“Oh.”
“So McCabe will get a big front-page story. We will release the information in the form most favorable to us. Markene Caldicott will have been scooped, and her story, if she even bothers to air the damn thing, will have virtually no impact. And the Cozzano family and administration will be totally exonerated, because I, the runty Jew lawyer, will take all the heat.”
“That’s very good of you,” Mary Catherine said.
Mel laughed and slapped the steering wheel. “Ha! Good of me. I like that. You downstaters just kill me. ‘Very good of you,’ ” he mimicked her, not unkindly, and laughed again. Mary Catherine could feel her face radiating warmth. “Look, kid, this is not about good. This is not a good and evil thing. This is about being smart and taking our losses in the way that is least disadvantageous to us. That’s what I am trying to set up here.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to great lengths to be clever and set this whole thing up the way that is best for us,” Mel continued, now starting to sound almost a little peeved, “and it just kills me when you try to characterize it as some kind of church-social altruism. It’s like you’re failing to see and appreciate the full artistry that is involved here.”
“Sorry. I think it’s very devious,” she said, now getting a little peeved herself.
“Thank you. That’s a compliment I can handle. Now we are on the same wavelength.”
“Good.”
“We’re both listening to the same station,” Mel said, extending the metaphor. “Both listening to the BBC instead of that RNA crap.” He spoke the final word with a resounding, sardonic whiplash that made them both laugh, albeit nervously. “So let’s stay away from this weepy sentimental shit and do what is best for our families over the next several generations,” Mel said.
“Okay.”
“What is best, for right now, is that I, Mel Meyer, get out of Dodge.”
“What do you mean?”
Mel sighed, a little defeated, as if he’d been hoping that Mary Catherine would simply get it. “Jesus, girl, I’m going public tonight. Telling the whole world that I did something unethical. I’m going to take the heat for the decisions that I made in January and February. Which were good decisions—but sooner or later, the karma comes back and hits you. Now, once I’ve made myself out to be the evil, scheming homunculus that I am, how can I possibly continue to be a close adviser and confidante of the Cozzano clan? The whole point is that everyone throws shit at me, it all sticks, and then I run away and take all the shit with me. If I stick around you guys, some of it’s bound to rub off.”
As Mel explained all of this, the whole situation became clear to Mary Catherine, and the cloud of emotion that had obscured the beginning of this conversation lifted away. She felt calm and relaxed.
“How far away are you going to run?”
“Oh, pretty far, at least for a while,” Mel said. “I’m formally severing my relationship with your father, as his attorney, and sending his files over to Ty Addison at Norton Addison Goldberg Green. Ty’ll take good care of you guys. I will stay in touch by phone, but this is the last time I’ll show my face in Tuscola for a while. It’s okay for us to see each other when you come up to Chicago, as long as it’s something casual, like lunch. Anything more than that, and someone in the media will notice it, and make it out to look like I’m still lurking in the shadows, pulling strings.”
“What about the long term you were talking about?”
“Long term, nothing has changed. This is a blip on the screen of history.”
During the conversation he had been steering the Mercedes randomly around the gridwork of roads that covered the area, occasionally zigzagging his way back toward the Cozzano farmhouse. Myron Morris’s Suburban passed them going the other way and they waved at each other. Finally Mel stopped next to Mary Catherine’s car, parked along the shoulder, and she realized that he meant for her to get out.
“Do I get a hug?” she asked. “Or is that too sinister for Markene Caldicott?”
Mel just sat there passively, as though suddenly stunned by what he was doing.
Mary Catherine unfastened her seat belt, leaned over the gap between the seats, and encircled Mel’s neck in her arms, nearly lying down sideways across the front of the car. Mel wrapped his arms around her body and held her tight for at least a minute. Then he let go, all of a sudden.
“Okay, I want to be alone now,” he said.
Mary Catherine pecked him once on the cheek and climbed rapidly out of the car without looking back. She slammed the door behind her. Mel’s car was moving forward before the door was even shut. The tires broke loose from the pavement, spun, and squealed, kicking back twin spurts of blue smoke, and the Mercedes shot down the road past the old farmhouse, just like in the old days. In the windows of the farmhouse, the faces of young Cozzanos appeared, drawn by the noise, then drifted away as they saw that it was just Mel Meyer, the old lawyer from Chicago who liked to drive fast.
William A. Cozzano was out for his morning constitutional: out his back door, through the gate and into the alley, half a block down, through a break in the hedge, and into the Thorsen’s driveway. Down the edge of their side yard, waving to ninety-year-old Mrs. Thorsen, who was invariably standing at her kitchen window washing dishes, then into the street, another half block up, through a gap in the chain-link fence around Tuscola City Park, and from there, wherever he wanted to go. It was a route he had been following since he had learned to walk the first time, and it was one of the first things he had done when he learned to walk the second time.
Nowadays, of course, he was usually accompanied by half a dozen support personnel when he did it. Mrs. Thorsen didn’t seem to mind all those people traipsing through her yard. She lived alone now. It was a mystery how she could have so many dishes to wash, but she was always there washing them.
The trip to the park was a tricky, twisting affair that Cozzano’s entourage had to accomplish in single file. Once they reached the broad open spaces of the park proper, they were able to spread out and walk in a group. Usually the entourage consisted of a couple of nurses, Myron Morris’s home-movie crew, and someone from the Radhakrishnan Institute, connected back to a bedroom in the Cozzano house by a radio headset. On this particular day, Zeldo came along for the walk.
“You’re walking. You’re talking. Congratulations,” he said.
“Thanks. It’s nice,” Cozzano said.
“If you keep improving the way you have been, then by sometime in mid-June you should be essentially back to normal.”
“Excellent.”
“I’d like to know if you would have any interest in developing some capabilities that are better than normal.”
This was a bizarre suggestion and Zeldo knew it; he was visibly nervous as he spoke the words. He watched Cozzano’s face carefully for a reaction.
For a long time, Cozzano didn’t react at all. He kept walking as if he hadn’t heard. But he was no longer looking around. He was staring down at the grass in front of his feet, trying to scorch a hole in the ground with his eyes.
After a minute or so, he seemed to reach a conclusion. He looked up again. But he still didn’t speak for another minute or so. He was apparently formulating a response. Finally he looked at Zeldo and said, nonchalantly, “I have always been a strong believer in self-improvement.”
“I’m seeing my aunt Mary taking an apple pie out of the oven,” Cozzano said. “It is Thanksgiving Day of 1954 at 2:15 P.M. A football game is going on the television in the next room. My father and some uncles and cousins are watching it. They are all smoking pipes and the smoke stings my nose. The Lions have the ball on their own thirty-five, second down and four yards to go. But I’m concentrating on the pie.”
“Okay, that’s good,” Zeldo said, typing all of this furiously into the computer. “Now, what happens when I stimulate this link?” He swiveled around to another keyboard and typed a command into another computer.
Cozz
ano’s eyes narrowed. He was staring into the distance, unfocused.
“Just a very fleeting image of Christina at the age of about thirty-five,” Cozzano said. “She’s in the living room, wearing a yellow dress. I can’t remember much more than that. Now it’s fading.”
“Okay, how about this one?” Zeldo said, typing in another command.
Cozzano drew a sharp breath into his nostrils and began to smack his lips and swallow. “A very intense odor. Some kind of chemical odor that I was exposed to at the plant. Possibly a pesticide.”
“But you’re not getting any visuals?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Okay, how about this one?”
“Jesus!” Cozzano shouted. Genuine fright and astonishment had come over his face. He half-slid, half-rolled out of his chair and dropped to the floor of the bedroom, landing on his belly, and crawled on his elbows so that he was half-hidden under a bed.
“Let me guess,” Zeldo said. “Something from Vietnam.”
Cozzano went limp and dropped his face down onto his arms, staring directly into the floor. His back and shoulders were heaving and sweat was visible along his hairline.
“Sorry about that,” Zeldo said.
“It was unbelievably realistic,” Cozzano said. “My god, I actually heard the sound of a bullet whizzing past my head.” He sat up and held up one hand, just above and to one side of his right temple. “It was from an AK-47. It came from this direction, right out of the jungle, and shot past me. Missed me by a couple of inches, I’d say.”
“Is that a specific memory of something that happened to you?” Zeldo said.
Cozzano’s eyes became distant. He was staring at the wall, but he wasn’t seeing it. “Hard to say. Hard to say.”
“When you saw the apple pie, it seemed very specific.”
“It was specific. It really happened. This was more of a fleeting glimpse of something. Almost like a reconstruction of a generic type of event.”
“Interesting,” Zeldo said. “Would you like to take a break?”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind,” Cozzano said. “That one really shook me up. How many more do we have to do?”
Zeldo laughed. “We’ve done three dozen so far,” he said, “and we could potentially do a couple of thousand. It’s up to you.”
By the end of the day, Zeldo had stimulated more than a hundred separate connections into Cozzano’s brain. Each one elicited a completely different response.
AN ENTIRE PASSAGE FROM MARK TWAIN MATERIALIZED IN HIS HEAD.
HE SMELLED THE ROOT CELLAR AT THE OLD FARMHOUSE OUTSIDE OF TOWN.
HE FELT AN OVERPOWERING SENSE OF GRIEF AND LOSS, FOR NO REASON AT ALL.
A COLD FOOTBALL SLAMMED INTO HIS HANDS DURING A SCRIMMAGE IN CHAMPAIGN.
HE BIT INTO A THICKLY FROSTED CHOCOLATE CAKE.
A B-52 STREAKED OVERHEAD.
HE SAW A FULL PAGE FROM HIS WEEKLY APPOINTMENT CALENDAR, MARCH 25–31, 1991.
SNOWFLAKES DRIFTED ONTO HIS OUTSTRETCHED TONGUE AND MELTED.
HE BECAME SEXUALLY AROUSED FOR NO DISCERNIBLE REASON.
AN OLD BARRY MANILOW SONG PLAYED IN HIS HEAD.
HIS CAR SKIDDED OFF AN ICY ROAD IN WINTER 1960 AND HIT A TELEPHONE POLE; HIS FOREHEAD SLAMMED INTO THE WINDSHIELD AND CRACKED IT.
THE TINKLING SOUND OF ICE CUBES IN A GLASS PITCHER OF ICED TEA BEING STIRRED BY ONE OF HIS AUNTS.
HE TRIMMED HIS FINGERNAILS IN A TOKYO HOTEL ROOM.
MARY CATHERINE DID SOMETHING THAT MADE HIM VERY ANGRY; HE WASN’T SURE EXACTLY WHAT.
“I have to quit,” Zeldo said. “I can’t type any more. My fingers are dead.”
“I want to keep going,” Cozzano said. “This is incredible.”
Zeldo thought about it. “It is incredible. But I’m not sure if it’s useful.”
“Useful for what?”
“The whole point of this exercise was to figure out a way to use this chip in your head for communication,” Zeldo said.
Cozzano laughed. “You’re right. I had forgotten about that.”
“I’m not sure how we use all of this stuff to communicate,” Zeldo said. “It’s all impressionistic stuff. Nothing rational.”
“Well,” Cozzano said, “it’s a new communications medium. What is necessary is to develop a grammar and syntax.”
Zeldo laughed and shook his head. “You lost me.”
“It’s like film,” Cozzano said. “When film was invented, no one knew how to use it. But gradually, a visual grammar was developed. Filmgoers began to understand how the grammar was used to communicate certain things. We have to do the same thing with this.”
“I should get you together with Ogle,” Zeldo said.
“You should have studied more liberal arts,” Cozzano said.
twenty-nine
ELEANOR MADE the mistake of giving out her full name. Since her name was listed in the telephone book, she was now reachable by everyone, all the time. She had the impression that her phone number must have been spray-painted in digits ten feet tall on the wall of every public housing project in greater Denver. And somehow they had all heard that Eleanor Richmond was a nice lady who would help you out with your problems.
She began to get calls from constituents in the middle of the night. When some unemployed mother of three phoned her at one o’clock one night and asked her for a personal loan of a hundred dollars, Eleanor came to her senses and decided that this had to stop. She could not be unofficial mom to all of Denver. She soon got into the habit of turning off the ringer on her phone when she went to bed.
This was a difficult step for a mother of two teenagers to take, because once she turned off that ringer, she knew that her kids would not be able to wake her up in the middle of the night and ask her advice, or request help, apologize, or simply burst into tears whenever they got themselves into a Situation. And although Eleanor’s kids were reasonably smart and fairly responsible and kind of prudent, they still had an amazing talent for finding their way into Situations.
But by this point in her mothering career, Eleanor had seen enough Situations that she had begun to suspect that her kids were more apt to get into them when they knew that Mom would be there at the other end of the phone line to bail them out. And sure enough, when she got in the habit of turning her phone off at night, the incidence of Situations dropped. Or maybe she just stopped hearing about them. Either way it was fine with her.
It didn’t help her sleep, though. Turning off the phones prevented them from ringing. But she could still hear the mechanical parts inside her answering machine clunking and whirring all night long, as people left messages for her. She put the answering machine in the far corner of her trailer and buried it under a pillow, but that didn’t help. She still lay awake at night wondering, Why the hell are these people calling me?
She had never called anyone. It had never even occurred to her, when she was broke, and her husband had gone on the lam to the Afterlife, and her mother was soiling her pants in the middle of the night, and Clarice and Harmon, Jr., were out getting into Situations, to pick up the phone and contact the office of the Senator. It would not have occurred to her in a million years.
Where had these people gotten the weird idea that the government was going to take care of their problems?
The answer to that one was pretty simple: the government had told them as much. And they had been dumb enough to believe it. When it turned out to be a lie (or at least a hell of an exaggeration) they didn’t go out and help themselves. Instead they stewed in their own problems and they got self-righteous about it and started calling Eleanor Richmond in the wee hours to vent their outrage.
She had to stop thinking this way. She was thinking exactly like Earl Strong. Blaming everything on the welfare mothers. As if the welfare mothers had caused the savings and loan crisis, the budget deficit, the decline of the schools, and El Niño all at once.
She would lie awake every night for hours, sensing the distant clunking of her answering machine under
the pillow in the next room, and run through this series of thoughts over and over again, like a rat on a treadmill, exhausting herself but never going anywhere.
One morning in the middle of April she got up, turned on her coffeemaker, took the pillow off her answering machine, and played back the messages, as she did every morning. Today there were only four of them. The people who had Eleanor’s phone number written on the walls of their trailers and project flats had begun to learn that she never responded to messages and, bit by bit, weren’t bothering to call anymore.
One of the messages was from someone speaking a language that Eleanor had never heard before. He rambled on until the machine cut him off. Then there were a couple of irate voters. And then there came a voice she recognized: it was one of Senator Marshall’s political aides, calling from Washington.
“Hi, this is Roger calling from D.C. at nine A.M. local time.”
Eleanor glanced at her clock. It was 7:15. This message had just come in while she was showering.
“We have a major problem that’s up your alley. Please call me as soon as you can.”
Eleanor picked up her phone and started punching numbers. She got through to Roger in D.C. During her month of working for Senator Marshall she had spoken briefly to this man once previously, and seen his name on a lot of memos.
Senators were too important to do anything personally. They were like sultans being carried around on sedan chairs, their feet never actually touching the ground. They showed up at the Capitol to make speeches and cast votes, and they made a lot of essentially social appearances, but most of the actual grunge work was delegated to a few key aides. This Roger character was one of those aides. He was a highly media-conscious, touchy-feely sort who spent a lot of time worrying about Senator Marshall’s image with the folks at home. When a high-school band made a trip to Washington, D.C., it was Roger who made sure that they got in to the Senator’s office for a photograph and a brief chat.