the same words, printed on the inside.
After a smoke, they are back on the road. More black cones coalesce,
all around them now, and the road begins to ramble up over hills and down
into valleys. The trees get closer and closer together until they are riding
through a sort of cultivated and inhabited jungle: pineapples close to the
ground, coffee and cocoa bushes in the middle, bananas and coconuts
overhead. They pass through one village after another, each one a cluster of
dilapidated huts huddled around a great white church, built squat and strong
to survive earthquakes. They zigzag around heaps of fresh coconuts piled by
the roadside, spilling out into the right of way. Finally they turn off of
the main road and into a dirt track that winds through the trees. The track
has been rutted by the tires of trucks that are much too big for it. Freshly
snapped off tree branches litter the ground.
They pass through a deserted village. Stray dogs flit in and out of
huts whose front doors swing unlatched. Heaps of young green coconuts rot
under snarls of black flies.
Another mile down the road, the cultivated forest gives way to the wild
kind, and a military checkpoint bars the road. The smile vanishes from the
driver's face.
Goto Dengo states his name to one of the guards. Not knowing why he is
here, he can say nothing else. He is pretty sure now that this is a prison
camp and that he is about to become an inmate. As his eyes adjust he can see
a barrier of barbed wire strung from tree to tree, and a second barrier
inside of that. Peering carefully into the undergrowth he can make out where
they dug bunkers and established pillboxes, he can map out their
interlocking fields of fire in his mind. He sees ropes dangling from the
tops of tall trees where snipers can tie themselves into the branches if
need be. It has all been done according to doctrine, but it has a perfection
that is never seen on a real battlefield, only in training camps.
He is startled to realize that all of these fortifications are designed
to keep people out, not keep them in.
A call comes through on the field telephone, the barrier is raised, and
they are waved through. Half a mile into the jungle they come to a cluster
of tents pitched on platforms made from the freshly hewn logs of the trees
that were cut down to make this clearing. A lieutenant is standing in a
shady patch, waiting for them.
"Lieutenant Goto, I am Lieutenant Mori."
"You have arrived in the Southern Resource Zone recently, Lieutenant
Mori?"
"Yes. How did you know?"
"You are standing directly beneath a coconut tree."
Lieutenant Mori looks straight up in the air to see several wooly brown
cannonballs dangling high over his head. "Ah, so!" he says, and moves out of
the way. "Did you have any conversation with the driver on the way here?"
"Just a few words."
"What did you discuss with him?"
"Cigarettes. Silver."
"Silver?" Lieutenant Mori is very interested in this, so Goto Dengo
recounts their whole conversation.
"You told him that you were a digger?"
"Something like that, yes."
Lieutenant Mori backs off a step, turning to an enlisted man who has
been standing off to the side, and nods. The enlisted man picks the butt of
his rifle up off the ground, wheels the weapon around to a horizontal
position, and turns towards the driver. He covers the distance in about six
steps, accelerating to a full sprint, and cuts loose with a throaty roar as
he drives his bayonet into the driver's slim body. The victim is picked up
off his feet, then sprawls on his back with a low gasp. The soldier
straddles him and thrusts the bayonet into his torso several more times,
each stroke making a wet hissing sound as metal slides between walls of
meat.
The driver ends up sprawled motionless on the ground, jetting blood in
all directions.
"The indiscretion will not be held against you," says Lieutenant Mori
brightly, "because you did not know the nature of your new assignment.
"Pardon me?"
"Digging. You are here to dig, Goto san." He snaps to attention and
bows deeply. "Let me be the first to congratulate you. Your assignment is a
very important one."
Goto Dengo returns the bow, not sure how deep to make it. "So I'm not "
He gropes for words. In trouble? A pariah? Condemned to death? "I'm not a
low person here?"
"You are a very high person here, Goto san. Please come with me."
Lieutenant Mori gestures towards one of the tents.
As Goto Dengo walks away, he hears the young motorcycle driver mumble
something.
"What did he say?" Lieutenant Mori asks.
"He said, 'Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.' It's a
religious thing," Goto Dengo explains.
Chapter 63 CALIFORNIA
Half of the people who work at SFO, San Francisco International
Airport, now seem to be Filipino, which certainly helps to ease the shock of
reentry. Randy gets singled out, as he always does, for a thorough luggage
search by the exclusively Anglo customs officials. Men traveling by
themselves with practically no luggage seem to irritate the American
authorities. It's not so much that they think you are a drug trafficker as
that you fit, in the most schematic possible way, the profile of the most
pathologically optimistic conceivable drug trafficker, and hence practically
force them to investigate you. Irritated that you have forced their hand in
this manner, they want to teach you a lesson: travel with a wife and four
kids next time, or check a few giant trundling bags, or something, man! What
were you thinking? Never mind that Randy is coming in from a place where
DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS is posted all over the airport the way CAUTION:
WET FLOOR is here.
The most Kafkaesque moment is, as always, when the customs official
asks what he does for a living, and he has to devise an answer that will not
sound like the frantic improvisations of a drug mule with a belly full of
ominously swelling heroin stuffed condoms. "I work for a private
telecommunications provider" seems to be innocuous enough. "Oh, like a phone
company?" says the customs official, as if she's having none of it. "The
phone market isn't really that available to us," Randy says, "so we provide
other communications services. Mostly data."
"Does that involve a lot of traveling around from place to place then?"
asks the customs official, paging through the luridly stamped back pages of
Randy's passport. She makes eye contact with a more senior customs official
who sidles over towards them. Randy now feels himself getting nervous,
exactly the way your drug mule would, and fights the impulse to scrub his
damp palms against his pant legs, which would probably guarantee him a trip
through the magnetic tunnel of a CAT scanner, a triple dose of mint flavored
laxative, and several hours of straining over a stainless steel evidence
bucket. "Yes, it does," Randy says.
The senior customs official, trying to be unobtrusive and low key in a
way that makes Randy stifle a sort of gasping, pained outburst of laughter,
begins to flip through some appalling communications industry magazine that
Randy stuffed into his briefcase on his way out the door back in Manila. The
word INTERNET appears at least five times on the front cover. Randy stares
directly into the eyes of the female customs official and says, "The
Internet." Totally factitious understanding dawns on the woman's face, and
her eyes ping bosswards. The boss, still deeply absorbed in an article about
the next generation of high speed routers, shoves out his lower lip and
nods, like every other nineties American male who senses that knowing this
stuff is now as intrinsic to maleness as changing flat tires was to Dad. "I
hear that's really exciting now," the woman says in a completely different
tone of voice, and begins scooping Randy's stuff together into a big pile so
that he can repack it. Suddenly the spell is broken, Randy is a member in
good standing of American society again, having cheerfully endured this
process of being ritually goosed by the Government. He feels a strong
impulse to drive straight to the nearest gun store and spend about ten
thousand dollars. Not that he wants to hurt anyone; it's just that any kind
of government authority gives him the creeps now. He's probably been hanging
out too much with the ridiculously heavily armed Tom Howard. First a
hostility to rainforests, now a desire to own an automatic weapon; where is
this all going?
Avi is waiting for him, a tall pale figure standing at the velvet rope
surrounded by hundreds of Filipinas in a state of emotional riot,
brandishing gladiola spears like medieval pikemen. Avi has his hands in the
pockets of his floor skimming coat, and keeps his head turned in Randy's
direction but is sort of concentrating on a point about halfway between
them, frowning in an owlish way. This is the same frown that Randy's
grandmother used to wear when she was teasing apart a tangle of string from
her junk drawer. Avi adopts it when he is doing basically the same thing to
some new complex of information. He must have read Randy's e mail message
about the gold. It occurs to Randy that he missed a great opportunity for a
practical joke: he could have loaded up his bag with a couple of lead bricks
and then handed it to Avi and completely blown his mind. Too late. Avi
rotates around his vertical axis as Randy comes abreast of him and then
breaks into a stride that matches Randy's pace. There is some unarticulated
protocol that dictates when Randy and Avi will shake hands, when they will
hug, and when they will just act like they've only been separated for a few
minutes. A recent exchange of e mail seems to constitute a virtual reunion
that obviates any hand shaking or hugging. "You were right about the cheesy
dialog," is the first thing Avi says. "You're spending too much time with
Shaftoe, seeing things his way. This was not an attempt to send you a
message, at least not in the way Shaftoe means."
"What's your interpretation, then?"
"How would you go about establishing a new currency?" Avi asks.
Randy frequently overhears snatches of business related conversation
from people he passes in airports, and it's always about how did the big
presentation go, or who's on the short list to replace the departing CFO, or
something. He prides himself on what he believes to be the much higher
plane, or at least the much more bizarre subject matter, of his interchanges
with Avi. They are walking together around the slow arc of SFO's inner ring.
A whiff of soy sauce and ginger drifts out of a restaurant and fogs Randy's
mind, making him unsure, for a moment, which hemisphere he's in.
"Uh, it's not something I have given much thought to," he says. "Is
that what we are about now? Are we going to establish a new currency?"
"Well obviously someone needs to establish one that doesn't suck," Avi
says.
"Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?" Randy asks.
"Don't you ever read the newspapers?" Avi grabs Randy by the elbow and
drags him over towards a newsstand. Several papers are running front page
stories about crashing Southeast Asian currencies, but this isn't all that
new.
"I know currency fluctuations are important to Epiphyte," Randy says.
"But my god, it's so tedious I just want to run away.
"Well, it's not tedious to her," Avi says, yanking out three different
newspapers that have all decided to run the same wire service photograph: an
adorable Thai moppet standing in a mile long queue in front of a bank,
holding up a single American dollar bill.
"I know it's a big deal for some of our customers," Randy says, "I just
didn't really think of it as a business opportunity."
"No, think about it," Avi says. He counts out a few dollar bills of his
own to pay for the newspapers, then swerves towards an exit. They enter a
tunnel that leads to a parking garage. "The sultan feels that "
"You've been just sort of hanging out with the sultan?"
"Mostly with Pragasu. Will you let me finish? We decided to set up the
Crypt, right?"
"Right."
"What is the Crypt? Do you remember its original stated function?"
"Secure, anonymous, unregulated data storage. A data haven."
"Yeah. A bit bucket. And we envisioned many applications for this."
"Boy, did we ever," Randy says, remembering many long nights around
kitchen tables and hotel rooms, writing versions of the business plan that
are now as ancient and as lost as the holographs of the Four Gospels.
"One of these was electronic banking. Heck, we even predicted it might
be one of the major applications. But whenever a business plan first makes
contact with the actual market the real world suddenly all kinds of stuff
becomes clear. You may have envisioned half a dozen potential markets for
your product, but as soon as you open your doors, one just explodes from the
pack and becomes so instantly important that good business sense dictates
that you abandon the others and concentrate all your efforts."
"And that's what happened with the e banking thing," Randy says.
"Yes. During our meetings at the Sultan's Palace," Avi says. "Before
those meetings, we envisioned well you know what we envisioned. What
actually happened was that the room was packed with these guys who were
exclusively interested in the e banking thing. That was our first clue.
Then, this!" He holds up his newspapers, whacks the dollar brandishing
moppet with the back of his hand. "So, that's the business we're in now."
"We are bankers," Randy says. He will have to keep saying this to
himself for a while in order to believe it, like, "We are striving with all
our might to uphold the goals of the 23rd Party Congress." We are bankers.
We are bankers.
"Banks used to issue their own currencies. You can see these old
banknotes in the Smithsonian. 'First National Bank of South Bumfuck will
remit ten pork bellies to the bearer,' or whatever. That had to stop because
commerce became nonlocal you needed to be able to take your money with you
when you went out West, or whatever."
"But if we're online, the whole world is local," Randy says.
"Yeah. So all we need is something to back the currency. Gold would be
good."
"Gold? Are you joking? Isn't that kind of old fashioned?"
"It was until all of the unbacked currencies in Southeast Asia went
down the toilet."
"Avi, so far I am still kind of confused, frankly. You seem to be
working your way around to telling me that my little trip to see the gold in
the jungle was no coincidence. But how can we use that gold to back our
currency?"
Avi shrugs as if it's such a minor detail he hasn't even bothered to
think about it. "That's just a deal making issue."
"Oh, god."
"These people who sent you a message want to get into business with us.
Your trip to see the gold was a credit check."
They are walking through a tunnel toward the garage, stuck behind an
extended clan of Southeast Asians in elaborate headdresses. Perhaps the
entire remaining gene pool of some nearly extinct mountain dwelling minority
group. Their belongings are in giant boxes wrapped in iridescent pink
synthetic twine, balanced atop airport luggage carts.
"A credit check." Randy always hates it when he gets so far behind Avi
that all he can do is lamely repeat phrases.
"You know how, when you and Charlene bought that house, the lender had
to look at it first?"
"I bought it for cash."
"Okay, okay, but in general, before a bank will issue a mortgage on a
house, they will inspect it. Not in great detail, necessarily. They'll just
have some executive of the bank drive by the property to verify that it
exists and is where the documents claim it is, and so on.
"So, that's what my journey to the jungle was about?"
"Yeah. Some of the potential, uh, participants in the project just
wanted to make it clear to us that they were, in fact, in possession of this
gold."
"I really have to wonder what 'possession' denotes in this case."
"Me too," Avi says. "I've been sort of puzzling over that one." Hence,
Randy thinks, the frowny look in the airport.
"I just thought they wanted to sell it," Randy says.
"Why? Why sell it?"
"To liquidate it. So they could buy real estate. Or five thousand pairs
of shoes. Or something."
Avi scrunches his face in disappointment. "Oh, Randy, that is really
unworthy, alluding to the Marcoses. The gold you saw is pocket change
compared to what Ferdinand Marcos dug up. The people who set up your trip to
the jungle are satellites of satellites of him."
"Well. Consider it a cry for help," Randy says. "Words seem to be
passing back and forth between us, but I understand less and less."
Avi opens his mouth to respond, but just then the animists trigger
their car alarm. Unable to propitiate it, they form a circle around the car
and grin at one another. Avi and Randy pick up their pace and get well away
from it.
Avi stops and straightens, as if pulled up short. "Speaking of not
understanding things," he says, "you need to communicate with that girl. Amy
Shaftoe."
"Has she been communicating with you?"
"In the course of twenty minutes' phone conversation, she has deeply
and eternally bonded with Kia," Avi says.
"I would believe that without hesitation."
"It wasn't even like they got to know each other. It was like they knew
each other in a previous life and had just gotten back in touch."
"Yeah. So?"
"Kia now feels bound by duty and honor to present a united front with
America Shaftoe."
"It all hangs together," Randy says.
"Acting sort of like Amy's emotional agent or lawyer, she has made it
clear to me that we, Epiphyte Corporation, owe Amy our full attention and
concern."
"And what does Amy want?"
"That was my question," Avi says, "and I was made to feel very bad for
asking it. Whatever it is that we that you owe to Amy is something so
obvious that merely manifesting a need to verbalize it is... just...
really..."
"Shabby. Insensitive."
"Coarse. Brutish."
"A really transparent, toddler level exercise in the cheapest kind of,
of. . ."
"Of evasion of personal responsibility for one's own gross misdeeds."
"Kia was rolling her eyes, I imagine. Her lip was sort of curled."
"She drew breath as if to give me a good piece of her mind but then
thought better of it."
"Not because you're her boss. But because you would never understand."
"This is just one of those evils that has to be sort of accepted and
swallowed, by any mature woman who's been around the block."
"Who knows the harsh realities. Yeah," Randy says.
"Okay, you can tell Kia that her client's needs and demands have been
communicated to the guilty party "
"Have they?"
"Tell her that the fact that her client has needs and demands has been
heavy handedly insinuated to me and that it is understood that the ball is
in my court."
"And we can stand down to some kind of detente while a response is
prepared?"
"Certainly. Kia can return to her normal duties for the time being."
"Thank you, Randy."
Avi's Range Rover is parked in the most remote part of the roof of the
parking ramp, in the center of about twenty five empty parking spaces that
form a sort of security buffer zone. When they have traversed about half of
the glacis, the car's headlights flutter, and Randy hears the preparatory
snap of a sound system being energized. "The Range Rover has picked us up on
Doppler radar," Avi says hastily.
The Range Rover speaketh in a fearsome Oz like voice cranked up to
burning bush decibel levels. "You are being tracked by Cerberus! Please
alter your course immediately!"
"I can't believe you bought one of these things," Randy says.
"You have encroached on the Cerberus defensive perimeter! Move back.
Move back," says the Range Rover. "An armed response team is being placed on
standby."
"It is the only cryptographically sound car alarm system," Avi says, as
if that settles the matter. He digs out a keychain attached to a black
polycarbonate fob with the same dimensions, and number of buttons, as a
television remote control. He enters a long series of digits and cuts off
the voice in the middle of proclaiming that Randy and Avi are being recorded
on a digital video camera that is sensitive into the near infra red range.
"Normally it doesn't do that," Avi says. "I had it set to its maximum
alert status."
"What's the worst that could happen? Someone would steal your car and
the insurance company would buy you a new one?"
"I couldn't care less if it gets stolen. The worst that could happen
would be a car bomb, or, not quite as bad, someone putting a bug in my car
and listening to everything I say."
Avi drives Randy over the San Andreas Fault to his place in Pacifica,
which is where Randy stores his car while he's overseas. Avi's wife Devorah
is in at the doctor's for a routine prenatal and all the kids are either at
school or being hustled around the neighborhood by their tag team duo of
tough Israeli nannies. Avi's nannies have the souls of war hardened Soviet
paratroopers in the bodies of nubile eighteen year old girls. The house has
been utterly abandoned to kid raising. The formal dining room has been
converted to a nanny barracks with bunk beds hammered together from
unfinished two by fours, the parlor filled with cribs and changing tables,
and every square centimeter of cheap shag carpet in the place has been
infused with a few dozen flakes of glitter, in various festive colors, which
if they even cared about getting rid of it could only be removed through
direct microsurgical extraction, one flake at a time. Avi plies Randy with a
sandwich of turkey bologna and ketchup on generic Wonderoid bread. It is
still too early in Manila for Randy to call Amy and make amends for whatever
he did wrong. Down below them, in Avi's basement office, a fax machine
shrieks and rustles like a bird in a coffee can. A laminated CIA map of
Sierra Leone is spread out on the table, peeking out here and there through
numerous overlying strata of dirty dishes, newspapers, coloring books, and
drafts of the Epiphyte(2) Business Plan. Post it notes are stuck to the map
from place to place. Written on each note, in Avi's distinctive triple ought
Rapidograph drafting pen hand, is a latitude and longitude with lots of
significant digits, and some kind of precis of what happened there: "5
women, 2 men, 4 children, with machetes photos:" and then serial numbers
from Avi's database.
Randy was a little groggy on the drive over, and was irritable about
the inappropriate daylight, but after the sandwich his metabolism tries to
get into the spirit of things. He has learned to surf these mysterious
endocrinological swells. "I'm going to get going," he says, and stands.
"Your overall plan, again?"
"First I go south," Randy says, superstitiously not even wanting to
utter the name of the place where he used to live. "For no more than a day,
I hope. Then jet lag will land on me like a plunging safe and I will hole up
somewhere and watch basketball through the vee of my feet for maybe a day.
Then I head north to the Palouse country."
Avi raises his eyebrows. "Home?"
"Yeah."
"Hey, before I forget could you look for information on the Whitmans
while you're up there?"
"You mean the missionaries?"
"Yeah. They came out to the Palouse to convert the Cayuse Indians, who
were these magnificent horsemen. They had the best of intentions, but they
accidentally gave them measles. Annihilated the whole tribe."
"Does that really land within the boundaries of your obsession?
Inadvertent genocide?"
"Anomalous cases have heightened utility in that they help us delineate
the boundaries of the field."
"I'll see what I can find about the Whitmans."
"May I inquire," Avi says, "why you are going up there? Family visit?"
"My grandmother is moving to a managed care facility. Her children are
convening to divide up her furniture and so on, which I find a little
ghoulish, but it's nobody's fault and it has to be done."
"And you are going to participate?"
"I am going to avoid it as much as I can, because it's probably going
to be a catfight. Years from now, family members will still not be speaking
to each other because they didn't get Mom's Gomer Bolstrood credenza."
"What is it with Anglo Saxons and furniture? Could you explain that to
me?"
"I am going because we found a piece of paper in a briefcase in a
sunken Nazi submarine in the Palawan Passage that says, 'WATERHOUSE LAVENDER
ROSE.'"
Avi looks baffled now, in a way that Randy finds satisfying. He gets up
and climbs into his car and starts driving south, down the coast, the slow
and beautiful way.
Chapter 64 ORGAN
Lawrence Waterhouse's libido is suppressed for about a week by the pain
and swelling in his jaw. Then the pain and swelling in his groin surges into
the fore, and he begins searching his memories of the dance, wondering if he
made any progress with Mary cCmndhd.
He wakes up suddenly at four o'clock one Sunday morning, clammily
coated from his nipples to his knees. Rod is still sleeping soundly, thank
god, and so if Waterhouse did any moaning or calling out of names during his
dream, Rod's probably not aware of it. Waterhouse begins trying to clean
himself off without making a lot of noise. He doesn't even want to think
about how he's going to explain the condition of the sheets to Who Will
Launder Them. "It was completely innocent, Mrs. McTeague. I dreamed that I
came downstairs in my pajamas and that Mary was sitting in the parlor in her
uniform, drinking tea, and she turned and looked me in the eye, and then I
just couldn't control myself and aaaaAAAHHH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH!
HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! And then I woke up and just look at the mess.
Mrs. McTeague (and other old ladies like her all around the world) does
the laundry only because it is her role in the giant Ejaculation Control
Conspiracy which, as Waterhouse is belatedly realizing, controls the entire
planet. No doubt she has a clipboard down in the cellar, next to her mangle,
where she marks down the frequency and volume of the ejaculations of her
four boarders. The data sheets are mailed into some Bletchley Park type of
operation somewhere (Waterhouse guesses it's disguised as a large convent in
upstate New York), where the numbers from all round the world are tabulated
on Electrical Till Corporation machines and printouts piled up on carts that
are wheeled into the offices of the high priestesses of the conspiracy,
dressed in heavily starched white raiments, embroidered with the emblem of
the conspiracy: a penis caught in a mangle. The priestesses review the data
carefully. They observe that Hitler still isn't getting any, and debate
whether letting him have some would calm him down a little bit or just give
him license to run further out of control. It will take months for the name
of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse to come to the top of the list, and months
for orders to be sent out to Brisbane and even then, the orders may condemn
him to another year of waiting for Mary cCmndhd to show up in his dreams
with a teacup.
Mrs. McTeague, and other ECC members (such as Mary cCmndhd and
basically all of the other young women) are offended by easy girls,
prostitutes, and whorehouses, not for religious reasons, but because they
provide a refuge where men can have ejaculations that are not controlled,
metered, or monitored in any way. Prostitutes are turncoats, collaborators.
All of this comes into Waterhouse's mind as he lies in his damp bed
between four and six o'clock in the morning, considering his place in the
world with the crystalline clarity that can only be obtained by getting a
good night's sleep and then venting several weeks' jism production. He has
reached a fork in the road.
Last night, before Rod turned in, he shined his shoes, explaining that
tomorrow morning he had to be up bright and early for church. Now,
Waterhouse knows what that means, having spent many a Sabbath on Qwghlm,
cringing and blushing under the glares of the locals, who were outraged that
he appeared to be running the huffduff equipment on the day of rest. He has
seen them shuffling into their morbid, thousand year old black stone chapel
on Sunday mornings for their three hour services. Hell, Waterhouse even
lived in a Qwghlmian chapel for several months. Its gloom suffused his whole
being.
Going to church with Rod would mean giving in to the ECC, becoming
their minion. The alternative is the whorehouse.
Even though he grew up in churches, raised by church people, Waterhouse
(as must be obvious by this point) never really understood their attitudes
about sex. Why did they get so hung up on that one issue, when there were
others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence?
Now, finally, he gets it: the churches are merely one branch of the
ECC. And what they are doing, when they fulminate about sex, is trying to
make sure that all the young people fall in line with the ECC's program.
So, what is the end result of the ECC's efforts? Waterhouse stares at
the ceiling, which is starting to become fuzzily visible as the sun rises in
the west, or the north, or wherever the hell it rises here in the Southern
Hemisphere. He takes a quick inventory of the world and finds that basically
the ECC is running the entire planet, good countries and bad countries
alike. That all successful and respected men are minions of the ECC, or at
least are so scared of it that they pretend to be. Non ECC members live on
the fringes of society, like prostitutes, or have been driven deep
underground and must waste tremendous amounts of time and energy keeping up
a false front. If you knuckle under and become a minion of the ECC, you get
to have a career, a family, kids, wealth, house, pot roasts, clean laundry,
and the respect of all the other ECC minions. You have to pay dues in the
form of chronic nagging sexual irritation which can only be relieved by, and
at the discretion and convenience of, one person, the person designated for
this role by the ECC: your wife. On the other hand, if you reject the ECC
and its works, you can't, by definition, have a family, and your career
options are limited to pimp, gangster, and forty year enlisted sailor.
Hell, it's not even that bad of a conspiracy. They build churches and
universities, educate kids, install swingsets in parks. Sometimes they throw
a war and kill ten or twenty million people, but it's a drop in the bucket
compared to stuff like influenza which the ECC campaigns against by nagging
everyone to wash their hands and cover their mouths when sneezing.
The alarm clock. Rod rolls out of bed like it's a Nip air raid.
Waterhouse stares at the ceiling for another few minutes, dithering. But he
knows where he's going, and there's no point in wasting any more time. He's
going to church, and not exactly because he has renounced Satan and all his
works, but because he wants to fuck Mary. He almost can't help flinching
when he says (to himself) this terrible sounding thing. But the weird thing
about church is that it provides a special context within which it is
perfectly okay to want to fuck Mary. As long as he goes to church, he can
want to fuck Mary as much as he wants, he can spend all of his time, in and
out of church, thinking about fucking Mary. He can let her know that he
wants to fuck her as long as he finds a more oblique way of phrasing it. And
if he jumps through certain hoops (hoops of gold) he can even fuck Mary in
actuality, and it will all be perfectly acceptable at no time will he have
to feel the slightest trace of shame or guilt.
He rolls out of bed, startling Rod, who (being some sort of jungle
commando) is easily startled. "I'm going to fuck your cousin until the bed
collapses into a pile of splinters," Waterhouse says.
Actually, what he says is "I'm going to church with you." But
Waterhouse, the cryptologist, is engaging in a bit of secret code work here.
He is using a newly invented code, which only he knows. It will be very
dangerous if the code is ever broken, but this is impossible since there is
only one copy, and it's in Waterhouse's head. Turing might be smart enough
to break the code anyway, but he's in England, and he's on Waterhouse's
side, so he'd never tell
A few minutes later, Waterhouse and cCmndhd go downstairs, headed for
"church," which in Waterhouse's secret code, means "headquarters of the Mary
fucking campaign of 1944."
As they step out into the cool morning air they can hear Mrs. McTeague
bustling into their bedroom to strip their beds and inspect their sheets.
Waterhouse smiles, thinking that he has just gotten away with something; the
damning and overwhelming evidence found on his bed linens will be neatly
cancelled out by the fact that he got up early and went to church.
He is expecting a prayer group meeting in the basement of a dry goods
store, but it turns out that the Inner Qwghlmians got banished to Australia
in droves. Many of them settled in Brisbane. In the downtown they managed to
construct a United Ecclesiastical Church out of rough hewn beige sandstone.
It would look big, solid, and almost opulent if it were not directly across
the street from the Universal Ecclesiastical Church, which is twice as big
and made of smooth faced limestone. Outer Qwghlmians, dressed in dour blacks
and greys, and frequently in navy uniforms, shuffle up the wide, time
blackened steps of the Universal Ecclesiastical Church, occasionally turning
their heads to throw disapproving looks across the street at the Inner
Qwghlmians, who are actually dressed for the season (it is summer in
Australia) or in Army uniforms. Waterhouse can see that what really pisses
them off is the sound of the music that vents from the United Ecclesiastical
Church whenever its red enameled front doors are hauled open. The choir is
practicing and the organ is playing. But he can tell from half a block away
that something's wrong with the instrument.
The look of the Inner Qwghlmian women in their pastel dresses and
bright bonnets is reassuring. These do not look like people who engage in
human sacrifice. Waterhouse tries to spring lightly up the steps as if he
really wants to be here. Then he remembers that he does want to be here,
because it is all part of his plan to fuck Mary.
The churchgoers are all talking in Qwghlmian, greeting each other and
saying nice things to Rod, who is evidently well thought of. Waterhouse has
no idea what they are saying, and finds it comforting to know that most of
them don't either. He strolls into the central aisle of the church, stares
down its vault to the altar, the choir behind it, singing beautifully; Mary
is there, in the alto section, exercising those pipes of hers, which are
framed attractively by the satin stole of her chorister's uniform. Above and
behind the choir, a big old pipe organ spreads its tarnished wings, like a
stuffed and mounted eagle that's been sitting in a damp attic for fifty
years. It wheezes and hisses asthmatically, and emits bizarre, discordant
drones when certain stops are used; this happens when a valve is stuck open,
and it is called a cipher. Waterhouse knows all about ciphers.
Notwithstanding the pathetic organ, the choir is spectacular, and
builds to a stirring six part harmony climax as Waterhouse ambles up the
aisle, wondering whether his erection is visible. A shaft of light comes in
through the stained glass rosette above the organ pipes and pinions
Waterhouse in its gaudy beam. Or maybe it just feels that way, because
Waterhouse has it all figured out now.
Waterhouse is going to fix the church's organ. This project will be
sure to have side benefits for his own organ, a single pipe instrument that
needs attention just as badly.
It turns out that, like all ethnic groups that have been consistently
screwed for a long time, the Inner Qwghlmians have great music. Not only
that, they actually have fun in church. The minister actually has a sense of
humor. It's about as tolerable as church could ever be. Waterhouse hardly
pays attention because he is doing a lot of staring: first, at Mary, then at
the organ (trying to figure out how it is engineered) then back to Mary for
a while.
He is outraged and offended, after the service, when the powers that be
are reluctant to let him, a total stranger and a Yank to boot, begin ripping
off access panels and meddling with the inner workings of the organ. The
minister is a good judge of character a little too good to suit Waterhouse.
The organist (and hence ultimate authority on all matters organic) looks to
have been shipped over here with the very first load of convicts after
having been convicted, in the Old Bailey, of talking too loud, bumping into
things, not tying his shoelaces properly, and having dandruff so in excess
of Society's unwritten standards as to offend the dignity of the Queen and
of the Empire.
It all leads to an unbearably tense and complicated meeting in a Sunday
school classroom near the offices of the minister, who is called the Rev.
Dr. John Mnrh. He is a stout red faced chap who clearly would prefer to have
his head in a tun of ale but who is putting up with all of this because it's
good for his immortal soul.
This meeting essentially becomes a venue within which the organist, Mr.
Drkh, can vent his opinions on the sneakiness of the Japanese, why the
invention of the well tempered tuning system was a bad idea and how all
music written since has been a shabby compromise, the sterling qualities of
the General, the numerological significance of the lengths of various organ
pipes, how the excessive libido of American troops might be controlled with
certain dietary supplements, how the hauntingly beautiful modes of
traditional Qwghlmian music are particularly ill suited to the well tempered
tuning system, how the king's dodgy Germanic relatives are plotting to take
over the Empire and turn it over to Hitler, and, first and foremost, that
Johann Sebastian Bach was a bad musician, a worse composer, an evil man, a
philanderer, and the figurehead of a worldwide conspiracy, headquartered in
Germany, that has been slowly taking over the world for the last several
hundred years, using the well tempered tuning system as a sort of carrier
frequency on which its ideas (which originate with the Bavarian illuminati)
can be broadcast into the minds of everyone who listens to music especially
the music of Bach. And by the way how this conspiracy may best be fought off
by playing and listening to traditional Qwghlmian music, which, in case Mr.
Drkh didn't make this perfectly clear, is wholly incompatible with well
tempered tuning because of its haunting and beautiful, but numerologically
perfect, scale.
"Your thoughts on numerology are most interesting," Waterhouse says
loudly, running Mr. Drkh off the rhetorical road. "I myself studied with
Drs. Turing and von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Princeton."
Father John snaps awake, and Mr. Drkh looks as if he's just taken a
fifty caliber round in the small of his back. Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a
long career of being the weirdest person in any given room,