Cryptonomicon

The children abandon him to watch a pair of American P-38s fly by, out over the ocean. Bored with airplanes, Goto Dengo squats on his haunches and observes the menagerie of arthropods that have converged on him in hopes of sucking his blood, taking a bite of his flesh, eating his eyeballs out of his skull, or impregnating him with their eggs. The haunch position is a good one because every five seconds or so he has to bash his face against one knee, then the other, in order to keep the bugs out of his eyes and nostrils. A bird drops out of a tree, lands clumsily on his head, pecks something out of his hair, and flies away. Blood jets out of his anus and pools hotly under the arches of his feet. Creatures with many legs gather at the edge of the pool and begin to feast. Goto Dengo moves away, and leaving them to it, gets a fewminutes' respite.

The men in the hut arrive at some sort of agreement. The tension is broken. There is laughter, even. He wonder what counts as funny to these guys.

The guy who wanted to impale him earlier comes across the clearing, takes his leash, and tugs Goto Dengo to a standing position. "Patah,"he says.

He looks at the sky. It is getting late, but he does not relish trying to explain to them that they should simply wait until tomorrow. He stumbles across the clearing to the cooking fire and nods at a pan full of brain stew. "Wok," he says.

It doesn't work. They think he wants to trade gold for the wok.

There follows about eighteen hours of misunderstandings and failed attempts to communicate. Goto Dengo almost dies; at least he feels like he might. Now that he is not on the move, the last few days are really catching up with him. But finally, in the middle of the next morning, he gets to show his magic. Squatting in the nearby stream, his elbows unbound, the wok in his hands, surrounded by skeptical village fathers still keeping a tight grip on his rustic noose, he begins to pan for gold. Within a few minutes he has managed to summon a few flakes of the stuff out of the riverbed, demonstrating the basic concept.

They want to learn it themselves. He was expecting this. He tries to show one of them how it's done, but (as Goto Dengo himself learned long ago) it is one of those harder-than-it-looks deals.

Back to the village. He actually gets a place to sleep this night: they stuff him into a long skinny sack of woven grass and tie it shut above his head--this is how they keep themselves from being eaten alive by insects while they are asleep. Malaria hits him now: alternating waves of chill and heat swamping his body with the force of riptides.

Time goes out of whack for a while. Later, he realizes he has been here for a while now, because his broken forefinger is now solid and gnarled, and the abrasions that he got from the coral head are now a field of fine, parallel scars, like the grain in a piece of wood. His skin is covered with mud and he smells of coconut oil and of the smoke that they fill their huts with to chase away the bugs. His life is simple: when malaria has him teetering on the brink of death, he sits in front of a felled palm tree and chips away at it mindlessly for hours, slowly creating a heap of fibrous white stuff that the women use to make starch. When he is feeling stronger, he drags himself over to the river and pans for gold. In return they do what they can to keep New Guinea from killing him. He's so weak they do not even bother to send a chaperone with him when he goes out.

It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration. The one thing that Goto Dengo thinks about, when he's capable of thinking, is that there is a boy in this village who looks to be about twelve years old. He remembers the twelve-year-old who was initiated by driving a spear through his companion's heart, and wonders who's going to be used for this boy's initiation rite.