Interface. Part 3

Ogle held one finger up. "Not exactly. I said I worked in the media industry. But I am not a mediaperson, per se."

"What are you?"

"A scientist."

"And what is your field of study?"

"You, Aaron, are a biophysicist. You study the laws that determine the functioning of the body. Well, I am a political biophysicist. I study the laws that govern the functioning of the body politic."

"Oh. Could you be a little more specific?"

"People call me a pollster," Ogle said. "Which is like calling you a palm reader."

4.

ELEANOR BOXWOOD RICHMOND HEARD THE STATE OF THE UNION address on the radio, but she didn't really listen to it. She was driving a borrowed car down abandoned streets in Eldorado Highlands, an aborted suburb ten miles north of Denver. She had borrowed the car from Doreen, who lived in the trailer next to hers, several miles to the east, in the town of Commerce City.

In case the police tried to phone with any news of her husband, Eleanor had dropped her football phone out her kitchen window, pulled it across the gap between her trailer and Doreen's, and fed it through the window of Doreen's bedroom. Eleanor's husband, Harmon, for whom she was searching, had obtained the football phone free of charge by subscribing to Sports Ill.u.s.trated some years ago. Now the Sports Ill.u.s.trated were still showing up on time, every week, while Harmon himself, depressed by unemployment and bankruptcy, had become more and more erratic. Some things you could at least count on.

Eleanor felt foolish and humiliated every time she spoke on the football phone. It did not make looking for a job in the banking industry any easier. She would sit there in her trailer, which would be baking hot or freezing cold according to the outside temperature. She kept the windows closed even in summer so that the screaming of Doreen's kids, and the heavy metal from the trailer on the other side, would not be audible to the person she was speaking to. She would telephone people wearing dark suits in air-conditioned buildings and she would hold the little plastic football to the side of her head and try to sound like a banker. So far she had not gotten any jobs.

Back in the old days, when the whole family had lived together, happily, in their big house in this suburban development in Eldorado Highlands, they had had a phone in every room. In addition to the football phone they had had a sneaker phone; a cheap little Radio Shack phone that would always go off the hook unless you set it down firmly on a hard surface; and a couple of solid, traditional AT&T telephones. All of these phones had disappeared during the second burglary of their trailer and so they had been forced to get the football phone out of storage and use that instead.

Eleanor Richmond had not seen her husband, Harmon, in two days. For the first day, this had been more of a relief than anything else, because usually when she did see him, he was half-reclined on their broken- backed sofa in front of the TV set, drinking. From time to time he would go out and get a Mcjob, work at it for a few days, quit or get fired, and then come back home. Harmon never lasted very long at Mcjobs because he was an engineer, and flipping burgers or jerking Slurpees grated on his nerves, just as talking on the football phone grated on Eleanor's.

The neighborhood that Eleanor was driving through had been built on a perfectly flat high plains ranch in the early eighties. All of the houses were empty, and three-quarters of them always had been; as you drove down the curvy streets, you could look across yards that were reverting to short-gra.s.s prairie, in through the front windows of the houses, all the way through their empty interiors, out the back windows,across a couple of more yards, and through another similar house on another similar street.

Eleanor and Harmon Richmond had purchased their house brand new, before the carpet was even installed. It was early in the Reagan administration. Harmon worked for a medium-sized aeros.p.a.ce firm that sold avionics to the Defense Department. Eleanor had just finished raising their two children to school age and had reentered the workforce. She had started out as a teller for a bank in Aurora and been promoted to customer service representative in fairly short order. Soon she would be branch manager.

Eleanor's mother, a widow, had sold the ancestral town house in Washington, D.C., and moved out to a fairly nice retirement community a short distance away.

They were doing pretty well for themselves. So, when the houses around them remained empty, for a month, then six months, then a year, and the value of their house began to fall, they didn't get too worried about it. Everyone makes a b.u.m investment now and then. They were well compensated, the mortgage pay- ments weren't that bad, and they could easily cover their expenses, including the monthly payment to Mother's retirement community.

Times had actually been good for several years. They should have taken advantage of that to squirrel some money away. But the Richmonds were the only people in their respective families who had managed to make the breakthrough to the middle cla.s.s, which meant that each one of them had a coterie of siblings, nephews, nieces, and cousins living in various ghettos up and down the East Coast, all of whom felt they had a claim on what they all imagined was the family fortune. They wired a lot of money back East. It didn't come back.

They broke even until the early nineties, when Harmon's company got LBO'd, and the financiers in New York who had bought it began to break it up and sell off the little parts to various people. The particular part of it that Harmon worked for got sold to Gale Aeros.p.a.ce, a defense contractor based in Chicago. They gave him a choice: move to Chicago or move to Chicago. But they couldn't move to Chicago without selling their house, which now was worth half what they had paid for it. Harmon got fired.

They following year, the bank that Eleanor worked for was bought out by a huge California bank that already had millions of branches all over the area - including one that was directly across the street from the one where Eleanor worked. They closed her branch and she lost her job.

The foreclosure on their house had not been long in coming. They had bounced around from one big apartment complex to another for a few years and finally wound up in the trailer park in Commerce City, next to Doreen. They still had two cars, a 1981 Volvo wagon that they had bought used, and a rather old Datsun that did not work anymore and -was parked, permanently, in front of the trailer. Harmon had taken the Volvo with him when he disappeared, stranding Eleanor in the trailer.

She had sought him everywhere else. Now, just for the sake of being complete, she was back in the old neighborhood.

It was amazing how quickly you forgot the street patterns. It was almost as if the people who laid these things out wanted you to get lost. She drove for a quarter of an hour down the winding lanes, courts, and terraces, flipping U-turns in circles. The voice of the President of the United States continued to whinny from the radio. The words seemed almost devoid of meaning and the rhythm of the speech was constantly broken up by outbursts of applause and cheering. The pale, desiccated prairie gra.s.s, dusted with powdery snow, reflected the moonlight through the windows of the empty houses. Many of the streets had never been finished, the asphalt would simply terminate and become a hard-packed arroyo lined with uncompleted houses, their naked studs and unconnected plumbing lines projecting into the dry air like the rib cages of dead animals.

Finally she saw some landmarks that reminded her of where she was, and her old reflexes took over, guiding her automatically through the twists and turns.

Their house sat up on a little rise at the end of a cul-de-sac, a lollipop-shaped street that broadened into a circle at the end. Their house was right at the top of the lollipop, looking down the length of the street and out over a nice view of the Rockies rising into the night sky with the lights of Denver lapping up against them.

The house shone tonight in the moonlight. The "White House." They had called it that partlybecause it was white, and partly because moving into it had made them feel like they white people.

It was meant ironically. Feeling like a white person had been one of Eleanor Richmond's big goals in life.

She had grown up in the heart of Washington, D.C., and had often gone for weeks at a time without seeing a single white face. People would come in from other parts of the country and complain about how the system was stacked against them; the cops and the judges and the juries were all white. But in D.C., the cops and judges and juries were all black. As were the teachers and the preachers and the nuns who had educated Eleanor. She had never gotten the sense that being black singled her out in any way. In some ways that had actually made it easier for her and Harmon to settle down in a predominantly white middle-cla.s.s area.

Still, moving into a white house in a suburban development in Colorado had made her feel like a pioneer on the edge of the wilderness. She had often longed to jump into the Volvo and drive back to D.C. It felt better if she joked about it, and so she called it the White House. And when her relatives from D.C.

came out to visit and b.u.m money off of them, she laughed and joked about the White House all the way from the airport, so that by the time they got there, and saw just how white it was, they were ready for it, and they didn't take her for some kind of traitor.

When she pulled into the old cul-de-sac, the White House was dead ahead, sitting up on its little hill, and it was all lit up from within. The only house within a mile that was lit up. Someone must have broken into it and turned all the power back on at the circuit panel.

Someone named Harmon.

Eleanor braked Doreen's little car to a halt, there in the handle of the little lollipop street, and sat for a couple of minutes, staring through the windshield, up the hill, at the White House full of light and good cheer.

The Volvo was not visible anywhere. But the light inside the garage was turned on. Once he'd gotten the power restored, he must have used it to open the garage door, and parked the Volvo inside, just like in the old days.

Eleanor was trying to make up her mind what she should do now. Because her husband had clearly gone crazy. Either that, or gotten so drunk that he might as well be crazy.

She was tired of having crazy relatives. Her mother had Alzheimer's. They had moved her to a much cheaper nursing home and might have to move her into the trailer any day now. She was basically crazy. Her kids were both teenagers, hence crazy by definition. Now her husband was crazy.

Eleanor Richmond was the only person in the whole family who was not crazy.

Not that she wasn't tempted.

Eventually she reasoned that, crazy or not, it wouldn't do her husband any good to wind up in jail. He might think, in his own crazy, drunk mind, that he still owned this house. But he didn't. The Resolution Trust Corporation owned it; they had taken it over from the defunct savings and loan that had foreclosed on it. Eventually the RTC would probably sell it to speculators who would come and strip out the usable wiring and carpets, or maybe just bulldoze the whole thing down to its floor slab and turn the neighborhood into a dirt-bike track or a toxic waste dump. Eleanor knew that this house was walking dead, a real estate zombie, and that it was going to be wasted. But that didn't change the fact that they didn't own it anymore and Harmon could go to jail for having broken into it.

Maybe going to jail would do Harmon some good. Shame him a little, snap him out of his depression.

But she kept saying that to herself every time something bad happened to them and it never worked; he just got more depressed and bitter. He didn't need any more shame.

She'd better go get him. Once again, Eleanor, the solid one, the noncrazy maternal figure, would bail everyone else out. Someday she would have to indulge herself and go crazy a little and let someone else bail her out. But she didn't know anyone who was up for the job.

The front door was unlocked. The house smelled funny. Maybe it had been shut up for too long, baking in the sun that poured in through the windows all day, peeling all kinds of fumes and chemicals out of the paint and the carpet and making the air stink. She left the door open."Harmon?" she said. Her voice echoed off every wall.

There was no answer. He was probably dead drunk in the living room.

But he was not in the living room. The only things there, the only sign that Harmon had been in the place at all, were a few tools dropped on the floor in one corner of the room, over by a little broom closet where they used to store the slide projector and the Monopoly game and the jigsaw puzzles.

The door to the broom closet was open, the tools spilled out on the floor next to it. A hammer and a crowbar. Eleanor would have known that they were Harmon's even if he had not carefully painted RICHMOND on the handle of each one, in her nail polish.

The thin strip of trim that ran around the door had been removed entirely and thrown on the floor, little nails poking up into the air. Uncovered drywall had been exposed where the piece of trim had covered it up, and Eleanor could see dents in it where Harmon had inserted the crowbar.

The door opening was lined with another piece of trim, a doorjamb with a little bra.s.s strike plate about halfway up where the latch of the door would catch. Harmon had tried to pry this jamb off.

Eleanor squatted down in the doorway and put her hand on the doorjamb. An uneven ladder of pencil and ball-point pen marks climbed up the wood. Each mark had a name and a date written next to it: Harmon Jr. - age 7, Clarice - age 4. And so on. They reached all the way up to nearly Eleanor's height; the last one was marked Harmon Jr. - age 12.

Harmon had tried to pry the jamb off and take it with him. But the wood was thin and cheap, and under the twisting force of his crowbar, it had split in half down the middle, half of it remaining nailed down to the door frame, the other half pulled halfway out, white unstained wood exposed where it had shattered.

She wondered how long Harmon had been sitting there on their broken-backed sofa in the trailer in Commerce City, his beer in his hand, meditating over this doorjamb, planning to come and take it away.

Had it been eating away at him ever since they had moved out?

Clarice's birthday was next week. Maybe he intended to give this to her as a birthday present. It had great sentimental value, and it was free.

"Harmon?" she said, again, and heard it echo again off the bare walls of the house. She went to check the bedrooms, but he wasn't in any of them.

The sound of music finally drew her to the garage. Faint, tinny music was coming out of the Volvo's stereo. It was barely audible through the mud room door. She went into the garage.

Harmon was sitting in the driver's seat of the Volvo, reclined all the way back. Once she got the door open, she recognized the music: Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. Harmon's favourite. Years ago, on their first trip to Colorado, they had parked on the summit of Pike's peak and listened to this tape, loud.

She walked quietly up the flank of the Volvo and looked in the driver's window. Harmon had leaned the seat all the way back and folded up his jacket to make a little pillow on the headrest. His eyes were closed and he wasn't moving.

The keys were in the ignition, in the ON position. The tank was empty. The engine was dead. The volume on the stereo was turned all the way up. The tape had been running for hours, possibly even days, auto- reversing itself back and forth, playing the symphony over and over again, running the battery down until hardly anything came out of the speakers.

Harmon was dead. He had been dead for quite some time.

Before she did anything else she reached inside the car and pounded the garage door opener clipped to the sun visor. The big door creaked open, letting in a rush of fresh clean air and opening up a clear glittering view of the suburbanized foothills.

It was a very sensible thing to do. Eleanor Richmond did it because she was not crazy, would not allow herself to be crazy, would not allow herself to succ.u.mb to the poison gas that her husband had used to kill himself. Her kids and her mother needed her and she could not indulge herself the way Harmon had.

She did not want to look at Harmon or touch his body and so she went and sat on the front steps of the White House for a while, letting tears run down her face and shatter her clear view of the lights of Denver.

She did not have any shoulder to rest her head on and so she scooted over to one end of the step and leanedagainst the white vinyl siding of the house, which gave a little under the weight of her head.

After a while, she walked back in through the open front door and went back into the living room. She picked up her husband's crowbar from where he had thrown it away. The floor was dented beneath it; he must have hurled it down there in a rage when the door jamb had shattered. From there he had probably gone straight to the Volvo.

Eleanor worked the point of the crowbar underneath the portion of the doorjamb that was still nailed down, and prying gently, a little at a time, moving the crowbar up and down its length, worked the jamb loose from the frame of the house. It held together okay and she knew that a little Elmer's glue would fix it right up. She would ask Doreen's boyfriend to nail it up to the wall of the trailer and then she would have Clarice and Harmon, Jr., stand against it and she would measure their height and mark their progress. They would roll their eyes and say it was stupid, but they would secretly love it.

Every few seconds, all the way through this, she remembered, with a shock, that her husband was dead.

She carried the doorjamb out and fed it in through the open window of Doreen's car. It still stuck out a little bit but it would be okay for the drive home. Living in Commerce City, watching Mexicans, she had learned that you could get away with letting just about anything hang out the windows of your car. She backed out of the driveway and turned around in the big circle and left White House beyond, driving aimlessly into the heart of her old neighborhood, looking for another house with lights in it, a house where they might have a working telephone.

PART 2.

The Ride.

5.

MARSHA WYZNIEWCZKI'S RELATIONSHIP WITH HER BOSS HAD NEVER been ceremonious. When he didn't answer for the third time, she got up from her desk, worked up a good head of steam accelerating across ten feet of office floor, and threw her full hundred and ten pounds against one of the two tall, narrow,Lincolnesque doors that separated her office from the Governor's.

A small old gray man was hunched over in the Governor's chair, in a pool of light in the dark office.

Marsha had to look at him for several seconds before she was completely sure that this man was William Anthony Cozzano, the tall st.u.r.dy hero who had entered the office a few hours ago, ruddy from his afternoon jog up around Lincoln's Tomb. He had somehow been transformed into this. A wraith from the VA Hospital.

A mother's reflex took over; she groped for the wall switch, lighting up the office. "w.i.l.l.y?" she said, addressing him this way for the first time ever. "w.i.l.l.y, are you all right?"

"Call," he said.

"Call whom?"

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it," he said, unable to remember a name. This was the first time she had ever heard him utter profanity when he knew that she was listening. "Call her."

"Call whom?"

"The three-alarm lamp scooter," he said.

Cozzano flapped his right arm, causing his whole body to bend perilously to that side, and pointed across the office at his wall of pictures. "Three-alarm lamp scooter."

Marsha couldn't tell which picture he was pointing at. Christina? The little Vietnamese girl? One of the bridesmaids? Or his daughter, Mary Catherine?

Mary Catherine was a doctor, three years out of medical school. She was a neurology resident at a big hospital in Chicago. The last time the Governor had gone to the city, he had visited her apartment and come back chuckling about one detail of her life: She spent so much time on call and slept so little that she had to have three alarm clocks by her bed.

"Mary Catherine?"

"Yes, G.o.dd.a.m.n it!"

Marsha went back to her little c.o.c.kpit, where she sat all day, irradiated on three sides by video screens.

Sliding a computer mouse around on the desktop, she located Mary Catherine Cozzano's name and slapped a b.u.t.ton. She heard the computer dialing the number, a quick tuneless series of notes, like the song of an exotic bird.

"South Sh.o.r.e Hospital switchboard, may I help you?"

Cozzano's voice broke in before Marsha could say anything; he had picked up his extension. "The budlecker! Make the budlecker go!" Then, infuriated at himself: "No, G.o.dd.a.m.n it!"

"Excuse me?" the operator said.

"Mary Catherine Cozzano. Pager 806," Marsha said.

"Dr. Cozzano is not on call at this time. Would you like to speak to the doctor who is?"

Marsha did not understand the following words were true until she spoke them: "This is a family emergency. A medical emergency."

Then she dialed 911 on another line.