Cryptonomicon

Half of the people who work at SFO, San Francisco International Airport, now seem to be Filipino, which certainly helps to ease the shock of reentry. Randy gets singled out, as he always does, for a thorough luggage search by the exclusively Anglo customs officials. Men traveling by themselves with practically no luggage seem to irritate the American authorities. It's not so much that they think you are a drug trafficker as that you fit, in the most schematic possible way, the profile of the most pathologically optimistic conceivable drug trafficker, and hence practically force them to investigate you. Irritated that you have forced their hand in this manner, they want to teach you a lesson: travel with a wife and four kids next time, or check a few giant trundling bags, or something, man! What were you thinking? Never mind that Randy is coming in from a place where DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS is posted all over the airport the way CAUTION: WET FLOOR is here.

The most Kafkaesque moment is, as always, when the customs official asks what he does for a living, and he has to devise an answer that will not sound like the frantic improvisations of a drug mule with a belly full of ominously swelling heroin-stuffed condoms. "I work for a private telecommunications provider" seems to be innocuous enough. "Oh, like a phone company?" says the customs official, as if she's having none of it. "The phone market isn't really that available to us," Randy says, "so we provide other communications services. Mostly data."

"Does that involve a lot of traveling around from place to place then?"asks the customs official, paging through the luridly stamped back pages of Randy's passport. She makes eye contact with a more senior customs official who sidles over towards them. Randy now feels himself getting nervous, exactly the way your drug mule would, and fights the impulse to scrub his damp palms against his pant legs, which would probably guarantee him a trip through the magnetic tunnel of a CAT scanner, a triple dose of mint-flavored laxative, and several hours of straining over a stainless-steel evidence bucket. "Yes, it does," Randy says.

The senior customs official, trying to be unobtrusive and low key in a way that makes Randy stifle a sort of gasping, pained outburst of laughter, begins to flip through some appalling communications-industry magazine that Randy stuffed into his briefcase on his way out the door back in Manila. The word INTERNET appears at least five times on the front cover. Randy stares directly into the eyes of the female customs official and says, "The Internet." Totally factitious understanding dawns on the woman's face, and her eyes ping bosswards. The boss, still deeply absorbed in an article about the next generation of high-speed routers, shoves out his lower lip and nods, like every other nineties American male who senses that knowing this stuff is now as intrinsic to maleness as changing flat tires was to Dad. "I hear that's really exciting now," the woman says in a completely different tone of voice, and begins scooping Randy's stuff together into a big pile so that he can repack it. Suddenly the spell is broken, Randy is a member in good standing of American society again, having cheerfully endured this process of being ritually goosed by the Government. He feels a strong impulse to drive straight to the nearest gun store and spend about ten thousand dollars. Not that he wants to hurt anyone; it's just that any kind of government authority gives him the creeps now. He's probably been hanging out too much with the ridiculously heavily armed Tom Howard. First a hostility to rainforests, now a desire to own an automatic weapon; where is this all going?