Neal Stephenson - Interface

"But I can't just go out and write it."

"Listen to me. When you made the 'Colorado is a welfare queen state' speech you set me to thinking. I am as much a part of the problems as Jesse is or Ted Kennedy or for that matter that poor little Shad Harper son of a bitch you nailed in Denver. You know, I love this country. I never had much trouble with money because my dad left me a lot of property and I had the privilege of being a maverick. The one thing I noticed in forty-eight years of public service, forty-four up here, is that the rarest thing in life is a person who speaks the truth. The most dangerous thing in life is a person who constantly refers to 'values.' If I was going to write down my testament, that is it. None of us has the right to tell anyone else how to live. None of us has the right to hold back anybody else for any reason - race, religion, income, or what have you. The rest of life is an open field, a crap shoot. The role of government is to make it an equal crap shoot for everybody. Not real profound, but real effective."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"If you feel able to adhere to the general message I just laid out-"

"I do."

"Feel your way through this P.R. maze, go out and represent me on TV, and keep writing your best thoughts down in this goddamn book. Represent freedom and honesty - whoops, there I go talking about values again."

"You really think that someone like me is the person to represent a card-carrying member of the power structure, like you."

"You're goddamned right. I never get co-opted by nobody. Nobody is ever going to co-opt you. And in this auto-erotic, skill to stay in the Beltway town, that's a huge advantage."

"When I go public, how do I identify myself?"

"Why, as Eleanor Richmond."

"If you want to. Lady, you're my last gift to the country."

By the end of the day, Eleanor's calendar had been filled for the summer. One major interview show a week, and two print journalists a week. Her first interview would be with the Alexandria Gazette on Friday. Even Dr. Lawrence called up, full of contrition about his lack of sensitivity, and tried to take Eleanor out on a date to the Maison Blanche. Eleanor was a hot topic for the rest of May and June.

It didn't take her long to figure out why: she was close to Senator Marshall, and everyone in town had heard rumors that Senator Marshall was dying. They would pump her for information about the Senator, in more or less subtle ways. She would ward off their questions and then talk about whatever she wanted - which is what Washington people always did with the press anyway.

"Floyd Wayne Vishniak," said the digitized voice from the computer, and an array of fresh windows popped into life on Aaron Green's high-resolution video screen. One of the windows was a photograph, a head shot of a white man with lank blond hair, not short enough to be short and not long enough to be long, sticking out from beneath a blue baseball cap that were turned down at the corners, giving him a sad and bedraggled appearance, and his skin was flushed and glossy under the blaze of an electronic flash. This was not a posed shot. It had been taken from a low angle as Floyd Wayne Vishniak rode down an escalator at a shopping mall some­where. He was staring down into the camera with a blank and baffled expression that had not yet developed into surprise. He was wearing a tightly stretched, inside-out, navy blue T-shirt with a couple of holes in it and he had the ropy muscles of a man who got them by doing physical labor and not by working out at any health club.

This image was not the only window on the computer screen. There was a small one next to it, this one showing a brief video clip that kept looping back and replaying. It showed Floyd Wayne Vishniak sitting in the cheap seats at a sports arena somewhere, leaping to his feet along with all of the other people in his vicinity to shout abuse at some miscreant down below. In this clip, Vishniak was wearing a tremendously oversized, bright yellow foam rubber hand over his real hand. The long finger of the hand was extended. Just in case this message was not clear, it had been printed with the words FUCK THE REF. And in case the ref did not happen to be looking in his direction, Vishniak could clearly be seen mouthing the same words - chanting them over and over - in unison with all of the other sports fans in his section. In Vishniak's other hand he was holding a plastic beer cup the size of the Louvre. While he was waving his giant yellow digit in the air, beer sloshed over the rim and splashed down on the shoulders of the fan in front of him, who reacted, but either did not care or was afraid to make a big deal out of it. Floyd Wayne Vishniak was not a person that most people would consider picking a fight with. He was not especially big, but he was tightly wound in the extreme.

Other people were waving giant foam rubber hockey sticks and other hockey-related paraphernalia. Though the action below - the source of the controversy - was not shown on this video clip, it was evidently a hockey game, and at least one of the teams was apparently named the Quad Cities Whiplash.

Another window, below the video loop, showed a map of the fifty states with a blinking red X superimposed on the Mississippi River, between western Illinois and eastern Iowa. Under the blinking X was the label DAVENPORT, IOWA (QUAD CITIES).

There were two other windows on the screen, both of them carrying textual information. One of them was a brief c.v. of Floyd Wayne Vishniak. He had grown up in the Quad Cities, straddling the Illinois-Iowa border, dropped out of high school to get a job in a tractor factory, and been laid off and rehired six times in the intervening fifteen years. During the past year he had barely managed to earn his weight in dollars.

The remaining window was a tall narrow one that ran down the side of the computer screen. It was a list containing exactly one hundred items. Each item consisted of a phrase describing a subset of the American population, followed by a person's name.

As this presentation - this computerized dossier - proceeded from one name to the next, the corresponding item on the list was highlighted, a bright purple box drawn over it so that the user could see which category he was dealing with at the moment. The hundred categories and names on the list were as follows:

IRRELEVANT MOUTH BREATHER

400-POUND TAB DRINKER

STONE-FACED URBAN HOMEBOY

BURGER-FLIPPING HISTORY MAJOR

SQUIRRELLY WINNEBAGO JOCKEY

BIBLE-SLINGING PORCH MONKEY

ECONOMIC ROADKILL

PENT-UP CORPORATE LICKSPITTLE

HIGH-METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR

MIDAMERICAN KNICKKNACK QUEEN

SNUFF-HAWKING BASEMENT DWELLER

POSTADOLESCENT ROAD WARRIOR

DEPRESSION-HAUNTED CAN STACKER

PRETENTIOUS URBAN-LIFESTYLE SLAVE

FORMERLY RESPECTABLE BANKRUPTCY SURVIVOR

FROSTY-HAIRED COUPON SNIPPER

CYNICAL MEDIA MANIPULATOR

RETICENT GUN NUT

UFOS ATE MY BRAIN

MALL-HOPPING CORPORATE CONCUBINE

HIGH-FIBER DUCK SQUEEZER

POST-CONFEDERATE GRAVY EATER

MANIC THIRD-WORLD ENTREPRENEUR

OVEREXTENDED YOUNG PROFESSIONAL

APARTMENT-DWELLING MALL STAFF

TRADE SCHOOL METAL HEAD

ORANGE COUNTY BOOK BURNER

FIRST-GENERATION BELTWAY BLACK

80'S JUNK-BOND PAR VENUE

DEBT-HOUNDED WAGE SLAVE

ACTIVIST TUBE FEEDER

TOILET-SCRUBBING EX-STEEL WORKER

NEO-OKIE

SHIT-KICKING WRESTLEMANIAC

SUNBELT CONDO COMMANDO

RUST-BELT LUMPENPAOL

and others...

Aaron hit the space bar on the Calyx workstation's keyboard. All of the windows disappeared except for the long skinny one with the list of categories. The next item on the list was highlighted and spoken aloud by the digitized computer voice: RETICENT GUN NUT - JIM HANSON, N. PLATTE, NEBRASKA.