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. <I>Homo
sapiens</I> 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.


     <B>***</B>


     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.


     <B>***</B>


     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  <I>did</I> take  it  personally.  It wasn't
being  told  that they were  wrong  that offended  them, though it  was  the
underlying assumption that a person <I>could</I> be right or  wrong about <I>anything.</I>
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
<I>really</I> (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 <I>Who
invited  this  poor lightweight?</I>  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>I do.</I> "
     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.


     <B>Chapter 7 BURN</B>


     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 <I>here.</I> 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.


     <B>Chapter 8 PEDESTRIAN</B>


     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