Cryptonomicon

Chapter 84 CAPTIVITY

“Someone is trying to send you a message,” Attorney Alejandro says, scant minutes into his first interview with his new client.

Randy's ready for it. “Why does everyone here have these incredibly cumbersome ways of sending me messages? Don't you people have e-mail?”

The Philippines are one of those countries where “Attorney” is used as a title, like “Doctor.” Attorney Alejandro has a backswept grey pompadour that gets a little curly down around the nape of his neck which, as he probably well knows, makes him look distinguished in a nineteenth-century-statesman kind of way. He smokes a lot, which bothers Randy hardly a bit since he has been in places, for a couple of days, where everyone smokes. You don't even need to bother with cigarettes and matches in a jail. Just breathe, and you get the equivalent of one or two packs a day worth of slightly pre-owned tar and nicotine.

Attorney Alejandro decides to act as if Randy has never made this last comment. He attends to a bit of business with his cigarette. If he wants that cigarette up and burning between his lips, he can make it happen without even moving his hands; suddenly it's just there, as if he had been hiding it, already lit, inside his mouth. But if he needs to introduce a caesura into the conversation, he can turn the selection, preparation, and ignition of a cigarette into something that in terms of solemn ritual is just this side of the cha-no-yu. It must knock 'em dead in the court room. Randy's feeling better already.

“What do you suppose the message is? That they are capable of killing me if they want to? Because I already know that. I mean, shit! How much does it cost to have a man killed in Manila?”

Attorney Alejandro frowns fiercely. He has taken this question the wrong way: as a suggestion that he is the kind of guy who would know such a thing. Of course, given that he was personally recommended by Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, he probably is just precisely that kind of guy, but it is probably rude to aver this. “Your imagination is running wild,” he says. “You have blown the death penalty aspect of this thing all out of proportion.” As Attorney Alejandro probably expected, this display of blitheness renders Randy speechless long enough for him to execute another bit of patter with a cigarette and a stainless-steel lighter encrusted with military regalia. Attorney Alejandro has mentioned, twice, that he was a colonel in the Army and lived for years in the States. “We reinstated the death penalty in '95 after a hiatus of ten years approximately.” The word approximately crackles and explodes from his mouth like a spark from a Tesla coil. Filipinos enunciate better than Americans and they know it.

Randy and Alejandro are meeting in a high, narrow room somewhere in between the jail and the courtroom in Makati. A prison guard loitered in the room with them for a few minutes, hunched over with sheepishness, leaving only when Attorney Alejandro went over and spoke to him in low, fatherly tones and pressed something into his hand. There is an open window, and the sound of honking horns comes through it from the street two stories below. Randy's half expecting Doug Shaftoe and his comrades to rappel down from the roof and enter suddenly in glittering and screaming cloaks of broken window-glass and extract Randy while Attorney Alejandro heaves his bulk against this half-ton nara table and uses it to block the door shut.

Coming up with fantasies like this one helps to break the tedium of being in jail, and probably does a lot to explain Randy's jailmates' taste in videos, which they cannot actually watch but which they talk about incessantly in a mixture of English and Tagalog that he now almost understands. The videos, or rather the lack of them, has given rise to some kind of retrograde media-evolution phenomenon: an oral storytelling rooted in videos that these guys once saw. A particularly affecting description of, for example, Stallone in Rambo III cauterizing his abdominal bullet wound by igniting a torn-open rifle cartridge and shooting gunpowder-flames through it will plunge all of the men into several moments of reverent awe. It is about the only quiet time Randy gets now, and he has consequently begun cooking up a new plan: he will exploit his Californian provenance by asserting that he has seen martial-arts films that have not yet been bootlegged to the streets of Manila, and narrate them in terms so eloquent that the entire jailhouse will for a few minutes become a place of monastic contemplation, like the idealized Third-World prison that Randy wishes he were in. Randy read Papillon cover-to-cover a couple of times when he was a kid and has always imagined Third-World prisons as places of supreme and noble isolation: steep tropical sunlight setting the humid and smoky air aglow as it slants in over iron bars close-set in thick masonry walls. Sweaty, shirtless steppenwolves prowling back and forth in their cells, brooding about where it all went wrong. Prison journals furtively scribbled on cigarette papers.

Instead, the jail where they've been keeping Randy is just a really crowded urban society where some of the people cannot actually leave. Everyone there is extremely young except for Randy and an ever-rotating population of drunks. It makes him feel old. If he sees one more video-addled boy strutting around in a bootleg “Hard Rock Cafe” t-shirt and fronting hand gestures from American gangsta rappers, he may actually have to become a murderer.

Attorney Alejandro says, rhetorically, “Why 'Death to Drug Smugglers'?” Randy hasn't asked why, but Attorney Alejandro wants to share something with him about why. “The Americans were very angry that some people in this part of the world persisted in selling them the drugs that they want so very badly.”

“Sorry. What can I say? We suck. I know we suck.”

“And so as a gesture of friendship between our peoples, we instituted the death penalty. The law specified two, and only two, methods of execution,” Attorney Alejandro continues, “the gas chamber and the electric chair. As you can see, we took our lead—in this as in many other things, some wise and some foolish—from the Americans. Now, at the time, we did not have a gas chamber anywhere in the Philippines. A study was made. Plans were drawn up. Do you have any idea what is involved in constructing a proper gas chamber?” Attorney Alejandro now goes off on a fairly lengthy riff, but Randy finds it hard to concentrate until something in Attorney Alejandro's tone tells him that a coda is approaching. “… prison service said, 'How can you expect us to construct this space-age facility when we have not even the funds to purchase rat poison for the overcrowded prisons we already have?' As you can see they were just whining for more funding. You see?” Attorney Alejandro raises his eyebrows significantly and sucks in his cheeks, as he reduces a good two or three centimeters of a Marlboro to ash. That he feels it necessary to explain the underlying motivations of the prison service so baldly seems to imply that his estimate of Randy's intelligence is none too favorable, which given the way he was arrested at the airport might be fair enough. “So this left only the electric chair. But do you know what happened to the electric chair?”

“I can't imagine,” Randy says.

“It burned. Faulty wiring. So we had no way to kill people.” All of a sudden Attorney Alejandro, who has betrayed no amusement thus far, remembers to laugh. It is perfunctory, and by the time Randy has bestirred himself to show a little polite amusement, it's over and Alejandro's back to being serious. “But Filipinos are highly adaptable.”

“Once again,” Attorney Alejandro says, “we looked to America. Our friend, our patron, our big brother. You are familiar with the expression Ninong? Of course you are, I forget you have spent a whole lotta time here.” Randy is always impressed by the mixture of love, hate, hope, disappointment, admiration, and derision that Filipinos express towards America. Having actually been a part of the United States at one point, they can take digs at it in a way that's usually reserved for lifelong U.S. citizens. The failure of the United States to protect them from Nippon after Pearl Harbor is still the most important thing that ever happened to them. Probably just slightly more important than MacArthur's return to the country a few years later. If that doesn't inculcate a love-hate relationship…

“The Americans,” Attorney Alejandro continues, “were also reeling under the expense of executing people and having embarrassments with their electric chairs. Maybe they should have jobbed it out.”

“Pardon me?” Randy says. He gets the idea that Attorney Alejandro is just checking to see if he's awake.

“Jobbed it out. To the Nipponese. Gone to Sony or Panasonic or one of those guys and said (now reverting to a perfect American-yokel accent), We just love the VCRs that y'all've been sellin' us—why don't you make an electric chair that actually works?' Which the Nips would have done-it is the kind of thing they would excel at—and then after they sold Americans all of the electric chairs they needed, we could have purchased some factory seconds at cut-rate.” Whenever Filipinos slag America in earshot of an American, they usually try to follow it up with some really vile observations about the Nipponese, just to put everything in perspective.

“Where are we going with this?” Randy says.

“Please forgive my digression. The Americans had gone over to executing prisoners by lethal injection. And so we have once again decided to take a cue from them. Why didn't we just hang people? We have plenty of rope—this is where rope comes from, you know—”

“Yes.”

“—or shoot them? We have plenty of guns. But no, the congress wanted to be modern like Uncle Sam, and so lethal injection it was. But then we sent a delegation to see how the Americans lethally injected people, and you know what they reported when they came back?”

“It takes all kinds of special equipment.”

“It takes all kinds of special equipment, and a special room. This room has not yet been constructed. So, you know how many people we have on death row now?”

“I can't imagine.”

“More than two hundred and fifty. Even if the room were built tomorrow, most of them could not be executed, because it is illegal to carry out the execution until one year has passed since the final appeal.”

“Well, wait a minute! If you've lost your final appeal, then why wait a whole year?”

Attorney Alejandro shrugs.

“In America, they usually do the final appeal while the prisoner is lying strapped to the table with the needle in his arm.”

“Maybe they wait in case there is a miracle during that year. We are a very religious people—even some of the death row prisoners are very religious. But they are now begging to be executed. They cannot stand the wait any longer!” Attorney Alejandro laughs and slaps the table. “Now, Randy, all of these two hundred and fifty people are poor. All of them.” He stops significantly.

“I hear you,” Randy says. “Did you know that my net worth is less than zero, by the way?”

“Yes, but you are rich in friends and connections.” Attorney Alejandro starts frisking himself. A picture of a fresh pack of Marlboros appears over his head in a little thought-balloon. “I recently received a telephone call from a friend of yours in Seattle.”

“Chester?”

“Yes, he's the one. He has money.”

“You could say that.”

“Chester is seeking ways to put his financial resources to work on your behalf. He feels frustrated and unsure of himself because while his resources are quite significant, he does not know the fine points of how to wield them in the context of the Philippine judicial system.”

“That's him all over. Is there any chance that you might be able to give him some pointers?”

“I'll talk to him.”

“Let me ask you this,” Randy says. “I understand that financial resources, wielded properly, could free me. But what if some rich person wanted to use his money to send me to death row?”

This one stops Attorney Alejandro dead for a minute. “There are more efficient ways for a wealthy person to kill someone. For the reasons I have described, a would-be assassin would first look somewhere outside of the Philippine capital-punishment apparatus. That is why, in my opinion as your lawyer, what is really going on here is that—”

“Someone is trying to send me a message.”

“Exactly. You see, now you are beginning to understand.”

“Well, I'm wondering if you could give me a ballpark estimate of how long I'm going to be locked up. I mean, do you want me to plead to a lesser charge and then serve a few years?”

Attorney Alejandro looks pained and scoffs. He doesn't deign to answer. “I didn't think so,” says Randy. “But at what point in these proceedings do you imagine I could get out? I mean, they refused to release me on bail.”

“Of course! You are charged with a capital crime! Even though everyone knows it is a joke, proper respect must be shown.”

“They pulled the planted drugs out of my bag—there are a million witnesses. It was a drug, right?”

“Malaysian heroin. Very pure,” Attorney Alejandro says admiringly.

“So there are all of these people who can testify that a sack of heroin was found in my luggage. That would seem to complicate the job of getting me out of jail.”

“We can probably get it dismissed before an actual trial is launched, by pointing out flaws in the evidence,” Attorney Alejandro says. Something in his tone of voice, and the way he's staring out the window, suggests this is the first time he's actually thought about how he's going to specifically attack this problem. “Perhaps a baggage handler at NAIA will step forward and testify that he saw a shadowy figure planting the drugs in your bag.”

“A shadowy figure?”

“Yesss,” says Attorney Alejandro irritably, anticipating sarcasm.

“Are there a lot of those hanging around backstage at NAIA?”

“We don't need a lot.”

“How much time do you think might pass before this baggage handler's conscience finally gets the better of him and he decides to step forward?”

Attorney Alejandro shrugs. “A couple of weeks, perhaps. For it to be done properly. How are your accommodations?”

“They suck. But you know what? Nothing really bothers me anymore.”

“There is concern among some of the officials of the prison service that when you get out, you may say harsh things about the conditions.”

“Since when do they care?”

“You are a little famous in America. Not very famous. A little. Do you remember the American boy in Singapore, who was caned?”

“Of course.”

“Very bad publicity for Singapore. So there are officials of the prison service who would be sympathetic to the idea of putting you in a private cell. Clean. Quiet.”

Randy cops a questioning look, and holds up one hand and rubs his thumb and fingers together in the “money” gesture.

“It is done already.”

“Chester?”

“No. Someone else.”

“Avi?”

Attorney Alejandro shakes his head.

“The Shaftoes?”

“I cannot answer your question, Randy, because I do not know. I was not involved in this decision. But whoever did it was also listening to your request for some way to kill the time. You requested books?”

“Yeah. Do you have some?”

“No. But they will allow this.” Attorney Alejandro now opens up his briefcase, reaches in with both hands, and pulls out—Randy's new laptop. It still has a police evidence sticker on it.

“Give me a fucking break!” Randy says.

“No! Take it!”

“Isn't it like evidence or something?”

“The police are finished. They have opened it up and looked for drugs inside. Dusted it for fingerprints—you can still see the dust. I hope that it did not damage the delicate machinery.”

“Yeah, me too. So, are you telling me that I'm free to take this to my new, clean, quiet, private cell?”

“That is what I am telling you.”

“And I can use it there? No restrictions?”

“They will give you an electrical socket. A plug-in,” Attorney Alejandro says, and then adds significantly, “I asked them,” which is clearly a little reminder that any fees eventually paid to him will have been richly earned.

Randy draws a nice deep breath, thinking, Well, it is just fantastically generous—in fact, a little bit startling—that the powers that want to convict and execute me are willing to go to such lengths to allow me to dick around on my computer while I am awaiting my trial and death. He exhales and says, “Thank god, at least I'll be able to get some work done.” Attorney Alejandro nods approvingly.

“Your girlfriend is waiting to see you,” he announces.

“She's not really my girlfriend. What does she want?” Randy demands.

“What do you mean, what does she want? She wants to see you. To give you emotional support. To let you know that you are not all alone.”

“Shit!” Randy mutters. “I don't want emotional support. I want to get the fuck out of jail.”

“That is my department,” Attorney Alejandro says proudly.

“You know what this is? It's one of those men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus things.”

“I have not heard of this phrase but I understand immediately what you are saying.”

“It's one of those American books where once you've heard the title you don't even need to read it,” Randy says.

“Then I won't.”

“You and I see just that someone is trying to fuck me over and that I need to get out of jail. Very simple and clean. But to her, it is much more than that—it is an opportunity to have a conversation!”

Attorney Alejandro just rolls his eyes and makes the universal “females yammering” gesture: thumb and fingertips closing and opening like a disembodied flapping jaw.

“To share deep feelings and emotionally bond,” Randy continues, closing his eyes.

“But this is not so bad,” Attorney Alejandro says, radiating insincerity like a mirrored ball in a disco.

“I'm doing okay in this jail. Surprisingly okay,” Randy says, “but it's all about keeping up a kind of emotionless front. Many barriers between me and my surroundings. And so it just makes me crazy that she's picking this particular moment to implicitly demand that I let my guard down.”

“She knows you are weak,” Attorney Alejandro says, and winks. “She smells your vulnerability.”

“That's not all she's going to smell. Is this new cell going to have a shower?”

“Everything. Remember to put something heavy on the drain so that rats do not climb up out of it during the night.”

“Thanks. I'll just put my laptop there.” Randy leans back in his chair and wiggles his butt around. There is a problem now with an erection. It has been at least a week for Randy. Three nights in the jail, the night before that at Tom Howard's house, before that the airplane, before that Avi's basement floor… actually it has probably been a lot more than a week. Randy needs badly to get into that private cell if for no other reason than it will give him an opportunity to vent that which is bearing down hard on his prostate gland and get his mind back on an even keel. He prays to god that he's only going to be seeing Amy through a thick glass partition.

Attorney Alejandro opens the door and says something to the waiting guard, who leads them down a hallway toward another room. This one's bigger, and has a number of long tables, with little familial clusters of Filipinos scattered about. If these tables were ever intended to serve as barriers against physical contact, it has long been forgotten; it would take something more like the Berlin Wall to prevent Filipinos from showing affection for each other. So Amy is there, already striding around the end of one of the tables as a couple of guards pointedly look the other way (though their eyes dart back to check out her ass after she has blown by them). No dress this time. Randy predicts it will be a few years before he sees Amy in a dress again. Last time he did, his dick got hard, his heart pounded, he literally salivated, and then suddenly armed men were putting handcuffs on him.

Right now, Amy's in old jeans ripped out at the knee, a tank-top undershirt and a black leather jacket, better to accommodate her concealed weapons. Knowing the Shaftoes, they've probably gone to some very high Defcon level, the one just short of all-out nuclear exchange. Doug Shaftoe probably showers with a SEAL knife clenched in his teeth now. Amy, who normally goes for a low, one-armed, sidelong type of hug, now throws both arms up as if signaling a touchdown and crooks both elbows behind the nape of Randy's neck and lets him feel everything. The flesh of his lower belly can count the stitch-marks in Amy's appendectomy scar. So that he has a boner is probably about as obvious to her as that he smells bad. He might as well have one of those long fluorescent orange bicycle flags lashed to the shaft of his phallus and sticking up out of his pants.

She steps back, looks down at it, then very deliberately looks him in the eye and says, “How do you feel?” which being as it is the obligatory question of females, is hard to read—deadpan/ironic or just sweetly naive?

“I miss you,” he says, “and I apologize if my limbic system has misinterpreted your gesture of emotional support.”

She takes this levelly, shrugs, and says, “No need to apologize. It's all a part of you, Randy. I don't have to get to know you in pieces, do I?”

Randy resists the impulse to check his watch, which would be pointless because it has been confiscated anyway. She has undoubtedly set some kind of world speed record here, in the male/female conversation category, for working the subject around to Randy's own failure to be emotionally available. To do it in this setting displays a certain chutzpah that he cannot help but admire.

“You've talked to Attorney Alejandro,” she says.

“Yeah. I assume he's imparted to me whatever he was supposed to impart.”

“I don't have much more for you,” she says. Which on a pure tactical level means a lot. If the wreck had been found by the Dentist's minions, or their salvage work had been somehow interrupted, she'd say something. For her to say nothing means that they are probably hauling gold out of that submarine at this very moment.

So. She's busy working on the gold salvage operation, to which her contributions are no doubt vital. She has absolutely no specific information to impart to him about anything. So why has she made the long, alternately dull and dangerous trek to Manila? In order to do what exactly? It is one of these fiendish mind-reading exercises. She has her arms crossed over her bosom and is eyeing him coolly. Someone is trying to send you a message.

He suddenly gets the feeling that she's got him right where she wants him. Maybe she's the one who planted the heroin in his bag. It's a power thing, that's all.

A big slab of memory floats up to the surface of Randy's mind, like a floe calved off the polar icecap. He and Amy and the Shaftoe boys were in California, right after the earthquake, going through all the old crap in the basement looking for a few key boxes of papers. Randy heard Amy squealing with laughter and found her sitting in the corner on top of some old book boxes, reading a paperback novel by flashlight. She had uncovered a huge cache of paperback romance novels, none of which Randy had ever seen before. Bodice-rippers of the most incredibly cheesy sort. Randy assumed they'd been left behind by the house's previous owners until he flipped through a couple of them, checking the copyright dates: all from the years when he and Charlene were living together. Charlene must have been reading them at a rate of about one a week.

“Ooh baby,” Amy said, and read him a passage about a rugged but sensitive but tough but loving but horny but smart hero having his way with a protesting but willing but struggling but yielding tempestuous female. “God!” She frisbeed the book into a puddle on the basement floor.

“I always got the sense she had furtive reading habits.”

“Well, now you know what she wanted,” Amy said. “Did you give her what she wanted, Randy?”

And Randy has been thinking about that ever since. And when he got over his surprise that Charlene was a bodice-ripper addict, he decided it wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though in her circle, reading books like that would be tantamount to wearing a tall pointy hat in the streets of Salem Village, Mass. circa 1692. She and Randy had tried, awfully hard, to have an egalitarian relationship. They had spent money on relationship counseling trying to keep the egalitarian relationship alive. But she had become more and more angry, without ever giving him a reason, and he had become more and more confused. Eventually he stopped being confused and just got irritated, and tired of her. After Amy discovered those books in the basement, Randy slowly put a whole new and different story together in his head: that Charlene's limbic system was simply hooked up in such a way that she liked dominant men. Again, not in a whips and chains sense, just in the sense that in most relationships someone's got to be active and someone's got to be passive, and there's no particular logic to that, but there's nothing bad about it either. In the end, the passive partner can have just as much power, and just as much freedom.

Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous days of labor were unable to reveal.

Randy has this very strong feeling that Amy doesn't read bodice-ripper novels. She goes the other way. She can't tolerate surrendering to any one. Which makes it hard for her to function in polite society; she could not have been happy sitting at home during her senior year of high school, waiting for a boy to invite her to the prom. This feature of her personality is extremely prone to misinterpretation, so she bailed out. She would rather be lonely, and true to herself, and in control, in an out-of-the-way part of the world, with her music-by-intelligent-female-singer-songwriters to keep her company, than misinterpreted and hassled in America.

“I love you,” he says. Amy looks away and heaves a big sigh like, At last we're getting somewhere. Randy continues, “I've been infatuated with you ever since we met.”

Now she's back to looking at him expectantly.

“And the reason I've been slow to, uh, to actually show it, or do anything about it, is first of all because I wasn't sure whether or not you were a lesbian.”

Amy scoffs and rolls her eyes.

“… and later just because of my own reticence. Which is unfortunately part of me too, just like this part.” He glances down just for a microsecond.

She's shaking her head at him in amazement.

“The fact that the scientific investigator works fifty percent of his time by nonrational means is quite insufficiently recognized,” Randy says.

Amy sits down on his side of the table, jacknifes, spins around neatly on her ass, and comes to light on the other side. “I'll think about what you said,” she says. “Hang in there, sport.”

“Smooth sailing, Amy.”

Amy gives him a little smile over her shoulder, then walks straight to the exit, turning around once in the doorway to make sure he's still looking at her.

He is. Which, he feels quite confident, is the right answer.