Interface

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  “Bullshit,” Cozzano said.

  “If what you say is true,” Mary Catherine said, “then the worst conclusion we can come to is that they really want Dad as a client, and they’ve pushed their schedule up in order to make a good impression on him.”

  Mel thought that one over for a while. Cozzano, obviously amused, watched Mel’s face. “I don’t like the idea of them using Willy as a guinea pig,” Mel said.

  “Phooey,” Cozzano said. “Better a dead pioneer than a live feeb.”

  “You want to pursue this?” Mary Catherine said.

  “Yes, goddamn it,” Cozzano said.

  Mel just closed his eyes and shook his head in disbelief.

  “There is a step we can take now, without committing ourselves,” Mary Catherine said. “I don’t know whether I like this. But I have to give you all the information. As you said, Mel, we’re all adults.”

  “What is it?” Mel said warily.

  “Dad has to go up to Champaign, to Burke Hospital, tomorrow for a routine checkup. While he’s in there, we could arrange for a biopsy.”

  “Of what?”

  “Brain cells.”

  “Why?”

  “We could send them to Genomics. They could hang on to them there. That way, if Dad made the decision to go ahead with an implant, they could culture the cells and prepare the biochip at any time.”

  “Do it,” Cozzano said.

  “Oh, shit,” Mel said.

  “Do the biopsy?” Mary Catherine said. “Tomorrow?”

  Cozzano just looked her in the eye and nodded. His eyes looked a little brighter. He smiled at Mary Catherine with the good side of his mouth, and a thin trickle of drool streamed down out of the other side.

  “I’m tired of this,” Cozzano said, wiping off the drool with his good hand. “This is bad.”

  “Yes, it’s bad,” Mel said, “but—”

  “I want to be the Milhous,” Cozzano said.

  “And one day you will be,” Mel said, “but—”

  “Shut up, goddamn it!” Cozzano bellowed. Suddenly he ripped the blanket off his lap with his good hand. Then he pitched forward in his wheelchair so violently that he seemed to be falling out.

  Everyone jumped up and converged on him. But he wasn’t falling. He was trying to stand up. The momentum of his upper body carried him halfway to his feet and he used the powerful thrust of his good arm to push him up on one leg. Then he almost tottered over, but Mary Catherine had already danced around the coffee table and now she drove her shoulder up under her father’s armpit, taking most of his weight.

  Though no one but Mary Catherine would ever know it, this had taken a lot of guts on her part, because her impulse had been to shrink away. Suddenly back on his feet, Dad was massive, dark, and towering. Mary Catherine’s love for her father had always been mingled with a judicious amount of fear, or maybe respect was a nicer word for it. He had never struck her or even threatened to, but he never needed to. The tornadic force of his personality made people cringe and scurry, especially when he was mad, and right now he was really pissed. He threw his entire weight on her body for a moment, nearly buckling her knees, and finally got his weight centered over his good leg again.

  And then he started to hop. He was going somewhere. He had fixed a dark, unblinking gaze on the far wall of the den, and seeing this, Mary Catherine tried to help him along. They moved together one hop at a time across the shag carpet and into the den. Mel shuffled along behind them.

  Cozzano was headed for a framed picture hung on the wall. It was a picture of Cozzano shaking George Bush’s hand on the south lawn a few years ago. Barbara Bush stood off to the side, hands clasped together, beaming supportively. Behind them rose the columns of the White House.

  Cozzano went straight across the floor and fell, crushing Mary Catherine into the wall with his bad shoulder and pinning her there. He reached across his body with his good hand and slammed the end of his index finger into the framed picture so hard that it whacked back into the wall and a couple of cracks appeared in the glass.

  He wasn’t pointing to himself or to the Bushes. He was pointing to the White House.

  “This is mine,” he said. “This is my barn.” He slammed his index finger into the White House a couple of more times for emphasis. “I should have done it before.”

  “You have to get better first,” Mary Catherine said in a strangled voice.

  “Well, I guess I better print up a shitload of bumper stickers,” Mel said morosely. “Femelhebbers for Cozzano.”

  Mary Catherine didn’t say anything. She was feeling the hairs stand up on the back of her neck.

  Her dad was running for president. Her dad was running for president. President of the United States. It was enough to make her forget about the stroke, to obliterate the fact that there was no way he could be elected in his condition.

  She wanted to talk to her mother. She wished Mom was here. This would be a good time to have a mother.

  But Mom wasn’t here. She forced herself to open her eyes and stare at him.

  He was looking right back at her with the frightening, soul-penetrating glare that made people want to leave the room.

  Then it went away and was replaced by an idiotic grin. Mary Catherine had seen this grin a million times while examining neurology patients, and she had seen it on Dad’s face a few times since the stroke, usually when it seemed like he was giving up. It was the drooling, clownlike, sheepish grin of a near vegetable. It was a lot more frightening than his intense glare.

  “You are the quarterback now, peanut,” he said. His eyes rolled back into his head and he went completely limp, as if his bones had turned to water. Mary Catherine let him down to the floor as gently as she could; Mel stepped in to support his head.

  “He’s just had another stroke,” Mary Catherine said. “Forget about the phone, Tuscola doesn’t have 911. Let’s get him into that fast little car of yours. And then you need to drive it like a bat out of hell.”

  eighteen

  THE SOUTH Platte River looked big and important on maps of Denver. It approached the city from the north-northeast. Its valley and flood plain were several miles wide and served as a corridor for a bundle of major transportation routes: state highways, an interstate, natural gas pipelines, major railways, and high-tension power lines. The first time Eleanor had seen it was shortly after she and Harmon had arrived in Denver and they were driving around looking for places to live. Harmon drove and Eleanor navigated, and she got them lost. She got them lost because she was trying to use the mighty South Platte as a landmark, and instead they kept crossing back and forth over a paltry creek or drainage ditch out in the middle of nowhere. Not until she actually saw the name of the thing on a sign by a bridge could she believe that this dried-up rill was all there was to it.

  They had crossed the Platte again a couple of years ago on their way to the Commerce Vista Motel and Mobile Home Haven. In retrospect, Eleanor knew that Harmon had craftily plotted their trajectory so that they could reach the place without having to pass through any part of Commerce City proper. They’d come in from the northwest, from the middle-class suburbs where they had raised their family, past brand-new strip malls sitting totally empty with weathered FOR LEASE banners stretched across their fronts, across open grassland that was too close to the flood plain or too far from the highway to develop. At the edge of Commerce City they had passed quickly through a brief unpleasant flurry of franchise development and then come upon the Commerce Vista. Somehow Eleanor had failed to notice the WEEKLY RATES sign on the motel’s marquee, and she hadn’t even bothered to look across the highway, off to the eastern edge of the mobile home park. She hadn’t looked that way because it was nothing but empty grassland stretching vastly under a white sky, and Eleanor didn’t like to look east across that territory because it told her exactly how far she was from home. But if she had looked she would have seen that it was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, with signs e
very few yards reading U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS—NO TRESPASSING. Tangles of plumbing stuck mysteriously out of the ground from place to place, and every few hundred yards was a white wooden box with a peaked roof, like an oversized birdhouse, containing instruments to monitor the air.

  Prairie grass was the only thing that would grow in the yellow rock flour that passed for soil at the Commerce Vista. But the vegetation was all gone and so now it was just a hardpan mixed with broken glass so that it sparkled when the sun hit it right. There were no particular roads or streets, only the tracks left by the last vehicle. The only thing that kept it all from blowing away was the tamping action of car and truck tires, and the little waist-high fences that partitioned the land into tiny lots and gave each trailer a yard to call its own.

  On their first visit to the place, Eleanor had noticed that the neighbor’s gate had a little decoration on it. One of Doreen’s kids had put it up. It was a jack-o-lantern: a circle of orange construction paper with three black triangles in it, one for each eye and one at the bottom that was apparently supposed to be the mouth. It hadn’t struck her as odd that they had Halloween decorations up in June. Not until they’d moved in did Doreen explain that the symbol was, in fact, a copy of the radiation symbols that their kids saw across the highway at the arsenal.

  She remembered all of these things one night as she reclined in the front seat of her old Datsun, trying to get some sleep. Eleanor tried not to think of the old Datsun as a car. She tried to think of it as a highly compact mobile home. She called it the Annex.

  She could still remember walking down the street in D.C. with her mother when she was a kid and encountering dirty men who slept in parked cars. She could remember how frightened she was of those men and of the way they lived. She didn’t want to be like that.

  It was not really such a big deal, when you thought about it logically. She was living in a mobile-home park, for god’s sake. What was a mobile home but a big boxy car without an engine? Her old beat-up Datsun, parked on four flat tires in front of the mobile home, was like a little annex, a mother-in-law apartment.

  The seats did not exactly recline all the way, but they reclined quite a bit. The only hard part was trying to find a comfortable place to lay her head, because it tended to roll back and forth on the hard surface of the headrest as she relaxed. After a couple of hard nights she finally worked out an arrangement of pillows that held her head in place comfortably. That and a sleeping bag and she was all set. She knew that she might be sleeping this way for a while, so she safety-pinned clean sheets into the inside of the sleeping bag and took them out every week and laundered them.

  The car’s battery was run down but it still had enough juice to run the radio, so it could be said that the Annex had a home entertainment system. Sometimes Eleanor would sit there and listen to a little music, or to news of the presidential candidates. Looking out the windshield, she could see into her neighbor Doreen’s trailer and see the candidates running around on Doreen’s TV set on top of the fridge. When she watched TV in this way, from a great distance, through layers of dirty glass, unable to hear the sound, it had a weird, pixilated look to it. There were so many politicians going so many places, doing so many cute things to get the attention of the cameras. It was like a nursery school, she thought, full of lonely kids who were always punching each other, running with sharp objects, and sticking pencils up their noses—anything to draw attention to themselves. The TV producers, like overburdened nursery-school teachers, cut frantically from one three-second shot to another, trying to keep track of them, and all their little activities. Each cut made the image on Doreen’s TV set jump, startling Eleanor a bit and making her eyes jerk involuntarily toward the screen.

  So that was why kids couldn’t stop watching television.

  The candidates did not seem to have much of an attention span. As the weeks went on, most of them ran into trouble of one kind or another—a poor showing in a state primary, a scandal, or money woes—and dropped out. It always seemed momentous at the time of the actual announcement, and when Eleanor saw a candidate standing somberly in front of some blue curtains, she would turn on the Annex’s radio and listen for news of his withdrawal. But a few days later she would realize that she could hardly even remember the candidate’s name or what he stood for. And it got to the point that whenever one of the candidates made his little withdrawal speech, she would say, “Good riddance,” and snap off the radio.

  Eleanor Richmond was sleeping in her car because there was no room left in the mobile home. It only had two bedrooms. Until recently, she and Harmon had slept in one and their children Clarice and Harmon, Jr., had slept in the other.

  Now everything was discombobulated. Harmon had killed himself. Harmon, Jr., had taken to staying out late. Clarice had remained stable and reliable, a good girl, for a few weeks following the suicide, and then one night she had not come home at all.

  And then Eleanor’s mother had moved back in with them. Eleanor spent about half of one night trying to sleep in the same bed with her mother before going out into the living room, where she found Harmon, Jr., sacked out on the couch. From there she had gone straight to the car.

  Eleanor loved her mother, but her mother had died a long time ago. Only the body lived on. The Alzheimer’s had started when she was in the first retirement community. The nice one. The expensive one. By the time they were forced to move her into the not-so-nice one, she had deteriorated to the point where she had no idea what was going on, which was a blessing for all concerned.

  Now she was home with Eleanor. She was back in diapers. Mother didn’t mind, but Eleanor certainly did—and the children couldn’t handle it at all. Eleanor hadn’t seen much of her children since Mother had moved in.

  With other kids, that would have been worrisome. But Eleanor’s kids weren’t like that. She had raised them the way Mother had raised her. They had their heads on straight. Even when Clarice stayed out all night, Eleanor felt confident that she was using her head and not doing any of that stupid underclass behavior.

  Harmon, Jr., was a case in point. He had been horrified that first morning when he found his mother sleeping in a car. He had tried to insist that he be the one to sleep outside. Eleanor had put her foot down. She was still a parent; Harmon, Jr., was still her child. It was the parent’s duty to look out for her children. No son of hers was going to sleep outside, not while she could help it. Harmon, Jr., eventually backed down. But the next day he came home with some sheets of silvery plastic stuff that he had bought at an auto parts store. He went out to the Datsun and stuck this material up on the insides of all the windows, turning them into one-way mirrors. From inside the car, it just tinted the windows a little bit. But from the outside, no one could see in.

  Eleanor really liked it. She liked to come out here and snuggle into her sleeping bag, lock the doors, and lie for a while, gazing out the windows. Usually when you went to bed, you were blind. If you heard a mysterious noise outside the window or in the house, you felt scared and helpless. You had to get out of bed and turn on all the lights to find out what was happening. Here in her silvered bubble she could see everything, but no one could see her. If she heard a noise, all she had to do was open her eyes, and she could see that it was a cat scratching in the dirt, or Doreen coming back from her evening shift at the 7-Eleven. And if it was anything more than that, she had Harmon’s old officer’s .45 sitting in the glove compartment right in front of her, practically in her lap. Eleanor had spent a few years in the Army herself and she knew how to use it. She knew exactly how to use it.

  When money got short and times got hard, you stopped worrying about all the superficial nonsense of modern life and you got down to basics. The basic thing that a parent did was to protect her family. That is why Eleanor Richmond felt more comfortable, and slept much more soundly, in her silverized glass bubble with a loaded gun six inches away. Whatever else was going wrong, she knew that if anyone tried to get into her house and hurt her fam
ily, she would kill them. She had that one base covered. Everything else was details.

  Her eyes came open in the middle of the night and she knew that something was wrong without even turning her head.

  The Commerce Vista ran right up to the edge of the highway, and it didn’t have any of this exit-ramp nonsense. One minute you were going sixty miles an hour and the next minute you were skidding across yellow dust and broken glass, trying to kill speed. Whenever someone performed this maneuver, Eleanor heard it and opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was always the white aluminum front of the mobile home. If the car then turned onto her particular lane, its headlights would sweep across that surface.

  It had just happened a few seconds ago. And now she heard footsteps crunching in the gravel, right outside of the car.

  She lifted her head slowly and quietly. A man was walking in front of her car. A beefy, bearded white man, young-looking but with the bulk of middle age, dressed in jeans and a dark windbreaker, wearing a baseball cap. He moved confidently, as if he belonged in her front yard, as if he belonged on her front step.

  Which he definitely did not.

  Eleanor had practiced this; she had been ready for it since the first night in the Annex. As the man was mounting the steps to their front door, his back turned to her, she rolled out the front door of the car, dropping to her knees, pulling the gun out of the glove compartment, and took cover behind the corner of the mobile home, sighting down the side of the house, drawing a bead on the center of the man’s windbreaker. From here he looked exactly like a silhouette target at the firing range.