“I am channeling the bad shit!” Avi said.
The number came through on Randy’s pager while he was sitting around a table in a grubhouse along the coast with his girlfriend’s crowd. A place where, every day, they laser-printed fresh menus on 100% recycled imitation parchment, where oscilloscope tracings of neon-colored sauces scribbled across the plates, and the entrees were towering, architectonic stacks of rare ingredients carved into gemlike prisms. Randy had spent the entire meal trying to resist the temptation to invite one of Charlene’s friends (any one of them, it didn’t matter) out on the sidewalk for a fistfight.
He glanced at his pager expecting to see the number of the Three Siblings Computer Center, which was where he worked (technically, still does). The fell digits of Avi’s phone number penetrated the core of his being in the same way that 666 would a fundamentalist’s.
Fifteen seconds later, Randy was out on the sidewalk, swiping his card through a pay phone like an assassin drawing a single-edged razor blade across the throat of a tubby politician.
“The power is coming down from On High,” Avi continued. “Tonight, it happens to be coming through me—you poor bastard.”
“What do you want me to do?” Randy asked, adopting a cold, almost hostile tone to mask sick excitement.
“Buy a ticket to Manila,” Avi said.
“I have to talk it over with Charlene first,” Randy said.
“You don’t even believe that yourself,” Avi said.
“Charlene and I have a long-standing relationsh—”
“It’s been ten years. You haven’t married her. Fill in the fucking blanks.”
(Seventy-two hours later, he would be in Manila, looking at the One-Note Flute.)
“Everyone in Asia is wondering when the Philippines is finally going to get its shit together,” Avi said, “it’s the question of the nineties.”
(The One-Note Flute is the first thing you see when you make it through Passport Control.)
“I flashed on this when I was standing in line at Passport Control at Ninoy Aquino International Airport,” Avi said, compressing that entire name into a single, sharply articulated burst. “You know how they have different lanes?”
“I guess so,” Randy said. A parallelpiped of seared tuna did a barrel roll in his gullet. He felt a perverse craving for a double ice-cream cone. He did not travel as much as Avi, and had only a vague idea of what he meant by lanes.
“You know. One lane for citizens. One for foreigners. Maybe one for diplomats.”
(Now, standing there waiting to have his passport stamped, Randy can see it clearly. For once he doesn’t mind the wait. He gets in a lane next to the OCW lane and studies them. They are Epiphyte Corp.’s market. Mostly young women, many of them fashionably dressed, but still with a kind of Catholic boarding-school demureness. Exhausted from long flights, tired of the wait, they slump, then suddenly straighten up and elevate their fine chins, as if an invisible nun were making her way up the line whacking their manicured knuckles with a ruler.)
But seventy-two hours ago he hadn’t really understood what Avi meant by lanes, so he just said, “Yeah, I’ve seen the lane thing.”
“At Manila, they have a whole lane just for returning OCWs!”
“OCWs?”
“Overseas Contract Workers. Filipinos working abroad—because the economy of the Philippines is so lame. As maids and nannies in Saudi. Nurses and anesthesiologists in the States. Singers in Hong Kong, whores in Bangkok.”
“Whores in Bangkok?” Randy had been there, at least, and his mind reeled at the concept of exporting prostitutes to Thailand.
“The Filipino women are more beautiful,” Avi said quietly, “and have a ferocity that makes them more interesting, to the innately masochistic business traveler, than all those grinning Thai bimbos.” Both of them knew that this was complete bullshit; Avi was a family man and had no firsthand experience whereof he spoke. Randy didn’t call him on it, though. As long as Avi retained this extemporaneous bullshitting ability there was a better than even chance of all of them making fuck-you money.
(Now that he’s here, it is tempting to speculate as to which of the girls in the OCW lane are hustlers. But he can’t see that going anywhere but wrong, so he squares his shoulders and marches toward the yellow line.
The government has set up glass display cases in the concourse leading from Passport Control to the security barrier. The cases contain artifacts demonstrating the glories of pre-Magellan Filipino culture. The first one of these contains the pièce de résistance: a rustic hand-carved musical instrument labeled with a long and unreadable name in Tagalog. Underneath that, in smaller letters, is the English translation: ONE-NOTE FLUTE.)
“See? The Philippines is innately hedged,” Avi said. “You know how rare that is? When you find an innately hedged environment, Randy, you lunge into it like a rabid ferret going into a pipe full of raw meat.”
A word about Avi: his father’s people had just barely gotten out of Prague. As Central European Jews went, they were fairly typical. The only thing about them that was really anomalous was that they were still alive. But his mother’s people were unbelievably peculiar New Mexican crypto-Jews who had been living on mesas, dodging Jesuits, shooting rattlesnakes and eating jimson weed for three hundred years; they looked like Indians and talked like cowboys. In his relations with other people, therefore, Avi dithered. Most of the time he was courtly and correct in a way that was deeply impressive to businesspeople—Nipponese ones expecially—but there were these eruptions, from time to time, as if he’d been dipping into the loco weed. Randy had learned to deal with it, which is why Avi called him at times like this.
“Oh, calm down!” Randy said. He watched a tanned girl rollerblade past him, on her way up from the beach. “Innately hedged?”
“As long as the Philippines don’t have their shit together, there’ll be plenty of OCWs. They will want to communicate with their families—the Filipinos are incredibly family-oriented. They make Jews look like a bunch of alienated loners.”
“Okay. You know more about both groups than I do.”
“They are sentimental and affectionate in a way that’s very easy for us to sneer at.”
“You don’t have to be defensive,” Randy said, “I’m not sneering at them.”
“When you hear their song dedications on the radio, you’ll sneer,” Avi said. “But frankly, we could take some pointers from the Pinoys on this front.”
“You are so close to being sanctimonious right now—”
“I apologize,” Avi said, with absolute sincerity. Avi’s wife had been pregnant almost continuously for the four years they’d been married. He was getting more religiously observant daily and couldn’t make it through a conversation without mentioning the Holocaust. Randy was a bachelor who was just about to break up with the chick he’d been living with.
“I believe you, Avi,” Randy said. “Is it a problem with you if I buy a business-class ticket?”
Avi didn’t hear him, so Randy assumed that meant yes. “As long as that’s the case, there will be a big market for Pinoy-grams.”
“Pinoy-grams?”
“For god’s sake, don’t say it out loud! I’m filling out the trademark application as we speak,” Avi said. Randy could hear a rattling sound in the background, computer keys impacting so rapidly it sounded like Avi was simply holding the keyboard between his pale, spindly hands and shaking it violently up and down. “But if the Filipinos do get their shit together, then we see explosive growth in telecoms, as in any other Arday.”
“Arday?”
“R-D-A-E. Rapidly Developing Asian Economy. Either way, we win.”
“I gather you want to do something with telecoms?”
“Bingo.” In the background, a baby began to cough and cry. “Gotta go,” Avi said, “Shlomo’s asthma is spiking again. Take down this fingerprint.”
“Fingerprint?”
“For my encryption key. For e-mail.”
> “Ordo?”
“Yeah.”
Randy took out a ballpoint pen and, finding no paper in his pocket, poised it over the palm of his hand. “Shoot.”
“67 81 A4 AE FF 40 25 9B 43 0E 29 8D 56 60 E3 2F.” Then Avi hung up the phone.
Randy went back into the restaurant. On his way back, he asked the waiter to bring him a half-bottle of good red wine. Charlene heard him, and glowered. Randy was still thinking about innate ferocity, and did not see it in her face; only a schoolmarmishness common among all of her friends. My god! I have to get out of California, he realized.
SEAWEED
* * *
Woman holds baby
Eyes pale as a muzzle flash
Band chimes frozen tears
THE FOURTH MARINES IS MARCHING DOWNHILL TO the strains of John Philip Sousa, which ought to be second nature to a Marine. But the Fourth Marines have been in Shanghai (which ain’t no halls of Montezuma nor shores of Tripoli) for too long, longer than Marines should ever stay in one place, and Bobby’s already seen his sergeant, one Frick, throw up from opium withdrawal.
A Marine band is several Shanghai blocks ahead. Bobby’s platoon can hear the thumpity-thump of the big drums and the piercing noises from piccolos and glockenspiels but he can’t follow the tune. Corporal Shaftoe is effectively their leader, because Sergeant Frick is useless.
Shaftoe marches alongside the formation, supposedly to keep an eye on his men, but mostly he’s just staring at Shanghai.
Shanghai stares back, and mostly gives them a standing ovation. Of course there is a type of young street rowdy who makes it a point of honor to let the Marines know he isn’t scared of them, and they are jeering the Marines from a safe distance, and setting off strings of firecrackers, which does nothing to steady anyone’s nerves. The Europeans are applauding—a whole chorus line of Russian dancing girls from Delmonte’s is showing thigh and blowing kisses. But most of the Chinese look pretty stonefaced, which—Bobby suspects—means they’re scared shitless.
The worst thing is the women carrying half-white babies. A few of these women are rabid, hysterical, throwing themselves into formations of massed Marines, undeterred by rifle butts. But most of them are stoic: they stand with their light-eyed babies and glare, searching the ranks and files for the guilty party. They’ve all heard about what happened upriver in Nanjing when the Nips came there, and they know that when it’s all over, the only trace that they and their babies ever existed may be a really bad memory in the mind of some American Marine.
It works for Shaftoe: he has hunted deer in Wisconsin and seen them limping across the snow, bleeding to death. He saw a man die in basic training at Parris Island. He has seen whole tangles of bodies in the Yangtze, downstream of where the Nipponese were prosecuting the China Incident, and he has seen refugees from places like Nanjing starve to death in the gutters of Shanghai. He has himself killed people who were trying to storm the riverboats it was his duty to protect. He thinks that he has never seen, and will never see, anything as terrible as those stone-faced Chinese women holding their white babies, not even blinking as the firecrackers explode all around them.
Until, that is, he looks into the faces of certain Marines who stare into that crowd and see their own faces looking back at them, pudgy with baby fat and streaked with tears. Some of them seem to think it’s all a joke. But many of the Marines who march out of their empty barracks that morning sane and solid men, have, by the time they reach the gunboats waiting for them at the Bund, gone mad. They don’t show it. But Shaftoe can see in their eyes that something has given way inside.
The very best men in the regiment are in a foul mood. The ones like Shaftoe, who didn’t get involved with the Chinese women, are still leaving plenty behind: houses with maids and shoeshine boys and coolies, with women and opium for almost nothing. They don’t know where they are being shipped off to, but it’s safe to say that their twenty-one dollars a month won’t go as far. They’ll be in barracks and they’ll have to learn to polish their own boots again. When the gangplanks are drawn in from the stone edge of the Bund, they are cut off from a whole world that they’ll never see again, a world where they were kings. Now they are Marines again. It’s okay with Shaftoe, who wants to be a Marine. But many of the men have become middle-aged here, and don’t.
The guilty men duck belowdecks. Shaftoe remains on the deck of the gunboat, which casts off from the Bund, headed for the cruiser Augusta, which awaits in mid-channel.
The Bund is jammed with onlookers in a riot of differently colored clothing, so one patch of uniform drab catches his eye: a group of Nip soldiers who’ve come down to bid their Yank counterparts a sarcastic farewell. Shaftoe scans the group looking for someone tall and bulky, and picks him out easily. Goto Dengo’s waving to him.
Shaftoe takes his helmet off and waves back. Then, on impulse, just for the hell of it, he winds up and flings the helmet directly at Goto Dengo’s head. The throw goes awry and Goto Dengo has to knock down about a dozen of his comrades in order to catch it. All of them seem to think that it is a high honor, as well as tremendously amusing, to be knocked down by Goto Dengo.
Twenty seconds later, a comet sails up out of the flesh cosmos of the Bund and bounces on the wooden deck of the gunboat—a hell of a throw. Goto Dengo is showing off his follow-through. The projectile is a rock with a white streamer wrapped around it. Shaftoe runs over and snatches it. The streamer is one of those thousand-stitch headbands (supposedly; he’s taken a few off of unconscious Nips, but he’s never bothered to count the stitches) that they tie around their heads as a good-luck charm; it has a meatball in the center and some Nip writing to either side. He unties it from around the rock. In so doing he realizes, suddenly, that it’s not a rock after all; it is a hand grenade! But good old Goto Dengo was just joking—he didn’t pull the pin. A nice souvenir for Bobby Shaftoe.
Shaftoe’s first haiku (December 1940) was a quick and dirty adaptation of the Marine Creed:
This is my rifle
There are many like it but
This rifle is mine.
He wrote it under the following circumstances: Shaftoe and the rest of Fourth Marines were stationed in Shanghai so that they could guard the International Settlement and work as muscle on the gunboats of the Yangtze River Patrol. His platoon had just come back from the Last Patrol: a thousand-mile reconnaissance-in-force all the way up past what was left of Nanjing, to Hankow, and back. Marines had been doing this ever since the Boxer Rebellion, through civil wars and everything else. But towards the end of 1940, what with the Nips* basically running all of northeast China now, the politicians back in D.C. had finally thrown in the towel and told the China Marines not to steam up the Yangtze any more.
Now, the Old Breed Marines like Frick claimed they could tell the difference between organized brigands; armed mobs of starving peasants; rogue Nationalists; Communist guerrillas; and the irregular forces in the pay of warlords. But to Bobby Shaftoe they were all just crazy, armed slopes who wanted a piece of the Yangtze River Patrol. The Last Patrol had been a wild trip. But it was over and they were back in Shanghai now, the safest place you could be in China, and about a hundred times more dangerous than the most dangerous place you could be in America. They had climbed off the gunboat six hours ago, gone to a bar, and not come out until just now, when they had decided it was high time they went to a whorehouse. On their way, they happened to pass this Nip restaurant.
Bobby Shaftoe had looked in the windows of the place before, and watched the man with the knife, trying to figure out what the hell he was doing. It looked a hell of a lot like he was cutting up uncooked fish and putting the raw meat on bullets of rice and handing it over to the Nips on the other side of the counter, who were wolfing it down.
It had to be some kind of optical illusion. The fish must have been precooked in the back room.
This had been nagging at Shaftoe for about a year. As he and the other horny drunk Marines went by the place, he slowed down t
o peer through the window, trying to gather more evidence. He could swear that some of that fish looked ruby red, which it wouldn’t have been if it were cooked.
One of his buddies, Rhodes from Shreveport, noticed him looking. He dared Shaftoe to go in there and sit down at that bar. Then another private, Gowicki from Pittsburgh, double-dared him!
Shaftoe sucked his teeth and considered the matter. He had already made up his mind that he was going to do it. He was a sniper scout, and it was in his nature to do crazy shit like this; but it was also part of his training to scan the terrain carefully before venturing in.
The restaurant was three-quarters full, and everyone in the place was a uniformed member of the Nipponese military. At the bar where the man was cutting up the apparently raw fish, there was a marked concentration of officers; if you only had one grenade, that’s where you’d throw it. Most of the place was filled with long tables where enlisted men sat, drinking noodle soup from steaming urns. Shaftoe paid particular attention to these, because they were the ones who were going to be beating the shit out of him in about sixty seconds. Some were there alone, with reading material. A cluster of them, back in one corner, were paying attention to one fellow who was apparently telling a joke or story.
The longer Shaftoe spent reconnoitering the place, the more convinced Rhodes and Gowicki became that he was actually going to do it. They became excited and called for the other Marines, who had gone ahead of them down the block, headed for that whorehouse.
Shaftoe saw the others coming back—his tactical reserve. “What the fuck,” he said, and went into the restaurant. Behind him, he could hear the others shouting excitedly; they couldn’t believe he was doing it. When Shaftoe stepped over the threshold of that Nip restaurant, he passed into the realm of legend.
All the Nips looked up at him when he came in the door. If they were surprised, they didn’t show it. The chef behind the counter began to holler out some kind of ritual greeting, which faltered and trailed off as he got a look at what had just come in. The fellow in the back of the room—a husky, pink-cheeked Nip—continued telling his joke or story or whatever it was.