Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  “Whom should I be nice to?”

  Marshall hooted, “Not one of those cold-blooded, cock-sucking sons a bitches. They crank out these talking-heads programs like bad sausage. They have to fill air time every night. Their Rolodexes are full of white men and everyone nags them about it. If they put you on TV, then they can point to you and prove how radically diverse they are.”

  “Oh. I thought it was because of my cogent analysis.”

  “That too,” Senator Marshall said.

  The phone rang again a few minutes later. This time it was Anita Ross of the Style section of the Post. “Ms. Richmond, we’ve heard how you stiffed Dr. Lawrence. We’d like to do a feature on you for the Style section.”

  Marshall was still sitting within earshot, apparently having nothing better to do with his time, so Eleanor hit the mute button and shouted, “It’s the Post.”

  “Fuck ‘em.”

  “Ms. Ross,” Eleanor said, “why not call me in a couple of weeks, when I’ve had the chance to get settled in. Why, the ink on my badge is hardly dry.”

  “You’d better know that by taking on the Professor, you could become an instant culture hero. But only if the story gets published.”

  “A culture hero in five minutes? Not bad.”

  “Some have come and gone here in fifteen minutes,” Ms. Ross said pointedly.

  “Well, its been nice talking to you,” Eleanor said. “Call back in twenty minutes and see if I’m still around.”

  “Nicely done,” Marshall said. “What do you think of my thoughts?”

  Eleanor realized that Marshall was waiting for her to look into the book. “I really can’t say. I haven’t had a chance to open it up yet.”

  Marshall tottered into her office, audibly grinding his teeth from pain. “Go ahead, have a look, I’ll just stretch out here on this couch.”

  Eleanor picked up the book and opened it. The first page was blank, and the second, and the third. She riffled through the pages. They were all blank.

  “Senator, what is this?”

  “It is my tabula rasa. A work in progress. You’re going to ghost­write it for me. Just like the old song says, ‘Ghost writers in the sky.’”

  “What do you want me to write?”

  “Don’t trouble me with details, woman. I don’t have much time left.”

  “But I can’t just go out and write it.”

  “Listen to me. When you made the ‘Colorado is a welfare queen state’ speech you set me to thinking. I am as much a part of the problems as Jesse is or Ted Kennedy or for that matter that poor little Shad Harper son of a bitch you nailed in Denver. You know, I love this country. I never had much trouble with money because my dad left me a lot of property and I had the privilege of being a maverick. The one thing I noticed in forty-eight years of public service, forty-four up here, is that the rarest thing in life is a person who speaks the truth. The most dangerous thing in life is a person who constantly refers to ‘values.’ If I was going to write down my testament, that is it. None of us has the right to tell anyone else how to live. None of us has the right to hold back anybody else for any reason - race, religion, income, or what have you. The rest of life is an open field, a crap shoot. The role of government is to make it an equal crap shoot for everybody. Not real profound, but real effective.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “If you feel able to adhere to the general message I just laid out-”

  “I do.”

  “Feel your way through this P.R. maze, go out and represent me on TV, and keep writing your best thoughts down in this goddamn book. Represent freedom and honesty - whoops, there I go talking about values again.”

  “You really think that someone like me is the person to represent a card-carrying member of the power structure, like you.”

  “You’re goddamned right. I never get co-opted by nobody. Nobody is ever going to co-opt you. And in this auto-erotic, skill to stay in the Beltway town, that’s a huge advantage.”

  “When I go public, how do I identify myself?”

  “Why, as Eleanor Richmond.”

  “If you want to. Lady, you’re my last gift to the country.”

  By the end of the day, Eleanor’s calendar had been filled for the summer. One major interview show a week, and two print journalists a week. Her first interview would be with the Alexandria Gazette on Friday. Even Dr. Lawrence called up, full of contrition about his lack of sensitivity, and tried to take Eleanor out on a date to the Maison Blanche. Eleanor was a hot topic for the rest of May and June.

  It didn’t take her long to figure out why: she was close to Senator Marshall, and everyone in town had heard rumors that Senator Marshall was dying. They would pump her for information about the Senator, in more or less subtle ways. She would ward off their questions and then talk about whatever she wanted - which is what Washington people always did with the press anyway.

  35

  “Floyd Wayne Vishniak,” said the digitized voice from the computer, and an array of fresh windows popped into life on Aaron Green’s high-resolution video screen. One of the windows was a photograph, a head shot of a white man with lank blond hair, not short enough to be short and not long enough to be long, sticking out from beneath a blue baseball cap that were turned down at the corners, giving him a sad and bedraggled appearance, and his skin was flushed and glossy under the blaze of an electronic flash. This was not a posed shot. It had been taken from a low angle as Floyd Wayne Vishniak rode down an escalator at a shopping mall some­where. He was staring down into the camera with a blank and baffled expression that had not yet developed into surprise. He was wearing a tightly stretched, inside-out, navy blue T-shirt with a couple of holes in it and he had the ropy muscles of a man who got them by doing physical labor and not by working out at any health club.

  This image was not the only window on the computer screen. There was a small one next to it, this one showing a brief video clip that kept looping back and replaying. It showed Floyd Wayne Vishniak sitting in the cheap seats at a sports arena somewhere, leaping to his feet along with all of the other people in his vicinity to shout abuse at some miscreant down below. In this clip, Vishniak was wearing a tremendously oversized, bright yellow foam rubber hand over his real hand. The long finger of the hand was extended. Just in case this message was not clear, it had been printed with the words FUCK THE REF. And in case the ref did not happen to be looking in his direction, Vishniak could clearly be seen mouthing the same words - chanting them over and over - in unison with all of the other sports fans in his section. In Vishniak’s other hand he was holding a plastic beer cup the size of the Louvre. While he was waving his giant yellow digit in the air, beer sloshed over the rim and splashed down on the shoulders of the fan in front of him, who reacted, but either did not care or was afraid to make a big deal out of it. Floyd Wayne Vishniak was not a person that most people would consider picking a fight with. He was not especially big, but he was tightly wound in the extreme.

  Other people were waving giant foam rubber hockey sticks and other hockey-related paraphernalia. Though the action below - the source of the controversy - was not shown on this video clip, it was evidently a hockey game, and at least one of the teams was apparently named the Quad Cities Whiplash.

  Another window, below the video loop, showed a map of the fifty states with a blinking red X superimposed on the Mississippi River, between western Illinois and eastern Iowa. Under the blinking X was the label DAVENPORT, IOWA (QUAD CITIES).

  There were two other windows on the screen, both of them carrying textual information. One of them was a brief c.v. of Floyd Wayne Vishniak. He had grown up in the Quad Cities, straddling the Illinois-Iowa border, dropped out of high school to get a job in a tractor factory, and been laid off and rehired six times in the intervening fifteen years. During the past year he had barely managed to earn his weight in dollars.

  The remaining window was a tall narrow one that ran down the side of the computer scree
n. It was a list containing exactly one hundred items. Each item consisted of a phrase describing a subset of the American population, followed by a person’s name.

  As this presentation - this computerized dossier - proceeded from one name to the next, the corresponding item on the list was highlighted, a bright purple box drawn over it so that the user could see which category he was dealing with at the moment. The hundred categories and names on the list were as follows:

  IRRELEVANT MOUTH BREATHER

  400-POUND TAB DRINKER

  STONEFACED URBAN HOMEBOY

  BURGER-FLIPPING HISTORY MAJOR

  SQUIRRELLY WINNEBAGO JOCKEY

  BIBLE-SLINGING PORCH MONKEY

  ECONOMIC ROADKILL

  PENT-UP CORPORATE LICKSPITTLE

  HIGH-METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR

  MIDAMERICAN KNICKKNACK QUEEN

  SNUFF-HAWKING BASEMENT DWELLER

  POSTADOLESCENT ROAD WARRIOR

  DEPRESSION-HAUNTED CAN STACKER

  PRETENTIOUS URBAN-LIFESTYLE SLAVE

  FORMERLY RESPECTABLE BANKRUPTCY SURVIVOR

  FROSTY-HAIRED COUPON SNIPPER

  CYNICAL MEDIA MANIPULATOR

  RETICENT GUN NUT

  UFOS ATE MY BRAIN

  MALL-HOPPING CORPORATE CONCUBINE

  HIGH-FIBER DUCK SQUEEZER

  POST-CONFEDERATE GRAVY EATER

  MANIC THIRD-WORLD ENTREPRENEUR

  OVEREXTENDED YOUNG PROFESSIONAL

  APARTMENT-DWELLING MALL STAFF

  TRADE SCHOOL METAL HEAD

  ORANGE COUNTY BOOK BURNER

  FIRST-GENERATION BELTWAY BLACK

  80’S JUNK-BOND PAR VENUE

  DEBT-HOUNDED WAGE SLAVE

  ACTIVIST TUBE FEEDER

  TOILET-SCRUBBING EX-STEEL WORKER

  NEO-OKIE

  SHIT-KICKING WRESTLEMANIAC

  SUNBELT CONDO COMMANDO

  RUST-BELT LUMPENPAOL

  and others…

  Aaron hit the space bar on the Calyx workstation’s keyboard. All of the windows disappeared except for the long skinny one with the list of categories. The next item on the list was highlighted and spoken aloud by the digitized computer voice: RETICENT GUN NUT - JIM HANSON, N. PLATTE, NEBRASKA.

  Another set of windows appeared, just like the last set but carrying different images and information. The photo was in black and white this time, reproduced from a newspaper, showing Jim Hanson, a lean-faced man of about fifty, wearing an adult Boy Scout uniform and standing out in the woods somewhere. As before, there was a short loop of videotape. It showed him standing by a picnic table in a backyard somewhere, tending a barbecue and acting as eminence grise to a crowd of small children, presumably his grandkids. The map window was the same except that now the red X had moved to the middle of one of those states in the middle of the country; apparently this was Nebraska.

  Jim Hanson didn’t look very interesting. Aaron hit the space bar again, moving on to the next item on the list: HIGH-METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR CHASE

  MERRIAM, BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y. This time, the photo was a glossy color studio shot. The video clip showed Chase Merriam teeing off at a very nice golf course somewhere along with three other high-metabolism world dominators.

  Aaron started whacking the space bar, paging through the list, flashing up the hundred photos one at a time. When it worked its way down to the bottom, it cycled back up to the top again, so he could keep it up forever if he wanted to. The red X on the map hopped back and forth across the country, tracing out a perfectly balanced demographic profile of the United States.

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak was sitting in his trailer, watching Wheel, when he heard the sound of tires on gravel. He went to the front door, glancing over to make sure that his sawed-off shotgun was sitting in its secret place; it was there all right, craftily concealed in the narrow gap behind three stacked cases of beer, right next to the door. Having thus established his parameters, he looked out the window to see who had come all the way out here to pay him a visit. If it was another bill collector, he was not going to get a very friendly reception.

  From initial appearances, it could very well be a bill collector. It was a little skinny dark-haired man with glasses and he got out of the car wearing a button-up shirt and a tie. First thing he did was open the back door of his gray Ford LTD Crown Victoria and unhook his suit jacket from the little hook that was above the back door.

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak had been driving around in cars since he was tiny, of course, and he had seen those little hook thingies above the doors and someone had told him a long time ago that they were to hang coats off of. But this very moment was the first time in his entire life that he had actually seen one used.

  A seed of resentment was germinated in his mind. Garment hooks in the back seats of cars. Always there, never used. A mysterious vestige of other times and places, like spittoons. Nobody used them; that’s how it was. Nobody wore suits to begin with, unless they were going to a wedding or a funeral. When they did wear suits, if they absolutely had to take off the jacket for some reason, they would toss it out flat on the backseat. To hang it up that way - what was this little geek trying to say, exactly? That the lint or whatever on the backseat of his fancy luxury car (which was spotless) could not be allowed to touch the fabric of his fancy suit jacket?

  It was a nice car all right, brand new and probably costing in excess of fifteen thousand bucks. Its beautiful gray finish had been streaked, below the beltline, with dark brown mud thrown up by the wheels as it had come up the gravel road from the highway. Floyd had been kicked out of his apartment in Davenport so that the landlord could rent it out to a big family of African-Americans come from Chicago to steal away a few more of Davenport’s non­existent jobs. Fortunately he knew someone who had this farm just outside of town, and was willing to let him live here in this trailer.

  The man put his suit jacket on. The satin lining flashed in the horizontal sunlight of the early evening. He shrugged his shoulders

  a couple of times so that the jacket would fall into place and look pretty on him. The jacket had padding in the shoulders that made the man look bigger than he really was. He reached into the backseat and pulled out a briefcase.

  As soon as he saw that briefcase, Floyd opened the door of his trailer and stood there leaning against the doorframe and smoking his cigarette and looking down the full height of the jury-rigged, mud-tracked staircase at this little man.

  “Hello, Mr. Vishniak,” the man said, looking up at him.

  “That’s funny, I ain’t introduced myself yet. How’d you know my name? I don’t know you. I don’t know anyone like you. All my friends drive pickup trucks with a lot of rust on ‘em. Who the hell are you?”

  The visitor seemed taken aback. “My name’s Aaron Green,” he said. He looked like he really didn’t want to be here. That actually made Floyd more sympathetic to the man because Floyd didn’t want him to be there either. So that was a start anyway.

  “What do you want?” Floyd said.

  “I want to give you ten thousand dollars.”

  “You got it with you?”

  “No, but I have a down payment of one thousand.”

  Floyd stood there in the doorway for a while and smoked his cigarette and pondered this unusual situation. A man, very likely a Jew from Chicago, had just driven up to his trailer and offered him ten thousand dollars.

  “This a Publishers Clearinghouse thing? You a friend of Ed McMahon or something?”

  “No, it’s not a sweepstakes. I represent ODR, which is a poll-taking organization based in Virginia. We’ve identified you as being a typical representative of a particular part of the United States population.”

  Floyd snorted derisively. He could just imagine.

  “We would like to keep track of your reactions to the current presidential campaign. What you think of the different candidates and issues.”

  “So you want me to go to Virginia?”

  “No. Not at all. We want you to change your life
style as little as possible. That’s crucial to the system.”

  “So you’re going to call me up every couple days and ask me questions.”

  “It’s even easier than that,” Green said. “Can I step inside and show you?”

  Floyd snorted again. “My little abode ain’t much to look at.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll only take ten or fifteen minutes of your time.”

  “Come on in then.”

  Aaron Green and Floyd sat down in front of the TV. Floyd turned the volume down a little bit and offered his visitor a beer, which he declined. “I have to drive to Nebraska tonight,” he said, “and if I have a beer now I’ll be pulling over to urinate all night long.”

  “Nebraska? What, you taking one guy from each state?”

  “Something like that,” Aaron Green said. Obviously he did not believe that Floyd Wayne Vishniak, a dumb uneducated factory worker, would ever be smart enough to understand the details.

  “You ever read Dick Tracy comics?” Aaron Green asked.

  “They don’t have it in the paper here,” Floyd said. “You ever read Prince Valiant?”

  Again, Aaron Green stumbled. He was having a hard time building up his momentum. “Well, you might have heard of the wristwatch television set.”

  “Yeah, I heard of that.”

  “Well, here’s your chance to have a look at one.” Aaron Green pulled something out of his briefcase.

  It looked like a super hightech watch or something. Like some kind of secret military thing that a commando in a movie would wear.

  The band of the watch was not just a strip of leather or anything like that. It was made of hard black plastic ventilated with lots of holes. It was huge, about three inches wide. It consisted of several plates of this hard black plastic stuff hinged together so that it would curve around the wrist.

  Instead of having just one clockface on the top surface, it had a whole little screen type of thing, just like on a digital watch except that it wasn’t showing anything right now, just gray and blank. And in addition to that there were a few other raised black containers molded to the outer surface of the watchband, but they didn’t have any screens or buttons or anything like that, they were just blank, and must have contained batteries or something.