Interface (15 page)

"Okay."

"This afternoon, before traffic gets screwed up, go to LAX and
take a shuttle up to San Francisco and a car will meet you. Bring
everything."

"Gotcha."

"We got a new project underway, since I last talked to you, that
you are going to just love," Cy Ogle said. "You are just going to
love it."

Then Ogle hung up the phone.

Aaron considered showing up in the full set of Mickey Mouse ears,
just to prove that he had in fact gone to Disneyland. But he decided
at the last minute that this would be just a little bit too off-the-wall.
So he opted for a simple, oversized, 100 percent cotton Goofy T-
shirt. A T-shirt was more conservative than a set of ears, and Aaron
had a feeling that Cyrus Rutherford Ogle would relate better,
somehow, to Goofy.

When he came off the plane in San Francisco, a man was
standing by the gate holding a hand-lettered sign that said A.
GREEN. The driver seemed to read everything in his face, and
ventured into the torrent of deplaning businessmen to take Aaron's IMIPREM case out of his hand before Aaron had even identified
himself.

The driver was named Mike. He wasn't a uniformed chauffeur or anything like that, just a normal-looking black kid of eighteen
or twenty, wearing a black T-shirt. Quiet, courteous, and efficient.

After a brief wait by the baggage carousel, Mike led him out to a
navy-blue Ford Taurus with an oversized engine and lots of
antennas (innocuous but powerful; correct but not ostentatious;
comfortable but not decadent) and drove him up the freeway to the
Bay Bridge and across to Oakland, surging from lane to lane
(decisive but not reckless). They exited shortly after getting into
Oakland and then cruised down into a semirenovated downtown
area and from there into a not-so-renovated area on the fringe of
the waterfront warehouse district.

A number of the buildings down here were well on their way to b
eing trashed, but as usual in California, there were a few nice ones th
at stood out, not so much because they'd been perfectly mainta
ined, but because they had been well-designed to begin with.

One of the best was a big old Art Deco Cadillac dealership, a gl
ass-walled flatiron of a building set in the angle of two diverging a
venues. The ground floor was huge and wide open, with ceilings
that looked some twenty-five feet high, completely wrapped in
tinted glass. That was the showroom; behind it, farther back into
the block, was garage space. Above this ground floor were four or
five additional floors of office space. On top of the building, the word
 
CADILLAC
 
was
 
written
 
large
 
in
 
orange
 
neon
 
script,
looming over the intersection in letters that must have stood twenty
feet high. Beneath that, mounted high on the prow of the building,
was a big clock, a full story high, its numbers and hands outlined in m
ore neon. The neon worked but the clock didn't.

Most of the big windows were in surprisingly good shape. A few
of them had fist-sized holes in them, backed up with sheets of
plywood, and the wide, double glass doors that had once beckoned
would-be Cadillac buyers into the dealership had been rebuilt in
plywood and painted black. The upper floors of the building
looked empty. A few yellowed windowshades hung askew. It
wasn't until Mike pulled the Taurus up in front of the black
plywood doors, and Aaron saw the street number spray-painted
across them in orange, that he realized this address matched the one printed on Cy Ogle's business card.

Once Aaron entered the showroom, his eyes adjusted well
enough to see that it was mostly empty. No desks, no Cadillacs. He
pulled the door shut behind him and latched it using a big, old-
fashioned hook and eye.

The formerly high-gloss floor of the showroom was covered,
patchily, with swaths of bleak off-brown indoor-outdoor carpeting, and the occasional half-unrolled length of battered and scarred gray
foam rubber. A gridwork of black iron pipes hung down below the
ceiling, and a few dozen theatrical spotlights were clamped on to
the pipes here and there.

Other light fixtures
 
were
 
affixed to
 
tall,
  
telescoping poles
mounted on tripods. The tops of these devices had big white
umbrellas on them to serve as reflectors; the effect was that of a
sparse field of gigantic sunflowers. Heavy black electrical cables,
bundled together with gray tape, snaked all over the floor.

It was a stage. And the stage had props, scattered around irrationally
: a couple of heavy, impressive wooden desks. Plastic plants.
Several bookshelves loaded with books. But as Aaron found when
he looked at one of these, it was fake. There were no books on the
shelves. What looked like a line of books seen on edge was a hollow
plastic shell. The entire bookshelf weighed all of about twenty
pounds.

There were some muffled clunking noises, and some lights came
on at one end of the room. Aaron could only see about half of the
showroom floor from here, the rest of it had been blocked off by
flimsy partitions.

Finally he
 
made
 
out the
 
streamlined pear shape
 
of Cyrus
Rutherford Ogle, standing next to a gray steel circuit-breaker box bolted to the wall, clunking lights on and off.

"Goofy," Ogle said, "my favourite."

"Oh. If I'd know, I would have brought you a souvenir."

"I get a souvenir every time I meet with one of my clients, haw
haw haw," Ogle said. "Come on back, my offices are back here,
such as they are."

"Interesting building," Aaron said.

"We figured we'd leave the big CADILLAC up on the roof." Ogle said, "to attract Republicans."

Aaron walked toward the back of the showroom, picking his w
ay over cables and rolls of carpet padding.

"You might wonder why a man who has been described as a c
ross between Machiavelli and Zeffirelli would hang out in O
akland. Why not Sacramento, where the politicians are, or L.A., where all the media scum hang out?"

"The question had crossed my mind," Aaron said.

"It's a tug of war. Closer I am to Sacramento, the better it is for th
e politicians. Closer I am to L.A., the better it is for the creative tal
ent."

"You're close to Sacramento. So I guess the politicians win."

"They do not win, but they predominate. See, media people ha
ve no scruples. They will go anywhere. Politicians have no sc
ruples either. But they like to act as though they do. And it is b
eneath their sense of artificial dignity to go all the way to L.A. because they still think that I am just a huckster and it makes them think that they are groveling to the false gods."

Ogle turned his back on Aaron and led him through a maze of
partitions.

"So why not set yourself up in Sacramento, if media people will
anywhere?" Aaron said, strolling after him, looking around.

"Media people will go anywhere, but I won't. I won't go to Sa
cramento because it is a dried-up shithole. And San Fran is too d
amn expensive. So here I am, the best place I could ever be."

They were approaching some kind of an elaborate construction, a
room within a room. It was a three-dimensional webwork of tw
o-by-fours surrounding and supporting a curved wall. An old-fa
shioned, lath-and-plaster wall.

One side of the construct had been slid away so that Aaron could see
inside. The room as a whole was elliptical in shape, now split o
pen like a cracked egg.

Ogle noticed his curiosity and gestured at it. "Go on in," he said, "
Nicest room in this whole place."

Aaron sidestepped the unadorned beams of the wooden framing an
d passed through the gap into the oval room.

There was a nice desk in here. It was an office. An oval office.
It was
the
Oval Office.

Aaron had seen the real Oval Office in the White House once
when his high-school band went to Washington, D.C. And this
was the same. If the two halves were slid back together, it would
be an exact replica.

"It's perfect," he whispered.

"On TV it's perfect," Ogle said, ambling into the room. "On
film, it's just pretty good. Good enough for the yokels, anyway."

"Why would you need something like this?"

Ogle tapped the big leather swivel chair with the palm of his
hand, spinning it around toward him, and fell into it. He leaned the seat back and put his feet up on the presidential desk. "Ever hear of
the Rose Garden strategy?"

"Yeah, vaguely."

"Well, the White House is a busy place, what with all of those tour groups traipsing in and out, and as I said, most of the media
types are here in Cal. Sometimes it's more convenient to pursue the
Rose Garden strategy right here in Oakland."

"I didn't know you operated at that level," Aaron said. "I didn't
know you worked for presidential candidates."

"Son," Ogle said, "I work for
emperors."

"In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up
with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But
no one will ever have as much character as Lincoln and Lee. For
much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust
charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get
laid and send us to Vietnam."

Ogle had broken a six-pack out of a junky old refrigerator
behind the "Oval Office" and set up the cans on the presidential
desk. Aaron had pulled up another chair and now both of them had
their feet up on the desk and beers in their hands.

"So what's it about now?" Aaron said.

"Scrutiny. We are in the Age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media," Ogle said. "The President is
the ultimate public figure and must stand up under ultimate
scrutiny; he is like a man stretched out on a rack in the public sq
uare in some medieval shithole of a town, undergoing the rigors of
the Inquisition. Like the medieval trial by ordeal, the Age of Scruti
ny sneers at rational inquiry and debate, and presumes that me
re oaths and protestations are deceptions and lies. The only way to discover the real truth is by the rite of the ordeal, which exposes the
subject to such inhuman strain that any defect in his character will
cause him to crack wide open, like a flawed diamond. It is a m
ystical procedure that skirts rationality, which is seen as the work of
the Devil, instead of drawing down a higher, ineffable power. Li
ke the Roman haruspex who foretold the outcome of a battle, no
t by analyzing the strengths of the opposing forces but by groping th
rough the steaming guts of a slaughtered ram, we seek to establish a
candidate's fitness for office by pinning him under the lights of a te
levision studio and counting the number of times he blinks his ey
es in a minute, deconstructing his use of eye contact, monitoring hi
s gesticulations - whether his hands are held open or closed, to
ward or away from the camera, spread open forthcomingly or cl
enched like grasping claws.

"I paint a depressing picture here. But we, you and I, are like the lit
erate
 
monks
 
who
  
nurtured
 
the
 
flickering
 
flame
  
of Greek ra
tionality through the Dark Ages, remaining underground, know-ing
each other by secret signs and code words, meeting in cellars and thickets to exchange our dangerous and subversive ideas. We do
not have the strength to change the minds of the illiterate m
ultitude. But we do have the wit to exploit their foolishness, to fa
miliarize ourselves with their stunted thought patterns, and to use th
at knowledge to manipulate them toward the goals that we all kn
ow are, quote, right and true, unquote. Have you ever been on
TV, Aaron?"
"Just incidentally."