Neal Stephenson - Interface

Besides, Patricia might come in and discover him writing it. Then, he knew, they would take away the guns and anything else that he might use to hurt himself. They would shoot him full of drugs and mess with his brain.

And maybe they would be right. Maybe suicide was a stupid idea, Of course it wasn't a stupid idea. Suicide was a noble thing when done in the right circumstances. It was the act of a warrior, Cozzano was about to fall on his sword to spare himself further humiliation.

And now was the best time to do it. Before his spirit was broken by the drool on his chin and by the numbing onslaught of daytime television, before his feeble new image was discovered by the media harpies and broadcast to the world.

The doctors had said that as time went on, he might have additional strokes. This meant he might become even more pathetic, incapable of taking his own life.

Cozzano had never been sick. Cozzano had always known that barring the odd drunk driver or tornado, he was going to live until he was in his eighties.

Decades. Decades of this hell. Of watching Candid Video Blind Date. Of looking at that horrendous shag carpet and wishing he was man enough to handle a big floor sander. It was unimaginable. Cozzano hit the joystick and rolled across the room to the gun cabinet.

There was a sharp rapping noise. Someone was knocking on the window.

Cozzano turned the wheelchair halfway around and looked. It was Mel Meyer, standing out on the porch, waving to him.

Mel Meyer saw some boys on the shoulder of the interstate checking the tie-downs on a flatbed truck carrying a piece of farm machinery. He pulled into the left lane to give them a safe berth, and as he shot past them he realized that the boys were about sixty and forty years old respectively. They only looked like boys because, on this cold February day, they were wearing denim jackets that barely came down to their waists. Culture shock again, You'd think he would have gotten used to it by now.

Mel understood intellectually that these people had to wear short jackets because it gave them greater freedom of movement while they worked, and he also understood that their mall-dwelling females wore pastel workout clothes and running shoes at all times because they were more comfortable than anything else. But to Mel they all looked like children. This was not because Mel was some kind of a snob. It was because he was from Chicago and these people were from the entirely separate cultural, political, and economic entity called downstate.

To make anything work between two such disjointed places there had to be the equivalent of diplomats - people who, in another context, had once been defined as "men sent abroad to lie for their country - in both senses of the word." The intra-Illinois diplomats were the old family law firms in the major and minor towns of the state. These professionals lacked the partisanship to have a killer impulse for their clients. Instead they saw life in terms of each side winning, if at all possible.

In Chicago there were perhaps a hundred families such as the Meyers, ranging through the Polish, Slovak, Irish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, and even WASP sections of town, who kept the lines between the two Illinoises open and flowing, working in enter-prises legal and illegal. It was perhaps the purest and most professional group in Illinois, and the Meyers were masters of the guild. Shmuel Meirerowitz's son David, even though he was a Conservative Jew, had the skill and honesty to gain the trust of even the most bigoted downstate ambulance chaser. Generations of lawyers from. Cairo, Quincy, Macomb, Decatur, and Pekin (home of the Fighting Chinks) knew that the Meyer family's word was good. It was not particularly surprising, then, that the Cozzanos had encountered the Meyers, and that they had formed, an alliance.

Since then, a lot of Meyers had put a lot of miles on various cars, driving back and forth. Shmuel normally rode the Illinois Central, but David cruised up and down U.S. 45 in the stupendous Cadillacs and Lincolns of the 1950s and 1960s, and Mel scorched the pavement of Interstate 57 in a succession of Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes.

Mel had defined his very own Checkpoint Charlie, the official dividing line between Chicago and downstate. He drove by it every time he took I-57 south from the heart of the city. It was out in one of the suburbs, Mel had never bothered to find out which, where traffic finally started to open up a little bit. The landmark in question was a water tower, a modern lollipop-shaped one. It was painted bright yellow, and it had a smiley face on it. When Mel saw the damn smiley face he knew he had passed into hostile territory. The flatness of downstate was, in its way, just as stark and awe-inspiring as Grand Canyon or Half Dome. He had been down here a thousand times and it always startled him. The settlers had come here and found an unmarked geometric plane; anything that rose above that plane was the work of human beings. When Mel had first come this way it was mostly grain elevators, water towers, and ranks of bleachers rising up alongside high-school football fields. These artifacts were still there, but nowadays the most prominent structures were microwave relay towers: narrow vertical supports made of steel latticework, sprouting from concrete pads in cornfields, held straight by guy wires, drum-shaped antennas mounted to their tops. Each antenna was pointed several miles across the prairie in the direction of the next microwave relay tower. This was how phone calls got bounced around the country. These things were all over the place, crossing the country with a dense invisible web of high-speed communications, but other places you didn't see them. In cities they were hidden on the tops of buildings, and in places with hills, they were built into the high places where you couldn't see them unless you knew where to look. But out here, the buildings and hills had fallen out from under the phone company and their invisible network had been laid bare. It was not merely visible, but the single most obvious thing about the downstate landscape. It caused Mel to wonder, as he skimmed across the prairie on I-57, its four lanes straight as banjo strings, paralleling the equally straight Illinois Central railway line, whether downstate had some magical feature that might expose another network, a network that had, so far, so perfectly hidden its workings in the complexity of the modern world that Mel wasn't even sure it existed.

Cozzano beckoned Mel into the house and rolled forward into the living room.

"Hey, Willy, how are you?" Mel said, coming in the front door.

He spun a stack of newspapers into Cozzano's lap: the Financial Times was on top, and Cozzano could see the red corner of the Economist sticking out underneath. Mel pounded Cozzano on the shoulder, peeled off his heavy cashmere overcoat, and, oblivious to the fact that it cost more than a small car, tossed it full-length on to the sofa where it would pick up dog hairs. "What is this shit on the TV?" he said. He went up to the set and punched buttons on the cable box until he got CNBC. Then he turned the volume down so it wouldn't interfere with the conversation.

"Hey, Patty," Mel said. "You need to do any medical stuff with Governor Cozzano in the near future?"

Patricia had no idea how to deal with people who were not from Tuscola. She just stood in the dining room, glowing fuzzily in her peach-and-lavender sweatsuit, drying her hands, looking at Mel, completely baffled and uncertain. "Medical stuff?"

"I am asking you," Mel said, "if the Governor will be needing any specific medical attention from you in the next few hours -medications, therapy, anything like that. Or are your duties going to be strictly domestic in nature - making food and taking him to the bathroom and stuff like that?"