Interface (60 page)

This image was not the only window on the computer screen.
There was a small one next to it, this one showing a brief video clip
that kept looping back and replaying. It showed Floyd Wayne
Vishniak sitting in the cheap seats at a sports arena somewhere, leaping to his feet along with all of the other people in his vicinity
to shout abuse at some miscreant down below. In this clip, Vishniak
was wearing a tremendously oversized, bright yellow foam rubber
hand over his real hand. The long finger of the hand was extended.
Just in case this message was not clear, it had been printed with the
words FUCK THE REF. And in case the ref did not happen to be
looking in his direction, Vishniak could clearly be seen mouthing
the same words - chanting them over and over - in unison with all of the other sports fans in his section. In Vishniak's other hand he
was holding a plastic beer cup the size of the Louvre. While he was
waving his giant yellow digit in the air, beer sloshed over the rim
and splashed down on the shoulders of the fan in front of him, who reacted, but either did not care or was afraid to make a big deal out
of it. Floyd Wayne Vishniak was not a person that most people
would consider picking a fight with. He was not especially big, but
he was tightly wound in the extreme.

Other people were waving giant foam rubber hockey sticks and other hockey-related paraphernalia. Though the action below - the
source of the controversy - was not shown on this video clip, it was
evidently a hockey game, and at least one of the teams was
apparently named the Quad Cities Whiplash.

Another window, below the video loop, showed a map of the
fifty states with a blinking red X superimposed on the Mississippi
River, between western Illinois and eastern Iowa. Under the
blinking X was the label DAVENPORT, IOWA (QUAD
CITIES).

There were two other windows on the screen, both of them
carrying textual information. One of them was a brief c.v. of Floyd
Wayne Vishniak. He had grown up in the Quad Cities, straddling
the Illinois-Iowa border, dropped out of high school to get a job in a tractor factory, and been laid off and rehired six times in the
intervening fifteen years. During the past year he had barely
managed to earn his weight in dollars.

The remaining window was a tall narrow one that ran down the
side of the computer screen. It was a list containing exactly one
hundred items. Each item consisted of a phrase describing a subset
of the American population, followed by a person's name.

As this presentation - this computerized dossier - proceeded
from one name to the next, the corresponding item on the list was
highlighted, a bright purple box drawn over it so that the user could
see which category he was dealing with at the moment. The
hundred categories and names on the list were as follows:

IRRELEVANT MOUTH BREATHER

400-POUND TAB DRINKER

STONE-FACED URBAN HOMEBOY

BURGER-FLIPPING HISTORY MAJOR

SQUIRRELLY WINNEBAGO JOCKEY

BIBLE-SLINGING PORCH MONKEY

ECONOMIC ROADKILL

PENT-UP CORPORATE LICKSPITTLE

HIGH-METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR

MIDAMERICAN KNICKKNACK QUEEN

SNUFF-HAWKING BASEMENT DWELLER

POSTADOLESCENT ROAD WARRIOR

DEPRESSION-HAUNTED CAN STACKER

PRETENTIOUS URBAN-LIFESTYLE SLAVE

FORMERLY RESPECTABLE BANKRUPTCY SURVIVOR

FROSTY-HAIRED COUPON SNIPPER

CYNICAL MEDIA MANIPULATOR

RETICENT GUN NUT

UFOS ATE MY BRAIN

MALL-HOPPING CORPORATE CONCUBINE

HIGH-FIBER DUCK SQUEEZER

POST-CONFEDERATE GRAVY EATER

MANIC THIRD-WORLD ENTREPRENEUR

OVEREXTENDED YOUNG PROFESSIONAL

APARTMENT-DWELLING MALL STAFF

TRADE SCHOOL METAL HEAD

ORANGE COUNTY BOOK BURNER

FIRST-GENERATION BELTWAY BLACK

80'S JUNK-BOND PAR VENUE

DEBT-HOUNDED WAGE SLAVE

ACTIVIST TUBE FEEDER

TOILET-SCRUBBING EX-STEEL WORKER

NEO-OKIE

SHIT-KICKING WRESTLEMANIAC

SUNBELT CONDO COMMANDO

RUST-BELT LUMPENPAOL

and others . . .

Aaron hit the space bar on the Calyx workstation's keyboard. All
of the windows disappeared except for the long skinny one with
the list of categories. The next item on the list was highlighted and
spoken aloud by the digitized computer voice: RETICENT GUN
NUT -
JIM HANSON, N. PLATTE, NEBRASKA.

Another set of windows appeared, just like the last set but
carrying different images and information. The photo was in black
and white this time, reproduced from a newspaper, showing Jim
Hanson, a lean-faced man of about fifty, wearing an adult Boy
Scout uniform and standing out in the woods somewhere. As
before, there was a short loop of videotape. It showed him standing by a picnic table in a backyard somewhere, tending a barbecue and
acting as eminence grise to a crowd of small children, presumably his grandkids. The map window was the same except that now the red X had moved to the middle of one of those states in the middle
of the country; apparently this was Nebraska.

Jim Hanson didn't look very interesting. Aaron hit the space bar
again, moving on to the next item on the list: HIGH-
METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR
       
CHASE
MERRIAM, BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y. This time, the
photo was a glossy color studio shot. The video clip showed Chase
Merriam teeing off at a very nice golf course somewhere along with
three other high-metabolism world dominators.

Aaron started whacking the space bar, paging through the list,
flashing up the hundred photos one at a time. When it worked its way down to the bottom, it cycled back up to the top again, so he
could keep it up forever if he wanted to. The red X on the map
hopped back and forth across the country, tracing out a perfectly balanced demographic profile of the United States.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak was sitting in his trailer, watching
Wheel,
when he heard the sound of tires on gravel. He went to the front
door, glancing over to make sure that his sawed-off shotgun was
sitting in its secret place; it was there all right, craftily concealed in
the narrow gap behind three stacked cases of beer, right next to the
door. Having thus established his parameters, he looked out the
window to see who had come all the way out here to pay him a
visit. If it was another bill collector, he was not going to get a very
friendly reception.

From initial appearances, it could very well be a bill collector. It
was a little skinny dark-haired man with glasses and he got out of
the car wearing a button-up shirt and a tie. First thing he did was
open the back door of his gray Ford LTD Crown Victoria and
unhook his suit jacket from the little hook that was above the back door.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak had been driving around in cars since he
was tiny, of course, and he had seen those little hook thingies above
the doors and someone had told him a long time ago that they were to hang coats off of. But this very moment was the first time in his
entire life that he had actually seen one used.

A seed of resentment was germinated in his mind. Garment hooks
in the back seats of cars. Always there, never used. A mysterious
vestige of other times and places, like spittoons. Nobody used them;
that's how it was. Nobody wore suits to begin with, unless they
were going to a wedding or a funeral. When they did wear suits, if
they absolutely had to take off the jacket for some reason, they
would toss it out flat on the backseat. To hang it up that way - what
was this little geek trying to say, exactly? That the lint or whatever on the backseat of his fancy luxury car (which was spotless) could
not be allowed to touch the fabric of his fancy suit jacket?

It was a nice car all right, brand new and probably costing in
excess of fifteen thousand bucks. Its beautiful gray finish had been
streaked, below the beltline, with dark brown mud thrown up by
the wheels as it had come up the gravel road from the highway.
Floyd had been kicked out of his apartment in Davenport so that
the landlord could rent it out to a big family of African-Americans
come from Chicago to steal away a few more of Davenport's non
existent jobs. Fortunately he knew someone who had this farm just
outside of town, and was willing to let him live here in this trailer.

The man put his suit jacket on. The satin lining flashed in the
horizontal sunlight of the early evening. He shrugged his shoulders

a couple of times so that the jacket would fall into place and look
pretty on him. The jacket had padding in the shoulders that made
the man look bigger than he really was. He reached into the
backseat and pulled out a briefcase.

As soon as he saw that briefcase, Floyd opened the door of his
trailer and stood there leaning against the doorframe and smoking
his cigarette and looking down the full height of the jury-rigged,
mud-tracked staircase at this little man.

"Hello, Mr. Vishniak," the man said, looking up at him.

"That's funny, I ain't introduced myself yet. How'd you know
my name? I don't know you. I don't know anyone like you. All my friends drive pickup trucks with a lot of rust on 'em. Who the hell
are you?"

The visitor seemed taken aback. "My name's Aaron Green," he said. He looked like he really didn't want to be here. That actually
made Floyd more sympathetic to the man because Floyd didn't
want him to be there either. So that was a start anyway.

"What do you want?" Floyd said.

"I want to give you ten thousand dollars."

"You got it with you?"

"No, but I have a down payment of one thousand."

Floyd stood there in the doorway for a while and smoked his
cigarette and pondered this unusual situation. A man, very likely a Jew from Chicago, had just driven up to his trailer and offered him ten thousand dollars.

"This a Publishers Clearinghouse thing? You a friend of Ed
McMahon or something?"

"No, it's not a sweepstakes. I represent ODR, which is a poll-
taking organization based in Virginia. We've identified you as being a typical representative of a particular part of the United
States population."

Floyd snorted derisively. He could just imagine.

"We would like to keep track of your reactions to the current
presidential campaign. What you think of the different candidates
and issues."

"So you want me to go to Virginia?"

"No. Not at all. We want you to change your lifestyle as little as
possible. That's crucial to the system."

"So you're going to call me up every couple days and ask me
questions."

"It's even easier than that," Green said. "Can I step inside and show you?"

Floyd snorted again. "My little abode ain't much to look at."

"That's okay. I'll only take ten or fifteen minutes of your time."

"Come on in then."

Aaron Green and Floyd sat down in front of the TV. Floyd
turned the volume down a little bit and offered his visitor a beer, which he declined. "I have to drive to Nebraska tonight," he said,
"and if I have a beer now I'll be pulling over to urinate all night
long."

"Nebraska? What, you taking one guy from each state?"

"Something like that," Aaron Green said. Obviously he did not believe that Floyd Wayne Vishniak, a dumb uneducated factory
worker, would ever be smart enough to understand the details.

"You ever read Dick Tracy comics?" Aaron Green asked.

"They don't have it in the paper here," Floyd said. "You ever
read Prince Valiant?"

Again, Aaron Green stumbled. He was having a hard time
building up his momentum. "Well, you might have heard of the
wristwatch television set."