Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  The anchorman of the CBS Evening News, in a rare editorial, said that the presidential campaign had reached new depths this year, and stated that his organization was taking steps to make sure that it would not happen again.

  At the private hotel that serves as Jeremiah Freel’s headquarters, security remained tight. The elevators were turned off except when someone very important was expected, or three times a day when room service was brought up from the kitchen.

  For the fourth morning in a row, the waitress named Louella brought Jeremiah Freel his dish of stewed prunes. This did not go unnoticed by Freel. Louella was a hard woman not to notice. It was almost inconceivable that any woman, clad in the dowdy uniform of a hotel waitress, could appear sexy. But Louella managed. She must have taken her uniform home and modified it somehow, dropped the neckline, raised the hem. Every day, she was showing a little more cleavage, and every day, when she placed the breakfast tray on the table in front Jeremiah Freel, she bent down a little bit lower, gave him a longer and deeper look down into the front of her dress.

  Today he could no longer restrain himself. His hand darted down into her blouse, quick as a striking cobra, and caught her nipple. Not hard enough to hurt. But hard enough to keep her where she was.

  “Mr. Freel,” said one of his minders. One of the hated men in suits who surrounded him at all times.

  “Shut up, asswipe!” Freel said.

  Louella was staring straight into Freel’s eyes. She wasn’t angry at all. She was almost amused. She was interested. She licked her lips and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Freel, but fresh fruit isn’t on today’s menu.” Her face was about four inches from Freel’s. She was wearing a lot of perfume and Freel could smell it wafting up from the middle of her hot cleavage.

  “Then what do I have here?” Freel said, squeezing her nipple.

  “You don’t have a damn thing,” Louella said, “unless you can get us a little bit of privacy.” She looked around accusingly at all of the men in suits: four of them in this room alone.

  “Get the fuck out!” Freel shouted.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Freel, you know we can’t allow that!” said the head honcho, a guy who would only identify himself as Al. Al was clearly getting a little nervous. “Ma’am,” he said to Louella, “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”

  “But I can’t,” Louella said, “until Mr. Freel lets go of me. And I can tell you he’s not the kind of man who lets go until he gets what he wants.”

  “Get the fuck out,” Freel said, “or this whole campaign goes up in flames. Can’t you see I need to get laid?”

  This appeal to simple, basic human needs got through to Al. He broke eye contact and thought about it for a second. “Well, okay,” he finally said. “Come on guys, let’s leave them alone.”

  All of Freel’s minders got up and backed out of the room staring fixedly at Louella’s backside. Louella turned around and yelled at them on their way out. “And I don’t want you standing outside the door listening, either. You get back to your own rooms and watch TV of something.”

  Al, and the rest of the minders, left the room and closed the door.

  They were still standing there, nervously, a minute later, when Louella stuck her head out the door. “I knew it!” she said. “You guys are all perverts. Get back to your rooms!”

  Al posted one of his men by the elevators, just down the hall, and then the rest of the men retreated to their rooms, leaving the doors open.

  A minute later, the guard by the elevators heard the little bell chime. The down arrow lit up. The elevator door opened to reveal a pair of brawny men, both wearing gas masks and ear protectors, who were just in the perfectly timed act of bursting out the doors; one of them grabbed the guard by the collar and jammed a thick wad of cloth over his mouth as the other reached out with a small but dense blunt object and took it upside of his head.

  Louella emerged from Freel’s room, stark naked, pursued closely by Freel himself. She was laughing and screaming; he was shouting, “You dirty bitch! Get back here!”

  Louella made for the elevator. She reached it, and hit the lobby button, just as Al and the rest of Freel’s guards were emerging into the corridor. They saw nothing but Jeremiah Freel diving into the elevator, and two large, unfamiliar men strewing stun grenades up and down the length of the hallway.

  Twenty seconds later, staff and guests in the lobby were treated to the sight of Louella, a former Miss April, sprinting out of the elevator doors stark naked, still laughing and giggling, and running toward the front entrance, pursued the entire way by an old man with his erect penis sticking out of his fly.

  A doorman, reflexes honed by years of practice, cleared the way. Louella ran through the open door, into the horseshoe drive, and jumped into the back of a windowless van. The door slammed shut, the van burned rubber and shot forward out of the drive, revealing something that had been hiding on the other side of it: Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, flanked by two dozen TV cameramen and still photographers, all of whom were busily recording the quickly changing facial expressions of Jeremiah Freel, and his vanishing penis.

  “Come back to lose another election, Jeremiah?” Ogle said.

  Freel’s mouth dropped open and his nose wrinkled into a snarl. His eyes jumped back and forth between Ogle and the cameraman.

  Then he charged.

  Cy Ogle stood his ground, hands in the pockets of his trench coat.

  Freel dove the last six feet, wrapped his arms around Ogle’s thighs, and bent his head back, mouth open to bite into Ogle’s genitals.

  Ogle took his hand from his pocket, holding a small cylindrical object. His index finger twitched and fired a long stream of Mace directly into Freel’s open mouth. Freel went into violent convul­sions and fell to the horseshoe drive, thrashing, foaming, and howling like a wounded animal.

  “Welcome to public relations hell,” Ogle said, and then climbed into a waiting car. As it drove away, he was able to look back and watch Freel convulsing on the drive in front of the hotel, surrounded now by photographers and cameramen who were all aiming their lenses downward.

  56

  The final, and by far the most important, debate of the presidential campaign was held on the evening of Friday, November 1, four days before Election Day, in a lecture hall at Columbia University. The participants were the President of the United States, William Anthony Cozzano and Nimrod T. (“Tip”) McLane. The moderator was the president of the hosting univer­sity. He fielded questions among the three presidential candidates and a panel of four journalists, who were all of the first rank.

  All three of the candidates had spent the last couple of days mostly in seclusion, honing their skills in mock debates. McLane and the President had both brought in mimics to simulate the other two candidates, and spent hours in exhausting practice sessions, during which simulated journalists would throw out the most difficult, vicious, twisted questions imaginable.

  The advance people had been at the auditorium for a solid day. Lecterns had to be arranged on the stage. Lights had to be focused and adjusted. Camera placement had to be worked out. All of these were subject to intensive negotiation. A wrongly placed spotlight in ‘84 had emphasized the bags under Mondale’s eyes and made him look older than Reagan. The height of each lectern had to be adjusted relative to the height of the candidate. The color of the set and the color of the lights affected what kind of suits would look best; standins had to be brought onstage, wearing different suits, in order to decide which looked best. Makeup had to be tried out; makeup artists had to have rooms in which to work, and no one candidate’s could be bigger, better equipped, or closer to the stage than any other’s.

  Though an audience was going to be present in the hall, its only real function was to provide a bit of ambient noise: applause (to be kept under control as much as possible) and possibly the occasional outburst of laughter, though using humor in these circumstances was probably too risky to be considered. In the current political climate, humor was a
zero-sum game. The impression that the candidates made on the live audience was unimportant. A huge video screen was erected above the stage so that the people and the journalists in the hall could see the TV feed, which was the only thing that mattered.

  The same feed was piped into a large, low-ceilinged room beneath the auditorium and displayed on a couple of dozen monitors. This room was filled with long tables where journalists could set up their laptop computers, plug into telephone lines, and file their stories. This was the room where the spin doctors from the three campaigns would circulate before, during, and after the debate, explaining to the reporters what was happening.

  It was the single largest gathering of explosively tense people on the face of the earth. Tense people don’t like surprises. Therefore, there was a great deal of shock and unhappiness in that hall when, ten minutes before air time, just as the President and Tip McLane were emerging from their makeup rooms and taking their positions on the stage, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle appeared, walked up to the moderator, and informed him that William A. Cozzano would not be participating in tonight’s debate because he had more important things to do.

  Pandemonium was a term coined by Milton to refer to the capital of Hell, where all of the demons were together in one place. From this it naturally came to mean any central headquarters of wicked­ness. Over time, though, as happens with many good words, its meaning had been diluted to mean any place that was noisy and chaotic. Nowadays, a person could speak a pandemonium at a birthday party full of two-year-olds.

  Cy Ogle preferred the old definition of the word. No other word could possibly have described the situation in the auditorium after he strolled on to the stage and made his announcement. There was no doubt in his mind that if not for the presence of witnesses, the campaign staffs of the President, Tip McLane, the panel of journalists, and the organizers of the debate would drag him outside and hang him from a stately tree on the Columbia campus. Outside of an actual lynching, never had so much hostility been directed against one man by so many people for so many reasons. Consequently he could scarcely prevent himself from grinning through the whole thing.

  There was an initial phase during which people merely screamed at him, then ran off into the wings to spread the news to other people, who ran out to scream at him some more. This probably would have gone on for quite some time if not for the fact that air time was rapidly approaching. So it got compressed into a very intense couple of minutes. A tone of emotional restraint was imposed by the technical types, who had a show to put on.

  “Well, I can’t give you Cozzano in person,” Ogle said, “and I’m deeply sorry for that. But to make amends, we did blow quite a bindle buying some satellite time. Be can bring you Cozzano live from his home in Tuscola.”

  This announcement brought of Pandemonium into a state of stunned silence. Cozzano could participate via TV? And Ogle was paying for the satellite time? We can live with that.

  “Only thing is,” Ogle said, after they had bit on that, “that we will need to make one small change in the format. Cozzano has an important announcement to make. A very, very important announcement. And with your forbearance, we would like to have a minute or two at the beginning of this program for him to make that announcement.”

  Absolute silence reigned on the stage.

  Pandemonium had relocated downstairs, into the press room, where a couple of hundred reporters were screaming into their telephones. Most of them were screaming the same thing: Cozzano is withdrawing from the race!

  They managed to launch the program on time. The moderator took these last-minute changes calmly, made a few changes to his notes, and sat down in his throne, unruffled. McLane and the President met in the middle of the stage and shook hands (this encounter had been choreographed during an hour-long summit conference between their campaign staffs) and Cozzano’s lectern remained unoccupied.

  Out in the parking lot behind the auditorium, several semitrailer rigs were parked in parallel slots. There were some satellite uplink trucks, one GODS container on a flatbed rig, and a mobile studio from one of the networks, which was the nerve center of the whole debate: this was where the pool feed originated. Feeds from all of the cameras on the stage converged on this vehicle and showed up on small monitors. A director sat in front of them and decided which camera was going on the air. Now, the director had a new feed patched into his system, which came directly from a satellite downlink. This feed originated in Tuscola, Illinois.

  When he had learned about the business with Cozzano, the director had been expecting just a simple, live, one-camera feed, probably Cozzano sitting in his living room by the fire, or some­thing. It would be there all night long, and whenever Cozzano’s turn came up, he would push the appropriate button and the image of Cozzano would go out.

  Naturally, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that. The feed from Tuscola, when he first saw it, consisted of a long shot of Cozzano’s house as seen from the street. Obviously, Cozzano’s house wasn’t going to participate in the debate. They would have to have at least one more camera, inside the house. Which meant that somewhere in Tuscola there was another director who was sitting in another studio like this one - a director who worked for Cy Ogle and William A. Cozzano. That director was managing feeds from at least two cameras, deciding which one was going to be fed up to the satellite.

  The director, in his trailer behind the auditorium, was the first person in the United States to figure out that Ogle had taken them for a ride. The choreography of this debate, which had been hammered out through many hours of negotiations, over a period of weeks, had just been torn to shreds and replaced by something totally new, entirely Ogle’s.

  The moderator began the debate with a few introductory remarks. On TV, you always had to explain the obvious, over and over again: “In four days, Americans go to the polls to select the man who will be their next president. This is a profoundly significant choice …”

  “… this debate was originally intended to include all three major candidates. Tonight, we have two of them. The President of the United States. And Representative Tip McLane of California.”

  As the moderator introduced the two men, the directory, outside in the trailer, caused their faces to appear on air. Neither one of them seemed to be ready for it. Ever since Ogle’s announcement, no one had really known what the hell was going on, what would happen when, who would be introduced in what order. McLane and the President had both spent a lot of time in front of television cameras in the last few days, in the privacy of their campaign headquarters, practicing what they would do at the moment they were introduced; now, neither one of them did the right thing. They looked agitated, sweaty, shifty-eyed, and when they realized they were on TV, they both looked surprised.

  “The third candidate, William A. Cozzano, Governor of Illinois, announced a few minutes ago that he could not participate.”

  The director cut to a camera that had been set up to show all three of the candidates’ lecterns in a single shot. McLane and the President looked stiff and self-conscious. The empty lectern made both of them look foolish.

  “Instead, he will be addressing us from his home in Tuscola, Illinois.”

  Cut to the shot of Cozzano’s house with the sun setting behind it. It looked inviting and refreshing compared to the stale tense atmosphere of the auditorium.

  “Now, the format of this debate has been established in advance, by consensus between campaign staffs and the sponsoring organiza­tions, and I intend to adhere strictly to that format. But there is one deviation that needs to be made, and we will do that right away now and get it out of the way. I understand that Governor Cozzano has an important announcement that he needs to make, and that he is going to make it now. So I will offer the floor to him at this time. Governor Cozzano, are you there?”

  “Here goes nothing,” said the director, out in his trailer, and cut from the image of the moderator back to the feed from Tuscola.

  The feed remained steady
on the image of the house for a minute. Lights were coming on inside as the sun set spectacularly behind it. It looked cheery and welcoming and it broke the rigid, lockstep schedule of the debate. Then the Tuscola feed cut to a shot of William A. Cozzano. But it was not the expected picture of Cozzano in a suit, sitting by the fire reading a book and smoking a pipe. It was totally different. For a few moments, it was difficult to make out. Cozzano appeared to be lying on his back in a cramped space, staring upward, reaching up above him with one arm. “Good evening,” he said, “I’ll be with you momentarily.”

  Cut to another angle of the same thing. Whatever Cozzano was doing, and wherever he was, they had at least two cameras on him.

  This angle was a closeup of Cozzano’s hand. It was dirty and greasy and flecked with a small drop of blood where he had torn one of his knuckles. He was spinning some small metal object around between his fingers. Then he yanked his hand away and a stream of black fluid shot out of an opening and into a metal tray beneath.

  Cut to yet another angle, this one showing Cozzano’s legs sticking out from beneath a car. He was lying on the floor of his garage.

  Actually, he was lying on a mechanic’s creeper. He slid out from underneath the car, sat up, and rose lightly to his feet. He picked up an old rag and began to wipe oil from his hands, addressing the cameras. “My apologies. I wanted to participate in tonight’s debate, but I’ve been very busy lately. A few days ago I stopped flying around the country for the first time in a couple of months and came back here to my home, the house that my father bought back during the Depression to impress a young woman named Francesca Dominica, who became his wife, and my mother.

  “And, you know, I decided that I liked it here. And looking around the place I saw that there was a lot to do here that I had left undone.” Cozzano nodded at his car. “For example, changing the oil in my car. I just took it for a quick drive through the cornfields, out to the old family home farm and back, to warm up the engine so that the oil would flow out. It was a nice drive. Some people think that the landscape here is boring, but I think it’s beautiful.”