Interface (17 page)

"Five million," he said. "No, goddamn it!"
"Well, sometimes it seems like this cable TV has about five
million channels, but I don't think I can do that!" Patricia said in a
high, inflated tone, her I'm-making-a-joke voice. "Did you mean
to say channel five?"

"No!" he said. "Twice that."
"Two?"

"No! Three squared plus one. Six plus four. The square root of
one hundred," he said. Why didn't she just give him the remote
control?

"Oh, here's a news program. How's that?" Patricia said. She had
hit one of the network stations. It was a little one-minute news break at the top of the hour, between soap operas.

"Yes," he said.

"Here's the remote control in case you change your mind," she
aid, and left it on the table next to him.

Cozzano sat and watched the little news break. It was totally inconsequential: presidential candidates cavorting around Iowa in a se
ries of staged media events. The caucuses were in a week and a h
alf.

Cozzano could have won the caucuses without lifting a finger.
People in Iowa loved him, they knew he was a small-town boy. Anyone who lived in the eastern part of that state saw him on TV al
l the time. All he had to do was pick up a phone and get n
ominated. Looking at the candidates on TV, he was tempted to do
just that and put an end to all of this nonsense.

Senators and governors were out in the snow, picking up baby livestock, milking cows, standing in schoolyards wrapped up in h
eavy overcoats, tossing footballs to red-faced blond kids. Cozzano c
hortled as he watched Norman Fowler, Jr., billionaire high-tech twit,
walking across the hard-frozen stubble of a cornfield in eight-h
undred-dollar shoes. The wind chill was thirty below zero and
these guys were standing out on the prairie without hats. That said e
verything about their fitness to be president.

Cozzano's family had always told him he ought to run for
president one day. It sounded like a nice idea, bandied across a
dinner table after a couple of glasses of wine. In practice it would be
ugly and hellish. Knowing this, he had never seriously considered
the idea. He had known for some time that Mel had quietly o
rganized a shadow campaign committee and laid the groundwork.
That was Mel's job, as a lawyer, he was supposed to anticipate th
ings.

Of course, now that Cozzano had had a stroke and couldn't run, he wanted to be President worse than anything. He could make a p
hone call and a few hours later a chartered campaign plane would
be waiting for him at the airport in Champaign, and suddenly
literature and campaign videos would be piled up in heaps all over th
e United States. Mel could make it happen. And then Patricia would wheel him up on to the plane, drooling for the cameras.

This was the hardest phase of recovering from the stroke.
Cozzano had not yet readjusted his expectations of life. When his
high expectations collided with reality, it hurt like hell.

The news break metamorphosed into a commercial for cold medicine. Then the anchor person came back on to tell America when the next news break would be. And then a new program started up:
Candid Video Blind Date.

Cozzano was so disgusted that he could not change the channel
fast enough. It was as if this tawdry program would cause him
physical damage if he watched it for more than ten seconds.

The remote control was on the table to his right, on the good
side of his body. He reached over for it, but she had put it a little
too far back on the table; the heel of his hand could touch it but his
fingers couldn't. He tried to screw his arm around into a kind of
self-induced hammerlock, but in his disgust he was doing it so
hastily that he just ended up knocking it farther back on the table.
It shot backward, flew off the table, and buried itself in the shag
carpet. Now it was stuck between the table and a bin full of old
newspapers: a two-week accumulation of the
Trib, The New York Times,
and
The Wall Street Journal,
none of which he would ever
read.

He couldn't reach the damn thing. He would have to ask Patricia
for help.

On the screen, the hysterical applause of the crowd had subsided
and the host was warming them up with a few jokes. The humor was
crudely sexual, the kind of thing that would embarrass even a ninth
grade boy, but the crowd was eating it up: in a series of reaction shots,
Big Hair Girls and fat middle-aged women and California surfer
types jackknifed in their seats, mouths gaping in narcotic glee. The game show host grinned devilishly into the camera.

"Goddamn it!" Cozzano said.

Patricia was washing some dishes in the kitchen and had the water going full blast, she couldn't hear him.

He didn't want Patricia to hear him. He didn't want to beg
Patricia to come into the room and change the channel on the TV
for him. He couldn't stand it.

He couldn't stand this TV program either. William A. Cozzano was
watching
Candid Video Blind Date.
Across town, John and Gu
iseppe and Guillermo were turning over in their graves.
All of a sudden tears came to his eyes. It happened without warning.
 
He hadn't cried since the
 
stroke.
 
Suddenly he was so
bbing, tears running down his face and dripping from his jaw on to
his blanket. He hoped to God that Patricia didn't come in.
He had to stop crying. This wouldn't do. This was too pathetic, Cozzano
took a few deep breaths and got it under control. For som
e reason, the most important thing in the world to him was that Pa
tricia not find out that he had been crying.
Sitting there in his wheelchair,
 
trying not to
 
look at the tele
vision set, Cozzano let his eye wander around the room, trying to
concentrate on something else.

In the far end of the living room, a pair of heavy sliding doors led into a small den. Cozzano had never used it for much. It had a small rol1-top desk where he balanced his checkbook. A beautiful antique gun
case stood against one wall. Like all of the other furniture in Cozzano
's house it had been made out of hardwood by people who kn
ew what they were doing back in the nineteenth century. There was
more solid wood in one piece of this furniture than you would find in a whole house nowadays. The top half of the gun case was a c
abinet for long weapons, closed off by a pair of beveled-glass doo
rs with a heavy brass lock. A skeleton key projected from, the key
hole. Cozzano had half a dozen shotguns and two rifles in there: all
of his father's and grandfather's guns, plus a few that he had picked up during his life. There was a pump shotgun that he had use
d in Vietnam, an ugly, cheap, scarred monstrosity that spoke vo
lumes about the nature of that war. Cozzano kept it in there as a reality check. It made a nice contrast between the fancy guns, the orn
ate collector's items that various rich and important sycophants had
given him.

Above and below the long weapons, a few handguns hung on pegs
. The bottom half of the gun cabinet consisted entirely of small drawers with ornately carved fronts where he kept his ammunition, oil,
rags, and other ballistic miscellanea.

Sitting in the next room in his wheelchair, Cozzano tried a little
experiment. He reached up into the air with his right hand, seeing
how high he could get. He was pretty sure that he could reach high
enough to turn the skeleton key on the gun cabinet doors. And if
not, he could always haul himself up out of his wheelchair for a few
moments and carry all his weight on his right leg. The cabinet was
massive and stable and he could probably use it to pull himself up.
So he could probably get the doors open. He could pull out one
of the guns. It would probably make the most sense to use one of
the handguns, because the long weapons were all enormous and
heavy and would be awkward to maneuver with only one hand.
The .357 Magnum. That was the one to use. He knew he had
ammunition for it, stored in the upper right-hand drawer, easy to
reach. He would pull the pin that held the cylinder in place and let
it fall open into his hand. Then he would drop it into his lap, letting
it rest on the blanket between his thighs. He would grope in the
drawer and pull out a handful of rounds. He would insert a few of
these into the cylinder - one would suffice - and then snap it back
into place. He would rotate the cylinder into position to make sure
that one of the loaded chambers was next up.

Then what? Given the power of the weapon, it was likely that the bullet would come flying out the far side of his head and hit
something else. There was an elementary school nearby and he
could not take any chances.

The answer was right there: across the den, opposite to the gun
case, was a heavy oak bookcase.

Cozzano couldn't see it from here. He reached down and hit the
joystick attached to the right arm of his wheelchair. A whining
noise came out of the little electric motor and he began to move
forward. Cozzano had to do a little bit of back-and-forth to get
himself free of the living room furniture, then he swung around
back of the sofa and into the den. He spun the wheelchair around
in the middle of the den and backed himself up to the wall next to
the bookcase.

It was perfect. The bullet would emerge from his head, hit the
side of the bookcase, and if it penetrated that inch of hardwood,
would go right into the back cover of the first volume in a com
memorative edition of the complete works of Mark Twain. No bullet in the world could make it all the way through Mark Twai
n.

So freedom was within reach. Now he just had to think it though
.

Suicide would void his life insurance policies. That was a minus. Bu
t that didn't matter so much; his wife was already dead and the his kids could support themselves. In fact, his kids didn't need to wo
rk, they had trust funds.

His body would be discovered by Patricia. That was a plus. He wo
uld not want to put a family member through that kind of trauma.
It was a good bet that his brains would be splattered all over the
room. Patricia was a medical professional who would be psychologically equipped to handle this, and Cozzano felt that the
experience would be good for her. It might make her into a little
less of a sugary lightweight.

He wondered if he ought to leave some kind of a note. His roll
top desk was right there. He decided against it. It would look path
etic, written with his wrong hand. Better for him to be remem
bered for what he had done before his stroke. For anyone who
knew him,
Candid Video Blind Date
running on his TV set was suic
ide note enough.

Besides, Patricia might come in and discover him writing it. Then
, he knew, they would take away the guns and anything else tha
t he might use to hurt himself. They would shoot him full of dru
gs and mess with his brain.

And maybe they would be right. Maybe suicide was a stupid idea, Of
course it wasn't a stupid idea. Suicide was a noble thing when don
e in the right circumstances.
 
It was the act of a warrior, Cozzano
was about to fall on his sword to spare himself further humi
liation.

And now was the best time to do it. Before his spirit was broken by
the drool on his chin and by the numbing onslaught of daytime tele
vision, before his feeble new image was discovered by the medi
a harpies and broadcast to the world.

The doctors had said that as time went on, he might have
additional
 
strokes.
 
This
 
meant he
 
might become
 
even more
pathetic, incapable of taking his own life.

Cozzano had never been sick. Cozzano had always known that
barring the odd drunk driver or tornado, he was going to live until
he was in his eighties.

Decades. Decades of this hell. Of watching
Candid Video Blind
Date.
Of looking at that horrendous shag carpet and wishing he was
man enough to handle a big floor sander. It was unimaginable. Cozzano hit the joystick and rolled across the room to the gun
cabinet.