" Julieta begins. But Bobby cuts her off: "You got what
you wanted and then some. A British passport and " glancing out the window
he sees the doctor emerging from the courthouse " Enoch's survivor's
benefits on top of it. And maybe more later. As for you, Otto, your career
as a smuggler is over. I suggest you get the fuck out of here."
Otto's still too flabbergasted to be outraged, but he's sure enough
gonna be outraged pretty soon. "And go where!? Have you bothered to look at
a map?"
"Display some fucking adaptability," Shaftoe says. "You can figure out
a way to get that tub of yours to England."
Say what you will about Otto, he likes a challenge. "I could traverse
the Göta Canal from Stockholm to Göteborg no Germans there that would get me
almost to Norway but Norway's full of Germans! Even if I make it through the
Skagerrak you expect me to cross the North Sea? In winter? During a war?"
"If it makes you feel any better, after you get to England you have to
sail to Manila."
"Manila!?"
"Makes England seem easy, huh?"
"You think I am a rich yachtsman, who sails around the world for fun!?"
"No, but Rudolf von Hacklheber is. He's got money, he's got
connections. He's got a line on a good yacht that makes your ketch look like
a dinghy," Shaftoe says. "C'mon, Otto. Stop whining, pull some more diamonds
out of your asshole, and get it done. It beats being tortured to death by
Germans." Shaftoe stands up and chucks Otto encouragingly on the shoulder,
which Otto does not like at all. "See you in Manila."
The doctor's coming in the door. Bobby Shaftoe slaps some money down on
the table. He looks Julieta in the eye. "Got some miles to cover now," he
says, "Glory's waiting for me."
Julieta nods. So in the eyes of one Finnish girl, anyway, Shaftoe's not
such a bad guy. He bends over and gives her a big succulent kiss, then
straightens up, nods to the startled doctor, and walks out.
Chapter 61 COURTING
Waterhouse has been chewing his way through exotic Nip code systems at
the rate of about one a week, but after he sees Mary Smith in the parlor of
Mrs. McTeague's boarding house, his production rate drops to near zero.
Arguably, it goes negative, for sometimes when he reads the morning
newspaper, its plaintext scrambles into gibberish before his eyes, and he is
unable to extract any useful information.
Despite his and Turing's disagreements about whether the human brain is
a Turing machine, he has to admit that Turing wouldn't have too much trouble
writing a set of instructions to simulate the brain functions of Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse.
Waterhouse seeks happiness. He achieves it by breaking Nip code systems
and playing the pipe organ. But since pipe organs are in short supply, his
happiness level ends up being totally dependent on breaking codes.
He cannot break codes (hence, cannot be happy) unless his mind is
clear. Now suppose that mental clarity is designated by C [sub m], which is
normalized, or calibrated, in such a way that it is always the case that
0 <= C [sub m] < 1
where C [sub m] = 0 indicates a totally clouded mind and C [sub m] = 1
is Godlike clarity an unattainable divine state of infinite intelligence. If
the number of messages Waterhouse decrypts, in a given day, is designated by
then it will be governed by C [sub m] in roughly the following way:
Clarity of mind (C [sub m]) is affected by any number of factors, but
by far the most important is horniness, which might be designated by
[sigma], for obvious anatomical reasons that Waterhouse finds amusing at
this stage of his emotional development.
Horniness begins at zero at time t = t [sub 0] (immediately following
ejaculation) and increases from there as a linear function of time:
The only way to drop it back to zero is to arrange another ejaculation.
There is a critical threshold [sigma sub c] such that when [sigma] >
[sigma sub c] it becomes impossible for Waterhouse to concentrate on
anything, or, approximately,
which amounts to saying that the moment [sigma] rises above the
threshold [sigma sub c] it becomes totally impossible for Waterhouse to
break Nipponese cryptographic systems. This makes it impossible for him to
achieve happiness (unless there is a pipe organ handy, which there isn't).
Typically, it takes two to three days for [sigma] to climb above [sigma
sub c] after an ejaculation:
Critical, then, to the maintenance of Waterhouse's sanity is the
ability to ejaculate every two to three days. As long as he can arrange
this, [sigma] exhibits a classic sawtooth wave pattern, optimally with the
peaks at or near [sigma sub c] [see p. 546 top] wherein the grey zones
represent periods during which he is completely useless to the war effort.
So much for the basic theory. Now, when he was at Pearl Harbor, he
discovered something that, in retrospect, should have been profoundly
disquieting. Namely, that ejaculations obtained in a whorehouse (i.e.,
provided by the ministrations of an actual human female) seemed to drop
[sigma] below the level that Waterhouse could achieve through executing a
Manual Override. In other words, the post ejaculatory horniness level was
not always equal to zero, as the naive theory propounded above assumes, but
to some other quantity dependent upon whether the ejaculation was induced by
Self or Other: [sigma] =[sigma sub self] after masturbation but
[sigma]=[sigma sub other] upon leaving a whorehouse, where [sigma sub self]
> [sigma sub other] an inequality to which Waterhouse's notable successes
in breaking certain Nip naval codes at Station Hypo were directly
attributable, in that the many convenient whorehouses nearby made it
possible for him to go somewhat longer between ejaculations.
Note the twelve day period [above], 19 30 May 1942, with only one brief
interruption in productivity during which Waterhouse (some might argue)
personally won the Battle of Midway.
If he had thought about this, it would have bothered him, because
[sigma sub self] > [sigma sub other] has troubling implications
particularly if the values of these quantities w.r.t. the all important
[sigma sub c] are not fixed. If it weren't for this inequality, then
Waterhouse could function as a totally self contained and independent unit.
But [sigma sub self] > [sigma sub other] implies that he is, in the long
run, dependent on other human beings for his mental clarity and, therefore,
his happiness. What a pain in the ass!
Perhaps he has avoided thinking about this precisely because it is so
troubling. The week after he meets Mary Smith, he realizes that he is going
to have to think about it a lot more.
Something about the arrival of Mary Smith on the scene has completely
fouled up the whole system of equations. Now, when he has an ejaculation,
his clarity of mind does not take the upwards jump that it should. He goes
right back to thinking about Mary. So much for winning the war!
He goes out in search of whorehouses, hoping that good old reliable
[sigma sub other] will save his bacon. This is troublesome. When he was at
Pearl, it was easy, and uncontroversial. But Mrs. McTeague's boardinghouse
is in a residential neighborhood, which, if it contains whorehouses, at
least bothers to hide them. So Waterhouse has to travel downtown, which is
not that easy in a place where internal combustion vehicles are fueled by
barbecues in the trunk. Furthermore Mrs. McTeague is keeping her eye on him.
She knows his habits. If he starts coming back from work four hours late, or
going out after dinner, he'll have some explaining to do. And it had better
be convincing, because she appears to have taken Mary Smith under one
quivering gelatinous wing and is in a position to poison the sweet girl's
mind against Waterhouse. Not only that, he has to do much of his excuse
making in public, at the dinner table, which he shares with Mary's cousin
(whose first name turns out to be Rod).
But hey, Doolittle bombed Tokyo, didn't he? Waterhouse should at least
be able to sneak out to a whorehouse. It takes a week of preparations
(during which he is completely unable to accomplish meaningful work because
of the soaring [sigma] level), but he manages it.
It helps a little, but only on the [sigma] management level. Until
recently, that was the only level and so it would have been fine. But now
(as Waterhouse realizes through long contemplation during the hours when he
should be breaking codes) a new factor has entered the system of equations
that governs his behavior; he will have to write to Alan and tell him that
some new instructions will have to be added to the Waterhouse simulation
Turing machine. This new factor is F [sub MSp], the Factor of Mary Smith
Proximity.
In a simpler universe, F [sub MSp], would be orthogonal to [sigma],
which is to say that the two factors would be entirely independent of each
other. If it were thus, Waterhouse could continue the usual sawtooth wave
ejaculation management program with no changes. In addition, he would have
to arrange to have frequent conversations with Mary Smith so that F [sub
MSp] would remain as high as possible.
Alas! The universe is not simple. Far from being orthogonal, F [sub
MSp] and [sigma] are involved, as elaborately as the contrails of
dogfighting airplanes.
The old [sigma] management scheme doesn't work anymore. And a platonic
relationship will actually make F [sub MSp] worse, not better. His life,
which used to be a straightforward set of basically linear equations, has
become a differential equation.
It is the visit to the whorehouse that makes him realize this. In the
Navy, going to a whorehouse is about as controversial as pissing down the
scuppers when you are on the high seas the worst you can say about it is
that, in other circumstances, it might seem uncouth. So Waterhouse has been
doing it for years without feeling troubled in the slightest.
But he loathes himself during, and after, his first post Mary Smith
whorehouse visit. He no longer sees himself through his own eyes but through
hers and, by extension, those of her cousin Rod and of Mrs. McTeague and of
the whole society of decent God fearing folk to whom he has never paid the
slightest bit of attention until now.
It seems that the intrusion of F [sub MSp] into his happiness equation
is just the thin edge of a wedge which leaves Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse
at the mercy of a vast number of uncontrollable factors, and requiring him
to cope with normal human society. Horrifyingly, he now finds himself
getting ready to go to a dance.
The dance is being organized by an Australian volunteer organization he
doesn't know or care about the details. Mrs. McTeague evidently feels that
the rent she collects from her boarders obligates her to find them wives as
well as feeding and housing them, so she badgers all of them to go, and to
bring dates if possible. Rod finally shuts her up by announcing that he will
be attending with a large group, to include his country cousin Mary. Rod is
about eight feet tall, and so it will be easy to pick him out across a
crowded dance floor. With any luck, then, the diminutive Mary will be in his
vicinity.
So Waterhouse goes to the dance, ransacking his mind for opening lines
that he can use with Mary. He comes up with several possibilities:
"Do you realize that Nipponese industry is only capable of producing
forty bulldozers per year?" To be followed up with: "No wonder they use
slave labor to build their revetments!"
Or, "Because of antenna configuration limitations inherent in their
design, Nipponese naval radar systems have a blind spot to the rear you
always want to come in from dead astern."
Or, "The Nip Army's minor, low level codes are actually harder to break
than the important high level ones! Isn't that ironic?"
Or, "So, you're from the outback ... do you can a lot of your own food?
It might interest you to know that a close relative of the bacterium that
makes canned soup go bad is responsible for gas gangrene."
Or, "Nip battleships have started to blow up spontaneously, because the
high explosive shells in their magazines become chemically unstable over
time."
Or, "Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that
all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical
operations."
And much more in this vein. So far he has not hit on anything that is
absolutely guaranteed to sweep her off her feet. He doesn't, in fact, have
the first idea what the fuck he's going to do. Which is how it's always been
with Waterhouse and women, which is why he has never really had a girlfriend
before.
But this is different. This is desperation.
What is there to say about the dance? Big room. Men in uniforms, mostly
looking smarter than they have a right to. Mostly looking smarter, in fact,
than Waterhouse. Women in dresses and hairdos. Lipstick, pearls, a big band,
white gloves, fist fights, a little bit o' kissin' and a wee bit o'
vomitin'. Waterhouse gets there late that transportation thing again. All
the gasoline is being used to hurl enormous bombers through the atmosphere
so that high explosives can be showered on Nips. Moving the wad of flesh
called Waterhouse across Brisbane so he can try to deflower a maiden is way
down the priority list. He has to do a lot of walking in his stiff, shiny
leather shoes, which become less shiny. By the time he gets there, he is
pretty sure that they are functioning only as tourniquets preventing
uncontrollable arterial bleeding from the wounds they've induced.
Rather late into the dance he finally picks out Rod on the dance floor
and stalks him, over the course of several numbers (Rod having no shortage
of dance partners), to a corner of the room where everyone seems to know
each other, and all of them seem to be having a perfectly fine time without
the intervention of a Waterhouse.
But finally he identifies Mary Smith's neck, which looks just as
unspeakably erotic seen from behind through thirty yards of dense cigarette
smoke as it did seen from the side in Mrs. McTeague's parlor. She is wearing
a dress, and a string of pearls that adorn the neck's architecture quite
nicely. Waterhouse sets his direction of march towards her and plods onward,
like a Marine covering the last few yards to a Nip pillbox where he knows
full well he's going to die. Can you get a posthumous decoration for being
shot down in flames at a dance?
He's just a few paces away, still forging along woozily towards that
white column of neck, when suddenly the tune comes to an end, and he can
hear Mary's voice, and the voices of her friends. They are chattering away
happily. But they are not speaking English.
Finally, Waterhouse places that accent. Not only that: he solves
another mystery, having to do with some incoming mail he has seen at Mrs.
McTeague's house, addressed to someone named cCmndhd.
It's like this: Rod and Mary are Qwghlmian! And their family name is
not Smith it just sounds vaguely like Smith. It's really cCmndhd. Rod grew
up in Manchester in some Qwghlmian ghetto, no doubt and Mary's from a branch
of the family that got into trouble (probably sedition) a couple of
generations back and got Transported to the Great Sandy Desert.
Let's see Turing explain this one! Because what this proves, beyond all
doubt, is that there is a God, and furthermore that He is a personal friend
and supporter of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. The opening line problem is
solved, neat as a theorem. Q. E. D., baby. Waterhouse strides forward
confidently, sacrificing another square centimeter of epidermis to his
ravenous shoes. As he later reconstructs it, he has, without meaning to,
interpolated himself between Mary cCmndhd and her date, and perhaps jostled
the latter's elbow and forced him to spill his drink. It is a startling move
that quiets the group. Waterhouse opens his mouth and says "Gxnn bhldh sqrd
m!"
"Hey, friend!" says Mary's date. Waterhouse turns towards the sound of
the voice. The sloppy grin draped across his face serves as a convenient
bulls eye, and Mary's date's fist homes in on it unerringly. The bottom half
of Waterhouse's head goes numb, his mouth fills with a warm fluid that
tastes nutritious. The vast concrete floor somehow takes to the air, spins
like a flipped coin, and bounces off the side of his head. All four of
Waterhouse's limbs seem to be pinned against the floor by the weight of his
torso.
Some sort of commotion is happening up on that remote plane of most
people's heads, five to six feet above the floor, where social interaction
traditionally takes place. Mary's date is being hustled off to the side by a
large powerful fellow it is hard to recognize faces from this angle, but a
good candidate would be Rod. Rod is shouting in Qwghlmian.
Actually, everyone is shouting in Qwghlmian even the ones who are
speaking in English because Waterhouse's speech recognition centers have a
bad case of jangly ganglia. Best to leave that fancy stuff for later, and
concentrate on more basic phylogenesis: it would be nice, for example, to be
a vertebrate again. After that quadrupedal locomotion might come in handy.
A perky Qwghlmian Australian fellow in an RAAF uniform steps up and
grabs his right anterior fin, jerking him up the evolutionary ladder before
he's ready. He is not doing Waterhouse a favor so much as he is getting
Waterhouse's face up where it can be better scrutinized. The RAAF fellow
shouts at him (because the music has started again):
"Where'd you learn to talk like that?"
Waterhouse doesn't know where to begin; god forbid he should offend
these people again. But he doesn't have to. The RAAF guy screws up his face
in disgust, as if he had just noticed a six foot tapeworm trying to escape
from Waterhouse's throat. "Outer Qwghlm?" he asks.
Waterhouse nods. The confused and shocked faces before him collapse
into graven masks. Inner Qwghlmians! Of course! The inner islanders are
perennially screwed, hence have the best music, the most entertaining
personalities, but are constantly being shipped off to Barbados to chop
sugar cane, or to Tasmania to chase sheep, or to well, to the Southwest
Pacific to be pursued through the jungle by starving Nips draped with live
satchel charges.
The RAAF chap forces himself to smile, chucks Waterhouse gently on the
shoulder. Someone in this group is going to have to take the unpleasant job
of playing diplomat, smoothing it all over, and with the true Inner
Qwghlmian's nose for a shit job, RAAF boy has just volunteered. "With us,"
he explains brightly, "what you just said isn't a polite greeting."
"Oh," Waterhouse says, "what did I say, then?"
"You said that while you were down at the mill to lodge a complaint
about a sack with a weak seam that sprung loose on Thursday, you were led to
understand, by the tone of the proprietor's voice, that Mary's great aunt, a
spinster who had a loose reputation as a younger woman, had contracted a
fungal infection in her toenails."
There is a long silence. Then everyone speaks at once. Finally a
woman's voice breaks through the cacophony: "No, no!" Waterhouse looks; it's
Mary. "I understood him to say that it was at the pub, and that he was there
to apply for a job catching rats, and that it was my neighbor's dog that had
come down with rabies."
"He was at the basilica for confession the priest angina " someone
shouts from the back. Then everyone talks at once: "The dockside Mary's half
sister leprosy Wednesday complaining about a loud party!"
There's a strong arm around Waterhouse's shoulders, turning him away
from all for this. He cannot turn his head to see who owns this limb,
because his vertebrae have again become unstacked. He figures out that it's
Rod, nobly taking his poor addled Yank roommate under his wing. Rod pulls a
clean hanky from his pocket and puts it up to Waterhouse's mouth, then takes
his hand away. The hanky sticks to his lip, which is now shaped like a
barrage balloon.
That's not the only decent thing he does. He even gets Waterhouse a
drink, and finds him a chair. "You know about the Navajos?" Rod asks.
"Huh?"
"Your marines use Navajo Indians as radio operators they can speak to
each other in their own language and the Nips have no idea what the fuck
they're saying."
"Oh. Yeah. Heard about that," Waterhouse says.
"Winnie Churchill heard about those Navajos. Liked the idea. Wanted His
Majesty's forces to do likewise. We don't have Navajos. But "
"You have Qwghlmians," Waterhouse says.
"There are two different programs underway," Rod says. "Royal Navy is
using Outer Qwghlmians. Army and Air Force are using Inner."
"How's it working out?"
Rod shrugs. "So so. Qwghlmian is a very pithy language. Bears no
relationship to English or Celtic its closest relatives are !Qnd, which is
spoken by a tribe of pygmies in Madagascar, and Aleut. Anyway, the pithier,
the better, right?"
"By all means," Waterhouse says. "Less redundancy harder to break the
code."
"Problem is, if it's not exactly a dead language, then it's lying on a
litter with a priest standing over it making the sign of the cross. You
know?"
Waterhouse nods.
"So everyone hears it a little differently. Like just now they heard
your Outer Qwghlmian accent, and assumed you were delivering an insult. But
I could tell you were saying that you believed, based on a rumor you heard
last Tuesday in the meat market, that Mary was convalescing normally and
would be back on her feet within a week."
"I was trying to say that she looked beautiful," Waterhouse protests.
"Ah!" Rod says. "Then you should have said, 'Gxnn bhldh sqrd m!'"
"That's what I said!"
"No, you confused the mid glottal with the frontal glottal," Rod says.
"Honestly," Waterhouse says, "can you tell them apart over a noisy
radio?"
"No," Rod says. "On the radio, we stick to the basics: 'Get in there
and take that pillbox or I'll fucking kill you.' And that sort of thing."
Before much longer, the band has finished its last set and the party's
over. "Well," Waterhouse says, "would you tell Mary what I really did mean
to say?"
"Oh, I'm sure there's no need," Rod says confidently. "Mary is a good
judge of character. I'm sure she knows what you meant. Qwghlmians excel at
nonverbal communication."
Waterhouse just barely restrains himself from saying I guess you'd have
to, which would probably just earn him another slug in the face. Rod shakes
his hand and departs. Waterhouse, marooned by his shoes, hobbles out.
Chapter 62 INRI
Goto Dengo lies on a cot of woven rushes for six weeks, under a white
cone of mosquito netting that stirs in the breezes from the windows. When
there is a typhoon, the nurses clasp mother of pearl shutters over the
windows, but mostly they are left open day and night. Outside the window, an
immense stairway has been hand carved up the side of a green mountain. When
the sun shines, the new rice on those terraces fluoresces; green light boils
into the room like flames. He can see small gnarled people in colorful
clothes transplanting rice seedlings and tinkering with the irrigation
system. The wall of his room is plain, cream colored plaster spanned with
forking deltas of cracks, like the blood vessels on the surface of an
eyeball. It is decorated only with a crucifix carved out of napa wood in
maniacal detail. Jesus's eyes are smooth orbs without pupil or iris, as in
Roman statues. He hangs askew on the crucifix, arms stretched out, the
ligaments probably pulled loose from their moorings now, the crooked legs,
broken by the butt of a Roman spear, unable to support the body. A pitted,
rusty iron nail transfixes each palm, and a third suffices for both feet.
Goto Dengo notices after a while that the sculptor has arranged the three
nails in a perfect equilateral triangle. He and Jesus spend many hours and
days staring at each other through the white veil that hangs around the bed;
when it shifts in the mountain breezes, Jesus seems to writhe. An open
scroll is fixed to the top of the crucifix; it says I.N.R.I. Goto Dengo
spends a long time trying to fathom this. I Need Rapid something? Initiate
Nail Removal Immediately?
The veil parts and a perfect young woman in a severe black and white
habit is standing in the gap, radiant in the green light coming off the
terraces, carrying a bowl of steaming water. She peels back his hospital
gown and begins to sponge him off. Goto Dengo motions towards the crucifix
and asks about it perhaps the woman has learned a little Nipponese. If she
hears him, she gives no sign. She is probably deaf or crazy or both; the
Christians are notorious for the way they dote on defective persons. Her
gaze is fixed on Goto Dengo's body, which she swabs gently but implacably,
one postage stamp sized bit at a time. Goto Dengo's mind is still playing
tricks with him, and looking down at his naked torso he gets all turned
around for a moment and thinks that he is looking at the nailed wreck of
Jesus. His ribs are sticking out and his skin is a cluttered map of sores
and scars. He cannot possibly be good for anything now; why are they not
sending him back to Nippon? Why haven't they simply killed him? "You speak
English?" he says, and her huge brown eyes jump just a bit. She is the most
beautiful woman he has ever seen. To her, he must be a loathsome thing, a
specimen under a glass slide in a pathology lab. When she leaves the room
she will probably go and wash herself meticulously and then do anything to
flush the memory of Goto Dengo's body out of her clean, virginal mind.
He drifts away into a fever, and sees himself from the vantage point of
a mosquito trying to find a way in through the netting: a haggard, wracked
body splayed, like a slapped insect, on a wooden trestle. The only way you
can tell he's Nipponese is by the strip of white cloth tied around his
forehead, but instead of an orange sun painted on it is an inscription:
I.N.R.I.
A man in a long black robe is sitting beside him, holding a string of
red coral beads in his hand, a tiny crucifix dangling from that. He has the
big head and heavy brow of those strange people working up on the rice
terraces, but his receding hairline and swept back silver brown hair are
very European, as are his intense eyes. "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum," he
is saying. "It is Latin. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews."
"Jew? I thought Jesus was Christian," said Goto Dengo.
The man in the black robe just stares at him. Goto Dengo tries again:
"I didn't know Jews spoke Latin."
One day a wheeled chair is pushed into his room; he stares at it with
dull curiosity. He has heard of these things they are used behind high walls
to transport shamefully imperfect persons from one room to an other.
Suddenly these tiny girls have picked him up and dropped him into it! One of
them says something about fresh air and the next thing he knows he's being
wheeled out the door and into a corridor! They have buckled him in so he
doesn't fall out, and he twists uneasily in the chair, trying to hide his
face. The girl rolls him out to a huge verandah that looks out over the
mountains. Mist rises up from the leaves and birds scream. On the wall
behind him is a large painting of I.N.R.I. chained naked to a post, shedding
blood from hundreds of parallel whip marks. A centurion stands above him
with a scourge. His eyes look strangely Nipponese.
Three other Nipponese men are sitting on the verandah. One of them
talks to himself unintelligibly and keeps picking at a sore on his arm that
bleeds continuously into a towel on his lap. Another one has had his arms
and face burned off, and peers out at the world through a single hole in a
blank mask of scar tissue. The third has been tied into his chair with many
wide strips of cloth because he flops around all the time like a beached
fish and makes unintelligible moaning noises.
Goto Dengo eyes the railing of the verandah, wondering if he can muster
the effort to wheel himself over there and fling his body over the edge. Why
has he not been allowed to die honorably?
The crew of the submarine treated him and the other evacuees with an
unreadable combination of reverence and disgust.
When was he set apart from his race? It happened long before his
evacuation from New Guinea. The lieutenant who rescued him from the
headhunters treated him as a criminal and sentenced him to execution. Even
before then, he was different. Why did the sharks not eat him? Does his
flesh smell different? He should have died with his comrades in the Bismarck
Sea. He lived, partly because he was lucky, partly because he could swim.
Why could he swim? Partly because his body was good at it but partly
because his father raised him not to believe in demons.
He laughs out loud. The other men on the verandah turn to look at him.
He was raised not to believe in demons, and now he is one.
Black robe laughs out loud at Goto Dengo during his next visit. "I am
not trying to convert you," he says. "Please do not tell your superiors
about your suspicions. We have been strictly forbidden to proselytize, and
there would be brutal repercussions."
"You aren't trying to convert me with words," Goto Dengo admits, "but
just by having me here." His English does not quite suffice.
Black robe's name is Father Ferdinand. He is a Jesuit or something,
with enough English to run rings around Goto Dengo. "In what way does merely
having you in this place constitute proselytization?" Then, just to break
Goto Dengo's legs out from under him, he says the same thing in half decent
Nipponese.
"I don't know. The art."
"If you don't like our art, close your eyes and think of the emperor."
"I can't keep my eyes closed all the time."
Father Ferdinand laughs snidely. "Really? Most of your countrymen seem
to have no difficulty with keeping their eyes tightly shut from cradle to
grave."
"Why don't you have happy art? Is this a hospital or a morgue?"
"La Pasyon is important here," says Father Ferdinand.
"La Pasyon?"
"Christ's suffering. It speaks deeply to the people of the Philippines.
Especially now."
Goto Dengo has another complaint that he is not able to voice until he
borrows Father Ferdinand's Japanese English dictionary and spends some time
working with it.
"Let me see if I understand you," Father Ferdinand says. "You believe
that when we treat you with mercy and dignity, we are implicitly trying to
convert you to Roman Catholicism."
"You bent my words again," says Goto Dengo.
"You spoke crooked words and I straightened them," snaps Father
Ferdinand.
"You are trying to make me into one of you."
"One of us? What do you mean by that?"
"A low person."
"Why would we want to do that?"
"Because you have a low person religion. A loser religion. If you make
me into a low person, it will make me want to follow that religion."
"And by treating you decently we are trying to make you into a low
person?"
"In Nippon, a sick person would not be treated as well."
"You needn't explain that to us," Father Ferdinand says. "You are in
the middle of a country full of women who have been raped by Nipponese
soldiers."
Time to change the subject. "Ignoti et quasi occulti Societas
Eruditorum," says Goto Dengo, reading the inscription on a medallion that
hangs from Father Ferdinand's neck. "More Latin? What does it mean?"
"It is an organization I belong to. It is ecumenical."
"What does that mean?"
"Anyone can join it. Even you, after you get better."
"I will get better," Goto Dengo says. "No one will know that I was
sick."
"Except for us. Oh, I understand! You mean, no Nipponese people will
know. That's true."
"But the others here will not get better."
"It is true. You have the best prognosis of any patient here."
"You are receiving those sick Nipponese men into your bosoms."
"Yes. This is more or less dictated by our religion."
"They are low people now. You want them to join your low person
religion."
"Only insofar as it is good for them," says Father Ferdinand. "It's not
like those guys are going to run out and build us a new cathedral or
something."
The next day, Goto Dengo is deemed to be cured. He does not feel cured
at all, but he will do anything to get out of this rut: losing one staredown
after another with the King of the Jews.
He expects that they will saddle him with a duffel bag and send him
down to the bus terminal to fend for himself, but instead a car comes to get
him. As if that's not good enough, the car takes him to an airfield, where a
light plane picks him up. It is the first time he has ever flown in a plane,
and the excitement revives him more than six weeks in the hospital. The
plane takes off between two green mountains and heads south (judging from
the sun's position) and for the first time he understands where he's been:
in the center of Luzon Island, north of Manila.
Half an hour later, he's above the capital, banking over the Pasig
River and then the bay, chockablock with military transports. The corniche
is guarded by a picket line of coconut palms. Seen from overhead, their
branches writhe in the sea breeze like colossal tarantulas impaled on
spikes. Looking over the pilot's shoulder, he sees a pair of paved airstrips
in the flat paddy land just south of the city, crossing at an acute angle to
form a narrow X. The light plane porpoises through gusts. It bounces down
the airstrip like an overinflated soccer ball, taxiing past most of the
hangars and finally fishtailing to a stop near an isolated guard hut where a
man waits on a motorcycle with an empty sidecar. Goto Dengo is directed out
of the plane and into the sidecar by means of gestures; no one will speak to
him. He is dressed in an Army uniform devoid of rank and insignia.
A pair of goggles rests on the seat, and he puts them on to keep the
bugs out of his eyes. He is a little nervous because he does not have papers
and he does not have orders. But they are waved out of the airbase and onto
the road without any checks.
The motorcycle driver is a young Filipino man who keeps grinning
broadly, at the risk of getting insects stuck between his big white teeth.
He seems to think that he has the best job in the whole world, and perhaps
he does. He turns south onto a road that probably qualifies as a big highway
around these parts, and commences weaving through traffic. Most of this is
produce carts drawn by carabaos big oxlike things with imposing crescent
moon shaped horns. There are a few automobiles, and the occasional military
truck.
For the first couple of hours the road is straight, and runs across
damp table land used for growing rice. Goto Dengo catches glimpses of a body
of water off to the left, and isn't sure whether it is a big lake or part of
the ocean. "Laguna de Bay," says the driver, when he catches Goto looking at
it. "Very beautiful."
Then they turn away from the lake onto a road that climbs gently into
sugar cane territory. Suddenly, Goto Dengo catches sight of a volcano: a
symmetrical cone, black with vegetation, cloaked in mist as though protected
by a mosquito net. The sheer density of the air makes it impossible to judge
size and distance; it could be a little cinder cone just off the road, or a
huge stratovolcano fifty miles away.
Banana trees, coconut palms, oil palms, and date palms begin to appear,
sparsely at first, transforming the landscape into a kind of moist savannah.
The driver pulls into a shambolic roadside store to buy petrol. Goto Dengo
unfolds his jangled body from the sidecar and sits down at a table beneath
an umbrella. He wipes a crust of sweat and dirt from his forehead with the
clean handkerchief that he found in his pocket this morning, and orders
something to drink. They bring him a glass of ice water, a bowl of raw,
locally produced sugar, and a plate of pinball sized calamansi limes. He
squeezes the calamansis into the water, stirs in sugar, and drinks it
convulsively.
The driver comes and joins him; he has cadged a free cup of water from
the proprietors. He always wears a mischievous grin, as if he and Goto Dengo
are sharing a little private joke. He raises an imaginary rifle to his face
and makes a scratching motion with his trigger finger. "You soldier?"
Goto Dengo thinks it over. "No," he says, "I do not deserve to call
myself a soldier."
The driver is astonished. "No soldier? I thought you were soldier. What
are you?"
Goto Dengo thinks about claiming that he is a poet. But he does not
deserve that title either. "I am a digger," he finally says, "I dig holes."
"Ahh," the driver says, as if he understands. "Hey, you want?" He takes
two cigarettes out of his pocket.
Goto Dengo has to laugh at the smoothness of the gambit. "Over here,"
he says to the proprietor. "Cigarettes." The driver grins and puts his
cigarettes back where they came from.
The owner comes over and hands Goto Dengo a pack of Lucky Strikes and a
book of matches. "How much?" says Goto Dengo, and takes out an envelope of
money that he found in his pocket this morning. He takes the bills out and
looks at them: each is printed in English with the words THE JAPANESE
GOVERNMENT and then some number of pesos. There is a picture of a fat
obelisk in the middle, a monument to Jose P. Rizal that stands near the
Manila Hotel.
The proprietor grimaces. "You have silver?"
"Silver? Silver metal?"
"Yes," the driver says.
"Is that what people use?" The driver nods.
"This is no good?" Goto Dengo holds up the crisp, perfect bills.
The owner takes the envelope from Goto Dengo's hand and counts out a
few of the largest denomination of bills, pockets them, and leaves.
Goto Dengo breaks the seal on the pack of Lucky Strikes, raps the pack
on the tabletop a few times, and opens the lid. In addition to the
cigarettes, there is a printed card in there. He can just see the top part
of it: it is a drawing of a man in a military officer's cap. He pulls it out
slowly, revealing an eagle insignia on the cap, a pair of aviator
sunglasses, an enormous corncob pipe, a lapel bearing a line of four stars,
and finally, in block letters, the words I SHALL RETURN.
The driver is looking purposefully nonchalant. Goto Dengo shows him the
card and raises his eyebrows. "It is nothing," the driver says. "Japan very
strong. Japanese people will be here forever. MacArthur good only for
selling cigarettes."
When Goto Dengo opens the book of matches, he finds the same picture of
MacArthur, and the same words, printed on the inside.
After a smoke, they are back on the road. More black cones coalesce,
all around them now, and the road begins to ramble up over hills and down
into valleys. The trees get closer and closer together until they are riding
through a sort of cultivated and inhabited jungle: pineapples close to the
ground, coffee and cocoa bushes in the middle, bananas and coconuts
overhead. They pass through one village after another, each one a cluster of
dilapidated huts huddled around a great white church, built squat and strong
to survive earthquakes. They zigzag around heaps of fresh coconuts piled by
the roadside, spilling out into the right of way. Finally they turn off of
the main road and into a dirt track that winds through the trees. The track
has been rutted by the tires of trucks that are much too big for it. Freshly
snapped off tree branches litter the ground.
They pass through a deserted village. Stray dogs flit in and out of
huts whose front doors swing unlatched. Heaps of young green coconuts rot
under snarls of black flies.
Another mile down the road, the cultivated forest gives way to the wild
kind, and a military checkpoint bars the road. The smile vanishes from the
driver's face.
Goto Dengo states his name to one of the guards. Not knowing why he is
here, he can say nothing else. He is pretty sure now that this is a prison
camp and that he is about to become an inmate. As his eyes adjust he can see
a barrier of barbed wire strung from tree to tree, and a second barrier
inside of that. Peering carefully into the undergrowth he can make out where
they dug bunkers and established pillboxes, he can map out their
interlocking fields of fire in his mind. He sees ropes dangling from the
tops of tall trees where snipers can tie themselves into the branches if
need be. It has all been done according to doctrine, but it has a perfection
that is never seen on a real battlefield, only in training camps.
He is startled to realize that all of these fortifications are designed
to keep people out, not keep them in.
A call comes through on the field telephone, the barrier is raised, and
they are waved through. Half a mile into the jungle they come to a cluster
of tents pitched on platforms made from the freshly hewn logs of the trees
that were cut down to make this clearing. A lieutenant is standing in a
shady patch, waiting for them.
"Lieutenant Goto, I am Lieutenant Mori."
"You have arrived in the Southern Resource Zone recently, Lieutenant
Mori?"
"Yes. How did you know?"
"You are standing directly beneath a coconut tree."
Lieutenant Mori looks straight up in the air to see several wooly brown
cannonballs dangling high over his head. "Ah, so!" he says, and moves out of
the way. "Did you have any conversation with the driver on the way here?"
"Just a few words."
"What did you discuss with him?"
"Cigarettes. Silver."
"Silver?" Lieutenant Mori is very interested in this, so Goto Dengo
recounts their whole conversation.
"You told him that you were a digger?"
"Something like that, yes."
Lieutenant Mori backs off a step, turning to an enlisted man who has
been standing off to the side, and nods. The enlisted man picks the butt of
his rifle up off the ground, wheels the weapon around to a horizontal
position, and turns towards the driver. He covers the distance in about six
steps, accelerating to a full sprint, and cuts loose with a throaty roar as
he drives his bayonet into the driver's slim body. The victim is picked up
off his feet, then sprawls on his back with a low gasp. The soldier
straddles him and thrusts the bayonet into his torso several more times,
each stroke making a wet hissing sound as metal slides between walls of
meat.
The driver ends up sprawled motionless on the ground, jetting blood in
all directions.
"The indiscretion will not be held against you," says Lieutenant Mori
brightly, "because you did not know the nature of your new assignment.
"Pardon me?"
"Digging. You are here to dig, Goto san." He snaps to attention and
bows deeply. "Let me be the first to congratulate you. Your assignment is a
very important one."
Goto Dengo returns the bow, not sure how deep to make it. "So I'm not "
He gropes for words. In trouble? A pariah? Condemned to death? "I'm not a
low person here?"
"You are a very high person here, Goto san. Please come with me."
Lieutenant Mori gestures towards one of the tents.
As Goto Dengo walks away, he hears the young motorcycle driver mumble
something.
"What did he say?" Lieutenant Mori asks.
"He said, 'Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.' It's a
religious thing," Goto Dengo explains.
Chapter 63 CALIFORNIA
Half of the people who work at SFO, San Francisco International
Airport, now seem to be Filipino, which certainly helps to ease the shock of
reentry. Randy gets singled out, as he always does, for a thorough luggage
search by the exclusively Anglo customs officials. Men traveling by
themselves with practically no luggage seem to irritate the American
authorities. It's not so much that they think you are a drug trafficker as
that you fit, in the most schematic possible way, the profile of the most
pathologically optimistic conceivable drug trafficker, and hence practically
force them to investigate you. Irritated that you have forced their hand in
this manner, they want to teach you a lesson: travel with a wife and four
kids next time, or check a few giant trundling bags, or something, man! What
were you thinking? Never mind that Randy is coming in from a place where
DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS is posted all over the airport the way CAUTION:
WET FLOOR is here.
The most Kafkaesque moment is, as always, when the customs official
asks what he does for a living, and he has to devise an answer that will not
sound like the frantic improvisations of a drug mule with a belly full of
ominously swelling heroin stuffed condoms. "I work for a private
telecommunications provider" seems to be innocuous enough. "Oh, like a phone
company?" says the customs official, as if she's having none of it. "The
phone market isn't really that available to us," Randy says, "so we provide
other communications services. Mostly data."
"Does that involve a lot of traveling around from place to place then?"
asks the customs official, paging through the luridly stamped back pages of
Randy's passport. She makes eye contact with a more senior customs official
who sidles over towards them. Randy now feels himself getting nervous,
exactly the way your drug mule would, and fights the impulse to scrub his
damp palms against his pant legs, which would probably guarantee him a trip
through the magnetic tunnel of a CAT scanner, a triple dose of mint flavored
laxative, and several hours of straining over a stainless steel evidence
bucket. "Yes, it does," Randy says.
The senior customs official, trying to be unobtrusive and low key in a
way that makes Randy stifle a sort of gasping, pained outburst of laughter,
begins to flip through some appalling communications industry magazine that
Randy stuffed into his briefcase on his way out the door back in Manila. The
word INTERNET appears at least five times on the front cover. Randy stares
directly into the eyes of the female customs official and says, "The
Internet." Totally factitious understanding dawns on the woman's face, and
her eyes ping bosswards. The boss, still deeply absorbed in an article about
the next generation of high speed routers, shoves out his lower lip and
nods, like every other nineties American male who senses that knowing this
stuff is now as intrinsic to maleness as changing flat tires was to Dad. "I
hear that's really exciting now," the woman says in a completely different
tone of voice, and begins scooping Randy's stuff together into a big pile so
that he can repack it. Suddenly the spell is broken, Randy is a member in
good standing of American society again, having cheerfully endured this
process of being ritually goosed by the Government. He feels a strong
impulse to drive straight to the nearest gun store and spend about ten
thousand dollars. Not that he wants to hurt anyone; it's just that any kind
of government authority gives him the creeps now. He's probably been hanging
out too much with the ridiculously heavily armed Tom Howard. First a
hostility to rainforests, now a desire to own an automatic weapon; where is
this all going?
Avi is waiting for him, a tall pale figure standing at the velvet rope
surrounded by hundreds of Filipinas in a state of emotional riot,
brandishing gladiola spears like medieval pikemen. Avi has his hands in the
pockets of his floor skimming coat, and keeps his head turned in Randy's
direction but is sort of concentrating on a point about halfway between
them, frowning in an owlish way. This is the same frown that Randy's
grandmother used to wear when she was teasing apart a tangle of string from
her junk drawer. Avi adopts it when he is doing basically the same thing to
some new complex of information. He must have read Randy's e mail message
about the gold. It occurs to Randy that he missed a great opportunity for a
practical joke: he could have loaded up his bag with a couple of lead bricks
and then handed it to Avi and completely blown his mind. Too late. Avi
rotates around his vertical axis as Randy comes abreast of him and then
breaks into a stride that matches Randy's pace. There is some unarticulated
protocol that dictates when Randy and Avi will shake hands, when they will
hug, and when they will just act like they've only been separated for a few
minutes. A recent exchange of e mail seems to constitute a virtual reunion
that obviates any hand shaking or hugging. "You were right about the cheesy
dialog," is the first thing Avi says. "You're spending too much time with
Shaftoe, seeing things his way. This was not an attempt to send you a
message, at least not in the way Shaftoe means."
"What's your interpretation, then?"
"How would you go about establishing a new currency?" Avi asks.
Randy frequently overhears snatches of business related conversation
from people he passes in airports, and it's always about how did the big
presentation go, or who's on the short list to replace the departing CFO, or
something. He prides himself on what he believes to be the much higher
plane, or at least the much more bizarre subject matter, of his interchanges
with Avi. They are walking together around the slow arc of SFO's inner ring.
A whiff of soy sauce and ginger drifts out of a restaurant and fogs Randy's
mind, making him unsure, for a moment, which hemisphere he's in.
"Uh, it's not something I have given much thought to," he says. "Is
that what we are about now? Are we going to establish a new currency?"
"Well obviously someone needs to establish one that doesn't suck," Avi
says.
"Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?" Randy asks.
"Don't you ever read the newspapers?" Avi grabs Randy by the elbow and
drags him over towards a newsstand. Several papers are running front page
stories about crashing Southeast Asian currencies, but this isn't all that
new.
"I know currency fluctuations are important to Epiphyte," Randy says.
"But my god, it's so tedious I just want to run away.
"Well, it's not tedious to her," Avi says, yanking out three different
newspapers that have all decided to run the same wire service photograph: an
adorable Thai moppet standing in a mile long queue in front of a bank,
holding up a single American dollar bill.
"I know it's a big deal for some of our customers," Randy says, "I just
didn't really think of it as a business opportunity."
"No, think about it," Avi says. He counts out a few dollar bills of his
own to pay for the newspapers, then swerves towards an exit. They enter a
tunnel that leads to a parking garage. "The sultan feels that "
"You've been just sort of hanging out with the sultan?"
"Mostly with Pragasu. Will you let me finish? We decided to set up the
Crypt, right?"
"Right."
"What is the Crypt? Do you remember its original stated function?"
"Secure, anonymous, unregulated data storage. A data haven."
"Yeah. A bit bucket. And we envisioned many applications for this."
"Boy, did we ever," Randy says, remembering many long nights around
kitchen tables and hotel rooms, writing versions of the business plan that
are now as ancient and as lost as the holographs of the Four Gospels.
"One of these was electronic banking. Heck, we even predicted it might
be one of the major applications. But whenever a business plan first makes
contact with the actual market the real world suddenly all kinds of stuff
becomes clear. You may have envisioned half a dozen potential markets for
your product, but as soon as you open your doors, one just explodes from the
pack and becomes so instantly important that good business sense dictates
that you abandon the others and concentrate all your efforts."
"And that's what happened with the e banking thing," Randy says.
"Yes. During our meetings at the Sultan's Palace," Avi says. "Before
those meetings, we envisioned well you know what we envisioned. What
actually happened was that the room was packed with these guys who were
exclusively interested in the e banking thing. That was our first clue.
Then, this!" He holds up his newspapers, whacks the dollar brandishing
moppet with the back of his hand. "So, that's the business we're in now."
"We are bankers," Randy says. He will have to keep saying this to
himself for a while in order to believe it, like, "We are striving with all
our might to uphold the goals of the 23rd Party Congress." We are bankers.
We are bankers.
"Banks used to issue their own currencies. You can see these old
banknotes in the Smithsonian. 'First National Bank of South Bumfuck will
remit ten pork bellies to the bearer,' or whatever. That had to stop because
commerce became nonlocal you needed to be able to take your money with you
when you went out West, or whatever."
"But if we're online, the whole world is local," Randy says.
"Yeah. So all we need is something to back the currency. Gold would be
good."
"Gold? Are you joking? Isn't that kind of old fashioned?"
"It was until all of the unbacked currencies in Southeast Asia went
down the toilet."
"Avi, so far I am still kind of confused, frankly. You seem to be
working your way around to telling me that my little trip to see the gold in
the jungle was no coincidence. But how can we use that gold to back our
currency?"
Avi shrugs as if it's such a minor detail he hasn't even bothered to
think about it. "That's just a deal making issue."
"Oh, god."
"These people who sent you a message want to get into business with us.
Your trip to see the gold was a credit check."
They are walking through a tunnel toward the garage, stuck behind an
extended clan of Southeast Asians in elaborate headdresses. Perhaps the
entire remaining gene pool of some nearly extinct mountain dwelling minority
group. Their belongings are in giant boxes wrapped in iridescent pink
synthetic twine, balanced atop airport luggage carts.
"A credit check." Randy always hates it when he gets so far behind Avi
that all he can do is lamely repeat phrases.
"You know how, when you and Charlene bought that house, the lender had
to look at it first?"
"I bought it for cash."
"Okay, okay, but in general, before a bank will issue a mortgage on a
house, they will inspect it. Not in great detail, necessarily. They'll just
have some executive of the bank drive by the property to verify that it
exists and is where the documents claim it is, and so on.
"So, that's what my journey to the jungle was about?"
"Yeah. Some of the potential, uh, participants in the project just
wanted to make it clear to us that they were, in fact, in possession of this
gold."
"I really have to wonder what 'possession' denotes in this case."
"Me too," Avi says. "I've been sort of puzzling over that one." Hence,
Randy thinks, the frowny look in the airport.
"I just thought they wanted to sell it," Randy says.
"Why? Why sell it?"
"To liquidate it. So they could buy real estate. Or five thousand pairs
of shoes. Or something."
Avi scrunches his face in disappointment. "Oh, Randy, that is really
unworthy, alluding to the Marcoses. The gold you saw is pocket change
compared to what Ferdinand Marcos dug up. The people who set up your trip to
the jungle are satellites of satellites of him."
"Well. Consider it a cry for help," Randy says. "Words seem to be
passing back and forth between us, but I understand less and less."
Avi opens his mouth to respond, but just then the animists trigger
their car alarm. Unable to propitiate it, they form a circle around the car
and grin at one another. Avi and Randy pick up their pace and get well away
from it.
Avi stops and straightens, as if pulled up short. "Speaking of not
understanding things," he says, "you need to communicate with that girl. Amy
Shaftoe."
"Has she been communicating with you?"
"In the course of twenty minutes' phone conversation, she has deeply
and eternally bonded with Kia," Avi says.
"I would believe that without hesitation."
"It wasn't even like they got to know each other. It was like they knew
each other in a previous life and had just gotten back in touch."
"Yeah. So?"
"Kia now feels bound by duty and honor to present a united front with
America Shaftoe."
"It all hangs together," Randy says.
"Acting sort of like Amy's emotional agent or lawyer, she has made it
clear to me that we, Epiphyte Corporation, owe Amy our full attention and
concern."
"And what does Amy want?"
"That was my question," Avi says, "and I was made to feel very bad for
asking it. Whatever it is that we that you owe to Amy is something so
obvious that merely manifesting a need to verbalize it is... just...
really..."
"Shabby. Insensitive."
"Coarse. Brutish."
"A really transparent, toddler level exercise in the cheapest kind of,
of. . ."
"Of evasion of personal responsibility for one's own gross misdeeds."
"Kia was rolling her eyes, I imagine. Her lip was sort of curled."
"She drew breath as if to give me a good piece of her mind but then
thought better of it."
"Not because you're her boss. But because you would never understand."
"This is just one of those evils that has to be sort of accepted and
swallowed, by any mature woman who's been around the block."
"Who knows the harsh realities. Yeah," Randy says.
"Okay, you can tell Kia that her client's needs and demands have been
communicated to the guilty party "
"Have they?"
"Tell her that the fact that her client has needs and demands has been
heavy handedly insinuated to me and that it is understood that the ball is
in my court."
"And we can stand down to some kind of detente while a response is
prepared?"
"Certainly. Kia can return to her normal duties for the time being."
"Thank you, Randy."
Avi's Range Rover is parked in the most remote part of the roof of the
parking ramp, in the center of about twenty five empty parking spaces that
form a sort of security buffer zone. When they have traversed about half of
the glacis, the car's headlights flutter, and Randy hears the preparatory
snap of a sound system being energized. "The Range Rover has picked us up on
Doppler radar," Avi says hastily.
The Range Rover speaketh in a fearsome Oz like voice cranked up to
burning bush decibel levels. "You are being tracked by Cerberus! Please
alter your course immediately!"
"I can't believe you bought one of these things," Randy says.
"You have encroached on the Cerberus defensive perimeter! Move back.
Move back," says the Range Rover. "An armed response team is being placed on
standby."
"It is the only cryptographically sound car alarm system," Avi says, as
if that settles the matter. He digs out a keychain attached to a black
polycarbonate fob with the same dimensions, and number of buttons, as a
television remote control. He enters a long series of digits and cuts off
the voice in the middle of proclaiming that Randy and Avi are being recorded
on a digital video camera that is sensitive into the near infra red range.
"Normally it doesn't do that," Avi says. "I had it set to its maximum
alert status."
"What's the worst that could happen? Someone would steal your car and
the insurance company would buy you a new one?"
"I couldn't care less if it gets stolen. The worst that could happen
would be a car bomb, or, not quite as bad, someone putting a bug in my car
and listening to everything I say."
Avi drives Randy over the San Andreas Fault to his place in Pacifica,
which is where Randy stores his car while he's overseas. Avi's wife Devorah
is in at the doctor's for a routine prenatal and all the kids are either at
school or being hustled around the neighborhood by their tag team duo of
tough Israeli nannies. Avi's nannies have the souls of war hardened Soviet
paratroopers in the bodies of nubile eighteen year old girls. The house has
been utterly abandoned to kid raising. The formal dining room has been
converted to a nanny barracks with bunk beds hammered together from
unfinished two by fours, the parlor filled with cribs and changing tables,
and every square centimeter of cheap shag carpet in the place has been
infused with a few dozen flakes of glitter, in various festive colors, which
if they even cared about getting rid of it could only be removed through
direct microsurgical extraction, one flake at a time. Avi plies Randy with a
sandwich of turkey bologna and ketchup on generic Wonderoid bread. It is
still too early in Manila for Randy to call Amy and make amends for whatever
he did wrong. Down below them, in Avi's basement office, a fax machine
shrieks and rustles like a bird in a coffee can. A laminated CIA map of
Sierra Leone is spread out on the table, peeking out here and there through
numerous overlying strata of dirty dishes, newspapers, coloring books, and
drafts of the Epiphyte(2) Business Plan. Post it notes are stuck to the map
from place to place. Written on each note, in Avi's distinctive triple ought
Rapidograph drafting pen hand, is a latitude and longitude with lots of
significant digits, and some kind of precis of what happened there: "5
women, 2 men, 4 children, with machetes photos:" and then serial numbers
from Avi's database.
Randy was a little groggy on the drive over, and was irritable about
the inappropriate daylight, but after the sandwich his metabolism tries to
get into the spirit of things. He has learned to surf these mysterious
endocrinological swells. "I'm going to get going," he says, and stands.
"Your overall plan, again?"
"First I go south," Randy says, superstitiously not even wanting to
utter the name of the place where he used to live. "For no more than a day,
I hope. Then jet lag will land on me like a plunging safe and I will hole up
somewhere and watch basketball through the vee of my feet for maybe a day.
Then I head north to the Palouse country."
Avi raises his eyebrows. "Home?"
"Yeah."
"Hey, before I forget could you look for information on the Whitmans
while you're up there?"
"You mean the missionaries?"
"Yeah. They came out to the Palouse to convert the Cayuse Indians, who
were these magnificent horsemen. They had the best of intentions, but they
accidentally gave them measles. Annihilated the whole tribe."
"Does that really land within the boundaries of your obsession?
Inadvertent genocide?"
"Anomalous cases have heightened utility in that they help us delineate
the boundaries of the field."
"I'll see what I can find about the Whitmans."
"May I inquire," Avi says, "why you are going up there? Family visit?"
"My grandmother is moving to a managed care facility. Her children are
convening to divide up her furniture and so on, which I find a little
ghoulish, but it's nobody's fault and it has to be done."
"And you are going to participate?"
"I am going to avoid it as much as I can, because it's probably going
to be a catfight. Years from now, family members will still not be speaking
to each other because they didn't get Mom's Gomer Bolstrood credenza."
"What is it with Anglo Saxons and furniture? Could you explain that to
me?"
"I am going because we found a piece of paper in a briefcase in a
sunken Nazi submarine in the Palawan Passage that says, 'WATERHOUSE LAVENDER
ROSE.'"
Avi looks baffled now, in a way that Randy finds satisfying. He gets up
and climbs into his car and starts driving south, down the coast, the slow
and beautiful way.
Chapter 64 ORGAN
Lawrence Waterhouse's libido is suppressed for about a week by the pain
and swelling in his jaw. Then the pain and swelling in his groin surges into
the fore, and he begins searching his memories of the dance, wondering if he
made any progress with Mary cCmndhd.
He wakes up suddenly at four o'clock one Sunday morning, clammily
coated from his nipples to his knees. Rod is still sleeping soundly, thank
god, and so if Waterhouse did any moaning or calling out of names during his
dream, Rod's probably not aware of it. Waterhouse begins trying to clean
himself off without making a lot of noise. He doesn't even want to think
about how he's going to explain the condition of the sheets to Who Will
Launder Them. "It was completely innocent, Mrs. McTeague. I dreamed that I
came downstairs in my pajamas and that Mary was sitting in the parlor in her
uniform, drinking tea, and she turned and looked me in the eye, and then I
just couldn't control myself and aaaaAAAHHH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH!
HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! And then I woke up and just look at the mess.
Mrs. McTeague (and other old ladies like her all around the world) does
the laundry only because it is her role in the giant Ejaculation Control
Conspiracy which, as Waterhouse is belatedly realizing, controls the entire
planet. No doubt she has a clipboard down in the cellar, next to her mangle,
where she marks down the frequency and volume of the ejaculations of her
four boarders. The data sheets are mailed into some Bletchley Park type of
operation somewhere (Waterhouse guesses it's disguised as a large convent in
upstate New York), where the numbers from all round the world are tabulated
on Electrical Till Corporation machines and printouts piled up on carts that
are wheeled into the offices of the high priestesses of the conspiracy,
dressed in heavily starched white raiments, embroidered with the emblem of
the conspiracy: a penis caught in a mangle. The priestesses review the data
carefully. They observe that Hitler still isn't getting any, and debate
whether letting him have some would calm him down a little bit or just give
him license to run further out of control. It will take months for the name
of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse to come to the top of the list, and months
for orders to be sent out to Brisbane and even then, the orders may condemn
him to another year of waiting for Mary cCmndhd to show up in his dreams
with a teacup.
Mrs. McTeague, and other ECC members (such as Mary cCmndhd and
basically all of the other young women) are offended by easy girls,
prostitutes, and whorehouses, not for religious reasons, but because they
provide a refuge where men can have ejaculations that are not controlled,
metered, or monitored in any way. Prostitutes are turncoats, collaborators.
All of this comes into Waterhouse's mind as he lies in his damp bed
between four and six o'clock in the morning, considering his place in the
world with the crystalline clarity that can only be obtained by getting a
good night's sleep and then venting several weeks' jism production. He has
reached a fork in the road.
Last night, before Rod turned in, he shined his shoes, explaining that
tomorrow morning he had to be up bright and early for church. Now,
Waterhouse knows what that means, having spent many a Sabbath on Qwghlm,
cringing and blushing under the glares of the locals, who were outraged that
he appeared to be running the huffduff equipment on the day of rest. He has
seen them shuffling into their morbid, thousand year old black stone chapel
on Sunday mornings for their three hour services. Hell, Waterhouse even
lived in a Qwghlmian chapel for several months. Its gloom suffused his whole
being.
Going to church with Rod would mean giving in to the ECC, becoming
their minion. The alternative is the whorehouse.
Even though he grew up in churches, raised by church people, Waterhouse
(as must be obvious by this point) never really understood their attitudes
about sex. Why did they get so hung up on that one issue, when there were
others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence?
Now, finally, he gets it: the churches are merely one branch of the
ECC. And what they are doing, when they fulminate about sex, is trying to
make sure that all the young people fall in line with the ECC's program.
So, what is the end result of the ECC's efforts? Waterhouse stares at
the ceiling, which is starting to become fuzzily visible as the sun rises in
the west, or the north, or wherever the hell it rises here in the Southern
Hemisphere. He takes a quick inventory of the world and finds that basically
the ECC is running the entire planet, good countries and bad countries
alike. That all successful and respected men are minions of the ECC, or at
least are so scared of it that they pretend to be. Non ECC members live on
the fringes of society, like prostitutes, or have been driven deep
underground and must waste tremendous amounts of time and energy keeping up
a false front. If you knuckle under and become a minion of the ECC, you get
to have a career, a family, kids, wealth, house, pot roasts, clean laundry,
and the respect of all the other ECC minions. You have to pay dues in the
form of chronic nagging sexual irritation which can only be relieved by, and
at the discretion and convenience of, one person, the person designated for
this role by the ECC: your wife. On the other hand, if you reject the ECC
and its works, you can't, by definition, have a family, and your career
options are limited to pimp, gangster, and forty year enlisted sailor.
Hell, it's not even that bad of a conspiracy. They build churches and
universities, educate kids, install swingsets in parks. Sometimes they throw
a war and kill ten or twenty million people, but it's a drop in the bucket
compared to stuff like influenza which the ECC campaigns against by nagging
everyone to wash their hands and cover their mouths when sneezing.
The alarm clock. Rod rolls out of bed like it's a Nip air raid.
Waterhouse stares at the ceiling for another few minutes, dithering. But he
knows where he's going, and there's no point in wasting any more time. He's
going to church, and not exactly because he has renounced Satan and all his
works, but because he wants to fuck Mary. He almost can't help flinching
when he says (to himself) this terrible sounding thing. But the weird thing
about church is that it provides a special context within which it is
perfectly okay to want to fuck Mary. As long as he goes to church, he can
want to fuck Mary as much as he wants, he can spend all of his time, in and
out of church, thinking about fucking Mary. He can let her know that he
wants to fuck her as long as he finds a more oblique way of phrasing it. And
if he jumps through certain hoops (hoops of gold) he can even fuck Mary in
actuality, and it will all be perfectly acceptable at no time will he have
to feel the slightest trace of shame or guilt.
He rolls out of bed, startling Rod, who (being some sort of jungle
commando) is easily startled. "I'm going to fuck your cousin until the bed
collapses into a pile of splinters," Waterhouse says.
Actually, what he says is "I'm going to church with you." But
Waterhouse, the cryptologist, is engaging in a bit of secret code work here.
He is using a newly invented code, which only he knows. It will be very
dangerous if the code is ever broken, but this is impossible since there is
only one copy, and it's in Waterhouse's head. Turing might be smart enough
to break the code anyway, but he's in England, and he's on Waterhouse's
side, so he'd never tell
A few minutes later, Waterhouse and cCmndhd go downstairs, headed for
"church," which in Waterhouse's secret code, means "headquarters of the Mary
fucking campaign of 1944."
As they step out into the cool morning air they can hear Mrs. McTeague
bustling into their bedroom to strip their beds and inspect their sheets.
Waterhouse smiles, thinking that he has just gotten away with something; the
damning and overwhelming evidence found on his bed linens will be neatly
cancelled out by the fact that he got up early and went to church.
He is expecting a prayer group meeting in the basement of a dry goods
store, but it turns out that the Inner Qwghlmians got banished to Australia
in droves. Many of them settled in Brisbane. In the downtown they managed to
construct a United Ecclesiastical Church out of rough hewn beige sandstone.
It would look big, solid, and almost opulent if it were not directly across
the street from the Universal Ecclesiastical Church, which is twice as big
and made of smooth faced limestone. Outer Qwghlmians, dressed in dour blacks
and greys, and frequently in navy uniforms, shuffle up the wide, time
blackened steps of the Universal Ecclesiastical Church, occasionally turning
their heads to throw disapproving looks across the street at the Inner
Qwghlmians, who are actually dressed for the season (it is summer in
Australia) or in Army uniforms. Waterhouse can see that what really pisses
them off is the sound of the music that vents from the United Ecclesiastical
Church whenever its red enameled front doors are hauled open. The choir is
practicing and the organ is playing. But he can tell from half a block away
that something's wrong with the instrument.
The look of the Inner Qwghlmian women in their pastel dresses and
bright bonnets is reassuring. These do not look like people who engage in
human sacrifice. Waterhouse tries to spring lightly up the steps as if he
really wants to be here. Then he remembers that he does want to be here,
because it is all part of his plan to fuck Mary.
The churchgoers are all talking in Qwghlmian, greeting each other and
saying nice things to Rod, who is evidently well thought of. Waterhouse has
no idea what they are saying, and finds it comforting to know that most of
them don't either. He strolls into the central aisle of the church, stares
down its vault to the altar, the choir behind it, singing beautifully; Mary
is there, in the alto section, exercising those pipes of hers, which are
framed attractively by the satin stole of her chorister's uniform. Above and
behind the choir, a big old pipe organ spreads its tarnished wings, like a
stuffed and mounted eagle that's been sitting in a damp attic for fifty
years. It wheezes and hisses asthmatically, and emits bizarre, discordant
drones when certain stops are used; this happens when a valve is stuck open,
and it is called a cipher. Waterhouse knows all about ciphers.
Notwithstanding the pathetic organ, the choir is spectacular, and
builds to a stirring six part harmony climax as Waterhouse ambles up the
aisle, wondering whether his erection is visible. A shaft of light comes in
through the stained glass rosette above the organ pipes and pinions
Waterhouse in its gaudy beam. Or maybe it just feels that way, because
Waterhouse has it all figured out now.
Waterhouse is going to fix the church's organ. This project will be
sure to have side benefits for his own organ, a single pipe instrument that
needs attention just as badly.
It turns out that, like all ethnic groups that have been consistently
screwed for a long time, the Inner Qwghlmians have great music. Not only
that, they actually have fun in church. The minister actually has a sense of
humor. It's about as tolerable as church could ever be. Waterhouse hardly
pays attention because he is doing a lot of staring: first, at Mary, then at
the organ (trying to figure out how it is engineered) then back to Mary for
a while.
He is outraged and offended, after the service, when the powers that be
are reluctant to let him, a total stranger and a Yank to boot, begin ripping
off access panels and meddling with the inner workings of the organ. The
minister is a good judge of character a little too good to suit Waterhouse.
The organist (and hence ultimate authority on all matters organic) looks to
have been shipped over here with the very first load of convicts after
having been convicted, in the Old Bailey, of talking too loud, bumping into
things, not tying his shoelaces properly, and having dandruff so in excess
of Society's unwritten standards as to offend the dignity of the Queen and
of the Empire.
It all leads to an unbearably tense and complicated meeting in a Sunday
school classroom near the offices of the minister, who is called the Rev.
Dr. John Mnrh. He is a stout red faced chap who clearly would prefer to have
his head in a tun of ale but who is putting up with all of this because it's
good for his immortal soul.
This meeting essentially becomes a venue within which the organist, Mr.
Drkh, can vent his opinions on the sneakiness of the Japanese, why the
invention of the well tempered tuning system was a bad idea and how all
music written since has been a shabby compromise, the sterling qualities of
the General, the numerological significance of the lengths of various organ
pipes, how the excessive libido of American troops might be controlled with
certain dietary supplements, how the hauntingly beautiful modes of
traditional Qwghlmian music are particularly ill suited to the well tempered
tuning system, how the king's dodgy Germanic relatives are plotting to take
over the Empire and turn it over to Hitler, and, first and foremost, that
Johann Sebastian Bach was a bad musician, a worse composer, an evil man, a
philanderer, and the figurehead of a worldwide conspiracy, headquartered in
Germany, that has been slowly taking over the world for the last several
hundred years, using the well tempered tuning system as a sort of carrier
frequency on which its ideas (which originate with the Bavarian illuminati)
can be broadcast into the minds of everyone who listens to music especially
the music of Bach. And by the way how this conspiracy may best be fought off
by playing and listening to traditional Qwghlmian music, which, in case Mr.
Drkh didn't make this perfectly clear, is wholly incompatible with well
tempered tuning because of its haunting and beautiful, but numerologically
perfect, scale.
"Your thoughts on numerology are most interesting," Waterhouse says
loudly, running Mr. Drkh off the rhetorical road. "I myself studied with
Drs. Turing and von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Princeton."
Father John snaps awake, and Mr. Drkh looks as if he's just taken a
fifty caliber round in the small of his back. Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a
long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about
to go down in flames.
In general, Waterhouse isn't good at just winging it, but he's tired
and pissed off and horny, and this is a fucking war, and sometimes you have
to. He mounts the podium, dives for a round of chalk, and starts hammering
equations onto the blackboard like an ack ack gun. He uses well tempered
tuning as a starting point, takes off from there into the deepest realms of
advanced number theory, circles back all of a sudden to the Qwghlmian modal
scale, just to keep them on their toes, and then goes screaming straight
back into number theory again. In the process, he actually stumbles across
some interesting material that he doesn't think has been covered in the
literature yet, and so he diverts from strict bullshitting for a few minutes
to explore this thing and actually prove something that he thinks could
probably be published in a mathematical journal, if he just gets around to
typing it up properly. It reminds him that he's not half bad at this stuff
when he's recently ejaculated, and that in turn just fuels his resolve to
get this Mary fucking thing worked out.
Finally, he turns around, for the first time since he started. Father
John and Mr. Drkh are both dumbfounded.
"Let me just demonstrate!" Waterhouse blurts, and strides out of the
room and doesn't bother looking back. Back in the church, he goes to the
console, blows the dandruff off the keys, hits the main power switch. The
electric motors come on, somewhere back behind the screen, and the
instrument begins to complain and whine. No matter it can all be drowned
out. He scans the rows of stops he already knows what this organ's got,
because he's listened and deconstructed. He starts yanking out knobs.
Now Waterhouse is going to demonstrate that Bach can sound good even
played on Mr. Drkh's organ, if you choose the right key. Just as Father John
and Mr. Drkh are about halfway up the aisle, Waterhouse slams into that old
chestnut, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, except that he's transposing it into
C sharp minor as he goes along, because (according to a very elegant
calculation that just came into his head as he was running up the aisle of
the church) it ought to sound good that way when played in Mr. Drkh's
mangled tuning system.
The transposition is an awkward business at first and he hits a few
wrong notes, but then it comes naturally and he transitions from the toccata
into the fugue with tremendous verve and confidence. Gouts of dust and
salvos of mouse droppings explode from the pipes as Waterhouse invokes whole
ranks that have not been used in decades. Many of these are big bad loud
reed stops that are difficult to tune. Waterhouse senses the pumping
machinery straining to keep up with this unprecedented demand for power. The
choir loft is suffused with a brilliant glow as the dust flung out of the
choked pipes fills the air and catches the light coming through the rose
window. Waterhouse muffs a pedal line, spitefully kicks off his terrible
shoes and begins to tread the pedals the way he used to back in Virginia,
with his bare feet, the trajectory of the bass line traced out across the
wooden pedals in lines of blood from his exploded blisters. This baby has
some nasty thirty two foot reed stops in the pedals, real earthshakers,
probably put there specifically to irritate the Outer Qwghlmians across the
street. None of the people who go to this church have ever heard these stops
called into action, but Waterhouse puts them to good use now, firing off
power chords like salvos from the mighty guns of the battleship Iowa.
All during the service, during the sermon and the scripture readings
and the prayers, when he wasn't thinking about fucking Mary, he was thinking
about how he was going to fix this organ. He was thinking back to the organ
he worked on in Virginia, how the stops enabled the flow of air to the
different ranks of pipes and how the keys on the keyboards activated all of
the pipes that were enabled. He has this whole organ visualized in his head
now, and while he is pounding through to the end of the figure, the top of
his skull comes off, the filtered red light pours in, he sees the entire
machine in his mind, as if in an exploded draftsman's view. Then it
transforms itself into a slightly different machine an organ that runs on
electricity, with ranks of vacuum tubes here, and a grid of relays there. He
has the answer, now, to Turing's question, the question of how to take a
pattern of binary data and bury it into the circuitry of a thinking machine
so that it can be later disinterred.
Waterhouse knows how to make electric memory. He must go write a letter
to Alan instantly!
"Excuse me," he says, and runs from the church. On his way out, he
brushes past a small young woman who has been standing there gaping at his
performance. When he is several blocks away, he realizes two things: that he
is walking down the street barefoot, and that the young woman was Mary
cCmndhd. He will have to circle back later and get his shoes and maybe fuck
her. But first things first!
Chapter 65 HOME
Randy opens his eyes from out of a sliding nightmare. He was in his
car, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway, when something went wrong with
the steering. The car began to wander, first towards the vertical stone
cliff on the left and then towards the sheer drop to huge jagged rocks
projecting from thrashing waves on the right. Big rocks were rolling
nonchalantly across the highway. He could not steer; the only way to stop
moving is to open his eyes.
He is lying on a sleeping bag on a polished maple floor that is not
level, and that is why he had the sliding dream. The eye/inner ear conflict
makes his body spasm, he flails to plant both hands against the plane of the
floor.
America Shaftoe sits, jeaned and barefoot, in the blue light of a
window, bobby pins sprouting from chapped lips, looking at her face in an
isosceles triangle of mirror whose scalpel sharp edges depress but do not
cut the pink skin of her fingertips. A web of lead ropes sags in the empty
windowframe, a few lozenges of beveled glass still trapped in the
interstices. Randy lifts his head slightly and looks downhill, into the
corner of the room, and sees a great heap of swept shards. He rolls over,
looks out the door and across the hallway and into what used to be
Charlene's home office. Robin and Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe are sharing a
double mattress in there, a shotgun and a rifle, a couple of big black cop
flashlights, a Bible and a calculus textbook neatly arranged on the floor
next to them.
The nightmare's feeling of panic, of needing to go somewhere and do
something, subsides. Lying here in his ruined house listening to Amy's brush
whistle through her hair, throwing off electrostatic snaps, is one of the
calmer moments he's had.
"You just about ready to hit the road?" Amy says.
Across the hallway, one of the Shaftoe boys sits up without making any
sound. The other opens his eyes, lifts his head, glances towards the
weapons, lights, and Good Book, then relaxes again.
"I got a fire going out in the yard," Amy says, "and some water
boiling. Didn't think it was safe to use the fireplace."
Everyone slept in their clothes last night. All they have to do is put
their shoes on and piss out the windows. The Shaftoes move about the place
faster than Randy does, not because they are more surefooted, but because
they never saw this house when it was level and sound. But Randy lived here
for years and years when it was, and his mind thinks it knows its way around
the place. Going to bed last night, his biggest fear was that he would get
up drowsily in the middle of the night and try to go downstairs. The house
used to have a beautiful winding stairway which has now telescoped into the
basement. Last night, by dint of pulling the U Haul onto the front lawn and
aiming its headlights directly in through windows (whose cracks and jags and
facets refracted the light gorgeously), they were able to clamber into the
basement and find a ten foot aluminum extension ladder which they used to
get into the upstairs. Once they had gotten up, they pulled the ladder up
with them, like a drawbridge, so that even if looters did enter the
downstairs, the Shaftoe boys would be able to sit at the top of what used to
be the stairway and pick them off leisurely with the long guns (this
scenario seemed plausible last night, in the dark, but now strikes Randy as
a bumpkin's reverie).
Amy's turned some balusters from the veranda's railing into a nice
bonfire in the front yard. She stomps a crushed saucepan back into shape
with a small number of deftly aimed heel strokes and cooks oatmeal. The
Shaftoe boys throw whatever looks potentially useful into the back of the U
Haul, and check the oil in their hot rod.
All of Charlene's stuff is in New Haven now. In Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik's
house, to be specific. He has generously offered to let her stay there while
she looks for a house; Randy predicts she'll never leave. All of Randy's
stuff is in Manila or in Avi's basement, and all of the disputed items are
in a storage locker at the edge of town.
Randy spent most of yesterday evening cruising around town checking in
on various old friends to see if they were all right. Amy went with him,
taking a voyeuristic interest in this tour of his former life, and, from a
social point of view, complicating things incalculably. In any case, they
didn't make it back to the house until after dark, and so this is Randy's
first chance to see the damage in full daylight. He orbits it again and
again, amused, almost to the point of giggling, by how perfectly destroyed
it is, taking pictures with a disposable camera he borrowed from Marcus
Aurelius Shaftoe, trying to see if there is anything left that could
conceivably be worth money.
The house's stone foundation rises three feet above grade. The wooden
walls of the house were built on top of that, but not actually attached to
it (a common practice in the old days, which, at the time he blew town, was
on Randy's list of things to fix before the next earthquake). When the earth
began to oscillate side to side at 2:16 in the afternoon yesterday, the
foundation oscillated right along with it, but the house wanted to stay
where it was. Eventually the foundation wall moved right out from underneath
the house, one corner of which dropped three feet to the ground. Randy could
probably estimate the amount of kinetic energy the house picked up during
this fall, and convert it to an equivalent in pounds of dynamite or swings
of a wrecking ball, but it would be a nerdy exercise, since he can see the
effects for himself. Let's just say that when it smashed to earth the whole
structure suffered a vicious shock. The parallel, upright joists in the
floors all went horizontal, collapsing like dominoes. Every window and
doorframe instantly became a parallelogram, so all of the glass broke, and
in particular all of the leaded glass was rent asunder. The stairway fell
into the basement. The chimney, which had been in need of tuck pointing for
some time, sprayed bricks all over the yard. Most of the plumbing was
wrecked, which means that the heating system is history, since the house
used radiators. The plaster fell from the lath everywhere, cumulative tons
of old horse hair plaster just exploding out of the walls and ceilings and
mixing with the water from the busted plumbing to make a grey slurry that
congealed in the downhill corners of the rooms. The hand crafted Italian
tiles that Charlene picked out for the bathrooms are seventy five percent
broken. The granite counters in the kitchen are now seamed tectonic systems.
A few of the major appliances look repairable, but ownership of those was in
dispute anyway.
"It's a tear down, sir," says Robin Shaftoe. He has spent his whole
life in some Tennessee mountain town, living in trailers and cabins, but
even he has enough real estate acumen to sense this.
"Is there something you wanted to get out of the basement, sir?" says
Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe.
Randy laughs. "There's a filing cabinet down there . . . wait!" he
reaches out and puts a hand on Marcus's shoulder, to prevent him from
sprinting into the house and diving like Tarzan into the stairway pit. "The
reason I wanted it was because it contains every single receipt for every
penny I put into this house. See, it was a wreck when I bought it. Sort of
like it is now. Maybe not as bad."
"You need those papers for your dee vorce?"
Randy stops and clears his throat in mild exasperation. He has
explained to them five times that he was never married to Charlene and so
it's not a divorce. But this idea of living with a woman to whom one is not
married is so embarrassing to the Tennessee branch of the Shaftoes that they
simply cannot process it, and so they keep talking about "your ex wahf" and
"your dee vorce."
Noting Randy's hesitation, Robin says, "Or for the IN surance?"
Randy laughs with surprising heartiness.
"You did get IN surance, didn't you sir?"
"Earthquake insurance, around here, is basically unobtainable," Randy
says.
This is the first time it dawns on any of the Shaftoes that as of 2:16
P.M. yesterday afternoon, in an instant, Randy's net worth dropped by
something like three hundred thousand dollars. They skulk away from him and
leave him alone for a while, taking pictures to document the loss.
Amy comes over. "Oatmeal's ready," she says.
"Okay."
She stands close to him with her arms folded. The town is uncannily
quiet: the power is off and few vehicles are on the streets. "I'm sorry I
ran you off the road."
Randy looks at his Acura: the gouge, high on the left rear fender,
where the bumper of Amy's U Haul truck took him from behind, and the
crumpled front right bumper where he was forced into a parked Ford Fiesta.
"Don't worry about it."
"If I'd known Jesus. The last thing you need is a body shop bill on top
of everything else. I'll pay for it."
"Seriously. Don't worry about it."
"Well . . ."
"Amy, I know perfectly well you don't give a shit about my stupid car,
and when you pretend otherwise, the strain shows."
"You're right. But I'm sorry I misapprehended the situation."
"It was my fault," Randy says, "I should have explained why I was
coming here. Why the hell did you rent a U Haul, anyway?"
"They were all out of regular cars at the San Francisco Airport. Some
kind of big convention at the Moscone Center. So I displayed adaptability. "
(1)
"How the hell did you get here so fast? I thought I took the last
flight out of Manila."
"I got to NAIA only a few minutes after you did, Randy. Your flight was
full. I got on the next flight to Tokyo. I think my flight actually took off
before yours did."
"Mine was delayed on the ground."
"Then from Narita I just grabbed the next flight to SFO. Landed a
couple hours after you. So I was surprised that you and I pulled into town
here at the same time."
"I stopped over at a friend's house. And I took the scenic route."
Randy closes his eyes for a moment, remembering those loose boulders on the
Pacific Coast Highway, the roadway shaking beneath the tires of his Acura.
"See, when I saw your car, that's when I felt that God was with me, or
something," Amy said. "Or with you."
"God was with me? How do you figure?"
"Well, first of all, I have to tell you that I left Manila not out of
concern for you but out of burning rage, and a desire to just feed you your
ass on a plate."
"I figured."
"It's not even clear to me that you and I constitute a potential
couple. But you have started acting towards me in a way that indicates some
interest in that direction, so you have certain obligations." Amy has now
started to get pissed off and begun to move around the yard. The Shaftoe
boys eye her warily from across their steaming oatmeal bowls, ready to
Spring into action and wrestle her to the ground if she should fly out of
control. "It would be just ... totally... unacceptable for you to make those
kinds of representations to me and then jet off and cuddle with your
California sweetheart without coming to me first and going through certain
formalities, which would be awkward but which I would hope you would be man
enough to endure. Right?"
"Absolutely right. Never felt otherwise."
"So you can imagine how it looked."
"I guess so. Assuming you have no faith in me whatsoever."
"Well, I'm sorry for that, but I will say that on the flight over I
began to think that it wasn't your fault, that Charlene had somehow gotten
to you."
"What do you mean, gotten to me?"
Amy looks at the ground. "I don't know, she must have some kind of hold
over you."
"I think not." Randy sighs.
"Anyway, I thought that maybe you were just in the process of making a
big, stupid mistake. So when I got on that plane in Tokyo I was just going
to track you down and. . ." She draws a deep breath and mentally counts to
ten. "But when I got off that plane I was to boot just obsessed with this
disgusting image of you getting back together with this woman who obviously
was no damn good for you. And I felt that would be an unfortunate outcome
for you. And I thought I was too late to do anything about it. So, when I
got into town, and pulled around the corner and saw your Acura in the lane
right there in front of me, and you talking on your cellphone "
"I was leaving a message on your answering machine in Manila," Randy
says. "Explaining that I was just coming here to pick up some papers and
there'd been an earthquake only minutes before and so I might be a while."
"Well, I didn't have time to check my messages, which were placed on my
machine too late to accomplish any useful purpose," Amy says, "and so I had
to go on an imperfect knowledge of these events since no one had bothered to
fill me in."
"So..."
"I felt that cooler heads should prevail."
"And therefore you ran me off the road?"
Amy looks a little disappointed. She takes a patient, Montessori
preschool teacher tone of voice. "Now, Randy, think about priorities for
just a minute. I could see the way you were driving."
"I was in a hurry to find out whether I was totally destitute, or
merely bankrupt."
"But because of my imperfect knowledge of the situation I thought maybe
you were rushing into your poor little Charlene's arms. In other words, that
the emotional stress of the earthquake might induce you to who knows what,
relationship wise."
Randy presses his lips together and takes a huge breath through his
nose.
"Compared to that, a little bit of sheet metal just was not very
important to me. Of course, I know that a lot of guys would just stand back
and allow someone they cared about to do something extremely foolish and
damaging, only so that everyone concerned could then drive off to a
miserable and emotionally fucked up future in perfect, shiny cars."
Randy can do nothing but roll his eyes. "Well," he says, "I am sorry
that I blew up at you when I got out of the car."
"You are? Why, exactly? You should be pissed off when a truck driver
runs you off the road."
"I didn't know who you were. I didn't recognize you in this context. It
did not occur to me that you would do what you did with the airplanes."
Amy laughs in a goofy, mischievous way that doesn't seem right here.
Randy feels quizzical and mildly irritated. She looks at him knowingly.
"I'll bet yo