Interface

  “I believe a dome light is standard on the big Mercedes. It’s probably broken.”

  “Yeah,” the man said, crestfallen. “I guess I’ll just have to grope around.”

  He picked up Merriam’s left arm and moved it out of the way, gently and firmly. Then he lay down on his belly and crawled forward, shoving his arms, head, and shoulders in through the crumpled window frame, shoving Merriam back against the seat, and began to feel around on the ceiling of the car, now the floor.

  “Damn!” he said. “It ain’t anywhere. You sure you had a wallet?”

  “Positive. Maybe it was thrown out of the car.”

  “Shit!” the guy said. He crawled into the car even farther, all the way up to his waist, the bulk of his body pinning Merriam tightly back. To judge from his breath, it had been a few decades since this guy had laid hands on dental floss.

  The insides of Chase Merriam’s eyelids glowed a warm pinkish-orange color.

  “Shit!” the guy said again, and began to thrash around wildly, trying to extricate himself from the car. In the process he did a little bit more damage to Chase Merriam, but by now it was all kind of superfluous. “They never come this fast!”

  “Freeze!” shouted a nearby voice that could only belong to a cop. “You are under arrest!”

  After that it was all footsteps. The man ran away. A cop followed him; they crashed into some brush and then receded into the distance. And then another set of footsteps approached the overturned car. Slowly, calmly.

  “Nice car,” the cop said. “Didn’t know these babies were four-wheel-drive.”

  The debate would be starting in less than five minutes. In addition to the cavernous exhibition space where most of the Town Meeting was happening, McCormick Place had its own theater, which was currently filling up with audience members chosen at random from Ogle’s ten thousand typical Americans.

  Eleanor Richmond, sitting in a dressing room backstage, having her face fixed by a professional makeup artist, was startled to realize that she wasn’t nervous at all.

  That was strange because she was about to go on national television. She had been on national television quite a bit recently, but this time she was going to engage in verbal combat with three other people who were better at this kind of thing than she was. Had she become so jaded that she didn’t even care anymore?

  Someone knocked on the door and pushed it open before Eleanor could tell them to get lost. It was Mary Catherine Cozzano. She slipped quickly into the room, glancing nervously behind her, and leaned back against the door, pushing it shut. She was carrying a bouquet of blue flowers.

  “Sorry, I didn’t want to be seen coming in here,” she said. “People would say I was playing favorites.”

  “Did you get those from a boyfriend, or just some political weasel?” Eleanor said, eyeing the flowers. “They’re nice.”

  “I got them from a florist,” Mary Catherine said. “They’re for you.”

  “Well, how nice! Thank you!”

  “I got blue ones, to symbolize the truth,” Mary Catherine said, “because you always tell the truth.”

  “Well, not always,” Eleanor said, “but often enough to give people the willies.”

  “You look great,” Mary Catherine said. “I hope you knock ’em dead.”

  Eleanor didn’t figure out the real reason for her lack of nervousness until she went out and sat down on the set. She was the last one to get there. The other debaters were a white man; a somewhat Anglicized Hispanic man; and a middle-aged woman, blond and blue-eyed. And all of them were perfect. They were good-looking, with large, clear features that looked good on television. They were poised, coiffed, made-up, dressed, prepped. She felt like she had blundered into the Academy Awards.

  She was here as a token. Nothing more. She didn’t have a chance of becoming William A. Cozzano’s vice-presidential candidate, even if she and Mary Catherine did have a mutual admiration society. That’s why she wasn’t nervous.

  Less than a hundred yards away from the debate set, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle was settling into the comfy swivel chair at the center of the Eye of Cy. For purposes of the National Town Meeting, the GODS container had been driven into the very heart of McCormick Place and everything else constructed around it; the platform where Cozzano and his guests stood every night was directly above his head.

  Compliance was good tonight. Ninety-eight of the hundred screens were lit up. The PIPER 100 had started out as a somewhat disorganized and unreliable group and, through practice, had now become steady and disciplined.

  That was comforting, because Cy Ogle was scared. The v.p. thing was the hardest of all. Practically everyone screwed this up. For the last week, Ogle had not been able to close his eyes at night without seeing the ghostly faces hanging before him: Nixon, Agnew, Eagleton, Bush, Quayle, Stockdale.

  The best that Ogle could do was round up the four best people he knew of—that is, the four people who made the best impression on television—put them up on the tube, side by side, and chart people’s reactions to them. Of course, he would have to bring in a moderator to ask them some questions. What kinds of questions didn’t really matter. Neither did the answers. The important thing was just to get their faces up on the tube, get their voices working. The hard part was going to be interpreting the data. Because the deeper he got into this, the more weird little angles he began to notice inside the minds of the PIPER 100.

  Mae Hunter was sitting not far from the banks of the Hudson River, applying lipstick and watching the sun go down on New Jersey. She had discovered the lipstick earlier today, in a wastebasket in the women’s room at the New York Public Library, and decided that it was a good shade for her. It was a pretty nice one, and brand new; some fickle shopper must have picked it up in one of the nice stores on Fifth Avenue, ducked into the library to touch herself up, and decided that under that light, it didn’t look so hot.

  Mae Hunter admired that decisiveness, the ability to fire a brand-new lipstick directly into the wastebasket because it was the wrong shade. Most women would have taken it home and put it on their dresser and left it there for the next twenty years. But here in New York, you met all kinds. People had higher standards. They did not tolerate imperfections quite so easily. This lipstick had obviously been thrown away by a woman of breeding.

  She had found a lot of interesting things in the restrooms of the New York Public Library. They didn’t let you bring food into the building, so the wastebaskets were cleaner. Almost everything that was in there was paper. Actual merchandise like the lipstick stood out prominently.

  Mae Hunter spent a great deal of time in the library because she didn’t have a job, family, or home to distract her from her real mission in life, which was to improve her mind. For the past few months she had been working her way through Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. She was halfway through the fifth of seven volumes.

  Reading was the most important thing in her life. She had found, over the year and a half since her husband died, that she could handle sleeping out of doors and dumpster-diving for food. She could handle the uncertainty and fear. She had been raped twice and she could even handle that. But the one thing that drove her nuts was the ignorance. She saw these people all around her, sleeping in the parks, spare-changing at Port Authority, checking themselves in to those awful homeless shelters, and none of them made any effort to improve their minds. You could hardly walk ten paces in New York City without coming across a discarded copy of the New York Times, the world’s finest newspaper, but none of these people bothered to avail themselves. As a former elementary-school teacher, she found that this really irked her. All that wasted brainpower.

  Another thing that annoyed her was people’s failure to take care of themselves, which is why she was being so exquisitely careful to get this lipstick on correctly. That done, she found a comfortable place and settled in against the base of a small embankment with some shrubs growing on top of it.

  She jumped as a bur
st of music sounded from nearby. Someone was listening to a transistor radio behind her, back in the bushes. “Hello?” she said. “Is someone back there?” But there was no answer.

  There was still barely enough light to see. She stood up and peered into the bushes. “Hello?”

  The music faded out and was replaced by the sound of an announcer. “From the National Town Meeting, four contenders for the vice presidency debate the issues . . .”

  She was almost positive that no one was back there. She walked back and forth in front of the bushes, peering in through gaps between the leaves, trying to see. Something was glowing back there. It looked like a little TV set. And no one was anywhere near it. She found a sort of gap through the little thicket where it looked as though someone had charged through it, flattening down the branches. She followed it in and picked up the source of the noise and light: a Dick Tracy watch.

  She debated whether to take it. It had obviously been stolen and dropped here by some criminal who might come back later to look for it.

  She looked at the screen. It was showing a TV program: a debate featuring four people who wanted to be William Cozzano’s vice-presidential candidate. One by one, the announcer introduced them as they nodded into the camera.

  “Brandon F. Doyle, former U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, currently on the faculty of Georgetown University . . .” This was a handsome, youngish man, probably in his late forties but young-looking for that age. He smiled a tight little smile into the camera and nodded. She didn’t like him.

  “Marco Gutierrez, Mayor of Brownsville, Texas, and a founding member of the international environmental group Toxic Borders . . .” This was a burly Latino man with a mustache and large, intense black eyes. He was leaning back in his chair, stroking his mustache with one finger. He raised his hand away from his face as his name was called and waved at the camera.

  Mae Hunter snapped the Dick Tracy watch into place around her wrist. She wanted to see at least this one program.

  The TV image cut to a blond, blue-eyed woman with one of those professional-looking haircuts that Mae always saw on the young women in midtown. She stared directly, and almost coldly, into the camera. “Laura Thibodeaux-Green, founder and CEO of Santa Fe Software, who, two years ago, came within a thousand votes of being elected senator from New Mexico.”

  Finally, to Mae Hunter’s surprise and delight, she appeared on the screen!

  “And Eleanor Richmond of Alexandria, Virginia, assistant to the late Senator Caleb Marshall.”

  The woman was so cool. She didn’t even look at the camera, didn’t react to the introduction at all. She was looking at some papers in her lap. Then she glanced up and looked around a little bit, calm, alert, but not paying any attention to the announcer or the TV cameras. She was so like a princess.

  What a terrible introduction that was! It didn’t do justice to the life and times of Eleanor Richmond at all. Mae Hunter knew all about her, she had followed her career in the discarded pages of the New York Times. She was a modern-day hero. Mae pushed her way out through the bushes and went onto the broad open bank of the Hudson to watch her girlfriend Eleanor.

  The moderator was Marcus Hale, a grizzled ex-anchorman who had gotten to the place in his career where he could write his own job description. He did a lot of work for TV North America now, because there, he didn’t have to keep stopping in midparagraph to pimp hemorrhoid remedies to the American public. And now that the candidacy of William A. Cozzano had developed into a media-certified Important Phenomenon, he had been all too eager to serve as the moderator of this vice-presidential showdown. He opened things up, in typical Marcus Hale style, with a lengthy editorial, though he probably would have preferred to call it analysis. Eventually he worked his way around to asking a question.

  And it was a doozy. “All of you are young people, in your forties. Chances are you’ll be around for at least another twenty-five years. One or more of you may even become president during that time. By then, people who are being born today will just be coming into the adult job market, and their success in that market will depend largely on the economic and educational initiatives that are taken during the next decade. These will be most important to the poorest people, who today face the most restricted opportunities. And without putting too fine a point on it, you know and I know that what I’m really talking about here is inner-city blacks. My question is: twenty-five years from now, what will life be like for these people, and what will you have done to make that life better?”

  Brandon F. Doyle of Massachusetts went first, and he looked scared. It was easy enough for an old man like Marcus Hale to drag these scary and difficult issues into the limelight. It was a lot harder for someone like Doyle to deal with the resulting mess, especially considering that he was sharing the stage with a black person who could shoot him down whenever she wanted.

  “Well, first of all, Marcus, let me say that opportunity—for all people, white or black—is a function of education. This is a message that we have always taken to heart in Massachusetts, which has a long heritage of brilliant institutions of higher learning. It’s my hope—and my intention—that twenty-five years from now, a lot of the people you’re talking about will be entering graduate school, or law school, or medical school, and they’ll be doing it with the full assistance and support of a government that takes these things with the utmost seriousness. Which is not to support big-spending government programs. I prefer to think of education as an investment, not an expense.”

  Next came Marco Gutierrez, who had a heavy, stolid, calm affect. That and his hair and his clothes had all been developed to make him seem like a cool norteamericano, not the jumpy, emotional Mexican that blue-eyed Duluth voters were afraid of. “Well, I would second a lot of what my friend Brandon said, but where we differ is at the end. Look. Government has a moral duty to educate its children. No matter what it costs. To say that education is a good investment misses the point. Even if it cost every penny in the Treasury, we should educate our kids to the best of our ability, because it’s the right thing to do.”

  It was Laura Thibodeaux-Green’s turn. “Kids spend seven hours a day in front of the television. Seven hours a day. Just think about that for a second. That’s a lot more time than they spend in the classroom. Well, my opinion is that TV doesn’t have to be mind-rotting garbage. It has the ability to educate. And the digital, high-definition TV that’s just starting to be introduced to the living rooms of America can be the most potent educational tool ever devised. I advocate a massive program to develop educational software that can run on these TV sets of the future, so that those seven hours a day spent in front of the TV can turn our little kids into little Shakespeares and Einsteins instead of illiterate couch potatoes.”

  Finally, Eleanor Richmond got her chance. “Look,” she said, “Abe Lincoln learned his lessons by writing on the back of a shovel. During slavery times, a lot of black people learned to read and write even though they weren’t allowed to go to school. And nowadays, Indochinese refugee kids do great in school even though they got no money at all and their folks don’t speak English. The fact that many black people nowadays aren’t getting educated has nothing to do with how much money we spend on schools. Spending more money won’t help. Neither will writing educational software to run on your home TV set. It’s just a question of values. If your family places a high value on being educated, you’ll get educated, even if you have to do your homework on the back of a shovel. And if your family doesn’t give a damn about developing your mind, you’ll grow up stupid and ignorant even if you go to the fanciest private school in America.

  “Now, unfortunately, I can’t give you a program to help develop people’s values. Personally, I’m starting to think that the fewer programs we have, the better off we are.”

  For the first time, the live audience broke into applause.

  “Amen to that!” Mae Hunter shouted, her voice echoing out across the gray Hudson. A couple of passing joggers gla
nced at her, then looked away quickly and pretended not to notice the crazy lady.

  Cy Ogle saw a screen flare bright green in the corner of his eye, and turned to look. The name at the bottom of the screen was CHASE MERRIAM.

  It was amazing. Out of all these candidates, Merriam’s clear favorite, so far, was Eleanor Richmond. Between the poor people and minorities on the bottom, and the women and people like Chase Merriam on the top, an astonishing number of people liked Eleanor Richmond.

  But on second thought, Ogle reflected, maybe it wasn’t so surprising after all. Months ago, when she had confronted Earl Strong in the shopping mall, he had pointed his finger at her image on the screen and pronounced her the first female president of the United States.

  forty-five

  ELEANOR WENT straight to her hotel room after the debate, talked to her kids in Alexandria, watched some TV, went to bed, and slept until ten Friday morning. When she opened her eyes, she knew without looking at the clock that she had lost control of herself and overslept massively. The red light on her phone was flashing like a police car, the blackout curtains on her hotel room windows were limned with the hot, hysterical white light of midday. She felt wizened and dehydrated and headachy.

  She opened her curtains about six inches, letting a slab of arid light into the room, ordered some room service (yogurt, a large infusion of juice, and lots of coffee), and took a shower. The yogurt arrived with a stack of message slips from various journalists, most of whom had deadlines that had already expired. She was still sitting on her bed in her hotel bathrobe, trying to get the coffee into her system as fast as possible, sorting these messages into stacks, when someone knocked at her door. Shave and a haircut, two bits.

  It was her girlfriend Mary Catherine Cozzano, turned out in a smashingly professional navy blue ensemble. Mary Catherine was doing some major grinning, showing some serious dimple action this morning.