On the Reasonable Distribution of Fault

We met in a county health department waiting room that had been closed for renovation — or rather, closed in the way that public buildings for poor people get closed, meaning someone had turned off the lights and locked the front door and nobody had gotten around to taking down the sign. The plastic chairs were still bolted to the floor in rows of four, angled slightly toward a television mount where no television hung. A notice board behind the intake window still displayed flyers for a flu clinic dated November 2019 and a WIC nutrition program whose phone number had been disconnected. I had found the place through a records request — it was the last physical office where Medicaid applications in the county were processed by a human being before the system went fully automated. It seemed right.

Butler arrived first, which surprised me. She walked the perimeter of the room like she was mapping it. She ran a finger along the intake window’s ledge, examined the dust, looked at the ceiling tiles — one was water-stained, bowed downward, holding its own small reservoir. She sat in the chair closest to the emergency exit.

“You picked this place on purpose,” she said. Not a question.

I admitted I had. I said something about wanting to ground the conversation in a physical space where the systems we were discussing had operated — where someone had once sat in these chairs and waited to be told whether they qualified for coverage.

“Someone sat in these chairs,” Butler said, “and waited to be told whether they deserved to live a little longer. Let’s not dress it up.”

Saramago arrived late, by which I mean he arrived exactly when he intended to, having stopped outside to read the posted hours of operation — Monday through Thursday, 8:00 to 4:30, closed for lunch from 12:00 to 1:00 — with what I can only describe as professional interest. He sat down across from Butler without introducing himself. They had not met before, as far as I knew, but the silence between them was the comfortable kind, the silence of two people who had spent decades listening to institutional language and could identify its particular music.

“So,” Saramago said, “we are writing about a woman who dies.”

“We’re writing about five people who watch a woman die,” I said. “Each of them operating one part of a system. None of them individually responsible.”

“All of them responsible,” Butler said.

“That depends,” said Saramago, “on what you mean by responsible. If you mean morally — perhaps. If you mean causally — it becomes very interesting. A man is driving a car. The brakes fail. He strikes a pedestrian. Is he responsible? He did nothing wrong. The mechanic who serviced the brakes — is she responsible? She followed the manufacturer’s specifications exactly. The manufacturer who designed the brakes — are they responsible? They met every regulatory standard. The regulator who set the standards — is the regulator responsible? The standards were based on the best available data. You see the problem. Everyone is correct. Everyone followed the rules. And someone is dead on the pavement.”

“That’s the premise,” I said. “That’s exactly the premise.”

“No,” Butler said. She had been watching Saramago with the focused patience I recognized from her interviews — the look of someone who is about to disagree with precision. “That’s not the premise. That’s the comfort. That’s what makes it tolerable. ‘Nobody did anything wrong.’ That sentence is what keeps the whole machine running. Because the moment you accept it, the moment you say yes, the system failed but no person failed, you’ve given everyone permission to go home and sleep.”

She leaned forward. “I want to write a story where they don’t sleep. Where the fact that they did nothing wrong is the thing that keeps them up at night. Not guilt — they don’t feel guilt, that’s the point — but something worse. The vibration of it. Like standing on a train platform when the express goes through. You didn’t step in front of it. You didn’t push anyone. But you felt it pass.”

I wrote that down — the vibration of it — and asked about the dead woman. Halima Hassan. Her name, her particulars. How much of her should we see?

“All of her,” Butler said. “Every piece of her life that the system touched. And I mean the actual body. Not the abstraction. The algorithms processed data points — her employment record, her insurance tier, her appointment availability. But underneath those data points was a woman with lungs that were filling with fluid and a prescription she couldn’t afford and a daughter who was twelve years old and already learning to navigate the same systems. I want the body in the room. I want the reader to feel the weight of her, not the weight of the argument.”

Saramago shifted in his chair. “This is where we disagree,” he said, almost gently. “You want the body in the room. I want the room itself. I want the architecture. Because the body — forgive me — the body is a fact. A death is a fact. Once it has occurred, once we have the body, we have sentiment. We have outrage. We have something for the newspaper. But the architecture is what persists. The architecture is what will be standing tomorrow, ready to process the next Halima Hassan, and the one after that, and the one after that, and it will process them with perfect efficiency and perfect blindness and perfect — what is your word in English — deniability.”

“The body is not a fact,” Butler said, her voice low and steady. “The body is what the architecture acts upon. You can describe the most elegant system in the world, and I will listen, and I will admire the description. But if you don’t put a body inside it — a specific body, with specific hands, specific lungs, a specific child waiting for her at home — then you have written an essay. A brilliant essay. But an essay.”

I felt caught between them. Both were right. Both were right in ways that excluded the other. I said something to that effect and Butler gave me a look that suggested I was being diplomatic when I should be choosing.

“Five perspectives,” Saramago said, folding one hand over the other. “You proposed five people who each operated one piece of the machine. This interests me. Not because of their individual stories — their individual stories are, I suspect, quite ordinary. A person doing a job. A person following guidelines. A person approving a form, or denying a form, or routing a form to the correct department. What interests me is the space between them. The connective tissue that does not exist. Because these five people never met. They never sat in a room together. They never looked at each other’s work and said, yes, I see how my piece connects to your piece, and together we have built something that kills. They are five fingers on a hand that does not know it is a fist.”

I asked him about the prose. His style — the long sentences, the minimal punctuation, dialogue unmarked and flowing into narration — would it serve this story?

“The comma,” he said, “is a matter of breathing. When I write a sentence that runs for half a page, with the dialogue of three characters woven through it like threads in a fabric — no, not a fabric, like water through channels, finding its own level — the reader cannot pause. The reader cannot stop to assign blame. The reader cannot say, ah, this is the part where the doctor speaks, and here is the part where the algorithm speaks, and here is the point where the decision was made. Because the decision was not made. The decision happened. Like weather. And you cannot punctuate weather into neat sentences.”

“You can describe the rain,” Butler said, “or you can describe the person standing in it.”

“Both,” I said, hearing myself say it before I could stop myself.

Saramago smiled. Not warmly, but with recognition. “Both is the ambition. Both is always the ambition. But what happens when both fails? What happens when the architecture and the body pull the prose in two directions? When the system requires long, flowing, interconnected sentences that mirror the system’s own interconnectedness, and the body requires short, blunt, physical sentences that land like blows?”

“Then the prose breaks,” Butler said. “And that’s where the story lives. In the break.”

I wanted to ask more about that — the idea that the story lives in the formal rupture between two styles, two visions of what the prose should be doing — but Butler had already moved on. She was talking about power.

“Every one of your five people,” she said, looking at me, “has power over Halima Hassan’s life. Not grand power. Not the power of a dictator or a CEO. Small power. Incremental power. The power to schedule an appointment three weeks out instead of one week out. The power to code a claim with this billing code instead of that billing code. The power to flag a file for secondary review or let it pass through. Each of those decisions, taken alone, is trivial. Defensible. Routine. But each of those decisions is an exercise of power over a specific person’s body, and the fact that the decision-maker doesn’t know the person’s name doesn’t make the power less real. It makes it more real. Because power that doesn’t know it’s power — power that thinks it’s just doing its job — that’s the kind of power that can kill someone and never notice.”

“This is what your book described,” Saramago said to me — meaning the Eubanks, meaning Automating Inequality, though he had the grace not to use the title as if citing a source. “The digital poorhouse. The automation of decisions that were once made by people who could be confronted, who could be shamed, who could be shown the body. Now the decisions are made by processes that have no eyes. You cannot show a process a body. You cannot shame an algorithm.”

“But you can shame the people who built it,” Butler said. “You can shame the people who maintain it. You can shame the people who fund it.”

“Can you?” Saramago asked. “Can you, really? Because they will say — correctly — that they built a tool. A neutral tool. A tool that processes applications according to criteria established by elected representatives acting on behalf of the public. They will say that the tool does exactly what it was designed to do. And they will be right. That is the horror. They will be right.”

I brought up something that had been nagging at me — the question of what the five perspectives should feel. Not think. Feel. In their bodies, in their sleep, in their unguarded moments. If none of them feels guilt, what do they feel?

Butler thought about this. “Irritation,” she said finally. “When someone brings up the death. A flash of irritation that is immediately followed by a reasonable explanation. And then nothing. The irritation and the explanation are the whole emotional landscape. There is no underneath. That’s what’s terrifying. There is no underneath to reach.”

“I think there is an underneath,” I said. “I think one of them — maybe only one — feels something she can’t name. Not guilt. Not regret. Something more like — vertigo. Like looking down from a height and realizing the railing is lower than you thought.”

“That’s too generous,” Butler said.

“Perhaps,” said Saramago. “But it is also dramatically necessary. If all five are equally sealed off, equally defended, then the story has no movement. It is a demonstration. An illustration of a thesis. If one of them cracks — not all the way, not into remorse, not into action, but just enough that the light gets in — then the crack becomes the reader’s way into the story.”

“The crack also becomes the lie,” Butler said. “Because it suggests that the system can be fixed by individual conscience. It can’t. Individual conscience is irrelevant to systemic harm. That’s the whole point. One person feeling bad about a death doesn’t change the architecture that produced the death.”

“But fiction is not policy,” Saramago said. “Fiction does not have to propose a solution. Fiction has to show a reader something true about the shape of the world. And if one of these five people lies awake at night and cannot sleep and does not know why — not because she feels responsible but because her body knows something her mind refuses to accept — that is not a solution. That is not redemption. That is description.”

They sat with that for a while. I was writing furiously. The waiting room was getting dark — the sun had moved past the one window that wasn’t boarded, and the fluorescent lights, of course, didn’t work.

Butler pointed at the intake forms still stacked on the counter. “Every one of those forms is a contract,” she said. “The person filling it out agrees to be translated into data. Agrees to become a case number, a set of eligibility criteria, a row in a database. And in exchange, the system agrees to process them. Not to help them. To process them. That’s the contract. And the system keeps its end. The system processes everyone. It processes Halima Hassan with perfect efficiency. It processes her all the way to death.”

Saramago stood up. He walked to the intake window and picked up one of the forms. He held it at arm’s length, reading it in the failing light.

“Name,” he read. “Date of birth. Do you currently have health insurance. If yes, please provide your policy number. If no, please indicate the reason.” He looked up. “The reasons are listed. Lost employment. Employer does not offer coverage. Cannot afford premiums. Aged out of parent’s plan. Other. There is always an ‘other.’ The system always provides an ‘other.’ It is the system’s way of saying, we have anticipated that we cannot anticipate everything, and we have made a box for what we cannot anticipate, and if you check that box, someone will — ”

He stopped.

“Someone will what?” Butler asked.

“Someone will look at it,” Saramago said. “That’s what the form promises. Someone will look at it. But in the automated system, the ‘someone’ is not a someone. The ‘someone’ is a process. And the process does not look. The process sorts.”

I asked whether we’d arrived at the story’s central image — the form, the sorting, the body that the form cannot contain.

“We haven’t arrived at anything,” Butler said, and she was already putting on her coat.