Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  But in this case, he probably hadn’t. This was too much of a dirty detail for the Senator to mess around with personally. He had probably just called one of the Senator’s aides. He had probably called Shad Harper, that underaged son of a bitch who had the office across the hallway from Eleanor’s.

  Ray was watching her in fascination. “You have this look on your face like you’re plotting an assassination,” he joked.

  “Something like that,” she said.

  30

  When little Bianca Ramirez was finally released from Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre after one week of hyperbaric oxygen treatment, a dozen television crews, four satellite uplink trucks, one Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, thirty print reporters, a hundred supportive protesters, the Mayor of Denver, staffers from all of the local senators’ and representatives’ offices, and a few lean and hungry lawyers were waiting for her. The only question was whether or not her parents, Carlos and Anna Ramirez, would actually show up to collect her.

  Her progress from nameless refugee to media star could be tracked by checking the headlines on a local newspaper, which had been sliding in the direction of out-and-out tabloid journalism for a number of years, and which had been driven completely beyond the pale by the Bianca Ramirez story.

  “TRUCK OF DEATH”

  had been the first headline concerning the Ramirez family. Slightly less hysterical coverage of the tragedy had actually made it on to a couple of national network newscasts, which was unusual to say the least; plenty of Chicano kids had suffocated in the backs of trucks without even being mentioned in the local newspapers. But this time around, several national Hispanic organisations got into the act and managed to stir up some interest on a national level. The case of the Ramirez family was a good one for TV. The truck of death per se was sitting in a driveway in Denver and anyone could go and videotape it. There had been one survivor, who happened to be an adorable little girl, and although this didn’t get reported right away, there was, as the saying goes, more to the story: a failure of responsibility by a major, rich, private hospital, and hints of potential scandal involving one Sam Wyatt, wealthy cattleman, golf partner of senators and CEOs.

  “LET HER DIE!”

  was the headline on Day 2. The story about Highlands’ refusal to treat Bianca had been leaked to the press by Ray del Valle. Leaked was a deceptive term. A leak was a tiny seeping crevice. In this case, blowout might have been more accurate. Ray made sure everyone with a minicam, laptop, pen, or pencil knew about the story. More sober journalists just viewed it as another example of “dumping,” the refusal of some hospitals to treat indigent patients. If they knew their business at all, it was an issue that they had already covered. Much more melodramatic examples of it happened in other cities.

  “HANG ON BIANCA!”

  was the headline for Day 3. This was somewhat meaningless. Day 3 was a Sunday and not much was going on. And Bianca’s ability to hang on had never really been in question. The fact that she was still breathing when she was pulled from the Truck of Death, and when the ambulance crew had taken her to Highlands, where they had been told Let Her Die, meant that the parts of her brain that controlled breathing and heartbeat still worked. She was, in other words, stable, albeit in a coma. There was nothing to hang on to. But it made for a great headline, and it gave the tabloid (and the television journalists who functioned at the same journalistic level) a bit of breathing room. For a couple of days they had been accumulating a great mass of basically irrelevant human-interest material: pictures of the big-eyed Bianca, testimonials from family and playmates, descriptions of her favourite foods and toys. Sunday gave them a chance to unload all of that stuff on the public. If nothing else, Sunday was the day that Bianca became an official public figure, someone who could be referred to by her first name in a tabloid or on a TV broadcast, like Madonna or Di. As such, she represented a money factory for the tabloid; for at least the next couple of weeks, whenever they needed to goose their circulation figures they just printed any headline containing the name Bianca.

  But Sunday was not a day of rest for everyone. A bleary-eyed Ray del Valle led a caravan of half a dozen journalist-laden vehicles on a drive across the prairie, headed for the patch of Forest Service grazing land where the Ramirez children had played their last game of soccer. The reason that Ray was bleary-eyed, even though the caravan departed at the civilized hour often a.m., was that he had spent the entire night driving from Denver to the site and back. On his drive out to the site, his car had been full of used toys and house-wares, which he had purchased for a few dollars at Goodwill. On his drive back to Denver, the car had been empty.

  When the caravan of journalists arrived at the site in mid-afternoon they were treated to the blindingly photogenic sight of cattle grazing over the remains of a hastily evacuated migrant settle­ment. Remains of human tragedy were strewn everywhere: Raggedy Andy dolls, overturned cooking pots, baby clothes, a battered, well-loved Malibu Barbie or two.

  None of it had been there the day before; the migrant workers had had plenty of time to pick up their things before they’d evacuated the site, and were not so wasteful as to leave perfectly good pots and toys strewn around. But it looked great, especially when the handsome, ponytailed Ray del Valle squatted down in the grass to ponder an abandoned soccer ball as fat cattle emblazoned with the Lazy Z brand grazed contentedly nearby. So it was no big surprise when a photograph along those lines took up most of the front page of the next morning’s tabloid, accompanied by the headline:

  “WYATT: ‘THROW ‘EM OUT!’”

  It would be an understatement to say that Sam Wyatt, his very close friends in Senator Marshall’s offices, and most of the Denver medical establishment were, so far, not amused by the way the Ramirez situation had been covered in the media. And although Ray del Valle had begun the new week with a crushing sucker punch, afterward it became the Week of the Backlash. The “THROW ‘EM OUT!” headline had been on the newsstands for less than six hours when two cars full of INS agents pulled up in front of the home of Pilar de la Cruz, nee Ramirez, and came to the door with the intention of arresting Carlos and Anna Ramirez, who both happened to be illegal aliens. If these agents had been reading their tabloids, they would not even have stopped; they would have known that Carlos and Anna were not there by the fact that the TRUCK OF DEATH was not parked in the driveway. But they made the mistake of going to the door anyway. Pilar, alerted to the fact that Immigration was after her sister and brother-in-law, telephoned Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre, where they were visiting Bianca, and warned them. They cut their visit short, jumped into the Truck of Death, and vanished from the face of the earth.

  “MOMMY HAS TO GO, BIANCA!”

  graced the newsstands the next morning, accompanied by a photo of the tearful Anna bidding farewell to her daughter, who was bottled up inside the giant pressurized chamber where she had been receiving her treatment. A photographer had been present in the room when Anna and Carlos received the warning from Pilar and had snapped pictures of them bidding a hasty farewell.

  None of which made the Powers That Be look especially good to the public. Which is why social workers from Health and Human services started paying very close attention to Bianca at the same time, and a motion was filed in court for the state of Colorado to become Bianca’s legal guardian. The gist of this legal document was that Carlos and Anna Ramirez, by driving their kids around in a truck full of lethal gases and killing three of them, had clearly demonstrated their unfitness as parents and should not be allowed to take care of Bianca anymore. The district attorney let it be known that his staff was actually investigating the possibility of filing charges against the Ramirezes and that, with every fibre of his being, he was refraining himself from issuing an arrest warrant for Carlos and Anna. It was all well and good to put public service announcements on TV begging people not to drive their kids around in the back of pickup trucks, but what would really put a stop to this sort of thing was pun
itive legal action against parents who did it. So the headline for Wednesday morning was

  “STATE: BIANCA IS OURS!”

  But all of this legal squalor was obscuring an interesting medical story. When Bianca arrived in the hyperbaric chamber she had been in a deep coma and totally unresponsive. But in the photo accompanying the “BIANCA IS OURS” story, a state social worker stood outside the hyperbaric chamber, smiling and waving through its thick pressure-proof window at the unseen Bianca inside. And there wasn’t much point smiling and waving to a vegetable. It seemed that Bianca had staged a miraculous recovery. She was far from being back to normal, but she was awake, alert, responsive to verbal communication, and mumbling a few words.

  This gave Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre’s new PR Director the ammunition he needed to thunder into the media fray. His predecessor and former boss had been sacked with astonishing dispatch as soon as “LET HER DIE!” had hit the streets. The new man had spent the first few days just trying to get on his feet. By the time Wednesday rolled around, he was ready. He brought in a select troop of journalists to videotape and photograph Bianca through the window of the chamber; she obliged by smiling and waving to them. Since she had all but been written off as a vegetable a few days earlier, this was certainly going to have an electrifying effect on the public.

  There followed a news conference in a hospital meeting room, where all of Bianca’s doctors, nurses, therapists, and court-appointed guardians stepped up to the microphone to deliver a few bright, upbeat sound bites praising Bianca’s plucky nature and emphasising the incredible nature of her recovery. A few cynical journalists tried to spoil the day by asking difficult questions, e.g.: “Does Bianca know that the INS is trying to deport her parents?” But the new PR Director was standing by the mike at all times, trying to anticipate any line of questioning that might lead to another headline along the lines of “LET HER DIE!,” and when­ever these issues came up he would do something about protecting the patient’s privacy and then point to some other journalist with a less acute critical facility. In general, the PR Director was finding that bald, middle-aged print journalists with nicotine stains on their fingers were troublesome, and beautiful twenty-five-year-old TV journalists who had arrived at the hospital carrying stuffed bunnies for Bianca were good people to call on. So the headline for Thursday morning was:

  “BIANCA: MIRACLE GIRL!”

  accompanied by a picture of her smiling her gap-toothed kid’s grin through the window of the chamber, cuddling a bunny to her chest.

  Anyone who bothered to read the complete news story about Bianca, all the way to the end, could find out that her treatment in the chamber was essentially complete, and that Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre was going to release her the following day, on Friday.

  Which meant that by the time the “MIRACLE GIRL” headline began to circulate on Thursday morning, all of the participants of the Ramirez affair, from Denver to the Lazy Z Ranch to Washington, D.C., were gearing up for the endgame.

  Most of Friday would be taken up with logistics: getting all the players to the hospital on time and keeping in touch with everyone on the phone. So Thursday was the last day for actually making moves. Ray del Valle kicked off the final round by arranging a press conference, in a “safe house” somewhere in greater Denver, in which Carlos and Anna Ramirez stepped before the court of Public Opinion to defend themselves from charges that they were illegal aliens and bad parents.

  The illegal alien part was difficult, because they were, in fact, illegal aliens. But in America, no issue was so clear-cut that it could not be obfuscated beyond recognition by a talented lawyer. The Ramirezes now had one: a nationally famous hell-raising San Francisco lawyer who liked to do pro-bono work if lots of TV cameras were present; he insisted that he was going to get these people green cards real soon.

  The part about being bad parents was different. The Ramirezes were actually known in their community as very good parents. Carlos was a teetotaler who spent every minute of his free time with his children, and Anna was a domestic saint. Ray had arranged for character witnesses to show up at the safe house and say as much.

  Eleanor Richmond’s part in the endgame was a different matter. She snuck into, and ransacked, the office of her young colleague Shad Harper. This was easily enough to get her fired and possibly even enough to get her thrown into jail. She understood this clearly and had already typed up a letter of resignation for Senator Marshall. She had been working at this job for exactly one month and had received exactly one pay check.

  It was completely insane for her to be doing this. If she had been looking for snippets of information that she could have kept to herself and used discreetly, that would have been one thing. But her entire goal was to dig up some dirt that she could turn around and release to the media. Eleanor Richmond had gone native. She was out of control.

  She had lost it sometime over the weekend. The realisation that Sam Wyatt, her boss’ main man, had triggered this whole chain of events was bad enough by itself. For a day or two she had wavered, mostly because she was turned off by Ray’s tactic of planting toys in the grass for photographers. When the INS had come around looking for Carlos and Anna, she had been annoyed. But when the state had tried to take Bianca away from her parents, Eleanor Richmond had gone nuts. That was no fair. She’d rather be a bag lady than a conspirator in an affair that involved breaking apart a family.

  So on Thursday, whenever Shad Harper left his office for more than ten minutes, Eleanor went in and made herself at home. It would be worth destroying her own career if she could find anything to bring Shad down along with her. It would have been nice to find something on Sam Wyatt, or on the aide in D.C. who had made the fateful phone call to the Forest Service, or even on Senator Marshall himself. But she was willing to settle for Shad Harper’s head on a platter.

  Somewhat to her own astonishment, she didn’t get caught. Once or twice, someone poked their head into Shad’s office while she was there, and she explained that she was looking for a stapler that Shad had borrowed. This explanation worked because Shad was always borrowing stuff, including money, and not returning it.

  Shad himself spent most of his day out of the office, deeply enmeshed in some kind of plot involving the Ramirez family.

  By the time the sun rose on Friday morning, illuminating the new headline:

  “BIANCA: I WANT MY MAMA!”

  nothing had really changed. Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre was going to release Bianca at 6:05 p.m. By an astonishing coincidence, this put her release just a few minutes into the local evening news programs, making it an ideal candidate for live TV coverage. Their new PR Director, who had been on the job for five days and had already received a raise and a bonus, insisted that this was just a coincidence and that the time of the release had been set for purely medical reasons.

  He deserved his raise. From a media/PR standpoint, Highlands had started out the week gut-shot and had made a miracle recovery of their own until they now looked like archangels in white coats, their arms brimming over with fuzzy stuffed animals. At 6:05, they would roll Bianca Ramirez out into the horseshoe drive where their uniformed valet parking attendants stood guard twenty-four hours a day, and release her into the world. This would be good for two reasons: it would cement their reputation as medical geniuses and it would clear out the hyperbaric chamber so that heavily insured middle-aged diabetics could get into it again.

  The question was: who was going to take charge of Bianca when her wheelchair reached the curb? The fact that no-one knew the answer to this question turned the entire scenario into a certified Real-Life Drama and insured vast saturating media coverage.

  Colorado was still trying to get a court order making Bianca a ward of the state, but the Ramirezes’ high-profile lawyer and his team of young legal ninjas had thrown this action into a procedural snafu that would take weeks to untangle. Barring any last-minute action by the judicial branch, Carlos and Anna would still be Bianca’s le
gal guardians as of 6:05.

  But Carlos and Anna were illegal aliens and the INS was still looking for them. As a matter of fact, the INS was right there at the hospital, and had been for three days, waiting for them to show up.

  So if Bianca’s parents actually showed up at 6:05 to take custody of their daughter, they would immediately be taken off to the slammer and someone else would have to step in to take care of Bianca. This would probably end up being Anna’s sister Pilar, but there had been rumours that the state might use the arrest of Carlos and Anna as a pretext to seize Bianca, in which case the media could look forward to a tearful three-way Solomonic showdown right there in the horseshoe drive.

  All the networks showed up, and as early as six o’clock on Friday morning, twelve hours before the Big Event, Highland’s new PR man was already out in the horseshoe drive with a thick piece of blue chalk, marking out camera position: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CHAN 4, CHAN 5, CHAN 7, and more.

  As one journalist could be heard remarking to another journalist while they waited in the car-rental line at Stapleton Airport: “It’s got a coma baby. It’s got a miracle recovery. Weepy parents. A crooked senator. And it’s even got a fucking cowboy!”

  By itself, the story was plenty, but things got even better, if that was possible, in the middle of the day, when rumours began to circulate that one of Senator Marshall’s staff members had documents incriminating another staff member in the Lazy Z Ranch grazing scandal that had triggered this whole mess, and that she was going to be there this evening to lay the whole thing out before the massed forces of the national press. And when this rumour was embellished a little, to the effect that the woman in question was the famous bag lady who had recently cut Earl Strong’s nuts off in public, journalists all over Denver had to put down their drinks and breathe into paper sacks for a while.