Neal Stephenson - Interface

Mary Catherine was astonished the first time she saw the crew in action. Myron Morris himself wasn't there; he had hung around quite a bit for the first day or two, then excused himself. That left the cameraman and the sound woman. The sound woman was carrying some heavy-duty gear: a big reel-to-reel machine slung over a shoulder strap, with an assortment of microphones. But the cameraman was packing a cheap piece of junk: a home-style VHS camcorder not much different from the one that was rusting away in the Cozzanos' garage.

"Why are you using a home camcorder?" Mary Catherine asked him, when he wasn't actively filming Dad.

He shrugged. "That's what Myron said to use. I don't get it either."

"Where's Myron?"

"Scouting."

"Scouting?"

"Locations. He's looking around the area."

"Why? Is he planning on producing a movie in Tuscola?"

The cameraman shrugged. "I'm just repeating his words."

She found him outside of town, at the old Cozzano farm. His giant Suburban was parked along the shoulder of the country road, looking as if it might roll over into the ditch. Morris had jumped a fence into a cornfield and was walking down one of the freshly plowed rows, his shoes sinking into the soft black earth. Every few paces he would stop walking and turn toward the farmhouse, which had been rebuilt by Dad and his cousins after the tornado destroyed it in the early fifties. He would lift a short, stubby black telescope to one eye and peer through it for a few seconds. Two or three of these devices were hung on ropes around his neck, clacking into one another as he walked.

Mary Catherine parked behind his Suburban, jumped the ditch, and vaulted the fence. Fence-vaulting was something she had known how to do, expertly, since an early age; in the extended Cozzano family, kids who couldn't vault fences got left behind and never had any fun. In her fancy grownup clothes it was slightly more complicated, but nowadays she had the advantage of height. Half a mile away she could see her second cousin Tim out plowing the field on one of the old tractors.

Myron Morris noticed her approaching. He stopped, waved, and stood there for a few moments, hands in pockets, watching her approach. Then he picked up one of the short stubby telescopes and used it to peer at her. He dropped that one and looked at her through another. Then another.

"What are those things?" she asked as she got closer.

"They simulate what I would see looking through the view-finder of a camera with a particular lens on it. It's just a visual device that makes it easier to frame one's shots, figure out where to put the camera."

"I've been following you around town" she said. "People said they've seen you out at the park, the high-school playing field, the old train station."

"I don't get out to Tuscola very often," he said. "So as long as I'm here I thought I'd get to know the place."

"Don't you think you're getting ahead of the game? Dad's staying at home."

"I won't bullshit you," he said. "Cy Ogle wants to work for your dad. This is important stuff to him. If anything happens, we'll need to know where are the best places to shoot. And that's what I'm finding out. Is that okay?"

Mary Catherine nodded at the little telescopes. "Do any of those things work with a video camcorder?"

"Nah. These are all for professional film cameras."

"I'm confused," she said. "In some ways, you guys are taking this thing way too seriously. In other ways, you're goofing off."

"You want to know why we're using that Kmart special to videotape the Governor."

"Yeah."

"The whole point here is that these things are supposed to be home movies. If the Governor chooses not to use our services, then you end up with home movies in a format you can use. But if he does hire us, we can make them into ads."

"Ads that look like shitty home movies."

"A-ha!" Myron Morris said, holding up one finger. "You were expecting something a little slicker."

"If there's one adjective that's most commonly used in connection with Cy Ogle, it is slick" Mary Catherine said.

"Which is why we want to go with the opposite of slick."

"I don't follow."

"Imagine it. A television ad showing big moments in the life of William Anthony Cozzano. We see him horsing around this very farm as a child. Scoring a touchdown in the Rose Bowl. We see him in Vietnam. We see him playing for the Bears. Raising his kids. All of this is going to be trashy, grainy, antiquated film stock. Home-movie stuff. And then we see his recovery from the stroke - some private moments at home - and all of a sudden it looks slick. It's shot on 35-millimeter film stock, the lighting is perfect, he's wearing makeup, all of a sudden it looks like goddamn Lawrence of Arabia. You think people aren't going to notice that?"

Mary Catherine didn't have an answer for that one.

"Americans may be undereducated, lazy, and disorganized, but they do one thing better than any people on the face of the earth, and that is watch television. The average eight-year-old American has absorbed more about media technology than a goddamn film student in most other countries. You can tell lies to them and they'll never know. But if you try to lie to them with the camera, they'll crucify you. Which is why, when we shoot home movies of your father, we use exactly the same machine that Joe Sixpack uses when he sends a tape of his dancing Dalmation to America's Funniest Home Videos. And to tell you the truth, we may actually have to go through and process that videotape and make it look worse than it does now."

"Are you sure about this?"

"Reagan did it in '80. I believe he made out okay." "But everyone will know that Ogle's working for Dad." Myron shook his head dismissively. "That's a verbal thing. Nobody gives a shit about that, as long as the ads don't look slick. Believe me, as long as we stick with half-inch videotape, and as long as we avoid releasing any images of your Dad standing with one arm around Cy Ogle, nobody who matters will think that he's ever been near a slick media man."

As Mary Catherine trudged back across the field to where she had parked her car behind Morris's Suburban, a third car cruised up the road and pulled on to the shoulder behind hers. It was Mel's Mercedes.

Mel set the hand brake, climbed out, waved to her, and then ambled around on the shoulder for a minute or two, squinting off into the distance, taking in the vista. Views in this part of Illinois were not exciting, but they were vast, and a person like Mel, who spent much time pent up in a city, could come out here and stare at the horizon in the same way that a vacationer in New York or L.A. might go to the ocean and gaze off into emptiness.

Mel had given up cigarettes by the trick of switching to cigars, which were so noxious that, like nuclear weapons, they could not be used except in remote, desolate environments. He did not smoke them in his Mercedes for fear of imparting an eternal reek to the leather and the carpets. Now that he was out on the road, he fished the extinct butt of a fat stogie from the pocket of his trench coat and stoked it into life with a wooden safety match. Bubbles of silver smoke blew out from the corners of his mouth, elongated in the wind, and whipped off across the prairie, picking up almost palpable momentum as they headed for the Indiana border.

After a minute or so, Mel's gaze settled on the farmhouse, which he had helped to rebuild. The concept of a Jew learning to use a claw hammer had been considered revolutionary by both the Meyers and the Cozzanos, and had met with some resistance from both groups. But the young Mel enjoyed his trips out of town and had insisted on riding the train down at least once a week during the summers to pound nails. Three volumes of the library of Cozzano family photo albums were devoted to the reconstruction of the house, and Mel showed up in a number of pictures, pale, skinny, and bent as a peeled banana, kneeling on the bare plywood of the new roof among burly, copper-hued Cozzanos, nailing down the shingles one strip at a time.