Cryptonomicon

Like a client of one of your less reputable pufferfish sushi chefs, Randy Waterhouse does not move from his assigned seat for a full ninety minutes after the jumbo leaves Ninoy Aquino International Airport. A can of beer is embedded in the core of his spiraled hand. His arm lies on the extra-wide Business Class armrest, a shank on a slab. He does not turn his head, or turret his eyeballs, even, to look out the window at northern Luzon. All that's out there is jungle, which has two sets of connotations going for it now. One is the spooky Tarzan/Stanley & Livingstone/"The horror, the horror"/natives-are-restless/Charlie's out there somewhere waiting for us kind. The second is the more modern and enlightened sort of Jacques Cousteauian teeming repository-of-brilliant-and-endangered-species lungs-of-the-planet kind. Neither really works for Randy anymore, which is why despite the state of hibernatory torpor he shunted into the moment his ass impacted on the navy blue leather of the seat, he feels a little spike of irritation every time one of the other passengers, peering out a window, pronounces the word "jungle." To him, it is just a shitload of trees now, trees going on for miles and miles, up the little hilly-willies and down the little hilly willies. It is easy, now, for him to understand tropical denizens' shockingly frank and blunt craving to drive through this sort of territory in the largest and widest available bulldozers (the only parts of his body that move during the first hour and a half of the flight are certain facial muscles which pull the corners of his mouth back into an ironic rictus when he imagines what Charlene would think of this--it is just too perfect--Randy goes off on a Business Foray and comes back identifying with people who bulldoze rainforests). Randy wants to bulldoze the jungle, all of it. Actually, thermonuclear weapons, detonated at a suitable height, would do the job faster. He needs to rationalize this urge. He will do so, as soon as he solves the running-out-of-planetary-oxygen problem.

By the time it even occurs to him to lift the beer to his lips, the heat of his body has gone into it, and his hand has become as chilly and stiff as an uncooked rolled roast. For that matter, his whole body has adjourned into some kind of metabolic recess, and his brain is not exactly purring at high RPM's either. He feels kind of the way he does, sometimes, the day before he comes down with a total-body cold-and-flu scenario, one of those crushing viral Tet Offensives that, every few years, swats you out of the land of the fully living for a week or two. It is as if about three-quarters of his body's resources of nutrients and energy have been diverted to the task of manufacturing quintillions of viruses. At the currency exchange window of NAIA, Randy had stood behind a Chinese man who, just before he stepped back from the window with his money, unloaded a Sneeze of such titanic force that the rolling pressure wave turbulating outwards from his raw, flapping facial orifices caused the wall of bulletproof glass separating him from the moneychangers to flex slightly, so that the reflection of the Chinese man, Randy behind him, the lobby of NAIA and the sunlit passenger-dropoff lane outside underwent a subtle warpage. The viruses must have roiled back from the glass, reflected like light, and enveloped Randy. So maybe Randy is the personal vector of this year's version of the flu-named-after-some-city-in-East-Asia that annually tours the United States, just barely preceded by rush shipments of flu vaccine. Or maybe it's Ebola.

Actually, he feels fine. Other than the fact that his mitochondria have gone on strike, or that his thyroid seems to be failing (perhaps it was secretly removed by black-market organ transplanters? He makes a mental note to check for new scars in the next mirror) he is not experiencing any viral symptoms at all.

It is some kind of post-stress thing. This is the first time he has relaxed in a couple of weeks. Not once has he sat down in a bar with a beer, or put his feet up on a desk, or just collapsed like a decaying corpse in front of the television set. Now his body is telling him it's payback time. He does not sleep; he does not feel drowsy at all. Actually, he's been sleeping rather well. But his body refuses to move for an hour, and then most of another hour, and to the extent his brain is working at all it can only chase its tail.

But there is something that he could be doing. This is why laptops were invented, so that important business persons would not fritter away long flights relaxing. He can see it right there on the floor in front of him. He knows he should reach for it. But it would break the spell. He feels as if water condensed on his skin and froze into a carapace that will shatter as soon as he moves any part of his body. This is, he realizes, exactly how a laptop computer must feel when it drops into its power-saving mode.