Cryptonomicon

The veil parts and a perfect young woman in a severe black-and-white habit is standing in the gap, radiant in the green light coming off the terraces, carrying a bowl of steaming water. She peels back his hospital gown and begins to sponge him off. Goto Dengo motions towards the crucifix and asks about it--perhaps the woman has learned a little Nipponese. If she hears him, she gives no sign. She is probably deaf or crazy or both; the Christians are notorious for the way they dote on defective persons. Her gaze is fixed on Goto Dengo's body, which she swabs gently but implacably, one postage-stamp-sized bit at a time. Goto Dengo's mind is still playing tricks with him, and looking down at his naked torso he gets all turned around for a moment and thinks that he is looking at the nailed wreck of Jesus. His ribs are sticking out and his skin is a cluttered map of sores and scars. He cannot possibly be good for anything now; why are they not sending him back to Nippon? Why haven't they simply killed him? "You speak English?" he says, and her huge brown eyes jump just a bit. She is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. To her, he must be a loathsome thing, a specimen under a glass slide in a pathology lab. When she leaves the room she will probably go and wash herself meticulously and then do anything to flush the memory of Goto Dengo's body out of her clean, virginal mind.

He drifts away into a fever, and sees himself from the vantage point of a mosquito trying to find a way in through the netting: a haggard, wracked body splayed, like a slapped insect, on a wooden trestle. The only way you can tell he's Nipponese is by the strip of white cloth tied around his forehead, but instead of an orange sun painted on it is an inscription: I.N.R.I.

A man in a long black robe is sitting beside him, holding a string of red coral beads in his hand, a tiny crucifix dangling from that. He has the big head and heavy brow of those strange people working up on the rice terraces, but his receding hairline and swept-back silver-brown hair are very European, as are his intense eyes. "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum," he is saying. "It is Latin. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews."

"Jew? I thought Jesus was Christian," said Goto Dengo.

The man in the black robe just stares at him. Goto Dengo tries again:

"I didn't know Jews spoke Latin."

One day a wheeled chair is pushed into his room; he stares at it with dull curiosity. He has heard of these things--they are used behind high walls to transport shamefully imperfect persons from one room to an other. Suddenly these tiny girls have picked him up and dropped him into it! One of them says something about fresh air and the next thing he knows he's being wheeled out the door and into a corridor! They have buckled him in so he doesn't fall out, and he twists uneasily in the chair, trying to hide his face. The girl rolls him out to a huge verandah that looks out over the mountains. Mist rises up from the leaves and birds scream. On the wall behind him is a large painting of I.N.R.I. chained naked to a post, shedding blood from hundreds of parallel whip-marks. A centurion stands above him with a scourge. His eyes look strangely Nipponese.

Three other Nipponese men are sitting on the verandah. One of them talks to himself unintelligibly and keeps picking at a sore on his arm that bleeds continuously into a towel on his lap. Another one has had his arms and face burned off,and peers out at the world through a single hole in a blank mask of scar tissue. The third has been tied into his chair with many wide strips of cloth because he flops around all the time like a beached fish and makes unintelligible moaning noises.

Goto Dengo eyes the railing of the verandah, wondering if he can muster the effort to wheel himself over there and fling his body over the edge. Why has he not been allowed to die honorably?

The crew of the submarine treated him and the other evacuees with an unreadable combination of reverence and disgust.

When was he set apart from his race? It happened long before his evacuation from New Guinea. The lieutenant who rescued him from the headhunters treated him as a criminal and sentenced him to execution. Even before then, he was different. Why did the sharks not eat him? Does his flesh smell different? He should have died with his comrades in the Bismarck Sea. He lived, partly because he was lucky, partly because he could swim.

Why could he swim? Partly because his body was good at it--but partly because his father raised him not to believe in demons.

He laughs out loud. The other men on the verandah turn to look at him.

He was raised not to believe in demons, and now he is one.

Black-robe laughs out loud at Goto Dengo during his next visit. "I am not trying to convert you," he says. "Please do not tell your superiors about your suspicions. We have been strictly forbidden to proselytize, and there would be brutal repercussions."