Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  Besides, they didn’t act like hit men, or how she thought hit men would act. They had gotten out of the car immediately on arrival, but then they just stopped. They made no move to enter Eleanor’s trailer.

  Eleanor raised her windowshade a little more, feeling bolder, and noticed that there was still one man inside the Lincoln Town Car. He was sitting in the middle of the backseat and he was talking on the telephone.

  He finished his conversation, hung up, and scooted down to the end of the seat. He climbed up out of the car, assisted by one of the young men in the dark glasses, and stood up on the gravel. He squinted into the unfiltered sunlight, his face wrinkling up tremendously, like a High Plains arroyo.

  She would have recognized him on the dark side of the moon: it was Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall, Republican of Colorado. He was so old that he was actually named after Teddy, not Franklin, Roosevelt. And he was so conservative that, during the thirties, when a lot of his idealistic young peers were going to Spain to fight on behalf of the revolutionaries there, he had volunteered to fight for the Fascists.

  He had been virulently opposed to America’s participation in World War II. A strong supporter of General MacArthur and a fierce advocate of “nuking the evil Chinks” (his words) in Korea. He had spent most of the fifties rooting out “Comsymps” from Capitol Hill and the media. He had called Goldwater a pinko. He had seen both the Berlin crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis as golden opportunities for a first nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, and had stood side-by-side with Curtis Lemay in the recommendation that North Vietnam be bombed back into the Stone Age.

  He had run abortively for president in four decades, from the fifties through the eighties, whenever he felt that the frontrunning Republican candidate was not gloomy, threatening, and violent enough. Consistently voted against affirmative action. Though Eleanor knew her civil rights history well enough to know that he had astonished just about everyone by voting in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  He was like that: he was fringy enough to teeter on the edge of becoming a one-dimensional stereotype, but one or twice a year he would do something freakish and astonishing. He had gained the grudging affection of some people by consistently hating Richard Nixon’s guts from the very beginning. He had come down on the side of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and delivered a lengthy and profane speech in her defense on the Senate floor, using it as an occasion to lament the total implosion of American values.

  Just when his image seemed on the verge of being rehabilitated, he would do something reactionary. For the last several years, he had celebrated Animal Rights Day by going out to his family ranch in southwestern Colorado and branding a few calves in front of the TV cameras. It got him tons of publicity, reinforced his caveman image, and made him wildly popular among farmers, westerners, and anyone else who made money from animals. The man knew how to get a campaign contribution.

  Now this weathered, deathless, inexplicable gnome was standing in front of her trailer, surrounded by men that, she now realized, were Secret Service agents. She did not know if she should run away and hide, or welcome him.

  Soon enough he was pounding on her front door and she had to make up her mind. She pulled her hair back and wrapped a scrunchie around it, went to the door, and opened it. But it was still chained shut and so it only came open a few inches. She found herself staring through the chain at Caleb Roosevelt Marshall. They were of roughly the same height.

  “Take it easy, woman,” he said, glancing at the chain. “I’m not here to burn a cross on your goddamn lawn.”

  She closed the door, unchained it, and opened it all the way. “Senator Marshall?” she said.

  “Eleanor Boxwood Richmond?”

  “Yes.”

  “Slayer of Erwin Dudley Strang?”

  “Well…”

  “Fastest tongue in the West?”

  She laughed.

  “If you would invite me in, I would have a few things to discuss with you.”

  “Come in.”

  “You don’t have to invite any of these people in.” Marshall said. He turned around and slammed the door in the face of an agent.

  “Can I offer you anything to drink?” she said.

  “I am in suspended animation. The only things I am allowed to drink are strange concoctions brewed up by pharmacists. You would not be able to afford them, and I can only do so by taking honoraria,” he said. He talked like a guy who was used to having his voice heard by a million people.

  “Well, then, please sit down anywhere you like.”

  “Whenever I lower myself to a seated or reclining position, it occurs to me that I may never stand on my feet again,” he said. “To a man of my age, even sitting down becomes a morbid thing. So I hope it will not make you feel awkward if I stand up.”

  “Not at all.” Eleanor pulled up a tall bar stool, one of the artifacts that they had salvaged from the wreck of their middle-class lifestyle, and sat down on it without losing any altitude. This way she could still talk to him face-to-face.

  “I know that this conversation has already gotten off on the wrong foot because you think that I am an evil vicious old man who hates persons of your race,” Senator Marshall said.

  “The thought had occurred to me.”

  “But in fact, the only thing I hate is bullshit. I hate bullshit because I grew up on ranch and I spent the first three decades of my life shoveling it. I went into politics largely because it was a desk job and naturally I thought that in a desk job I would not have to shovel any more bullshit. Of course nothing could have been further from the truth. So you see I have spent my whole life up to my nostrils in bullshit and consequently know more about it, and hate it more, than anyone else on the face of the earth.

  “Now, the reason that a lot of Negroes think I hate them is simple: there is a whole lot of bullshit in racial politics, even more than in other aspects of politics, and when I react against that bullshit, they think I’m reacting against them. But I’m not. I’m just reacting against their bullshit politics. Like affirmative action. That’s bullshit. But civil rights isn’t bullshit at all. I voted for that.”

  “I know you did.”

  “And all these different terms - colored, Negro, black, Afro-American - that’s all bullshit too. They’re always willing to come up with new rods for Negroes, but never to actually do something that will help them, and that’s bullshit. The basic fact is that all people should be treated the same, as specified in the goddamn Constitution, and everything else is bullshit.”

  “Well, Senator, I am aware that you are not a totally one-dimensional person, and so I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt as long as you are a guest in my home.”

  “I thought you would. A lot of Negroes hate my guts and start jumping up and down and organizing protest rallies as soon as I come over the horizon, but I figured you would be able to see things a little more clearly. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have a bullshit detector as good as mine, and that is a rare quality.”

  “Well, thank you, Senator.”

  “And you’re not afraid to use it.”

  “Well, that was a somewhat unusual thing for me to do. I was very upset at the time and not thinking clearly.”

  Senator Marshall was peeved and disappointed. “Bullshit! You were thinking as clearly as the human mind has ever thought. What do you mean, you weren’t thinking clearly?”

  “I mean that I was raised to have good manners and be diplomatic, and I would not have violated those standards if I had not been at the end of my rope emotionally.”

  “Well, you and I have different interpretations of this. Shit, I’ve been at the end of my rope emotionally since I was five years old.”

  “This fact has been widely commented upon,” Eleanor said.

  “You were perfectly justified in saying everything you said,” Senator Marshall said. “Do you realize that Earl Strong
may never recover, politically, from what you did to him?”

  “I think you are being very optimistic to say that.”

  “Bullshit. This is your polite upbringing talking, isn’t it?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I got a stack of poll results an inch thick. We have been watch­ing this thing. Hell, I wanted to come over here and congratulate you the same night you did it. But instead I waited a few days for the poll results. And lady, you blew that son of a bitch to smith­ereens. You ripped that little tick’s head off. You deserve a medal.”

  Eleanor laughed. “A medal? I’d rather have a job.”

  Senator Marshall stuck out his right hand and looked at Eleanor expectantly.

  She didn’t know what to do. The man was so weird. He was weird, he knew he was weird, he knew that she knew it, and he didn’t care.

  Finally politeness took over and she reached out and shook his hand. He seized hers, not with the perfunctory squeeze of a politician, but with the powerful grip of a man who has to pull himself up out of chairs and beds. He didn’t let go.

  “Done,” he said, “you’re hired.”

  Eleanor laughed wildly. “You’re crazy!” she said, “what are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So you’re just kidding.”

  “Oh no. I sure as hell ain’t kidding. You’re definitely hired. I just haven’t worked through all the bullshit yet.”

  “The bullshit?”

  “Job tide, GSA level, what kind of desk to get you, what kind of goddamn picture to hang on the wall of your office. See, one of the things you learn, when you’ve hired a lot of people, and then fired most of them, is that when you find a quality person, you hire them right away and work out the details later. And I just hired you.”

  “Just on the strength of the fact that I said some nasty things to Earl Strong.”

  “You said some true things,” Caleb Roosevelt Marshall said, “which is something that few people in Washington are capable of doing. And you said them well, which is just as unusual.”

  He still hadn’t let go of her hand.

  “I would have expected you to like Earl Strong.”

  “Ha! You think I’ll support anyone who comes along and spouts a few positions similar to mine. What do you think I am, a senile old moron?”

  “Isn’t that how it works?”

  “Positions change. People don’t. Earl Strong may or may not always be a so-called conservative populist. But he will definitely always be a pencil-neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal-Mart, as you pegged him. I don’t want to serve with him in the Senate. And you may have saved me from that fate. So I owe you a job.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I want to work with you.”

  “Eleanor Boxwood Richmond,” he said, “you and I got exactly the same politics. Only thing is, you don’t know it yet.”

  “How can you say that? I’ve been a liberal Democrat all my life.”

  Still gripping her hand, Senator Marshall shook his head dismissively. “All that Democrat/Republican stuff is bullshit,” he said. “And as far as liberal versus conservative, well, people are very promiscuous in the way they use those words. They don’t really mean anything. Within those two camps there are very wide divisions. And between those two camps, there is a lot more overlap than you think. None of that bullshit really matters. The only thing that matters is values.”

  “Values?”

  “Values. I’ve got ‘em. You’ve got ‘em. Earl Strong doesn’t. That means you and I are on the same side. We have to stick together, you and I.”

  “And that means you’re going to give me a job.”

  “I already figured it out. Took me a few minutes, but I figured it out. I need a health and human services liaison for my Denver office. We can start you on Monday. You’ll work your ass off and make forty-five thousand plus full medical. Interested?”

  “What can I say?” Indeed, what could she say? “Sure. I’ll take it. What do I have to do?”

  “Answer irate phone calls from parasites who want to know what became of their welfare checks.

  “Okay. I can do that.”

  “Done,” the Senator said, and let go of her hand finally.

  “One question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you expect me to blow these people off, or to actually help them? Because if someone calls me wanting to find their welfare check, I intend to help them out.”

  “None of them vote,” the Senator said, “so they can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned. You can handle it any way you want.”

  24

  The ride took her in slowly through Commerce City and north Denver, the attic of the West: square miles of warehouses, stacks of empty cargo pallets that must have consumed whole forests, entire blocks of businesses devoted to truck clutches. Eleanor had seen it too many times to count, but sitting on The Ride in her one and only decent dress, on her way to work - work - she saw it all from a new perspective, like a queen surveying her domain.

  The sky was always sapphire blue when Eleanor looked straight up, but as she tracked it down toward the horizon it faded to a hot yellowish brown as if something had singed it around the edges. Eleanor was never sure if the stuff in the air was pollution or airborne topsoil, but it usually gave her a bad feeling about wherever she was going. She was tired of being able to see so far, and wanted to be hemmed in a little bit.

  Downtown Denver fit that bill. It always looked clean because it was built-up, and so you couldn’t see far enough to notice how dirty the air was. Eleanor sat on a bench for a while, waiting for another Ride, and marveled at the place. When you were used to the dusty flatlands out by the arsenal, the smallest things - a freshly painted GODS drop box sitting on a street corner, a young woman wearing white stockings, a Volvo with water beaded up on its hood from the car wash - looked impossibly clean and new, like images from a Kodak or Polaroid advertisement.

  This was the world where a lot of people lived their whole lives. A world where Eleanor had lived for many years but that now looked like an alien planet to her dusty bloodshot eyes, and where she had just been given the tiniest of handholds.

  Tree-lined Pennsylvania Street ran north-south behind the state capitol. At some point in Denver’s early boom years it had been the fashionable place for barons to construct their mansions - not just homes, but seats of political and social influence. The architecture was diverse, and exuberant bordering on eccentric, including huge Victorian homes, plantation-style classical structures, arched-and-turreted Romanesques, and one especially large and bizarre structure, a red sandstone mission building that bore more than a passing resemblance to the Alamo.

  Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall used that building as his home office, and he referred to it as the Alamo, which was not a popular joke among his Mexican-American constituents, but then he was not the type to care.

  Like any big rambling eccentric old building, it had good offices and bad ones. The office assigned to Eleanor Richmond was especially bad, but that was a fact that wouldn’t even occur to her until she had been working there for a while. When she showed up for her first day as Health and Human Services Liaison, all she cared about was that she had a job. And a damn good job, as these things went.

  She was wearing her interview dress. She wasn’t sure why. She had worn it to all of her job interviews in the past several years and it hadn’t done a thing for her. She had interviewed for her job with Senator Marshall in a Towson State University sweatshirt and nonmatching Army sweatpants. But this was the one dress that she had been at pains to take care of through all the turbulence in her life. She had somehow thought that she could never become a true bag lady if she owned one clean, decent dress. So now she was wearing it to work. When the paychecks started coming in, she could go back to the Boulevard Mall, this time as a paying customer, and cut a swath through Nordstrom, like General Sherman plowing through Dixie.

  The first thing that anyone
said to her was a sound effect: “Foop-foop-foop.”

  She had been walking down a hallway in her interview dress, carrying a box full of photos and other personal effects in her arms, looking into each door as she went by, trying to find the one that belonged to her. And when she finally found it, walked into the small windowless room (later she learned it had been the walk-in closet of a railway baroness), and set her box down on the crated and elbow-worn formica of the desktop, she heard it. She turned around. A man was standing in her office doorway. She didn’t like him.

  He was in his mid-to-late twenties, or maybe he was an older guy who just looked young. He was wearing a pinstriped suit with cowboy boots. His comb had left visible, parallel grooves through his heavily gelled brown hair, like the tracks of fleeing dinosaurs in a fresh volcanic mudflow. He had sparkly gray eyes and high mischievous eyebrows that could have made him look wild and fun, if he could have ditched the suit and the gel for, say, a pair of shorts and a long outdoorsman’s mane. But instead he struck Eleanor as unnaturally pinned back.

  When she first saw him, he was leaning into her office doorway, holding one index finger straight up in the air, rotating his hand around in a circle, saying , “Foop-foop-foop.”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Somebody ought to put a revolving door on this office,” he said. “Seems like I get a new neighbor in here every week - Hello,” he said, segueing in midsentence like a game show host, and turning the rotating index finger into an outstretched right hand, “Shad Harper. You’d be Eleanor.”

  Eleanor took half a step toward him and began to extend her right hand. He dove in, grabbed her hand too soon, seized the very tips of her fingers, squeezed them together hard, and pumped for a few seconds.

  “Eleanor Richmond,” she said, but this hint was completely lost on him, as she knew it would be.

  “Good to know you, Eleanor.”