Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  “-for not having the guts to commit suicide,” Eleanor said, “which would be the only decent way out for some people in D.C.”

  “Are you here as an observer,” Mary Catherine said, “or are you a participant?”

  “This whole thing is so slick I’m not sure there’s a difference,” Eleanor said.

  “I hear you,” Mary Catherine said.

  “But to answer your question, I was invited here for the debate.”

  “Debate?”

  “Yes. Thursday night. After The Simpsons and before L.A. Law. All of the potential running mates are going to fight it out.”

  “He’s considering you as a running mate?” Mary Catherine asked. She was embarrassed to have been so surprised. Eleanor was looking at her knowingly and indulgently. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’d be great,” Mary Catherine said. “You’d be fantastic. But I hadn’t heard any of this.”

  “Honey, remember how this works,” Eleanor said. “Neither your dad nor any other candidate is going to pick a black woman as a running mate anytime soon - and if they did, they’d never pick me. But he does get some brownie points - as it were - for putting one in the final four. And that’s why I’m invited.”

  “Well, I’ll definitely look forward to the debate.”

  “How about you? What’s your role in all this?” Eleanor said, sweeping her hand across the smoking panorama of the barbecue.

  Mary Catherine looked at the view and considered this question. She knew now why she had chosen to go on the boat ride: to get away, to stand back from things, to look at her life from a distance. The same impulse had probably struck most of the people on the boat. This conversation with Eleanor was just what she had been looking for.

  She trusted Eleanor instinctively and wanted to tell her the truth: that something was wrong with her father. That during the last couple of months she had watched his every move, listened to his every utterance, used every scrap of her neurological training to piece together the puzzle of what was happening inside his brain. That she was spending a couple of hours a day with him in intensive, private therapy, trying to bring him back. And that the further she got into this thing, the lonelier she got, the more scared she became.

  But she couldn’t quite say that yet. So she had to play the airhead. “Who the hell knows?” she said.

  Eleanor put one hand over her mouth, in a gesture that was incongruous and cute in a tough middle-aged woman, and laughed.

  Mary Catherine continued, “My role is to be pretty, but not too pretty; smart, but not too; athletic, but not too. I think what they really wanted was a nice college girl. You know, the kind of girl who could go to college campuses in jeans and a sweater and sit cross-legged on the floor in dorm loungers and rap with her peers. They got a neurologist instead. And there’s only so many AIDS babies I can kiss before that gets kind of old. So my life is on hold for a while until things settle down.”

  “Well, we all go through transitions,” Eleanor said. “This sort of thing - a big campaign - is a kind of upheaval that can be useful.”

  “Useful how?”

  “It shakes everything up. Everything’s in flux for a moment, you have the chance to go off in new directions, fix old problems in your life. Believe me on this.”

  Mary Catherine smiled. “I believe you,” she said.

  Ever since the beginning of William A. Cozzano’s National Town Meeting, the hightech wristwatch strapped to Floyd Wayne Vishniak’s arm had been flaring into action several times a day, confronting him with live coverage of the events that were taking place only a couple of hundred miles away. He welcomed the free entertainment, which took his mind off the stupid work he was doing.

  He had lived for quite some time now on a meager unemploy­ment check, and had long since given up trying to find himself a job. But now, Floyd Wayne Vishniak, by virtue of the PIPER watch on his arm, had become, in effect, a personal adviser to Governor Cozzano. It was a weighty responsibility. He was not going to sit around in his trailer drinking beer and acting like some kind of a buffoon. He was going to educate himself. He was going to start paying attention to the presidential campaign and learn about all of the candidates and the issues.

  A week or two after he had first donned the PIPER watch, back in June, Vishniak had been in downtown Davenport to take care of a bit of business, and he had seen a cluster of newspaper machines on a street corner. In addition to the Quad Cities paper and The Des Moines Register, these included the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. As it happened, his pockets were heavy with quarters, and so he brought a copy of each, blowing two and a half dollars. He took them all back to his trailer and read them. There was some interesting stuff in there.

  Since then it had become a habit. Two and a half bucks a day, six days a week, added up to fifteen bucks, plus an additional five bucks on Sunday made twenty bucks a week. Eighty dollars a month. On Floyd Wayne Vishniak’s budget it was a lot of money. He had cut back on his beer consumption, and, as the summer wore on and the tassels began to sprout from the corn, he had taken a job detasseling.

  Detasseling was a common practice in Iowa; it was the mass castration of corn plants by the forcible removal of their tassels. The actual yanking was done by hand, by individual detasselers walking up and down the rows, endlessly, beneath the hot August sun.

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak would drive out to the fields early each morning to put in a couple of hours before the sun became hot, go back into Davenport to feed rolls of quarters into the newspaper machines, read the papers and drink Mountain Dew all day, then drive back out to the fields in the cool of the evening to continue his work. For the first couple of weeks of the detasseling season, the evening shift had been rather dull, but things perked up when Cozzano’s National Town Meeting finally got started, and he began to get coverage two or three hours a night.

  The Town Meeting had seemed a little bit hokey when they announced it, but in practice it turned out to be damn impressive. Some very important people were showing up at this thing. They had a couple of so-called surprise appearances every evening, as movie stars, ex-football heroes, captains of industry, and even a few renegade politicians began to show up at the Meeting and throw their support behind Cozzano.

  By the third or fourth evening, a clear pattern emerged in the coverage. At seven p.m. the PIPER watch would come on, with the familiar logo and theme music. For fifteen minutes or so it would show an edited broadcast of that day’s events at McCormick Place, Chicago’s huge lakeside convention center, the site of the National Town Meeting. Then there would be fifteen minutes of analysis from a team of pundits, some pro-Cozzano, some anti-. Then half an hour of taped stuff, like a speech by Cozzano from earlier in the day. Then the program would cut to a hotel suite somewhere, a living-room-type environment, and Cozzano would sit down with various groups of Americans who wanted to bitch about their problems: unemployment, lack of heath insurance, shitty public schools, and so on. Cozzano would sit there and listen to them ventilate, jot down the occasional note, ask the occasional question, and then he would usually deliver some kind of a little sermon that was intended to calm them down and make them believe that he cared about their problems and would certainly do something about them at the White House.

  The PIPER watch beamed out these little images as he made his way across a vast flat cornfield, completely alone, the only thing moving within several miles. His hands bobbed up and down rhythmically as he shuffled down the mile-long rows, reaching out with both arms to grip and yank the tassels, and when something especially interesting came on the screen - a surprise appearance by a major star, for example - he would stop for a minute and stand motionless, staring at his wrist. At the beginning of these evening shifts, the images on the little screen were pale and washed-out, but as he inched his way across the field, and the sun sank into the flat horizon, the light from the watch became brighter, its colors purer, until finally the moon and the stars came out a
nd Vishniak was groping his way across the field in darkness, the images of the National Town Meeting radiating in pure intense colors as though the wristwatch were a bracelet of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires.

  Tonight, Governor Cozzano was meeting with a group of black persons who had organized themselves out of the undifferentiated mass of Americans gathered together for the National Town Meeting. They had got together and formed their own little organization which had then promptly splintered into little groups who all hated each other. Now, the leaders of the little factions were meeting with Governor Cozzano over a nice dinner in his hotel suite. They were eating tiny little miniature chickens and drinking wine.

  One of the black people was using an analogy to explain why black people were not becoming successful executives in large enough numbers. In the game of football, he pointed out, black people were often valued as wide receivers and running backs, but coaches were resistant to making them quarterbacks. Governor William A. Cozzano listened to this analogy soberly and thought­fully, chewing on a morsel of the miniature chicken and nodding his head from time to time, never taking his gaze off the face of the man who was speaking. When the man was done, Cozzano sat back in his chair, took a sip of wine, and went on a little stroll down memory lane.

  “You know, that business about quarterbacks really hits home to me. I can remember back in about 1963 when I was on the Illinois team, and we traveled to Iowa City to play a game against the Hawkeyes. They had a starting quarterback and two others on the bench, all of them white, and they also had a few black players recruited from across the river, here in Illinois. In particular they had a young man named Lucullus Campbell, who had been the starting quarterback for his high-school team in Quincy, Illinois, a river town. He had been splendid in that role - an incredible passer who could also run the ball. Well, before the game even started, the Hawkeyes’ starting quarterback was out with the stomach flu. They started their second-string quarterback, and sometime in the second quarter of the game, he took a very serious hit and went down with a knee injury that knocked him out of the game. And so they put in their third-string quarterback.

  “And let me tell you, that young man - with all due respect to him - was just no good as a quarterback. He dropped the ball. He threw interceptions. He tried to hand off the ball to people who weren’t even there.” Cozzano paused for a moment and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin while the people around the table laughed. “Now, I was an offensive player, and so, when their offense was on the field - while this poor fellow was making all of these mistakes - I was on the sidelines, looking straight across the field at poor Lucullus Campbell. He was watching this third-string quarterback in disbelief. I could clearly read the frustration on his face. Finally he got up and approached the coach and spoke to him. I couldn’t hear his words, but I knew what he was saying. It’s a universal plea: ‘Put me in, Coach. I can do it.’ And you know what? The coach didn’t even look up at him. He wouldn’t look Lucullus Campbell in the eye. He just shook his head no and kept going through his clipboard. And I remember thinking that that was just about the most unfair thing I had ever seen. I went up to him after the game and I told him so, and I’d like to think that he took a bit of comfort in my words.” Cozzano had delivered the first part of this story with kind of a wry humorous tone, then turned sad. But at this point he became angry at the memory, sat up straight in his chair, and began pounding his index finger into the dinner table. His guests sat riveted. Cozzano, pissed off, was a formidable presence. “Ever since that day, I have found it heart­rending to see talented, ambitious black people, willing and able to compete in whatever field, held back by tired old white men who don’t want to give them a chance. And I vow to you that I will never become one of those tired old white men - and I won’t allow any of them to serve under me either.”

  The dinner guests broke into spontaneous applause. Floyd Wayne Vishniak, standing two hundred miles away in a cornfield, who did not give a damn about black persons, got a lump in his throat.

  The next day, after he had bought all of his newspapers and read them over a bottomless cup of coffee in a diner, he went to the public library and, with some assistance from a librarian, looked up the microfilms for The Des Moines Register during the fall of 1963. He searched back and forth, the photographed pages zooming across the screen of the microfilm reader, until he found the account of the Illini-Hawkeye game.

  An hour later he was out on the road in his truck, headed south along the river, toward the town of Quincy.

  After he returned from his night detasseling shift, he sat down at his kitchen table with a beer and a fresh white piece of paper and relayed the results of his research activities to the one man who could make the best use of the information.

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak

  R.R. 6 Box 895

  Davenport, Iowa

  Aaron Green

  Ogle Data Research

  Pentagon Towers

  Arlington, Virginia

  Dear Mr. Green:

  Yesterday night your friend and mine Governor Cozzano told a very interesting dinnertime story about the 1963 Illini-Hawkeye football game and one Lucullus Campbell. This story put a lump in my throat and so I went down to the public library to read more about it, as they often encourage us to do at the end of important TV shows.

  Imagine my surprise to discover that the young William A. Cozzano did not even participate in the 1963 game because he was suffering from the stomach flu. He did not even set foot in Iowa City on that day.

  Perhaps he just got the year wrong. Well, I checked 1962, ‘61, and ‘60 also. In ‘60 and ‘62, the game was held in Champaign. In ‘61, it was held in Iowa City. Cozzano was there all right, but according to the Des Moines Register, the starting quarterback played the whole game.

  Perhaps it happened in Champaign? Well, in ‘60, the starting quarterback for the Hawkeyes got hurt and the second-string quarterback played very well for the entire game. And in ‘63, the starting quarterback played the entire game.

  There was no Lucullus Campbell playing for Iowa ever.

  I took a little drive down to Quincy and found out that there was a Lucullus Campbell who played for their high school and who was on the 1959 Illinois Ail-Star team. That was the same year Cozzano was an All-Star. He was a halfback. He never played college ball because he got killed in a car crash on the night of his graduation from high school.

  So a person might think that William A. Cozzano is making up lies. That he is a dishonest politician like all the others.

  But I do not agree with this idea because I believe in Cozzano and I could see the strong emotion on his face when he told that story. No doubt, he believed in the sincerity of his own words.

  Then how to explain it? Is Cozzano crazy?

  No, I do not think so. But it is a well-known fact that Cozzano had a stroke earlier this year and that his Jew lawyer covered it up and secretly ran the state of Illinois for some time.

  Then Cozzano went and had him a special hightech operation and got better. OR SO THEY SAY. But maybe things aren’t completely fixed inside of his head. Maybe his brain’s memory banks have been scrambled. Maybe that new chip or whatever that they used to fix up his brain is actually playing tricks with his memory!

  I trust that you will provide this info to Governor Cozzano as soon as possible so that he can take steps to have the problem fixed before he becomes President and begins to run the entire country with his faulty brain. This is a matter of total importance.

  I cannot sleep anymore.

  You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.

  Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak

  44

  Chase Merriam, the High-Metabolism World Dominator and squire of Briarcliff Manor, New York, actually knew some people who seriously thought that the way to beat the crime problem in New York was to drive a junky old car. Most of these misguided people were rather young - kids who had come up in the eighties and had a lot of cleverness but
no real intelligence, when it came to money. At a certain point along their sharply rising income curves, they had all gone out and bought BMWs or the equivalent. Not top-of-the-line BMWs, but mediocre ones. Sports sedans. And, inevitably, within a couple of weeks, someone smashed out a window, the alarm went off, they had to get up in the middle of the night, sweep up the glass, call the insurance company - the whole ritual.

  Then they pontificated. It was easy enough to understand the psychology of it: all of these people were still young enough to think that life was terribly meaningful, that every little event had some role to play in the tightly written plot-line of the universe. You were supposed to learn from these things. Smash went the window, whoop-whoop-whoop went the car alarm, and then the yuppie came out of his brownstone, put his chin in his hand, and thought deep thoughts. The conclusion they always came to was that, by buying a nice car, they had somehow offended God with their dirty materialism, and now they were being punished. As if the dumpster colonists who roamed the streets at three a.m., punching out windows and scooping up people’s tollbooth change to buy crack, were righteous angels dispatched by an avenging God.

  Chase Merriam drove a Mercedes-Benz the size of an aircraft carrier and he made no apologies for it. It had a built-in alarm system, but he had no idea how to work it. He never used it. In fact, he never even bothered to take the keys from the ignition or lock the doors, because he never parked it more than fifty feet away from a good man with a gun. His parking space in Manhattan cost more than a three-bedroom split-level in the upper Midwest and was probably a better investment.

  A really, really expensive car emitted a powerful psychological force field of its own. Smashing out the driver’s-side window of a BMW 535i was a routine and insignificant New York gesture, on the level of vaulting a turnstile. Chase Merriam himself was often tempted to give it a try, to wrap his jacket around his hand and poke it through the glass just to see the little blue diamonds spray. But people were still awed by a big Mercedes sedan, Rolls Royce, or Ferrari. They respected these things intuitively. Maybe they harbored just a bit of fear, deep inside their hearts, that such cars were owned by Mob bosses or Colombian drug lords. But Chase Merriam liked to think that it wasn’t just the fear of retribution. He liked to think that deep inside their battered, blackened hearts, people still harbored a respect for Quality.