Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  William A. Cozzano was out for his morning constitutional: out his back door, through the gate and into the alley, half a block down, through a break in the hedge, and into the Thorsen’s driveway. Down the edge of their side yard, waving to ninety-year-old Mrs. Thorsen, who was invariably standing at her kitchen window washing dishes, then into the street, another half block up, through a gap in the chain-link fence around Tuscola City park, and from there, wherever he wanted to go. It was a route he had been following since he had learned to walk the first time, and it was one of the first thing he had done when he learned to walk the second time.

  Nowadays, of course, he was usually accompanied by half a dozen support personnel when he did it. Mrs. Thorsen didn’t seem to mind all those people traipsing through her yard. She lived alone now. It was a mystery how she could have so many dishes to wash, but she was always there washing them.

  The trip to the park was a tricky, twisting affair that Cozzano’s entourage had to accomplish in single file. Once they reached the broad open spaces of the park proper, they were able to spread out and walk in a group. Usually the entourage consisted of a couple of nurses, Myron Morris’s home-movie crew, and someone from the Radhakrishnan Institute, connected back to a bedroom in the Cozzano house by a radio headset. On this particular day, Zeldo came along for the walk.

  “You’re walking. You’re talking. Congratulations,” he said.

  “Thanks. It’s nice,” Cozzano said.

  “If you keep improving the way you have been, then by sometime in mid June you should be essentially back to normal.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I’d like to know if you would have any interest in developing some capabilities that are better than normal.”

  This was a bizarre suggestion and Zeldo knew it; he was visibly nervous as he spoke the words. He watched Cozzano’s face carefully for a reaction.

  For along time, Cozzano didn’t react at all. He kept walking as if he hadn’t heard. But he was no longer looking around. He was staring down at the grass in front of his feet, trying to scorch a hole in the ground with his eyes.

  After a minute, or so, he seemed to reach a conclusion. He looked up again. But he still didn’t speak for another minute or so. He was apparently formulating a response. Finally he looked at Zeldo and said, nonchalantly, “I have always been a strong believer in self-improvement.”

  “I’m seeing my aunt Mary taking an apple pie out of the oven,” Cozzano said. “It is Thanksgiving Day of 1954 at 2:15 p.m. A football game is going on the television in the next room. My father and some uncles and cousins are watching it. They are all smoking pipes and the smoke stings my nose. The Lions have the ball on their own thirty-five, second down and four yards to go. But I’m concentrating on the pie.”

  “Okay, that’s good,” Zeldo said, typing all of this furiously into the computer. “Now, what happens when I stimulate this link?” He swiveled around to another keyboard and typed a command into another computer.

  Cozzano’s eyes narrowed. He was staring into the distance, unfocused.

  “Just a very fleeting image of Christina at the age of about thirty-five,” Cozzano said. “She’s in the living room, wearing a yellow dress. I can’t remember much more than that. Now it’s fading.”

  “Okay, how about this one?” Zeldo said, typing in another command.

  Cozzano drew a sharp breath into his nostrils and began to smack his lips and swallow. “A very intense odor. Some kind of chemical odor that I was exposed to at the plant. Possibly a pesticide.”

  “But you’re not getting any visuals?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “Okay, how about this one?”

  “Jesus!” Cozzano shouted. Genuine fright and astonishment had come over his face. He half-slid, half-rolled out of his chair and dropped to the floor of the bedroom, landing on his belly, and crawled on his elbows so that he was half-hidden under a bed.

  “Let me guess,” Zeldo said. “Something from Vietnam.”

  Cozzano went limp and dropped his face down on to his arms, staring directly into the floor. His back and shoulders were heaving and sweat was visible along his hairline.

  “Sorry about that,” Zeldo said.

  “It was unbelievably realistic,” Cozzano said. “My God, I actually heard the sound of a bullet whizzing past my head.” He sat up and held up one hand, just above and to one side of his right temple. “It was from an AK-47. It came from this direction, right out of the jungle, and shot past me. Missed me by a couple of inches, I’d say.”

  “Is that a specific memory of something that happened to you?” Zeldo said.

  Cozzano’s eyes became distant. He was staring at the wall, but he wasn’t seeing it. “Hard to say. Hard to say.”

  “When you saw the apple pie, it seemed very specific.”

  “It was specific. It really happened. This was more of a fleeting glimpse of something. Almost like a reconstruction of a generic type of event.”

  “Interesting,” Zeldo said. “Would you like to take a break?”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind,” Cozzano said. “That one really shook me up. How many more do we have to do?”

  Zeldo laughed. “We’ve done three dozen so far,” he said, “and we could potentially do a couple of thousand. It’s up to you.”

  By the end of the day, Zeldo had stimulated more than a hundred separate connections into Cozzano’s brain. Each one elicited a completely different response.

  AN ENTIRE PASSAGE FROM MARK TWAIN MATERIALIZED IN HIS HEAD.

  HE SMELLED THE ROOT CELLAR AT THE OLD FARMHOUSE OUTSIDE OF TOWN.

  HE FELT AN OVERPOWERING SENSE OF GRIEF AND LOSS, FOR NO REASON AT ALL.

  A COLD FOOTBALL SLAMMED INTO HIS HANDS DURING A SCRIMAGE IN CHAMPAIGN.

  HE BIT INTO A THICKLY FROSTED CHOCOLATE CAKE. A B-52 STREAKED OVERHEAD.

  HE SAW A FULL PAGE FROM HIS WEEKLY APPOINTMENT CALENDAR, MARCH 25-31, 1991.

  SNOWFLAKES DRIFTED ON TO HIS OUTSTRETCHED TONGUE AND MELTED.

  HE BECAME SEXUALLY AROUSED FOR NO DISCERNIBLE REASON.

  AN OLD BARRY MANILOW SONG PLAYED IN HIS HEAD.

  HIS CAR SKIDDED OFF AN ICY ROAD IN WINTER 1960 AND HIT A TELEPHONE POLE; HIS FOREHEAD SLAMMED INTO THE WINDSHIELD AND CRACKED IT.

  THE TINKLING SOUND OF ICE CUBES IN A GLASS PITCHER OR ICED TEA BEING STIRRED BY ONE OF HIS AUNTS.

  HE TRIMMED HIS FINGERNAILS IN A TOKYO HOTEL ROOM.

  MARY CATHERINE DID SOMETHING THATMADE HIM VERY ANGRY; HE WASN’T SURE EXACTLY WHAT.

  “I have to quit,” Zeldo said. “I can’t type any more. My fingers are dead.”

  “I want to keep going,” Cozzano said. “This is incredible.”

  Zeldo thought about it. “It is incredible. But I’m not sure if its useful.”

  “Useful for what?”

  “The whole point of this exercise was to figure out a way to use this chip in your head for communication,” Zeldo said.

  Cozzano laughed. “You’re right. I had forgotten about that.”

  “I’m not sure how we use all of this stuff to communicate,” Zeldo said. “It’s all impressionistic stuff. Nothing rational.”

  “Well,” Cozzano said, “it’s a new communications medium. What is necessary is to develop a grammar and syntax.”

  Zeldo laughed and shook his head. “You lost me.”

  “It’s like film,” Cozzano said. “When film was invented, no one knew how to use it. But gradually, a visual grammar was developed. Filmgoers began to understand how the grammar was used to communicate certain things. We have to do the same thing with this.”

  “I should get you together with Ogle,” Zeldo said.

  “You should have studied more liberal arts,” Cozzano said.

  29

  Eleanor made the mistake of giving out her full name. Since her name was listed in the telephone book, she was now reachable by everyone, all the time. She had the impression that her phone number must have been spray-painted in digits
ten feet tall on the wall of every public housing project in greater Denver. And somehow they had all heard that Eleanor Richmond was a nice lady who would help you out with your problems.

  She began to get calls from constituents in the middle of the night. When some unemployed mother of three phoned her at one o’clock one night and asked her for a personal loan of a hundred dollars, Eleanor came to her senses and decided that this had to stop. She could not be unofficial mom to all of Denver. She soon got into the habit of turning off the ringer on her phone when she went to bed.

  This was a difficult step for a mother of two teenagers to take, because once she turned off that ringer, she knew that her kids would not be able to wake her up in the middle of the night and ask her advice, or request help, apologize, or simply burst into tears whenever they got themselves into a Situation. And although Eleanor’s kids were reasonably smart and fairly responsible and kind of prudent, they still had an amazing talent for finding their way into Situations.

  But by this point in her mothering career, Eleanor had seen enough Situations that she had begun to suspect that her kids were more apt to get into them when they knew that Mom would be there at the other end of the phone line to bail them out. And sure enough, when she got in the habit of turning her phone off at night, the incidence of Situations dropped. Or maybe she just stopped hearing about them. Either way it was fine with her.

  It didn’t help her sleep, though. Turning off the phones pre­vented them from ringing. But she could still hear the mechanical parts inside her answering machine clunking and whirring all night long, as people left messages for her. She put the answering machine in the far corner of her trailer and buried it under a pillow, but that didn’t help. She still lay awake at night wondering, Why the hell are these people calling me?

  She had never called anyone. It had never even occurred to her, when she was broke, and her husband had gone on the lam to the Afterlife, and her mother was soiling her pants in the middle of the night, and Clarice and Harmon, Jr., were out getting into Situations, to pick up the phone and contact the office of the Senator. It would not have occurred to her in a million years.

  Where had these people gotten the weird idea that the government was going to take care of their problems?

  The answer to that one was pretty simple: the government had told them as much. And they had been dumb enough to believe it. When it turned out to be lie (or at least a hell of an exaggeration) they didn’t go out and help themselves. Instead they stewed in their own problems and they got self-righteous about it and started calling Eleanor Richmond in the wee hours to vent their outrage.

  She had to stop thinking this way. She was thinking exactly like Earl Strong. Blaming everything on the welfare mothers. As if the welfare mothers had caused the savings and loan crisis, the budget deficit, the decline of the schools, and El Nino all at once.

  She would he awake every night for hours, sensing the distant clunking of her answer machine under the pillow in the next room, and run through this series of thoughts over and over again, like a rat on a treadmill, exhausting herself but never going anywhere.

  One morning in the middle of April she got up, turned on her coffee maker, took the pillow off her answering machine, and played back the messages, as she did every morning. Today there were only four of them. The people who had Eleanor’s phone number written on the walls of their trailers and project flats had begun to learn that she never responded to messages and, bit by bit, weren’t bothering to call anymore.

  One of the messages was from someone speaking a language that Eleanor had never heard before. He rambled on until the machine cut him off. Then there were a couple of irate voters. And then there came a voice she recognized: it was one of Senator Marshall’s political aides, calling from Washington.

  “Hi, this is Roger calling from D.C. at nine a.m. local time.”

  Eleanor glanced at her clock. It was 7:15. This message had just come in while she was showering.

  “We have a major problem that’s up your alley. Please call me as soon as you can.”

  Eleanor picked up her phone and started punching numbers. She got through to Roger in D.C. During her month of working for Senator Marshall she had spoken briefly to this man once previously, and seen his name on a lot of memos.

  Senators were too important to do anything personally. They were like sultans being carried around on sedan chairs, their feet never actually touching the ground. They showed up at the Capitol to make speeches and cast votes, and they made a lot of essentially social appearances, but most of the actual grunge work was delegated to a few key aides. This Roger character was one of those aides. He was a highly media-conscious, touchy-feely sort who spent a lot of time worrying about Senator Marshall’s image with the folks at home. When a high-school band made a trip to Washington, D.C., it was Roger who made sure that they got in to the Senator’s office for a photograph and a brief chat.

  “Hi, Eleanor, I’m glad you called back,” he said. “Look, I got a call this morning from Roberto Cuahtemoc at the Aztlan Center over in Rosslyn.”

  Rosslyn was part of Arlington, Virginia, right across the bridge from Eleanor’s hometown. Aztlan was a Hispanic advocacy group. Roberto Cuahtemoc had formerly been Roberto something-else and had switched to a Nahuatl last name during his college years. He was obscure to northeastern Hispanics, but in the Southwest, particularly among migrant workers, he was revered.

  Naturally, he and Senator Marshall hated each other. At least, they did in public. In private they had apparently reached some kind of an arrangement. When Roberto Cuahtemoc phoned the Senator first thing in the morning it probably meant he was pissed about something.

  “He’s really pissed,” Roger said. “He got a call from Ray del Valle this morning at seven a.m. our time, which means that our buddy Ray was up and at ‘em at five a.m. in Denver.”

  Ray del Valle was a Denver-based activist and protege of Cuahtemoc. He was young, smart, and, considering the intensity of his convictions, Eleanor had found him easy to get along with.

  “What’s Ray up to?” she said.

  “He’s convinced that some migrant family is getting screwed over by Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center. There’s a little kid involved. It’s the kind of thing where he could really beat our brains out in the media, and believe me, if anyone understand that fact, it’s Ray. So before he makes the Senator out to look like Francisco fucking Pizarro or something, please get over there and show the flag and tell everyone how concerned the Senator is. Are you ready to write down this address?”

  “Shoot,” she said.

  Fifteen minutes later she was there. It was a straight shot. She’d used most of her first paycheck to fix up the Volvo. She crept up to the edge of Highway 2, looked both ways, and punched the gas, spraying dust and rocks back into the Commerce Vista, screaming a wild left-hand turn on to the highway, headed southwest toward Denver. She weaved her way through heavy truck traffic, passing one trailer park after another, eventually getting into the heavy industrial zone of southern Commerce City - all the stuff that Harmon had avoided when he’d first taken her to look at the Commerce Vista. Passing out of the refinery zone, over and under freeways and railway lines, she entered a flat, hot warehouse region of north Denver that catered entirely to semitrailer rigs and the men who drove them. One parking lot had been turned into a makeshift bus station where you could catch a bus straight to Chihuahua. Finally she passed under Interstate 70 and into the area she was looking for.

  Her destination was a tiny brick bungalow in a neighborhood of tiny brick bungalows. The neighborhood was entirely Mexican-American and it seemed like 90 percent of its population was clustered around this particular house. She had to park her car a couple of blocks away and excuse her way through the crowd until she reached the epicenter.

  The center of attention wasn’t the house itself; it was a pickup truck parked in its driveway. A yellow Chevy pickup, at least twenty years old, rusted in many places, w
ith a white fiberglass camper cap attached to the back, held on to the box by means of four C-clamps. The truck’s tailgate and the rear window of the camper cap was spread open like a pair of jaws to provide a view inside: a couple of bulging Hefty bags filled with clothes, and a flannel sleeping bag, zipped open to expose its colorful lining (mallards in flight over a northern wetland) and spread out flat on the rusted steel floor to soften its corrugations. There were a couple of pillows shoved into the corners and some wadded-up sheets and blankets.

  And there were a lot of flowers too. A number of bouquets had been tossed in on top of the sleeping bag. More bunches were leaning against the side of the truck or resting on the roof of the fiberglass cap.

  At the very center of the action were two men whom Eleanor recognized. One of them was a tall, good-looking young man in jeans and a blazer. With his black ponytail he could have passed for a full-blooded Apache. This was Ray del Valle. He was talking to a local newspaper reporter who covered the Chicano affairs beat.

  Eleanor didn’t pay much attention to them. She just made her way through the crowd, trying to suppress a gag reflex that was gradually rising in her throat. She got close enough that she was practically standing in between the two men, staring into the maw of the pickup truck.

  Last night, the four children of Carlos and Anna Ramirez had lain down on that sleeping bag to sleep while their parents, sitting up front in the truck’s cab, had driven them across the high plains southeast of Denver. They had gone to sleep quickly, and slept well, not because it was cozy but because the back of the truck was full of carbon monoxide leaking from the truck’s exhaust. Three of the children had died. One was in the hospital in critical condition, with irreparable brain damage. Carlos and Anna Ramirez had not known what was going on until they had arrived here, early this morning, at the home of Anna’s sister.

  She knew all these things from her phone conversation with Roger. He had run through the story quickly and tersely and she had listened in much the same spirit, looking at it as a political problem to be solved. But now that she was here in the middle of a sniffling and wailing crowd, looking into the bed where the innocents had died, the emotional impact suddenly hit her like a truck. Eleanor put her hand over her mouth, closed her eyes, and tried to suppress the urge to become physically ill.