Cryptonomicon

Chapter 52 METEOR

“You sure don't fuck like a smart girl,” says Bobby Shaftoe, his voice suffused with awe.

The wood stove glows in the corner, even though it's only September for crissakes, in Sweden, where Shaftoe has spent the last six months.

Julieta is dark and lanky. She reaches one long arm far across the bed, gropes on the nightstand for a cigarette.

“Could you reach that jiz rag?” Shaftoe says, eyeing a neatly folded United States Marine Corps handkerchief next to the cigarettes. His arm is too short.

“Why?” Julieta speaks great English like all the other Finns. Shaftoe sighs in exasperation and buries his face in her black hair. The Gulf of Bothnia whooshes and foams down below them, like a badly tuned radio pulling in strange information.

Julieta is given to asking big questions.

“I just don't want there to be a big mess when I execute my withdrawal, ma'am,” he says.

He hears the flint of Julieta's lighter itching once, twice, thrice behind his ear. Then her chest pushes him up as her lungs fill with smoke.

“Take your time,” she purrs, her vocal cords syrupy with condensed tar. “What are you going to do, go for a swim? Invade Russia?”

Somewhere out there, across the Gulf, is Finland. There are Russians there, and Germans.

“See, even when you mention going for a swim, my dick gets smaller,” Shaftoe says. “So it's going to come out. Inevitably.” He thinks he pronounces this last word correctly.

“Then what will happen?” Julieta says.

“We'll get a wet spot.”

“So? It's natural. People have been sleeping on wet spots as long as beds have existed.”

“God damn it,” Shaftoe says, and lunges heroically for the Semper Fi handkerchief Julieta digs her fingernails into one of the sensitive spots that she has located during her exhaustive cartographic survey of his body. He squirms to no avail; all the Finns are great athletes. He pops out. Too late! He knocks his wallet onto the floor while grabbing the hanky, then rolls off Julieta and wraps it around himself, a flag on a broken pole, the only flag of surrender Bobby Shaftoe will ever wave.

Then he just lies there for a while, listening to the surf, and the popping of the wood in the stove. Julieta rolls away from him and lies curled up on her side, avoiding the wet spot, even though it is natural, and enjoying her cigarette, even though it isn't.

Julieta smells like coffee. Shaftoe likes to nuzzle and smell her coffee-scented flesh.

“The weather is not too bad. Uncle Otto should be back before night,” she says. She is lazily regarding a map of Scandinavia. Sweden dangles like a flaccid, circumcised phallus. Finland bulges scrotally underneath. Its eastern border, with Russia, no longer bears any resemblance to reality. This illusive frontier is furiously crosshatched with pencil marks, the axes of Stalin's repeated efforts to castrate Scandinavia, obsessively recorded and annotated by Julieta's uncle, who like all Finns is an expert skier, crack shot, and indomitable warrior.

Still they despise themselves. Shaftoe thinks it's because they eventually farmed out the defense of their country to the Germans. Finns excelled at an old-fashioned, personalized, retail style of Russian-killing, but when they started to run low on Finns, they had to call in the Germans, who are more numerous and who have perfected a wholesale Russian-slaughtering operation.

Julieta scoffs at this simple-minded theory: the Finns are a million times more complex than Bobby Shaftoe can ever understand. Even if the war had never happened, there would be an infinity of reasons for them to be depressed all the time. There is no point even in trying to explain it all. She can only provide him with the haziest glimpses into Finnish psychology by fucking his brains out once every couple of weeks.

He has been lying there for too long. Soon the left-over jism in his tract will harden like epoxy. This peril spurs him to action. He slides out of bed, cringes from the chill, hops across cold planks to the rug, scurries instinctively toward the warmth of the stove.

Julieta rolls over onto her back to watch this. She looks at him appraisingly. “Be a man,” she says. “Make me some coffee.”

Shaftoe snatches the cabin's cast-iron kettle, which could double as a ship anchor if need arose. He throws a blanket over his shoulders and runs outside. He stops at the brink of the seawall, knowing that the splintery pier will not be kind to his bare feet, and pisses down onto the beach. The yellow arc is veiled in steam, redolent of coffee. He squints across the gulf and sees a tug pulling a boom of logs down the coast, and a couple of sails, but not Uncle Otto's.

Behind the cabin is a standpipe that is fed from a spring in the hills. Shaftoe fills the kettle, snatches a couple of hunks of firewood and scampers back inside, maneuvering between stacked bricks of foil-packed java and crates of Suomi machine pistol ammunition. He sets the kettle on the iron stove and then stokes it up with the wood.

“You use too much wood,” Julieta says, “Uncle Otto will be noticing.”

“I'll chop more,” Shaftoe says. “This whole fucking country is full of nothing but wood.”

“You'll be chopping wood all day if Uncle Otto gets angry at you.”

“So it's okay for me to sleep with Otto's niece, but burning a couple of sticks of wood to make her coffee is grounds for dismissal?”

“Grounds,” Julieta says. “Coffee grounds.”

The entire country of Finland (to hear Otto tell it) has been plunged into an endless night of existential despair and suicidal depression. The usual antidotes have been exhausted: self-flagellation with steeped birch twigs, mordant humor, week-long drinking bouts. The only thing to save Finland now is coffee. Unfortunately the government of that country has been short-sighted enough to raise taxes and customs duties through the roof. Supposedly it is to pay for killing Russians, and for resettling the hundreds of thousands of Finns who have to pull up stakes and move whenever Stalin, in a drunken lunge, or Hitler, in a psychotic fit, attacks a map with a red Crayola. It just has the effect of making coffee harder to obtain. According to Otto, Finland is a nation of unproductive zombies, except in areas that have been penetrated by the distribution networks of coffee smugglers. Finns are generally strangers to the entire concept of good fortune, however they are lucky enough to live right across the Gulf of Bothnia from a neutral, reasonably prosperous country famous for its coffee.

With this background, the existence of a small Finnish colony in Norrsbruck becomes pretty much self-explanatory. The only thing that is missing is muscle to load the coffee onto the boat, and to unload whatever swag Otto brings back. Needed: one muscular lunkhead willing to be paid off the record in whatever specie Otto comes up with.

Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans into the grinder and starts to belabor the crank. A black flurry begins to accumulate in the coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedish way, using an egg to settle the grounds.

Chopping wood, fucking Julieta, grinding coffee, fucking Julieta, pissing on the beach, fucking Julieta, loading and unloading Otto's ketch. This has been pretty much it for Bobby Shaftoe during the last half year. In Sweden he has found the calm, grey-green eye of the blood hurricane that is the world.

Julieta Kivistik is the central mystery. They do not have a love affair; they have a series of love affairs. At the beginning of each affair, they are not even speaking to each other, they do not even know each other, Shaftoe is just a drifter who loads for her uncle. At the end of each affair they are in bed fucking. In between, there is anywhere from one to three weeks of tactical maneuver, false starts, and arduous cut-and-thrust flirtation.

Other than that, each affair is completely different, like a whole new relationship between two entirely different people. It is crazy. Probably because Julieta is crazy—much crazier than Bobby Shaftoe. But there's no reason for Shaftoe not to be crazy, here and now.

He boils the coffee, does the trick with the egg, pours her a mug. This is nothing more than a courtesy: their affair just ended and the new one hasn't started yet.

When he brings her the mug, she is sitting up in bed, smoking another cigarette, and (just like a woman) cleaning out his wallet, which is something that he has not done since—well, since he first made it, ten years ago, in Oconomowoc, in fulfillment of the requirements for the Leatherworking merit badge. Julieta has pulled the stuffing out of the thing and is going through it as if it were a paperback book. Much of the stuff in there has been ruined by seawater. But she is looking, analytically, at a snapshot of Glory.

“Gimme that!” he says, and snatches it from her.

If she were his lover, she would try to play keep-away with him, there would be silliness and, perhaps, more sex at the end of it. But she is a stranger now and she lets him have the wallet.

She watches him set down the coffee, as if he's a waiter in a cafe.

“You have a girlfriend—where? In Mexico?”

“Manila,” Bobby Shaftoe says, “if she's even still alive.”

Julieta nods, completely impassive. She is neither jealous of Glory, nor worried about Glory's fate at the hands of the Nips. What's happening in the Philippines can't be any worse than what she's seen in Finland. And why should she care, anyway, about the past romantic entanglements of her uncle's stevedore, young what's-his-name?

Shaftoe pulls on boxers, wool pants, a shirt and a sweater. “I'm going into town,” he says. “Tell Otto I'll be back to unload the boat.”

Julieta says nothing.

As a last, polite gesture, Shaftoe stops at the door, reaches behind a stack of crates, hauls out the Suomi machine pistol (19) and checks it: clean, loaded, ready for action, just like it was about an hour ago, the last time he checked it. He puts it back in its place, turns around, locks eyes with Julieta for a moment. Then he goes out and pulls the door shut. Behind him, he can hear her naked feet on the cold floor, and the satisfying sound of the door's bolts being rammed home.

He steps into a pair of tall rubber boots and then begins to trudge south along the beach. The boots are Otto's and are a couple of sizes too big for his feet. They make him feel like a little boy, splashing through puddles in Wisconsin. This is what a boy of his age ought to be doing: working, hard and honest, at a simple job. Kissing girls. Walking into town to buy some smokes and maybe have a beer. The idea of flying around on heavily armed warplanes and using modern weapons systems to kill hundreds of foreign homicidal maniacs now strikes him as dated and inappropriate.

He slows down every few hundred yards to look at a steel drum, or other war debris, cast up by the waves, half-buried in sand, stenciled cryptically in Cyrillic or Finnish or German. They remind him of the Nipponese drums on that Guadalcanal beach.

Moon lifts sea, but not the ones who sleep on the beach. Each wave a shovel

A lot of stuff gets wasted in a war—not just stuff that comes in crates and drums. It frequently happens, for example, that men are called upon to die willingly that others may live. Shaftoe learned on Guadalcanal that you can never tell when circumstances will make you into that guy. You can go into battle with the clearest, simplest, smartest plan ever devised, worked out by Annapolis-trained, battle-hardened Marine officers, and based upon tons of intelligence. But ten seconds after the first trigger has been pulled, shit is happening all over the place, people are running around like maniacs. The battle plan that was genius a minute ago suddenly looks as sweetly naive as the inscriptions in your high school year book. Guys are dying. Some of them are dying because a shell happens to fall on them, but surprisingly often, they are dying because they are ordered to.

It was like that with U-691. That whole thing with the Trinidadian steamer was probably a brilliant plan (Waterhouse's, he suspects) at some point. But then it all went wrong, and some Allied commander gave the order that Shaftoe and Root, along with the crew of U-691, were to die.

He should have died on the beach on Guadalcanal, along with his buddies, and he didn't. Everything between then and U-691 was just sort of an extra bonus life. He got a chance to go home and see his family, sort of like Jesus after the Resurrection.

Now Bobby Shaftoe is dead for sure. This is why he walks so slowly down the beach, and takes such a brotherly interest in these items, because Bobby Shaftoe is, too, a corpse washed up on the beach in Sweden.

He is thinking about this when he sees the Heavenly Apparition.

The sky here is like a freshly galvanized bucket that has been inverted over the world to block out inconvenient sunlight; if someone lights up a cigarette half a mile away, it blazes like a nova. By those standards, the Heavenly Apparition looks like a whole galaxy falling out of orbit to graze the surface of the world. You could almost mistake it for an air plane, except that it does not make the requisite chesty, droning thrum. This thing emits a screaming whine—and a long trail of fire. Besides, it goes too fast for an airplane. It comes streaking in from the Gulf of Bothnia and crosses the shoreline a couple of miles north of Otto's cabin, gradually losing altitude and slowing down. But as it slows down, the flames burgeon, and claw their way forward up the thing's black body, which resembles the crumpled, curling wick at the root of a candle flame.

It disappears behind trees. Around here, everything disappears behind trees sooner or later. A ball of fire erupts from those trees, and Bobby Shaftoe says, “One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand five, one thousand six, one thousand seven” and then stops, hearing the explosion. Then he turns around and walks into Norrsbruck, going faster now.