Cryptonomicon

(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 jimsonweed 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?"