g them out of a conversational hole. "It'll be a
bad day for MacArthur when he tries to take Rabaul!"
Ninomiya trudges along silently for a bit, trying to control himself,
and fails. "You idiot," he says, "don't you see? MacArthur isn't coming.
There's no need."
"But Rabaul is the cornerstone of the whole theater!"
"It is a cornerstone of soft, sweet wood in a universe of termites,"
Ninomiya snaps. "All he has to do is ignore us for another year, and then
everyone will be dead of starvation or typhus."
The jungle thins out. The plants are wrestling for footholds on a loose
slope of volcanic cinders, and only smaller ones endure. This puts Goto
Dengo in the mind of writing a poem in which the small, tenacious Nipponese
prevail over the big, lumbering Americans, but it has been a long time since
he wrote a poem and he can't make the words go together.
Someday the plants will turn this cone of scoria and rubble into soil,
but not yet. Now that Goto Dengo can finally see for more than a few yards
he is beginning to understand the lay of the land. The numerical data that
he and Ninomiya have compiled over the last week is being synthesized,
within his mind, into a solid understanding of how this place works.
Calvary is an old cinder cone. It started as a fissure from which ash
and scoria were ejected, one fragment at a time, for thousands of years,
tumbling up and outwards in a family of mortar shell like parabolic curves,
varying in height and distance depending on the size of each fragment and
the direction of the wind. They landed in a wide ring centered on the
fissure. As the ring grew in height it naturally spread out into a broad,
truncated cone with a central pit gouged out of its top, with the spitting
fissure in the bottom of that pit.
The winds here tend to come from a little bit east of due south, and so
the ash tended to be pushed towards the north by northwest edge of the
cone's rim. That is still the highest point of the cinder cone. But the
fissure died out eons ago, or perhaps was plugged by its own emissions, and
the whole structure has been much eroded since then. The southern rim of the
cone is just a barrier of low hills perforated by the courses of the
Yamamoto River and the two tributaries that come together to form the Tojo
River. The central pit is a bowl of loathsome jungle, so saturated with
chlorophyll that it looks black from above. Birds cruise above the canopy,
looking like colored stars from up here.
The northern rim still rises a good five hundred meters above the bowl
of jungle, but its formerly smooth arc has been dissected by erosion to form
three distinct summits, each one a pile of red scoria half concealed by a
stubble of green vegetation. Without discussion, Ninomiya and Goto Dengo
head for the one in the middle, which is the highest. They reach it at about
two thirty in the afternoon, and immediately wish they hadn't because the
sun is beating almost straight down on top of them. But there is a cool
breeze up here, and once they have protected their heads with makeshift
burnooses, it's not so bad. Goto Dengo sets up the tripod and the transit
while Ninomiya uses his sextant to shoot the sun. He has a pretty good
German watch which he zeroed against the radio transmission from Manila this
morning, and this enables him to reckon the longitude. He works the
calculation out on a scrap of paper on his lap, then goes back and does it
again to double check the numbers, speaking them out loud. Goto Dengo copies
them down in his notebook, just in case Ninomiya's notes get lost.
At three o'clock sharp, the enlisted man down in the tree begins to
flash his mirror at them: a brilliant spark from a dark rug of jungle that
is otherwise featureless. Ninomiya centers his transit on this signal and
takes down more figures. In combination with various other data from maps,
aerial photos and the like, this should enable him to make an estimate of
the main shaft's latitude and longitude.
"I don't know how accurate this will be," he frets, as they trudge down
the mountain. "I have the peak exactly what did you call it? Cavalry?"
"Close enough."
"This means soldiers on horseback, correct?"
"Yes."
"But the site of the shaft I will not have very precisely unless I can
use better techniques."
Goto Dengo considers telling him that this is perfectly all right, that
the place was made to be lost and forgotten. But he keeps his mouth shut.
The survey work takes another couple of weeks. They figure out where
the shore of Lake Yamamoto will be and calculate its volume. It will be more
of a pond than a lake less than a hundred meters across but it will be
deceptively deep, and it will hold a lot of water. They calculate the angle
of the shaft that will connect the bottom of the lake to the main network of
tunnels. They figure out where all of the horizontal tunnels will emerge
from the walls of the Tojo River's gorge, and stake out the routes of roads
and railways that will lead to those openings, so that debris can be removed
and precious war material brought in for storage. They double– and
triple check all of it to make sure that no fragment of the works will be
visible from the air.
Meanwhile, down below, Lieutenant Mori and a small work detail have
planted some fenceposts and strung some barbed wire just enough to contain a
hundred or so prisoners, who arrive packed into a couple of military trucks.
When these are put to work, the camp expands very rapidly; the military
barracks go up in a few days and the double barbed wire perimeter is
completed. They never seem to lack for supplies here. Dynamite comes in by
the truckload, as if it weren't desperately needed in places like Rabaul,
and is carefully stored under the supervision of Goto Dengo. Prisoners carry
it into a special shed that has been constructed for this purpose in the
shade of the jungle. Goto Dengo has not been close to the prisoners before,
and is startled to realize that they are all Chinese. And they are not
speaking the dialect of Canton or of Formosa, but rather one that Goto Dengo
heard frequently when he was posted in Shanghai. These prisoners are
northern Chinese.
It is stranger and stranger all the time, this Bundok place.
The Filipinos, he knows, have been uniquely surly about their inclusion
in the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere. They are well armed, and
MacArthur has been egging them on. Many thousands of them have been taken
prisoner. Within half a day's drive of Bundok there are more than enough
Filipino prisoners to fill Lieutenant Mori's camp and accomplish Lieutenant
Goto's project. And yet the powers that be have shipped hundreds of Chinese
people all the way down from Shanghai to do this work.
At times like this he begins to doubt his own sanity. He feels an urge
to discuss the matter with Lieutenant Ninomiya. But the surveyor, his friend
and confidant, has made himself scarce since his work was completed. One
day, Goto Dengo goes by Ninomiya's tent and finds it empty. Captain Noda
explains that the surveyor was called away suddenly to perform important
work elsewhere.
About a month later, when the road building work in the Special
Security Zone is well underway, some of the Chinese workers who are digging
begin shouting excitedly. Goto Dengo understands what they are saying.
They have uncovered human remains. The jungle has done its work and
practically nothing is left but bones, but the smell, and the legions of
ants, tell him that the corpse is a fairly recent one. He grabs a shovel
from one of the workers and pulls up a scoop of dirt and carries it over to
the river, dripping tangles of ants. He lowers it carefully into the running
water. The dirt dissolves into a brown trail in the river and the skull is
soon revealed: the dome of the head, the eye sockets still not entirely
empty, the nasal bone with some fragments of cartilage still attached, and
finally the jaws, pocked with old abcesses and missing most of their teeth,
except for one gold tooth in the middle. The current turns the skull over
slowly, as if Lieutenant Ninomiya is hiding his face in shame, and Goto
Dengo sees a neat hole punched through the base of the skull.
He looks up. A dozen Chinese are gathered above him on the riverbank,
watching him impassively.
"Do not speak of this to any of the other Nipponese," Goto Dengo says.
Their eyes go wide and their lips part in astonishment as they hear him
speaking the precise dialect of Shanghai prostitutes.
One of the Chinese workers is nearly bald. He seems to be in his
forties, though prisoners age rapidly and so it is always difficult to tell.
He is not scared like the others. He is looking at Goto Dengo appraisingly.
"You," Goto Dengo says, "pick two other men and follow me. Bring
shovels."
He leads them into the jungle, into a place where he knows there will
be no further digging, and shows them where to put Lieutenant Ninomiya's new
grave. The bald man is a good leader as well as a strong worker and he gets
the grave dug quickly, then transfers the remains without squeamishness or
complaint. If he has been through the China Incident and survived for this
long as a prisoner of war, he has probably seen and done much worse.
Goto Dengo does his part by distracting Captain Noda for a couple of
hours. They go up and tour the dam work on the Yamamoto River. Noda is
anxious to create Lake Yamamoto as soon as possible, before MacArthur's air
force makes detailed surveys of the area. The sudden appearance of a lake in
the jungle would probably not go unnoticed.
The site of the lake is a natural rock bowl, covered by jungle, with
the Yamamoto River running through the middle of it. Right next to the
riverbank, men are already at work with rock drills, placing dynamite
charges. "The inclined shaft will start here," Goto Dengo tells Captain
Noda, "and runs straight " turning his back on the river he makes one hand
into a blade and thrusts it into the jungle " straight down to Golgotha."
The Place of the Skull.
"Gargotta?" Captain Noda says.
"It is a Tagalog word," Goto Dengo says authoritatively. "It means
'hidden glade.' "
"Hidden glade. I like it! Very good. Gargotta!" Captain Noda says.
"Your work is proceeding very well, Lieutenant Goto."
"I am only striving to live up to the high standard that was set by
Lieutenant Ninomiya," says Goto Dengo.
"He was an excellent worker," Noda says evenly.
"Perhaps when I am finished here, I can follow him to wherever he was
sent."
Noda grins. "Your work is only beginning. But I can say with confidence
that when you are finished you will be reunited with your friend."
Chapter 72 SEATTLE
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's widow and five children agree that Dad
did something in the war, and that's about all. Each of them seems to have a
different 1950s B movie, or 1940s Movietone newsreel, in his or her head,
portraying a rather different set of events. There is not even agreement on
whether he was in the Army or the Navy, which seems like a pretty
fundamental plot point to Randy. Was he in Europe or Asia? Opinions differ.
Grandma grew up on an Outback sheep farm. One might therefore think that, at
some point in her life, she might have been an earthy cuss the type of woman
who would not only remember which service her late husband had been in but
would be able to take down his rifle from the attic and field strip it
blindfolded. But she had evidently spent something like seventy five percent
of her waking hours in church (where she not only worshipped but went to
school and transacted essentially all of her social life), or in transit
thereto or therefrom, and her own parents quite explicitly did not want her
to wind up living on a farm, ramming her arm up livestock vaginas and
slapping raw steaks over the black eyes dished out by some husband. Farming
might have been an adequate sort of booby prize for one or at most two of
their sons, sort of a fallback for any offspring who happened to suffer
major head injuries or fall into chronic alcoholism. But the real purpose of
the cCmndhd kids was to restore the past and lost glories of the family, who
allegedly had been major wool brokers around the time of Shakespeare and
well on their way to living in Kensington and spelling their name Smith
before some combination of scrapie, long term climatic change, nefarious
conduct by jealous Outer Qwghlmians, and a worldwide shift in fashions away
from funny smelling thirty pound sweaters with small arthropods living in
them had driven them all into honest poverty and then not so honest poverty
and led to their forcible transportation to Australia.
The point here being that Grandma was incarnated, indoctrinated, and
groomed by her Ma to wear stockings and lipstick and gloves in a big city
somewhere. The experiment had succeeded to the point where Mary cCmndhd
could, at any point in her post adolescent life, have prepared and served
high tea to the Queen of England on ten minutes' notice, flawlessly, without
having to even glance in a mirror, straighten up her dwelling, polish any
silver, or bone up on any etiquette. It had been a standing joke among her
male offspring that Mom could walk unescorted into any biker bar in the
world and simply by her bearing and appearance cause all ongoing fistfights
to be instantly suspended, all grubby elbows to be removed from the bar,
postures to straighten, salty language to be choked off. The bikers would
climb over one another's backs to take her coat, pull her chair back,
address her as ma'am, etc. Though it had never been performed, this biker
bar scene was like a whole sort of virtual or notional comedy sketch that
was a famous moment in entertainment for the Waterhouse family, like the
Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Belushi doing his samurai bit on Saturday Night
Live. It was up there on their mental videocassette shelves right next to
their imaginary newsreels and B movies of what the Patriarch had done in the
war.
The bottom line was that the ability to run a house in the way Grandma
was legendary or infamous for doing, to keep the personal grooming up to
that standard, to send out a few hundred Christmas cards every year, each
written in flawless fountain pen longhand, etc., etc., that all of these
things taken together took up as much space in her brain as, say mathematics
might take up in a theoretical physicist's.
And so when it came to anything of a practical nature she was perfectly
helpless, and probably always had been. Until she had gotten too old to
drive, she had continued to tool around Whitman in the 1965 Lincoln
Continental, which was the last vehicle her husband had purchased, from
Whitman's Patterson Lincoln Mercury, before his untimely death. The vehicle
weighed something like six thousand pounds and had more moving parts than a
silo full of Swiss watches. Whenever any of her offspring came to visit,
someone would discreetly slip out to the garage to yank the dipstick, which
would always be mysteriously topped up with clear amber colored 10W40. It
eventually turned out that her late husband had summoned the entire living
male lineage of the Patterson family four generations of them into his
hospital room and gathered them around his deathbed and wrought some kind of
unspecified pact with them along the general lines of that, if at any point
in the future, the tire pressure in the Lincoln dropped below spec or the
maintenance in any other way lapsed, all of the Pattersons would not merely
sacrifice their immortal souls, but literally be pulled out of meetings or
lavatories and dragged off to hell on the spot, like Marlowe's Dr. Faustus.
He knew that his wife had only the vaguest idea of what a tire was, other
than something that from time to time a man would heroically jump out of the
car and change while she sat inside the car admiring him. The world of
physical objects seemed to have been made solely for the purpose of giving
the men around Grandma something to do with their hands; and not, mind you,
for any practical reason, but purely so that Grandma could twiddle those
men's emotional knobs by reacting to how well or poorly they did it. Which
was a fine setup as long as men were actually around, but not so good after
Grandpa died. So guerilla mechanic teams had been surveilling Randy's
grandmother ever since and occasionally swiping her Lincoln from the church
parking lot on Sunday mornings and taking it down to Patterson's for sub
rosa oil changes. The ability of the Lincoln to run flawlessly for a quarter
of a century without maintenance without even putting gasoline in the tank
had only confirmed Grandmother's opinions about the amusing superfluity of
male pursuits.
In any event, what it all came down to was that Grandma, whose grasp of
practical matters had only declined (if that was even possible) with
advanced age, was not the sort of person you would go to for information
about her late husband's war record. Defeating the Nazis was in the same
category as changing a flat tire: an untidy business that men were expected
to know how to do. And not just the men of yore, the supermen of her
generation; Randy was expected to know about these things too. If the Axis
reconstituted itself tomorrow, Grandma would expect Randy to be suited up
behind the controls of a supersonic fighter plane the day after that. And
Randy would sooner spiral into the ground at Mach 2 than bear her tidings
that he wasn't up to the job.
Luckily for Randy, who has recently become intensely curious about
Grandpa, an old suitcase has been unearthed. It's a rattan and leather
thing, sort of a snappy Roaring Twenties number complete with some badly
abraded hotel stickers plotting Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's migration
from the Midwest to Princeton and back which is completely filled with small
black and white photographs. Randy's father dumps the contents out on a ping
pong table that inexplicably sits in the center of the rec room at Grandma's
managed care facility, whose residents are about as likely to play ping pong
as they are to get their nipples pierced. The photos are messed out into
several discrete piles which are in turn sorted through by Randy and his
father and his aunts and uncles. Most of them are photos of the Waterhouse
kids, so everyone's fascinated until they have found pictures of themselves
at a couple of different ages. Then the pile of photos begins to look
depressingly large. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse was evidently a shutterbug
of sorts and now his offspring are paying the price.
Randy has a different set of motives, and so he stays there late, going
through pictures by himself. Ninety nine out of a hundred are snapshots of
Waterhouse brats from the 1950s. But some are older. He finds a photo of
Grandpa in a place with palm trees, in a military uniform, with a big white
disk shaped officer's cap on his head. Three hours later he comes across a
picture of a very young Grandpa, really just a turkey necked adolescent
costumed in grownup clothes, standing in front of a gothic building with two
other men: a grinning dark haired chap who looks vaguely familiar, and an
aquiline blond fellow in rimless glasses. All three men have bicycles;
Grandpa is straddling his, and the other two, perhaps considering this to be
not so dignified, are supporting theirs with their hands. Another hour goes
by, and then there's Grandpa in a khaki uniform with more palm trees in the
background.
The next morning he sits down next to his grandmother, after she has
finished her daily hourlong getting out of bed ritual. "Grandmother, I found
these two old photographs." He deals them out on the table in front of her
and gives her a few moments to switch contexts. Grandma doesn't turn on a
dime conversationally, and besides, those stiff old lady corneas take a
little while to shift focus.
"Yes, these are both Lawrence when he was in the service." Grandmother
has always had this knack for telling people the obvious in a way that is
scrupulously polite but that makes the recipient feel like a butthead for
having wasted her time. By this point she is obviously tired of IDing
photographs, a tedious job with an obvious subtext of "you're going to die
soon and we were curious who is this lady standing next to the Buick?"
"Grandmother," Randy says brightly, trying to rouse her interest, "in
this photo here, he is wearing a Navy uniform. And in this photo here, he is
wearing an Army uniform."
Grandma Waterhouse raises her eyebrows and looks at him with the
synthetic interest she would use if she were at a formal affair of some
kind, and some man she'd just met tried to give her a tutorial on tire
changing.
"It is, uh, I think, kind of unusual," Randy says, "for a man to be in
both the Army and the Navy during the same war. Usually it's one or the
other."
"Lawrence had both an Army uniform and a Navy uniform," Grandmother
says, in the same tone she'd used to say he had both a small intestine and a
large intestine, "and he would wear whichever one was appropriate."
"Of course he would," Randy says.
***
The laminar wind is gliding over the highway like a crisp sheet being
stripped from a bed, and Randy's finding it hard to keep the Acura on the
pavement. The wind isn't strong enough to blow the car around, but it
obscures the edges of the road; all he can see is this white, striated plane
sliding laterally beneath him. His eye tells him to steer into it, which
would be a bad idea since it would take him and Amy straight into the lava
fields. He tries to focus on a distant point: the white diamond of Mount
Rainier, a couple of hundred kilometers west.
"I don't even know when they got married," Randy says. "Isn't that
horrible?"
"September of 1945," Amy says. "I dragged it out of her."
"Wow."
"Girl talk."
"I didn't know you were even rigged for girl talk."
"We can all do it."
"Did you learn anything else about the wedding? Like "
"The china pattern?"
"Yeah."
"It was in fact Lavender Rose," Amy says.
"So it fits. I mean, it fits chronologically. The submarine went down
in May of 1945 off of Palawan four months before the wedding. Knowing my
grandmother, wedding preparations would have been well advanced by that
point they definitely would have settled on a china pattern."
"And you think you have a photo of your grandpa in Manila around that
time?"
"It's definitely Manila. And Manila wasn't liberated until March of
'45."
"So what do we have, then? Your grandpa must've had some kind of
connection with someone on that U boat, between March and May."
"A pair of eyeglasses was found on the U boat." Randy pulls a photo out
of his shirt pocket and hands it across to Amy. "I'd be interested to know
if they match the specs on that guy. The tall blond."
"I can check it out when I go back. Is the geek on the left your
grandpa?"
"Yeah."
"Who's the geek in the middle?"
"I think it's Turing."
"Turing, as in TURING Magazine?"
"They named the magazine after him because he did a lot of early work
with computers," Randy says.
"Like your grandpa did."
"Yeah."
"How about this guy we're going to see in Seattle? He's a computer guy
too? Ooh, you're getting this look on your face like 'Amy just said
something so stupid it caused me physical pain.' Is this a common facial
expression among the men of your family? Do you think it is the expression
that your grandfather wore when your grandmother came home and announced
that she had backed the Lincoln Continental into a fire hydrant?"
"I am sorry if I make you feel bad sometimes," Randy says. "The family
is full of scientists. Mathematicians. The least intelligent of us become
engineers. Which is sort of what I am."
"Excuse me, did you just say you were one of the least intelligent?"
"Least focused, maybe."
"My point is that precision, and getting things right, in the
mathematical sense, is the one thing we have going for us. Everyone has to
have a way of getting ahead, right? Otherwise you end up working at
McDonald's your whole life, or worse. Some are born rich. Some are born into
a big family like yours. We make our way in the world by knowing that two
plus two equals four, and sticking to our guns in a way that is kind of
nerdy and that maybe hurts people's feelings sometimes. I'm sorry."
"Hurts whose feelings? People who think that two plus two equals five?"
"People who put a higher priority on social graces than on having every
statement uttered in a conversation be literally true."
"Like, for example . . . female people?"
Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, "If there is
any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how
women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this
incredibly narrow laser beam focus on one tiny little subject and think
about nothing else."
"Whereas women can't?"
"I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I'm
characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and
healthier.
"See, you are being a little paranoid here and focusing on the negative
too much. It's not about how women are deficient. It's more about how men
are deficient. Our social deficiencies, lack of perspective, or whatever you
want to call it, is what enables us to study one species of dragonfly for
twenty years, or sit in front of a computer for a hundred hours a week
writing code. This is not the behavior of a well balanced and healthy
person, but it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or
whatever."
"But you said that you yourself were not very focused."
"Compared to other men in my family, that's true. So, I know a little
about astronomy, a lot about computers, a little about business, and I have,
if I may say so, a slightly higher level of social functioning than the
others. Or maybe it's not even functioning, just an acute awareness of when
I'm not functioning, so that I at least know when to feel embarrassed."
Amy laughs. "You're definitely good at that. It seems like you sort of
lurch from one moment of feeling embarrassed to the next."
Randy gets embarrassed.
"It's fun to watch," Amy says encouragingly. "It speaks well of you."
"What I'm saying is that this does set me apart. One of the most
frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's
socially inept because everybody's been there but rather his complete lack
of embarrassment about it."
"Which is still kind of pathetic."
"It was pathetic when they were in high school," Randy says. "Now it's
something else. Something very different from pathetic."
"What, then?"
"I don't know. There is no word for it. You'll see."
***
Driving over the Cascades produces a climatic transition that would
normally require a four hour airplane flight. Warm rain spatters the wind
shield and loosens the rinds of ice on the wipers. The gradual surprises of
March and April are compressed into a terse executive summary. It is about
as tantalizing as a strip tease video played on fast forward. The landscape
turns wet, and so green it's almost blue, and bolts straight up out of the
soil in the space of about a mile. The fast lanes of Interstate 90 are
strewn with brown snow turds melted loose from homebound skiers' Broncos.
Semis plummet past them in writhing conical shrouds of water and steam.
Randy's startled to see new office buildings halfway up the foothills,
sporting high tech logos. Then he wonders why he's startled. Amy has never
been here, and she takes her feet down from the airbag deployment panel and
sits up straight to look, wishing out loud that Robin and Marcus Aurelius
had come along, instead of turning back towards Tennessee. Randy remembers
to glide over into the right lanes and slow down as they shed the last
thousand feet of altitude into Issaquah, and sure enough the highway patrol
is out there ticketing speeders. Amy's duly impressed by this display of
acumen. They are still miles outside of the city core, in the half forested
suburbs of the East Side, where street and avenue numbers are up in the
triple digits, when Randy pulls onto an exit ramp and drives them down a
long commercial strip that turns out to be just the sphere of influence of a
big mall. Several satellite malls have burst from the asphalt all around it,
wiping out old landmarks and screwing up Randy's navigation. Everything is
crowded because people are out returning their Christmas gifts. After a
little bit of driving around and cursing, Randy finds the core mall, which
looks a little shabby compared to its satellites. He parks in the far corner
of the lot, explaining that it is more logical to do this and then walk for
fifteen seconds than it is to spend fifteen minutes looking for a closer
space.
Randy and Amy stand behind the Acura's open trunk for a minute peeling
off layers of suddenly gratuitous Eastern Washington insulation. Amy frets
about her cousins and wishes that she and Randy had donated all of their
cold weather gear to them; when last seen they were circling the Impala like
a pair of carrier based fighter aircraft orbiting their mother ship in
preparation for landing, checking tire pressures and fluid levels with an
intensity, an alertness, that made it seem as if they were about to do
something much more exciting than settle their asses into bucket seats and
drive east for a couple of days. They have a gallant style about them that
must knock the girls dead back home. Amy hugged them both passionately, as
if she'd never see them again, and they accepted her hugs with dignity and
forbearance, and then they were gone; resisting the urge to lay a patch
until they were a couple of blocks distant.
They go into the mall, Amy still wondering aloud why they are here, but
game. Randy is a little bit turned around, but eventually homes in on a
dimly heard electronic cacophony digitized voices prophesying war and
emerges into the mall's food court. Navigating now partly by sound and
partly by smell, he comes to the corner where a lot of males, ranging from
perhaps ten to forty years old, are seated in small clusters, some
extracting quivering chopstick loads of Szechuan from little white boxes but
most fixated on what, from a distance, looks like some kind of paperwork. As
backdrop, the ultraviolet maw of a vast game arcade spews digitized and
sound lab sweetened detonations, whooshes, sonic booms and Gatling farts.
But the arcade seems nothing more than a defunct landmark around which has
gathered this intense cult of paperwork hobbyists. A wiry teenager in tight
black jeans and a black t shirt prowls among the tables with the provocative
confidence of a pool hustler, a long skinny cardboard box slung over his
shoulder like a rifle. "These are my ethnic group," Randy explains in
response to the look on Amy's face. "Fantasy role playing gamers. This is
Avi and me ten years ago.
"They look like they're playing cards." Amy looks again, and wrinkles
her nose. "Weird cards." Amy barges curiously into the middle of a four nerd
game. Almost anywhere else, the appearance of a female with discernible
waist among these guys would cause some kind of a stir. Their eyes would at
least travel rudely up and down her body. But these guys only think about
one thing: the cards in their hands, each contained in a clear plastic
sleeve to keep it mint condition, each decorated with a picture of a troll
or wizard or some other leaf on the post Tolkienian evolutionary tree, and
printed on the back with elaborate rules. Mentally, these guys are not in a
mall on the East Side of greater Seattle. They are on a mountain pass trying
to kill each other with edged weapons and numinous fire.
The young hustler is sizing Randy up as a potential customer. His box
is long enough to contain a few hundred cards, and it looks heavy. Randy
would not be surprised to learn something depressing about this kid, like
that he makes so much money from buying cards low and selling them high that
he owns a brand new Lexus he's too young to drive. Randy catches his eye and
asks, "Chester?"
"Bathroom."
Randy sits down and watches Amy watching the nerds play their game. He
thought he'd hit bottom in Whitman, out there on the parking lot, that
surely she would get scared and flee. But this is potentially worse. A bunch
of tubby guys who never go outside, working themselves into a frenzy over
elaborate games in which nonexistent characters go out and do pretend things
that mostly are not as interesting as what Amy, her father, and various
other members of her family do all the time without making any fuss about
it. It is almost like Randy is deliberately hammering away at Amy trying to
find out when she'll break and run. But her lip hasn't started to writhe
nauseously yet. She's watching the game impartially, peeking over the nerds'
shoulders, following the action, occasionally squinting at some abstraction
in the rules.
"Hey, Randy."
"Hey, Chester."
So Chester's back from the bathroom. He looks exactly like the Chester
of old, except spread out over a somewhat larger volume, like the classic
demo of the expanding universe theory in which a face, or some other figure,
is drawn on a partly inflated balloon which is then inflated some more. The
pores have gotten larger, and the individual shafts of hair farther apart,
which produces an illusion of impending baldness. It seems like even his
eyes have gotten farther apart and the flecks of color in the irises grown
into blotches. He is not necessarily fat he has the same rumpled heftiness
he used to. Since people do not literally grow after their late teens, this
must be an illusion. Older people seem to take up a larger space in the
room. Or maybe older people see more.
"How's Avid?"
"As avid as ever," Randy says, which is lame but obligatory. Chester is
wearing a sort of photographer's vest with a gratuitous number of small
pockets, each of which is stuffed with gaming cards. Maybe that's why he
seems big. He has like twenty pounds of cards strapped to him. "I note that
you have made the transition to card based RPGs," Randy says.
"Oh, yeah! It is so much better than the old pencil and paper way. Or
even computer mediated RPGs, with all due respect to the fine work that you
and Avi did. What are you working on now?"
"Something that might actually be relevant to this," Randy says. "I was
just realizing that if you have a set of cryptographic protocols suitable
for issuing an electronic currency that cannot be counterfeited which oddly
enough we do you could adapt those same protocols to card games. Because
each one of these cards is like a banknote. Some more valuable than others."
Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt
Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when
someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads
into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the
information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self confidence,
and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And
highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative
sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the
social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed
as aggression under any circumstances. "It's already being done," Chester
says, when Randy's finished. "In fact, that company you and Avi worked for
in Minneapolis is one of the leaders "
"I'd like you to meet my friend, Amy," Randy interrupts, even though
Amy is a good distance away, and not paying attention. But Randy is afraid
that Chester's about to tell him that stock in that Minneapolis company is
now up to the point where its market capitalization exceeds that of General
Dynamics, and that Randy should've held onto his shares. "Amy, this is my
friend Chester," Randy says, leading Chester between tables. At this point
some of the gamers actually do look up interestedly not at Amy, but at
Chester, who (Randy infers) has probably got some one of a kind cards tucked
away in that vest, like THE THERMONUCLEAR ARSENAL OF THE UNION OF SOVIET
SOCIALIST REPUBLICS or YHWH. Chester exhibits a marked improvement in social
skills, shaking Amy's hand with no trace of awkwardness and dropping
smoothly into a pretty decent imitation of a mature and well rounded
individual engaging in polite small talk. Before Randy knows it, Chester has
invited them over to his house.
"I heard it wasn't done yet," Randy says.
"You must've seen the article in The Economist," Chester says.
"That's right."
"If you'd seen the article in The New York Times, you'd know that the
article in The Economist was wrong. I am now living in the house."
"Well, it'd be fun to see it," Randy says.
***
"Notice how well paved my street is?" Chester says sourly, half an hour
later. Randy has parked his hammered and scraped Acura in the guest parking
lot of Chester's house and Chester has parked his 1932 Dusenberg roadster in
the garage, between a Lamborghini and some other vehicle that would appear
to be literally an aircraft, built to hover on ducted fans.
"Uh, I can't say that I did," Randy says, trying not to gape at
anything. Even the pavement under his feet is some kind of custom made
mosaic of Penrose tiles. "I sort of vaguely remember it as being broad and
flat and not having any chuckholes. Well paved, in other words."
"This," Chester says, head faking towards his house, "was the first
house to trigger the LOHO."
"LOHO?"
"The Ludicrously Oversized Home Ordinance. Some malcontents rammed it
through the city council. You get these, like cardiovascular surgeons and
trust fund parasites who like to have big nice houses, but God forbid some
dirty hacker should try to build a house of his own, and send a few cement
trucks down their street occasionally."
"They made you repave the street?"
"They made me repave half the fucking town," Chester says. "I mean,
some of the neighbors were griping that the house was an eyesore, but after
we got off on the wrong foot my attitude was, to hell with 'em." Indeed,
Chester's house does resemble nothing so much as a regional trucking hub
with a roof made entirely of glass. He waves his arm down a patchily turfed
slab of mud that slopes down into Lake Washington. "Obviously the
landscaping hasn't even begun yet. So it looks like a science fair project
on erosion."
"I was going to say the Battle of the Somme," Randy says.
"Not as good an analogy because there are no trenches," Chester says.
He is still pointing down towards the lake. "But if you look near the
waterline you can just make out some railroad ties, half buried. That's
where we laid the tracks."
"Tracks?" Amy says, the only word she's been able to get out of her
mouth since Randy drove his Acura through the main gate. Randy told her, on
the way over here, that if he, Randy, had a hundred thous