Interface. Part 20

Not in an overtly s.e.xy way. She had a nice face, with big eyes. She was wearing an overcoat that was too big, but its bulk contrasted well with her relatively sharp and slender build, and its navy-blue color suited her skin tones. Her backdrop was a wall of Earl Strong supporters wearing colorful T-s.h.i.+rts, all of whom were hastily backing away from her; she stood in the center of an arena of fat, vivid Aryans, all facing inward, emphasizing her importance. As she spoke, she inclined her face up into the even, omnidirectional light streaming down from above; the same light that cast Earl Strong into shadow served as perfect illumination for her.

"The ch.o.r.eography blows my mind," Ogle said.

"I love her," Tricia Gordon said. "And she lights well."

"She's telling the truth," Schram said. "Whatever she's saying, I believe her."

"The drama of this thing is unreal," Myron Morris said. "One woman standing alone, all these trailer- park n.a.z.is shrinking away like rats."

Cut back to Earl Strong, now looking straight down at her so that his face was completely obscured by a sinister shadow.

Myron Morris suddenly went nuts! He fell out of his chair, dropping to his knees below the television set, and clasped his hands together as if in prayer.

"Zoom in! Zoom in! Zoom in and his career is over!" he screamed.

The camera began to zoom. Earl Strong's face grew to fill the screen, grew into a devastating extreme closeup.

"Yes! Yes! Yesss!" Morris was screaming. "Slit the b.a.s.t.a.r.d's throat!"

Once the backlighting had been removed by zooming in tight, the camera's electronics were able to pick up every nuance of Earl Strong's face in clinical detail. A storm front of perspiration had burst through the powder and pancake on his forehead; individual drops of it began to run down. One of them made a beeline for the corner of his eye and that eye began to blink spastically. Earl Strong's mouth was half open and his tongue had come forward, sticking half out of his mouth as he tried to think of what to do next. A huge Caucasian blur burst up through the bottom of the frame: his hand, brus.h.i.+ng the sweat away from his stricken eyeball, stopping on the way down to shove one thumb into a nostril and pick out something that had been troubling him there.

Morris suddenly jumped to his feet and thrust an accusing finger directly into Earl Strong's face on the screen. "Yes! You are dead! You are dead! You are dead! You are dead and buried, you inbred booger picking little s.h.i.+t! We gotta find the cameraman who did that and give him a medal."

"And a decent job," Ogle said.Back to the black woman, still standing there. Her face was alert, her jaw set, her eyes burning, but she remained solid and still, a perfect subject for the camera. The camera zoomed in a little closer but still found no imperfections. There were a few wrinkles around the eyes. It just made her look even wiser than she already did, standing next to Earl Strong.

"Ronald Reagan eat your f.u.c.king heart out," Shane Schram said.

"There's something about her face, too," Ogle said.

"She's been through some heavy s.h.i.+t, you can tell. An American Pieta," Tricia Gordon said.

"Let's go down there and represent her," Shane Schram said.

"What's she running for?" Morris said.

"Nothing. She's a bag lady," Ogle said.

A look of ecstatic fulfillment came over Morris's face.

"No!" he said.

"Yes," Ogle said.

"It can't be. It's too perfect," Morris said. "It is just too f.u.c.king ideal."

"She's a bag lady, and according to our polls, she knocked twenty-five points off of Earl Strong's standings today."

Morris threw up his hands. "I quit," he said. "There's no need for me. Real life is too good."

"We have to run her for something," Tricia Gordon said, staring fixedly at the TV screen.

"Excuse me," Aaron said, "but aren't you all forgetting something?"

"What's that?" Ogle said. They were all staring at him, suddenly quiet.

"We haven't heard a word the woman's said," Aaron said. "I mean, she could be a raving lunatic."

They all burst into dismissive scoffing noises. "Screw that," Shane Schram said. "Look at her face.

She's solid."

"f.u.c.k that s.h.i.+t," Morris said. "That's what writers are for."

21.

MARY CATHERINE WAS EXPECTING A CAR, NOT A LIMOUSINE, so SHE didn't know that the s.h.i.+ny black behemoth was hers until the driver got out, walked around, and opened the door for her. By that time, the sight of the limousine was already drawing a crowd; not many of these showed up in this particular neighborhood of Chicago.

Her lunch date had told her that he would send a car around to pick her up at the hospital. Instead, he had dispatched a limousine. Which didn't make a lot of difference to Mary Catherine. Both of them were just vehicles to her, just ways of getting around town. She had been around enough not to be bowled over by the gesture. It was just another exercise in being William Cozzano's daughter and trying to keep things in perspective.

The limousine had a TV and a little bar inside of it. The driver offered to give her a hand mixing a drink.

She laughed and shook her head no. She was going to have to come back from this lunch and keep working.

She knew that there was a certain kind of person - a certain kind of man, to be specific - for whom the back of this limousine was like a natural habitat, who felt as comfortable sitting on those leather seats and drinking Chivas in the middle of the day as Mary Catherine felt behind the wheel of her beat-up old car.

During the time that Dad had been Governor, she had run into a lot of those people, gotten to know their peculiar rhythms and their particular view of life. They had always seemed completely alien to her, likecosmonauts or Eskimos.

Then Dad had proclaimed her the quarterback. As if her regular job wasn't enough responsibility. Now, she had to dash out of the neurology war, filled with gunshot-paralyzed drug dealers and demented AIDS patients, and dash down the stairs and jump into the back of a limousine where the decisions were all different: what kind of drink to mix, what channel to view on the TV.

She had club soda and watched CNN, which was what the TV set was already showing when she climbed in. The timing was fortuitous: it was high noon, the beginning of a fresh news broadcast. The Illinois primary was tomorrow. The elections were still very much up in the air, not much else was happening in the world, and so the campaign was being covered pretty heavily.

The out-of-power party had their front-runner (Norman Fowler, Jr.), their runner-up (Nimrod T.

["Tip"] McLane), and their plucky underdog (the Reverend Doctor Billy Joe Sweigel). And just to make things interesting, they also had a popular favourite: Governor William A. Cozzano, who wasn't even running. But wildcat Cozzano pet.i.tion drives were popping up all over the place and so the media had to treat him as a serious candidate.

All three of the legitimate candidates got roughly the same sort of coverage: shots of the great man flying or driving into a prefabricated campaign event, a rally at a high school or whatever. They shook hands, they smiled, and they all did something just a little bit wacky, hoping that it would gain them just a little more recognition among TV viewers.

Mary Catherine was tired and stressed and she quickly zoned out, found herself watching all of this stuff without really processing it. She had slumped way down in the soft leather seat of the limo, displaying posture that would have driven her late mother to hysterics, and was gazing through heavy lids at the colorful images on the screen, letting them pa.s.s directly into her brain without hindrance. Which was exactly the way you were supposed to watch TV.

As if on cue, there was her father.

CNN was showing her a wall of gla.s.s windows. The camera was aimed upward at the outside of a building. Ceiling light could be seen in a few rooms, and many of the windows were festooned with mylar balloons, flowers, and children's artwork. Mary Catherine saw an IV bottle hanging from a rack and realized that she was looking at a hospital. The camera zoomed in on a particular window with lots of expensive flower arrangements. A man in a wheelchair was dimly visible peeking out between the bouquets.

Then it all snapped into place. This was Burke Hospital in Champaign, and they were zooming in on her father's private room. The TV crew must have gone to the roof of the parking ramp directly across the street, five stories high, and aimed the camera up and across to his window.

Dad was nothing more than a silhouette. The windows were all metallic and reflective; you could only see into them when it was dark outside. But sometimes when the sky was profoundly overcast in the middle of the day, it was possible to look in those windows and see dim shapes underneath the silvery reflections. And that was what some enterprising cameraman had captured on videotape: Dad, sitting in a wheelchair, looking out his window.

The image was gray and indistinct and so you couldn't tell that Dad was, in fact, strapped into the wheelchair to keep him from slumping over. He had been turned squarely toward the window and so you couldn't see the support that rose up behind his head to keep it from flopping around. He was lit from behind so you couldn't see the drool coming out of his mouth and the moronic expression on his paralyzed face.

A couple of standing silhouettes were visible behind him: a nurse and a slender young man. James. James pushed the wheelchair closer to the window so that Dad could see out. Then he left Dad alone there and disappeared from the frame. The camera panned 180 degrees.

The parking ramp covered about half a square block. Parking was not hard to find in the area, so few cars ever made it all the way up to the rooftop level. Right now, half a dozen vehicles were scattered around.

Most of the remainder of the roof was covered with people. Hundreds of them. They were carrying signs and banners. They were all looking straight up in the air. Straight up toward Dad. And now that he hadappeared in the window, they were all rising to their feet, reaching into the air, shoving their signs and banners up into s.p.a.ce as if Dad could reach down and pluck them out of their hands. But it was a strangely silent demonstration.

Of course it was - they were in front of a hospital. They had to be quiet.

The camera zoomed in on a long, crudely fas.h.i.+oned banner, like the ones that fans hold up at football games: WE LOVE YOU w.i.l.l.y! Others could be seen in the background: FIRST AND TEN FOR Cozzano! GET WELL SOON - THEN GET ELECTED!

There were a couple of shots of other hospital patients, in their flannel jammies and their walkers, looking out windows and pointing. Then back to the shot of Dad's silhouette, just visible from the chest up, in front of his window.

He waved out the window.

Which wasn't possible. Most of his body was paralyzed after the second stroke. But he was doing it. He was waving vigorously to the crowd.

Something looked funny: his hand and arm weren't big enough.

It was James. He must be down on his knees next to Dad, concealed behind the windowsill, holding up his hand and waving for him.

Cut back to the crowd, waving their banners hysterically, going nuts.

Cut back to the window. James was till waving, pretending to be Dad. Then his hand stopped waving and became a fist. Two fingers extended from the fist in a V sign.

Mary Catherine shot upright and spilled her club soda on the limousine's wool carpet. "You b.a.s.t.a.r.d,"

she said.

Back to the crowd. Finally they lost it, forgot they were in front of a hospital, started screaming and cheering. Hospital security cops jumped forward, waving their arms, telling them to keep it down. And then they cut back to network headquarters, where all of this was being watched by their afternoon anchorman.

Pete Ledger. Former pro football player, turned sportscaster, turned newscaster.

A well-respected, middle-aged black guy with a sharp, fast tongue who'd probably end up having his own talk show one of these days.

His eyes were red. He reached up with one hand just for an instant and wiped his runny nose with the back of one finger, sniffled audibly, took a big deep breath, forced himself to smile into the camera, and announced, in a cracking voice, that they were going to break for a commercial.

"My G.o.d," Mary Catherine said out loud to no one. "We're in deep s.h.i.+t."

She flinched as the door of the limousine came open, letting in bright unfiltered light. The car had stopped.

She'd lost track, but something about the light told her they were near downtown, hemmed in by skysc.r.a.pers. They were in a crowded little side street, just south and west of the Board of Trade, stopped in front of a brownstone with a first-floor restaurant. An awning extended from the front door, across the sidewalk, to a loading zone along the curb. An uniformed doorman had opened the door for her.

He reached in with one hand and helped her out, which was a nice, if superfluous, gesture. He was an older guy, a kindly white-haired doorman type, and as he was helping her out on to the sidewalk, he gave her hand an extra squeeze, nodded at her, looking at her in a way that was almost wors.h.i.+pful.

There was another man, a guy in a plain old dark suit, standing under the awning waiting for her. Dad had once told her that you could gauge the quality of a restaurant according to how many people you spoke to before you actually got around to ordering food. She wasn't even into the door of this place yet and she had already encountered two people.

"Howdy, Miz Cozzano," the man said, "I'm Cy Ogle."

"Oh, h.e.l.lo," she said, shaking his hand. "Did you just get here?"

"Nah, I nailed down a table for us," he said. "But I figured that since I dug you out of work like this on such an ugly day, least I could do was come out and say hi."

"Well, that's very nice," she said noncommitally.

So far, he didn't seem like the cynical, media-manipulating son of a b.i.t.c.h that he was supposed to be. But.i.t was way, way too early to be jumping to conclusions.

Another guy in a suit, who clearly did work here, nearly killed himself bursting out the front door of the place, and met her halfway up the sidewalk, holding out one hand, bending his knees as he approached so that by the time he reached Mary Catherine he was practically duck-walking. Mary Catherine could see in his whole face and affect that he was Italian.

He was crying, for G.o.d's sake. He pumped her hand and grabbed her upper arm with his left, as if only all the willpower in his body prevented him from violently embracing her. He said nothing but merely shook his head. He was so overcome with emotion that he couldn't speak.

"We were just watching CNN over the bar," Ogle explained. "It was incredible."

Some kind of a huge commotion was going on inside the place. It got louder as Mary Catherine moved toward the door, led by the crying Italian and followed by Ogle, and as she crossed the threshold, it exploded.

The back of the restaurant was all quiet little tables, but the front of the place was a sizable bar, currently packed with bodies. They were all men in suits. This was an expensive place where people in the commodities business, and the lawyers and bankers who fed off them, gathered to fortify themselves with martinis and five-dollar mineral water.

And right now they were all on their feet, howling, applauding, stamping their feet, whistling, as if the Bears had just run back an interception for a touchdown. They were going nuts.

And they were all looking at Mary Catherine.

She came to a dead stop, shocked and intimidated by the noise. Ogle nearly rear-ended her. He put one hand lightly on top of her shoulder and bent toward her. "Pretend they don't exist," Ogle said, not shouting but projecting a deep actor's voice that cut through the noise. "You're the Queen of England and they're drunks in the gutter."

Mary Catherine stopped looking at them. She stopped making eye contact with any of them. She focused on the back of the rnaitre d', who was plunging through the crowd of pinstripes, making an avenue for her, and she followed him straight through the thick of it and into the restaurant proper. The people at the bar were chanting now: Cozzano! Cozzano! Cozzano!

Half of the people dining in the restaurant area stood up as she came through. Nearly all of them applauded. The maitre d' led them straight to a table at the very back of the place, behind a part.i.tion. At last, they had privacy. Just Mary Catherine and Ogle.

"I'm really, really sorry about that," Ogle said, after they had been seated, menued, watered, and breadsticked by a swirl of efficient, white-ap.r.o.ned young Italian men. "I should have arranged to bring you in the rear entrance."

"It's okay," she said.

"Well, I'm embarra.s.sed," Ogle said. "This is my business, you see. It was unprofessional on my part.

But they had CNN going above the bar, and I didn't reckon on that footage being shown just before you got here."

"Powerful stuff," she said.

"It was unbelievable," Ogle said. He stared off into s.p.a.ce. His face went slack and his eyes went out of focus. He sat motionless for a few seconds, moving his lips ever so slightly, gradually beginning to shake his head from side to side, playing the whole thing back on the videotape recorder of his mind.

Finally he blinked, came awake, and looked at her. "The kicker was Pete Ledger getting choked up. I never thought I'd see that in a million years."

"Me neither," she said. "He's usually too smart for that kind of thing."

"Well," Ogle said, "this is some powerful stuff that's going on right now."