The dinner guests broke into spontaneous applause. Floyd Wayne Vishniak, standing two hundred miles away in a cornfield, who did not give a damn about black persons, got a lump in his throat.
The next day, after he had bought all of his newspapers and read them over a bottomless cup of coffee in a diner, he went to the public library and, with some assistance from a librarian, looked up the microfilms for the Des Moines Register during the fall of 1963. He searched back and forth, the photographed pages zooming across the screen of the microfilm reader, until he found the account of the Illini-Hawkeye game.
An hour later he was out on the road in his truck, headed south along the river, toward the town of Quincy.
After he returned from his night detasseling shift, he sat down at his kitchen table with a beer and a fresh white piece of paper and relayed the results of his research activities to the one man who could make the best use of the information.
Floyd Wayne Vishniak
R.R. 6 Box 895
Davenport, Iowa
Aaron Green
Ogle Data Research
Pentagon Towers
Arlington, Virginia
Dear Mr. Green:
Yesterday night your friend and mine Governor Cozzano told a very interesting dinnertime story about the 1963 Illini-Hawkeye football game and one Lucullus Campbell. This story put a lump in my throat and so I went down to the public library to read more about it, as they often encourage us to do at the end of important TV shows.
Imagine my surprise to discover that the young William A. Cozzano did not even participate in the 1963 game because he was suffering from the stomach flu. He did not even set foot in Iowa City on that day.
Perhaps he just got the year wrong. Well, I checked 1962, ’61, and ’60 also. In ’60 and ’62, the game was held in Champaign. In ’61, it was held in Iowa City. Cozzano was there all right, but according to the Des Moines Register, the starting quarterback played the whole game.
Perhaps it happened in Champaign? Well, in ’60, the starting quarterback for the Hawkeyes got hurt and the second-string quarterback played very well for the entire game. And in ’63, the starting quarterback played the entire game.
There was no Lucullus Campbell playing for Iowa ever.
I took a little drive down to Quincy and found out that there was a Lucullus Campbell who played for their high school and who was on the 1959 Illinois All-Star team. That was the same year Cozzano was an All-Star. He was a halfback. He never played college ball because he got killed in a car crash on the night of his graduation from high school.
So a person might think that William A. Cozzano is making up lies. That he is a dishonest politician like all the others.
But I do not agree with this idea because I believe in Cozzano and I could see the strong emotion on his face when he told that story. No doubt, he believed in the sincerity of his own words.
Then how to explain it? Is Cozzano crazy?
No, I do not think so. But it is a well-known fact that Cozzano had a stroke earlier this year and that his Jew lawyer covered it up and secretly ran the state of Illinois for some time.
Then Cozzano went and had him a special high-tech operation and got better. OR SO THEY SAY. But maybe things aren’t completely fixed inside of his head. Maybe his brain’s memory banks have been scrambled. Maybe that new chip or whatever that they used to fix up his brain is actually playing tricks with his memory!
I trust that you will provide this info to Governor Cozzano as soon as possible so that he can take steps to have the problem fixed before he becomes President and begins to run the entire country with his faulty brain. This is a matter of total importance.
I cannot sleep anymore.
You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.
Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak
forty-four
CHASE MERRIAM, the High-Metabolism World Dominator and squire of Briarcliff Manor, New York, actually knew some people who seriously thought that the way to beat the crime problem in New York was to drive a junky old car. Most of these misguided people were rather young—kids who had come up in the eighties and had a lot of cleverness but no real intelligence, when it came to money. At a certain point along their sharply rising income curves, they had all gone out and bought BMWs or the equivalent. Not top-of-the-line BMWs, but mediocre ones. Sports sedans. And, inevitably, within a couple of weeks, someone smashed out a window, the alarm went off, they had to get up in the middle of the night, sweep up the glass, call the insurance company—the whole ritual.
Then they pontificated. It was easy enough to understand the psychology of it: all of these people were still young enough to think that life was terribly meaningful, that every little event had some role to play in the tightly written plotline of the universe. You were supposed to learn from these things. Smash went the window, whoop-whoop-whoop went the car alarm, and then the yuppie came out of his brownstone, put his chin in his hand, and thought deep thoughts. The conclusion they always came to was that, by buying a nice car, they had somehow offended God with their dirty materialism, and now they were being punished. As if the dumpster colonists who roamed the streets at three A.M., punching out windows and scooping up people’s tollbooth change to buy crack, were righteous angels dispatched by an avenging God.
Chase Merriam drove a Mercedes-Benz the size of an aircraft carrier and he made no apologies for it. It had a built-in alarm system, but he had no idea how to work it. He never used it. In fact, he never even bothered to take the keys from the ignition or lock the doors, because he never parked it more than fifty feet away from a good man with a gun. His parking space in Manhattan cost more than a three-bedroom split-level in the upper Midwest and was probably a better investment.
A really, really expensive car emitted a powerful psychological force field of its own. Smashing out the driver’s-side window of a BMW 535i was a routine and insignificant New York gesture, on the level of vaulting a turnstile. Chase Merriam himself was often tempted to give it a try, to wrap his jacket around his hand and poke it through the glass just to see the little blue diamonds spray. But people were still awed by a big Mercedes sedan, Rolls-Royce, or Ferrari. They respected these things intuitively. Maybe they harbored just a bit of fear, deep inside their hearts, that such cars were owned by Mob bosses or Colombian drug lords. But Chase Merriam liked to think that it wasn’t just the fear of retribution. He liked to think that deep inside their battered, blackened hearts, people still harbored a respect for Quality.
Merriam had seen the Mercedes-Benz side-impact simulator in action on the promotional videotape that the Mercedes dealership had given to him. It was a naked automobile chassis with a huge block of concrete projecting out the front end, painted with dangerous black-and-yellow diagonal stripes. Like a rifle bullet, exploding balloon, or hummingbird’s wings, it was a thing never seen by the naked eye; it was visible only in high-speed movie films, drifting in from the side with ghostly clarity, utterly silent, seeming to move only at a snail’s pace. But when it drifted into the side of the big Mercedes-Benz sedan, like a cloud scudding across the summer sky, the side of the car caved in and the head of the dummy snapped sideways and you realized, for the first time, just how fast that black-and-yellow juggernaut was moving.
Those side impacts could be vicious. It didn’t take many viewings of the side-impact videotape to figure that out. The side of your head always whacked into something. And that’s where all of the good stuff was. The front of your head held your personality, and if the rim of the steering wheel happened to punch through it at sixty miles per hour, the worst you could expect was maybe a divorce and then you had to throw out your ties and buy new ones. Big deal. A personality change, after all these years of having the same old one, would be kind of interesting. But the side of your brain held all the good stuff. That’s where you did your thinking. The left side, which was the one at risk during a side impact, contained your logical, rational, spatial capabilities, an
d if you got a hunk of imploding door frame jammed into that, you’d be out of a job. You would have to start taking pottery classes.
The Mercedes people were intelligent enough to realize this and so they had plowed their big black-and-yellow slab of concrete through a few million dollars’ worth of rolling stock, gone over the creepily silent high-speed films, and made a few changes. Which meant that the left hemisphere of Chase Merriam’s cerebral cortex was about as safe as it could ever be inside of a moving car.
These factors put together—the guarded parking space; his safe haven up in Westchester, where crime was still illegal; the mysterious psychological force field; and the high-speed films—all combined to give Chase Merriam a feeling of invulnerability. Which was a good thing, because he liked to work late, long past the dinner hour in his office in lower Manhattan. And he wouldn’t have been able to do that if he drove a Subaru and parked it on the street. He would have been too terrified to venture out after dark, he would have slept on the leather couch in his office and scurried out at daybreak to find that his Subaru was now a stripped frame.
He did some of his best work late at night. Which, in any given month, more than paid back the cost of the big car. The one drawback to working late was that, lately, his damn wristwatch kept interrupting him. But in a way, he didn’t mind all that much. He enjoyed keeping up with political events. This thing on his wrist only came to life once or twice a day, and it was always with something important. It was like having a personal assistant who did nothing but screen the political coverage for him, letting him know when to tune in.
Cozzano’s National Town Meeting was about halfway through its one-week life span when Chase Merriam worked rather late one night, watched the eleven o’clock news just long enough to get the baseball scores, and then headed down to the parking space where his Mercedes-Benz awaited, keys in the ignition, gleaming and polished under the brilliant homeboy-chasing lights in his private parking ramp. The guards washed and polished the car during the day. They didn’t have much else to do.
Chase Merriam thought that his car looked especially clean and nice tonight and so he slipped a few greenbacks to the guard as he opened the driver’s-side door for him. He sank into the ergonomic leather and twisted the key and the tachometer needle lifted off the pin and settled in at a comfortable idle. Short of getting down on your hands and knees behind the car and sticking your tongue into the tailpipe, this was the only way to tell that the engine was running. He was out on the West Side Highway, northbound, almost instantly.
The West Side Highway was not much of a highway at all until you got a little bit farther north and it became a proper limited-access affair with on-ramps and so on. At this hour it was always surprisingly free from traffic. The only people out tonight were a few nocturnal taxi drivers and one or two heavily burdened third-worldish vehicles, the lifeblood of the New Economy, out running errands.
Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center towered above the highway on concrete buttresses, like a hydroelectric project accidently constructed in the wrong place, appallingly large. Chase Merriam weaved through some complicated ramps and lanes under the George Washington Bridge, almost out of Manhattan now, and pulled up short behind a rickety, windowless gray-and-rust-colored van, bouncing along on bald tires and dead shocks, with a whole lot of shit piled on top of the roof. The driver was badly confused by all of those lanes, splitting and converging inexplicably under the distracting sight of the mighty bridge. Chase Merriam could have roared past him to one side or the other, but the driver of the van kept changing his mind as to which lane he should be in, making violent changes in his course, and each time he jerked the wheel toward this lane or that, his van, top-heavy with scrap metal, rocked dangerously on its overmatched suspension.
The gloom-slicing headlights of the Mercedes-Benz illuminated the rear bumper of the van, some kind of a homemade number welded together from diamond-tread steel plate. The owner, who was quite obviously in the scrap business, had manufactured the bumper himself. It was hardly less imposing than the black-and-yellow ram of the sideways impact simulator, and so Chase Merriam resolved to keep the gleaming perfection of his Mercedes far away from it.
The maker, upon finishing the structural part of the bumper, had turned his torch to decorative purposes. He had laid down a thick bead of molten iron on the back surface of the bumper, inscribing the following message on it in careening, heavy-metal cursive: SOLO DIOS SABE HACIA DONDE VOY.
Chase Merriam, who did not speak Spanish but who had developed a basic level of skill in Romance languages during his prep years, was mentally translating this phrase (ONLY GOD KNOWS something . . .) when a sleek aluminum-alloy wheel rim, freshly stripped from a hapless Acura Legend somewhere on the streets of the naked city, slid off the roof of the van, bounced once on the pavement, and plunged directly through his windshield, catching him in the forehead.
In the instant that the rim had taken its fateful bounce, glittering in his headlights like a meteor, the whole world had become a Mercedes-Benz crash-testing laboratory. Chase Merriam, of course, was the dummy. But he experienced it with the eerie clarity of the white-coated Teutonic engineers in the safety of their screening room, going over the silent videotapes. It all happened silently and very, very slowly, and when the car, at some point several minutes into the crash, slammed into some sort of a momentous object—he wasn’t sure exactly what, but he had the sense that he was a great distance from the roadway proper at this point, and that the car hadn’t been properly horizontal for a long, long time—he actually saw the air bag unfurl before him, fluttering like a white flag raised in a hurricane.
The car kept skidding and rolling and plowing through things for a long time, repeatedly changing direction, like the Magic Bullet meandering through Kennedy and Connally. Each little scrape and secondary impact probably did about five thousand dollars’ worth of damage. After a while, it almost got boring; he must be leaving a trail of torn-up sod and flattened road signs all the way to Yonkers. But eventually, he stopped. His inner ear still told him he was riding the Tilt-A-Whirl, but by now his left arm had flopped outward, through the place where the double-glazed window was supposed to be, and was resting limply on some kind of a surface—hard-packed, inorganic New York dirt—and that surface sure wasn’t moving.
So far he had not experienced even the smallest bit of physical pain, but something about the car just didn’t feel right. Because his eyes got smeary with blood and then swelled shut pretty quickly, he had to figure it out using other sensory inputs. But the upshot seemed to be that his Mercedes-Benz was upside-down now and he was hanging by the safety belt and the shoulder harness, his legs supported by the steering wheel, his knees poked uncomfortably by the turn-signal levers.
The phone was right there, he could find it by groping for it, he knew which button turned it on. Then all he had to do was dial 911. But he couldn’t see the number buttons. He punched one of the presets, the one that dialed his home number. He would tell Elizabeth to call the NYPD. But it was now past eleven thirty and Elizabeth had turned off the ringer on the phone and gone to bed; all he got was his own answering machine.
He considered dictating a last message to the world. Elizabeth would find the light blinking on the machine tomorrow and listen to it; she would call the NYPD and they would at last find him, dead from boredom. They would play the tape at his memorial service. It would be dry, calm, witty, noble, and brave.
But he could always call back later and do that. So he hung up to consider his options. All the other presets were business numbers. No one would answer them at this time of the night. Dialing 911 was harder than it sounded, because the phone had too many buttons and they all felt the same.
“You okay?” a voice said. A man’s voice.
“Hello?” Chase Merriam said.
“Shit, man, that was incredible,” the man said. “I can’t believe you alive. That is a bitchin’ car, man!”
He couldn’t seem to move h
is left arm, which was still dangling on the ground. He reached across his body with his right hand and stuck the phone out the window. “Would you please dial 911?”
“Sure,” the man said. Chase Merriam heard him shuffling the phone around in his hands, figuring out which way was up, then he heard the three electronic beeps.
“Hello, Officer,” the man said, “I would like to report a car crash in Fort Washington Park. Down by the river. This car jumped the guardrail on the highway and now it’s upside down. And I think you better get here real quick, because this dude is stuck inside the car, and this is a real bad area. It’s full of bad criminals, man, people who would cut this guy’s heart out for a dollar, and they are all gathering around the vehicle right now, like jackals around a wounded beast, waiting for the right moment to strike. Huh? No, I’m sorry, I won’t give you my name. Okay. Bye.”
“Thank you,” Chase Merriam said.
“No problem.”
“That business about the jackals—that wasn’t for real was it?”
“Shit, man, where do you think you are? Cape May?” the man said. “We are, like, just a couple blocks from the biggest homeless shelter in New York City. The only ones here are the people they wouldn’t let into the shelter because we’re too big and bad and scary.”
“Take whatever you want,” Chase Merriam said. “I don’t care.”
“Okay. We’ll begin with the watch,” the man said. He picked up Merriam’s arm, which instantly began to hurt, and after a little bit of fiddling around, figured out how to detach the watch. “What kind of watch is this, anyway? Looks like some cheap piece of digital shit.”
“It’s a long story.”
“Well, if a guy was going to look for your wallet—”
“Beats me,” Chase Merriam said. “I have to assume it fell out.”
The man reached in the window and patted Merriam down, finding no wallets in the usual places. “Does this thing have a dome light?” he asked.