7. PORTREX

Presbyterian Hospital: a history lesson

Previously—In episode 6, the Ceramicist, we learn from Dr. Vandyck that Mr. Spillers, in addition to having extremely long life, can revivify people—can literally bring them back from the dead—which he does to Anton Ramler, after crushing his skull. We see this happen in the area J aperture. A few months later, the freshly resurrected Ramler pays a visit to captain Sepulveda at building one. Things start off well, but take a turn for the worse when the captain suspects that Ramler’s stories are flat out lies, and that he’s concealing something about New York Presbyterian hospital. So he calls bullshit—then pulls a gun, and demands to know everything about the mysterious detainee Ramler’s so curious to see—Jesus Santiago.

In this episode—Captain Sepulveda explains what happened recently to his men at New York Presbyterian hospital. Ramler, who’s being held at gunpoint, has to decide—is it time for an on-the-spot-correction… or something else? He shares some backstory about what’s in the crate, and how its contents overlap with classified Los Alamos research being done in Puerto Rico.

Ramler looks at the Smith & Wesson ‘45 pointed at his chest. He’s familiar with the model—knows it uses a six round speed-loader, and wonders if Sepulveda has any more moon clips squirreled away—maybe inside that drawer he pulled the gun out of.

When the captain speaks, there’s a tinge of hardness in his voice. “I’m dying—cancer.” He waits for Ramler’s eyes to meet his, then adds, “Just in case you get any crazy ideas, I’m already a dead man. The cancer’s in my bones, so there’s no way to cut it out. I found out towards the end of August.”

August, Ramler thinks. That’s when he swung by the police station in San Juan to pick up that damn crate. It was a Sunday and the Cubs were playing the Phillies. He was going to watch that game at the bowling alley over at Las Campas with Widger. But then, Spillers called. And plans changed. Ramler’s fingers squeeze the tops of his knees. He steals a sweeping glance down at the floor, toward the kit bag—to what’s in it. Not sure why, he wants to be closer to it—to open it.

Sepulveda notices a small flutter in Ramler, but dismisses it. “Four of my men died at Presbyterian hospital,” he says flatly. “Work detail to help build a road. All in one week. Each time, I’d get a call from the hospital like—‘sorry to inform you sir, but Private so and so was complaining of pain and difficulty breathing. He was examined, but went into seizures. Died an hour later.’” The captain, watching Ramler’s face, eases up on the grip of the ‘45. He wonders how much of what Ramler said in the stairwell was true and how much was made up—all that shit about men wanting certainty of their knowledge. Then his eyes dart left, over to a photograph hanging on the wall behind Ramler. “You’re smart,” he says. “Smarter than me anyway, so I’m going to tell you a couple of things. And depending on what comes out of your mouth, I’m either going to hand you this gun… or not.”

Ramler, feeling the captain’s eyes on him like a pair of walnut crackers, says nothing. Sepulveda takes the silence as agreement, then nods and continues. “You show up here from FBI headquarters a couple days after we get Santiago. Give me a load of crap about interrogation techniques, but leave out the most interesting part. The reason why you’re really here. The wooden crate.”

Ramler sits motionless.

“Yeah, I know about the crate.” Sepulveda says icily. “A minute ago, you told me Santiago worked as a medical assistant at the hospital.” He shakes his head from side to side. “That’s a NO-GO. Santiago’s a coffee farmer who doesn’t even own a pair of shoes.”

“Sir, ” Ramler says confidently, “if you get on the phone right now with the station chief—”

“Maybe I’ll do that.” Sepulveda interrupts, smiling. “To express my condolences. Explain how their man was assaulted during a routine interrogation with our guy Santiago. You know, lots of crazy things happen during interrogation. Things get out of control.”

Ramler clenches his jaw, wondering which fact is more surprising—that Sepulveda knows about the crate, or that he’s already escalated things to the point of premeditated murder. The captain drones on, explaining an elaborate scenario. He doesn’t have to. Things just got complicated. Back in the stairwell, when Sepulveda had raised his fist in that strange way, and adjusted his feet into a pigeon toed stance—that’s what boxers do. Funny thing with boxing though, it doesn’t work when you’re on the ground. Ramler wonders if Sepulveda is as fast as he looks. He’s probably in the midrange of cruiserweight. Cancer or no, the way his fatigues drape over him, Ramler can tell. The man is a carpet of densely braided muscle and tendon and capillaries. And then there was the problem of the gun. Ramler wonders how many rounds he could take before going unconscious. Could he even survive a shot to the head? At close range? Without Spillers here to patch him up, he didn’t want to find out.

Fucking complexity.

As Sepulveda drones on with his “condolences” scenario, Ramler’s breathing slows a fraction. His eyes move in small left-right tics, simultaneously tracking numerous back-of-the-envelope estimates—the captain’s approximate strength to weight ratio, his likely reaction time, the thickness of the window behind him, the amount of insulation in the walls, the speed at which Montoya might respond to a sudden noise, the distance between the office door and the chair Ramler is sitting in, and a reasonable range of ETA’s of the errand-running Torres. And then the question of Santiago. Ramler would need someone here—someone alive—to show him where the old man was being kept. And the kit bag. Under no circumstances could this be damaged.

Without warning, Sepulveda plops the ‘45 down on his desk and rotates the barrel ninety degrees right, making a dull scratching noise of metal on metal. The captain’s right hand remains attached to the gun through the tips of splayed fingers for half a second before finally disconnecting. “Look,” he says, leaning forward and bringing his elbows down on the desk. Though he’s not holding the gun any longer, he cordons it off behind his forearms and interlaced fingers. “You were in the army right?” Sepulveda asks.

Ramler pancakes his lips together and relaxes his forehead, attempting to look serene as he recalculates his odds of being shot. “Yes sir. 1st Ranger battalion—”

“Yeah yeah. I get it.” Sepulveda says, “Airborne all the way. You don’t need to blow that shit up my ass. Believe me, it’s already way up in there. You know about PORTREX?”

Ramler knows it instantly. It had just happened in the spring. “Massive war game.” he says. “Kind of a shocking result though.”

Sepulveda corrects him. “Oh, it was a big shock—just not to me and my men. Shocking to the department of the Army and the New York Times. PORTREX was about showing off how an American liberating force could swoop in and beat the shit out of an aggressor force. Just like in Normandy, but in Puerto Rico—with me and my men playing the role of the aggressors.”

“Right,” Ramler says, “probably send a message to the Russians. That was my read.”

Sepulveda smiles and points a bingo finger at Ramler. “The newspapers were calling it D-Day on Vieques.” As the word Vieques slips from his lips, Sepulveda’s body stiffens, as he’s yanked back to that night in Puerto Ferro—to the drunk Marines grabbing the waitress—and their argument with Mapepe—and the fight—and the court martial—and that smarmy Navy JAG lawyer. He swallows down the anger, refocusing his eyes on Ramler. “When the beachhead attack started, things went to shit for the landing force. We took out half their paratroopers by forcing them to move their drop zone to a spot where we could easily pick them off.”

Interesting, Ramler thinks. “How’d you do that?”

“Vieques is small. Nothing like France.” says the captain. “There aren’t that many good drop zones to begin with. You’ve heard of Rommel’s asparagus?”

“Oh yeah.” Ramler says. He had seen it all over the beaches of France in ‘44 and ‘45. Goddamn paratrooper’s nightmare—pikes sticking up out of the ground like needles, for the sole purpose of shattering bodies moving at twenty miles an hour toward the ground in a silk parachute.

Sepulveda grins. “We made something similar, but with sugar cane stalks. Flimsy as hell, but it didn’t matter—we just needed to make it look good to their aerial spotters so they’d move their drop zone somewhere else. And then we had teams of machine gunners set up in fortified positions behind the tree line. It worked. When the 82nd jumped out of their C-119s at the new location—” Sepulveda’s left hand went up like a spring-loaded trebuchet arm, then came slamming down on the desk. “OOP—gain ohbel!”

Ramler grins, but is puzzled. He takes a moment to unpack the word gain ohbel. What was that? Spanish? Basque? Creole? Then, thinking of the Cubs game he missed back in August, he makes the connection. The Army rec center at Camp Las Casas—the same one that Ramler and his FBI buddies went to bowl and watch baseball games—Sepulveda was stationed there for years before coming here to Ramey. In the back of that rec center, next to the felt dartboards—there’s a single pinball machine. Sepulveda’s saying game over. Ramler smiles.

The captain’s stories went on for several minutes. He described wooden hedgehogs attached to mines, boobytrapped concertina, camouflaged forward observers to call in artillery strikes, and wide open lanes that acted as funneling channels for kill zones—each time, with the same result—gain ohbel, gain ohbel, gain ohbel! Aside from the open palm slamming, Ramler enjoyed hearing the stories.

“We stopped them.” Sepulveda says. “The Puerto Rican 65th infantry regiment stopped an airborne amphibious assault force of the greatest military in the history of the world.”

“Well,” Ramler starts. “That’s a little on the dramatic side.” 

“What the fuck, dramatic?” Sepulveda says loudly. “I was there, you weren’t.”

“Well, I remember hearing there were reasons why—”

“Bullshit!” Sepulveda says loudly, slamming his palm against the desk, this time minus the gain ohbel. “When the bad guy wins in pro wrestling it’s like ripping a wet fart in church. This was like that!”

Ramler raises both eyebrows, not sure if Sepulveda is joking, misusing an idiom, or just over-milking a metaphor.

Sepulveda explains, “When we beat the 82nd airborne, top brass had to explain what the fuck just happened. They cooked up a bunch of mumbo jumbo about complications with the beachhead assault.” He shakes his head from side to side. “Stormy seas… high winds… cloud cover… excessive humidity…” Sepulveda punctuates each excuse with a head shake, then caps off with, “FUCKING SAND. Ha! They couldn’t stop crying about that one.”

Ramler lets his laughter mix in with the captain’s. At some point in the story, between the first gain ohbel, and that FUCKING SAND crack, something in Ramler shifted, like a series of pin tumblers being rejiggered. He decided on a different course of action—one that would lead to the fewest unknowns. And hopefully, no bullets to the head. Pushing the toe of his boot against the edge of the kit bag, he looks at the captain and knits his brow, wondering how much classified information to share. Would it even matter? If the cancer wouldn’t finish him off, Spillers would. Or he would.

“I can’t give you all the details, but I can tell you some of what I know.”

Sepulveda leans in. “I’m listening.”

“In 1942, a young woman from San Juan walked into Presbyterian hospital to deliver a baby. During the hospital stay, she underwent a procedure—”

“La operación.” The captain replies, tilting his head up. He feels a rush of blood up in his face, and in an instant, he’s right back at his parents’ kitchen table—his father Jaime is sitting at his usual spot, butt up against the wall, jabbing at a plate of rice and mofongo. His mother Maria, in front of the stove, sprinkling salt into a frying pan of plantains over the low hiss of sizzling lard. Mami! he says, leaning in for a hug. After, she reaches in her pocket to fetch something. A letter. ¿Qué dice hijo? she says.

He takes it from her. It’s a single paragraph he forces himself to read four times before speaking. When he finally looks up, he explains using the fewest words he can, that the medical procedure she agreed to back in January 1937—it was called a salpingectomy—meant that she could never again become pregnant. Ever. He shoots a look over to his father, who just swallowed a mouth full of rice. No, he says softly, putting his fork down. Maria snatches the letter—starts shaking her head from side to side, pacing back and forth, opening cupboards and slamming them shut. NO. NO. NO. When the people from the health clinic stopped by the house, they said the procedure was simple and painless—they even gave her a cash voucher.

And besides, all the girls looking for work—if they could prove they got la operacion, they’d go to the head of the hiring line. It was easy: get the voucher, go to the clinic, get the procedure done, get paid, then go to the factory and get a job working a sewing machine. But they never said it would be permanent.

Sepulveda’s father, whose eyes are now puffy and moist, stands up out of his chair slowly, and walks over to his wife with open arms. Without saying a word, he embraces her in a bear hug. They stand there for a long time in front of the stove, not moving much. Just holding each other, quietly sobbing as plantains burn in the frying pan.

Sepulveda lingered a minute longer before turning off the stove, unable to make sense of what had happened. His mother was a seamstress at a uniform factory in Rio Piedras. His father rolled cigars at a lounge on Calle Del Cristo. Neither of them could read newspapers. They didn’t live in a world that discussed economics, public policy, or law. They didn’t know anything about Wall Street or pharmaceutical companies. Had no idea that Clarence Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble/Ivory Soap fortune, also happened to be a supporter of the Human Betterment Foundation, and had opened twenty two health clinics on the island of Puerto Rico. They didn’t understand that policy experts—the kind who wrote position papers for men like Clarence Gamble—studied unemployment rates and birthrates and death rates, and correlated them to all sorts of factors like cranial measurements along lines of race. They had no idea what eugenics was all about, or how popular it already was in the state legislatures of Indiana, Mississippi, and Virginia. And though it was reported by the New York Times, the Sepulvedas had no idea that Puerto Rico’s own governor—Blanton Winship, a personal friend of FDR himself and native of Macon, Georgia—had personally recommended immediate consideration of sterilization as a dependable means of improving the human race.

The breadcrumb trail explaining how all of this led to Maria Sepulveda opting in to becoming sterilized was effectively an incomprehensible ocean of antecedents—the tail end of a wormy grapevining of influences and hidden covenants, leading to the ratification in 1937 of Law #116, which made sterilization official policy on the island of Puerto Rico. All delivered along the merciless conveyor belt of consequences.

After a moment, Sepulveda is back again—back in the office with Ramler. The gun hasn’t moved. He doesn’t know why, but right at that moment, he thinks of a saying he once read on a billboard: big doors swing on small hinges. Inside his brain, a catalytic threshold has been met. The captain himself has no idea of the avalanche of microscopic activity currently underway. It’s what Dr. Vandyck at Area J calls geometric terraforming. Like all type 2 simulators, Sepulveda’s body is keyed up. His mind is like a foundry. Right now, he’s provisioning multiple ephemeral networks, recruiting and modulating fragments of working memory—some from the Army, some from his days working at the Condado Vanderbilit, and a few from the old tin house in la Perla. And from these raw materials, he’s assembling what to the observers at Area J would call a FOJIP polyhedron. He’s stitching together an analogical mapping, within which he interpolates many versions of himself and of the world outside of himself—recalibrating in ever-sharpening adjustments a high-fidelity map of a single aspect of reality—so he can know what kinds of things are real, can gauge their relative densities and intrinsic uncertainties, can understand how he stands in relation to those things, their interrelatedness, their meaning—their semantic shape. This is how FOJIP polyhedrons are scaffolded, and it’s all happening inside the captain’s lateral and medial frontal regions as he grins at Ramler.

La operación, Ramler thinks. He’s never heard that way of describing it, but nods and shrugs, “Yeah, that’s it.” Then he picks up where he left off, about the woman in 1942. “Any way, her name isn’t important, but she wasn’t expecting—”

“Wasn’t expecting?” Sepulveda says sharply. Ramler’s word choice, along with his dismissal of the woman’s name causes one face of the polyhedron to bulge, and its vertices to reconfigure. “She didn’t consent to being sterilized you mean.” Sepulveda says.

“Correct.” Ramler says, noticing Sepulveda’s posture stiffen. He sees, just barely, the outward physical impact of his words on Sepulveda, but doesn’t grasp the internal computational processes those words are accelerating. If he did, he’d understand that the captain is no longer simply listening to a story about an 18 year old woman in 1942. He’s running a type two simulation, and articulating the outer and inner surface geometries of a still-malleable polyhedron.

Ramler continues. “Thing is, the woman who walked into New York Presbyterian in 1942 and received… la operación… well, she wasn’t sterilized.”

“What do you mean?” Sepulveda asks. “I thought you said the procedure was done to her.”

“It was. Her tubes were removed. Completely. But she delivered her second child in 1943. A baby girl. Same hospital.”

A girl Sepulveda thinks, smiling. A baby sister. Multiple polygons along multiple faces of the polyhedron inside his head begin to stretch. He imagines his mother’s joy at finding out she would have a second baby. All of his aunts would have agreed, the right thing to do would be to name her after their grandmother Estella. Baby Estella would have turned fifteen years old in 1952. Sepulveda grew up poor, and had never been to a quinceanera—only heard about them from the younger soldiers. Snatching a memory from Camp Las Casas, he imagines walking up to the PX cashier, holding an Orthophonic RCA record player. That’s the one they kept locked up behind the glass case. It came in a hard shell brown box, a bit wider than a typewriter, and cost twenty five dollars. An extravagant gift for a teenager no doubt, but he imagines Estella unwrapping it and showing it off to all of the cousins, then gathering everyone around to listen to Jimmy Dorsey records. Maybe she would have preferred Elvis. That’s what the younger kids were into now. Their age difference would be enormous.

Ramler, who’s completely oblivious to the imaginary adolescence of baby Estella currently being simulated in Sepulveda’s brain, continues his story. “For the second birth in 1943, the maternity doctor at New York Presbyterian was the same doctor who did the first salpingectomy.”

Sepulveda nods, then goes right back to his private birthday party simulation. The polyhedron that had been taking shape is now fully cast. “Anyway,” Ramler continues, “this doctor… he takes a look at the woman, recognizes her from a year earlier, and has no idea how she’s pregnant. Obviously, he can’t explain to her why he’s surprised, but he knows something’s wrong. So… during the second birth, he brings the woman under general anesthesia, and does a uh… hysterectomy. Just—removes her entire uterus.”

Sepulveda’s face lowers, then comes back up, as though recoiling on tiny springs. His eyebrows are once again knitted up into angry caterpillars. Ramler doesn’t wait—just plows forward with fast staccato sentences. “The baby comes out. The woman’s uterus comes out. Gets placed in a jar. The mother wakes up a couple hours later without a uterus, but overall, happy to be alive. Goes home with baby number two and lives happily ever after.”

Sepulveda’s neck veins are standing out. “Who in the fuck does this? What’s the name of the doctor?”

Ramler blinks slowly. Once. It’s not quite a blink, more an acknowledgement. He does his best to not make eye contact with the gun. “Look, this doctor wasn’t doing any of this in connection with defense-related research. He took matters into his own hands, and just kind of—stumbled on to something unique.” Ramler waits a while, thinking Sepulveda will slam his hands against the desk again, but he just sits squinting. “OK,” Ramler says, “so a few days after the woman leaves the hospital, the doctor decides to take a closer look at the uterus. You know—to see if there’s anything—I don’t know, unusual.” He considers how to say the next thing, and decides for short and simple. “It’s still alive.”

“Alive?” Sepulveda shoots back, unsure if this news should incite outrage. “What do you mean… like… it had a pulse?”

“No.” says Ramler right away. Then, correcting himself, adds “Maybe.” He realizes he’s at the limit of his grasp of clinical science, and is in danger of falling down a rabbit hole of improvised human anatomy. He shakes it off. “Look, I’m not a doctor, so I don’t have the right words. All I know is, when you take a uterus out of a lady, it should die right away. That didn’t happen.”

Sepulveda’s wheels are turning over like crazy—doing their best to conjure an image of a disembodied uterus, but coming up with zilch. He realizes he doesn’t actually know the difference between a uterus and a vagina—and that up until now, his rank ignorance of female reproductive anatomy had absolutely no consequences. But the reality is, he has no idea how big a uterus is, what its shape ought to be, what color it is, how heavy it is, what size jar you’d need to store one in. There’s a pained look on his face Ramler picks up on and recognizes.

“Let me just get through the rest of the story,” Ramler says, “so you understand how this fits in with Santiago. And your men.”

The mention of Santiago’s name yanks Sepulveda back. Ramler continues. “So… this doctor in San Juan—who operated on the woman—he realizes how completely crazy the uterus-in-a-jar situation is, and gets on the phone with some friends back in New York. He explains things. They ask where the uterus is. When he tells them, they say—lock it up, sit tight, keep your mouth shut. So he does. And they make arrangements for a new team to show up the next day. The doctor is whisked away off the island, gets a cushy job, and lives happily ever after playing lots of golf.”

Sepulveda wants to know where that golf course is—wants to take a flame thrower to it, but reminds himself to stay focused. “And the new team? What happened with them?”

“Well, let’s see.” Ramler begins, trying to reconcile the parts he can say versus the parts he can’t. “Back in the forties, there was a medical research group out of Los Alamos—a dozen or so people from a bunch of hospitals all over the country. You had guys from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Very few people know this, but they injected a small number of their patients with plutonium… to study the effects of radiation on human subjects. And the new team I mentioned—the ones who came to San Juan for the uterus—they came out of that group.”

“This is insane.” Sepulveda says, slapping both palms against his desk. “This fucking happened?”

Ramler looks at the captain, his face bunching up into something just a hair below a sneer. “Think about the situation in 1942. Our people at Los Alamos were trying to build a working atomic bomb before the Nazis. And as smart as they were, they were making everything up as they went. Nothing they were doing was ever attempted before. They didn’t even know if their handling procedures were safe. That’s where the medical research group came in. One of their jobs was to figure out how much exposure was OK. And how much was dangerous.”

“That doesn’t make it not insane.” Sepulveda says.

Ramler shoots a look out at the window toward a huge tree off in the distance. Briefly, he wonders how tall it is, then taps his boot against the kit bag again, and turns to face the captain again. “Through a contact in New York, the research group became aware of the uh—uterus in San Juan. And that’s how the war department got involved.”

“You’re saying my men were injected with plutonium?”

“No, no.” Ramler says, shaking his head, eyeing the gun. “They—” he begins, then reconsiders—searching for a formulation that won’t send the captain into a rage. “The war department’s people studied the uterus, thinking they could figure out how to cure every disease known to man—maybe develop an antidote for radiation sickness.”

“And did they?”

“What, cure diseases?” he says rhetorically. “No. But they figured out a couple things about the uterus. First off, not even huge amounts of plutonium injections could kill that thing. People involved in the program started joking about it—calling it the indestructible pussy.”

“Are you fucking with me Ramler?” Sepulveda asks loudly. The thought of gringos in lab coats using a vulgar word to refer to his mother’s body makes him bite down and ball up his hands into fists. He wants to break Ramler’s jaw. “Are you making this shit up?”

“No.” he says firmly, eyeballing Sepulveda’s hands. “The second thing they learned was, you can’t just shave little bits of it off, put it in a rabbit, and get an indestructible rabbit. Doesn’t work that way.”

“Wait, they did that—to rabbits?” Sepulveda asks.

“Yeah, a lot of ‘em.” Ramler says.

Sepulveda leans back in his chair, trying to look casual. “So what happened?”

“Nothing. The rabbits stayed normal. But eventually… someone wanted to find out what would happen if you did the same thing to a human. Which brings us to your men.”

Sepulveda leans forward in his chair.

“In August, when your men showed up for that work detail at the hospital, they weren’t there to build a road. They were participating in an exposure trial—divided into three groups. One group was given a placebo. Another group was given some of the tissue sample. The third group was given something else—something the medical research group cooked up, derived from the tissue sample. Obviously, nothing happened to the placebo group. But group—”

Ramler’s eyes shift right like a pair of swinging metal balls on a Newton’s cradle. There’s the sound of footsteps approaching from outside. The captain hears them too because his eyebrows are climbing up his forehead. He wonders if it’s Torres, back from the motor pool. There’s at least two pairs of feet from the sound of it.

Then the door swings open and a dark suited blond haired man carrying a briefcase bursts in, all business. Staring right at Ramler, he says, “Not another word comes out of your mouth Mr. Ramler.”

Spillers.