Interface (45 page)

The door opened and the hunchbacked janitor dragged himself
into the room. He fixed his one good eye on Schram, slouched
over to him, and gave him a high five.

"Oscar-winning performance," the janitor said.
"You get best supporting actor, Cy," Schram said. "Nah, it's all special effects," Ogle said, reaching up to grab the
curtain of tortured flesh that ran from his jawbone down to his
chest. He pulled on it, and most of it peeled away in a single piece,
leaving a few strips and patches of burnt-looking skin adhering to
his face and neck. With a few minutes of additional peeling and
scrubbing, Ogle managed to get loose from most of the makeup,
though a few fragments of it still stuck to him here and there, like
bits of tissue paper left over from a bad shave, and the part of his
face that hadn't been covered still had colored greasepaint on it. Ogle didn't care; he was too busy staring at the monitors.

He loved it. His eyes were virtually popping out of his head. His
mouth was wide open and frozen in an expression of boyish glee,
like a farm boy getting his first look at Disney World. His eyes
darted back and forth from one screen to the next; he couldn't
decide what to look at.

"Days. Weeks," Ogle said. "I'm gonna be looking at this thing
for weeks."

"Check out the look on that can stacker's face when you dragged
your sorry ass into the room," Schram said.

"She's not a can stacker," Aaron said, "she's a coupon snipper."

They ran through the whole thing a couple of times. The computer allowed them to run it like a videotape, with fast-
forward, rewind, freeze-frame, the whole bit. As they went
through it, Schram jotted down notes on a yellow legal pad. Finally
they shunted the screens back over to a real-time display of what
was happening, right now, in the interview room.

Nothing was happening. The six faces were a picture of terminal
boredom. The good cop and the bad cop had gone away and been
replaced by a droning, monotonous voice that was going on and on
in some kind of pseudolegal jargon.

"That's an actor claiming to be a lawyer for Ogle Data
Research," Ogle explained. "He's been lecturing them for half an
hour while we dicked around with all this stuff."

"Let's see what self-righteous indignation looks like," Schram said, rising to his feet and heading for the interview room.

"Ten-four on that," Ogle said.

Schram walked into the interview room a moment later and the monitors all went ballistic. Ogle howled like a dog.

"All the same," he said, "they all react the same. The hunchback, the shooting, the pornography, and they all reacted differently. But
when they're pissed off, they all look alike. And that's why self-righteousness is the most powerful force in politics."

27

The first thing he learned how to move was his right thumb.
It wasn't a fluke, either. It was something that William Cozzano
worked on constantly from the first moment that he came awake
after the implantation.

Within a day, he was able to make the thumb jerk spasmodically
from time to time. By the time they loaded him on the plane and
flew him back to Tuscola, two days after the implantation, he was
able to jerk it whenever he wanted to.

Then he learned how to move it both ways, straightening the thumb and then curling it into the palm of his hand. Once he got
that down, he repeated it several thousand times, sixteen hours a
day, until they gave him sedatives to make him sleep. Eight hours
later he would wake up and begin exercising his thumb again.

For the first few days, neither Mary Catherine nor anyone else
could figure out why he was concentrating on the thumb. They
had assumed that he would want to work on his speech skills. And
he did, from time to time; within a week after the operation, it was
possible to watch him playing with muscle in his face. The
underside of his jaw throbbed in and out as he moved his tongue
around inside his mouth, and his lips began to move, on both sides,
jerkily at first and then smoothly. Within five days he had learned
to pucker up so that he could give Mary Catherine a kiss when she
bent down to offer her cheek.

But the whole time he was doing these things, his thumb was
active. It became a subject of concern among Cozzano's therapy
team - the half-dozen physical therapists, neurologists, and
computer people who had moved into some of the unused
bedrooms in the Tuscola house to monitor the Governor's
recovery. They had meetings about that thumb. Worried about
whether the movement was voluntary or involuntary, discussed the idea of taping it down so it wouldn't get worn out and arthritic over
time.

It all became clear the first time they put a remote control into his hand. By that time, his fingers had developed enough coordination to wrap around the underside of the remote and hold it in place, giving that thumb, now highly coordinated, the freedom
to roam around on its top surface, punching buttons. Changing channels. Moving the volume up and down. Activating the VCR
to tape certain programs, then playing them back later.

They decided to give him a test. They arranged a dinner party on a Thursday evening at seven o'clock, knowing that it would
interfere with Cozzano's favorite TV show, a satirical cartoon. He
passed that test with flying colors; without any hints or prompting
from the therapy team, he used his thumb to program his VCR.

"He still knows how to do it," said the head computer person,
Peter (Zeldo) Zeldovich. He was awed. "I mean, I wrote half of the
Calyx operating system. But I can't program a VCR."

"His memory seems pretty good," Mary Catherine said. She had
driven down from Chicago to attend the dinner, then snuck up to the hallway outside the master bedroom to see Dad rewind the
videotape and play back his favourite program.

The other bedrooms had been turned into a high-tech wonder
land. Zeldo filled Mary Catherine's old bedroom with computers and James's with communications gear. Mom's sewing room was
full of medical stuff. The two guest bedrooms were set up with
bunk beds and mattresses on the floor so that the nurses and
therapists could alternate between sleeping and working without
leaving the house.

Everything that Dad did now - every tiny motion of his thumb,
every twitch of his lips - had huge informational ramifications that
Zeldo could plot and graph on his computer screens. Thousands of connections had now grown into place between Dad's neurons and
the biochip, and hundreds of new ones were still being made every
day. All of the impulses passing from his brain outward into his
body and back passed through these connections, and could be
monitored by the biochip. Even when Dad was sleeping, it
amounted to an overwhelming flow of information, like all the
telephone calls being made into or out of Manhattan at a given
time.

There was no way to understand all of it. No way to keep track.
The best that Zeldo could do was keep a running tab on what was
happening, building up a statistical database, maybe get some sense
of which connections were being used for the thumb and which for
the left eyebrow. Still, it was fascinating to watch.

That all of these things worked was no news. The chip had
worked in the baboons and it had worked in Mohinder Singh, after
all. The real question on their minds was: how much damage had the strokes done to other parts of Cozzano's mind, for example,
memory, personality, cognitive skills?

The fact that he still wanted to watch the same TV show, still
thought it was funny, and still knew how to program his VCR
answered several questions. It was good news on all fronts.

But mostly Cozzano watched the news and public affairs programs about the presidential campaign. They would pin the latest
newspapers and magazines up on a reading stand in front of his face
and he would pore over them, his eyes flicking back and forth
between the coverage on the televisions and the printed page.

Only then - after he had got control of the TV channels and had
caught up on the newspapers - only then did he start working on
speech.

They set an ambitious schedule for him, worrying that they
might stress him out and overwork him, and he left that schedule
in the dust. First thing in the morning, the physical therapists came in, at first helping him move his limbs, later, when he got the hang
of that, running him through exercises. Then the speech therapist
came in and got him to put his tongue and lips in certain positions,
got him to make certain sounds, and then to string those sounds
together into syllables and words. Following an afternoon nap, the
physical therapists would come back in and work on the parts of his
body that they had missed in the morning. During the evenings he
could relax, watch TV, read.

He exercised his speech during physical therapy and he exercised
his body during speech therapy. He also exercised both of them while he was pretending to take his afternoon nap, and then he
exercised them all evening long when he was supposed to be taking
it easy. He even woke up in the middle of the night and exercised.

Getting up out of the wheelchair was an ambitious goal that he
wouldn't attempt for a few weeks. In the meantime there were a
few things he couldn't do for himself, such as going to the toilet,
taking baths, carrying in wood for the fireplace, and swapping tapes
in and out of the VCR. Nurses, aides, and family members had to do these things for him.

Almost two weeks after the implant, Mary Catherine came
down for another visit. She had been doing so much driving that
they had gone to the trouble of leasing a car, a brand-new Acura
luxury sedan, so that she could make the trip in comfort and safety.
The evening she arrived, she had a conversation with Dad.

"Vee . . . Cee . . Arrr," he said.

"VCR. You want me to do something with the VCR?"

"Yes."

"Okay. What do you want me to do?"

Dad aimed the remote shakily toward the TV cabinet and hit the
EJECT button. The VCR spat out a tape.

"You want me to take this out?"

"Yes."

"You want me to put a different tape in?"

"Yes."

The TV cabinet had a shelf along the top with a few dozen
videotapes in it, mostly old family tapes or favourite movies. Mary
Catherine began running her finger along the line of tapes.

"New!" Dad blurted.

"You want a new tape?"

"Blank."

"You want a blank tape."

"Yes."

Mary Catherine rummaged around in the cabinet until she found
a six-pack of fresh blank videocassettes. Dad always bought them
half a dozen at a time at Wal-Mart. He always bought everything
in vast, bulk quantities, dirt cheap, in huge drafty warehouse like
stores out in the middle of the prairie.

She unwrapped one and stuck it into the machine. "Okay, what
should I do with this old one?" she asked, wiggling the tape she had
just removed"

"Label."

The fresh videotape had come shipped with a number of blank
labels. She peeled a couple of them back and stuck them on to the
black shell of the cassette. Then she dug a small felt-tipped marker
out of her purse. "What do you want to call this?"

Dad rolled his eyes as if to indicate that this was not important,
he would remember what it was. Mary Catherine grinned and
looked him in the eye, pen poised over the tape, challenging him.

He looked her right back in the eye. "Eee . . . lack . . . sun."

"Election."

"One," Dad said. The fingers of his hand trembled and jerked
uncertainly. Finally the index finger extended, while the other
fingers clenched into a loose, jittering fist.

"Election One," Mary Catherine repeated, writing it on to the top and side of the tape. "Does this imply that it's the first in a
series?"