all to tighten up security, and
Marshall throws him a bone every so often, just to keep the Alliance on an
even keel." For the first time, the major looks Waterhouse in the eye. "You
happen to be the latest bone. That's all."
There is a long silence, as if Waterhouse is expected to say something.
He clears his throat. No one ever got court martialed for following his
orders. "My orders state that "
"Fuck your orders, Captain Waterhouse," the major says.
There is a long silence. The major tends to one or two other
distracting duties. Then he stares out the window for a few moments, trying
to compose his thoughts. Finally he says, "Get this through your head. We
are not idiots. The General is not an idiot. The General appreciates Ultra
as much as Sir Winston Churchill. The General uses Ultra as well as any
commander in this war."
"Ultra's no good if the Japanese learn about it."
"As you can appreciate, the General does not have time to meet with you
personally. Neither does his staff. So you will not have an opportunity to
instruct him on how to keep Ultra a secret," says the major. He glances down
a couple of times at a sheet of paper on his blotter, and indeed he is now
speaking like a man who is reading a prepared statement. "From time to time,
since we learned that you were being sent to us, your existence has been
brought to the General's attention. During the brief periods of time when he
is not occupied with more pressing matters, he has occasionally voiced some
pithy thoughts about you, your mission, and the masterminds who sent you
here."
"No doubt," Waterhouse says.
"The general is of the opinion that persons not familiar with the
unique features of the Southwest Pacific Theater may not be entirely
competent to judge his strategy," says the major. "The General feels that
the Nips will never learn about Ultra. Never. Why? Because they are
incapable of comprehending what has happened to them. The General has
speculated that he could go down to the radio station tomorrow and broadcast
a speech announcing that we had broken all of the Nip codes and were reading
all of their messages, and nothing would happen. The General's words were
something to the effect that the Nips will never believe how totally we have
fucked them, because when you get fucked that badly, it's your own goddamn
fucking fault and it makes you look like a fucking shithead."
"I see," Waterhouse says.
"But The General said all of that at much greater length and without
using a single word of profanity, because that is how The General expresses
himself."
"Thank you for boiling it down," Waterhouse says.
"You know those white headbands that the Nips tie around their
foreheads? With the meatball and the Nip characters printed on them?"
"I've seen pictures of them."
"I've seen them for real, tied around the heads of pilots of Nip
fighter planes that were about fifty feet away firing machine guns at me and
my men," says the major.
"Oh, yeah! Me too. At Pearl Harbor," Waterhouse says. "I forgot."
This appears to be the most irritating thing that Waterhouse has said
all day. The major has to spend a moment composing himself. "That headband
is called a hachimaki."
"Imagine this, Waterhouse. The emperor is meeting with his general
staff. All of the top generals and admirals in Nippon parade into the room
in full dress uniforms and bow down solemnly before the emperor. They have
come to report on the progress of the war. Each of these generals and
admirals is wearing a brand new hachimaki around his forehead. These
hachimakis are printed with phrases saying things like, 'I am a dipshit' and
'Through my personal incompetence I killed two hundred thousand of our own
men' and 'I handed our Midway plans over to Nimitz on a silver platter.'
The major now pauses and takes a phone call so that Waterhouse can
savor this image for a while. Then he hangs up, lights another cigarette,
and continues. "That's what it would look like for the Nips to admit at this
point in the war that we have Ultra."
More smoke rings. Waterhouse has nothing to say. So the major
continues. "See, we've gone over the watershed line of this war. We won
Midway. We won North Africa. Stalingrad. The Battle of the Atlantic.
Everything changes when you go over the watershed line. The rivers all flow
a different direction. It's as if the force of gravity itself has changed
and is now working in our favor. We've adjusted to that. Marshall and
Churchill and all those others are still stuck in an obsolete mentality.
They are defenders. But The General is not a defender. As a matter of fact,
just between you and me, The General is lousy on defense, as he demonstrated
in the Philippines. The General is a conqueror.
"Well," Waterhouse finally says, "what do you suggest I do with myself,
seeing as how I'm here in Brisbane?"
"I'm tempted to say you should connect up with all of the other Ultra
security experts Marshall sent out before you, and get a bridge group
together," the major says.
"I don't care for bridge," Waterhouse says politely.
"You're supposed to be some expert codebreaker, right?"
"Right."
"Why don't you go to Central Bureau. The Nips have a zillion different
codes and we haven't broken all of them yet."
"That's not my mission."
"You don't worry about your fucking mission," the major says. "I'll
make sure that Marshall thinks you're doing your mission, because if
Marshall doesn't think that, he'll give us no end of hassles. So you're
clean with the higher ups."
"Thank you."
"You can consider your mission accomplished," the major says.
"Congratulations."
"Thank you."
"My mission is to beat the stuffing out of the fucking Nips, and that
mission is not accomplished just yet, and so I have other matters to attend
to," the major says significantly.
"Shall I just see myself out then?" Waterhouse asks.
Chapter 55 DÖNITZ
Once, when Bobby Shaftoe was eight years old, he went to Tennessee to
visit Grandma and Grandpa. One boring afternoon he began skimming a letter
that the old lady had left lying on an end table. Grandma gave him a stern
talking to and then recounted the incident to Grandpa, who recognized his
cue and gave him forty whacks. That and a whole series of roughly parallel
childhood experiences, plus several years in the Marine Corps, have made him
into one polite fellow.
So he doesn't read others' mail. It be against the rules.
But here he is. The setting: a plank paneled room above a pub in
Norrsbruck, Sweden. The pub is a sailorly kind of place, catering to
fishermen, which makes it congenial for Shaftoe's friend and drinking buddy:
Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, Kriegsmarine of the Third Reich (retired).
Bischoff gets a lot of interesting mail, and leaves it strewn all over
the room. Some of the mail is from his family in Germany, and contains
money. Consequently Bischoff, unlike Shaftoe, will not have to work even if
this war continues, and he remains in Sweden cooling his boilers for another
ten years.
Some of the mail is from the crew of U 691, according to Bischoff.
After Bischoff got them all here to Norrsbruck in one piece, his second in
command, Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck, cut a deal with the Kriegsmarine in
which the crew were allowed to return to Germany, no hard feelings, no
repercussions. All of them except for Bischoff climbed on board what was
left of U 691 and steamed off in the direction of Kiel.
Only days later, the mail began to pour in. Every member of the crew,
to a man, sent Bischoff a letter describing the heroes' welcome they had
received: Dönitz himself met them at the pier and handed out hugs and kisses
and medals and other tokens in embarrassing profusion. They can't stop
talking about how much they want dear Günter to come back home.
Dear Günter isn't budging; he's been sitting in his little room for a
couple of months now. His world consists of pen, ink, paper, candles, cups
of coffee, bottles of aquavit, the soothing beat of the surf. Every crash of
wave on shore, he says, reminds him that he is above sea level now, where
men were meant to live. His mind is always back there a hundred feet below
the surface of the gelid Atlantic, trapped like a rat in a sewer pipe,
cringing from the explosions of the depths charges. He lived a hundred years
that way, and spent every moment of those hundred years dreaming of the
Surface. He vowed, ten thousand times, that if he ever made it back up to
the world of air and light, he would enjoy every breath, revel in every
moment.
That's pretty much what he's been doing, here in Norrsbruck. He has his
personal journal, and he's been going through it, page by page, filling in
all of the details that he didn't have time to jot down, before he forgets
them. Someday, after the war, it'll make a book: one of a million war
memoirs that will clog libraries from Novosibirsk to Gander to Sequim to
Batavia.
The pace of incoming mail dropped dramatically after the first weeks.
Several of his men still write to him faithfully. Shaftoe is used to seeing
their letters scattered around the place when he comes to visit. Most of
them are written on scraps of cheap, greyish paper.
Directionless silver light infiltrates the room through Bischoff's
window, illuminating what looks like a rectangular pool of heavy cream on
his tabletop. It is some kind of official Hun stationery, surmounted by a
raptor clenching a swastika. The letter is handwritten, not typed. When
Bischoff sets his wet glass down on it, the ink dissolves.
And when Bischoff goes to empty his bladder, Shaftoe can't keep his
eyes away from it. He knows that this is bad manners, but the Second World
War has led him into all sorts of uncouth behavior, and there don't seem to
be any angry grandpas lurking in the trenches with doubled belts; no
consequences at all for the wicked, in fact. Maybe that will change in a
couple of years, if the Germans and the Nips lose the war. But that
reckoning will be so great and terrible that Shaftoe's glance at Bischoff's
letter will probably go unnoticed.
It came in an envelope. The first line of the address is very long, and
consists of "Günter BISCHOFF" preceded by a string of ranks and titles, and
followed by a series of letters. The return address has been savaged by
Bischoffs letter opener, but it's somewhere in Berlin.
The letter itself is an impossible snarl of Germanic cursive. It is
signed, hugely, with a single word. Shaftoe spends some time trying to make
out that word; he whose John Hancock this is. Must have an ego that ranks
right up there with the General's.
When Shaftoe figures out the signature belongs to Dönitz, he gets all
tingly. That Dönitz is an important guy Shaftoe's even seen him on a
newsreel, congratulating a grimy U boat crew, fresh from a salty spree.
Why's he writing love notes to Bischoff? Shaftoe can't read this stuff
any better than he could Nipponese. But he can see a few figures. Dönitz is
talking numbers. Perhaps tons of shipping sunk, or casualties on the Eastern
Front. Perhaps money.
"Oh, yes!" Bischoff says, having somehow reappeared in the room without
making any noise. When you're down in a U boat, running silent, you learn
how to walk quietly. "I have come up with a hypothesis on the gold."
"What gold?" Shaftoe says. He knows, of course, but having been caught
in an act of flagrant naughtiness, his instinct is to play innocent.
"That you saw down in the batteries of U 553," Bischoff says. "You see,
my friend, anyone else would say that you are simply a crazy jughead."
"The correct term is Jarhead."
"They would say, first of all, that U 553 sank many months before you
claim to have seen it. Secondly, they would say that such a boat could not
have been loaded with gold. But I believe that you saw it."
"So?"
Bischoff glances at the letter from Dönitz looking mildly seasick. "I
must tell you something about the Wehrmacht of which I am ashamed, first."
"What? That they invaded Poland and France?"
"No.
"That they invaded Russia and Norway?"
"No, not that."
"That they bombed England and . . . "
"No, no, no," Bischoff says, the very model of forbearance. "Something
you did not know about."
"What?"
"It seems that, while I have been sneaking around the Atlantic, doing
my duty the Führer has come up with a little incentive program."
"What do you mean?"
"It seems that duty and loyalty are not enough for certain high ranking
officers. That they will not carry out their orders to the fullest unless
they receive . . . special awards."
"You mean, like medals?"
Bischoff is smiling nervously. "Some generals on the Eastern Front have
been given estates in Russia. Very, very large estates."
"Oh."
"But not everyone can be bribed with land. Some people require a more
liquid form of compensation."
"Booze?"
"No, I mean liquid in the financial sense. Something you can carry with
you, and that is accepted in any whorehouse on the planet."
"Gold," says Shaftoe, quietly.
"Gold would suffice," Bischoff says. It has been a long time since he
looked Shaftoe in the eye. He's staring out the window instead. His green
eyes might be a little moist. He takes a deep breath, blinks, and gets the
bitter irony under control before continuing: "Since Stalingrad, it has not
gone well on the Eastern Front. Let us say that Ukrainian real estate is no
longer worth what it used to be, if the deed to the land happens to be
written in German and issued in Berlin."
"It's getting harder to bribe a general by promising him a chunk of
Russian land," Shaftoe translates. "So Hitler needs lots of gold."
"Yes. Now, the Japanese have lots of gold consider that they sacked
China. As well as many other places. But they are lacking in certain things.
They need wolframite. Mercury. Uranium."
"What's uranium?"
"Who the hell knows? The Japanese want it, we provide it. We provide
them technology too blueprints for new turbines. Enigma machines." At this
point Bischoff breaks off and laughs, painfully and darkly, for a long time.
When he gets it under control, he continues: "So we have been shipping them
these things, in U boats."
"And the Nips pay you in gold."
"Yes. It is a dark economy, hidden beneath the ocean, trading small but
valuable items over vast distances. You got a glimpse of it."
"You knew this was going on but you didn't know about U 553," Shaftoe
points out.
"Ah, Bobby, there are many, many things going on in the Third Reich
that a mere U boat captain does not know about. You are a soldier, you know
this is true."
"Yes," Shaftoe says, recalling the peculiarities of Detachment 2702. He
looks down at the letter. "Why is Dönitz telling you all of this now?"
"He is not telling me anything," Bischoff says reprovingly. "I have
figured this out myself" He gnaws on a lip for a while. "Dönitz is making me
a proposition."
"I thought you'd retired."
Bischoff considers it. "I have retired from killing people. But the
other day I sailed a little sloop around the inlet."
"So?"
"So it seems that I have not retired from going down to the sea in
ships." Bischoff heaves a sigh. "Unfortunately, all of the really
interesting ships are owned by major governments."
Bischoff is getting a little spooky, so Shaftoe opts for a little
change in the subject. "Hey, speaking of really interesting things..." and
he tells the story of the Heavenly Apparition that he saw while he was
walking down here.
Bischoff is delighted by the story, which revives the hunger for
excitement that he has kept pickled in salt and alcohol ever since reaching
Norrsbruck. "You are sure it was manmade?" he asks.
"It whined. Chunks of shit were falling out of it. But I've never seen
a meteor so I don't know."
"How far away?"
"It crashed seven kilometers from where I was standing. So, ten clicks
from here."
"But ten kilometers is nothing for an Eagle Scout and a Hitler Youth!"
"You weren't a Hitler Youth."
Bischoff broods over this for a moment. "Hitler so embarrassing. I
hoped that if I ignored him he would go away. Perhaps if I had joined the
Hitler Youth, they would have given me a surface ship."
"Then you'd be dead."
"Right!" Bischoff's mood brightens considerably. "Ten kilometers is
still nothing. Let's go!"
"It's already dark."
"We will follow the flames."
"They will have gone out."
"We will follow the trail of debris, like Hansel and Gretel."
"It didn't work for Hansel and Gretel. Didn't you even read the fucking
story?"
"Don't be such a defeatist, Bobby," says Bischoff, diving into a hearty
fisherman's sweater. "Normally you are not like this. What is troubling
you?"
Glory. It is October and the days are growing short. Shaftoe and
Bischoff, both mired in the yet to be discovered emotional dumps of Seasonal
Affective Disorder, are like two brothers trapped in the same pit of
quicksand, each keeping a sharp eye on the other.
"Eh? Was ist los, buddy?"
"Guess I'm just feeling at loose ends."
"You need an adventure. Let's go!"
"I need an adventure like Hitler needs an ugly little toothbrush
mustache," says Bobby Shaftoe. But he drags himself up out of his chair and
follows Bischoff out the door.
***
Shaftoe and Bischoff are trudging through the dark Swedish woods like a
pair of lost souls trying to find the side entrance to Limbo. They take
turns carrying the kerosene lantern, which has an effective range about as
long as a grown man's arm. Sometimes they go for a whole hour without
talking, each man alone with his own struggle against suicidal depression.
Then one of them (usually Bischoff) will perk up and say something, like:
"Haven't seen Enoch Root recently. What has he been up to since he
finished curing you of your morphine addiction?" Bischoff asks.
"Don't know. He was such a fucking pain in the ass during that project
that I never wanted to see him again. But I think he got a Russian radio
transmitter from Otto and took it into that church basement where he lives;
he's been messing around with it ever since."
"Yes. I remember. He was changing the frequencies. Did he ever get it
to work?"
"Beats me," Shaftoe says, "but when big pieces of burning shit start
falling out of the sky in my neighborhood, makes me wonder."
"Yes. Also he goes to the post office quite frequently," Bischoff says.
"I chatted with him there once. He is carrying on a heavy correspondence
with others around the world."
"Other what?"
"That is my question, too."
Eventually they find the wreck only by following the sound of a
hacksaw, which reverberates through the pines like the shriek of some
extraordinarily stupid and horny bird. This enables them to home in on it in
a general way. Final coordinates are provided by a sudden, strobelike
flashing light, devastating noise, and a sap scented rain of amputated
foliage. Shaftoe and Bischoff both hit the dirt and lie there listening to
fat pistol slugs ricocheting from tree trunk to tree trunk. The hacksawing
noise continues with no break in rhythm.
Bischoff starts talking Swedish, but Shaftoe shushes him. "That was a
Suomi," he says. "Hey, Julieta! Knock it off! It's just me and Günter."
There is no answer. Then, Shaftoe remembers that he has recently fucked
Julieta, and therefore needs to remember his manners. "Excuse me, ma'am," he
says, "but I gather from the sound of your weapon that you are of the
Finnish nation, for which I have unbounded admiration, and I wanted to let
you know that I, former Sergeant Robert Shaftoe, and my friend, former
Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, mean you no harm."
Julieta, homing in on the sound of his voice in the darkness, responds
with a controlled burst of fire that passes about a foot over Bobby
Shaftoe's head. "Don't you belong in Manila?" she asks.
Shaftoe groans, and rolls over on his back as if he has been shot in
the gut.
"What does she mean by this?" asks the bewildered Günter Bischoff.
Seeing that his friend has been (emotionally) incapacitated, he tries: "This
is Sweden, a peaceful and neutral country! Why are you trying to machine gun
us?"
"Go away!" Julieta must be with Otto, because they hear her talk to him
before saying, "We do not want representatives of the American Marines and
the Wehrmacht here. You are not welcome."
"Sounds like you are sawing away on something that is pretty damn
heavy," Shaftoe finally retorts. "How you gonna haul it out of these woods?"
This leads to an animated conversation between Julieta and Otto. "You
may approach," Julieta finally says.
They find the Kivistiks, Julieta and Otto, standing in a pool of
lantern light around the severed, charred wing of an airplane. Most Finns
are hard to tell apart from Swedes, but Otto and Julieta both have black
hair and black eyes, and could pass for Turks. The tip of the airplane wing
is painted with the black and white cross of the Luftwaffe. An engine is
mounted to that wing. If Otto's hacksaw has its way, it won't be for much
longer. The engine has recently been set on fire and then used to knock down
a large number of pine trees. But even so Shaftoe can see it's like no
engine he has ever seen before. There is no propeller, but there are a lot
of little fan blades.
"It looks like a turbine," says Bischoff, "but for air, rather than
water." Otto straightens up, squeezes his lower back theatrically, and hands
Shaftoe the hacksaw. Then he hands him a bottle of benzedrine tablets for
good measure. Shaftoe eats a few tablets, strips off his shirt to reveal
splendid musculature, does a couple of USMC approved stretching exercises,
grabs the hacksaw, and sets to work. After a couple of minutes he looks up
nonchalantly at Julieta, who is standing there holding the machine pistol
and watching him with a look that is simultaneously frosty and smoldering,
like baked Alaska. Bischoff stands off to the side, reveling in this.
Dawn is slapping her chapped and reddened fingers against a frostbitten
sky, attempting to restore some circulation, when the remains of the turbine
finally fall away from the wing. Pumped on benzedrine, Shaftoe has been
operating the hacksaw for six hours; Otto has stepped in to change blades
several times, a major capital investment on his part. Next, they devote
half of the morning to dragging the engine through the woods and down a
creek bed to the sea, where Otto's boat is waiting, and Otto and Julieta
take their prize away. Bobby Shaftoe and Günter Bischoff trudge back up to
the site of the wreck. They have not discussed this openly yet it would be
unnecessary but they intend to find the part of the airplane that contains
the body of the pilot, and see to it that he gets a proper burial.
"What is in Manila, Bobby?" Bischoff asks.
"Something that morphine made me forget," Shaftoe answers, "and that
Enoch Root, that fucking bastard, made me remember."
Not fifteen minutes later they come to the gash in the woods that was
carved by the plunging airplane, and hear a man's voice wailing and sobbing,
completely out of his mind with grief. "Angelo! Angelo! Angelo! Mein
liebchen!"
They cannot see the man who is crying out in this way, but they do see
Enoch Root, standing there and brooding. He looks up alertly as they
approach, and produces a semiautomatic from his leather jacket. Then he
recognizes them, and relaxes.
"What the fuck is going on here?" Shaftoe says never one to beat around
in the bush. "Is that a fucking German you're with?"
"Yes, I am with a German," Root says, "as are you."
"Well, why is your German making such a fucking spectacle of himself?"
"Rudy is crying over the body of his lover," Root says, "who died in an
attempt to reunite with him."
"A woman was flying that plane?" says the flabbergasted Shaftoe.
Root rolls his eyes and heaves a sigh. "You have forgotten to allow for
the possibility that Rudy might be a homosexual."
It takes Shaftoe a long time to stretch his mind around this large,
inconveniently shaped concept. Bischoff, in typical European fashion, seems
completely unruffled. But he still has questions to ask. "Enoch, why are you
. . . here?"
"Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical body in this world
generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on
the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs
over the cremated remains of his Italian lover?
"Last rites," Root answers his own question. "Angelo was Catholic."
Then, after a while, he notices that Bischoff is staring at him, looking
completely unsatisfied. "Oh. I am here, in a larger sense, because Mrs.
Tenney, the vicar's wife, has become sloppy, and forgotten to close her eyes
when she takes the balls out of the bingo machine."
Chapter 56 CRUNCH
The condemned man showers, shaves, puts on most of a suit, and realizes
that he is ahead of schedule. He turns on the television, gets a San Miguel
out of the fridge to steady his nerves, and then goes to the closet to get
the stuff of his last meal. The apartment only has one closet and when its
door is open it appears to have been bricked shut, Cask of Amontillado
style, with very large flat red oblongs, each imprinted with the image of a
venerable and yet oddly cheerful and yet somehow kind of hauntingly sad
naval officer. The whole pallet load was shipped here several weeks ago by
Avi, in an attempt to lift Randy's spirits. For all Randy knows more are
still sitting on a Manila dockside ringed with armed guards and dictionary
sized rat traps straining against their triggers, each baited with a single
golden nugget.
Randy selects one of the bricks from this wall, creating a gap in the
formation, but there is another, identical one right behind it, another
picture of that same naval officer. They seem to be marching from his closet
in a peppy phalanx. "Part of this complete balanced breakfast," Randy says.
Then he slams the door on them and walks with a measured, forcibly calm step
to the living room where he does most of his dining, usually while facing
his thirty six inch television. He sets up his San Miguel, an empty bowl, an
exceptionally large soup spoon so large that most European cultures would
identify it as a serving spoon and most Asian ones as a horticultural
implement. He obtains a stack of paper napkins, not the brown recycled ones
that can't be moistened even by immersion in water, but the flagrantly
environmentally unsound type, brilliant white and cotton fluffy and
desperately hygroscopic. He goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge, reaches
deep into the back, and finds an unopened box bag pod unit of UHT milk. UHT
milk need not, technically, be refrigerated, but it is pivotal, in what is
to follow, that the milk be only a few microdegrees above the point of
freezing. The fridge in Randy's apartment has louvers in the back where the
cold air is blown in, straight from the freon coils. Randy always stores his
milk pods directly in front of those louvers. Not too close, or else the
pods will block the flow of air, and not too far away either. The cold air
becomes visible as it rushes in and condenses moisture, so it is a simple
matter to sit there with the fridge door open and observe its flow
characteristics, like an engineer testing an experimental minivan in a River
Rouge wind tunnel. What Randy would like to see, ideally, is the whole milk
pod enveloped in an even, jacketlike flow to produce better heat exchange
through the multilayered plastic and foil skin of the milk pod. He would
like the milk to be so cold that when he reaches in and grabs it, he feels
the flexible, squishy pod stiffen between his fingers as ice crystals spring
into existence, summoned out of nowhere simply by the disturbance of being
squished.
Today the milk is almost, but not quite, that cold. Randy goes into his
living room with it. He has to wrap it in a towel because it is so cold it
hurts his fingers. He launches a videotape and then sits down. All is in
readiness.
This is one of a series of videotapes that are shot in an empty
basketball gym with a polished maple floor and a howling, remorseless
ventilation system. They depict a young man and a young woman, both
attractive, svelte, and dressed something like marquee players in the Ice
Capades, performing simple ballroom dance steps to the accompaniment of
strangled music from a ghetto blaster set up on the free throw line. It is
miserably clear that the video has been shot by a third conspirator who is
burdened with a consumer grade camcorder and reeling from some kind of inner
ear disease that he or she would like to share with others. The dancers
stomp through the most simple steps with autistic determination. The camera
operator begins in each case with a two shot, then, like a desperado
tormenting a milksop, aims his weapon at their feet and makes them dance,
dance, dance. At one point the pager hooked to the man's elastic waistband
goes off and a scene has to be cut short. No wonder: he is one of the most
sought after ballroom dance instructors in Manila. His partner would be too,
if more men in this city were interested in learning to dance. As it is, she
must scrape by earning maybe a tenth of what the male instructor pulls down,
giving lessons to a small number of addled or henpecked stumblebums like
Randy Waterhouse.
Randy takes the red box and holds it securely between his knees with
the handy stay closed tab pointing away from him. Using both hands in unison
he carefully works his fingertips underneath the flap, trying to achieve
equal pressure on each side, paying special attention to places where too
much glue was laid down by the gluing machine. For a few long, tense
moments, nothing at all happens, and an ignorant or impatient observer might
suppose that Randy is getting nowhere. But then the entire flap pops open in
an instant as the entire glue front gives way. Randy hates it when the box
top gets bent or, worst of all possible words, torn. The lower flap is
merely tacked down with a couple of small glue spots and Randy pulls it back
to reveal a translucent, inflated sac. The halogen down light recessed in
the ceiling shines through the cloudy material of the sac to reveal gold
everywhere the glint of gold. Randy rotates the box ninety degrees and holds
it between his knees so its long axis is pointed at the television set, then
grips the top of the sac and carefully parts its heat sealed seam, which
purrs as it gives way. Removal of the somewhat milky plastic barrier causes
the individual nuggets of Cap'n Crunch to resolve, under the halogen light,
with a kind of preternatural crispness and definition that makes the roof of
Randy's mouth glow and throb in trepidation.
On the TV, the dancing instructors have finished demonstrating the
basic steps. It is almost painful to watch them doing the compulsories,
because when they do, they must willfully forget everything they know about
advanced ballroom dancing, and dance like persons who have suffered strokes,
or major brain injuries, that have wiped out not only the parts of their
brain responsible for fine motor skills but also blown every panel in the
aesthetic discretion module. They must, in other words, dance the way their
beginning pupils like Randy dance.
The gold nuggets of Cap'n Crunch pelt the bottom of the bowl with a
sound like glass rods being snapped in half Tiny fragments spall away from
their corners and ricochet around on the white porcelain surface. World
class cereal eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl
of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one
wants the bone dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth
with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place
in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special
cereal eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a
little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl,
hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon
even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to
work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap'n Crunch in
your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of
loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap'n Crunch, takes about thirty
seconds.
At this point in the videotape he always wonders if he's inadvertently
set his beer down on the fast forward button, or something, because the
dancers go straight from their vicious Randy parody into something that
obviously qualifies as advanced dancing. Randy knows that the steps they are
doing are nominally the same as the basic steps demonstrated earlier, but
he's damned if he can tell which is which, once they go into their creative
mode. There is no recognizable transition, and that is what pisses Randy
off, and has always pissed him off, about dancing lessons. Any moron can
learn to trudge through the basic steps. That takes all of half an hour. But
when that half hour is over, dancing instructors always expect you'll take
flight and go through one of those miraculous time lapse transitions that
happen only in Broadway musicals and begin dancing brilliantly. Randy
supposes that people who are lousy at math feel the same way: the instructor
writes a few simple equations on the board, and ten minutes later he's
deriving the speed of light in a vacuum.
He pours the milk with one hand while jamming the spoon in with the
other, not wanting to waste a single moment of the magical, golden time when
cold milk and Cap'n Crunch are together but have not yet begun to pollute
each other's essential natures: two Platonic ideals separated by a boundary
a molecule wide. Where the flume of milk splashes over the spoon handle, the
polished stainless steel fogs with condensation. Randy of course uses whole
milk, because otherwise why bother? Anything less is indistinguishable from
water, and besides he thinks that the fat in whole milk acts as some kind of
a buffer that retards the dissolution into slime process. The giant spoon
goes into his mouth before the milk in the bowl has even had time to seek
its own level. A few drips come off the bottom and are caught by his freshly
washed goatee (still trying to find the right balance between beardedness
and vulnerability, Randy has allowed one of these to grow). Randy sets the
milk pod down, grabs a fluffy napkin, lifts it to his chin, and uses a
pinching motion to sort of lift the drops of milk from his whiskers rather
than smashing and smearing them down into the beard. Meanwhile all his
concentration is fixed on the interior of his mouth, which naturally he
cannot see, but which he can imagine in three dimensions as if zooming
through it in a virtual reality display. Here is where a novice would lose
his cool and simply chomp down. A few of the nuggets would explode between
his molars, but then his jaw would snap shut and drive all of the
unshattered nuggets straight up into his palate where their armor of razor
sharp dextrose crystals would inflict massive collateral damage, turning the
rest of the meal into a sort of pain hazed death march and rendering him
Novocain mute for three days. But Randy has, over time, worked out a really
fiendish Cap'n Crunch eating strategy that revolves around playing the
nuggets' most deadly features against each other. The nuggets themselves are
pillow shaped and vaguely striated to echo piratical treasure chests.
Now, with a flake type of cereal, Randy's strategy would never work.
But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would
last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a
deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape
that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between
the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken
treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably
clamoring for, they came up with this hard to pin down striated pillow
formation. The important thing, for Randy's purposes, is that the individual
pieces of Cap'n Crunch are, to a very rough approximation, shaped kind of
like molars. The strategy, then, is to make the Cap'n Crunch chew itself by
grinding the nuggets together in the center of the oral cavity, like stones
in a lapidary tumbler. Like advanced ballroom dancing, verbal explanations
(or for that matter watching videotapes) only goes so far and then your body
just has to learn the moves.
By the time he has eaten a satisfactory amount of Cap'n Crunch (about a
third of a 25 ounce box) and reached the bottom of his beer bottle, Randy
has convinced himself that this whole dance thing is a practical joke. When
he reaches the hotel, Amy and Doug Shaftoe will be waiting for him with
mischievous smiles. They will tell him they were just teasing and then take
him into the bar to talk him down.
Randy puts on the last few bits of his suit. Any delaying tactics are
acceptable at this point, so he checks his e mail.
To: randy@epiphyte.com
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: The Pontifex Transform, as requested
Randy,
You are right, of course as the Germans learned the hard way, no new
cryptosystem can be trusted until it has been published, so that people like
your Secret Admirer friends can have a go at breaking it. I would be in your
debt if you would do this with Pontifex.
The transform at the heart of Pontifex has various asymmetries and
special cases that make it difficult to express in a few clean, elegant
lines of math. It almost has to be written down as pseudo code. But why
settle for pseudo when you can have the real thing? What follows is Pontifex
written as a Perl script. The variable $D contains the 54 element
permutation. The subroutine e generates the next keystream value whilst
evolving $D.
#!/usr/bin/perl s
$f=$d? 1:1;$D=pack('C*'.33..86);$p=shift;
$p=~y/a z/A Z/;$U='$D=~s/(.*)U$/U$1/;
$D=~s/U(.)/$1U/;';($V=$U)=~s/U/V/g;
$p=~s/[A Z]/$k=ord($&) 64,&e/eg;$k=0;
while(<>){y/a z/A Z/;y/A Z//dc;$o.=$_}$o.='X'
while length ($o)%5&&!$d;
$o=~s/./chr(($f*&e+ord($&) l3)%26+65)/eg;
$o=~s/X*$// if $d;$o=~s/.{5}/$& /g;
print"$o\n";sub v{$v=ord(substr($D,$_[0])) 32;
$v>53?53:$v}
sub w{$D=~s/(.{$_[0]})(.*)(.)/$2$1$3/}
sub e{eval"$U$V$V";$D=~s/(.*)([UV].*[UV])(.*)/$3$2$l/;
&w(&v(53));$k?(&w($k)):($c=&v(&v(0)),$c>52?&e:$c)}
There is also one message from his palimony lawyer in California, which
he prints and puts into his breast pocket to savor while he is stuck in
traffic. He takes the elevator downstairs and catches a taxi to the Manila
Hotel. This (riding in a taxi through Manila) would be one of the more
memorable experiences of his life if this w