Interface (34 page)

"Oh, so that's it," he said. "This is some kind of vendetta."
Strong looked up at the crowd, turning his face up into the light
again. "This woman is upset because she gets static on her daytime
soap operas."

"No," Eleanor said, turning around to face the crowd, "I'm
upset because my son just got shot in the back for using a pay
phone. And Earl Strong, this juvenile delinquent with a fifty-dollar
haircut, is standing up tall and pretty telling me it's all because I
don't have values. Well, I may be sleeping in a car and eating
government surplus cheese but at least I haven't sunk low enough
to become a politician who feeds happy lies to starving children."

"I am exactly the opposite of the kind of politician you think I
am," Earl Strong said, "I am a man of the people. A populist."

"A populist? To you, a populist is someone who's popular
...
to
you, a homecoming queen is a populist. To me, a populist is
someone who serves the needs of the populace. And the only thing
you've ever done for the populace is show up late, drill holes in
their houses, and hand them a big fat bill. Which is exactly what I
predict you'll do for us in the Senate."

A high, enthusiastic screeching arose from the predominantly
female shoppers gathered around the edge, whose numbers had
now swelled to exceed the Strong supporters. They rattled their
shopping bags, waved their fists in the air, and stomped the floor with their stylish pumps.

20

There were lots of empty offices on the upper floors of Cy
Ogle's old Cadillac dealership. When the PIPER project got
underway, Aaron requested some place for the West Coast head
quarters of Green Biophysical Associates. Ogle just shrugged and
told him to go upstairs and stake a claim. Aaron picked out an office
on the third floor. As far as he could tell, he was the only other person in the whole building, which was kind of surprising in an
election year.

But he was hardly the first. The building had the eroded,
overused character of a subway station, with depressions worn into
the thresholds and steps. Every time Aaron stepped through a
doorway, through the sole of his tennis shoe he felt a gentle
concavity in the floor, burnished down through several stacked
layers of linoleum that left concentric ovals that looked like lines on
a topographic map.

The offices were furnished with old steel desks and chairs done
up in the colorless hues and unconvincing wood grain reserved for office furniture, but the walls were virtually papered with brightly
colored bumper stickers and posters. Giant multiline telephone
cables hung from rude holes in the plaster. Ogle was just in the
process of computerizing his whole operation, buying big high-
powered Calyx workstations from Pacific Netware, and those
unsightly holes in the plaster made installation a snap. The vendor
would haul the boxes into an office, uncrate the computers, and
feed cables into the holes. They would emerge from ragged holes in other offices and plug into other workstations.

Aaron could only identify about 10 percent of the candidates
hyped on the bumper stickers and posters that covered the walls, ceilings, doors, and even toilets. Most of them seemed to be for
senatorial and gubernatorial races in states he wasn't familiar with.
Many seemed to be from other countries. There were a few in
Cyrillic and other alphabets that Aaron couldn't even recognize,
much less read.

Aaron's life in the PIPER project was hectic but comfortable. He
had discarded all pretense of being a serious businessman and gone back to basic R&D, and he was surprised to find how much happier
he was. This was his natural way of life. He would meet with the
Pacific Netware people, either here in Oakland or in Marin
County, and identify a set of problems to work on. He would fly
to Boston and solve those problems with his partners, then fly back
here and repeat the cycle. He left his nice suit in Boston on his first trip and then returned to Oakland on the red-eye, checking a duffel bag stuffed with T-shirts and flannel shirts. He slept on the floor of
the new office in Oakland, ate pizza, and was happy.

On many occasions he ran into people in the empty hallways or the empty stairwells, carrying sheafs of paper or videotapes from one bleak, empty office to another. So far he had not seen anyone
twice. He did not know anyone well enough to say hello to them.
A lot of people worked for Ogle, it seemed, but they didn't stay in
one place for very long. So he was a little startled one evening when
Ogle abruptly stuck his head into the doorway and said, "You want
to see a hell of a thing?"

"What is it?" Aaron said.

"The first female president of the United States," Ogle said.

"I didn't realize they had held an election."

"Mark my words. I will lay money on it," Ogle said. "C'mon."

Aaron got up and followed Ogle down the stairs. He needed to
stretch his legs anyway.

Ogle had a video editing studio set up on the first floor, back behind the "Oval Office" and all the other sets. Half a dozen small
but good color monitors were mounted on racks, each hooked up
to a different videotape machine, and all the machines were hooked
up to each other, and to a Calyx workstation, with an
incomprehensible web of thick black cables.

Two men and a woman were in the room, draped over the
furniture in poses that suggested they had been there for quite a
while. Aaron had seen a couple of them, here and there, around the
building from time to time.

Ogle was a goofball. He was loose enough to seem positively loopy to most people. He spent a lot of time staring off into space with his rosebud mouth twisted in kind of an incredulous, sneering grin. But he was also a southerner and could suddenly turn on full charm-school etiquette when it was the appropriate thing to do. So
as he led Aaron into the room, he pirouetted and held one hand out
to gesture at these three people and properly introduce them.

"This is Aaron Green of Green Biophysical systems, our head
genius on PIPER," he said. "Aaron, I would like you to meet
Tricia Gordon, who is the most talented time buyer on earth; she
did the buying on the big Coke campaign last year."

Aaron did not have the slightest idea what Ogle was talking
about. He smiled at Tricia Gordon, she held out her hand, he
shook it. She was wearing a relatively formal blue knit dress, largish
abstract jewelry, and had red hair that was done up in a fairly
ambitious style. She was confident and pleasant.

"And this is Shane Schram, a clinical psychologist from Duke by
way of Harvard. He does our FGIs, and can he ever dig down
beneath the surface on an FGI!"

Aaron still had no idea what was happening. He shook the hand
of Shane Schram, who did not stand up or say anything, just
dropped the chopsticks he was using to eat with and held his hand
up in the air for Aaron to shake. He was broad-shouldered,
prematurely bald, rumpled, and smart.

Ogle was still laughing at Shane Schram. "When our FGI people
come out of the room, they feel like they've been on the rack.
Shane is the Savonarola of focus groups."

"I see, that's great," Aaron mumbled.

"And this is my old pal Myron Morris, who once said that the
single most important political development of the last quarter
century was the zoom lens. Myron's a filmmaker, in case you
hadn't guessed. He did those cinema verit
é
flood-damage spots for
Representative Dixon down in Texas."

Aaron shook the hand of Myron Morris, who was a wide-faced,
jolly but cynical type in his early fifties, wearing bits and pieces of
a fairly nice suit.

"I just caught his off CNN," Ogle said, waggling a thick, three-
quarter-inch video cassette in the air, "and I thought y'all might
like to see it."

"Was this on Prime News?" Tricia Gordon said.

"It was indeed," Ogle said, shoving the cassette into a big
professional videotape recorder. The VTR clunked loudly, like a
big truck shifting into gear, and an image materialized on the screen
above it.

The anchorman was introducing a segment; over his shoulder
was a small head shot of Earl Strong, the scary populist who had
been making waves in Colorado. Aaron couldn't hear much,
because the sound was turned down. They cut to a shot of a
shopping mall with the words DENVER, COLORADO supered
across the bottom.

Everyone except Aaron laughed.

"Original choice of venue," Myron Morris said, apparently
being facetious.

Reverse angle: as seen from near the entrance to the mall, a
white limousine pulled up, festooned with flags and slogans, and a
number of people climbed out, including Earl Strong.

"Jesus, what a putz," Myron Morris said. "It's deserted. What a waste."

Ogle must have noticed that Aaron looked confused. "They
probably have a million supporters inside the mall, but none
positioned outside to greet him. So he looks like a nobody," Ogle
explained.

"They should have pulled a bus or something up as a backdrop.
Something. Anything," Morris said.

"See, the parking lot behind is full of glare," Ogle explained.
"Reflections of windshields and so on. But the entrance to the mall
is in shade. So we can't see the guy's face at all-

"Now watch! He's just going to disappear here," Morris said.

On the TV, Earl Strong crossed into the shadow of the mall and
became a featureless silhouette. The camera zoomed in on his face,
trying to compensate for the high contrast between the glare out in
the parking lot and the dim light on Strong's face, but it looked
terrible either way.

"He tried," Ogle said.

"Who tried?" Aaron said.

"The cameraman," Morris snapped.

On the TV, Earl Strong approached the doors of the mall and then there was another cut. Aaron still couldn't hear anything, but
it sounded like a reporter was delivering a voiceover during all of
this.

"Master race in skimmers," Morris said.

As if on cue, the screen was filled with a couple of big fat middle-
aged white ladies in COME ON STRONG T-shirts and EARL
STRONG skimmers, clapping their hands to the beat of a
campaign song.

"Good rhythm for Aryans," Shane Schram said.

"UFOs Ate My Brain," Tricia Gordon said.

"Now we'll go to some stumpage," Morris said.

Again, perfectly on cue, Earl Strong appeared on screen,
delivering some prepared remarks.

"Have you seen this footage before?" Aaron asked Morris.

"Get out of here," Morris said.

"Nice lighting, huh?" Tricia Gordon said.

"I love it," Morris said.

Earl Strong was standing on a platform. The camera shooting this
footage was down below him, aimed upward so that, as backdrop,
Earl Strong had mostly the ceiling of the mall. But part of the
ceiling consisted of skylights, and where it didn't have skylights, it
had brilliant mercury-vapor lamps. The skylights made great
patches of glare and the lamps made long wavy streaks across Earl Strong's face.

"Jesus. Television cameras should be outlawed in the Sun Belt,"
Morris said. "Film only. How many times do I have to say it?"

Everyone in the room was laughing at Morris. But Morris had eyes only for the TV set. "Whoa! Whoa! Hold up here! We have
some real-life campaign drama!"

Everyone was suddenly totally silent, crowding in closer to the
screen.

The camera was now aimed at a black woman who was
apparently standing down below Earl Strong. She was slender, with high cheekbones, and at first glance she looked as if she might be in
her late twenties. But on second thought, early forties was more
like it. For a woman in her early forties she was a knockout. Not in
an overtly sexy 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-shirts, 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.