heeting down it.
One evening when Avi and his family had been over for dinner, Randy had
said, "I'm the beard, Avi's the suit," as a way of explaining their business
relationship, and from that point Charlene had been off and running.
Charlene has recently finished a scholarly article, deconstructing beards.
In particular, she was aiming at beard culture in the Northern California
high tech community Randy's crowd. Her paper began by demolishing, somehow,
the assumption that beards were more "natural" or easier to maintain than
clean shavenness she actually published statistics from Gillette's research
department comparing the amount of time that bearded and beardless men spent
in the bathroom each day, proving that the difference was not statistically
significant. Randy had any number of objections to the way in which these
statistics were gathered, but Charlene was having none of it. "It is
counterintuitive," she said.
She was in a big hurry to move on to the meat of her argument. She went
up to San Francisco and bought a few hundred dollars' worth of pornography
at a boite that catered to shaving fetishists. For a couple of weeks, Randy
couldn't come home in the evening without finding Charlene sacked out in
front of the TV with a bowl of popcorn and a Dictaphone, watching a video of
a straight razor being drawn along wet, soapy flesh. She taped a few lengthy
interviews with some actual shaving fetishists who described in great detail
the feeling of nakedness and vulnerability shaving gave them, and how erotic
that was, especially when freshly shaved areas were slapped or spanked. She
worked up a detailed comparison of the iconography of shaving fetishist porn
and that of shaving product commercials shown on national TV during football
games, and proved that they were basically indistinguishable (you could
actually buy videotapes of bootleg shaving cream and razor ads in the same
places that sold the out and out pornography).
She pulled down statistics on racial variation in beard growth.
American Indians didn't grow beards, Asians hardly did, Africans were a
special case because daily shaving gave them a painful skin condition. "The
ability to grow heavy, full beards as a matter of choice appears to be a
privilege accorded by nature solely to white males," she wrote.
Alarm bells, red lights, and screaming klaxons went off in Randy's mind
when he happened across that phrase.
"But this assertion buys into a specious subsumption. 'Nature' is a
socially constructed discourse, not an objective reality [many footnotes
here]. That is doubly true in the case of the 'nature' that accords full
beards to the specific minority population of northern European males. Homo
sapiens evolved in climatic zones where facial hair was of little practical
use. The development of an offshoot of the species characterized by densely
bearded males is an adaptive response to cold climates. These climates did
not 'naturally' invade the habitats of early humans rather, the humans
invaded geographical regions where such climates prevailed. This
geographical transgression was strictly a sociocultural event and so all
physical adaptations to it must be placed in the same category including the
development of dense facial hair."
Charlene published the results of a survey she had organized, in which
a few hundred women were asked for their opinions. Essentially all of them
said that they preferred clean shaven men to those who were either stubbly
or bearded. In short order, Charlene proved that having a beard was just one
element of a syndrome strongly correlated to racist and sexist attitudes,
and to the pattern of emotional unavailability so often bemoaned by the
female partners of white males, especially ones who were technologically
oriented.
"The boundary between Self and Environment is a social con[struct]. In
Western cultures this boundary is supposed to be sharp and distinct. The
beard is an outward symbol of that boundary, a distancing technique. To
shave off the beard (or any body hair) is to symbolically annihilate the
(essentially specious) boundary separating Self from Other . . ."
And so on. The paper was rapturously received by the peer reviewers and
immediately accepted for publication in a major international journal.
Charlene is presenting some related work at the War as Text conference:
"Unshavenness as Signifier in World War II Movies." On the strength of
her beard work, three different Ivy League schools are fighting over who
will get to hire her.
Randy does not want to move to the East Coast. Worse yet, he has a full
beard, which makes him feel dreadfully incorrect whenever he ventures out
with her. He proposed to Charlene that perhaps he should issue a press
release stating that he shaves the rest of his body every day. She did not
think it was very funny. He realized, when he was halfway over the Pacific
Ocean, that all of her work was basically an elaborate prophecy of the doom
of their relationship.
Now he is thinking of shaving his beard off. He might do his scalp and
his upper body, while he's at it.
He is in the habit of doing a lot of vigorous walking. By the standards
of the body nazis who infest California and Seattle, this is only a marginal
improvement over (say) sitting in front of a television chain smoking
unfiltered cigarettes and eating suet from a tub. But he has stuck to his
walking doggedly while his friends have taken up fitness fads and dropped
them. It has become a point of pride with him, and he's not about to stop
just because he is living in Manila.
But damn, it's hot. Hairlessness would be a good thing here.
***
Only two good things came out of Randy's ill fated First Business Foray
with the food gathering software. First, it scared him away from trying to
do any kind of business, at least until he had the foggiest idea of what he
was getting into. Second, he developed a lasting friendship with Avi, his
old gaming buddy, now in Minneapolis, who displayed integrity and a good
sense of humor.
At the suggestion of his lawyer (who by that point was one of his major
creditors), Randy declared personal bankruptcy and then moved to central
California with Charlene. She had gotten her Ph.D. and landed a teaching
assistant job at one of the Three Siblings. Randy enrolled at another
Sibling with the aim of getting his master's degree in astronomy. This made
him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to
relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating
people and doing research.
Within a month of his arrival, Randy solved some trivial computer
problems for one of the other grad students. A week later, the chairman of
the astronomy department called him over and said, "So, you're the UNIX
guru." At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this
attention, when he should have recognized them as bone chilling words.
Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree,
and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his
bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX. Later, he
was to calculate that, at the going rates for programmers, the department
had extracted about a quarter of a million dollars' worth of work from him,
in return for an outlay of less than twenty thousand. The only compensation
was that his knowledge didn't seem so useless anymore. Astronomy had become
a highly networked discipline, and you could now control a telescope on
another continent, or in orbit, by typing commands into your keyboard,
watching the images it produced on your monitor.
Randy was now superbly knowledgeable when it came to networks. Years
ago, this would have been of limited usefulness. But this was the age of
networked applications, the dawn of the World Wide Web, and the timing
couldn't have been better.
In the meantime, Avi had moved to San Francisco and started a new
company that was going to take role playing games out of the nerd ghetto and
make them mainstream. Randy signed on as the head technologist. He tried to
recruit Chester, but he'd already taken a job with a software company back
up in Seattle. So they brought in a guy who had worked for a few video game
companies, and later they brought in some other guys to do hardware and
communications, and they raised enough seed money to build a playable
prototype. Using that as their dog and pony show, they went down to
Hollywood and found someone to back them to the tune of ten million dollars.
They rented out some industrial space in Gilroy, filled it full of graphics
workstations, hired a lot of sharp programmers and a few artists, and went
to work.
Six months later, they were frequently mentioned as among Silicon
Valley's rising stars, and Randy got a little photograph in Time magazine in
an article about Siliwood the growing collaboration between Silicon Valley
and Hollywood. A year after that, the entire enterprise had crashed and
burned.
This was an epic tale not worth telling. The conventional wisdom circa
the early nineties had been that the technical wizards of Northern
California would meet the creative minds of Southern California halfway and
create a brilliant new collaboration. But this was rooted in a naive view of
what Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank a
consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for
a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that
product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal
was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the
talent had been paid off and sent packing. Casablanca, for example, was
still putting asses in seats decades after Bogart had been paid off and
smoked himself into an early grave.
In the view of Hollywood, the techies of Silicon Valley were just a
particularly naive form of talent. So when the technology reached a certain
point the point where it could be marketed to a certain large Nipponese
electronics company at a substantial profit the backers of Avi's company
staged a lightning coup that had obviously been lovingly planned. Randy and
the others were given a choice: they could leave the company now and hold on
to some of their stock, which was still worth a decent amount of money. Or
they could stay in which case they would find themselves sabotaged from
within by fifth columnists who had been infiltrated into key positions. At
the same time they would be besieged from without by lawyers demanding their
heads for the things that were suddenly going wrong.
Some of the founders stayed on as court eunuchs. Most of them left the
company, and of that group, most sold their stock immediately because they
could see it was going nowhere but down. The company was gutted by the
transfer of its technology to Japan, and the empty husk eventually dried up
and blew away.
Even today, bits and pieces of the technology keep popping up in the
oddest places, such as advertisements for new video game platforms. It
always gives Randy the creeps to see this. When it all started to go wrong,
the Nipponese tried to hire him directly, and he actually made some money
flying over there to work, for a week or a month at a time, as a consultant.
But they couldn't keep the technology running with the programmers they had,
and so it hasn't lived up to its potential.
Thus ended Randy's Second Business Foray. He came out of it with a
couple of hundred thousand dollars, most of which he plowed into the
Victorian house he shares with Charlene. He hadn't trusted himself with that
much liquid cash, and locking it up in the house gave him a feeling of
safety, like reaching home base in a frenzied game of full contact tag.
He has spent the years since running the Three Siblings' computer
system. He hasn't made much money, but he hasn't had much stress either.
***
Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full
of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took
it personally.
Charlene's crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn't
being told that they were wrong that offended them, though it was the
underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything.
So on the Night in Question the night of Avi's fateful call Randy had done
what he usually did, which was to withdraw from the conversation. In the
Tolkien, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense, Randy is a Dwarf.
Tolkien's Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent
a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of
Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war ax for a while
to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits
(i.e., Charlene's friends), had actually done a lot for Randy's peace of
mind over the years. He knew perfectly well that if he were stuck in
academia, these people, and the things they said, would seem momentous to
him. But where he came from, nobody had been taking these people seriously
for years. So he just withdrew from the conversation and drank his wine and
looked out over the Pacific surf and tried not to do anything really obvious
like shaking his head and rolling his eyes.
Then the topic of the Information Superhighway came up, and Randy could
feel faces turning in his direction like searchlights, casting almost
palpable warmth on his skin.
Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik had a few things to say about the Information
Superhighway. He was a fiftyish Yale professor who had just flown in from
someplace that had sounded really cool and impressive when he had gone out
of his way to mention it several times. His name was Finnish, but he was
British as only a non British Anglophile could be. Ostensibly he was here to
attend War as Text. Really he was there to recruit Charlene, and really
really (Randy suspected) to fuck her. This was probably not true at all, but
just a symptom of how wacked out Randy was getting by this point. Dr. G. E.
B. Kivistik had been showing up on television pretty frequently. Dr. G. E.
B. Kivistik had a couple of books out. Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was, in short,
parlaying his strongly contrarian view of the Information Superhighway into
more air time than anyone who hadn't been accused of blowing up a day care
center should get.
A Dwarf on sojourn in the Shire would probably go to a lot of dinner
parties where pompous boring Hobbits would hold forth like this. This Dwarf
would view the whole thing as entertainment. He would know that he could
always go back out into the real world, so much vaster and more complex than
these Hobbits imagined, and slay a few Trolls and remind himself of what
really mattered.
That was what Randy always told himself, anyway. But on the Night in
Question, it didn't work. Partly because Kivistik was too big and real to be
a Hobbit probably more influential in the real world than Randy would ever
be. Partly because another faculty spouse at the table a likable, harmless
computerphile named Jon decided to take issue with some of Kivistik's
statements and was cheerfully shot down for his troubles. Blood was in the
water.
Randy had ruined his relationship with Charlene by wanting to have
kids. Kids raise issues. Charlene, like all of her friends, couldn't handle
issues. Issues meant disagreement. Voicing disagreement was a form of
conflict. Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social
interaction the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the
usual litany of dreadful things. Regardless, Randy decided to get
patriarchal with Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik.
"How many slums will we bulldoze to build the Information
Superhighway?" Kivistik said. This profundity was received with thoughtful
nodding around the table.
Jon shifted in his chair as if Kivistik had just dropped an ice cube
down his collar. "What does that mean?" he asked. Jon was smiling, trying
not to be a conflict oriented patriarchal hegemonist. Kivistik in response,
raised his eyebrows and looked around at everyone else, as if to say Who
invited this poor lightweight? Jon tried to dig himself out from his
tactical error, as Randy closed his eyes and tried not to wince visibly.
Kivistik had spent more years sparring with really smart people over high
table at Oxford than Jon had been alive. "You don't have to bulldoze
anything. There's nothing there to bulldoze," Jon pleaded.
"Very well, let me put it this way," Kivistik said magnanimously he was
not above dumbing down his material for the likes of Jon. "How many on ramps
will connect the world's ghettos to the Information Superhighway?"
Oh, that's much clearer, everyone seemed to think. Point well taken,
Geb! No one looked at Jon, that argumentative pariah. Jon looked helplessly
over at Randy, signaling for help.
Jon was a Hobbit who'd actually been out of the Shire recently, so he
knew Randy was a dwarf. Now he was fucking up Randy's life by calling upon
Randy to jump up on the table, throw off his homespun cloak, and whip out
his two handed ax.
The words came out of Randy's mouth before he had time to think better
of it. "The Information Superhighway is just a fucking metaphor! Give me a
break!" he said.
There was a silence as everyone around the table winced in unison.
Dinner had now, officially, crashed and burned. All they could do now was
grab their ankles, put their heads between their knees, and wait for the
wreckage to slide to a halt.
"That doesn't tell me very much," Kivistik said. "Everything is a
metaphor. The word 'fork' is a metaphor for this object." He held up a fork.
"All discourse is built from metaphors."
"That's no excuse for using bad metaphors," Randy said.
"Bad? Bad? Who decides what is bad?" Kivistik said, doing his killer
impression of a heavy lidded, mouth breathing undergraduate. There was
scattered tittering from people who were desperate to break the tension.
Randy could see where it was going. Kivistik had gone for the usual
academician's ace in the hole: everything is relative, it's all just
differing perspectives. People had already begun to resume their little side
conversations, thinking that the conflict was over, when Randy gave them all
a start with: "Who decides what's bad? I do. "
Even Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was flustered. He wasn't sure if Randy was
joking. "Excuse me?"
Randy was in no great hurry to answer the question. He took the
opportunity to sit back comfortably, stretch, and take a sip of his wine. He
was feeling good. "It's like this," he said. "I've read your book. I've seen
you on TV. I've heard you tonight. I personally typed up a list of your
credentials when I was preparing press materials for this conference. So I
know that you're not qualified to have an opinion about technical issues.''
"Oh," Kivistik said in mock confusion, "I didn't realize one had to
have qualifications."
"I think it's clear," Randy said, "that if you are ignorant of a
particular subject, that your opinion is completely worthless. If I'm sick,
I don't ask a plumber for advice. I go to a doctor. Likewise, if I have
questions about the Internet, I will seek opinions from people who know
about it."
"Funny how all of the technocrats seem to be in favor of the Internet,"
Kivistik said cheerily, milking a few more laughs from the crowd.
"You have just made a statement that is demonstrably not true," Randy
said, pleasantly enough. "A number of Internet experts have written well
reasoned books that are sharply critical of it."
Kivistik was finally getting pissed off. All the levity was gone.
"So," Randy continued, "to get back to where we started, the
Information Superhighway is a bad metaphor for the Internet, because I say
it is. There might be a thousand people on the planet who are as conversant
with the Internet as I am. I know most of these people. None of them takes
that metaphor seriously. Q.E.D."
"Oh. I see," Kivistik said, a little hotly. He had seen an opening. "So
we should rely on the technocrats to tell us what to think, and how to
think, about this technology."
The expressions of the others seemed to say that this was a telling
blow, righteously struck.
"I'm not sure what a technocrat is," Randy said. "Am I a technocrat?
I'm just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of
textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and
read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays,
and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it.
Does that make me a technocrat?"
"You belonged to the technocratic elite even before you picked up that
book," Kivistik said. "The ability to wade through a technical text, and to
understand it, is a privilege. It is a privilege conferred by an education
that is available only to members of an elite class. That's what I mean by
technocrat."
"I went to a public school," Randy said. "And then I went to a state
university. From that point on, I was self educated."
Charlene broke in. She had been giving Randy dirty looks ever since
this started and he had been ignoring her. Now he was going to pay. "And
your family?" Charlene asked frostily.
Randy took a deep breath, stifled the urge to sigh. "My father's an
engineer. He teaches at a state college."
"And his father?"
"A mathematician."
Charlene raised her eyebrows. So did nearly everyone else at the table.
Case closed.
"I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped
as a technocrat," Randy said, deliberately using oppressed person's
language, maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them but more
likely (he thinks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an
uncontrollable urge to be a prick. Some of them, out of habit, looked at him
soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed.
Others gasped in outrage to hear these words coming from the lips of a known
and convicted white male technocrat. "No one in my family has ever had much
money or power," he said.
"I think that the point that Charlene's making is like this," said
Tomas, one of their houseguests who had flown in from Prague with his wife
Nina. He had now appointed himself conciliator. He paused long enough to
exchange a warm look with Charlene. "Just by virtue of coming from a
scientific family, you are a member of a privileged elite. You're not aware
of it but members of privileged elites are rarely aware of their
privileges."
Randy finished the thought. "Until people like you come along to
explain to us how stupid, to say nothing of morally bankrupt, we are."
"The false consciousness Tomas is speaking of is exactly what makes
entrenched power elites so entrenched," Charlene said.
"Well, I don't feel very entrenched," Randy said. "I've worked my ass
off to get where I've gotten."
"A lot of people work hard all their lives and get nowhere," someone
said accusingly. Look out! The sniping had begun.
"Well, I'm sorry I haven't had the good grace to get nowhere," Randy
said, now feeling just a bit surly for the first time, "but I have found
that if you work hard, educate yourself and keep your wits about you, you
can find your way in this society."
"But that's straight out of some nineteenth century Horatio Alger
book," Tomas sputtered.
"So? Just because it's an old idea doesn't mean it's wrong." Randy
said.
A small strike force of waitpersons had been forming up around the
fringes of the table, arms laden with dishes, making eye contact with each
other as they tried to decide when it was okay to break up the fight and
serve dinner. One of them rewarded Randy with a platter carrying a wigwam
devised from slabs of nearly raw tuna. The pro consensus, anti confrontation
elements then seized control of the conversation and broke it up into
numerous small clusters of people all vigorously agreeing with one another.
Jon cast a watery look at Randy, as if to say, was it good for you too?
Charlene was ignoring him intensely; she was caught up in a consensus
cluster with Tomas. Nina kept trying to catch Randy's eye, but he studiously
avoided this because he was afraid that she wanted to favor him with a
smoldering come hither look, and all Randy wanted to do right then was to go
thither. Ten minutes later, his pager went off, and he looked down to see
Avi's number on it.
Chapter 7 BURN
The American base at Cavite, along the shore of Manila Bay, burns real
good once the Nips have set it on fire, Bobby Shaftoe and the rest of the
Fourth Marines get a good long look at it as they cruise by, sneaking out of
Manila like thieves in the night. He has never felt more personally
disgraced in his life, and the same thing goes for the other Marines. The
Nips have already landed in Malaya and are headed for Singapore like a
runaway train, they are besieging Guam and Wake and Hong Kong and God knows
what else, and it should be obvious to anyone that they are going to hit the
Philippines next. Seems like a regiment of hardened China Marines might
actually come in handy around here.
But MacArthur seems to think he can defend Luzon all by himself,
standing on the walls of Intramuros with his Colt .45. So they are shipping
out. They have no idea where to. Most of them would rather hit the beaches
of Nippon itself than stay here in Army territory.
The night the war began, Bobby Shaftoe had first gotten Glory back into
the bosom of her family.
The Altamiras live in the neighborhood of Malate, a couple of miles
south of Intramuros, and not too far from the place where Shaftoe has just
had his half hour of Glory along the seawall. The city has gone mad, and
it's impossible to get a car. Sailors, marines, and soldiers are spewing
from bars, nightclubs, and ballrooms and commandeering taxis in groups of
four and six it's as crazy as Shanghai on Saturday night like the war's
already here. Shaftoe ends up carrying Glory halfway home, because her shoes
aren't made for walking.
The family Altamira is vast enough to constitute an ethnic group unto
itself and all of them live in the same building practically in the same
room. Once or twice, Glory had begun to explain to Bobby Shaftoe how they
are all related. Now there are many Shaftoes mostly in Tennessee but the
Shaftoe family tree still fits on a cross stitch sampler. The family Shaftoe
is to the Altamira clan as a single, alienated sapling is to a jungle.
Filipino families, in addition to being gigantic and Catholic, are massively
crosslinked by godparent/godchild relationships, like lianas stretched from
branch to branch and tree to tree. If asked, Glory is happy, even eager, to
talk for six hours nonstop about how the Altamiras are related to one
another, and that is just to give a general overview. Shaftoe's brain always
shuts off after the first thirty seconds.
He gets her to the apartment, which is usually in a state of hysterical
uproar even when the nation is not under military assault by the Empire of
Nippon. Despite this, the appearance of Glory, shortly after the outbreak of
war, borne in the arms of a United States Marine, is received by the
Altamiras in much the same way as if Christ were to materialize in the
center of their living room with the Virgin Mary slung over his back. All
around him, middle aged women are thudding down onto their knees, as if the
place has just been mustard gassed. But they are just doing it to shout
hallelujah! Glory alights nimbly upon her high heels, tears exploring the
exceptional geometry of her cheeks, and kisses everyone in the entire clan.
All of the kids are wide awake, though it is three in the morning. Shaftoe
happens to catch the eye of a squad of boys, aged maybe three to ten, all
brandishing wooden rifles and swords. They are all staring at Bobby Shaftoe,
replendent in his uniform, and they are perfectly thunderstruck; he could
throw a baseball into the mouth of each one from across the room. In his
peripheral vision, he sees a middle aged woman who is related to Glory by
some impossibly complex chain of relationships, and who already has one of
Glory's lipstick marks on her cheek, vectoring toward him on a collision
course, grimly determined to kiss him. He knows that he must get out of this
place now or he will never leave it. So, ignoring the woman, and holding the
gaze of those stunned boys, he rises to attention and snaps out a perfect
salute.
The boys salute back, raggedly, but with fantastic bravado. Bobby
Shaftoe turns on his heel and marches out of the room, moving like a bayonet
thrust. He reckons that he will come back to Malate tomorrow, when things
are calmer, and check up on Glory and the rest of the Altamiras.
He does not see her again.
He reports back to his ship, and is not granted any more shore leave.
He does manage to have a conversation with Uncle Jack, who pulls up
alongside in a small motorboat long enough for them to shout a few sentences
back and forth. Uncle Jack is the last of the Manila Shaftoes, a branch of
the family spawned by Nimrod Shaftoe of the Tennessee Volunteers. Nimrod
took a bullet in his right arm somewhere around Quingua, courtesy of some
rebellious Filipino riflemen. Recovering in a Manila hospital, old Nimrod,
or 'Lefty" as he was called by that point, decided that he liked the pluck
of these Filipino men, in order to kill whom a whole new class of
ridiculously powerful sidearm (the Colt .45) had had to be invented. Not
only that, he liked the looks of their women. Promptly discharged from the
service, he found that full disability pay would go a long way on the local
economy. He set up an export business along the Pasig riverfront, married a
half Spanish woman, and sired a son (Jack) and two daughters. The daughters
ended up in the States, back in the Tennessee mountains that have been the
ancestral wellspring of all Shaftoes ever since they broke out of the
indentured servitude racket back in the 1700s. Jack stayed in Manila and
inherited Nimrod's business, but never married. By Manila standards he makes
a decent amount of money. He has always been an odd combination of salty
waterfront trader and perfumed dandy. He and Mr. Pascual have been in
business together forever, which is how Bobby Shaftoe knows Mr. Pascual, and
which is how he originally met Glory.
When Bobby Shaftoe repeats the latest rumors, Uncle Jack's face
collapses. No one hereabouts is willing to face the fact that they are about
to be besieged by Nips. His next words ought to be, "Shit then, I'm getting
the hell out of here, I'll send you a postcard from Australia." But instead
he says something like "I'll come by in a few days to check up on you."
Bobby Shaftoe bites his tongue and does not say what he's thinking,
which is that he is a Marine, and he is on a ship, and this is a war, and
Marines on ships in wars are not known for staying put. He just stands there
and watches as Uncle Jack putt putts away on his little boat, turning back
every so often to wave at him with his fine Panama hat. The sailors around
Bobby Shaftoe watch with amusement, and a bit of admiration. The waterfront
is churning insanely as every piece of military gear that's not set in
concrete gets thrown onto ships and sent to Bata'an or Corregidor, and Uncle
Jack, standing upright in his boat, in his good cream colored suit and
Panama hat, weaves through the traffic with aplomb. Bobby Shaftoe watches
him until he disappears around the bend into the Pasig River, knowing that
he is probably the last member of his family who will ever see Uncle Jack
alive.
Despite all of those premonitions, he's surprised when they ship out
after only a few days of war, pulling out of their slip in the middle of the
night without any of the traditional farewell ceremonies. Manila is
supposedly lousy with Nip spies, and there's nothing the Nips would like
better than to sink a transport ship stuffed with experienced Marines.
Manila disappears behind them into the darkness. The awareness that he
hasn't seen Glory since that night is like a slow hot dentist's drill. He
wonders how she's doing. Maybe, once the war settles down a little bit, and
the battle lines firm up, he can figure out a way to get stationed in this
part of the world. MacArthur's a tough old bastard who will put up a hell of
a fight when the Nips come. And even if the Philippines fall, FDR won't let
them remain in enemy hands for very long. With any luck, inside of six
months, Bobby Shaftoe will be marching up Manila's Taft Avenue, in full
dress uniform, behind a Marine Band, perhaps nursing a minor war wound or
two. The parade will come to a section of the avenue that is lined, for a
distance of about a mile, with Altamiras. About halfway along, the crowd
will part, and Glory will run out and jump into his arms and smother him
with kisses. He'll carry the girl straight up the steps of some nice little
church where a priest in a white cassock is waiting with a big grin on his
face That dream image dissolves in a mushroom cloud of orange fire rising up
from the American base at Cavite. The place has been burning all day, and
another fuel dump has just gone up. He can feel the heat on his face from
miles away. Bobby Shaftoe is on the deck of the ship, all bundled up in a
life vest in case they get torpedoed. He takes advantage of the flaring
light to look down a long line of other Marines in life vests, staring at
the flame with stunned expressions on their tired, sweaty faces.
Manila is only half an hour behind them, but it might as well be a
million miles away.
He remembers Nanking, and what the Nips did there. What happened to the
women.
Once, long ago, there was a city named Manila. There was a girl there.
Her face and name are best forgotten. Bobby Shaftoe starts forgetting just
as fast as he can.
Chapter 8 PEDESTRIAN
RESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN, say the street signs of metro Manila. As soon
as Randy saw those he knew that he was in trouble.
For the first couple of weeks he spent in Manila, his work consisted of
walking. He walked all over the city carrying a handheld GPS receiver,
taking down latitudes and longitudes. He encrypted the data in his hotel
room and e mailed it to Avi. It became part of Epiphyte's intellectual
property. It became equity.
Now, they had secured some actual office space. Randy walks to it,
doggedly. He knows that the first time he takes a taxi there, he'll never
walk again.
RESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN, the signs say, but the drivers, the physical
environment, local land use customs, and the very layout of the place
conspire to treat the pedestrian with the contempt he so richly deserves.
Randy would get more respect if he went to work on a pogo stick with a
propeller beanie on his head. Every morning the bellhops ask him if he wants
a taxi, and practically lose consciousness when he says no. Every morning
the taxi drivers lined up in front of the hotel, leaning against their cars
and smoking, shout "Taxi? Taxi?" to him. When he turns them down, they say
witty things to each other in Tagalog and roar with laughter.
Just in case Randy hasn't gotten the message yet, a new red and white
chopper swings in low over Rizal Park, turns around once or twice like a dog
preparing to lie down, and settles in, not far from some palm trees, right
in front of the hotel.
Randy has gotten into the habit of reaching Intramuros by cutting
through Rizal Park. This is not a direct route. The direct route passes over
a no man's land, a vast, dangerous intersection lined with squatters huts
(it is dangerous because of the cars, not the squatters). If you go through
the park, on the other hand, you only have to brush off a lot of whores. But
Randy's gotten good at that. The whores cannot conceive of a man rich enough
to stay at the Manila Hotel who voluntarily walks around the city every day,
and they have given him up as a maniac. He has passed into the realm of
irrational things that you must simply accept, and in the Philippines this
is a nearly infinite domain.
Randy could never understand why everything smelled so bad until he
came upon a large, crisp rectangular hole in the sidewalk, and stared down
into a running flume of raw sewage. The sidewalks are nothing more than lids
on the sewers. Access to the depths is provided by concrete slabs with rebar
lifting loops protruding from them. Squatters fashion wire harnesses onto
those loops so that they can pull them up and create instant public
latrines. These slabs are frequently engraved with the initials, team name,
or graffiti tag of the gentlemen who manufactured them, and their competence
and attentiveness to detail vary, but their esprit de corps is fixed at a
very high level.
There are only so many gates that lead into Intramuros. Randy must run
a daily gauntlet of horse drawn taxis, some of whom have nothing better to
do than follow him down the street for a quarter of an hour muttering, "Sir?
Sir? Taxi? Taxi?" One of them, in particular, is the most tenacious
capitalist Randy has ever seen. Every time he draws alongside Randy, a rope
of urine uncoils from his horse's belly and cracks into the pavement and
hisses and foams. Tiny comets of pee strike Randy's pant legs. Randy always
wears long pants no matter how hot it is.
Intramuros is a strangely quiet and lazy neighborhood. This is mostly
because it was destroyed during the war, and hasn't been undestroyed yet.
Much of it is open weed farms still, which is very odd in the middle of a
vast, crowded metropolis.
Several miles south, towards the airport, amid nice suburban
developments, is Makati. This would be the logical place to base Epiphyte
Corp. It's got a couple of giant five star luxury hotels on every block, and
office towers that look clean and cool, and modern condos. But Avi, with his
perverse real estate sense, has decided to forgo all of that in favor of
what he described on the phone as texture. "I do not like to buy or lease
real estate when it is peaking," he said.
Understanding Avi's motives is like peeling an onion with a single
chopstick. Randy knows there is much more to it: perhaps he's earning a
favor, or repaying one, to a landlord. Perhaps he's been reading some
management guru who counsels young entrepreneurs to get deeply involved in a
country's culture. Not that Avi has ever been one for gurus. Randy's latest
theory is that it all has to do with lines of sight the latitudes and
longitudes.
Sometimes Randy walks along the top of the Spanish wall. Around Calle
Victoria, where MacArthur had his headquarters before the war, it is as wide
as a four lane street. Lovers nestle in the trapezoidal gunslits and put up
umbrellas for privacy. Below him, to the left, is the moat, a good city
block or two in width, mostly dry. Squatters have built shacks on it. In the
parts that are still submerged, they dig for mud crabs or string improvised
nets among the purple and magenta lotus blossoms.
To the right is Intramuros. A few buildings poke up out of a jumbled
wilderness of strewn stone. Ancient Spanish cannon are sprinkled around the
place, half buried. The rubble fields have been colonized by tropical
vegetation and squatters. Their clothesline poles and television antennas
are all wrapped up in jungle creepers and makeshift electrical wiring.
Utility poles jut into the air at odd angles, like widowmakers in a burned
forest, some of them almost completely obscured by the glass bubbles of
electrical meters. Every dozen yards or so, for no discernable reason, a
pile of rubble smolders.
As he goes by the cathedral, children follow him, whining and begging
piteously until he puts pesos in their hands. Then they beam and sometimes
give him a bright "Thank you!" in perfect American scented shopping mall
English. The beggars in Manila never seem to take their work very seriously,
for even they have been infected by the cultural fungus of irony and always
seem to be fighting back a grin, as if they can't believe they're doing
anything so corny.
They do not understand that he is working. That's okay.
Ideas have always come to Randy faster than he could use them. He spent
the first thirty years of his life pursuing whatever idea appealed to him at
the moment, discarding it when a better one came along.
Now he is working for a company again, and has some kind of
responsibility to use his time productively. Good ideas come to him as fast
and thick as ever, but he has to keep his eye on the ball. If the idea is
not relevant to Epiphyte, he has to jot it down and forget about it for now.
If it is relevant, he has to restrain his urge to dive into it and consider:
has anyone else come up with this idea before him? Is it possible to just go
out and buy the technology? Can he delegate the work to a contract coder in
the States?
He walks slowly, partly because otherwise he will suffer heatstroke and
fall dead in the gutter. Worse yet, he may fall through an open hatch into a
torrent of sewage, or brush against one of the squatters's electrical wires,
which dangle from overhead like patient asps. The constant dangers of sudden
electrocution from above or drowning in liquid shit below keep him looking
up and down as well as side to side. Randy has never felt more trapped
between a capricious and dangerous heaven and a hellish underworld. This
place is as steeped in religion as India, but all of it is Catholic.
At the northern end of Intramuros is a little business district. It is
sandwiched between Manila Cathedral and Fort Santiago, which the Spaniards
constructed to command the outlet of the Pasig River. You can tell it's a
business district because of the phone wires. As in other Rapidly Developing
Asian Economies, it is difficult to tell whether these are pirate wires, or
official ones that have been incredibly badly installed. They are a case
study in why incrementalism is bad. The bundles are so thick in some places
that Randy probably could not wrap both arms around them. Their weight and
tension have begun to pull the phone poles over, especially at curves in the
roads, where the wires go round a corner and exert a net sideways force on
the pole.
All of these buildings are constructed in the least expensive way
conceivable: concrete poured in place in wooden forms, over grids of hand
tied rebar. They are blocky, grey, and completely indistinguishable from one
another. A couple of much taller buildings, twenty or thirty stories, loom
over the district from a big intersection nearby, wind and birds circulating
through their broken windows. They were badly shaken up in an earthquake
during the 1980s and have not been put to rights yet.
He passes by a restaurant with a squat concrete blockhouse in front,
its openings covered with blackened steel grates, rusty exhaust pipes
sticking out the top to vent the diesel generator locked inside. NO BROWN
OUT has been proudly stenciled all over it. Beyond that is a postwar office
building, four stories high, with an especially thick sheaf of telephone
wires running into it. The logo of a bank is bolted to the front of the
building, down low. There is angle parking in front. The two spaces in front
of the main entrance are blocked off with hand painted signs: RESERVED FOR
ARMORED CAR and RESERVED FOR BANK MANAGER. A couple of guards stand in front
of the entrance clutching the fat wooden pistol grips of riot guns, weapons
that have the hulking, cartoonish appearance of action figure accessories.
One of the guards remains behind a bulletproof podium with a sign on it:
PLEASE DEPOSIT GUNS/FIREARMS TO THE GUARD.
Randy exchanges nods with the gunmen and goes into the building's
lobby, which is just as hot as outside. Bypassing the bank, ignoring the
unreliable elevators, he goes through a steel door that takes him into a
narrow stairwell. Today, it is dark. The building's electrical system is a
patchwork several different systems coexisting in the same space, controlled
by different panels, some on generators and some not. So blackouts begin and
end in phases. Somewhere near the top of the stairwell, small birds chirp,
competing with the sound of car alarms being set off outside.
Epiphyte Corp. rents the building's top floor, although he is the only
person working there so far. He keys his way in. Thank god; the air
conditioning has been working. The money they paid for their own generator
was worth it. He disables the alarm systems, goes to the fridge, and gets
two one liter bottles of water. His rule of thumb, after a walk, is to drink
water until he begins to urinate again. Then he can consider other
activities.
He is too sweaty to sit down. He must keep moving so that the cold dry
air will flow around his body. He flicks globes of sweat out of his beard
and does an orbit of the floor, looking out the windows, checking out the
lines of sight. He pulls a ballistic nylon traveler's wallet out of his
trousers and lets it dangle from his belt loop so that the skin underneath
it can breathe. It contains his passport, a virgin credit card, ten crisp
new hundred dollar bills, and a floppy disk with his 4096 bit encryption key
on it.
Northwards he can survey the greens and ramparts of Fort Santiago,
where phalanxes of Nipponese tourists toil, recording their fun with
forensic determination. Beyond that is the Pasig River, choked with floating
debris. Across the river is Quiapo, a built up area: high rise apartment and
office buildings with corporate names emblazoned on their top storeys and
satellite dishes on the roofs.
Unwilling to stop moving just yet, Randy strolls clockwise around the
office. Intramuros is ringed with a belt of green, its former moat. He has
just walked up its western verge. The eastern one is studded with heavy
neoclassical buildings housing various government ministries. The Post and
Telecommunications Authority sits on the Pasig's edge, at a vertex in the
river from which three closely spaced bridges radiate into Quiapo. Beyond
the large new structures above the river, Quiapo and the adjoining
neighborhood of San Miguel are a patchwork of giant institutions: a train
station, an old prison, many universities, and Malacanang Palace, which is
farther up the Pasig.
Back on this side of the river, it is Intramuros in the foreground
(cathedrals and churches surrounded by dormant land), government
institutions, colleges, and universities in the middle ground, and, beyond
that, a seemingly infinite sprawl of low lying, smoky city. Miles to the
south is the gleaming business city of Makati, built around a square where
two big roads intersect at an acute angle, echoing the intersecting runways
at NAIA, a bit farther south. An emerald city of big houses perched on big
lawns spreads away from Makati: it is where the ambassadors and corporate
presidents live. Continuing his clockwise stroll he can follow Roxas
Boulevard coming toward him up the seawall, marked by a picket line of tall
palm trees. Manila Bay is jammed with heavy shipping, big cargo ships
filling the water like logs in a boom. The container port is just below him
to the west: a grid of warehouses on reclaimed land that is about as flat,
and as natural, as a sheet of particle board.
If he looks over the cranes and containers, due west across the bay, he
can barely make out the mountainous silhouette of the Bata'an Peninsula,
some forty miles distant. Following its black skyline southwards tracing the
route taken by the Nipponese in '42 he can almost resolve a lump lying off
its southern tip. That would be the island of Corregidor. This is the first
time he's ever been able to see it; the air is unusually clear today.
A fragment of historical trivia floats to the surface of his melted
brain. The galleon from Acapulco. The signal fire on Corregidor.
He punches in Avi's GSM number. Avi, somewhere in the world, answers
it. He sounds like he is in a taxi, in one of those countries where horn
honking is still an inalienable right. "What's on your mind, Randy?"
"Lines of sight," Randy says.
"Huh!" Avi blurts, as if a medicine ball has just slammed into his
belly. "You figured it out."
Chapter 9 GUADALCANAL
The marine raiders' bodies are no longer pressurized with blood and
breath. The weight of their gear flattens them into the sand. The
accelerating surf has already begun to shovel silt over them; comet trails
of blood fade back into the ocean, red carpets for any sharks who may be
browsing the coastline. Only one of them is a giant lizard. but all have the
same general shape: fat in the middle and tailing off at the ends,
streamlined by the waves.
A little convoy of Nip boats is moving down the slot, towing barges
loaded with supplies packed into steel drums. Shaftoe and his platoon ought
to be lobbing mortars at them right now. When the American planes show up
and begin to kick the shit out of them, the Nips will throw the drums
overboard and run away, and hope that some of them will wash ashore on
Guadalcanal.
The war is over for Bobby Shaftoe, and hardly for the first or last
time. He trudges among the platoon. Waves hit him in the knees, then spread
into magic carpets of foam and vegetable matter that skim along the beach so
that his footing appears to glide out from under him. He keeps twisting
around for no reason and falling on his ass.
Finally he reaches the corpsman's corpse, and divests it of anything
with a red cross on it. He turns his back on the Nip convoy and looks up a
long glacis toward the tideline. It might as well be Mt. Everest as seen
from a low base camp. Shaftoe decides to tackle the challenge on hands and
knees. Every so often, a big wave spanks him on the ass, rushes up between
his legs orgasmically and washes his face. It feels good and also keeps him
from pitching forward and falling asleep below the high tide mark.
The next couple of days are a handful of dirty, faded black and white
snapshots, shuffled and dealt over and over again: the beach under water.
positions of corpses marked by standing waves. The beach empty. The beach
under water again. The beach strewn with black lumps, like a slice of
Grandma Shaftoe's raisin bread. A morphine bottle half buried in the sand.
Small, dark people, mostly naked, moving along the beach at low tide and
looting the corpses.
Hey, wait a sec! Shaftoe is on his feet somehow, clutching his
Springfield. The jungle doesn't want to let go of him; creepers have
actually grown over his limbs in the time he has lain there. As he emerges.
dragging foliage behind him like a float in a ticker tape parade, the sun
floods over him like warm syrup of ipecac. He can see the ground headed his
way. He spins as he falls momentarily glimpsing a big man with a rifle and
then his face is pressed into the cool sand. The surf roars in his skull: a
nice standing ovation from a studio audience of angels, who having all died
themselves, know a good death when they see one.
Little hands roll him over onto his back. One of his eyes is frozen
shut by sand. Peering through the other he sees a big fellow with a rifle
slung over his shoulder standing over him. The fellow has a red beard, which
makes it just a bit less probable that he is a Nipponese soldier. But what
is he?
He prods like a doctor and prays like a priest in Latin, even. Silver
hair buzzed close to a tanned skull. Shaftoe scans the fellow's clothing for
some kind of insignia. He's hoping to see a Semper Fidelis but instead he
reads: Societas Eruditorum and Ignoti et quasi occulti.
"Ignoti et ... what the fuck does that mean?" he asks.
"Hidden and unknown more or less," says the man. He's got a weird
accent, sort of Australian, sort of German. He checks out Shaftoe's insignia
in turn. "What's a Marine Raider? Some kind of new outfit?"
"Like a Marine, only more so," Shaftoe says. Which might sound like
bravado. Indeed it partly is. But this comment is as heavy laden with irony
as Shaftoe's clothes are with sand, because at this particular moment in
history, a Marine isn't just a tough s.o.b. He is a tough S.O.B. stuck out
in the middle of nowhere (Guadalcanal) with no food or weapons (owing, as
every Marine can tell you, to a sinister conspiracy between General
MacArthur and the Nips) totally making everything up as he goes along,
improvising weapons from found objects, addled, half the time, by disease
and the drugs supplied to keep diseases at bay. And in every one of those
senses, a Marine Raider is (as Shaftoe says) like a Marine, only more so.
"Are you some kind of commando or something?" Shaftoe asks,
interrupting Red as he is mumbling.
"No. I live on the mountain."
"Oh, yeah? What do you do up there, Red?"
"I watch. And talk on the radio, in code." Then he goes back to
mumbling.
"Who you talkin' to, Red?"
"Do you mean, just now in Latin, or on the radio in code?"
"Both I reckon."
"On the radio in code, I talk to the good guys.
"Who are the good guys?"
"Long story. If you live, maybe I'll introduce you to some of them,"
says Red.
"How about just now in Latin?"
"Talking to God," Red says. "Last rites, in case you don't live."
This makes him think of the others. He remembers why he made that
insane decision to stand up in the first place. "Hey! Hey!" He tries to sit
up, and finding that impossible, twists around. "Those bastards are looting
the corpses!"
His eyes aren't focusing and he has to rub sand out of the one.
Actually, they are focusing just fine. What looked like steel drums
strewn around the beach turn out to be steel drums strewn around the beach.
The natives are pawing them out of the sucking sand, digging with their
hands like dogs, rolling them up the beach and into the jungle.
Shaftoe blacks out.
When he wakes up there's a row of crosses on the beach sticks lashed
together with vines, draped with jungle flowers. Red is pounding them in
with the butt of his rifle. All the steel drums, and most of the natives,
are gone. Shaftoe needs morphine. He says as much to Red.
"If you think you need it now," Red says, "just wait." He tosses his
rifle to a native, strides up to Shaftoe, and heaves him up over his
shoulders in a fireman's carry. Shaftoe screams. A couple of Zeroes fly
overhead, as they stride into the jungle. "My name is Enoch Root," says Red,
"but you can call me Brother."
Chapter 10 GALLEON
One morning, Randy Waterhouse rises early, takes a long hot shower,
plants himself before the mirror of his Manila Hotel suite, and shaves his
face bloody. He was thinking of farming this work out to a specialist: the
barber in the hotel's lobby. But this is the first time Randy's face will be
visible in ten years, and Randy wants to be the first person to see it. His
heart actually thumps, partly out of primal brute fear of the knife, and
partly from the sheer anticipation. It is like the scene in corny old movies
where the bandages are finally taken off of the patient's face, and a mirror
proffered.
The effect is, first of all, intense deja vu, as if the last ten years
of his life were but a dream, and he now has them to live over again.
Then he begins to notice subtle ways in which his face has been
changing since it was last exposed to air and light. He is mildly astonished
to find that these changes are not entirely bad. Randy has never thought of
himself as especially good looking, and has never especially cared. But the
blood spotted visage in the mirror is, arguably, better looking than the one
that faded into the deepening shade of stubble a decade ago. It looks like a
grownup's face.
***
It has been a week since he and Avi laid out the entire plan for the
high officials of the PTA: the Post and Telecoms Authority. PTA is a generic
term that telecom businessmen slap, like a yellow stickynote, onto what ever
government department handles these matters in whatever country they happen
to be visiting this week. In the Philippines, it is actually called
something else.
Americans brought, or at least accompanied, the Philippines into the
twentieth century and erected the apparatus of its central government.
Intramuros, the dead heart of Manila, is surrounded by a loose ring of giant
neoclassical buildings, very much after the fashion of the District of
Columbia, housing various parts of that apparatus. The PTA is headquartered
in one of those buildings, just south of the Pasig.
Randy and Avi get there early because Randy, accustomed to Manila
traffic, insists that they budget a full hour to cover the one– or two
mile taxi ride from the hotel. But traffic is perversely light and they end
up with a full twenty minutes to kill. They stroll around the side of the
building and up onto the green levee. Avi draws a bead on the Epiphyte Corp.
building, just to reassure himself that their line of sight is clear. Randy
is already satisfied of this, and just stands there with arms crossed,
looking at the river. It is choked, bank to bank, with floating debris: some
plant material but mostly old mattresses, cushions, pieces of plastic
litter, hunks of foam, and, most of all, plastic shopping bags in various
bright colors. The river has the consistency of vomit.
Avi wrinkles his nose. "What's that?"
Randy sniffs the air and smells, among everything else, burnt plastic.
He gestures downstream. "Squatter camp on the other side of Fort Santiago, '
he explains. "They sieve plastic out of the river and burn it for fuel."
"I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago," Avi says. "They have plastic
forests there!"
"What does that mean?"
"Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags
out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because
light and air can't get through to the leaves. But they remain standing,
totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors."
Randy shrugs his blazer off, rolls up his sleeves; Avi does not seem to
notice the heat. "So that's Fort Santiago," Avi says, and starts walking
towards it.
"You've heard of it?" Randy asks, following him, and heaving a sigh.
The air is so hot that when it comes out of your lungs it has actually
cooled down by several degrees.
"It's mentioned in the video," Avi says, holding up a videotape
cassette and wiggling it.
"Oh, yeah."
Soon they are standing before the fort's entrance, which is flanked by
carvings of a pair of guards cut into the foamy volcanic tuff: halberd
brandishing Spaniards in blousy pants and conquistador helmets. They have
been standing here for close to half a millennium, and a hundred thousand
tropical thundershowers have streamed down their bodies and polished them
smooth.
Avi is working on a much shorter time horizon he has eyes only for the
bullet craters that have disfigured these soldiers far worse than time and
water. He puts his hands in them, like doubting Thomas. Then he steps back
and begins to mutter in Hebrew. Two ponytailed German tourists stroll
through the gate in rustic sandals.
"We have five minutes," Randy says.
"Okay, let's come back here later."
***
Charlene wasn't totally wrong. Blood seeps out of tiny, invisible
painless cuts on Randy's face and neck for ten or fifteen minutes after he
has shaved. Moments ago, that blood was accelerating through his ventricles,
or seeping through the parts of his brain that make him a conscious entity.
Now the same stuff is exposed to the air; he can reach up and wipe it off.
The boundary between Randy and his environment has been annihilated.
He gets out a big tube of heavy waterproof sunblock and greases his
face, neck, arms, and the small patch of scalp on the top of his head where
the hair is getting thin. Then he pulls on khakis, boat shoes, and a loose
cotton shirt, and a beltpack containing his GPS receiver and a couple of
other essentials like a wad of toilet paper and a disposable camera. He
drops his key off at the front desk, and the employees all do double takes
and grin. The bellhops seem particularly delighted by his makeover. Or
perhaps it is just that he is wearing leather shoes for once: topsiders,
which he's always thought of as the mark of effete preppies, but which are
actually a reasonable thing for him to wear today. Bellhops make ready to
haul the front door open, but instead, Randy cuts across the lobby towards
the back of the hotel, skirts the swimming pool, and walks through a line of
palm trees to a stone railing along the top of a seawall. Below him is the
hotel's dock, which sticks out into a small cove that opens onto Manila Bay.
His ride isn't here yet, so he stands at the railing for a minute. One
side of the cove is accessible from Rizal Park. A few gnarly Filipino
squatter types are lazing on the benches, staring back at him. Down below
the breakwater, a middle aged man, wearing only boxer shorts, stands in knee
deep water with a pointed stick, staring with feline intensity into the
lapping water. A black helicopter makes slow, banking circles against a
sugar white sky. It is a Vietnam vintage Huey, a wappity wap kind of chopper
that also makes a fierce reptilian hissing noise as it slithers overhead.
A boat materializes from the steam rising off the bay, cuts its
engines, and coasts into the cove, shoving a bow wave in front of it, like a
wrinkle in a heavy rug. A tall, slender woman is poised on the prow like a
living figurehead, holding a coil of heavy rope.
***
The big satellite dishes on the roof of the PTA's building are pointed
almost straight up, like birdbaths, because Manila is so close to the
equator. On its stone walls, spackle is coming loose from the bullet and
shrapnel craters into which it was troweled after the war. Window air
conditioners centered in the building's Roman arches drip water onto the
limestone balusters below, gradually melting them away. The limestone is
blackened with some kind of organic slime, and pitted by the root systems of
little plants that have taken root in them probably grown from seeds
conveyed in the shit of the birds that congregate there to bathe and drink,
the squatters of the aerial realm.
In a paneled conference room, a dozen people are waiting, equally
divided between table sitting big wheels and wall crawling minions. As Randy
and Avi enter a great flurry of hand shaking and card presenting ensues,
though most of the introductions zoom through Randy's short term memory like
a supersonic fighter blowing past shoddy Third World air defense systems. He
is left only with a stack of business cards. He deals them out on his patch
of table like a senescent codger playing Klondike on his meal tray. Avi, of
course, knows all of these people already seems to be on a first name basis
with most of them, knows their children's names and ages, their hobbies,
their blood types, chronic medical conditions, what books they are reading,
whose parties they have been going to. All of them are evidently delighted
by this, and all of them, thank god, completely ignore Randy.
Of the half dozen important people in the room, three are middle aged
Filipino men. One of these is a high ranking official in the PTA. The second
is the president of an upstart telecommunications company called FiliTel,
which is trying to compete against the traditional monopoly. The third is
the vice president of a company called 24 Jam that runs about half of the
convenience stores in the Philippines, as well as quite a few in Malaysia.
Randy has trouble telling these men apart, but by watching them converse
with Avi, and by using inductive logic, he is soon able to match business
card with face.
The other three are easy: two Americans and one Nipponese, and one of
the Americans is a woman. She is wearing lavender pumps color coordinated
with a neat little skirt suit, and matching nails. She looks as if she might
have stepped straight off the set of an infomercial for fake fingernails or
home permanents. Her card identifies her as Mary Ann Carson, and claims that
she is a V.P. with AVCLA, Asia Venture Capital Los Angeles, which Randy
knows dimly as a Los Angeles based firm that invests in Rapidly Developing
Asian Economies. The American man is blond and has a hard jawed quasi
military look about him. He seems alert, disciplined, impassive, which
Charlene's crowd would interpret as hostility born of repression born of
profound underlying mental disorder. He represents the Subic Bay Free Port.
The Nipponese man is the executive vice president of a subsidiary of a
ridiculously colossal consumer electronics company. He is about six feet
tall. He has a small body and a large head shaped like an upside down Bosc
pear, thick hair edged with gray, and wire rimmed glasses. He smiles
frequently, and projects the serene confidence of a man who has memorized a
two thousand page encyclopedia of business etiquette.
Avi wastes little time in starting the videotape, which at the moment
represents about seventy five percent of Epiphyte Corp.'s assets. Avi had it
produced by a hot multimedia startup in San Francisco, and the contract to
produce it accounted for one hundred percent of the startup's revenue this
year. "Pies crumble when you slice them too thin," Avi likes to say.
It starts with footage pilfered from a forgotten made for TV movie of a
Spanish galleon making headway through heavy seas. Superimpose title: SOUTH
CHINA SEA A.D. 1699. The soundtrack has been beefed up and Dolbyized from
its original monaural version. It is quite impressive.
("Half of the investors in AVCLA are into yachting," Avi explained.)
Cut to a shot (produced by the multimedia company, and seamlessly
spliced in) of a mangy, exhausted lookout in a crow's nest, peering through
a brass spyglass, hollering the Spanish equivalent of "Land ho!"
Cut to the galleon's captain, a rugged, bearded character, emerging
from his cabin to stare with Keatsian wild surmise at the horizon.
"Corregidor!" he exclaims.
Cut to a stone tower on the crown of a green tropical island, where a
lookout is sighting the (digitally inserted) galleon on the horizon. The
lookout cups his hands around his mouth and bellows, in Spanish, "It is the
galleon! Light the signal fire!"
("The family of the guy who runs the PTA is really into local history,"
Avi said, "they run the Museum of the Philippines.")
With a lusty cheer, Spaniards (actually, Mexican American actors) in
conquistador helmets plunge firebrands into a huge pile of dry wood which
evolves into a screaming pyramid of flame powerful enough to flash roast an
ox.
Cut to the battlements of Manila's Fort Santiago (foreground: carved
styrofoam; background: digitally generated landscape), where another
conquistador spies a light flaring up on the horizon. "Mira! El galleon!" he
cries.
Cut to a series of shots of Manila townsfolk rushing to the seawall to
adore the signal fire, including an Augustinian monk who clasps his rosary
strewn hands and bursts into clerical Latin on the spot ("the family that
runs FiliTel endowed a chapel at Manila Cathedral") as well as a clean cut
family of Chinese merchants unloading bales of silk from a junk ("24 Jam,
the convenience store chain, is run by Chinese mestizos").
A voiceover begins, deep and authoritative, English with a Filipino
accent ("The actor is the brother of the godfather of the grandson of the
man who runs the PTA"). Subtitles appear on the bottom of the screen in
Tagalog ("the PTA people have a heavy political commitment to the native
language").
"In the heyday of the Spanish Empire, the most important event of the
year was the arrival of the galleon from Acapulco, laden with silver from
the rich mines of America silver to buy the silks and spices of Asia, silver
that made the Philippines into the economic fountainhead of Asia. The
approach of the galleon was heralded by a beacon of light from the island of
Corregidor, at the entrance of Manila Bay."
Cut (finally!) from the beaming, greed lit faces of the Manila
townsfolk to a 3 D graphics rendering of Manila Bay, the Bata'an Peninsula,
and the small islands off the tip of Bata'an, including Corregidor. The
point of view swoops and zooms in on Corregidor where a hokily, badly
rendered fire blazes up. A beam of yellow light, like a phaser blast in Star
Trek, shoots across the bay. Our point of view follows it. It splashes
against the walls of Fort Santiago.
The signal fire was an ancient and simple technology. In the language
of modern science, its light was a form of electromagnetic radiation,
propagating in a straight line across Manila Bay, and carrying a single bit
of information. But, in an age starved for information, that single bit
meant everything to the people of Manila."
Cue that funky music. Cut to shots of teeming modern Manila. Shopping
malls and luxury hotels in Makati. Electronics factories, school children
sitting in front of computer screens. Satellite dishes. Ships unloading at
the big free port of Subic Bay. Lots and lots of grinning and thumbs up
gestures.
"The Philippines of today is an emerging economic dynamo. As its
economy grows, so does its hunger for information not single bits, but
hundreds of billions of them. But the technology for transmitting that
information has not changed as much as you might imagine."
Back to the 3 D rendering of Manila Bay. This time, instead of a
bonfire on Corregidor, there's a microwave horn up on a tower on the isle's
summit, gunning electric blue sine waves at the sprawl of Metro Manila.
"Electromagnetic radiation in this case, microwave beams propagating in
straight lines, over line of sight routes, can transmit vast quantities of
information quickly. Modern cryptographic technology makes the signal safe
from would be eavesdroppers."
Cut back to the galleon and lookout footage. "In the old days,
Corregidor's position at the entrance of Manila Bay made it a natural look
out a place where information about approaching ships could be gathered."
Cut to a shot of a barge in a cove somewhere, feeding thick tarry cable
overboard, divers at work with queues of round orange buoys. "Today,
Corregidor's geographical situation makes it an ideal place to land deep sea
fiberoptic cables. The information coming down these cables from Taiwan,
Hong Kong, Malaysia, Nippon, and the United States can from there be
transmitted directly into the heart of Manila. At the speed of light! "
More 3 D graphics. This time, it's a detailed rendering of the
cityscape of Manila. Randy knows it by heart because he gathered the data
for the damn thing by walking around town with his GPS receiver. The beam of
bits from Corregidor comes straight in off the bay and scores a bullseye on
the rooftop antenna of a nondescript four story office building between Fort
Santiago and the Manila Cathedral. It is Epiphyte's building, and the
antenna is discreetly labeled with the name and logo of Epiphyte Corp. Other
antennas then retransmit information to the PTA building and to other nearby
sites: skyscrapers in Makati, government offices in Quezon City, and an Air
Force base south of town.
***
Hotel staff throw a carpeted gangway across the gap between seawall and
boat. As Randy is walking across it, the woman extends her hand to him. He
reaches out to shake it. "Randy Waterhouse," he says.
She grabs his hand and pulls him on board not so much greeting him as
making sure he doesn't fall overboard. "Hi. Amy Shaftoe," she says. "Welcome
to Glory. "
"Pardon me?"
" Glory. The name of this junk is Glory ," she says. She speaks
forthrightly and with great clarity, as though communicating over a noisy
two way radio. "Actually, it's Glory IV," she continues. Her accent is
largely Midwestern, with a trace of Southern twang, and a little bit of
Filipino, too. If you saw her on the streets of some Midwestern town you
might not notice the traces of Asian ancestry around her eyes. She has dark
brown hair, sun streaked, just long enough to form a secure ponytail, no
longer.
"'Scuse me a sec," she says, pokes her head into the pilot house, and
speaks to the pilot in a mixture of Tagalog and English. The pilot nods,
looks around, and begins to manipulate the controls. The hotel staff pull
the gangway back. "Hey," Amy says quietly, and underhands a pack of
Marlboros across the gap to each one of them. They snatch them out of the
air, grin, and thank her. Glory IV begins to back away from the dock.
Amy spends the next few minutes walking around the deck, going through
some kind of mental checklist. Randy counts four men in addition to Amy and
the pilot two Caucasians and two Filipinos. All of them are fiddling around
with engines or diving gear in a way Randy recognizes, through many cultural
and technological barriers, as debugging. Amy walks past Randy a couple of
times, but avoids looking him in the eye. She's not a shy person. Her body
language is eloquent enough: "I am aware that men are in the habit of
looking at whatever women happen to be nearby, in the hopes of deriving
enjoyment from their physical beauty, their hair, makeup, fragrance, and
clothing. I will ignore this, politely and patiently, until you get over
it." Amy is a long limbed girl in paint stained jeans, a sleeveless t shirt,
and high tech sandals, and she lopes easily around the boat. Finally she
approaches him, meeting his eyes for just a second and then glancing away as
if bored.
"Thanks for giving me the ride," Randy says.
''It's nothing,'' she says.
"I feel embarrassed that I didn't tip the guys at the dock. Can I
reimburse you?"
"You can reimburse me with information," she says without hesitation.
Amy reaches up with one hand to rub the back of her neck. Her elbow pokes up
in the air. He notices about a month's growth of hair in her armpit, then
glimpses the corner of a tattoo poking out from under her shirt. "You're in
the information business, right?" She watches his face, hoping that he'll
take the cue and laugh, or at least grin. But he's too preoccupied to catch
it. She glances away, now with a knowing, sardonic look on her face you
don't understand me, Randy, which is absolutely typical, and I'm fine with
that. She reminds Randy of level headed blue collar lesbians he has known,
drywall hanging urban dykes with cats and cross country ski racks.
She takes him into an air conditioned cabin with a lot of windows and a
coffee maker. It has fake wood veneer paneling like a suburban basement, and
framed exhibits on the walls official documents like licenses and
registrations, and enlarged black and white photographs of people and boats.
It smells like coffee, soap, and oil. There is a boom box held down with
bungee cords, and a shoebox with a couple of dozen CDs in it, mostly albums
by American woman singer songwriters of the offbeat, misunderstood, highly
intelligent but intensely emotional school, getting rich selling music to
consumers who understand what it's like not to be understood (1).
Amy pours two mugs of coffee and sets them down on the cabin's bolted down
table, then fishes in the tight pockets of her jeans, pulls out a waterproof
nylon wallet, extracts two business cards, and shoots them across the table,
one after the other, to Randy. She seems to enjoy doing this a small,
private smile comes onto her lips and then vanishes the moment Randy sees
it. The cards bear the logo of Semper Marine Services and the name America
Shaftoe.
"Your name's America?" Randy asks.
Amy looks out the window, bored, afraid he's going to make a big deal
out of it. "Yeah," she says.
"Where'd you grow up?"
She seems to be fascinated by the view out the window: big cargo ships
strewn around Manila Bay as far as the eye can see, ships hailing from
Athens, Shanghai, Vladivostok, Cape Town, Monrovia. Randy infers that
looking at big rusty boats is more interesting than talking to Randy.
"So, would you mind telling me what's going on?" she asks. She turns to
face him, lifts the mug to her lips, and finally, looks him straight in the
eye.
Randy's a little nonplussed. The question is basically impertinent
coming from America Shaftoe. Her company, Semper Marine Services, is a
contractor at the very lowest level of Avi's virtual corporation only one of
a dozen boats and divers outfits that they could have hired so this is a bit
like being interrogated by one's janitor or taxi driver.
But she's smart and unusual, and, precisely because of all her efforts
not to be, she's cute. As an interesting female, and a fellow American, she
is pulling rank, demanding to be accorded a higher status. Randy tries to be
careful.
"Is there something bothering you?" he asks.
She looks away. She's afraid she's given him the wrong impression. "Not
in particular," she says, "I'm just nosy. I like to hear stories. Divers
always sit around and tell each other stories."
Randy sips his coffee. America continues, "In this business, you never
know where your next job is going to come from. Some people have really
weird reasons for wanting to get stuff done underwater, which I like to
hear." She concludes, "It's fun!" which is clearly all the motivation she
needs.
Randy views all of the above as a fairly professional bullshitting job.
He decides to give Amy press release material only. "All the Filipinos are
in Manila. That's where the information needs to go. It is somewhat awkward,
getting information to Manila, because it has mountains in back of it and
Manila Bay in front. The bay is a nightmare place to run submarine cables "
She's nodding. Of course she would know this already. Randy hits the
fast forward. "Corregidor's a pretty good place. From Corregidor you can
shoot a line of sight microwave transmission across the bay to downtown
Manila."
"So you are extending the North Luzon coastal festoon from Subic Bay
down to Corregidor," she says.
"Uh two things about what you just said," Randy says, and pauses for a
moment to get the answer queued up in his output buffer. "One, you have to
be careful about your pronouns what do you mean when you say 'you'? I work
for Epiphyte Corporation, which is designed from the ground up to work, not
on its own, but as an element in a virtual corporation, kind of like "
"I know what an epiphyte is," she says. "What's two?"
"Okay, good," Randy says, a little off balance. "Two is that the
extension of the North Luzon Festoon is just the first of what we hope will
be several linkups. We want to lay a lot of cable, eventually, into
Corregidor."
Some kind of machinery behind Amy's eyes begins to hum. The message is
clear enough. There will be work aplenty for Semper Marine, if they handle
this first job well.
"In this case, the entity that's doing the work is a joint venture
including us, FiliTel, 24 Jam, and a big Nipponese electronics company,
among others."
"What does 24 Jam have to do with it? They're convenience stores."
"They're the retail outlet the distribution system for Epiphyte's
product."
"And that is?"
"Pinoy grams." Randy manages to suppress the urge to tell her that the
name is trademarked.
"Pinoy grams?"
"Here's how it works. You are an Overseas Contract Worker. Before you
leave home for Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a
little gizmo from us. It's about the size of a paperback book and encases a
thimble sized video camera, a tiny screen, and a lot of memory chips. The
components come from all over the place they are shipped to the free port at
Subic and assembled in a Nipponese plant there. So they cost next to
nothing. Anyway, you take this gizmo overseas with you. Whenever you feel
like communicating with the folks at home, you turn it on, aim the camera at
yourself and record a little video greeting card. It all goes onto the
memory chips. It's highly compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a phone
line and let it work its magic."
"What's the magic? It sends the video down the phone line?"
"Right."
"Haven't people being messing around with video phones for a long
time?''
"The difference here is our software. We don't try to send the video in
real time that's too expensive. We store the data at central servers, then
take advantage of lulls, when traffic is low through the undersea cables,
and shoot the data down those cables when time can be had cheap. Eventually
the data winds up at Epiphyte's facility in Intramuros. From there we can
use wireless technology to send the data to 24 Jam stores all over Metro
Manila. The store just needs a little pie plate dish on the roof, and a
decoder and a regular VCR down behind the counter. The Pinoy gram is
recorded on a regular videotape. Then, when Mom comes in to buy eggs or Dad
comes in to buy cigarettes, the storekeeper says, 'Hey, you got a Pinoy gram
today,' and hands them the videotape. They can take it home and get the
latest news from their child overseas. When they're done, they bring the
videotape back to 24 Jam for reuse."
About halfway through this, Amy understands the basic concept, looks
out the window again and begins trying to work a fragment of breakfast out
of her teeth with the tip of her tongue. She does it with her mouth
tastefully closed, but it seems to occupy her thoughts more than the
explanation of Pinoy grams.
Randy is gripped by a crazy, unaccountable desire not to bore Amy. It's
not that he is getting a crush on her, because he puts the odds at fifty
fifty that she's a lesbian, and he knows better. She is so frank, so
guileless, that he feels he could confide anything in her, as an equal.
This is why he hates business. He wants to tell everyone everything. He
wants to make friends with people.
"So, let me guess," she says, "you are the guy doing the software."
"Yeah," he admits, a little defensive, "but the software is the only
interesting part of this whole project. All the rest is making license
plates.''
That wakes her up a little. "Making license plates?"
"It's an expression that my business partner and I use," Randy says.
"With any job, there's some creative work that needs to be done new
technology to be developed or whatever. Everything else ninety nine percent
of it is making deals, raising capital, going to meetings, marketing and
sales. We call that stuff making license plates."
She nods, looking out the window. Randy is on the verge of telling her
that Pinoy grams are nothing more than a way to create cash flow, so that
they can move on to part two of the business plan. He is sure that this
would elevate his stature beyond that of dull software boy. But Amy puffs
sharply across the top of her coffee, like blowing out a candle, and says,
"Okay. Thanks. I guess that was worth the three packs of cigarettes."
Chapter 11 NIGHTMARE
Bobby Shaftoe has become a connoisseur of nightmares.
Like a fighter pilot ejecting from a burning plane, he has just been
catapulted out of an old nightmare, and into a brand new, even better one.
It is creepy and understated; no giant lizards here.
It begins with heat on his face. When you take enough fuel to push a
fifty thousand ton ship across the Pacific Ocean at twenty five knots, and
put it all in one tank and the Nips fly over and torch it all in a few
seconds, while you stand close enough to see the triumphant grins on the
pilots' faces, then you can feel the heat on your face in this way.
Bobby Shaftoe opens his eyes, expecting that, in so doing, he is
raising the curtain on a corker of a nightmare, probably the final moments
of Torpedo Bombers at Two O'Clock! (his all time favorite) or the surprise
beginning of Strafed by Yellow Men XVII.
But the sound track to this nightmare does not seem to be running. It
is as quiet as an ambush. He is sitting up in a hospital bed surrounded by a
firing squad of hot klieg lights that make it difficult to see anything
else. Shaftoe blinks and focuses on an eddy of cigarette smoke hanging in
the air, like spilled fuel oil in a tropical cove. It sure smells good.
A young man is sitting near his bed. All that Shaftoe can see of this
man is an asymmetrical halo where the lights glance from the petroleum glaze
on his pompadour. And the red coal of his cigarette. As he looks more
carefully he can make out the silhouette of a military uniform. Not a Marine
uniform. Lieutenant's bars gleam on his shoulders, light shining through
double doors.
"Would you like another cigarette?" the lieutenant says. His voice is
hoarse but weirdly gentle.
Shaftoe looks down at his own hand and sees the terminal half inch of a
Lucky Strike wedged between his fingers.
'Ask me a tough one," he manages to say. His own voice is deep and
skirted, like a gramophone winding down.
The butt is swapped for a new one. Shaftoe raises it to his lips. There
are bandages on that arm, and underneath them, he can feel grievous wounds
trying to inflict pain. But something is blocking the signals.
Ah, the morphine. It can't be too bad of a nightmare if it comes with
morphine, can it?
"You ready?" the voice says. God damn it, that voice is familiar.
"Sir, ask me a tough one, sir!" Shaftoe says.
"You already said that."
"Sir, if you ask a Marine if he wants another cigarette, or if he's
ready, the answer is always the same, sir!"
"That's the spirit," the voice says. "Roll film."
A clicking noise starts up in the outer darkness beyond the klieg light
firmament. "Rolling," says a voice.
Something big descends towards Shaftoe. He flattens himself into the
bed, because it looks exactly like the sinister eggs laid in midair by Nip
dive bombers. But then it stops and just hovers there.
"Sound," says another voice.
Shaftoe looks harder and sees that it is not a bomb but a large bullet
shaped microphone on the end of a boom.
The lieutenant with the pompadour leans forward now, instinctively
seeking the light, like a traveler on a cold winter's night.
It is that guy from the movies. What's his name. Oh, yeah!
Ronald Reagan has a stack of three by five cards in his lap. He skids
up a new one: "What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man
ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young
Marines on their way to Guadalcanal?"
Shaftoe doesn't have to think very long. The memories are still as
fresh as last night's eleventh nightmare: ten plucky Nips in Suicide Charge!
"Just kill the one with the sword first."
"Ah," Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking
his pompadour in Shaftoe's direction. "Smarrrt – you target them
because they're the officers, right?"
"No, fuckhead!" Shaftoe yells. "You kill 'em because they've got
fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword ?"
Reagan backs down. He's scared now, sweating off some of his makeup,
even though a cool breeze is coming in off the bay and through the window.
Reagan wants to turn tail and head back down to Hollywood and nail a
starlet fast. But he's stuck here in Oakland, interviewing the war hero. He
flips through his stack of cards, rejects about twenty in a row. Shaftoe's
in no hurry, he's going to be flat on his back in this hospital bed for
approximately the rest of his life. He incinerates half of that cigarette
with one long breath, holds it, blows out a smoke ring.
When they fought at night, the big guns on the warships made rings of
incandescent gas. Not fat doughnuts but long skinny ones that twisted around
like lariats. Shaftoe's body is saturated with morphine. His eyelids
avalanche down over his eyes, blessing those orbs that are burning and
swollen from the film lights and the smoke of the cigarettes. He and his
platoon are racing an incoming tide, trying to get around a headland. They
are Marine Raiders and they have been chasing a particular unit of Nips
across Guadalcanal for two weeks, whittling them down. As long as they're in
the neighborhood, they've been ordered to make their way to a certain point
on the headland from which they ought to be able to lob mortar rounds
against the incoming Tokyo Express. It is a somewhat harebrained and
reckless tactic, but they don't call this Operation Shoestring for nothing;
it is all wacky improvisation from the get go. They are behind schedule
because this paltry handful of Nips has been really tenacious, setting
ambushes behind every fallen log, taking potshots at them every time they
come around one of these headlands. . .
Something clammy hits him on the forehead: it is the makeup artist
taking a swipe at him. Shaftoe finds himself back in the nightmare within
which the lizard nightmare was nested.
"Did I tell you about the lizard?" Shaftoe says.
"Several times," his interrogator says. "This'll just take another
minute." Ronald Reagan squeezes a fresh three by five card between thumb and
forefinger, fastening onto something a little less emotional: "What did you
and your buddies do in the evenings, when the day's fighting was done?"
"Pile up dead Nips with a bulldozer," Shaftoe says, "and set fire to
'em. Then go down to the beach with a jar of hooch and watch our ships get
torpedoed."
Reagan grimaces. "Cut!" he says, quietly but commanding. The clicking
noise of the film camera stops.
"How'd I do?" Bobby Shaftoe says as they are squeegeeing the Maybelline
off his face, and the men are packing up their equipment. The klieg lights
have been turned off, clear northern California light streams in through the
windows. The whole scene looks almost real, as if it weren't a nightmare at
all.
"You did great," Lieutenant Reagan says, without looking him in the
eye. "A real morale booster." He lights a cigarette. "You can go back to
sleep now."
"Haw!" Shaftoe says. "I been asleep the whole time. Haven't I?"
***
He feels a lot better once he gets out of the hospital. They give him a
couple of weeks of leave, and he goes straight to the Oakland station and
hops the next train for Chicago. Fellow passengers recognize him from his
newspaper pictures, buy him drinks, pose with him for snap shots. He stares
out the windows for hours, watching America go by, and sees that all of it
is beautiful and clean. There might be wildness, there might be deep forest,
there might even be grizzly bears and mountain lions, but it is cleanly
sorted out, and the rules (don't mess with bear cubs, hang your food from a
tree limb at night) are well known, and published in the Boy Scout Manual.
In those Pacific islands there is too much that is alive, and all of it is
in a continual process of eating and being eaten by something else, and once
you set foot in the place, you're buying into the deal. Just sitting in that
train for a couple of days, his feet in clean white cotton socks, not being
eaten alive by anything, goes a long way towards clearing his head up. Only
once, or possibly two or three times, does he really feel the need to lock
himself in the can and squirt morphine into his arm.
But when he closes his eyes, he finds himself on Guadalcanal, sloshing
around that last headland, racing the incoming tide. The big waves are
rolling in now, picking up the men and slamming them into rocks.
Finally they turn the corner and see the cove: just a tiny notch in the
coast of Guadalcanal. A hundred yards of tidal mudflats backed up by a
cliff. They will have to get across those mudflats and establish a foothold
on the lower part of the cliff if they aren't going to be washed out to sea
by the tide.
The Shaftoes are Tennessee mountain people miners, among other things.
About the time Nimrod Shaftoe went to the Philippines, a couple of his
brothers moved up to western Wisconsin to work in lead mines. One of them
Bobby's grandpa became a foreman. Sometimes he would go to Oconomowoc to pay
a visit to the owner of the mine, who had a summer house on one of the
lakes. They would go out in a boat and fish for pike. Frequently the mine
owner's neighbors owners of banks and breweries would come along. That is
how the Shaftoes moved to Oconomowoc, and got out of mining, and became
fishing and hunting guides. The family has been scrupulous about holding on
to the ancestral twang, and to certain other traditions such as military
service. One of his sisters and two of his brothers are still living there
with Mom and Dad, and his two older brothers are in the Army. Bobby's not
the first to have won a Silver Star, though he is the first to have won the
Navy Cross.
Bobby goes and talks to Oconomowoc's Boy Scout troop. He gets to be
grand marshal of the town parade. Other than that, he hardly budges from the
house for two weeks. Sometimes he goes out into the yard and plays catch
with his kid brothers. He helps Dad fix up a rotten dock. Guys and gals from
his high school keep coming round to visit, and Bobby soon learns the trick
that his father and his uncles and granduncles all knew, which is that you
never talk about the specifics of what happened over there. No one wants to
hear about how you dug half of your buddy's molars out of your leg with the
point of a bayonet. All of these kids seem like idiots and lightweights to
him now. The only person he can stand to be around is his great grandfather
Shaftoe, ninety four years of age and sharp as a tack, who was there at
Petersburg when Burnside blew a huge hole in the Confederate lines with
buried explosives and sent his men rushing into the crater where they got
slaughtered. He never talks about it, of course, just as Bobby Shaftoe never
talks about the lizard.
Soon enough his time is up, and then he gets a grand sendoff at the
Milwaukee train station, hugs Mom, hugs Sis, shakes hands with Dad and the
brothers, hugs Mom again, and he's off.
Bobby Shaftoe knows nothing of his future. All he knows is that he has
been promoted to sergeant, detached from his former unit (no great
adjustment, since he is the only surviving member of his platoon) and
reassigned to some unheard of branch of the Corps in Washington, D.C.
D.C.'s a busy place, but last time Bobby Shaftoe checked the
newspapers, there wasn't any combat going on there, and so it's obvious he's
not going to get a combat job. He's done his bit anyway, killed many more
than his share of Nips, won his medals, suffered from his wounds. As he
lacks administrative training, he expects that his new assignment will be to
travel around the country being a war hero, raising morale and suckering
young men into joining the Corps.
He reports, as ordered, to Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C. It's the
Corps's oldest post, a city block halfway between the Capitol and the Navy
Yard, a green quadrangle where the Marine Band struts and the drill team
drills. He half expects to see strategic reserves of spit and of polish
stored in giant tanks nearby.
Two Marines are in the office: a major, who is his new, nominal
commanding officer, and a colonel, who looks and acts like he was born here.
It is shocking beyond description that two such personages would be there to
greet a mere sergeant. Must be the Navy Cross that got their attention. But
these Marines have Navy Crosses of their own two or three apiece.
The major introduces the colonel in a way that doesn't really explain a
damn thing to Shaftoe. The colonel says next to nothing; he's there to
observe. The major spends a while fingering some typewritten documents.
"Says right here you are gung ho."
"Sir, yes sir!"
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Sir, it is a Chinese word! There's a Communist there, name of Mao, and
he's got an army. We tangled with 'em on more'n one occasion, sir. Gung ho
is their battle cry, it means 'all together' or something like that, so
after we got done kicking the crap out of them, sir, we stole it from them,
sir!"
"Are you saying you have gone Asiatic like those other China Marines,
Shaftoe?"
"Sir! On the contrary, sir, as I think my record demonstrates, sir!"
"You really think that?" the major says incredulously. "We have an
interesting report here on a film interview that you did with some soldier
(1) named Lieutenant Reagan."
"Sir! This Marine apologizes for his disgraceful behavior during that
interview, sir! This Marine let down himself and his fellow Marines, sir!"
"Aren't you going to give me an excuse? You were wounded. Shell
shocked. Drugged. Suffering from malaria."
"Sir! There is no excuse, sir!"
The major and the colonel nod approvingly at each other.
This "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit
to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the
officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had
trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it
growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter.
Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the
terminal ones (violent death, court martial, retirement), he has come to
understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it
becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the
ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing
each other or completely losing their minds in the process. The extreme
formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important
subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my
problem, sir, is doing it. My gung ho posture says that once you give the
order I'm not going to bother you with any of the details and your half of
the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not
b