"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 hasneeds 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 livedin 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 doeswant 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, 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 haveto. 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. "[20]
"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."