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Ogle shook his head. "They won't hire me. They don't work
that way. They always form their own in-house agency so that the
political hacks, with all their little ambitions and intrigues, can exert
more control over the ad people, whom they see as unprincipled
vermin."

"So beyond having interesting conversations, what use are you
to me? And what use am I to you?"

Once again, Ogle broke eye contact, put his silverware down, stared off into the distance, thinking.

"Let me just state one ground rule first," he said. "This conversation is not a business thing."

"It's not?"

"Nope. But it's not a social thing either, because we are total
strangers."

"So what is it, Mr. Ogle?"

"Two people talking to each other."

"And what exactly are we talking about?"

"Surfing."

"Surfing?"

"Media is like a wave," Ogle said. "It's powerful and uncon
trollable. If you're good, you can surf on it for a little bit, get a boost
from it. Gary Hart surfed on that wave for a few weeks in 1984, after he won New Hampshire from Mondale. But by the time the
Illinois primary came around, he had fallen off the surfboard. The
wave broke over him and swamped him. He tried again in 1988 but
that time he just plain drowned. Perot rode the wave for a month
or two in '92, then he lost his nerve."

Ogle turned in his chair and focused in on Mary Catherine now.
"You and your family, you've been having a day at the beach.
You've been out wading in the shallow waters where everything is warm and safe. But the currents are tricky and suddenly you find that you have been swept far out into the deep black water by a
mysterious undertow. And now, great waves are cresting over your
heads. You can get up and ride those waves wherever they take
you, or you can pretend it's not happening. You can keep treading
water, in which case the tsunami will break on top of you and slam
you down on to the bottom."

Mary Catherine just kept her mouth shut and stared into her water glass. She was feeling several powerful emotions at once
and she knew that if she opened her mouth she'd probably
regret it.

There was fear. Fear because she knew that Ogle was exactly
right. Resentment because this total stranger was presuming to give
her advice. And there was a frightening sense of exhilaration, wild
thrilling danger, almost sexual in its power.

Fear, resentment, and exhilaration. She knew that her brother,
James, was experiencing the same feelings. And she knew that he was ignoring the fear, swallowing the resentment, and giving in to the exhilaration. Holding up his hand in the V sign, egging on the crowd. It was unforgivable. A hundred million people were going to see that.

She looked at Ogle. Ogle was looking back at her, a little bit sideways, not wanting to confront her directly.

"There's a third outcome you didn't mention," she said.

"What's that?" Ogle said, startled.

"You start riding the wave because you enjoy the thrill of it. But
you don't know what you're doing. And you end up getting
slammed into the rocks."

Ogle nodded. "Yes, the world is full of bad surfers."

"My brother, James, is a bad surfer. He's a
really bad surfer,"
Mary
Catherine said, "but he thinks he's good. And he seems to have
located a really big wave."

Ogle nodded.

"Now, I have no idea, still, what it is that you want, or what you
are proposing, or what you think you're going to get out of it,"
Mary Catherine said. "But I can tell you this. James is a problem.
My father and our lawyer Mel and I would all agree on that. And
without committing myself or my family to anything financial, let me say that if you can provide some advice in dealing with this
problem, it would not be forgotten."

"You did what!?" Mel said.

She knew he was going to say it. "I asked him for advice," Mary

Catherine said. She was in the back of the limousine, riding back
to the hospital.

"You shouldn't have done that," Mel said. "You shouldn't even
have met with the guy without my being there."

"I was very good. I'm not the sap you think I am, Mel. I didn't make any kind of financial commitment. It was just a couple of
people having lunch together, talking. And I asked him for advice."

"About what?"

"About James."

Mel sounded disappointed, wounded. "Mary Catherine. Why
would you ask a total stranger for advice in dealing with your own flesh and blood?"

"Because half of my family is dead, or nearly dead, you're away on business, and James is being a complete asshole."

"What do you mean? What's James doing?"

She explained it all to him: the wave, the V sign, the cheers of
the crowd, the hysterical reaction of the businessmen inside the bar.

But Mel didn't get it. He listened, he understood, but he hadn't
seen
it. He hadn't seen the emotion on people's faces. He didn't
understand the power of what was going on here. To him it was all
TV, it was all Smurfs, and he couldn't bring himself to take it
seriously. He didn't get it.

She was glad she had talked to Cy Ogle, who definitely did get
it.

"What did this guy say?" Mel said.

"His name is Cy Ogle," Mary Catherine said, "and he said that
he would think about it."

"What kind of a name is Ogle?"

"That's beside the point. But he said that it was originally
Oglethorpe, which is a big name in Georgia. But somewhere along the line someone had a bastard child, who ended up with the name
Ogle, and he's descended from that person."

"So he comes from a long line of bastards."

"Mel!"

"Don't Mel me. He charmed you with some kind of southern
shit, didn't he? I can smell it from New York. Told you a bunch of
wacky tales about his picturesque family down in the land of
cotton, seemed like the nicest guy in the world."

"Mel. Be honest. You don't know anything about handling the
media. Do you?"

"I happen to know a lot about it."

"Then how did that happen today? That thing with James? If
you're so good at handling the media, then why is it that everyone
in the country has the impression, today, that Dad is running for
president?"

Mel didn't say anything. She knew she had him.

"Because of what happened today, we have to have a media
person," Mary Catherine said. "It doesn't have to be Cy Ogle. But
depending on what he does with James, it might very well be."

Mel sounded glum. "I hate the media."

"I know you do, Mel," she said. "That's why we're in deep shit now. We need someone who loves the media. And I can tell you
that whatever imperfections Cy Ogle might have, he definitely
loves his work."

22

William
A.
Cozzano was a lousy patient. mary catherine had
never understood this until she became a doctor in her own right,
and got into the habit of judging people's ability to receive medical
treatment.

Good patients were as close as possible to being laboratory rats.
They were meek, docile, cooperative, and not very intelligent. The intelligent ones gave you fits because they were always asking
questions. They knew full well that they were as smart as the doctor
was. That if they were to go off and enroll in a medical school,
they'd know as much as the doctor did within a few years.

William A. Cozzano was one of those patients who disputed
everything the doctor said. Who forgot to take his medicine -
deliberately. Who pushed his recovery schedule into the realm of
the absurd. Partly it was a holdover from the war, where you had to keep going even when you were wounded, and partly it came
from football, where the standard treatment for broken bones was
a layer of athletic tape.

The stroke had been hell for him because it left him unable to
argue with his doctors. Mary Catherine had seen it in his face. A
doctor would come in and tell him to turn off CNN and get some
rest, because he needed sleep. Dad would get a certain look on his
face, the look that signaled the beginning of intellectual combat, the
look that he got when he was marshaling his arguments and
preparing to demolish an opponent. Then he would open his
mouth and gibberish would come out. The doctor would turn off the TV, turn off the lights, and leave him there in the dark.

He had been much the same way during his four-day stay at the
Radhakrishnan Institute in California. But there it wasn't quite so
bad. It was a cross between a research institute and an exclusive
private hospital. From the very first contacts the Cozzanos had with
the Institute, it was made plain to them that here, the patient wasn't
just a laboratory rat. Here, the patient was a partner in his own
treatment and recovery. He was consulted on a number of major
decisions. He sat in on the meetings where recovery strategy was
discussed. These people weren't afraid of intelligent, questioning
patients. They welcomed them. They preferred them.

"Neurology is a fascinating science, full of riddles and mysteries,"
Dr. Radhakrishnan had said during their first meeting, in the conference room on the high bluff over the Pacific Ocean.

Mary Catherine had stifled a smile. Radhakrishnan was a neurosurgeon
, and uncharacteristically, he was talking about what a
wonderful discipline neurology was. She wondered if it had anything
to do with the fact that the patient's daughter was a neurologist.

"In your therapy," Radhakrishnan continued, "we will be
exploring realms that have never been entered. We will watch the
data streaming out of your biochip like the astronomers viewing the
images from the
Voyager
spacecraft on its journey to the outer
planets. Every day and every hour, we will see new and unexpected
things. Enough new data will be generated to write a thousand
articles and a hundred Ph.D. dissertations.

"But the information that we receive from the implanted
biochip will be reaching us through a narrow bottleneck. You, the patient, will have access to a far broader spectrum of information
and experience. This is why we welcome the opportunity to pursue
this therapy with a highly intelligent and perceptive patient. We need your help, Governor Cozzano. We need your partnership in
this scientific venture."

Dad hadn't spoken a word, just gazed out the big windows at the
pounding surf. But Mary Catherine knew that he was hearing and understanding every word. He knew exactly what was going on.
And she knew he was excited about it. Two months of being
treated like a child by Patricia had left him ravenous for this kind of
thing.

She had gone over every inch of the Radhakrishnan Institute.
Reviewed the records of their baboon experiments and of their
work on an Indian truck driver named Monhinder Singh, who had
been miraculously cured using the same therapy. Viewed many
hours of videotapes of Singh, taken before the implant and over the
course of his subsequent therapy. The results would have been
impressive to anyone; to a professional neurologist, they were
uncanny.

She had interviewed Dr. Radhakrishnan and some of his top staff
members for hours, asking them a lot of hard questions about what
could go wrong with this procedure and what steps they had taken
to avoid it. She always got good answers to her questions. Answers
that seemed to have been prepared in advance, as though they had anticipated all of her thoughts.

But this was a paranoid attitude. She couldn't find anything
wrong. The only bad thing that could be said about the
Radhakrishnan Institute was that they had made the transition from
baboons to humans rather hastily. They had taken big chances. If it had failed, it would have meant that they were rash and foolish. But
it had worked, so they were brilliant and daring.