Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  “Eleanor,” Ray del Valle said, “come on, let’s talk somewhere else. You don’t want to dwell on this.” Eleanor felt Ray’s arm tightening around her shoulders. He led her around the truck and into the backyard, gently but surely, like a ballroom dancer leading his date around the floor.

  She took the opportunity to rest her head on his chest for just a moment. She didn’t exactly cry, though tears were in her eyes.

  “It’s a hard thing for a parent to look at, isn’t it?” Ray said. “It’s our worst nightmare come to life. Like an image from the Holocaust.”

  Eleanor took a half step away from Ray and drew a few deep breaths. “Are the parents inside?” she said.

  “Yes. Anna has been sedated. Carlos is drinking a lot and vowing to kill himself. Anna’s family is trying to keep him on an even keel. It’s very difficult.”

  “I heard that there is a problem with the surviving child’s medical care and I am here to inform the Ramirez family that Senator Marshall is at their service in whatever capacity is needed. Do you think that you could go in and relay that message to them?”

  Ray snorted with just the tiniest hint of amusement and glanced down at his wristwatch. “The Senator runs a tight ship. As always.”

  Ray went into the house and came out a couple of minutes later with Anna’s sister Pilar. From a distance Pilar seemed utterly stonefaced, but from arm’s length her eyes were swollen and red and she looked stunned, rather than impassive.

  “I told her what you said,” Ray said. “She has authorized me to explain the child’s medical situation.”

  “Okay.”

  “When they arrived this morning and found their four children unresponsive, they called the ambulance. Three children were pronounced dead at the scene. The fourth, the eight-year-old girl Bianca, still had a pulse. The ambulance took her straight to Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center.”

  “Why there?” Highlands was a private hospital, well endowed, certainly not the closest to this bungalow. Not the kind of place where migrant workers ended up.

  “Carbon monoxide poisoning was obviously the culprit here. And Highlands has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. It is the best treatment. So that’s where they went. The emergency room staff at Highlands treated Bianca but they refused to admit her for hyperbaric oxygen treatment. Instead they dumped her back to Denver County, where she is now.”

  “How can they justify that?”

  Ray just shrugged. “As we say in the Third World, Quién sabe?”

  Something clicked in the back of Eleanor’s head. Maybe it was her temper breaking. She squared her shoulders and flared her nostrils. “Would you please come with me, Ray?” she said.

  “Okay. Where we going?”

  Eleanor realized that she didn’t even know. “We’re just going to take care of a few things, that’s all.”

  The two of them got into Eleanor’s car and headed in the direction of Denver County Hospital, were Ray knew some doctors.

  “This happens hundreds of times every year,” Ray said. “All over North America.”

  “What happens?”

  “Exactly this situation. Remember what a migrant worker is: someone who migrates. These people cover a lot of territory and the vehicle of choice is a pickup truck. It’s always the same: the parents sit up front in the cab and the kids lie down in the back and try to sleep. The exhaust comes up through holes in the floor, or else it leaks through the crack under the tailgate. In warm weather they open the windows and survive. But if it’s chilly, like it was last night, they close the cab up and suffocate.”

  “You’d think that they would have gotten some indication before. That their kids would have gotten headaches or felt woozy.”

  Ray snorted. “If you drove for eight or ten hours in the back of a truck, you’d feel that way even without carbon monoxide.”

  At the county hospital, Ray tracked down Dr. Escobedo, a young internist who was looking after Bianca. They all sat around a table in the corner of the cafeteria.

  “Should Bianca be here, or at Arapahoe Highlands?” Eleanor said.

  “At Highlands,” Dr. Escobedo said without hesitation, and without rancour.

  “Why?”

  “They have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.”

  “And that is the standard treatment for this kind of thing?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “Well, for example, there are a lot of migrant workers up in Washington State, and this kind of thing has happened up there on a fairly regular basis. Now, there is a hospital in Seattle that has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, which is basically used to decompress divers with the bends. When you put a patient with carbon monoxide poisoning into such a chamber, it helps get oxygen into their tissues, which is what such a patient needs. So people up there have learned that when an unconscious kid is pulled out of the back of a pickup truck, you send them straight to the one hospital with the hyperbaric chamber. But this is kind of a new practice, and in the eyes of some, it’s experimental.”

  “And that’s what the people at Highlands think.”

  “Exactly. If this treatment were standard medical practice, they’d have no excuse not to admit Bianca. But because they can label it experimental, there’s no way they’ll admit her. Because they know they’ll lose money.”

  “Why does Denver have a chamber like this?” Ray said. “We don’t have many scuba divers around here.”

  “It’s used for diabetics and other people with poor circulation,” Escobedo said. “So it’s popular in areas with a large middle-aged and elderly population that’s well insured. It’s an expensive treatment with a high profit margin for the hospital. Which is why they don’t want to tie up the chamber with a charity case.”

  “Okay, I get the picture,” Eleanor said. “Now, who is in charge of Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center?”

  “The chief administrator is Dr. Morgan,” Escobedo said.

  Eleanor stood up and yanked her jacket off the back of the chair. “Let’s go kick his white ass,” she said.

  Ray and Escobedo looked astonished and glanced at each other, a bit nervously. “You might want to call ahead and find out where he is first,” Ray suggested.

  “I’m sure that an important man like Dr. Morgan has a secretary who is very good at putting people like me off - over the phone,” Eleanor said. “The more I get in that secretary’s face, the more helpful she’ll be.”

  “This may not be an appropriate time for me to get political,” Ray said, after they had been driving in silence for a few minutes, humming down Broadway toward the rolling, prosperous southern suburbs. “But this is going to be a long drive and I can’t help myself.”

  “Shoot,” Eleanor said. ” It would be unlike you not to get political.”

  “Okay. Well, there is one question you have forgotten to ask me about this whole affair.”

  “What question is that?”

  “Why did the Ramirezes suddenly jump into their truck and take a six-hour drive across the prairie in the middle of the night?”

  Eleanor thought that one over, feeling slightly embarrassed. “I thought you said this was what migrant workers do. They migrate.”

  “They’re human beings,” Ray said.

  “I know that,” Eleanor said, somewhat testily. Ray had a tendency to be a little too obnoxious in his political correctness.

  “So they have to sleep. They generally do it at night. And they drive during the daytime, like everyone else.”

  “Okay. So tell me, Ray, why did the Ramirezes suddenly get it into their heads to jump into their truck and go on a long night drive?”

  “Because a couple of months ago, after the State of Union address, there was a stock market crash.”

  Eleanor looked over at Ray. He was smiling back at her mysteriously.

  “I’ll bite,” she said.

  “The capital markets crashed. People sold their stoc
ks and needed somewhere else to put their money. In times of economic uncertainty, people tend to invest in commodities. So, on the Chicago Board of Trade, the price of beef went up. Raising cattle became a money-making proposition. But it takes time to raise cattle, you don’t make a full-grown steer overnight. So cattlemen in this state began to raise a larger number of calves than usual.

  “In the expectation that they’d be able to make more money off them when they were full-grown,” Eleanor said. She did not know the first thing about ranching but this concept seemed simple enough.

  “Right. Well, by now, these calves are starting to get big and starting to need more food - you know how growing children are. In this part of the country, cattle graze - they eat grass out on the range. Much of the range land is owned by the federal Government, and cattlemen are allowed to graze their cattle on that land.

  “There is a nice patch of BLM land that I know about six hours from here. It’s in the basin of the Arkansas River, so it always has plenty of green grass, but unlike a lot of the other land around there it hasn’t been converted to truck farming yet.”

  “Truck farming… that means vegetables and so on?”

  “There’s a lot of that stuff down there along the Arkansas,” Ray said. “Migrants work there, picking vegetables for shipment to Oklahoma and Texas.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “Last year, when the price of beef was low, no one wanted to use this land and so a number of migrant workers - including the Ramirezes - went there and parked their trucks and trailers on it and started living there. Set up a little community. Planted some little gardens and so on. Waiting for the next harvest to come in.”

  “But last week, a cattleman in that area found that he was running out of land on which to graze all of these calves that he started when the price of beef got high. And now, in place of the community of migrant workers that used to be on that land, this man’s cattle are there, eating the lush green grass.”

  “You’re saying that the Ramirezes were kicked off the land.”

  “They and all the other people living there were evicted yesterday,” Ray said. “The closest place for the Ramirez family to stay was Anna’s sister’s house, here in Denver. So they put the kids in the back of the truck and came here.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hundreds of people are on the road today, all over the High Plains, because some cattle got hungry,” Ray said. “And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were several more cases of carbon monoxide poisoning in the backs of pickup trucks that we haven’t heard about yet.”

  “If I am a cattleman,” Eleanor said, “and I want to use a piece of BLM land, and some migrant workers happen to be living on it, then what is the mechanism? How do I make those workers go away? Call the cops?”

  “No you don’t call the cops. There are a number of approaches one could take,” Ray said, “but if I had the right connections, my first choice would be to make a phone call to the Alamo.”

  Eleanor thought this one over for a minute.

  “Ray, if nothing else, you just guaranteed Bianca Ramirez a spot in the hyperbaric chamber,” she said.

  Eleanor was right. Dr. Morgan did have a very capable secretary.

  She could tell just by looking at the woman that she knew her business.

  “Good morning, my name is Eleanor Richmond and I just got off the phone from talking to my boss, Senator Marshall,” she lied, “and based on the results of that conversation I think I can promise you that the single most important thing that your boss Dr. Morgan will do this whole month, possibly this whole year, will be to have a conversation with me right now.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Ray and Dr. Escobedo grinning at each other. This was like a carnival ride for them.

  Dr. Morgan’s secretary was cheerful enough about it. If she was pissed off, she was good enough not to show it in front of Eleanor. She reached Dr. Morgan on his car phone; he was on his way in.

  Within fifteen minutes, Dr. Morgan, Eleanor, Ray and Dr. Escobedo were all sitting around a table in Morgan’s office. They made small talk about what kind of additives they wanted in their coffee and what a nice day it was. Then things got quiet, and Eleanor found that everyone was looking at her expectantly. She folded her hands in her lap and composed herself for a moment.

  “I’m not very good at this sort of thing,” she said, “so maybe the best way for me to proceed is just to come out and say something.”

  “Shoot,” Dr. Morgan said.

  “This is an exercise in raw political brute force. You will give Bianca Ramirez treatment in the hyperbaric oxygen chamber or else the Senator, I’m sure, will make it his mission in life to turn this medical centre into a smoking hole in the ground.”

  “Consider it done,” Dr. Morgan said cheerfully. “Dr. Escobedo, you’ll make the arrangements to send Bianca over?”

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent,” Dr. Morgan said. He seemed pleased and cheerful, as if he woke up every morning of his life and got slapped around by a U.S. Senator. “Now, is there anything else on the agenda?”

  “God,” Eleanor said, an hour later, over breakfast with Ray, “I really overdid it. I’m so embarrassed.”

  Ray shrugged. Significantly, he didn’t try to disagree with her. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You got what we wanted.”

  After she had dropped Escobedo off at the county hospital; it had come to their attention that neither one of them had had any breakfast. So now they were at a little family place not far from the Alamo. Eleanor was having huevos rancheros. Ray was licking his lips over a huge steaming bowl of tripe.

  “I tend to forget how powerful a senator is,” Eleanor said. “I probably could have just made a phone call and gotten the same result. Instead I came in like Rambo. Used a flame thrower where I could have flicked a Bic.”

  “Hey, if nothing else it was great theatre,” Ray said. “That’s your genius, you know.”

  “Huh?”

  Ray was studying her face interestedly. “You don’t know, do you?” he said. “You just do it on instinct.”

  “Do what on instinct?”

  Ray shook his head flirtatiously. “I don’t want to make you self-conscious and ruin it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I really admire what you did to Earl Strong, you know,” he said, changing the subject none too subtly.

  “Yeah, you tell me that every time we see each other.”

  “Now what we need to do is get that flame thrower aimed at the right target.”

  “Aha,” she said. “The hidden agenda comes out.”

  “I told you I was paying for breakfast. What did you think?”

  “And an excellent breakfast it is,” she mumbled, chewing her first mouthful. They ate in silence for a minute. Both of them were ravenous. Emotion burns calories.

  “I talked to Jane Osborne,” Ray said. “I was all ready to be pissed at her, but she’s nice.”

  “Here’s the part where I ask who Jane Osbourne is.”

  “She’s a forest ranger out in La Junta.”

  “A forest ranger? In the prairie?”

  “Funny, that’s exactly what she said when she was assigned there,” Ray said. “She likes forests. She went into the Forest Service hoping she would end up in one.”

  “Logical enough.”

  “She didn’t count on the fact that the Forest Service owns a lot of grassland. Including the piece of land where the Ramirez family was living until yesterday. And they need people to look after that land. These people are called forest rangers. They wear Smokey Bear hats and everything. So Jane Osbourne is stuck out there, not a single tree, much less a forest, for a hundred miles, in this shitty, dead-end GS-12 position, driving around in a pickup truck chasing dirt bikers and replacing signs that have been shotgun-blasted by the local intellectuals.”

  “Must be disappointing.”

  “Yeah. But it’s not as bad as what c
omes next.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “She’s about ready to turn in for the evening when she gets a call from On High and she is ordered to personally evict about a hundred migrant workers from this patch of grazing land.”

  “How does a single woman do that?”

  “She called in a few other rangers and brought in some federal marshals too, as a show of force.”

  “Who gave the order?”

  “Her boss. Who got it from Denver. And they got it from Washington. I’m sure.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Eleanor said, “but I’m sure that this wasn’t the only patch of federal land in Colorado that was housing squatters.”

  Ray smiled. “You got that right.”

  “Have any other such communities been evicted?”

  Ray shook his head.

  “Just this one,” Eleanor said.

  “Just this one.”

  “So this wasn’t a blanket order from Washington. It was targeted at this one piece of land.”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  “And why,” Eleanor said, “do you suppose that some bureaucrat in D.C. would suddenly take an interest in this one parcel?”

  Ray shrugged. “I can only speculate.”

  “Please do.”

  “This bureaucrat probably went to law school with one of Senator Marshall’s aides. Or was his college roommate. Or their kids go to the same day care. Something like that.”

  Eleanor waggled a finger at Ray. “There you go making assumptions. How do you know there’s a connection to Caleb Roosevelt Marshall?”

  “The piece of land in question adjoins the Lazy Z Ranch,” Ray said, “and the cattle grazing on it now all wear the Lazy Z brand.”

  “Say no more.” Eleanor said. “You win.”

  The Lazy Z ranch was owned by Sam Wyatt. Sam Wyatt was Caleb Roosevelt Marshall’s biggest private contributor. And the president of Senator Marshall’s PAC. Sam Wyatt was one of a dozen or so constituents who could get through to the Senator on the phone whenever he wanted to.