Interface (75 page)

Then they pontificated. It was easy enough to understand the
psychology of it: all of these people were still young enough to
think that life was terribly meaningful, that every little event had
some role to play in the tightly written plot-line of the universe. You were supposed to learn from these things. Smash went the
window,
whoop-whoop-whoop
went the car alarm, and then the
yuppie came out of his brownstone, put his chin in his hand, and thought deep thoughts. The conclusion they always came to was
that, by buying a nice car, they had somehow offended God with their dirty materialism, and now they were being punished. As if
the dumpster colonists who roamed the streets at three
a.m.,
punching out windows and scooping up people's tollbooth change
to buy crack, were righteous angels dispatched by an avenging
God.

Chase Merriam drove a Mercedes-Benz the size of an aircraft
carrier and he made no apologies for it. It had a built-in alarm
system, but he had no idea how to work it. He never used it. In
fact, he never even bothered to take the keys from the ignition or
lock the doors, because he never parked it more than fifty feet away
from a good man with a gun. His parking space in Manhattan cost
more than a three-bedroom split-level in the upper Midwest and
was probably a better investment.

A really, really expensive car emitted a powerful psychological
force field of its own. Smashing out the driver's-side window of a BMW 535i was a routine and insignificant New York gesture, on
the level of vaulting a turnstile. Chase Merriam himself was often
tempted to give it a try, to wrap his jacket around his hand and poke
it through the glass just to see the little blue diamonds spray. But
people were still awed by a big Mercedes sedan, Rolls Royce, or
Ferrari. They respected these things intuitively. Maybe they
harbored just a bit of fear, deep inside their hearts, that such cars
were owned by Mob bosses or Colombian drug lords. But Chase
Merriam liked to think that it wasn't just the fear of retribution. He
liked to think that deep inside their battered, blackened hearts,
people still harbored a respect for Quality.

Merriam had seen the Mercedes-Benz side-impact simulator in action on the promotional videotape that the Mercedes dealership had given to him. It was a naked automobile chassis with a huge
block of concrete projecting out the front end, painted with
dangerous black-and-yellow diagonal stripes. Like a rifle bullet,
exploding balloon, or hummingbird's wings, it was a thing never
seen by the naked eye; it was visible only in high-speed movie
films, drifting in from the side with ghostly clarity, utterly silent,
seeming to move only at a snail's pace. But when it drifted into the side of the big Mercedes-Benz sedan, like a cloud scudding across
the summer sky, the side of the car caved in and the head of the
dummy snapped sideways and you realized, for the first time, just
how fast that black-and-yellow juggernaut was moving.

Those side impacts could be vicious. It didn't take many
viewings of the side-impact videotape to figure that out. The side
of your head always whacked into something. And that's where all
of the good stuff was. The front of your head held your personality,
and if the rim of the steering wheel happened to punch through it
at sixty miles per hour, the worst you could expect was maybe a divorce and then you had to throw out your ties and buy new ones. Big deal. A personality change, after all these years of having the
same old one, would be kind of interesting. But the side of your brain held all the good stuff. That's where you did your thinking.
The left side, which was the one at risk during a side impact,
contained your logical, rational, spatial capabilities, and if you got a
hunk of imploding door frame jammed into that, you'd be out of a
job. You would have to start taking pottery classes.

The Mercedes people were intelligent enough to realize this and
so they had plowed their big black-and-yellow slab of concrete
through a few million dollars' worth of rolling stock, gone over the creepily silent high-speed films, and made a few changes. Which meant that the left hemisphere of Chase Merriam's cerebral cortex was about as safe as it could ever be inside of a moving car.

These factors put together - the guarded parking space, his safe
haven up in Westchester, where crime was still illegal; the
mysterious psychological force field; and the high-speed films - all
combined to give Chase Merriam a feeling of invulnerability.
Which was a good thing, because he liked to work late, long past
the dinner hour in his office in lower Manhattan. And he
wouldn't have been able to do that if he drove a Subaru and
parked it on the street. He would have been too terrified to
venture out after dark, he would have slept on the leather couch
in his office and scurried out at daybreak to find that his Subaru was now a stripped frame.

He did some of his best work late at night. Which, in any given
month, more than paid back the cost of the big car. The one
drawback to working late was that, lately, his damn wristwatch kept
interrupting him. But in a way, he didn't mind all that much. He
enjoyed keeping up with political events. This thing on his wrist only came to life once or twice a day, and it was always with
something important. It was like having a personal assistant who did
nothing but screen the political coverage for him, letting him know
when to tune in.

Cozzano's National Town Meeting was about halfway through
its one-week life span when Chase Merriam worked rather late one
night, watched the eleven o'clock news just long enough to get the
baseball scores, and then headed down to the parking space where
his Mercedes-Benz awaited, keys in the ignition, gleaming and polished under the brilliant homeboy-chasing lights in his private parking ramp. The guards washed and polished the car during the
day. They didn't have much else to do.

Chase Merriam thought that his car looked especially clean and nice tonight and so he slipped a few greenbacks to the guard as he
opened the driver's-side door for him. He sank into the ergonomic
leather and twisted the key and the tachometer needle lifted off the
pin and settled in at a comfortable idle. Short of getting down on
your hands and knees behind the car and sticking your tongue into
the tailpipe, this was the only way to tell that the engine was
running. He was out on the West Side Highway, northbound,
almost instantly.

The West Side Highway was not much of a highway at all until
you got a little bit farther north and it became a proper limited-
access affair with on-ramps and so on. At this hour it was always
surprisingly free from traffic. The only people out tonight were a few nocturnal taxi drivers and one or two heavily burdened thirdworldish vehicles, the lifeblood of the New Economy, out running
errands.

Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center towered above the
highway on concrete buttresses, like a hydroelectric project
accidently constructed in the wrong place, appallingly large. Chase
Merriam weaved through some complicated ramps and lanes under the George Washington Bridge, almost out of Manhattan now, and pulled up short behind a rickety, windowless gray-and-rust-colored
van, bouncing along on bald tires and dead shocks, with a whole
lot of shit piled on top of the roof. The driver was badly confused
by all of those lanes, splitting and converging inexplicably under the
distracting sight of the mighty bridge. Chase Merriam could have
roared past him to one side or the other, but the driver of the van
kept changing his mind as to which lane he should be in, making violent changes in his course, and each time he jerked the wheel
toward this lane or that, his van, top-heavy with scrap metal,
rocked dangerously on its overmatched suspension.

The gloom-slicing headlights of the Mercedes-Benz illuminated
the rear bumper of the van, some kind of a home-made number
welded together from diamond-tread steel plate. The owner, who
was quite obviously in the scrap business, had manufactured the bumper himself. It was hardly less imposing than the black-and-
yellow ram of the sideways impact simulator, and so Chase
Merriam resolved to keep the gleaming perfection of his Mercedes far away from it.

The maker, upon finishing the structural part of the bumper, had
turned his torch to decorative purposes. He had laid down a thick bead of molten iron on the back surface of the bumper, inscribing
the following message on it in careening, heavy-metal cursive:
SOLO DIOS SABE HACIA DONDE VOY.

Chase Merriam, who did not speak Spanish but who had
developed a basic level of skill in Romance languages during his prep years, was mentally translating this phrase (ONLY GOD
KNOWS something . . .) when a sleek aluminium-alloy wheel rim, freshly stripped from a hapless Acura Legend somewhere on the
streets of the naked city, slid off the roof of the van, bounced once on the pavement, and plunged directly through his windshield,
catching him in the forehead.

In the instant that the rim had taken its fateful bounce, glittering in his headlights like a meteor, the whole world had become a
Mercedes-Benz crash-testing laboratory. Chase Merriam, of
course, was the dummy. But he experienced it with the eerie clarity
of the white-coated Teutonic engineers in the safety of their
screening room, going over the silent videotapes. It all happened
silently and very, very slowly, and when the car, at some point
several minutes into the crash, slammed into some sort of a
momentous object - he wasn't sure exactly what, but he had the
sense that he was a great distance from the roadway proper at this
point, and that the car hadn't been properly horizontal for a long,
long time - he actually saw the air bag unfurl before him, fluttering
like a white flag raised in a hurricane.

The car kept skidding and rolling and plowing through things for
a long time, repeatedly changing direction, like the Magic Bullet meandering through Kennedy and Connally. Each little scrape and secondary impact probably did about five thousand dollars' worth
of damage. After a while, it almost got boring; he must be leaving
a trail of torn-up sod and flattened road signs all the way to
Yonkers. But eventually, he stopped. His inner ear still told him he
was riding the Tilt-a-Whirl, but by now his left arm had flopped outward, through the place where the double-glazed window was
supposed to be, and was resting limply on some kind of a surface -
hard-packed, inorganic New York dirt - and that surface sure wasn't moving.

So far he had not experienced even the smallest bit of physical pain, but something about the car just didn't feel right. Because his
eyes got smeary with blood and then swelled shut pretty quickly, he had to figure out using other sensory inputs. But the upshot
seemed to be that his Mercedes-Benz was upside-down now and
he was hanging by the safety belt and the shoulder harness, his legs supported by the steering wheel, his knees poked uncomfortably by
the turn-signal levers.

The phone was right there, he could find it by groping for it, he
knew which button turned it on. Then all he had to do was dial 911. But he couldn't see the number buttons. He punched one of
the presets, the one that dialed his home number. He would tell
Elizabeth to call the NYPD. But it was now past eleven thirty and
Elizabeth had turned off the ringer on the phone and gone to bed;
all he got was his own answering machine.

He considered dictating a last message to the world. Elizabeth
would find the light blinking on the machine tomorrow and listen
to it; she would call the NYPD and they would at last find him,
dead from boredom. They would play the tape at his memorial service. It would be dry, calm, witty, noble, and brave.

But he could always call back later and do that. So he hung up
to consider his options. All the other presets were business
numbers. No one would answer them at this time of the night.
Dialing 911 was harder than it sounded, because the phone had too
many buttons and they all felt the same.
"You okay?" a voice said. A man's voice.
"Hello?" Chase Merriam said.