Interface (49 page)

Cozzano went limp and dropped his face down on to his arms,
staring directly into the floor. His back and shoulders were heaving and sweat was visible along his hairline.

"Sorry about that," Zeldo said.

"It was unbelievably realistic," Cozzano said. "My God, I
actually heard the sound of a bullet whizzing past my head." He sat
up and held up one hand, just above and to one side of his right
temple. "It was from an AK-47. It came from this direction, right
out of the jungle, and shot past me. Missed me by a couple of
inches, I'd say."

"Is that a specific memory of something that happened to you?"
Zeldo said.

Cozzano's eyes became distant. He was staring at the wall, but he
wasn't seeing it. "Hard to say. Hard to say."

"When you saw the apple pie, it seemed very specific."

"It was specific. It really happened. This was more of a fleeting
glimpse of something. Almost like a reconstruction of a generic type of event."

"Interesting," Zeldo said. "Would you like to take a break?"

"Yeah, I wouldn't mind," Cozzano said. "That one really shook
me up. How many more do we have to do?"

Zeldo laughed. "We've done three dozen so far," he said, "and
we could potentially do a couple of thousand. It's up to you."

By the end of the day, Zeldo had stimulated more than a
hundred separate connections into Cozzano's brain. Each one
elicited a completely different response.

AN ENTIRE PASSAGE FROM MARK TWAIN MATERIALIZED IN
HIS HEAD.

HE SMELLED THE ROOT CELLAR AT THE OLD FARMHOUSE
OUTSIDE OF TOWN.

HE
 
FELT
 
AN
 
OVERPOWERING
 
SENSE
 
OF
  
GRIEF
 
AND
 
LOSS,
FOR NO REASON AT ALL.

A COLD
 
FOOTBALL SLAMMED
 
INTO
 
HIS
 
HANDS DURING A
SCRIMAGE IN CHAMPAIGN.

HE BIT INTO A THICKLY FROSTED CHOCOLATE CAKE. A B-52 STREAKED OVERHEAD.

HE
  
SAW
  
A
  
FULL
  
PAGE
  
FROM
  
HIS
  
WEEKLY
  
APPOINTMENT
CALENDAR, MARCH 25-31, 1991.

SNOWFLAKES DRIFTED ON TO HIS OUTSTRETCHED TONGUE
AND MELTED.

HE
  
BECAME
  
SEXUALLY
  
AROUSED
  
FOR
  
NO
  
DISCERNIBLE
REASON.

AN OLD BARRY MANILOW SONG PLAYED IN HIS HEAD.

HIS CAR SKIDDED OFF AN ICY ROAD IN WINTER 1960 AND
HIT A TELEPHONE POLE; HIS FOREHEAD SLAMMED INTO THE
WIND-SHIELD AND CRACKED IT.

THE TINKLING SOUND OF ICE CUBES IN A GLASS PITCHER OR ICED TEA
BEING STIRRED BY ONE OF HIS AUNTS.

HE TRIMMED HIS FINGERNAILS IN A TOKYO HOTEL ROOM.

MARY CATHERINE DID SOMETHING THATMADE HIM VERY ANGRY
; HE WASN'T SURE EXACTLY WHAT.

"I have to quit," Zeldo said. "I can't type any more. My fingers are dead."

"I want to keep going," Cozzano said. "This is incredible."

Zeldo thought about it. "It
is
incredible. But I'm not sure if its
useful."

"Useful for what?"

"The whole point of this exercise was to figure out a way to use
this chip in your head for communication," Zeldo said.

Cozzano laughed. "You're right. I had forgotten about that."

"I'm not sure how we use all of this stuff to communicate,"
Zeldo said. "It's all impressionistic stuff. Nothing rational."

"Well," Cozzano said, "it's a new communications medium.
What is necessary is to develop a grammar and syntax."

Zeldo laughed and shook his head. "You lost me."

"It's like film," Cozzano said. "When film was invented, no one
knew how to use it. But gradually, a visual grammar was developed.
Filmgoers began to understand how the grammar was used to
communicate certain things. We have to do the same thing with
this."

"I should get you together with Ogle," Zeldo said.

"You should have studied more liberal arts," Cozzano said.

29

Eleanor made the mistake of giving out her full name. Since
her name was listed in the telephone book, she was now reachable
by everyone, all the time. She had the impression that her phone
number must have been spray-painted in digits ten feet tall on the
wall of every public housing project in greater Denver. And somehow they had all heard that Eleanor Richmond was a nice lady who would help you out with your problems.

She began to get calls from constituents in the middle of the
night. When some unemployed mother of three phoned her at one o'clock one night and asked her for a personal loan of a hundred
dollars, Eleanor came to her senses and decided that this had to stop.
She could not be unofficial mom to all of Denver. She soon got
into the habit of turning off the ringer on her phone when she went
to bed.

This was a difficult step for a mother of two teenagers to take,
because once she turned off that ringer, she knew that her kids
would not be able to wake her up in the middle of the night and
ask her advice, or request help, apologize, or simply burst into tears
whenever they got themselves into a Situation. And although
Eleanor's kids were reasonably smart and fairly responsible and kind
of prudent, they still had an amazing talent for finding their way
into Situations.

But by this point in her mothering career, Eleanor had seen
enough Situations that she had begun to suspect that her kids were
more apt to get into them when they knew that Mom would be
there at the other end of the phone line to bail them out. And sure
enough, when she got in the habit of turning her phone off at
night, the incidence of Situations dropped. Or maybe she just
stopped hearing about them. Either way it was fine with her.

It didn't help her sleep, though. Turning off the phones pre
vented them from ringing. But she could still hear the mechanical
parts inside her answering machine clunking and whirring all night
long, as people left messages for her. She put the answering
machine in the far corner of her trailer and buried it under a pillow,
but that didn't help. She still lay awake at night wondering, Why
the hell are these people calling me?

She had never called anyone. It had never even occurred to her,
when she was broke, and her husband had gone on the lam to the
Afterlife, and her mother was soiling her pants in the middle of the
night, and Clarice and Harmon, Jr., were out getting into
Situations, to pick up the phone and contact the office of the
Senator. It would not have occurred to her in a million years.

Where had these people gotten the weird idea that the
government was going to take care of their problems?

The answer to that one was pretty simple: the government had
told them as much. And they had been dumb enough to believe it. When it turned out to be lie (or at least a hell of an exaggeration)
they didn't go out and help themselves. Instead they stewed in their
own problems and they got self-righteous about it and started
calling Eleanor Richmond in the wee hours to vent their outrage.

She had to stop thinking this way. She was thinking exactly like Earl Strong. Blaming everything on the welfare mothers. As if the welfare mothers had caused the savings and loan crisis, the budget
deficit, the decline of the schools, and El Nino all at once.

She would he awake every night for hours, sensing the distant
clunking of her answer machine under the pillow in the next room,
and run through this series of thoughts over and over again, like a
rat on a treadmill, exhausting herself but never going anywhere.

One morning in the middle of April she got up, turned on her
coffee maker, took the pillow off her answering machine, and
played back the messages, as she did every morning. Today there
were only four of them. The people who had Eleanor's phone
number written on the walls of their trailers and project flats had
begun to learn that she never responded to messages and, bit by bit,
weren't bothering to call anymore.

One of the messages was from someone speaking a language that
Eleanor had never heard before. He rambled on until the machine
cut him off. Then there were a couple of irate voters. And then
there came a voice she recognized: it was one of Senator Marshall's
political aides, calling from Washington.

"Hi, this is Roger calling from D.C. at nine
a.m.
local time."

Eleanor glanced at her clock. It was 7:15. This message had just
come in while she was showering.

"We have a major problem that's up your alley. Please call me as
soon as you can."

Eleanor picked up her phone and started punching numbers. She
got through to Roger in D.C. During her month of working for
Senator Marshall she had spoken briefly to this man once
previously, and seen his name on a lot of memos.

Senators were too important to do anything personally. They
were like sultans being carried around on sedan chairs, their feet
never actually touching the ground. They showed up at the Capitol
to make speeches and cast votes, and they made a lot of essentially
social appearances, but most of the actual grunge work was
delegated to a few key aides. This Roger character was one of those
aides. He was a highly media-conscious, touchy-feely sort who
spent a lot of time worrying about Senator Marshall's image with
the folks at home. When a high-school band made a trip to
Washington, D.C., it was Roger who made sure that they got in to
the Senator's office for a photograph and a brief chat.

"Hi, Eleanor, I'm glad you called back," he said. "Look, I got a
call this morning from Roberto Cuahtemoc at the Aztlan Center over in Rosslyn."

Rosslyn was part of Arlington, Virginia, right across the bridge from Eleanor's hometown. Aztlan was a Hispanic advocacy group.
Roberto Cuahtemoc had formerly been Roberto something-else
and had switched to a Nahuatl last name during his college years. He was obscure to northeastern Hispanics, but in the Southwest, particularly among migrant workers, he was revered.

Naturally, he and Senator Marshall hated each other. At least,
they did in public. In private they had apparently reached some
kind of an arrangement. When Roberto Cuahtemoc phoned the
Senator first thing in the morning it probably meant he was pissed
about something.

"He's really pissed," Roger said. "He got a call from Ray del
Valle this morning at seven
a.m.
our time, which means that our
buddy Ray was up and at 'em at five
a.m.
in Denver."

Ray del Valle was a Denver-based activist and protege of
Cuahtemoc. He was young, smart, and, considering the intensity of
his convictions, Eleanor had found him easy to get along with.

"What's Ray up to?" she said.

"He's convinced that some migrant family is getting screwed
over by Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center. There's a little kid
involved. It's the kind of thing where he could really beat our
brains out in the media, and believe me, if anyone understand that
fact, it's Ray. So before he makes the Senator out to look like
Francisco fucking Pizarro or something, please get over there and show the flag and tell everyone how concerned the Senator is. Are
you ready to write down this address?"

"Shoot," she said.

Fifteen minutes later she was there. It was a straight shot. She'd used most of her first paycheck to fix up the Volvo. She crept up to
the edge of Highway 2, looked both ways, and punched the gas,
spraying dust and rocks back into the Commerce Vista, screaming a
wild left-hand turn on to the highway, headed southwest toward
Denver. She weaved her way through heavy truck traffic, passing one
trailer park after another, eventually getting into the heavy industrial
zone of southern Commerce City - all the stuff that Harmon had avoided when he'd first taken her to look at the Commerce Vista.
Passing out of the refinery zone, over and under freeways and railway
lines, she entered a flat, hot warehouse region of north Denver that
catered entirely to semitrailer rigs and the men who drove them. One
parking lot had been turned into a makeshift bus station where you
could catch a bus straight to Chihuahua. Finally she passed under
Interstate 70 and into the area she was looking for.