Interface (12 page)

After a while, Mel somehow tracked her down and sat next to
h
er without saying anything. Something about the darkness of the room made people hush.

Mary Catherine used a trackball and a set of menus and control
windows to open up a large color window on the screen. "They p
ut his head in a magnet and baloney-sliced his brain," she said. "Come again?" Mel said. It was funny to see him non-plussed.
"Did a series of CAT scans. Had the computer integrate them
into a three-dimensional model of Dad's melon, which makes it a lo
t easier to visualize which parts of his brain got gorked out."

A brain materialized in the window on the computer screen,
three-dimensional, rendered in shades of gray. "Is this the way doctors talk?" Mel said, fascinated.
"Yes," Mary Catherine said, "when lawyers aren't around, that is. Let me change the palette; we can use a false-color scheme to h
ighlight the bad parts," she said, whipping down another menu.

The brain suddenly bloomed with color. Most of it was now in sh
ades of red and pink, fading down toward white, but small
portions of it showed up blue. "When lawyers and family members a
re present," Mary Catherine said, "we say that the blue parts were
dam
aged by the stroke and have a slim chance of ever recovering t
heir normal function."
"And amongst medical colleagues?"
"We say that those parts of the brain are toast. Croaked. Kaput.

Not coming back."
"I see," Mel said.
"Been taking a stroll down memory lane," Mary Catherine said.

"Check this out." She played with the menus for a moment and another window opened up, a huge one filling most of the black-
and-white screen. It was a chest X-ray. "See that?" she said, tracing
a crooked rib with her fingertip.

"Bears-Packers, 1972," Mel said. "I remember when they
carried him off the field. I lost a thousand bucks on that fucking
game."

Mary Catherine laughed. "Serves you right," she said. She closed
the window with the chest X-ray. Then she used the trackball to
rotate the image of the brain back and forth in different ways to
reveal selected areas. "This stroked area accounts for the paralysis
and this small one here is responsible for his aphasia. In the old days
we had to figure this stuff out just by talking to the patient and
watching the way he moved."

"I detect from your tone of voice that you think this is all
basically superficial crap," Mel said.

Mary Catherine just turned toward him and smiled a little bit.

"I like video games too," Mel said, "but let's talk seriously for a
moment here."

"Dad's mixed dominant, which is good," Mary Catherine said.

"Meaning?"

"He does some things with his right hand and others with his
left. Neither side of the brain predominates.
 
People like that
recover better from strokes."

Mel raised his eyebrows. "That's good news."

"Recovery from this kind of insult is extremely hard to predict. Most people hardly get better at all. Some recover quite well. We may see changes over the course of the next couple of weeks that will tell us which way he's going to go."

"A couple of weeks," Mel said. He was clearly relieved to have
a specific number, a time frame to deal with. "You got it."

"Guess what?" Mel said to the Cozzanos the morning after the
stroke. It was six
a.m.
None of them had slept except for the
Governor, who was under the influence of various drugs. James
Cozzano had arrived shortly after midnight, driving his Miata in
from South Bend, Indiana, where he was a graduate student in the
political science department. He and Mary Catherine had spent the w
hole night sitting around in the Executive Mansion, which was nice, but not exactly home. Mary Catherine had tried to sleep in
bed and been unable to. She had put on her clothes, sat down in a
chair to talk to James, and fallen dead asleep for four hours. James
just watched TV. Mel had spent the same time elsewhere, on the telephone, waking people up.

Now they were all together in the same room. The Governor's
eyes were open, but he wasn't saying much. When he tried to talk,
the wrong words came out, and he got angry.
"What?" Mary Catherine finally said.

Mel looked William A. Cozzano in the eye. "You're running for
president."

Cozzano rolled his eyes. "You swebber putter," he said. Mary Catherine gave Mel a wary, knowing look, and waited for
an explanation.

James got flustered. "Are you crazy? This is no time for him to
be launching a campaign. Why haven't I heard about this?"

His father was watching him out of the corner of his eye. "Don't
squelch," he said, "it's a million fudd. Goddamn it!"

"I spent the whole night putting together a campaign com
mittee," Mel said.

"You lie," Cozzano said.

"Okay," Mel admitted, "I put together a campaign committee a
long time ago, just in case you changed your mind and decided to run. All I did last night was wake them up and piss them off." "What's the scam here?" Mary Catherine said. Mel sucked his teeth and looked at Mary Catherine indulgently. "You know, 'scam' is just a Yiddishized pronunciation of'scheme'
- a much nobler word meaning 'plan.' So let's not be invidious.
Let's call it a plan instead."

"Mel," Mary Catherine said, "what's the scam?"
Cozzano and Mel looked soberly at each other and then cracked
up.

"If you turn on that TV in a couple of hours," Mel said, "you
will see the Governor's press secretary releasing a statement, which I
wrote on my laptop in the lobby of this hospital and faxed to him
an hour ago. In a nutshell, what it says is this: in the light of the
extremely serious and, in the Governor's view, irresponsible statements
made by the President last night, the Governor has decided
to take another look at the idea of running for president - because
clearly the country has gone adrift and needs new leadership. So he
has cleared his appointment calendar for the next two weeks and is
going to closet himself in Tuscola, with his advisers, and formulate
a plan to throw his hat into the ring."

"So all the media will go to Tuscola," James said. "I would guess so," Mel said.
"But Dad's not in Tuscola."
Mel shrugged as if this were a minor annoyance. "Sipes says he's transportable. We'll use the chopper. More private and presidential
as hell."

Cozzano chuckled. "Good backing," he said. "We'll go to the
buckyball."

"What's the point?" James said. He actually shouted it. Suddenly he had become upset. "Dad's had a stroke. Can't you see that? He's
sick. How long do you think you can hide it?"
"A couple of weeks," Mel said.
"Why bother?" James said. "Is there any reason for all this
subterfuge? Or are you just doing it for the thrill of playing the
game?"

"People my age get their thrills by having good bowel movements
, not by playing games," Mel said. "I'm doing it because we
don't yet know the full extent of the damage. We don't know how much Willy is going to recover in the next couple of weeks."
"But sooner or later
..."
"Sooner or later, we'll have to come out and say he's had a
stroke," Mel said, "and then the presidential bid is stillborn. But it's
better to have a nice little planned stroke at home, while trying to
lead the country, than a big
 
ugly surprising one while you're
picking your nose in the statehouse, don't you think?" "I don't know," James said, shrugging. "Is it?"

Mel swiveled his head around to look directly at James. His face bore an expression of surprise. He was able to mask his emotions
before they developed into disappointment or contempt.

Everyone had always assumed that James would one day develop
from a bright boy into a wise man, but it hadn't happened yet. Like
many sons of great and powerful men, he was still trapped in a larval
stage. If he hadn't been the son of the Governor, he probably
would have developed into one of those small-town letter-of-thelaw types that Mel found
so
tiresome.

But he was the son of the Governor. Mel accepted that. He
didn't say what was on his mind:
James, don't be a sap.

"James," Mary Catherine said, speaking so quietly that she could
barely be heard across the room, "don't be a sap."

James turned and gave Mary Catherine the helpless, angry look of a little brother who has just had his cowlick pulled by his big
sister.

Mel and the Governor locked eyes across the bedspread.

"Hut one!" Cozzano said.

7

Gangadhar
V.R.J.V.V.
Radhakrishnan,
M.D.,
Ph.D., had not
cracked a skull in seventy-nine days and he was not happy about it. Even the shaven-headed thugs stamping out license plates ten miles
down the road at the New Mexico State Men's Reformatory
would get rusty without their daily quota of practice on the license-
plate stamping machine. For a neurosurgeon, eleven weeks without
pressing the madly vibrating blade of the bone saw against a freshly
peeled human skull was intolerable.

In order to crack a skull he had to get to a decent hospital. In
order to reach a decent hospital from here, he had to use the Elton
State University airplane. But every time he needed it, the football
coach had taken it out on a recruiting trip to L.A. or Houston. This
was in direct violation of Dr. Radhakrishnan's contract with Elton
State, which stated that he would have access to the airplane as
needed.

The only person who could help him was Dr. Artaxerxes
Jackman, the president of Elton State University, and Jackman had
to be approached in the right way. Jackman had a Ph.D. in
education and higher administration. It was almost criminal fraud
to call him a doctor, but in the academic sense, a doctor he was. Dr.
Radhakrishnan had not spent most of his life in his native India without figuring out that important positions are quite often filled
by underserving swine, who must be deferred to in any case.

His own father was a case in point. Forty years ago, about the
time Gangadhar had been born, Jagdish Radhakrishnan had been a
rising young idealist in the Nehru administration. That very
idealism had led to an appointment on the Railway Corruption
Enquiry Committee of 1953. Jagdish had carried out his respon
sibilities zealously, refusing to pull his punches even when it
became evident that he was getting close to many a high-ranking
official. He found himself summarily transferred to a low post in the
Sheet Mica Price Controller's organisation, where he had lan
guished ever since, living only for the achievements of his two sons:
Arun,
 
the golden boy,
 
the firstborn son,
 
now a member of
Parliament, and to a lesser extent, Gangadhar.

Gangadhar V.R.J.V.V. Radhakrishnan knew that the faculty of
Elton State University was, in the academic world, roughly
equivalent to the Sheet Mica Price Controller's Organisation, and that if he ever wanted to get out of this place he would have show
more discretion - more savvy - less boneheaded idealism than his
father had back in the 1950s. For half a year he had been trying,
diplomatically and politely, to get in for a face-to-face with Dr.
Jackman, but there meeting kept getting postponed.

Before he even veered into the parking lot of the Coover
biotechnology pavilion, blood balloons began to detonate on the
windshield of his full-sized, one-ton, six-wheel-drive Chevy
pickup truck. He kept driving even though he could no longer see
through the windshield. If he was lucky, he might run over an
animal rights activist and then claim it was an accident. The truck was not in a mood to slow down; it was heavily laden with fifty-
pound sacks of Purina Monkey Chow. He had just paid for the
monkey chow himself, with his own money, down at the grain
elevator - the closest thing there was to a skyscraper in Elton, a
white tubular obelisk sticking up above the railroad tracks on the
edge of town. He had talked to the grinning windburned Nazis,
given them his money, endured their snickering at his accent and their remarks about his heavy winter coat.