Neal Stephenson - Interface

"Thanks," she snapped, rolling her eyes.

"Now that the ceremony is over, you can go back to being who you are. No more creepy stuff at least until he gets inaugurated."

"One more thing."

"What's that?"

"I'm the campaign physician."

Ogle was a bit startled. "We already hired-"

"I'm the campaign physician."

"We need you for other-"

"I'm the campaign physician," she said.

This time it sunk in. Ogle shrugged and nodded. "You're obviously the best person for the job."

The direct hit to Ogle's head had put the little kid on the pitcher's mound over the five-hundred-point mark. Mary Catherine thought about starting another game, but her attention had been drawn by a great deal of cheering and hilarity from one of the other playing fields. She headed in that direction.

A football game was in progress. Two teams of at least fifteen players each had taken the field. The ex-Bears were evenly divided between those two teams. Cozzano was, of course, the quarterback of one team. The opposing quarterback wore two Super Bowl rings. The ages of the teams ranged from ten years old up to the early seventies. Some of the players were farmers and some ran major corporations. Mary Catherine recognized Kevin Tice, the founder of Pacific Netware, serving as a wide receiver; in person, he was bigger and more athletic than his nerdy image would lead one to believe. Zeldo was in the trenches on the defensive line, being blocked by none other than Hugh MacIntyre, CEO of MacIntyre Engineering, who must have been in his early sixties but looked as strong and healthy as Dad.

The game was an extremely loose and goofy affair, with players of both teams constantly circulating on and off the field to get refreshments or visit the portable toilets. It was too hot to play hard. Still, each team had a hard core of adult men with highly com­petitive natures, and as the game wore on, all the little kids and the dilettantes dropped out and left behind half a dozen or so guys on each side, playing football that verged on serious. They didn't have a formal timekeeper, but they did have a deadline: a formal reception was taking place later at the Cozzano residence and they all had to quit playing at six o'clock.

At the end, the game actually got exciting. Cozzano's team was down by three points with time left for only one play. They came out in shotgun formation; the ball was expertly snapped by a Nobel laureate from the University of Chicago and Cozzano dropped back to pass, faking repeatedly in the direction of a very tall retired Celtic who was running toward the end zone, waving his arms frantically. The defense shouted in unison "ONE MISSISSIPPI TWO MISSISSIPPI THREE MISSISSIPPI!" giving Cozzano a little bit of time, and then they attacked. Zeldo defeated the blocking efforts of Hugh MacIntyre, despite the fact the MacIntyre illegally held on to his belt and began to chase Cozzano around the backfield. Cozzano scrambled expertly and wildly, evading tackle after tackle; he was older and slower than Zeldo, but he was wearing shoes with rubber soles. Finally, Zeldo managed to bring Cozzano down near the forty-yard line, just as Cozzano launched a desperation pass known as a Hail Mary. To no one's surprise, the ex-Celtic grabbed the bull out of the air high over the outstretched hands of the defenders and then fell into the end zone, winning the game.

Mary Catherine applauded and cheered along with the rest of the crowd, then looked back up the field at her father and Zeldo. They were lying on the grass next to each other, propped up on their elbows, watching the action, laughing the deep, booming laughter of men completely out of their mind on a potent cocktail of dirt, football, male bonding, and testosterone.

Mary Catherine extricated herself from the reception around midnight and snuck upstairs to her room. Once inside, she stuck a bent paper clip into the keyhole of the old door hardware and shot the bolt, a skill she had picked up through long practice at the age of eight. Now that most of the techies and therapists had left, she had her room back the way it was supposed to be, with her old single bed with the handmade quilt on it, family pictures, her own little TV set on a table at the foot of the bed. She kicked her shoes off and stretched out full length on top of the old quilt. For the first time she realized how completely exhausted she was.

The red digits of the bedside clock flipped over to 12:00. A barrage of firecrackers went off all over town, ringing out the Fourth of July. "God forgive me for this," Mary Catherine said, reaching for the remote control on her bedside table, "but I have to see how this looked on TV."

It was the top story on CNN. And it looked fantastic. Mary Catherine had always known, vaguely, that things looked different on TV than they did in reality. But she didn't understand that well enough to predict how something would turn out on the small screen.

Ogle, obviously, had the knack. The rally had been impressive enough in person. But on television, you didn't see any of the boring, grungy stuff around the edges. All you saw was the good stuff. They covered the smoke divers. They showed most of Cozzano's run across the football field, and even a brief glimpse of a string of firecrackers being set off. The shower of confetti looked incredible.

And she looked incredible. She almost didn't recognize herself, but was embarrassed anyway. Could it be that she was destined to wear this sort of clothes?

The CNN report didn't last long. They hit all the high points of the rally, airing all of the shots that Ogle had handed them on a silver platter, and then tossed in a few shots of the picnic, including some great footage of Cozzano throwing the Hail Mary.

CNN moved on to other topics. Mary Catherine picked up the remote control again and wandered up and down the electro­magnetic spectrum, catching glimpses of fishing shows, Home Shopping Network, Weather Channel, and Star Trek before finally locating C-SPAN, which was playing Dad's speech back in its entirety. For the first time, she got a chance to hear what he had been saying while she was looking around and chatting with all the little kids.

"About half a mile from here there's a factory that my father built, largely with his own capital and with the sweat of his brow, during the 1940s. The Army wouldn't let him fight - his mother had already lost one son to a German torpedo - but he was determined to get into the war one way or the other."

This was not true. He didn't build it with his own capital. The Meyers raised most of the money.

On the TV, Dad continued. "That factory made a new product known as nylon, which was an inexpensive replacement for silk - the main ingredient in parachutes. When the D day invasion was finally launched, my father couldn't be there. But the parachutes that he manufactured right here in Tuscola were strapped to the backs of every paratrooper who ventured into the skies of France on that fateful day."

He didn't make the chutes. Just the nylon fiber. The Army bought nylon from a whole bunch of suppliers.

"After V-E Day, a young man showed up in my father's factory one beautiful spring morning, asking to see Mr. Cozzano. Well, in a lot of places he would have gotten the brushoff from the receptionists and the P.R. people but in my father's company you could always go straight to the top. So in short order this man was ushered into John Cozzano's office. And when he finally came face-to-face with my father, this strapping young lad became positively choked up with emotion and couldn't bring himself to speak for a few moments. And he explained that he was a para­trooper who had been in the very spearhead of the D day invasion. A hundred men had parachuted down from his unit and a hundred of them landed safely and took their objective with a minimum loss of life. Well, it seemed that these troopers had noticed the Cozzano label printed on to their chutes and decided that they liked that name and they had begun to call themselves the Cozzano gang. That became their rallying cry when they would jump out of the airplane. And at that point, my dad, who never shed tears in my presence in his entire life, well, he just burst out crying, you see, because that meant more to him than any of the money or anything else that he had gotten out of his factory-