Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  It was a blast. Mary Catherine was having a great time. She could hardly hear a word Dad was saying. All of the kids in all of those extended families looked up to her, she was like a goddess, role model, and honorary big sister to dozens. She had the special status accorded to big girls who know how to drive, are skilled at kissing owies, and aren’t afraid to throw and catch a football. Consequently she was visited by a never-ending stream of perfectly dressed-up little kids who came up to her to pay homage, admire her dress, show her their owies, give her presents, have their shoes tied, display important baseball cards, and ask for directions back to their mommies.

  Consequently she had no idea what was going on when, suddenly, the entire crowd - bleachers, podium, everywhere - suddenly jumped to its feet and burst forth in wild exaltation. Ten thousand helium balloons launched themselves from the end zone and headed for Mars. Tremendous barrages of firecrackers went off all over the place, releasing skeins of acrid smoke into the air. Boat horns screeched all over the place as if all the world’s seagulls were dying at once, the podium reverberated with the thumping bass drums of the marching band, and from somewhere - a helicopter, maybe? - a thunderhead of confetti descended upon the scene, so dense that for a few moments you could hardly see your own hand. Mary Catherine instinctively looked to her father, who was just visible through the confetti as a glowing outline, limned by the television lights, blurred by the red-white-and-blue blizzard.

  It seemed like he was a thousand miles away from her. Not a human being, but an electronic figment conjured up from the computers of a media laboratory. Ronald Reagan had been an actor. At times, William A. Cozzano had begun to seem like a special effect.

  Then the blizzard of confetti cleared and he was just standing there, letting the waves of sound roll over him, and he turned towards her, his eye searching through the faces, the smoke, the streamers and balloons, and he found her, caught her eye, and smiled a smile that was for her and for her alone.

  She smiled back. She knew that both of them were thinking about Mom.

  She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do. She didn’t even know what was going on, really. But she wanted to be with Dad, and so she walked across the podium and climbed the steps to the raised lectern. He caught her up with one arm around her waist as she reached the top step and crushed her to his side. The noise level went up by another few decibels, if that was possible, and she did what she was supposed to do: she looked not at her father, but out on to the crowd, into the battery of lenses, and waved. She felt terrified and forlorn, but with Dad holding her up she knew she’d get through it. It was so good to have him back.

  A huge banner had unfurled from the top of the bleachers and it said, COZZANO FOR PRESIDENT. This was not the first time that Mary Catherine had seen those words, but when she saw them up there, ten feet high, on the Tuscola High School bleachers, she knew it was for real. And she finally realized what had touched off all of this tumult: Dad had done it. He had announced. He was running for president.

  The rest of the day was completely out of control. It was like being stuck in the middle of a riot in which no one got hurt. It was like the biggest, rowdiest, most drunken wedding of all time, to the tenth power; and instead of a single photographer telling everyone what to do, there was an army of photographers. So many flashes went off in Mary Catherine’s eyes that she began to see things that weren’t there, as if the electronic flash was a gateway to a hidden dimension. The rally developed into an open-air hugging, kissing, handshaking, and sweating festival and, assisted by shuttle buses, gradually migrated across town to the Tuscola City Park, where half of the pigs in the Midwest were revolving on spits inside giant, rusted, smoking, portable barbecue pits. Green fiberglass portable toilets were lined up in ranks at one end of the park, like ceremonial guards at a coronation. A linear mile of picnic tables had been set up with red-white-and-blue tablecloths and loaded up with lemonade, iced tea, punch, water, coffee, and beer.

  Mary Catherine made her way through all of this one step at a time, stooping every yard or so to greet someone new. After the first thousand or so people, she completely lost her ability to remember faces. A nice lady came up and shook her hand and chatted with her for a while; Mary Catherine had her pegged as her old Sunday School teacher until she realized that this woman was, in fact, the wife of a Supreme Court justice. She said hello to Althea Coover, DeWayne Coover’s granddaughter and an old college mate of hers. As the hours went on, she saw a great many people whom she recognized, but oddly enough they were people she had never met before. They were movie stars, professional athletes, senators, and musicians. She knew their faces as well as she knew the faces of her own aunts and uncles, and so it didn’t seem strange at all to see them wandering around Tuscola, to see the Senator from Wyoming swapping jokes with the coach of the Bulls.

  At one point she even ran into Cy Ogle and had the presence of mind to tell him that she wanted to talk to him when he got a chance. He couldn’t talk to her right away because he was addressing the two squads of cheerleaders, Tuscola and Rantoul, who had all gotten a chance to take showers and get pretty. He was confessing his total inability to choose which squad had done better, and promising to buy new uniforms for both squads. Consequently he didn’t talk to Mary Catherine until about an hour later, when he finally tracked her down on the edge of the festival.

  She was standing at home plate on the softball diamond. She had hung her blazer up on a nail sticking out of the wooden backstop. She had an aluminium bat in her hands and she was knocking fly balls and grounders to half a dozen preadolescent boys, arrayed throughout the infield and outfield, playing a game called five hundred. In honor of her high birth, superior muscles, and pinpoint place-hitting ability, they had named her All-Time Batter. She punched the balls out. They caught them, keeping track of their own scores, and threw them back. By hitting the balls in the right places, she was able to keep their scores pretty closely bunched together. After a while, a Japanese TV crew showed up and began to film her. She didn’t mind.

  “I detect some bias here,” someone drawled, just after she hit an easy grounder to a small boy who had just entered the game.

  She turned around. It was Ogle, watching her through the backstop. “How long have you been watching?” she said.

  “Couple minutes. I was going to come out and catch for you. But that’d spoil the visual,” he said, nodding toward the Japanese video crew. She could not tell, from the way he said this, whether he was serious or making fun of himself.

  “They’ve got their visual,” she said. “Why don’t you come out and catch before I break a nail and spoil that visual.”

  “Okay, kids!” Ogle shouted, emerging from behind the back­stop, “Now y’all got an all-time catcher too! First one who bops me in the head gets two hundred points!”

  A ball came sailing from left field, directly toward Ogle’s head.

  He pretended not to notice until it was nearly there, then suddenly held up his hands and grabbed it inches away from his face. “Wow!” he said, looking frightened and shaking his head in astonishment. The kids went nuts.

  Ogle underhanded the ball gently to Mary Catherine. She one-handed it, then turned to survey the field. All the kids jumped up and down and punched their gloves. Little Peter Domenici was currently trailing the field, so she tossed the ball lightly up in the air and punched a pop fly to him. He didn’t even have to move in order to catch it, but he dropped it anyway.

  “We need to talk about a couple of things,” she said.

  “I’m all ears,” Ogle said, pulling on his ears ridiculously. They were prominent ears at the best of times. A hard pitch from Peter Domenici was sailing directly toward his right temple and at the last minute he let go of his ear and clawed the ball out of the air. A moan of disappointment went up from the fielders.

  “This whole thing is so vast that I don’t know where to begin,” she said. “I have so many questions.”

  “There’s no way
you can understand everything,” Ogle said, tossing the ball to her. “That’s my job. Why don’t you just tell me your main concerns.”

  Mary Catherine knocked a difficult grounder out to one of her Tuscola cousins. “Whose idea was it to have Dad jog from the helicopter to the podium?”

  Ogle squinted into the sun, thinking that one over. “I’d be hard put to remember who came up with that one first. But your dad enjoyed doing it. And I didn’t try to discourage him.”

  “Do you think it’s advisable, given his medical problems?”

  “Well, he’s been jogging three miles a day.”

  “Yeah, but wearing a suit, under all that stress, and in front of all those cameras - what if he had some kind of a problem? Even healthy people like Bush and Carter have had problems while jogging.”

  “Exactly,” Ogle said “that’s exactly why it works.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know and I know, and your dad knows, that it’s perfectly okay for him to run that short distance. My god, the man is like a human steam locomotive. But most people don’t know that. All they know is that Cozzano is supposed to have been sick. They have developed this image of him as a frail, faltering invalid. When they see him jog across that football field, they see vivid evidence that this is a wrong impression, and they watch very carefully, because there’s an element of danger.”

  “Could you run that last part by me again?” Mary Catherine said. She and Ogle had gotten into a smooth rhythm now, knocking hit after hit out to the little kids with their baseball gloves.

  “The skydivers,” he said. “We had three skydivers come in low over the podium and land on the grass. Now, why on earth did we do that?” Ogle sounded mystified.

  “I don’t know. Why did you?”

  “Because everyone knows that sometimes skydivers break legs. They can’t help watching. Same deal with those idiots who were setting off firecrackers.”

  “They worked for you?”

  “Sure they did. Oh, those were just tiny little ladyfingers. You could set one off in the palm of your hand and you’d be fine. But it sure looked dangerous. So people watched. And that’s why it was a great visual when your dad ran across the field.”

  Mary Catherine sighed. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”

  Ogle shrugged. “Everyone’s entitled to feelings.”

  “Speaking of that whole safety issue,” she said, “when did the Secret Service start following Dad around? I didn’t know he had a Secret Service detail.”

  “He doesn’t,” Ogle said. “Those were just actors.”

  She dropped the tip of the bat down on to home plate and stared at him. “What did you say?”

  “They were actors dressed up like Secret Service.”

  “Hired by you.”

  “Of course.”

  She shook her head uncomprehendingly. “Why?”

  “For the same reason we built extra bleachers, and put extra microphones on the lectern.”

  “And what reason is that?”

  “Being a third-party candidate has big, big advantages,” Ogle said. “But it has some disadvantages too. One of the disadvantages, as Perot found out, is that people may not take you seriously. That is the single most dangerous thing we have to worry about. So at every step along the way, we need to surround your father with the visible trappings of presidentiality. Chief among those is the Secret Service detail.”

  Mary Catherine just shook her head. “I can’t believe you,” she said.

  “Sometimes I can hardly believe myself,” he said, turning to face her. A soft, arcing throw was headed toward Ogle from a five-year-old stationed on the pitcher’s mound. Ogle deliberately took it in the back of the head and went into a staggering pantomime of a silly man with a mild concussion, wobbling around home plate, rolling his eyes, bouncing drunkenly off the backstop. The kids went completely out of their gourds and a couple of them actually fell down on the grass, tossing their gloves up in the air, screaming with uncontrollable laughter. Mary Catherine shook her head, smiling in spite of herself. She looked at the kids who were still strong enough to remain on their feet and twirled her finger around her ear.

  “When you’ve recovered,” she said, “I have one or two more things.”

  “I think I feel a little better now,” Ogle said. “Shoot.”

  “I feel like I’m being set up as some kind of a surrogate wife. It’s creepy.”

  “Yes, it is,” Ogle said.

  “It borders on the perverse. I’m not going to do it anymore.”

  “You don’t have to,” Ogle said. “The only reason it happened today was that this is a formal event, kind of like a wedding. In a wedding, you know, the father is supposed to give away the bride. But if the father of the bride is dead, or if he hit the road twenty years ago with some white trash floozy and a fifth of Jack and never was heard from again, then that place must be filled by some other individual - it doesn’t matter who - anyone with a Y chromosome. Could be a brother, an uncle, even the bride’s high-school basketball coach. It just don’t matter. Well, a campaign announce­ment is the same deal except that normally the wife is there in her silly hat and her sensible shoes. You performed that role today; it’s just that you happened to look a hell of a lot better.”

  “Thanks,” she snapped, rolling her eyes.

  “Now that the ceremony is over, you can go back to being who you are. No more creepy stuff at least until he gets inaugurated.”

  “One more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m the campaign physician.”

  Ogle was a bit startled. “We already hired-”

  “I’m the campaign physician.”

  “We need you for other-”

  “I’m the campaign physician,” she said.

  This time it sunk in. Ogle shrugged and nodded. “You’re obviously the best person for the job.”

  The direct hit to Ogle’s head had put the little kid on the pitcher’s mound over the five-hundred-point mark. Mary Catherine thought about starting another game, but her attention had been drawn by a great deal of cheering and hilarity from one of the other playing fields. She headed in that direction.

  A football game was in progress. Two teams of at least fifteen players each had taken the field. The ex-Bears were evenly divided between those two teams. Cozzano was, of course, the quarterback of one team. The opposing quarterback wore two Super Bowl rings. The ages of the teams ranged from ten years old up to the early seventies. Some of the players were farmers and some ran major corporations. Mary Catherine recognized Kevin Tice, the founder of Pacific Netware, serving as a wide receiver; in person, he was bigger and more athletic than his nerdy image would lead one to believe. Zeldo was in the trenches on the defensive line, being blocked by none other than Hugh MacIntyre, CEO of MacIntyre Engineering, who must have been in his early sixties but looked as strong and healthy as Dad.

  The game was an extremely loose and goofy affair, with players of both teams constantly circulating on and off the field to get refreshments or visit the portable toilets. It was too hot to play hard. Still, each team had a hard core of adult men with highly com­petitive natures, and as the game wore on, all the little kids and the dilettantes dropped out and left behind half a dozen or so guys on each side, playing football that verged on serious. They didn’t have a formal timekeeper, but they did have a deadline: a formal reception was taking place later at the Cozzano residence and they all had to quit playing at six o’clock.

  At the end, the game actually got exciting. Cozzano’s team was down by three points with time left for only one play. They came out in shotgun formation; the ball was expertly snapped by a Nobel laureate from the University of Chicago and Cozzano dropped back to pass, faking repeatedly in the direction of a very tall retired Celtic who was running toward the end zone, waving his arms frantically. The defense shouted in unison “ONE MISSISSIPPI TWO MISSISSIPPI THREE MISSISSIPPI!” giving Coz
zano a little bit of time, and then they attacked. Zeldo defeated the blocking efforts of Hugh MacIntyre, despite the fact the MacIntyre illegally held on to his belt and began to chase Cozzano around the backfield. Cozzano scrambled expertly and wildly, evading tackle after tackle; he was older and slower than Zeldo, but he was wearing shoes with rubber soles. Finally, Zeldo managed to bring Cozzano down near the forty-yard line, just as Cozzano launched a desperation pass known as a Hail Mary. To no one’s surprise, the ex-Celtic grabbed the bull out of the air high over the outstretched hands of the defenders and then fell into the end zone, winning the game.

  Mary Catherine applauded and cheered along with the rest of the crowd, then looked back up the field at her father and Zeldo. They were lying on the grass next to each other, propped up on their elbows, watching the action, laughing the deep, booming laughter of men completely out of their mind on a potent cocktail of dirt, football, male bonding, and testosterone.

  41

  Mary Catherine extricated herself from the reception around midnight and snuck upstairs to her room. Once inside, she stuck a bent paper clip into the keyhole of the old door hardware and shot the bolt, a skill she had picked up through long practice at the age of eight. Now that most of the techies and therapists had left, she had her room back the way it was supposed to be, with her old single bed with the handmade quilt on it, family pictures, her own little TV set on a table at the foot of the bed. She kicked her shoes off and stretched out full length on top of the old quilt. For the first time she realized how completely exhausted she was.