Cryptonomicon

"No! No! That's totally wrong!" hollers the corporal.

"I know that you will visit me there and remember me fondly, as I remember you."

The corporal splashes into the surf, trying to chase the boat, and the privates plunge in after him and grab him by the arms. The corporal shouts, "Soon we will deal the Americans a smashing defeat and then I will march home through the streets of Hiroshima in triumph along with my comrades!" He recites it like a schoolboy doing his lessons.

"Know that I died bravely, in a magnificent battle, and never for one moment shirked my duty!" Goto Dengo shouts back.

"Please send me some strong thread so that I can mend my boots!" the corporal cries.

"The Army has looked after us well, and we have lived the last months of our lives in such comfort and cleanliness that you would hardly guess we had ever left the Home Islands!" Goto Dengo shouts, knowing that he must be difficult to hear now above the surf. "When the final battle came, it came quickly, and we went to our deaths in the full flower of our youth, like the cherry blossoms spoken of in the emperor's rescript, which we all carry against our breasts! Our departure from this world is a small price to pay for the peace and prosperity that we have brought to the people of New Guinea!"

"No, that's totally wrong!" wails the corporal. But his comrades are dragging him up the beach now, back towards the jungle, where his voice is lost in an eternal cacophony of hoots, screeches, twitters and eerie cries.

Goto Dengo smells diesel and stale sewage. He turns around. The stars behind them are blocked out by something long and black and shaped kind of like a submarine.

"Your message is much better," someone mumbles. It is a young fellow carrying a toolbox: an airplane mechanic who has not seen a Nipponese airplane in half a year.

"Yes," says another man--also a mechanic, apparently. "His family will find your message much more comforting."

"Thank you," Goto Dengo says. "Unfortunately I have no idea what the kid's name is."

"Then go to Yamaguchi," says the first mechanic, "and pick some old couple at random."

Chapter 52 METEOR

"You sure don't fucklike a smart girl," says Bobby Shaftoe, his voice suffused with awe.

The wood stove glows in the corner, even though it's only September for crissakes, in Sweden, where Shaftoe has spent the last six months.

Julieta is dark and lanky. She reaches one long arm far across the bed, gropes on the nightstand for a cigarette.

"Could you reach that jiz rag?" Shaftoe says, eyeing a neatly folded United States Marine Corps handkerchief next to the cigarettes. His arm is too short.

"Why?" Julieta speaks great English like all the other Finns. Shaftoe sighs in exasperation and buries his face in her black hair. The Gulf of Bothnia whooshes and foams down below them, like a badly tuned radio pulling in strange information.

Julieta is given to asking big questions.

"I just don't want there to be a big mess when I execute my withdrawal, ma'am," he says.

He hears the flint of Julieta's lighter itching once, twice, thrice behind his ear. Then her chest pushes him up as her lungs fill with smoke.

"Take your time," she purrs, her vocal cords syrupy with condensed tar. "What are you going to do, go for a swim? Invade Russia?"

Somewhere out there, across the Gulf, is Finland. There are Russians there, and Germans.

"See, even when you mention going for a swim, my dick gets smaller," Shaftoe says. "So it's going to come out. Inevitably." He thinks he pronounces this last word correctly.

"Then what will happen?" Julieta says.

"We'll get a wet spot."

"So? It's natural. People have been sleeping on wet spots as long as beds have existed."

"God damn it," Shaftoe says, and lunges heroically for the Semper Fi handkerchief Julieta digs her fingernails into one of the sensitive spots that she has located during her exhaustive cartographic survey of his body. He squirms to no avail; all the Finns are great athletes. He pops out. Too late! He knocks his wallet onto the floor while grabbing the hanky, then rolls off Julieta and wraps it around himself, a flag on a broken pole, the only flag of surrender Bobby Shaftoe will ever wave.

Then he just lies there for a while, listening to the surf, and the popping of the wood in the stove. Julieta rolls away from him and lies curled up on her side, avoiding the wet spot, even though it is natural, and enjoying her cigarette, even though it isn't.

Julieta smells like coffee. Shaftoe likes to nuzzle and smell her coffee-scented flesh.