Cryptonomicon

Terrified by this sound, all of the pigs (I would suppose) voided their bowels just as the driver of the Pig Truck swerved violently away from us. Certain first-year-physics conservation-of-momentum issues dictated that I be showered with former pig bowel contents in order to enhance shareholder value. This was evidently the funniest thing that the two Asian-looking gentlemen had ever seen and rendered them helpless for several minutes. One of them actually retched from laughing too hard (the first time that our vehicle's lack of windows came in handy). The other extended his hand and introduced himself as one Jean Nguyen. This is the French male name "zhohn" and not the Anglo female name "jeen." Jean Nguyen looked at me expectantly after telling me his name, as did DMS, as if they were expecting me to get a fairly obvious joke. Perhaps preoccupied with hygienic issues. I failed to get it. and they pointed out to me that when "Jean" is pronounced like "John" and "Nguyen" is pronounced the way a lot of Americans mangle it, the name sounds arguably like "John Wayne," which is how I was encouraged to address this Jean Nguyen from that point onwards. It seemed in retrospect that I was being given an opportunity to have a small chuckle at Jean Nguyen's expense and thereby to even the scales, in some small but symbolically important sense, for the pig shit incident. My failure to exploit this opportunity left everyone feeling mildly uneasy and like they still owed me one. The other gentle man was introduced as Jackie Woo. He spoke English with a vaguely East Indian crackle which led me to peg him, speculatively, as a Malay Peninsula native of Chinese descent, e.g.. from Singapore or Penang.

First day's travel got us across the central Luzon plain (rice and sugar cane) to the town of San Jose at the foot of the southernmost extension of the Cordillera Central (trees and bugs). By this point it was dark, and to my relief, neither DMS nor Bong-Bong was eager to brave twisty Cordillera roads in darkness. We stayed in a guest house. At this point, having devoted much time to detailed Pig Truck description I will elide various details concerning San Juan, its inhabitants (of various taxonomic phyla some of which I had never encountered until that night), the character-building nature of our lodgings and, in particular, their fanciful plumbing system which was a credit to the imagination, though not the hydrostatic acumen, of its anonymous creator. It was the kind of hostel that makes a traveler eager to get an early and explosively sudden start in the morning, which we did.

A note now about the physical properties of space, as perceived by human beings imprisoned within bodies of limited physical capabilities. I have long noticed that space seems to be more compressed, more involuted, some how psychically LARGER in some places than others. Covering a distance of three or four miles in the totally open scrublands of central Washington State is a simple matter, and takes less than an hour on foot. and only a few minutes if you have some kind of vehicle. Covering the same distance in Manhattan takes much longer. It's not just that the space in Manhattan is more physically obstructed (though it definitely is) but that there is some kind of psychological impact that alters the way you perceive and experience distance. You cannot see as far, and what you do see is full of people, buildings, goods, vehicles, and other stuff that it takes your brain some amount of effort to sort through, to process. Even if you had some kind of magic carpet that would glide past all of the physical obstructions the distance would seem much longer, and would take longer to cover, simply because your mind would have to deal with more stuff.