Interface (81 page)

Mr. Salvador reached Cy Ogle by sky phone the next day. Ogle
was on one of the Cozzano campaign planes.
Cozzano 1
carried the candidate, his Secret Service detail, staff, and immediate hangers-
on;
Cozzano 2,
was a press plane, and
Cozzano 3,
which hardly anyone knew about, was a GODS cargo plane. It carried a GODS
shipping container, the Eye of Cy. Ogle was on
Cozzano 1
when
he got the call from Mr. Salvador, who was upset. "Did you see the
morning papers?"

"Of course I did," Ogle said.

"It's exactly as I predicted. Eleanor Richmond is a loose
cannon."

"Now, why would you say that?"

"Are you kidding? The first thing she does is go out and get
herself arrested."

"Detained. Not arrested."

"And then, immediately, without consulting you, she begins to
run her mouth. Yap yap yap, racists here, racists there, lynch mob
mentality, all the usual radical Afro-American buzzwords."

"You can't blame her for being pissed."

"I can blame her for being strident. Did you see her on TV this
morning? In front of the hotel?"

"Yes."

"Who authorized her to throw a street rally?"

"I don't think she threw it, per se," Ogle said. "It just sort of
happened. A bunch of people came up from the South Side and
wanted to burn the hotel down. She came out and cooled them
off."

"Well, it
looked
like a rally."

"I know it did."

"And the last thing we need is some kind of outspoken radical
black woman running through the streets with a megaphone."

"Mr. Salvador," Ogle said, quietly and forbearingly, "Eleanor
Richmond, as we speak, is on a plane to Cashmere, Washington,
to pick apples with migrant farm workers. Then she's going to go
white-water rafting and read a scripted speech about the
importance of wild rivers. Then she's going to fly to San Diego to mend fences with those Mexican people who run up the centerline
of highways. Then-"

"Okay, I get the picture," Mr. Salvador said.

"So does she, I think," Ogle said.

48

Presidential campaigns had their own calendar: a series of
special days, sprinkled throughout the year, determined by certain
arcane astrological formulae. Chief among these was Election Day
itself, which was the first Tuesday after the first Monday in
November. Another such occasion was Labor Day, which, to most
people, marked the end of summer, but which to politicians
marked the formal beginning of the presidential campaign - a
complete surprise to almost everyone in America.

So television viewers across the land, who for the last year had not been able to settle into their recliners without being exposed to
a scene of red-white-and-blue balloons and flawlessly coiffed candidates standing in front of blue curtains in hotel ballrooms,
were generally befuddled when they checked the evening news on
Labor Day and were informed, by solemn anchorpersons, that Tip
McLane, the President, and William A. Cozzano had all kicked off their campaigns today.

The shortest point between a camera and a backdrop is a straight
line passing through the candidate's head. Who these three
candidates were, and how they would run their campaigns, could
be inferred from the things they stood in front of.

The President stood in front of an empty Buick plant in Flint,
Michigan. This informed the viewing public that he was a serious,
taking-care-of-business type who cared about the downtrodden (unlike, for example, Tip McLane) and that he intended to renew
America.

Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane stood in a lettuce field in California where he and his parents had once stooped at menial labor; behind
him rose a mountain vista. This backdrop told the viewing public
that Tip McLane had not forgotten his humble roots, that he was a grass-roots, back-to-basics conservative who was not afraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty.

William A. Cozzano and his running mate Eleanor Richmond
kicked off their independent campaign on the runway of a
municipal airport south of Seattle. This was a fairly complicated bit
of multileveled background engineering. The immediate back
ground consisted of a runway, outlined in colored lights and
streaked with tire marks, conveying a strong sense of motion
(Cozzano is taking off!). The next thing down the line was a vast
Boeing airplane factory; brand-new 767s were lined up on the
apron, each tail fin freshly and brightly painted in the color scheme
of a different airline somewhere around the world. Finally, in the
deep background, Mount Rainier heaved itself up out of a low,
dark line of foothills. It was so vast that it looked like a telephoto
lens shot, even through a normal lens, and when the cameramen
enhanced it with their telephotos (as none of them could resist
doing) it looked like a giant ice-covered asteroid looming over the
shoulders of William A. Cozzano and Eleanor Richmond.

Boeing had nothing to do with the Cozzano campaign, of
course, or so they said. This whole event was being held on
municipal property. The presence of a Boeing facility next door
was a convenient accident.

Cozzano looked snappy in his homburg, the sort of old-
fashioned men's hat that had gone out of fashion when JFK had refused to wear one, and that Cozzano was now single-handedly bringing back into fashion. In the middle of his campaign-kickoff
address, a new 767, painted with the logo of Japan Airlines, taxied
on to the runway. Its tail fin momentarily came between Cozzano and the glaciated slopes of Rainier, then narrowed into a vertical
blade as the plane turned onto the runway, revealing the mountain,
illuminated by a peach-colored sunrise. The icy clarity of Rainier
was muddled by the heat waves rising from the jet's engines. Then those engines glowed bluish-white, the plane accelerated down the
runway, directly toward Rainier, shot into the air, banked into a
climbing turn, and headed west, bound for Japan. It happened just as Cozzano was making a point about the trade deficit; and as the roar of the jet engines died away, it was almost possible to hear a
dim cacophony of whacking noises from the directions of
California and of Flint, Michigan, as Cozzano's competitors and
their campaign managers smacked their foreheads in anguish.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak watched this lovely spectacle in a cool, dark hollow set in the folds of the Monongahela National Forest in West
Virginia. He was not much more than a hundred miles outside of
Washington D.C., and yet the location could scarcely have been
more remote.

He had been camping out here for a couple of days, just lying
low for a time, watching Cozzano on his wristwatch TV-cum-brain-control device, tossing the occasional lure into the stream
that ran past his little campsite, draining cans of beer and then
shooting them full of big starburst holes with his nimble Fleischacker. His truck was stopped on a gravelly floodplain, the floor of a ravine with nearly vertical sides that made a perfect backstop
for shooting. He had brought two cases of inexpensive beer with
him, going out of his way to obtain cans rather than bottles. You could only shoot a bottle once, but you could shoot a can over and
over again until not much was left of it; this was how a man had to pinch his pennies nowadays.

Out here in the Eastern time zone, the sun had already been up
for a few hours and so the peach-coloured light on the slopes of
Rainier looked strange and faky. Vishniak was sure that the
lumbering jetliner and the ice-covered volcano looked great on the
kind of thirty-nine-inch Trinitron that rich people would own, but on his postage-stamp wristwatch it didn't really look so hot.

That was okay. Images were all fakery and manipulation cobbled
together by the evil gnomes of Ogle Data Research, who had their
secret headquarters just a short distance away, in the mysterious
place called Pentagon Towers. What counted was words. So when
Cozzano stepped up to the microphones to make the formal
campaign kickoff speech, Vishniak emptied his Fleischacker into a
hapless beer can, set the safety, put the gun into the shoulder holster
under his QUAD CITIES WHIPLASH windbreaker, and sat
down on the tailgate of his pickup to listen to the murmuring of the stream and the speech that William A. Cozzano was delivering to him and the rest of the American people. As the introductions were being made, Vishniak pulled a small reporter's notebook out of his
pocket. The last page read:

COZZANO'S HATS (CONTD.)

SUN AUG 25
CHICAGO CUBS BASEBALL CAP

MON AUG 26
        
HARD HAT (STEEL MILL VISIT)

TUE AUG 27
NO HAT - BUT HE STAYED IN-DOORS!!!

WED AUG 28
           
THE HOMBURG

THU AUG 29
         
U.S. FLAG BASEBALL CAP

FRI AUG 30
 
BIKE HELMET (ORLANDO BIKE-A-THON)

SAT AUG 31
THE HOMBURG

SUN SEP 1
              
NO HAT - WENT TO CHURCH

and now he added a new line:

SUN SEP 2
              
THE HOMBURG AGAIN

Some kind of spooky shit was definitely going on with those
hats. They were all saying now that the homburg was some kind of a Fashion Statement, but William A. Cozzano had never felt any
need to make such statements until he had gotten that chip stuck
into his brain. It obviously had something to do with brain waves.

In his speech, Cozzano covered the usual bases: the corruption of big-party politics, the need for change. Change not only in the
political system but in the values system of the entire country. Change that would renew our commitment to education and to long-term investment in the future. This topic led, inevitably, to
the subject of the economy, at which point Vishniak finally started
to pay attention. The economy was the only thing that mattered to
him.

"There are those who say that we are doomed to be a second
rate power, subjugated to the Japanese," Cozzano said, just as the
big Boeing jet was beginning its takeoff run. Vishniak clenched his teeth and became enraged, as he always did when people said this
kind of thing.

"To those people," Cozzano continued, "I have only one thing
to say: BEHOLD!" He turned aside and swept out one arm toward
the jet, then watched it take off. To shout above the scream of its
turbofans would have been futile, would have made him look tiny
by comparison. As Vishniak watched the miniature figure of the jet
take off on his little screen, saw it bank into its turn, exposing the
Rising Sun logo painted on its tail fin, his anger was replaced by a
surge of defiant pride. Sure the economic situation looked bleak,
but a country that could make airplanes like that could accomplish
anything if it just set its mind to it.

Cozzano turned to the microphones and said, "No matter how bleak the economists and the pundits say our situation is, I think
that any country that can make airplanes like that one can, with hard work and determination, accomplish anything."

Vishniak felt relieved that a great man like Cozzano felt the same
as he did, that his feelings weren't just stupid, blind patriotism. But he was a jittery and suspicious fellow by nature and could not be
satisfied with this kind of happy talk for long.

"Now, I would be lying if I stopped there, and left you with the
impression that happy talk is going to close the trade deficit,"
Cozzano said. "Uplifting speeches and slick media images do not an
economy make. What we need is to educate our children. But not
just to cram their heads with facts and figures - to teach them values
as well, values of hard, steady work."

That was a little better. Cozzano was talking some sense there. Although Vishniak was beginning to get a little skeptical about
politicians who always spouted this easy talk about education.
Education was great but it wouldn't really help the economy for
another twenty years. And it wouldn't help the likes of Floyd
Wayne Vishniak at all.