Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  About three people in the audience, widely spaced, shouted, “Praise the Lord!” Everyone else just looked embarrassed.

  “Truly doth the Lord work in mysterious ways,” Sweigel said.

  That’s for sure, McLane said to himself, thinking of Goofy.

  Norman Fowler, Jr., the Goofmeister himself, the reincarnation of Marvis, had not been invited to this little get-together, in the football-field-sized backyard of the Markham estate in Bel Air. The Southern California Rightist Coalition was not the kind of outfit that would let a moderate like Fowler anywhere near their cam­paign events, or their coffers. Tip McLane was a shoo-in, and the group had a large enough evangelical Christian wing that Sweigel had gotten an invite too.

  After the debacle in Illinois, followed by severe drubbings in the northeastern states where television evangelists had a bit of an image problem, Sweigel had stayed in the race anyway, as a broker for the evangelical vote. He was a political vampire. His broad­casting network in the Bible Belt served as an inexhaustible source of funds, and in every city he had a hard core of supporters who could be relied on to sustain his campaign.

  The incredible recovery of William A. Cozzano had caused a sudden surge in Sweigel’s popularity. Because of the number of people who believed that Sweigel had cured Cozzano, his numbers were now climbing up into double digits, and he was starting to become a major annoyance to McLane.

  But nothing more than an annoyance. Sweigel was frightening enough that he served as his own worst enemy, his own personal Goofy. Whenever he rose in the polls, he started to get more television coverage, people started having bad dreams about him, and he sank again.

  The hot dogs said everything about this luncheon. Hollywood people would not have served hot dogs. They would have served caviar, fine wines, California cuisine and all that, to show how rich and tasteful they were. But this luncheon was full of people who had come to California and staked claims to real estate prior to the invention of the movie camera, which was to say that they tended to be very old and endowed with a level of wealth that far transcended the petty plane of movie stars. Much of this wealth was not in liquid assets; all together, the territory owned by the people at this luncheon probably composed an area larger than many northeastern states. But however you looked at it, they were loaded, and this was one invitation you did not turn down.

  The man who had invited McLane to speak was none other than Karl Fort himself. Fort was now in his nineties. He had long since cashed in his agricultural holdings. Those original investments had made him a rich man, but they only produced steady dividends as long as Fort was right there on the ground, personally dispatching thugs with ax handles. This kind of micromanagement had grown wearisome, and so Fort had moved into less earthy forms of investment.

  This had left him with a great deal of free time, only some of which could be taken up on the golf course. Karl Fort had begun dabbling in politics during the sixties, supporting the likes of Caleb Roosevelt Marshall, Goldwater, and Wallace. He had been a major player in the California conservative movement of the seventies and eighties. He had given lots of money to the conservative think tanks that had provided Tip McLane with his first few jobs.

  And when the Markhams had begun making plans to host this luncheon, Karl Fort had called Tip McLane personally and actually reminisced about the good old days back in the Depression, and Tip McLane had actually called him “sir.”

  Sweigel eventually concluded his sermon with a prayer. A few people clenched their hands and bowed their heads fervently. Everyone else just looked restless or embarrassed. And then it was Tip McLane’s turn to speak.

  They applauded generously. The nervous silence that had reigned during Sweigel’s performance was finally broken. McLane got up from his seat at the high table in the front and waved and nodded to the crowd: a hundred and fifty of the richest people in the West, seated at a few long tables with their paper plates and plastic wineglasses. To one side, the press corps was corralled behind a red plastic ribbon, like wild animals.

  This was going to be a piece of cake. These people loved him; he could do no wrong here. “Thank you very much. And thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Markham for making the backyard of their magnificent home available for this event. In a few months I hope to return the invitation - though I’m afraid that you’ll have to fly all the way to Washington, D.C.”

  A few men in the crowd barked out laughter and there was a smattering of applause.

  “I have a dirty little secret for you: I’m sick to death of cam­paigning. I think everyone in America has heard my message by now. Most people who have heard it seem to agree with it. My opponents don’t, but, expecting Reverend Sweigel here, I’ve always found my opponents to be just a little bit on the goofy side.”

  About half a dozen people - those who had already seen the Fowler/Goofy image on TV - laughed loudly at this. Everyone else tittered uncertainly. The line wasn’t intended for them. It was intended to be used on the evening newscasts, at the appropriate moment.

  “So I’m not going to harangue you with my usual stump speech. Instead I’d like to speak, very briefly, about some of the ideas that I intend to put into action once I get settled into the White House next January.”

  At this point McLane paused for a moment and pretended to fiddle with his note cards. He was doing this because some kind of a distraction had arisen at one of the tables, and he didn’t want to try and shout his way through it. He assumed it was something minor, like a glass of lemonade that had spilled into someone’s lap. But it didn’t die away. It kept building.

  Several people had stood up now. They were all facing inward, looking at an elderly man who was leaning way back in his chair, almost lying down, pressing one fist into his breastbone. His mouth was open, he was gasping for breath.

  “Are there any doctors present here? This man is in distress,” McLane said.

  Something caught his eye: Zeke Zorn, standing up, waving him away from the lectern with both hands, like one of those guys at the airport directing the jetliners. McLane moved quickly away from the lectern. Only later would he understand that this had been good advice. There were very few things a man could say into a microphone at such a time that would make him look as though he had handled the situation presidentially. There were many ways to screw up.

  No one had responded to the call for a doctor. All of the lenses and microphones in the makeshift press gallery had swung over and brought themselves to bear on the man in distress.

  People were doing the normal sorts of folksy first-aid things. A couple of men cleared off a table in one instant by yanking at the tablecloth, sweeping all the plates and glasses off on to the ground, and then four people gathered around the stricken man and lifted him up on to the table’s clean surface. They loosened his tie. Someone offered him a glass of water. None of it was doing anything for his life expectancy, which clearly was measurable in seconds or minutes.

  Mr. Markham approached the lectern, pulled down the micro­phone, and spoke into it. “I’d like to ask everyone to please remain in their seats for now. Give Karl some air.”

  The stricken man was Karl Fort.

  McLane couldn’t keep his eyes off the man. Fort had ruled over the McLanes’ portion of California like a demon king. McLane had known the man’s name and face since he had been a toddler. He had been fearsome and omnipresent to those Okies who worked for him, who suffered beatings from his goons and who wondered, each week, if Fort would see fit to sign their paycheck. Uncle Purvis had, for a period of three or four decades, personally vowed to kill Karl Fort with his bare hands at least once a day. And now, after all that, Karl Fort was dying right in front of Nimrod McLane’s eyes. If only Purvis could have been here to see it.

  There was sudden motion off to McLane’s left. Someone had vaulted the high table and now was striding confidently across the lawn toward Karl Fort. Tip glanced over and realized that it was the Reverend Doctor William Joseph Sweigel.

  In the
same instant the entire press corps realized it too.

  Karl Fort’s attack had been an unfortunate coincidence. But when Rev. Sweigel stepped in to lay on his hands, it became something else: a campaign event. The plastic ribbon snapped. It was like a dam breaking. The journalists charged toward Karl Fort. There were three long rows of tables. Karl Fort was in the middle row. The first row formed a low barrier standing in the way of the journalists. The vanguard - nimble print reporters - made an end run. The second wave - burdened by minicams - simply rolled directly over the top of it, their knees nearly buckling from the weight as they jumped to the grass on the far side, and headed the print reporters off in the narrow pass between the first and middle rows.

  Three minicam operators, with their instinct for seizing the high ground, jumped to the top of the middle row. One of these three planted his foot in the midst of a paper plate heaped with baked beans and slipped; his boot shot off to the side and slammed into the chest of the fifth richest man in California so hard that it sent him toppling backward on to the ground. The cameraman slithered to his knees and then his feet, trashing a few more plates of food as he tried to accelerate in pursuit of the two other minicam operators who were now well ahead of him. His boots got traction on the tablecloth but the tablecloth slipped over the table, and so for the first few moments he actually ran in place, like a cartoon character, his feet churning madly and his body going nowhere as the tablecloth, with its burden of plates and cups, accordioned down to one end of the table, depositing a slippery obstacle course of beans, ketchup, MOO-tard, and ice cubes as it went.

  Finally he got traction and pursued the others, who had run into an obstacle of their own. Between them and Karl Fort was an ice sculpture, an intricately carved bowl of ice filled with pink lemonade. It had gone unnoticed by the cameraman who had momentarily taken the lead. His only concern was getting Karl Fort and Billy Joe Sweigel into his viewfinder as quickly as possible, and so he was running with one eye squinted shut and the other eye pressed into the neoprene cup of his eyepiece. Seeing the world in out-of-focus, black-and-white tunnel vision, he missed the ice sculpture entirely and slammed into it at a full sprint, catching it with both knees. The impact knocked his legs backward. The weight of the minicam on his shoulder jerked his body forward. He spun in midair, appeared to become completely horizontal, and then fell straight down on top of the ice sculpture. Half of the lemonade went up in the air and then all of it burst down and sideways as the cameraman’s body crushed the sculpture into con­venient bite-sized fragments. Nearby luncheon-goers caught the tsunami of ice and lemonade full in the face.

  The second cameraman was only a pace or two behind the first, he tried to stop, his feet got ahead of his body, and he landed on his ass in the midst of the ice storm, sliding to a halt and then careening off the edge of the table and landing full-length in the laps of three consecutive luncheon-goers.

  The third cameraman, also suffering from video tunnel vision, planted one foot in the small of the first cameraman’s back. That leg buckled. He caught his full weight on the other leg, hopped on it three times like a wide receiver trying not to go out of bounds, planted that foot on some ice, and skidded on one rigid leg for a distance of several feet, now looking perfectly like a figure skater. He finally got the other foot down on the edge of a serving platter, catapulting a dozen fresh grilled burgers into the chest of a prominent comedian-turned-real-estate magnate.

  At which point he realized, finally, that he was about to run over Karl Fort’s body. He planted both feet and once again created an accordion effect on a tablecloth. This carried him forward until he reached the edge of Fort’s table, where his rubber-soled boots contacted solid, clean, dry formica, and stopped dead. This slammed him forward on to his knees, which was perfect: he stopped in a kneeling position with the lens of his camera about four feet away from Karl Fort, looking straight down on his body.

  Unfortunately, from a strictly media-conscious point of view, Fort’s face wasn’t visible; the view was blocked by the beefy arms of a young man, possibly a security person, who had the heels of both hands in the middle of Fort’s naked breastbone and was rhythmically shoving off it, compressing his entire ribcage, making his bony thorax bulge outward around the sides like a stepped-on balloon. Even if this man had not been there, Fort’s face still would have been obscured by another man who was gripping Fort’s chin in one hand and his temples in the other, holding his mouth open in a yawn, bending forward to fasten his mouth over Fort’s.

  The Reverend had just arrived by Fort’s side; despite all of the above-mentioned hindrances, most of the journalistic corps had actually beaten Sweigel to the scene of the action.

  “Please step aside, please make way,” Sweigel was saying, in the rising, chantlike intonation of a preacher quoting Scripture. Since most of the people in his way were journalists who had come speci­fically to see what Sweigel was going to do, they made way willingly.

  Sweigel stood belly-up to the table, only inches away from Fort, and clasped his hands together for a moment, praying with his eyes tightly clenched shut. Then he held out both hands, palms downward, and laid them gently on Fort’s bare skin: one on the shoulder, one down on the belly, where they didn’t interfere with the CPR. Billy Joe Sweigel knew how to hedge his bets.

  Twenty feet away, Tip McLane stood numb with horror.

  He had been fighting the primary campaign for almost a year. It had been very much like an Okie bar fight: desperate men wielding brass knuckles, ice picks, and broken bottles in a dark back lot. In Iowa, New Hampshire, Super Tuesday, New York, he had taken on all comers. He had not made many friends, but, with Drasher providing the strategy and Zorn providing the media kidney punches, he had thrashed all of his adversaries into bloody, inert sides of meat. Norman Fowler had hung on all the way to California and then taken his own political life. He had come here, to safe, comfortable ground, to celebrate victory.

  And now he was being dry-gulched. Sweigel was going to nail him right between the eyes.

  If the CPR worked, if the ambulances got here in time, if the doctors arrived to deliver their miraculous clot-dissolving miracle drugs, then Sweigel would be two for two on national TV: first Cozzano, and now Karl Fort.

  Between his memories of Fort in the old days, and the prospect that the old son of a bitch might, by surviving, now torpedo his political career, Tip McLane had never wanted anyone to die quite so badly.

  “It’s fake,” Zorn said, standing very close to him and muttering into his ear. “Fort’s not really having a heart attack. Cy Ogle set this whole thing up.”

  “You’re a lunatic,” McLane said. But Zorn’s words had made him nervous anyway.

  “Lord, hear our prayer,” Sweigel said. “This man has been stricken. We pray that, in the name of JEEE-zuss, he may be healed, and walk among us once again.”

  Then he prayed silently, while the two men continued with CPR and mouth-to-mouth, until the ambulance showed up and the EMTs took over the job.

  McLane was a little surprised. He had expected that the EMTs would bundle Fort up and whisk him straight back to the ambulance as fast as possible. But instead they set up some equipment and worked on him for a few minutes, right there on the table, doing CPR with a sort of large plungerlike object and squeezing air into his lungs with a resuscitator.

  The attention of the guests, of the media, and especially of Billy Joe Sweigel could hardly have been more focused on Karl Fort. Standing at the periphery of the crowd, Tip McLane realized that, for once, absolutely no one was paying attention to him.

  From a media standpoint he was just like Gyges, ancestor of Croesus, who was able to become invisible. This was a story mentioned in Plato’s Republic. Gyges, being invisible, could get away with anything. If he used his power to do evil, but no one saw him, and he was thought to be a just man, then did he ever suffer for his crimes? Tip McLane decided to ponder this issue as he went for a bit of a stroll around the Markham estate.


  They were in the backyard, hemmed in between a sheer cliff wall on one side and the almost equally massive Markham mansion on the other. Perfectly manicured gardens wrapped around the mansion on both sides - neat paths winding between trellises of roses. Mrs. Markham adored her roses. Tip McLane walked into the fragrant and colorful jungle, quietly at first, then with long strides as he became confident that his departure had gone unnoticed.

  Within a few seconds he had worked his way around the side of the house to the front. He stood for a moment, framed in an arched trellis groaning with peach-colored roses, and took in a broad view of the horseshoe drive, which was paved with little interlocking geometric tiles.

  A few minutes ago this drive had been clogged with limousines and media vans. When the ambulance had been called, all of the drivers had pulled out of the horseshoe, down the long driveway, through the twelve-foot-high gate, and parked on the road. Now the whole front of the house was empty except for the ambulance, square in the middle of the horseshoe, doors open, engine running.

  Representative Nimrod T. (“Tip”) McLane sauntered out of the rose garden and into the horseshoe, trying to look like a man who was just out for a stroll, trying to clear his head and get away from the chaos out back. He looked carefully in all directions: into the garden, into the windows of the mansion, into the front seat of the ambulance itself. He saw no one. Everyone was out back.

  He had one or two incredible habits that he had picked up when he was just a boy, working in the broccoli fields, and that had remained unbroken through years of parochial education, Ph.D. study, conservative theorizing at various think tanks, White House dinners, and service in the House of Representatives. One habit was that he always carried a pocketknife. It was amazing how often a pocketknife came in handy.