Cryptonomicon

Julieta Kivistik is the central mystery. They do not have a love affair; they have a series of love affairs. At the beginning of each affair, they are not even speaking to each other, they do not even know each other, Shaftoe is just a drifter who loads for her uncle. At the end of each affair they are in bed fucking. In between, there is anywhere from one to three weeks of tactical maneuver, false starts, and arduous cut-and-thrust flirtation.

Other than that, each affair is completely different, like a whole new relationship between two entirely different people. It is crazy. Probably because Julieta is crazy--much crazier than Bobby Shaftoe. But there's no reason for Shaftoe not to be crazy, here and now.

He boils the coffee, does the trick with the egg, pours her a mug. This is nothing more than a courtesy: their affair just ended and the new one hasn't started yet.

When he brings her the mug, she is sitting up in bed, smoking another cigarette, and (just like a woman) cleaning out his wallet, which is something that he has not done since--well, since he first made it, ten years ago, in Oconomowoc, in fulfillment of the requirements for the Leatherworking merit badge. Julieta has pulled the stuffing out of the thing and is going through it as if it were a paperback book. Much of the stuff in there has been ruined by seawater. But she is looking, analytically, at a snapshot of Glory.

"Gimme that!" he says, and snatches it from her.

If she were his lover, she would try to play keep-away with him, there would be silliness and, perhaps, more sex at the end of it. But she is a stranger now and she lets him have the wallet.

She watches him set down the coffee, as if he's a waiter in a cafe.

"You have a girlfriend--where? In Mexico?"

"Manila," Bobby Shaftoe says, "if she's even still alive."

Julieta nods, completely impassive. She is neither jealous of Glory, nor worried about Glory's fate at the hands of the Nips. What's happening in the Philippines can't be any worse than what she's seen in Finland. And why should she care, anyway, about the past romantic entanglements of her uncle's stevedore, young what's-his-name?

Shaftoe pulls on boxers, wool pants, a shirt and a sweater. "I'm going into town," he says. "Tell Otto I'll be back to unload the boat."

Julieta says nothing.

As a last, polite gesture, Shaftoe stops at the door, reaches behind a stack of crates, hauls out the Suomi machine pistol (19) and checks it: clean, loaded, ready for action, just like it was about an hour ago, the last time he checked it. He puts it back in its place, turns around, locks eyes with Julieta for a moment. Then he goes out and pulls the door shut. Behind him, he can hear her naked feet on the cold floor, and the satisfying sound of the door's bolts being rammed home.

He steps into a pair of tall rubber boots and then begins to trudge south along the beach. The boots are Otto's and are a couple of sizes too big for his feet. They make him feel like a little boy, splashing through puddles in Wisconsin. This is what a boy of his age ought to be doing: working, hard and honest, at a simple job. Kissing girls. Walking into town to buy some smokes and maybe have a beer. The idea of flying around on heavily armed warplanes and using modern weapons systems to kill hundreds of foreign homicidal maniacs now strikes him as dated and inappropriate.

He slows down every few hundred yards to look at a steel drum, or other war debris, cast up by the waves, half-buried in sand, stenciled cryptically in Cyrillic or Finnish or German. They remind him of the Nipponese drums on that Guadalcanal beach.

Moon lifts sea, but not the ones who sleep on the beach Each wave a shovel

A lot of stuff gets wasted in a war--not just stuff that comes in crates and drums. It frequently happens, for example, that men are called upon to die willingly that others may live. Shaftoe learned on Guadalcanal that you can never tell when circumstances will make you into that guy. You can go into battle with the clearest, simplest, smartest plan ever devised, worked out by Annapolis-trained, battle-hardened Marine officers, and based upon tons of intelligence. But ten seconds after the first trigger has been pulled, shit is happening all over the place, people are running around like maniacs. The battle plan that was genius a minute ago suddenly looks as sweetly naive as the inscriptions in your high school year book. Guys are dying. Some of them are dying because a shell happens to fall on them, but surprisingly often, they are dying because they are ordered to.

It was like that with U-691. That whole thing with the Trinidadian steamer was probably a brilliant plan (Waterhouse's, he suspects) at some point. But then it all went wrong, and some Allied commander gave the order that Shaftoe and Root, along with the crew of U-691, were to die.