Interface

A picture of his father on a fishing trip in Alaska, shortly before his fatal heart attack.

A photo of Cozzano in his Chicago Bears uniform, sitting on his helmet to keep up and out of a sideline morass, black grease on his cheekbones, blood hardening on his knuckles, grass stains on his shoulder pads.

Pro Bowl rings from a couple of different years in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

The last formal portrait of Christina, shot just before she had been transfigured by radiation and chemotherapy; this one also said "olan mills" and had been shot in a slightly nicer motel room in Champaign-Urbana by the same photographer who had done Cozzano's parents in 1948.

A photo of William giving a victory speech on the front lawn of the family house in Tuscola, flanked by Mary Catherine and James. Autographed photo of William with George Bush at The Peking Gourmet Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, a harshly flash-lit amateur snapshot, Cozzano and Bush eating Peking duck in shirtsleeves and yukking it up.

Cozzano jogging around Camp David with Bill and Hilary Clinton.

An invitation to a White House di

The dome of the Illinois State capitol was built on foundations of solid stone seventeen feet thick. Cozzano needed to keep all of this stuff in his line of sight while he worked, because these pictures and souvenirs were his foundations.

Cozzano was reading a letter that he was supposed to sign. He knew that he should simply do it, but his father had told him that he should always read things before he signed them. Since a large part of Cozzano's job involved signing things, this meant that he often worked late. He was holding his big pen in his left fist, nervously popping its cap on and off with the ball of his thumb.

The intercom made a gentle popping noise as Marsha, his secretary, turned on her microphone in the next room. Cozzano startled a little. Marsha had a talent for finding things to do, and when Cozzano stayed late she often hung around for a few hours and did them. Her voice came out of the speaker: "The State of the Union speech is about to begin, Governor."

"Thank you," Cozzano said, and shut off the intercom. "I guess," he added, to himself.

Cozzano reached for the remote control and turned it on to C-SPAN - he could not abide the network anchors - just in time to see the cameras pan over the ritualistic standing ovation given every president, no matter how incompetent. Continuing to thumb buttons on the remote, he caused a little window to open up in the corner of the screen, ru

The egregious hypocrisy of the scene disgusted him. How could those assholes cheer the person who was leading - wrong, failing to lead - the country into disaster?

Eventually the applause died down, and the Speaker of the House reintroduced the president. There was a second obligatory standing ovation. Cozzano scoffed, shook his head, rubbed his temples with the palms of both hands. He couldn't take it. The cameras swept the section where the president's wife and family sat, smiling bravely. The president pathetically waved his arms to quiet the ovation, and then began his speech.

A year from tonight, I hope to stand on the West Front of this great building and begin my second term as your President.

(cheers and applause, mostly from one side of the hall)

He proceeded to do some ritual complaining about the usual topics: the budget deficit and the national debt. Just as predictably, he blamed it on the usual suspects: gridlock in Congress, the growth of entitlements, the insurmountable power of PACs, and, of course, the need to pay interest on the national debt, which had grown to something like ten trillion dollars. The only mildly interesting news coming out of the speech so far was that he intended to adopt a Rose Garden strategy during the coming election year, staying at the White House and doing battle with the two-headed monster of the deficit and the debt. This was the only responsible thing he could have done; but Congress applauded him deliriously.

It was all so completely predictable, so politics-as-usual, that Cozzano was lulled into a near coma, trapped between boredom and disgust. Which made it all the more shocking when the bombshell hit.

We must either cut entitlements - the payments made to our senior citizens on Social Security, and sick people on Medicare and Medicaid - or we must cut the interest that is paid to the national debt. Now, granted, we borrowed that money. We must pay it back if we can. And we most certainly will make our best effort to pay it back. But not at the expense of the sick and the old.

(applause and cheers)

Our debt is the result of our own sinful irresponsibility in fiscal matters, and we must accept the consequences of those sins.

But I am reminded of the words of the great Russian religious figure Rasputin, who once said, in a similar time of economic troubles, "Great sins demand great forgiveness."

(applause)

Let us not forget that we owe this money to ourselves. Surely we can find it in our hearts to repent from our economic foolishness and to forgive ourselves for the mistakes that were made by ourselves and by our predecessors.

(applause)

This nation was founded upon a great social contract. A contract in which people banded together to form governments in the defense of life, liberty, and property. This noble experiment has lasted for more than two centuries. Written into the contract by our founding father Jefferson was the assertion that if government violates the contract, the people have the right to overthrow it. This is the basis of the glorious revolutionary tradition that serves as a shining light of inspiration for the entire world.

(applause, cheers)

Tonight, in the spirit of Jefferson, I call for a new social contract. I am proposing to the Congress, and to the American people, the Declaration of Fiscal Independence.

(applause)

In short, my fellow Americans, I propose as a first step to place a cap on the percentage of our budget that can go toward paying interest on the national debt. The exact level of this cap, and the details of its implementation, are subject to discussion and agreement between my staff and Congress -and I'm sure that we can look forward to many lively discussion on the issue.

(laughter)

But regardless of the details, the message is the same. Great sins demand great forgiveness. Let us now forgive ourselves, so that we may go forth into the brave new world of the third mille

(thunderous applause and cheers)

Let the message go forth to the world that the country of the third mille

(ten-minute standing ovation)

It was an outrage, pure and simple.

Having failed over his entire term in office to do anything about the budget deficit, the President was now going to patch it up by allowing America to weasel out of its financial obligations.

Which was bad enough in and of itself; but he was also trying to portray this measure as an act of Lincolnian fortitude on his part.

Cozzano felt an atavistic desire to fly to Washington, climb up on that podium, and slap the President across the face. It was the same brute, animalistic impulse that came into his head when he imagined someone hurting his daughter. His heart thumped powerfully a few times. He realized that he was being primitive and stupid, and tried to calm himself down. There was no point in thinking these things.

Still Cozzano did not sign the letter on his desk - a thank-you note to the Prime Minister of Japan for his hospitality during Cozzano's visit last week. His powerful fingers gripped the smooth inlaid barrel of the pen. The rhodium alloy nib, charged with just the correct amount of French ink, was poised a few millimeters above the grainy surface of the buttery cotton-fiber stationery that Cozzano used for personal correspondence. But when Cozzano moved the pen - that is, when he did the thing in his mind that, ever since he had been inside his mother's womb, had caused his fingers and his hand to move - nothing happened. His eyes tracked