but he's about
to go down in flames.
In general, Waterhouse isn't good at just winging it, but he's tired
and pissed off and horny, and this is a fucking war, and sometimes you have
to. He mounts the podium, dives for a round of chalk, and starts hammering
equations onto the blackboard like an ack ack gun. He uses well tempered
tuning as a starting point, takes off from there into the deepest realms of
advanced number theory, circles back all of a sudden to the Qwghlmian modal
scale, just to keep them on their toes, and then goes screaming straight
back into number theory again. In the process, he actually stumbles across
some interesting material that he doesn't think has been covered in the
literature yet, and so he diverts from strict bullshitting for a few minutes
to explore this thing and actually prove something that he thinks could
probably be published in a mathematical journal, if he just gets around to
typing it up properly. It reminds him that he's not half bad at this stuff
when he's recently ejaculated, and that in turn just fuels his resolve to
get this Mary fucking thing worked out.
Finally, he turns around, for the first time since he started. Father
John and Mr. Drkh are both dumbfounded.
"Let me just demonstrate!" Waterhouse blurts, and strides out of the
room and doesn't bother looking back. Back in the church, he goes to the
console, blows the dandruff off the keys, hits the main power switch. The
electric motors come on, somewhere back behind the screen, and the
instrument begins to complain and whine. No matter it can all be drowned
out. He scans the rows of stops he already knows what this organ's got,
because he's listened and deconstructed. He starts yanking out knobs.
Now Waterhouse is going to demonstrate that Bach can sound good even
played on Mr. Drkh's organ, if you choose the right key. Just as Father John
and Mr. Drkh are about halfway up the aisle, Waterhouse slams into that old
chestnut, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, except that he's transposing it into
C sharp minor as he goes along, because (according to a very elegant
calculation that just came into his head as he was running up the aisle of
the church) it ought to sound good that way when played in Mr. Drkh's
mangled tuning system.
The transposition is an awkward business at first and he hits a few
wrong notes, but then it comes naturally and he transitions from the toccata
into the fugue with tremendous verve and confidence. Gouts of dust and
salvos of mouse droppings explode from the pipes as Waterhouse invokes whole
ranks that have not been used in decades. Many of these are big bad loud
reed stops that are difficult to tune. Waterhouse senses the pumping
machinery straining to keep up with this unprecedented demand for power. The
choir loft is suffused with a brilliant glow as the dust flung out of the
choked pipes fills the air and catches the light coming through the rose
window. Waterhouse muffs a pedal line, spitefully kicks off his terrible
shoes and begins to tread the pedals the way he used to back in Virginia,
with his bare feet, the trajectory of the bass line traced out across the
wooden pedals in lines of blood from his exploded blisters. This baby has
some nasty thirty two foot reed stops in the pedals, real earthshakers,
probably put there specifically to irritate the Outer Qwghlmians across the
street. None of the people who go to this church have ever heard these stops
called into action, but Waterhouse puts them to good use now, firing off
power chords like salvos from the mighty guns of the battleship Iowa.
All during the service, during the sermon and the scripture readings
and the prayers, when he wasn't thinking about fucking Mary, he was thinking
about how he was going to fix this organ. He was thinking back to the organ
he worked on in Virginia, how the stops enabled the flow of air to the
different ranks of pipes and how the keys on the keyboards activated all of
the pipes that were enabled. He has this whole organ visualized in his head
now, and while he is pounding through to the end of the figure, the top of
his skull comes off, the filtered red light pours in, he sees the entire
machine in his mind, as if in an exploded draftsman's view. Then it
transforms itself into a slightly different machine an organ that runs on
electricity, with ranks of vacuum tubes here, and a grid of relays there. He
has the answer, now, to Turing's question, the question of how to take a
pattern of binary data and bury it into the circuitry of a thinking machine
so that it can be later disinterred.
Waterhouse knows how to make electric memory. He must go write a letter
to Alan instantly!
"Excuse me," he says, and runs from the church. On his way out, he
brushes past a small young woman who has been standing there gaping at his
performance. When he is several blocks away, he realizes two things: that he
is walking down the street barefoot, and that the young woman was Mary
cCmndhd. He will have to circle back later and get his shoes and maybe fuck
her. But first things first!
Chapter 65 HOME
Randy opens his eyes from out of a sliding nightmare. He was in his
car, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway, when something went wrong with
the steering. The car began to wander, first towards the vertical stone
cliff on the left and then towards the sheer drop to huge jagged rocks
projecting from thrashing waves on the right. Big rocks were rolling
nonchalantly across the highway. He could not steer; the only way to stop
moving is to open his eyes.
He is lying on a sleeping bag on a polished maple floor that is not
level, and that is why he had the sliding dream. The eye/inner ear conflict
makes his body spasm, he flails to plant both hands against the plane of the
floor.
America Shaftoe sits, jeaned and barefoot, in the blue light of a
window, bobby pins sprouting from chapped lips, looking at her face in an
isosceles triangle of mirror whose scalpel sharp edges depress but do not
cut the pink skin of her fingertips. A web of lead ropes sags in the empty
windowframe, a few lozenges of beveled glass still trapped in the
interstices. Randy lifts his head slightly and looks downhill, into the
corner of the room, and sees a great heap of swept shards. He rolls over,
looks out the door and across the hallway and into what used to be
Charlene's home office. Robin and Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe are sharing a
double mattress in there, a shotgun and a rifle, a couple of big black cop
flashlights, a Bible and a calculus textbook neatly arranged on the floor
next to them.
The nightmare's feeling of panic, of needing to go somewhere and do
something, subsides. Lying here in his ruined house listening to Amy's brush
whistle through her hair, throwing off electrostatic snaps, is one of the
calmer moments he's had.
"You just about ready to hit the road?" Amy says.
Across the hallway, one of the Shaftoe boys sits up without making any
sound. The other opens his eyes, lifts his head, glances towards the
weapons, lights, and Good Book, then relaxes again.
"I got a fire going out in the yard," Amy says, "and some water
boiling. Didn't think it was safe to use the fireplace."
Everyone slept in their clothes last night. All they have to do is put
their shoes on and piss out the windows. The Shaftoes move about the place
faster than Randy does, not because they are more surefooted, but because
they never saw this house when it was level and sound. But Randy lived here
for years and years when it was, and his mind thinks it knows its way around
the place. Going to bed last night, his biggest fear was that he would get
up drowsily in the middle of the night and try to go downstairs. The house
used to have a beautiful winding stairway which has now telescoped into the
basement. Last night, by dint of pulling the U Haul onto the front lawn and
aiming its headlights directly in through windows (whose cracks and jags and
facets refracted the light gorgeously), they were able to clamber into the
basement and find a ten foot aluminum extension ladder which they used to
get into the upstairs. Once they had gotten up, they pulled the ladder up
with them, like a drawbridge, so that even if looters did enter the
downstairs, the Shaftoe boys would be able to sit at the top of what used to
be the stairway and pick them off leisurely with the long guns (this
scenario seemed plausible last night, in the dark, but now strikes Randy as
a bumpkin's reverie).
Amy's turned some balusters from the veranda's railing into a nice
bonfire in the front yard. She stomps a crushed saucepan back into shape
with a small number of deftly aimed heel strokes and cooks oatmeal. The
Shaftoe boys throw whatever looks potentially useful into the back of the U
Haul, and check the oil in their hot rod.
All of Charlene's stuff is in New Haven now. In Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik's
house, to be specific. He has generously offered to let her stay there while
she looks for a house; Randy predicts she'll never leave. All of Randy's
stuff is in Manila or in Avi's basement, and all of the disputed items are
in a storage locker at the edge of town.
Randy spent most of yesterday evening cruising around town checking in
on various old friends to see if they were all right. Amy went with him,
taking a voyeuristic interest in this tour of his former life, and, from a
social point of view, complicating things incalculably. In any case, they
didn't make it back to the house until after dark, and so this is Randy's
first chance to see the damage in full daylight. He orbits it again and
again, amused, almost to the point of giggling, by how perfectly destroyed
it is, taking pictures with a disposable camera he borrowed from Marcus
Aurelius Shaftoe, trying to see if there is anything left that could
conceivably be worth money.
The house's stone foundation rises three feet above grade. The wooden
walls of the house were built on top of that, but not actually attached to
it (a common practice in the old days, which, at the time he blew town, was
on Randy's list of things to fix before the next earthquake). When the earth
began to oscillate side to side at 2:16 in the afternoon yesterday, the
foundation oscillated right along with it, but the house wanted to stay
where it was. Eventually the foundation wall moved right out from underneath
the house, one corner of which dropped three feet to the ground. Randy could
probably estimate the amount of kinetic energy the house picked up during
this fall, and convert it to an equivalent in pounds of dynamite or swings
of a wrecking ball, but it would be a nerdy exercise, since he can see the
effects for himself. Let's just say that when it smashed to earth the whole
structure suffered a vicious shock. The parallel, upright joists in the
floors all went horizontal, collapsing like dominoes. Every window and
doorframe instantly became a parallelogram, so all of the glass broke, and
in particular all of the leaded glass was rent asunder. The stairway fell
into the basement. The chimney, which had been in need of tuck pointing for
some time, sprayed bricks all over the yard. Most of the plumbing was
wrecked, which means that the heating system is history, since the house
used radiators. The plaster fell from the lath everywhere, cumulative tons
of old horse hair plaster just exploding out of the walls and ceilings and
mixing with the water from the busted plumbing to make a grey slurry that
congealed in the downhill corners of the rooms. The hand crafted Italian
tiles that Charlene picked out for the bathrooms are seventy five percent
broken. The granite counters in the kitchen are now seamed tectonic systems.
A few of the major appliances look repairable, but ownership of those was in
dispute anyway.
"It's a tear down, sir," says Robin Shaftoe. He has spent his whole
life in some Tennessee mountain town, living in trailers and cabins, but
even he has enough real estate acumen to sense this.
"Is there something you wanted to get out of the basement, sir?" says
Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe.
Randy laughs. "There's a filing cabinet down there . . . wait!" he
reaches out and puts a hand on Marcus's shoulder, to prevent him from
sprinting into the house and diving like Tarzan into the stairway pit. "The
reason I wanted it was because it contains every single receipt for every
penny I put into this house. See, it was a wreck when I bought it. Sort of
like it is now. Maybe not as bad."
"You need those papers for your dee vorce?"
Randy stops and clears his throat in mild exasperation. He has
explained to them five times that he was never married to Charlene and so
it's not a divorce. But this idea of living with a woman to whom one is not
married is so embarrassing to the Tennessee branch of the Shaftoes that they
simply cannot process it, and so they keep talking about "your ex wahf" and
"your dee vorce."
Noting Randy's hesitation, Robin says, "Or for the IN surance?"
Randy laughs with surprising heartiness.
"You did get IN surance, didn't you sir?"
"Earthquake insurance, around here, is basically unobtainable," Randy
says.
This is the first time it dawns on any of the Shaftoes that as of 2:16
P.M. yesterday afternoon, in an instant, Randy's net worth dropped by
something like three hundred thousand dollars. They skulk away from him and
leave him alone for a while, taking pictures to document the loss.
Amy comes over. "Oatmeal's ready," she says.
"Okay."
She stands close to him with her arms folded. The town is uncannily
quiet: the power is off and few vehicles are on the streets. "I'm sorry I
ran you off the road."
Randy looks at his Acura: the gouge, high on the left rear fender,
where the bumper of Amy's U Haul truck took him from behind, and the
crumpled front right bumper where he was forced into a parked Ford Fiesta.
"Don't worry about it."
"If I'd known Jesus. The last thing you need is a body shop bill on top
of everything else. I'll pay for it."
"Seriously. Don't worry about it."
"Well . . ."
"Amy, I know perfectly well you don't give a shit about my stupid car,
and when you pretend otherwise, the strain shows."
"You're right. But I'm sorry I misapprehended the situation."
"It was my fault," Randy says, "I should have explained why I was
coming here. Why the hell did you rent a U Haul, anyway?"
"They were all out of regular cars at the San Francisco Airport. Some
kind of big convention at the Moscone Center. So I displayed adaptability. "
(1)
"How the hell did you get here so fast? I thought I took the last
flight out of Manila."
"I got to NAIA only a few minutes after you did, Randy. Your flight was
full. I got on the next flight to Tokyo. I think my flight actually took off
before yours did."
"Mine was delayed on the ground."
"Then from Narita I just grabbed the next flight to SFO. Landed a
couple hours after you. So I was surprised that you and I pulled into town
here at the same time."
"I stopped over at a friend's house. And I took the scenic route."
Randy closes his eyes for a moment, remembering those loose boulders on the
Pacific Coast Highway, the roadway shaking beneath the tires of his Acura.
"See, when I saw your car, that's when I felt that God was with me, or
something," Amy said. "Or with you."
"God was with me? How do you figure?"
"Well, first of all, I have to tell you that I left Manila not out of
concern for you but out of burning rage, and a desire to just feed you your
ass on a plate."
"I figured."
"It's not even clear to me that you and I constitute a potential
couple. But you have started acting towards me in a way that indicates some
interest in that direction, so you have certain obligations." Amy has now
started to get pissed off and begun to move around the yard. The Shaftoe
boys eye her warily from across their steaming oatmeal bowls, ready to
Spring into action and wrestle her to the ground if she should fly out of
control. "It would be just ... totally... unacceptable for you to make those
kinds of representations to me and then jet off and cuddle with your
California sweetheart without coming to me first and going through certain
formalities, which would be awkward but which I would hope you would be man
enough to endure. Right?"
"Absolutely right. Never felt otherwise."
"So you can imagine how it looked."
"I guess so. Assuming you have no faith in me whatsoever."
"Well, I'm sorry for that, but I will say that on the flight over I
began to think that it wasn't your fault, that Charlene had somehow gotten
to you."
"What do you mean, gotten to me?"
Amy looks at the ground. "I don't know, she must have some kind of hold
over you."
"I think not." Randy sighs.
"Anyway, I thought that maybe you were just in the process of making a
big, stupid mistake. So when I got on that plane in Tokyo I was just going
to track you down and. . ." She draws a deep breath and mentally counts to
ten. "But when I got off that plane I was to boot just obsessed with this
disgusting image of you getting back together with this woman who obviously
was no damn good for you. And I felt that would be an unfortunate outcome
for you. And I thought I was too late to do anything about it. So, when I
got into town, and pulled around the corner and saw your Acura in the lane
right there in front of me, and you talking on your cellphone "
"I was leaving a message on your answering machine in Manila," Randy
says. "Explaining that I was just coming here to pick up some papers and
there'd been an earthquake only minutes before and so I might be a while."
"Well, I didn't have time to check my messages, which were placed on my
machine too late to accomplish any useful purpose," Amy says, "and so I had
to go on an imperfect knowledge of these events since no one had bothered to
fill me in."
"So..."
"I felt that cooler heads should prevail."
"And therefore you ran me off the road?"
Amy looks a little disappointed. She takes a patient, Montessori
preschool teacher tone of voice. "Now, Randy, think about priorities for
just a minute. I could see the way you were driving."
"I was in a hurry to find out whether I was totally destitute, or
merely bankrupt."
"But because of my imperfect knowledge of the situation I thought maybe
you were rushing into your poor little Charlene's arms. In other words, that
the emotional stress of the earthquake might induce you to who knows what,
relationship wise."
Randy presses his lips together and takes a huge breath through his
nose.
"Compared to that, a little bit of sheet metal just was not very
important to me. Of course, I know that a lot of guys would just stand back
and allow someone they cared about to do something extremely foolish and
damaging, only so that everyone concerned could then drive off to a
miserable and emotionally fucked up future in perfect, shiny cars."
Randy can do nothing but roll his eyes. "Well," he says, "I am sorry
that I blew up at you when I got out of the car."
"You are? Why, exactly? You should be pissed off when a truck driver
runs you off the road."
"I didn't know who you were. I didn't recognize you in this context. It
did not occur to me that you would do what you did with the airplanes."
Amy laughs in a goofy, mischievous way that doesn't seem right here.
Randy feels quizzical and mildly irritated. She looks at him knowingly.
"I'll bet you never blew up at Charlene."
"That's right," Randy says.
"You didn't? In all those years?"
"When we had issues, we talked them out."
Amy snorts. "I'll bet you had really boring " She stops herself.
"Boring what?"
"Never mind."
"Look, I think that in a good relationship, you have to have ways for
working out any issues that might come up." Randy says reasonably.
"And you don't consider ramming your car a good way, I'll bet."
"I can think of some problems with it."
"And you had ways of working out your problems with Charlene that were
very sophisticated. No voices were ever raised. No angry words exchanged."
"No cars rammed."
"Yeah. And that worked, right?"
Randy sighs.
"How about that thing that Charlene wrote about beards?" Amy asks.
"How did you know about that?"
"Looked it up on the Internet. Was that an example of how you guys
worked out your problems? By publishing totally oblique academic papers
blasting the other person?"
"I feel like having some oatmeal."
"So don't apologize to me for blowing up at me."
"That oatmeal would really hit the spot."
"For having, and showing, emotion."
"Chow time!"
"Because that's what it's all about. That's the name of the game, Randy
boy," she says, pulling abreast of him and whacking him between the shoulder
blades in a gesture inherited from her dad. "Mmm, that oatmeal does smell
good."
***
The caravan pulls out of town a little after noon: Randy leading the
way in his damaged Acura, Amy sitting in the passenger seat with her bare,
tanned feet up on the dashboard, spoked with white lines from the straps of
her high tech sandals, oblivious to the danger (alluded to by Randy) of her
legs being snapped by an air bag deployment. The souped up Impala is driven
by its owner of record and chief engineer, Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe. Bringing
up the rear, the almost totally empty U Haul truck, driven by Robin Shaftoe.
Randy has that moving through syrup feeling he gets when enacting some
emotionally huge transition in his life. He puts Samuel Barber's Adagio for
Strings on the Acura's stereo and drives very slowly down the main street of
the town, looking all around at the remains of the coffeehouses, bars, pizza
places, and Thai restaurants where, for many years, he prosecuted his social
life. He should have performed this little ceremony before he first left for
Manila, a year and a half ago. But then he fled as if from the scene of a
crime, or, at least, a grotesque personal embarrassment. He only had a day
or two before he got on the plane, and he spent most of it on the floor of
Avi's basement, dictating whole swathes of the business plan into a
microcassette recorder, as opposed to typing them, because his hands had
gone carpal.
He never even properly said good bye to most of the people he knew
here. He did not speak to them, and barely thought of them, until yesterday
evening, when he pulled up in front of their skewed and occasionally smoking
homes in his crumpled and U Haul orange streaked car with this strange,
wiry, tanned woman who, whatever strengths and shortcomings she might have,
was not Charlene. So, taking everything into account, it was not precisely
the way that Emily Post would have orchestrated a reunion with out of touch
friends. The evening's tour is still a flurry of odd, emotionally charged
images in his memory, but he's beginning to sort it out a little, to run the
numbers as it were, and he would say that of the people he ran into
yesterday people he had exchanged dinner invitations with and loaned tools
to, people whose personal computers he had debugged in exchange for six
packs of good beer, whom he had seen important movies with that at least
three quarters of these people have really no interest whatsoever in seeing
Randy's face again as long as they live, and were made to feel intensely
awkward by his totally unexpected reappearance in their front yards, where
they were throwing impromptu parties with salvaged beer and wine. This
hostility was pretty strongly gender linked, Randy is sad to conclude. Many
of the females wouldn't talk to him it all, or would come near him only the
better to fix him with frosty glares and appraise his presumed new
girlfriend. This only stands to reason, since, before she left for Yale,
Charlene had the better part of a year to popularize her version of events.
She has been able to structure the discourse to her advantage, just like a
dead white male. No doubt Randy has been classified as an abandoner, no
better than the married man who up and walks out on his wife and children
never mind that he was the one who wanted to marry her and have kids with
her. But his whining alert starts to buzz when he thinks about that, so he
backs up and tries another path.
He embodies (he realizes) just about the worst nightmare, for many
women, of what might happen in their lives. As for the men he saw last
night, they were pretty strongly incensed to back whatever stance their
wives adopted. Some of them really did, apparently, feel similarly. Others
eyed him with obvious curiosity. Some were openly friendly. Weirdly, the
ones who adopted the sternest and most terrible Old Testament moral tone
were the Modern Language Association types who believed that everything was
relative and that, for example, polygamy was as valid as monogamy. The
friendliest and most sincere welcome he'd gotten was from Scott, a chemistry
professor, and Laura, a pediatrician, who, after knowing Randy and Charlene
for many years, had one day divulged to Randy, in strict confidence, that,
unbeknownst to the academic community at large, they had been spiriting
their three children off to church every Sunday morning, and even had them
all baptized.
Randy had gone into their house once to help Scott wrestle a freshly
reconditioned clawfoot bathtub up the stairs, and had actually seen the word
GOD written on actual pieces of paper stuck to the walls of their house like
on the refrigerator door, and the walls of the children's bedrooms, where
juvenile art tends to be reposited. Little time wasting projects they had
done during Sunday school pages torn from coloring books, showing a somewhat
more multicultural Jesus than the one Randy had grown up with (curly hair,
e.g.), talking to little biblical kids or assisting disoriented Holy Land
livestock. The sight of this stuff around the house, commingled with normal
(i.e., secular) kid art junk from elementary school, Batman posters, etc.
made Randy feel grossly embarrassed. It was like going to the house of some
supposedly sophisticated people and finding a neon on black velvet Elvis
painting hanging above their state of the art Italian designer furniture.
Definitely a social class thing. And it wasn't like Scott and Laura were
deadly earnest types, and neither were they glassy eyed and foaming at the
mouth. They had after all managed to pass themselves off as members in good
standing of decent academic society for a number of years. They were a bit
quieter than many others, they took up less space in the room, but then that
was normal for people trying to raise three kids, and so they passed.
Randy and Amy had spent a full hour talking to Scott and Laura last
night; they were the only people who made any effort to make Amy feel
welcome. Randy hadn't the faintest idea what these people thought of him and
what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially that was
not the issue because even if they thought he had done something evil, they
at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with
transgressions. To translate it into UNIX system administration terms
(Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post modern,
politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found
themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz,
society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose
only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules
with a kind of neo Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal
with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were
wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they
might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs
and How tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when
things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying
adaptability.
"Yo! Randy!" says America Shaftoe. "M.A. is honking at you."
"Why?" Randy asks. He looks in the rearview, sees a reflection of the
ceiling of the Acura, and realizes he is slouched way down in his seat. He
sits up straight, and spots the Impala.
"I think it's because you're driving ten miles an hour," Amy says, "and
M.A. likes to go ninety."
"Okay," Randy says, and, just as simple as that, pushes down on the
accelerator pedal and drives out of town forever.
Chapter 66 BUNDOK
"The name of this place is Bundok," Captain Noda tells him confidently.
"We have chosen it carefully." Goto Dengo and Lieutenant Mori are the only
other persons present in the tent, but he speaks as if addressing a
battalion drawn up on a parade ground.
Goto Dengo has been in the Philippines long enough to understand that
in the local tongue bundok means any patch of rugged mountainous terrain,
but he does not reckon that Captain Noda is the sort who would appreciate
being brought up to speed by a subordinate. If Captain Noda says that this
place is called Bundok, then Bundok it is, and forever will be.
Captain is not an especially high rank, but Noda carries himself as if
he's a general. Somewhere, this man is important. He is pale skinned, as if
he's been spending the winter in Tokyo. His boots have not begun to rot on
his feet yet.
A hard leather attache case rests on the table. He opens one end and
draws out a large piece of folded white cloth. The two lieutenants scurry to
assist him in unfolding this across the tabletop. Goto Dengo is startled by
the feel of the linen. His fingertips are the only part of his body that
will ever touch bedsheets as fine as these. THE MANILA HOTEL is printed
along the selvedge.
A diagram has been sketched out on the bedsheet. Blue black fountain
pen marks, punctuated with spreading blotches where the hand hesitated,
reinforce an earlier stratum of graphite scratches. Someone terribly
important (probably the last person to sleep on this bedsheet) has come in
with a black grease pencil and reshaped the whole thing in his own image
with fat thrusting strokes and hasty notations that look like unraveled
braids in a woman's long hair. This work has been annotated politely by a
fastidious engineer, probably Captain Noda himself, working with ink and a
fine brush.
The heavy with the grease pencil has labeled the entire thing BUNDOK
SITE.
Lieutenants Mori and Goto affix the sheet to the canvas of the tent
with some small, rusty cotter pins that a private brings to them,
triumphantly, in a cracked porcelain coffee cup. Captain Noda watches
calmly, puffing on a cigarette. "Be careful," he jokes, "MacArthur slept on
that sheet!"
Lieutenant Mori dutifully cracks up. Goto Dengo is standing on tiptoe,
holding up the top edge of the sheet, examining the faint pencil marks
underlying the whole diagram. He sees a couple' of little crosses and,
having spent too long in the Philippines, supposes at first that they are
churches. In one place, three of them are clustered together and he imagines
Calvary.
Nearby, diggings have been indicated. He thinks Golgotha: The Place of
the Skull.
Lunatic! He needs to get his mind in order. Lieutenant Mori shoves pins
through the linen with faint popping noises. Goto Dengo steps away, keeping
his back to the Captain, closes his eyes, and gets his bearings. He is
Nipponese. He is in the Southern Resource Zone of Greater Nippon. The cross
shaped marks represent summits. The diggings are some sort of excavation in
which he is destined to play an important role.
The blue black fountain pen marks are rivers. Five of them sprawl from
the triple summit of Bundok. Two of the south going streams combine to make
a larger river. A third stream roughly parallels this one. But the man with
the black grease pencil has drawn a stout line across the stream with such
force that loose curls of black grease can still be seen dangling from the
linen. The fountain pen has been used to scratch out a bulge in the river
just upstream of this mark. Apparently they want to dam the river and make a
pool, or a pond, or a lake; it is difficult to get a sense of scale. It is
labeled, LAKE YAMAMOTO.
Looking more closely, he sees that the larger river the one formed by
the confluence of the two tributaries is also to be dammed, but much farther
south. This has been dubbed TOJO RIVER. But there is no LAKE TOJO. It
appears that this dam will thicken and deepen the Tojo River but not turn it
into an actual lake. Goto Dengo infers from this that the valley of the Tojo
River must be steep sided.
The same basic pattern is repeated everywhere on the bedsheet. Grease
pencil wants a complete perimeter security system. Grease pencil wants one
and only one road leading to this place. Grease pencil wants two areas for
barracks: one big area and one small area. The details have been worked out
by smaller men with better penmanship.
"Worker housing," explains Captain Noda, pointing to the big area with
his swagger stick. "Military barracks," he says, pointing to the small area.
Bending closer, Goto Dengo can see that the larger, worker area is to be
surrounded by an irregular polygon of barbed wire. Actually, two polygons,
one nested within the other, a barren space in between. The vertices of this
polygon are labeled with the names of weapons:
Nambu, Nambu, Model 89 field mortar.
A road or trail, or something, leads from there up the bank of the Tojo
River, past the dam, and terminates at the site of the proposed diggings.
Goto Dengo bends close and peers. The area including both Lake Yamamoto
and the diggings has been surrounded by a tidy square, neatly crosshatched
with Captain Noda's brush and ink, and labeled "special security zone."
He jerks back as Captain Noda shoves the end of his stick into the
narrow space between his nose and the bedsheet, and whacks on the Special
Security Zone a few times. Concentric ripples speed outwards, like shock
waves from dynamite. "This area is your responsibility, Lieutenant Goto." He
moves the pointer south and taps on the zone farther down the Tojo River,
with the worker housing and the barracks. "This is Lieutenant Mori's." He
circles the whole area, windmilling his arm to cover the entire security
perimeter and the road that gives access to it. "The entirety is mine. I
report to Manila. So, it is a very small chain of command for such a large
area. Secrecy is of paramount importance. Your first and highest order is to
preserve absolute secrecy at all costs."
Lieutenants Mori and Goto blurt "Hai!" and bow.
Addressing Mori, Captain Noda continues: "The housing area will appear
to be a prison camp for special prisoners. Its existence may be known to
some on the outside the local people will see trucks going in and out along
the road and will guess as much." Turning to Goto Dengo, he says: "The
existence of the Special Security Zone, however, will be totally unknown to
the outside world. Your work will proceed under the cover of the jungle,
which is extraordinarily dense here. It will be invisible to the enemy's
observation planes."
Lieutenant Mori jerks back as if a bug has just flown into his eye. To
him, the idea of enemy observation planes over Luzon is completely bizarre.
MacArthur is nowhere near the Philippines.
Goto Dengo, on the other hand, has been to New Guinea. He knows what
happens to Nipponese Army units who try to resist MacArthur in the jungles
of the Southwest Pacific. He knows that MacArthur is coming, and obviously
so does Captain Noda. More importantly, so do the men in Tokyo who sent Noda
down to accomplish this mission whatever it is.
They know. Everyone knows we are losing the war.
Everyone important, that is.
"Lieutenant Goto, you are not to discuss any details of your work with
Lieutenant Mori except insofar as they pertain to pure logistics: road
building, worker schedules, and so on." Noda is addressing this to both men;
the clear implication is that if Goto gets loose lipped, Mori is expected to
turn him in. "Lieutenant Mori, you are dismissed!"
Mori grunts out another "Hai!" and makes himself scarce.
Lieutenant Goto bows. "Captain Noda, please permit me to say that I am
honored to have been selected to construct these fortifications."
The stoic look on Noda's face dissolves for a moment. He turns away
from Goto Dengo and paces across the floor of the tent for a moment,
thinking, then turns to face him again. "It is not a fortification."
Goto Dengo is practically startled right out of his boots for a moment.
Then he thinks, a gold mine! They must have discovered an immense gold
deposit in this valley. Or diamonds?
"You must not think as if you were building a fortification," Noda says
solemnly.
"A mine?" Goto Dengo says. But he says it weakly. He is already
realizing that it does not make sense. It would be insane to put so much
effort into mining gold or diamonds at this point in the war. Nippon needs
steel, rubber, and petroleum, not jewelry.
Perhaps some new super weapon? His heart nearly bursts from excitement.
But Captain Noda's stare is as bleak as the fat muzzle of a tommy gun.
"It is a long term storage facility for vital war making materials,"
Captain Noda finally says.
He goes on to explain, in general terms, how the facility is to be
built. It is to be a network of intersecting shafts bored through hard
volcanic rock. Its dimensions are surprisingly small given the amount of
effort that will be spent on building it. They won't be able to store much
here: enough ammunition for a regiment to fight for a week, perhaps,
assuming that they make minimal use of heavy weapons, and get their food off
the land. But those supplies will be almost inconceivably well protected.
Goto Dengo sleeps that night in a hammock stretched between two trees,
protected by mosquito netting. The jungle emits a fantastic din.
Captain Noda's sketches looked familiar, and he is trying to place
them. Just as he's falling asleep, he remembers cutaway views of the
Pyramids of Egypt that his father had shown him in a picture book, showing
the design of the pharaoh's tombs.
A horrible thought comes to him then: he is building a tomb for the
emperor. When Nippon falls to MacArthur, Hirohito will carry out the rite of
seppuku. His body will be flown out of Nippon and brought to Bundok and
buried in the chamber that Goto Dengo is building. He has a nightmare of
being buried alive in a black chamber, the grey image of the emperor's face
fading to black as the last brick is rammed home on its bed of mortar.
He sits in absolute darkness, knowing that Hirohito is there with him,
afraid to move.
He is a little boy in an abandoned mine chamber, naked and soaked with
icy water. His flashlight has died. Before it flickered out, he thought he
saw the face of a demon. Now he hears only the drip, drip of ground water
into the sump. He can stay here and die, or he can dive into the water again
and swim back.
When he wakes up, it's raining and the sun has climbed free of the
horizon somewh