The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  Mel looked searchingly at Mary Catherine’s face for a moment and figured it out. “Oh. Gotcha.”

  Sipes’s key chain was dangling from a key switch on the control panel. Sipes reached for it.

  “Hang on a sec,” Mel said. Since he had emerged from the chopper his head had been swinging back and forth like that of a Secret Service agent, checking out the surroundings. “Let’s just have a chat before we go down to some lower floor where I assume that things will be in a state of hysteria.”

  Sipes blinked and smiled thinly, more out of surprise than amusement; he wasn’t expecting folksy humor at this stage in the proceedings. “Fair enough. The Governor said that I should be expecting you.”

  “Oh. So he is talking?”

  This was a simple enough question, and the fact that Sipes hesitated before answering told Mary Catherine as much as a CAT scan.

  “He’s not aphasic, is he?” she asked.

  “He is aphasic,” Sipes said.

  “And in English this means?” Mel said.

  “He has some problems speaking.”

  Mary Catherine put one hand over her face, as if she had a terrible headache, which she didn’t. This kept getting worse. Dad really had suffered a stroke. A bad one.

  Mel just processed the information unemotionally. “Are these problems things that would be obviously noticeable to a layman?”

  “I would say so, yes. He has trouble finding the right words, and sometimes makes words up that don’t exist.”

  “A common phenomenon among politicians,” Mel said, “but not for Willy. So he’s not going to be doing any interviews anytime soon.”

  “He’s intellectually coherent. He just has trouble putting ideas into words.”

  “But he told you to expect me.”

  “He said that a back would be coming.”

  “A back?”

  “Word substitution. Common among aphasics.” Sipes looked at Mary Catherine. “I assume that he doesn’t have a living grandmother?”

  “His grandmothers are dead. Why?”

  “He said that his grandmother would be coming too, and that she was a scooter from Daley. Which means Chicago.”

  “So ‘grandmother’ means ‘daughter’ and ‘scooter—’ ”

  “He refers to me and all the other physicians as scooters,” Sipes said.

  “Oy, fuck me,” Mel said. “This is gonna be a problem.”

  Mary Catherine had a certain skill for putting bad things out of her mind so that they would not cloud her judgment. She had been trained that way by her father and had gotten a brutal refresher course during high school, when her mother had fallen ill and died of leukemia. She stood up straight, squared her shoulders, blinked her eyes. “I want to know everything,” she said. “This Chinese water torture stuff is going to kill me.”

  “Very well,” Sipes said, and reached for his key chain. The elevator fell.

  All that Mary Catherine was doing, really, was coming to the hospital to visit a sick relative. The chairman of the neurology department did not have to guide her personally through the hospital. She was getting this treatment, she knew, because she was the Governor’s daughter.

  It was one of those weird things that happened to you all the time when you were the daughter of William A. Cozzano. The important thing was not to get used to this kind of treatment, not to expect it. To remember that it could be taken away at any time. If she could make it all the way through her father’s political career without ever forgetting this, she’d be okay.

  Dad had a private room, on a quiet floor full of private rooms, with an Illinois State Patrolman stationed outside it.

  “Frank,” Mel said, “how’s the knee?”

  “Hey, Mel,” the trooper said, reached around his body, and shoved the door open.

  “Change into civvies, will ya?” Mel said.

  When Sipes led Mel and Mary Catherine inside, Dad was asleep. He looked normal, if somewhat deflated. Sipes had already warned them that the left side of his face was paralyzed, but it did not show any visible sagging, yet.

  “Oh, Dad,” she said quietly, and her face scrunched up and tears started pouring down her face. Mel turned toward her, as if he’d been expecting this, and opened his arms wide. He was two inches shorter than Mary Catherine. She put her face down into the epaulet of his trench coat and cried. Sipes stood uncertainly, awkwardly, checking his wristwatch once or twice.

  She let it go on for a couple of minutes. Then she made it stop. “So much for getting that out of the way,” she said, trying to make it into a joke. Mel was gentlemanly enough to grin and chuckle halfheartedly. Sipes kept his face turned away from her.

  Mary Catherine was one of those people that everyone naturally liked. People who knew her in med school had tended to assume that she would go into a more touchy-feely specialty like family practice or pediatrics. She had surprised them all by picking neurology instead. Mary Catherine liked to surprise people; it was another habit she had picked up congenitally.

  Neurology was a funny specialty. Unlike neurosurgery, which was all drills and saws and bloody knives, neurology was pure detective work. Neurologists learned to observe funny little tics in patients’ behavior—things that laymen might never notice—and mentally trace the faulty connections back to the brain. They were good at figuring out what was wrong with people. But usually it was little more than a theoretical exercise, because there was no cure for most neurological problems. Consequently, neurologists tended to be cynical, sardonic, remote, with a penchant for dark humor. Sipes was a classic example, except that he appeared to have no sense of humor at all.

  Mary Catherine was trying to make a personal crusade of bringing more humanity to the profession. But standing by her stricken father’s bedside crying her eyes out was not what she’d had in mind.

  “Why is he so out of it?” Mel said.

  “Stroke is a major shock to the system. His body isn’t used to this. Plus, we put him on a number of medications that, taken together, slow him down, make him drowsy. It’s good for him to sleep right now.”

  “Mary Catherine told me that guys of his age, in good shape, shouldn’t have strokes.”

  “That’s correct,” Sipes said.

  “So why did he have one?”

  “Usually stroke happens when you are old and the arteries to your brain are narrowed by deposits. This patient’s arteries are in good shape. But a big blood clot got loose in his system.”

  “Damn,” Mary Catherine said, “it was the mitral valve prolapse, wasn’t it?”

  “Probably,” Sipes said.

  “Whoa, whoa!” Mel said. “What is this? I never heard about this.”

  “You never heard about it because it’s a trivial problem. Most people don’t know they have it and don’t care.”

  “What is it?”

  Mary Catherine said, “It’s a defect in the valve between the atrium and the ventricle on the left side of your heart. Makes a whooshing noise. But it has no effect on performance, which is why Dad was able to join the Marines and play football.”

  “Okay,” Mel said.

  “The reason it makes a whooshing noise is that it creates a pattern of turbulent flow inside the heart,” Sipes said. “In some cases, this turbulent flow can develop into a sort of stagnant backwater. It’s possible for blood clots to form there. That’s probably what happened. A clot formed inside the heart, eventually got large enough to be caught up in the normal flow of blood, and shot up his carotid artery into his brain.”

  “Jesus,” Mel said. He sounded almost disgusted that something so prosaic could fell the Governor. “Why didn’t this happen to him twenty years ago?”

  “Could have,” Sipes said. “It’s purely a chance thing. A bolt from the blue.”

  “Could it happen again?”

  “Sure. But we’re keeping him on blood thinners at the moment, so it can’t happen right now.”

  Mel stood there nodding at Sipes while he said this. Then
Mel kept nodding for a minute or so, just staring off into space.

  “I have eight hundred million phone calls to make,” Mel said. “Let’s get down to business. List for me all of the other human beings in the world who know the information that you just gave me. And I don’t want him being wheeled around this hospital for everyone to look at. He stays in this room until we make further arrangements. Okay?”

  “Okay, I’ll pass that along to the others—”

  “Don’t bother, I’ll do it,” Mel said.

  It was like the old days in Tuscola, when a hot, portentous afternoon would suddenly turn dark and purple and the air would be torn by tornado sirens and the police cars would cruise up and down the streets warning everyone to take cover. Dad was always there, guiding the kids and the dogs down into the tornado cellar, checking to see that the barbecue and lawn chairs and garbage can lids were stowed away, telling them funny stories while the cellar door above their heads pocked from the impacts of baseball-sized hailstones. Now, something even worse was happening. And Dad was sleeping through it.

  And Mom wasn’t around anymore. And there was her brother James. But he was just her brother. James wasn’t any stronger than she was. Probably less so. Mary Catherine was in charge of the Cozzano family.

  Sipes and Mary Catherine ended up in a dark, quiet room in front of a high-powered Calyx computer system with two huge monitors, one color and one black-and-white. It was a system for viewing medical imagery of all kinds—X-rays, CAT scans, and everything else. This hospital had had them for several years already. The hospital where Mary Catherine worked probably wouldn’t get one until sometime in the next decade. Mary Catherine had used them before, so as soon as Dr. Sipes set her up with access privileges, she was able to get started.

  After a while, Mel somehow tracked her down and sat next to her without saying anything. Something about the darkness of the room made people hush.

  Mary Catherine used a trackball and a set of menus and control windows to open up a large color window on the screen. “They put his head in a magnet and baloney-sliced his brain,” she said.

  “Come again?” Mel said. It was funny to see him nonplussed.

  “Did a series of CAT scans. Had the computer integrate them into a three-dimensional model of Dad’s melon, which makes it a lot easier to visualize which parts of his brain got gorked out.”

  A brain materialized in the window on the computer screen, three-dimensional, rendered in shades of gray.

  “Is this the way doctors talk?” Mel said, fascinated.

  “Yes,” Mary Catherine said, “when lawyers aren’t around, that is. Let me change the palette; we can use a false-color scheme to highlight the bad parts,” she said, whipping down another menu.

  The brain suddenly bloomed with color. Most of it was now in shades of red and pink, fading down toward white, but small portions of it showed up blue. “When lawyers and family members are present,” Mary Catherine said, “we say that the blue parts were damaged by the stroke and have a slim chance of ever recovering their normal function.”

  “And amongst medical colleagues?”

  “We say that those parts of the brain are toast. Croaked. Kaput. Not coming back.”

  “I see,” Mel said.

  “Been taking a stroll down memory lane,” Mary Catherine said. “Check this out.” She played with the menus for a moment and another window opened up, a huge one filling most of the black-and-white screen. It was a chest X-ray. “See that?” she said, tracing a crooked rib with her fingertip.

  “Bears-Packers, 1972,” Mel said. “I remember when they carried him off the field. I lost a thousand bucks on that fucking game.”

  Mary Catherine laughed. “Serves you right,” she said. She closed the window with the chest X-ray. Then she used the trackball to rotate the image of the brain back and forth in different ways to reveal selected areas. “This stroked area accounts for the paralysis and this small one here is responsible for his aphasia. In the old days we had to figure this stuff out just by talking to the patient and watching the way he moved.”

  “I detect from your tone of voice that you think this is all basically superficial crap,” Mel said.

  Mary Catherine just turned toward him and smiled a little bit.

  “I like video games too,” Mel said, “but let’s talk seriously for a moment here.”

  “Dad’s mixed dominant, which is good,” Mary Catherine said.

  “Meaning?”

  “He does some things with his right hand and others with his left. Neither side of the brain predominates. People like that recover better from strokes.”

  Mel raised his eyebrows. “That’s good news.”

  “Recovery from this kind of insult is extremely hard to predict. Most people hardly get better at all. Some recover quite well. We may see changes over the course of the next couple of weeks that will tell us which way he’s going to go.”

  “A couple of weeks,” Mel said. He was clearly relieved to have a specific number, a time frame to deal with. “You got it.”

  “Guess what?” Mel said to the Cozzanos the morning after the stroke. It was six A.M. None of them had slept except for the Governor, who was under the influence of various drugs. James Cozzano had arrived shortly after midnight, driving his Miata in from South Bend, Indiana, where he was a graduate student in the political science department. He and Mary Catherine had spent the whole night sitting around in the Executive Mansion, which was nice, but not exactly home. Mary Catherine had tried to sleep in bed and been unable to. She had put on her clothes, sat down in a chair to talk to James, and fallen dead asleep for four hours. James just watched TV. Mel had spent the same time elsewhere, on the telephone, waking people up.

  Now they were all together in the same room. The Governor’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t saying much. When he tried to talk, the wrong words came out, and he got angry.

  “What?” Mary Catherine finally said.

  Mel looked William A. Cozzano in the eye. “You’re running for president.”

  Cozzano rolled his eyes. “You swebber putter,” he said.

  Mary Catherine gave Mel a wary, knowing look, and waited for an explanation.

  James got flustered. “Are you crazy? This is no time for him to be launching a campaign. Why haven’t I heard about this?”

  His father was watching him out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t squelch,” he said, “it’s a million fudd. Goddamn it!”

  “I spent the whole night putting together a campaign committee,” Mel said.

  “You lie,” Cozzano said.

  “Okay,” Mel admitted, “I put together a campaign committee a long time ago, just in case you changed your mind and decided to run. All I did last night was wake them up and piss them off.”

  “What’s the scam here?” Mary Catherine said.

  Mel sucked his teeth and looked at Mary Catherine indulgently. “You know, ‘scam’ is just a Yiddishized pronunciation of ‘scheme’—a much nobler word meaning ‘plan.’ So let’s not be invidious. Let’s call it a plan instead.”

  “Mel,” Mary Catherine said, “what’s the scam?”

  Cozzano and Mel looked soberly at each other and then cracked up.

  “If you turn on that TV in a couple of hours,” Mel said, “you will see the Governor’s press secretary releasing a statement, which I wrote on my laptop in the lobby of this hospital and faxed to him an hour ago. In a nutshell, what it says is this: in the light of the extremely serious and, in the Governor’s view, irresponsible statements made by the President last night, the Governor has decided to take another look at the idea of running for president—because clearly the country has gone adrift and needs new leadership. So he has cleared his appointment calendar for the next two weeks and is going to closet himself in Tuscola, with his advisers, and formulate a plan to throw his hat into the ring.”

  “So all the media will go to Tuscola,” James said.

  “I would guess so,” Mel said.


  “But Dad’s not in Tuscola.”

  Mel shrugged as if this were a minor annoyance. “Sipes says he’s transportable. We’ll use the chopper. More private and presidential as hell.”

  Cozzano chuckled. “Good backing,” he said. “We’ll go to the buckyball.”

  “What’s the point?” James said. He actually shouted it. Suddenly he had become upset. “Dad’s had a stroke. Can’t you see that? He’s sick. How long do you think you can hide it?”

  “A couple of weeks,” Mel said.

  “Why bother?” James said. “Is there any reason for all this subterfuge? Or are you just doing it for the thrill of playing the game?”

  “People my age get their thrills by having good bowel movements, not by playing games,” Mel said. “I’m doing it because we don’t yet know the full extent of the damage. We don’t know how much Willy is going to recover in the next couple of weeks.”

  “But sooner or later . . .”

  “Sooner or later, we’ll have to come out and say he’s had a stroke,” Mel said, “and then the presidential bid is stillborn. But it’s better to have a nice little planned stroke at home, while trying to lead the country, than a big ugly surprising one while you’re picking your nose in the statehouse, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” James said, shrugging. “Is it?”

  Mel swiveled his head around to look directly at James. His face bore an expression of surprise. He was able to mask his emotions before they developed into disappointment or contempt.

  Everyone had always assumed that James would one day develop from a bright boy into a wise man, but it hadn’t happened yet. Like many sons of great and powerful men, he was still trapped in a larval stage. If he hadn’t been the son of the Governor, he probably would have developed into one of those small-town letter-of-the-law types that Mel found so tiresome.

  But he was the son of the Governor. Mel accepted that. He didn’t say what was on his mind: James, don’t be a sap.

  “James,” Mary Catherine said, speaking so quietly that she could barely be heard across the room, “don’t be a sap.”