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, and 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 thirdworldish 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 home-made 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 aluminium-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.