Cryptonomicon (109 page)

“Well, shit! There’s a padre right out there in the dugout. He can Christianize your ass in about ten seconds flat.” Bobby Shaftoe strides across the bathroom and swings the door open.

He is startled to see a man standing just a few paces away. The man is dressed in an old but clean khaki uniform, devoid of insignia except for a pentagon of stars on the collar. He has jammed a wooden match down into the bowl of a corncob pipe and is puffing away futilely. But it’s as if all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the air by the burning of the city. He throws the match away in disgust, then looks up into the face of Bobby Shaftoe—staring at him through a pair of dark aviator sunglasses that give his gaunt face the appearance of a skull. His mouth forms into an O for a moment. Then his jaw sets. “Shaftoe… Shaftoe! SHAFTOE!” he says.

Bobby Shaftoe feels his body stiffening to attention. Even if he had been dead for a few hours, his body would do this out of some kind of dumb ingrained reflex. “Sir, yes, sir!” he says wearily.

The General composes his thoughts for half a second, and then says: “You were supposed to be in Concepcion. You failed to be there. Your superiors did not know what to think. They have been worried sick about you. And the Department of the Navy has been positively insufferable ever since they became aware that you were working for me. They assert, in the most high-handed way, that you know important secrets, and should never have been placed in danger of capture. In short, your whereabouts and your status have been the subject of the most intense, nay, feverish speculation for the last several weeks. Many supposed that you
were dead, or, worse, captured. This distraction has been most unwelcome to me, inasmuch as the planning and execution of the reconquest of the Philippine Islands have left me little time to devote to such nagging distractions.” An artillery shell rips through the air and detonates in the bleachers, sending jagged fragments of planks, about the size of canoe paddles, whirling through the air all around them. One of them embeds itself like a javelin in the dirt between The General and Bobby Shaftoe.

The General takes advantage of this to draw breath, and then continues, as if he were reading this from a script. “And now, when I least expect it, I encounter you, here, many leagues distant from your assigned post, out of uniform, in a disheveled condition, accompanied by a Nipponese officer, violating the sanctity of a ladies’ powder room! Shaftoe, have you no sense whatsoever of military honor? Do you not respect decorum? Do you not believe that a representative of the United States military should comport himself with more dignity?”

Shaftoe’s kneecaps are joggling up and down uncontrollably. His guts have become molten, and he feels strange bubbling processes going on in his rectum. His molars are chattering together like a teletype machine. He senses Goto Dengo behind him, and wonders what the poor bastard can possibly be thinking.

“Begging your pardon, General, not to change the subject or anything, but are you here all by yourself?”

The General juts his chin towards the men’s room. “My aides are in there relieving themselves. They were in a great hurry to do so, and it is good that we came upon this place. But none of them considered invading the powder room,” he says severely.

“I apologize for that, sir,” Bobby Shaftoe says hastily, “and for all of those other things that you mentioned. But I still think of myself as a Marine, and Marines do not make excuses, so I will not even try.”

“That is not satisfactory! I need an explanation for where you’ve been.”

“I have been out in the world,” Bobby Shaftoe says, “getting butt-fucked by Fortune.”

The door of the men’s room opens and one of The General’s aides walks out, woozy and bowlegged. The General ignores him; he is gazing right past Shaftoe now.

“Pardon my manners, sir,” Shaftoe says, turning sideways. “Sir, my friend Goto Dengo. Goto-san, say hi to General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.”

Goto Dengo has been standing there like a pillar of salt this whole time, utterly dumbfounded, but now he snaps out of it, and bows very low. MacArthur nods crisply. His aide is staring darkly at Goto Dengo and has already drawn his Colt.

“Pleasure,” The General says airily. “Pray tell, what sort of business were you two gentlemen prosecuting in the ladies’?”

Bobby Shaftoe knows how to lunge for an opening. “Uh, it is very funny you should ask that question, sir,” he says offhandedly, “but Goto-san, just now, saw the light, and converted to Christianity.”

Some Nips on top of the wall open up on them with a machine gun. The flimsy, tumbling rounds crack through the air and thump into the ground. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur stands motionless for a long time, lips pursed. He sniffles once. Then he removes his aviator glasses carefully and wipes his eyes on the immaculate sleeve of his uniform. He pulls out a neatly folded white hankie and wraps it around his hawklike nose and honks into it a few times. He folds it up carefully and puts it back in his pocket, squares his shoulders, and then walks right up to Goto Dengo and wraps him up in a big, manly bearhug. The remainder of The General’s aides emerge from the shitter
en bloc
and view the scene with reticence and palpable tension all over their faces. Profoundly mortified, Bobby Shaftoe looks down at his feet, wiggles his toes, and caresses the linear scab running upside his head where the oar clocked him a few days ago. The machine-gun crew up on the wall are being picked off one by one by a sniper; they writhe and scream operatically. The Huks have come up from the dugout and stumbled into this little tableau; they all stand motionless with their jaws hanging down around their navels.

Finally MacArthur unhands the stiff body of Goto Dengo, steps back dramatically, and presents him to his staff. “Meet Goto-san,” he announces. “You have all heard the expression, ‘the only good Nip is a dead Nip’? Well, this young fellow is a counterexample, and as we learned in mathematics, it only takes one counterexample to disprove the theorem.”

His staff observe cautious silence.

“It seems only fitting that we take this young fellow to the Church of St. Agustin, over yonder in Intramuros, to carry out the sacrament of baptism,” The General says.

One of the aides steps forward, hunched over in that he’s expecting to get a slug between the shoulder blades any minute. “Sir, it is my duty to remind you that Intramuros is still controlled by the enemy.”

“Then it is high time we made our presence felt!” MacArthur says. “Shaftoe will get us there. Shaftoe and these fine Filipino gentlemen.” The General throws one arm around Goto Dengo’s neck in a highly affectionate, companionable way, and begins strolling with him towards the nearest gate. “I would like you to know, young man, that when I set up my headquarters in Tokyo—which, God willing, should be within a year—I want you there bright and early the first day!”

“Yes sir!” Goto Dengo says. All things considered, it is unlikely he would say anything else.

Shaftoe draws a deep breath, tilts his head back, and stares up into a smoky heaven. “God,” he says, “usually I bow my head when I’m talking to You, but I figure this is a good time for us to have a face-to-face. You see and know all things and so I will not explain the situation to You. I would just like to submit a request for You. I know You are getting requests from lonely soldiers all over the fucking place at this time, but since this one has to do with a shitload of women and children, and General MacArthur too, maybe You can jump me to the top of the stack. You know what I want. Let’s get it done.”

He borrows a small, straight twenty-round tommy gun magazine from one of his comrades and they set out for Intramuros. The gates are sure to be guarded, so Shaftoe and
the Huks run up the sloping walls instead, directly beneath that wiped-out machine-gun nest. They turn the gun around into Intramuros, and plant one of the wounded Huks there to operate it.

The first time Shaftoe gazes into the town, he nearly falls off the wall. Intramuros is gone. If he didn’t know where he was, he would never recognize it. Essentially all of the buildings have been leveled. Manila Cathedral and the Church of St. Agustin still stand, both with heavy damage. A few of the fine old Spanish houses still exist as hasty, freehand sketches of their former selves, missing roofs, wings, or walls. But most of the blocks are just jumbles of masonry and shattered red roof tiles with smoke and steam seething out of them. There are dead bodies all over the place, sowed all over the neighborhood like timothy seed broadcast onto freshly plowed soil. The artillery has mostly stopped—there being nothing left to destroy—but small-arms and machine-gun fire sound on almost every block.

Shaftoe is thinking he’ll have to assault one of the gates. But before he can even come up with a plan, MacArthur is up there with the rest of his group, having scrambled up the rampart behind them. This is evidently the first time that The General has gotten a good look at Intramuros, because he is stunned and, for once, speechless. He stands there for a long time with his mouth open, and begins to draw fire from a few Nips hidden in the wreckage below. The turned-around machine gun silences them.

It takes them several hours to make their way up the street and into the Church of St. Agustin. A bunch of Nips have barricaded themselves inside the place along with what sounds like every hungry infant and irritable two-year-old in Manila. The church is just one side of a large compound that includes a monastery and other buildings. Many of the structures have been torn open by artillery fire. The treasures hoarded in that place by the monks over the course of the last five hundred years have tumbled out into the street. Blown all over the neighborhood like shrapnel, and commingled with the bayoneted corpses of Filipino boys, are huge oil paintings of Christ being scourged, fantastic wooden sculptures of the Romans hammering the
spikes through his wrists and ankles, marbles of Mary holding the dead and mangled Christ in her lap, tapestries of the whipping post and the cat o’ nine tails in action, blood coursing out of Christ’s back through hundreds of parallel gouges.

The Nips still inside the church defend its main doors with the suicidal determination that Shaftoe has begun to find so tedious, but thanks to The General’s artillery, there are plenty of other ways, besides doors, to get into the place now. So it is that, even while a company of American infantry mount a frontal assault on the main entrance, Bobby Shaftoe and his Huks, Goto Dengo, The General, and his aides are already kneeling in a little chapel in what used to be part of the monastery. The padre leads them through a couple of extremely truncated prayers of thanksgiving and baptizes Goto Dengo with water from a font, with Bobby Shaftoe taking the role of beaming parent and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur serving as godfather. Shaftoe later remembers only one line of the ceremony.

“Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?” says the padre.

“I do!” says MacArthur with tremendous authority even as Bobby Shaftoe is muttering, “Fuck yes!” Goto Dengo, nods, gets wet, and becomes a Christian.

Bobby Shaftoe excuses himself and goes wandering through the compound. It seems as big and crazy as that Casbah in Algiers, all gloomy and dusty on the inside, and filled with still more La Pasyon art, made by artists who had obviously witnessed whippings firsthand, and who didn’t need any priest spouting little homilies about the glamor of Evil. He goes up and down the great stairway once, for old time’s sake, remembering the night Glory took him here.

There is a courtyard with a fountain in the center, surrounded by a long shaded gallery where Spanish friars could stroll in the shade and look out over the flowers and hear the birds singing. Right now the only things singing are shells passing overhead. But little Filipino kids are running races up and down the gallery, and their mothers and aunts and grannies are encamped in the courtyard, drawing water
from the fountain and cooking rice over piles of burning chair legs.

A grey-eyed two-year-old with a makeshift bludgeon is chasing some bigger kids down a stone arcade. Some of his hairs are the color of Bobby’s and some are the color of Glory’s, and Bobby Shaftoe can see Glory-ness shining almost fluoroscopically out of his face. The boy has the same bone structure that he saw on the sandbar a few days ago, but this time it is clothed in chubby pink flesh. The flesh admittedly bears bruises and abrasions. No doubt honorably earned. Bobby squats down and looks the little Shaftoe in the eye, wondering how to begin to explain
everything
. But the boy says, “Bobby Shaftoe, you have boo-boos,” and drops his club and walks up to examine the wounds on Bobby’s arm. Little kids don’t bother to say hello, they just start talking to you, and Shaftoe figures that’s a good way to handle what would otherwise be pretty damn awkward. The Altamiras have probably been telling little Douglas M. Shaftoe, since the day he was born, that one day Bobby Shaftoe would come in glory from across the sea. That he has now done so is just as routine and yet just as much of a miracle as that the sun rises every day.

“I see that you and yours have displayed adaptability and that is good,” says Bobby Shaftoe to his son, but sees immediately that he’s not getting through to the kid at all. He feels a need to get something into the kid’s head that is going to stick, and this need is stronger than the craving for morphine or sex ever was.

So he picks up the boy and carries him through the compound, down semicollapsed hallways and over settling rubble-heaps and between dead Nipponese boys to that big staircase, and shows him the giant slabs of granite, tells how they were laid, one on top of the next, year by year, as the galleons full of silver came from Acapulco. Doug M. Shaftoe has been playing with blocks, so he zeroes in on the basic concept right away. Dad carries son up and down the stairway a few times. They stand at the bottom and look up at it. The block analogy has struck deep. Without any prompting, Doug M. raises both arms over his head and hollers “Soooo big” and the sound echoes up and down the stairs.
Bobby wants to explain to the boy that
this is how it’s done,
you pile one thing on top of the next and you keep it up and keep it up—sometimes the galleon sinks in a typhoon, you don’t get your slab of granite that year—but you stick with it and eventually you end up with something
sooo big
.