Cryptonomicon

The Philippines are one of those countries where "Attorney" is used as a title, like "Doctor." Attorney Alejandro has a backswept grey pompadour that gets a little curly down around the nape of his neck which, as he probably well knows, makes him look distinguished in a nineteenth-century-statesman kind of way. He smokes a lot, which bothers Randy hardly a bit since he has been in places, for a couple of days, where everyone smokes. You don't even need to bother with cigarettes and matches in a jail. Just breathe, and you get the equivalent of one or two packs a day worth of slightly pre-owned tar and nicotine.

Attorney Alejandro decides to act as if Randy has never made this last comment. He attends to a bit of business with his cigarette. If he wants that cigarette up and burning between his lips, he can make it happen without even moving his hands; suddenly it's just there, as if he had been hiding it, already lit, inside his mouth. But if he needs to introduce a caesura into the conversation, he can turn the selection, preparation, and ignition of a cigarette into something that in terms of solemn ritual is just this side of the cha-no-yu.It must knock 'em dead in the court room. Randy's feeling better already.

"What do you suppose the message is? That they are capable of killing me if they want to? Because I already know that. I mean, shit! How much does it cost to have a man killed in Manila?"

Attorney Alejandro frowns fiercely. He has taken this question the wrong way: as a suggestion that he is the kind of guy who would know such a thing. Of course, given that he was personally recommended by Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, he probably is just precisely that kind of guy, but it is probably rude to aver this. "Your imagination is running wild," he says. "You have blown the death penalty aspect of this thing all out of proportion." As Attorney Alejandro probably expected, this display of blitheness renders Randy speechless long enough for him to execute another bit of patter with a cigarette and a stainless-steel lighter encrusted with military regalia. Attorney Alejandro has mentioned, twice, that he was a colonel in the Army and lived for years in the States. "We reinstated the death penalty in '95 after a hiatus of ten years approximately." The word approximately crackles and explodes from his mouth like a spark from a Tesla coil. Filipinos enunciate better than Americans and they know it.

Randy and Alejandro are meeting in a high, narrow room somewhere in between the jail and the courtroom in Makati. A prison guard loitered in the room with them for a few minutes, hunched over with sheepishness, leaving only when Attorney Alejandro went over and spoke to him in low, fatherly tones and pressed something into his hand. There is an open window, and the sound of honking horns comes through it from the street two stories below. Randy's half expecting Doug Shaftoe and his comrades to rappel down from the roof and enter suddenly in glittering and screaming cloaks of broken window-glass and extract Randy while Attorney Alejandro heaves his bulk against this half-ton nara table and uses it to block the door shut.

Coming up with fantasies like this one helps to break the tedium of being in jail, and probably does a lot to explain Randy's jailmates' taste in videos, which they cannot actually watch but which they talk about incessantly in a mixture of English and Tagalog that he now almost understands. The videos, or rather the lack of them, has given rise to some kind of retrograde media-evolution phenomenon: an oral storytelling rooted in videos that these guys once saw. A particularly affecting description of, for example, Stallone in Rambo IIIcauterizing his abdominal bullet wound by igniting a torn-open rifle cartridge and shooting gunpowder-flames through it will plunge all of the men into several moments of reverent awe. It is about the only quiet time Randy gets now, and he has consequently begun cooking up a new plan: he will exploit his Californian provenance by asserting that he has seen martial-arts films that have not yet been bootlegged to the streets of Manila, and narrate them in terms so eloquent that the entire jailhouse will for a few minutes become a place of monastic contemplation, like the idealized Third-World prison that Randy wishes he were in. Randy read Papilloncover-to-cover a couple of times when he was a kid and has always imagined Third-World prisons as places of supreme and noble isolation: steep tropical sunlight setting the humid and smoky air aglow as it slants in over iron bars close-set in thick masonry walls. Sweaty, shirtless steppenwolves prowling back and forth in their cells, brooding about where it all went wrong. Prison journals furtively scribbled on cigarette papers.