Neal Stephenson - Interface

After a brief wait by the baggage carousel, Mike led him out to a navy-blue Ford Taurus with an oversized engine and lots of antennas (innocuous but powerful; correct but not ostentatious; comfortable but not decadent) and drove him up the freeway to the Bay Bridge and across to Oakland, surging from lane to lane (decisive but not reckless). They exited shortly after getting into Oakland and then cruised down into a semirenovated downtown area and from there into a not-so-renovated area on the fringe of the waterfront warehouse district.

A number of the buildings down here were well on their way to being trashed, but as usual in California, there were a few nice ones that stood out, not so much because they'd been perfectly main­tained, but because they had been well-designed to begin with.

One of the best was a big old Art Deco Cadillac dealership, a glass-walled flatiron of a building set in the angle of two diverging avenues. The ground floor was huge and wide open, with ceilings that looked some twenty-five feet high, completely wrapped in tinted glass. That was the showroom; behind it, farther back into the block, was garage space. Above this ground floor were four or five additional floors of office space. On top of the building, the word CADILLAC was written large in orange neon script, looming over the intersection in letters that must have stood twenty feet high. Beneath that, mounted high on the prow of the building, was a big clock, a full story high, its numbers and hands outlined in more neon. The neon worked but the clock didn't.

Most of the big windows were in surprisingly good shape. A few of them had fist-sized holes in them, backed up with sheets of plywood, and the wide, double glass doors that had once beckoned would-be Cadillac buyers into the dealership had been rebuilt in plywood and painted black. The upper floors of the building looked empty. A few yellowed windowshades hung askew. It wasn't until Mike pulled the Taurus up in front of the black plywood doors, and Aaron saw the street number spray-painted across them in orange, that he realized this address matched the one printed on Cy Ogle's business card.

Once Aaron entered the showroom, his eyes adjusted well enough to see that it was mostly empty. No desks, no Cadillacs. He pulled the door shut behind him and latched it using a big, old-fashioned hook and eye.

The formerly high-gloss floor of the showroom was covered, patchily, with swaths of bleak off-brown indoor-outdoor carpeting, and the occasional half-unrolled length of battered and scarred gray foam rubber. A gridwork of black iron pipes hung down below the ceiling, and a few dozen theatrical spotlights were clamped on to the pipes here and there.

Other light fixtures were affixed to tall, telescoping poles mounted on tripods. The tops of these devices had big white umbrellas on them to serve as reflectors; the effect was that of a sparse field of gigantic sunflowers. Heavy black electrical cables, bundled together with gray tape, snaked all over the floor.

It was a stage. And the stage had props, scattered around irration­ally: a couple of heavy, impressive wooden desks. Plastic plants. Several bookshelves loaded with books. But as Aaron found when he looked at one of these, it was fake. There were no books on the shelves. What looked like a line of books seen on edge was a hollow plastic shell. The entire bookshelf weighed all of about twenty pounds.

There were some muffled clunking noises, and some lights came on at one end of the room. Aaron could only see about half of the showroom floor from here, the rest of it had been blocked off by flimsy partitions.

Finally he made out the streamlined pear shape of Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, standing next to a gray steel circuit-breaker box bolted to the wall, clunking lights on and off.

"Goofy," Ogle said, "my favourite."

"Oh. If I'd know, I would have brought you a souvenir."

"I get a souvenir every time I meet with one of my clients, haw haw haw," Ogle said. "Come on back, my offices are back here, such as they are."

"Interesting building," Aaron said.

"We figured we'd leave the big CADILLAC up on the roof." Ogle said, "to attract Republicans."

Aaron walked toward the back of the showroom, picking his way over cables and rolls of carpet padding.

"You might wonder why a man who has been described as a cross between Machiavelli and Zeffirelli would hang out in Oakland. Why not Sacramento, where the politicians are, or L.A., where all the media scum hang out?"

"The question had crossed my mind," Aaron said.

"It's a tug of war. Closer I am to Sacramento, the better it is for the politicians. Closer I am to L.A., the better it is for the creative talent."

"You're close to Sacramento. So I guess the politicians win."

"They do not win, but they predominate. See, media people have no scruples. They will go anywhere. Politicians have no scruples either. But they like to act as though they do. And it is beneath their sense of artificial dignity to go all the way to L.A. because they still think that I am just a huckster and it makes them think that they are groveling to the false gods."

Ogle turned his back on Aaron and led him through a maze of partitions.

"So why not set yourself up in Sacramento, if media people will anywhere?" Aaron said, strolling after him, looking around.

"Media people will go anywhere, but I won't. I won't go to Sacramento because it is a dried-up shithole. And San Fran is too damn expensive. So here I am, the best place I could ever be."

They were approaching some kind of an elaborate construction, a room within a room. It was a three-dimensional webwork of two-by-fours surrounding and supporting a curved wall. An old-fashioned, lath-and-plaster wall.

One side of the construct had been slid away so that Aaron could see inside. The room as a whole was elliptical in shape, now split open like a cracked egg.

Ogle noticed his curiosity and gestured at it. "Go on in," he said, "Nicest room in this whole place."

Aaron sidestepped the unadorned beams of the wooden framing and passed through the gap into the oval room.

There was a nice desk in here. It was an office. An oval office. It was the Oval Office.

Aaron had seen the real Oval Office in the White House once when his high-school band went to Washington, D.C. And this was the same. If the two halves were slid back together, it would be an exact replica.

"It's perfect," he whispered.

"On TV it's perfect," Ogle said, ambling into the room. "On film, it's just pretty good. Good enough for the yokels, anyway."

"Why would you need something like this?"

Ogle tapped the big leather swivel chair with the palm of his hand, spinning it around toward him, and fell into it. He leaned the seat back and put his feet up on the presidential desk. "Ever hear of the Rose Garden strategy?"

"Yeah, vaguely."

"Well, the White House is a busy place, what with all of those tour groups traipsing in and out, and as I said, most of the media types are here in Cal. Sometimes it's more convenient to pursue the Rose Garden strategy right here in Oakland."

"I didn't know you operated at that level," Aaron said. "I didn't know you worked for presidential candidates."

"Son," Ogle said, "I work for emperors."

"In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But no one will ever have as much character as Lincoln and Lee. For much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get laid and send us to Vietnam."

Ogle had broken a six-pack out of a junky old refrigerator behind the "Oval Office" and set up the cans on the presidential desk. Aaron had pulled up another chair and now both of them had their feet up on the desk and beers in their hands.