Cryptonomicon

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.”

“I think not.” Randy sighs.

“Anyway, I thought that maybe you were just in the process of making a big, stupid mistake. So when I got on that plane in Tokyo I was just going to track you down and…” She draws a deep breath and mentally counts to ten. “But when I got off that plane I was to boot just obsessed with this disgusting image of you getting back together with this woman who obviously was no damn good for you. And I felt that would be an unfortunate outcome for you. And I thought I was too late to do anything about it. So, when I got into town, and pulled around the corner and saw your Acura in the lane right there in front of me, and you talking on your cellphone—”

“I was leaving a message on your answering machine in Manila,” Randy says. “Explaining that I was just coming here to pick up some papers and there'd been an earthquake only minutes before and so I might be a while.”

“Well, I didn't have time to check my messages, which were placed on my machine too late to accomplish any useful purpose,” Amy says, “and so I had to go on an imperfect knowledge of these events since no one had bothered to fill me in.”

“So…”

“I felt that cooler heads should prevail.”

“And therefore you ran me off the road?”

Amy looks a little disappointed. She takes a patient, Montessori-preschool-teacher tone of voice. “Now, Randy, think about priorities for just a minute. I could see the way you were driving.”

“I was in a hurry to find out whether I was totally destitute, or merely bankrupt.”

“But because of my imperfect knowledge of the situation I thought maybe you were rushing into your poor little Charlene's arms. In other words, that the emotional stress of the earthquake might induce you to—who knows what, relationship-wise.”

Randy presses his lips together and takes a huge breath through his nose.

“Compared to that, a little bit of sheet metal just was not very important to me. Of course, I know that a lot of guys would just stand back and allow someone they cared about to do something extremely foolish and damaging, only so that everyone concerned could then drive off to a miserable and emotionally fucked-up future in perfect, shiny cars.”

Randy can do nothing but roll his eyes. “Well,” he says, “I am sorry that I blew up at you when I got out of the car.”

“You are? Why, exactly? You should be pissed off when a truck driver runs you off the road.”

“I didn't know who you were. I didn't recognize you in this context. It did not occur to me that you would do what you did with the airplanes.”

Amy laughs in a goofy, mischievous way that doesn't seem right here. Randy feels quizzical and mildly irritated. She looks at him knowingly. “I'll bet you never blew up at Charlene.”

“That's right,” Randy says.

“You didn't? In all those years?”

“When we had issues, we talked them out.”

Amy snorts. “I'll bet you had really boring—” She stops herself.

“Boring what?”

“Never mind.”

“Look, I think that in a good relationship, you have to have ways for working out any issues that might come up.” Randy says reasonably.

“And you don't consider ramming your car a good way, I'll bet.”

“I can think of some problems with it.”

“And you had ways of working out your problems with Charlene that were very sophisticated. No voices were ever raised. No angry words exchanged.”

“No cars rammed.”

“Yeah. And that worked, right?”

Randy sighs.

“How about that thing that Charlene wrote about beards?” Amy asks.

“How did you know about that?”

“Looked it up on the Internet. Was that an example of how you guys worked out your problems? By publishing totally oblique academic papers blasting the other person?”

“I feel like having some oatmeal.”

“So don't apologize to me for blowing up at me.”

“That oatmeal would really hit the spot.”

“For having, and showing, emotion.”

“Chow time!”

“Because that's what it's all about. That's the name of the game, Randy boy,” she says, pulling abreast of him and whacking him between the shoulder blades in a gesture inherited from her dad. “Mmm, that oatmeal does smell good.”

The caravan pulls out of town a little after noon: Randy leading the way in his damaged Acura, Amy sitting in the passenger seat with her bare, tanned feet up on the dashboard, spoked with white lines from the straps of her high-tech sandals, oblivious to the danger (alluded to by Randy) of her legs being snapped by an air bag deployment. The souped-up Impala is driven by its owner of record and chief engineer, Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe. Bringing up the rear, the almost totally empty U-Haul truck, driven by Robin Shaftoe. Randy has that moving-through-syrup feeling he gets when enacting some emotionally huge transition in his life. He puts Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings on the Acura's stereo and drives very slowly down the main street of the town, looking all around at the remains of the coffeehouses, bars, pizza places, and Thai restaurants where, for many years, he prosecuted his social life. He should have performed this little ceremony before he first left for Manila, a year and a half ago. But then he fled as if from the scene of a crime, or, at least, a grotesque personal embarrassment. He only had a day or two before he got on the plane, and he spent most of it on the floor of Avi's basement, dictating whole swathes of the business plan into a microcassette recorder, as opposed to typing them, because his hands had gone carpal.

He never even properly said good-bye to most of the people he knew here. He did not speak to them, and barely thought of them, until yesterday evening, when he pulled up in front of their skewed and occasionally smoking homes in his crumpled and U-Haul-orange-streaked car with this strange, wiry, tanned woman who, whatever strengths and shortcomings she might have, was not Charlene. So, taking everything into account, it was not precisely the way that Emily Post would have orchestrated a reunion with out-of-touch friends. The evening's tour is still a flurry of odd, emotionally charged images in his memory, but he's beginning to sort it out a little, to run the numbers as it were, and he would say that of the people he ran into yesterday—people he had exchanged dinner invitations with and loaned tools to, people whose personal computers he had debugged in exchange for six-packs of good beer, whom he had seen important movies with—that at least three-quarters of these people have really no interest whatsoever in seeing Randy's face again as long as they live, and were made to feel intensely awkward by his totally unexpected reappearance in their front yards, where they were throwing impromptu parties with salvaged beer and wine. This hostility was pretty strongly gender-linked, Randy is sad to conclude. Many of the females wouldn't talk to him it at all, or would come near him only the better to fix him with frosty glares and appraise his presumed new girlfriend. This only stands to reason, since, before she left for Yale, Charlene had the better part of a year to popularize her version of events. She has been able to structure the discourse to her advantage, just like a dead white male. No doubt Randy has been classified as an abandoner, no better than the married man who up and walks out on his wife and children—never mind that he was the one who wanted to marry her and have kids with her. But his whining alert starts to buzz when he thinks about that, so he backs up and tries another path.

He embodies (he realizes) just about the worst nightmare, for many women, of what might happen in their lives. As for the men he saw last night, they were pretty strongly incensed to back whatever stance their wives adopted. Some of them really did, apparently, feel similarly. Others eyed him with obvious curiosity. Some were openly friendly. Weirdly, the ones who adopted the sternest and most terrible Old Testament moral tone were the Modern Language Association types who believed that everything was relative and that, for example, polygamy was as valid as monogamy. The friendliest and most sincere welcome he'd gotten was from Scott, a chemistry professor, and Laura, a pediatrician, who, after knowing Randy and Charlene for many years, had one day divulged to Randy, in strict confidence, that, unbeknownst to the academic community at large, they had been spiriting their three children off to church every Sunday morning, and even had them all baptized.

Randy had gone into their house once to help Scott wrestle a freshly reconditioned clawfoot bathtub up the stairs, and had actually seen the word GOD written on actual pieces of paper stuck to the walls of their house—like on the refrigerator door, and the walls of the children's bedrooms, where juvenile art tends to be reposited. Little time-wasting projects they had done during Sunday school—pages torn from coloring books, showing a somewhat more multicultural Jesus than the one Randy had grown up with (curly hair, e.g.), talking to little biblical kids or assisting disoriented Holy Land livestock. The sight of this stuff around the house, commingled with normal (i.e., secular) kid-art-junk from elementary school, Batman posters, etc. made Randy feel grossly embarrassed. It was like going to the house of some supposedly sophisticated people and finding a neon-on-black-velvet Elvis painting hanging above their state-of-the-art Italian designer furniture. Definitely a social-class thing. And it wasn't like Scott and Laura were deadly earnest types, and neither were they glassy-eyed and foaming at the mouth. They had after all managed to pass themselves off as members in good standing of decent academic society for a number of years. They were a bit quieter than many others, they took up less space in the room, but then that was normal for people trying to raise three kids, and so they passed.

Randy and Amy had spent a full hour talking to Scott and Laura last night; they were the only people who made any effort to make Amy feel welcome. Randy hadn't the faintest idea what these people thought of him and what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially that was not the issue because even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with transgressions. To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.

“Yo! Randy!” says America Shaftoe. “M.A. is honking at you.”

“Why?” Randy asks. He looks in the rearview, sees a reflection of the ceiling of the Acura, and realizes he is slouched way down in his seat. He sits up straight, and spots the Impala.

“I think it's because you're driving ten miles an hour,” Amy says, “and M.A. likes to go ninety.”

“Okay,” Randy says, and, just as simple as that, pushes down on the accelerator pedal and drives out of town forever.