary Catherine, and the cloud of emotion that had obscured the beginning of this conversation lifted away. She felt calm
and relaxed.

  “How far away are you going to run?”

  “Oh, pretty far, at least for a while,” Mel said. “I’m formally severing my relationship with your father, as his attorney, and sending his files over to Ty Addison at Norton Addison Goldberg Green. Ty’ll take good care of you guys. I will stay in touch by phone, but this is the last time I’ll show my face in Tuscola for a while. It’s okay for us to see each other when you come up to Chicago, as long as it’s something casual, like lunch. Anything more than that, and someone in the media will notice it, and make it out to look like I’m still lurking in the shadows, pulling strings.”

  “What about the long term you were talking about?”

  “Long term, nothing has changed. This is a blip on the screen of history.”

  During the conversation he had been steering the Mercedes randomly around the gridwork of roads that covered the area, occasionally zigzagging his way back toward the Cozzano farmhouse. Myron Morris’s Suburban passed them going the other way and they waved at each other. Finally Mel stopped next to Mary Catherine’s car, parked along the shoulder, and she realized that he meant for her to get out.

  “Do I get a hug?” she asked. “Or is that too sinister for Markene Caldicott?”

  Mel just sat there passively, as though suddenly stunned by what he was doing.

  Mary Catherine unfasted her seat belt, leaned over the gap between the seats, and encircled Mel’s neck in her arms, nearly lying down sideways across the front of the car. Mel wrapped his arms around her body and held her tight for at least a minute. Then he let go, all of a sudden.

  “Okay, I want to be alone now,” he said.

  Mary Catherine pecked him once on the cheek and climbed rapidly out of the car without looking back. She slammed the door behind her. Mel’s car was moving forward before the door was even shut. The tires broke loose from the pavement, spun, and squealed, kicking back twin spurts of blue smoke, and the Mercedes shot down the road past the old farmhouse, just like in the old days. In the windows of the farmhouse, the faces of young Cozzanos appeared, drawn by the noise, then drifted away as they saw that it was just Mel Meyer, the old lawyer from Chicago who liked to drive fast.