Cryptonomicon

America Shaftoe sits, jeaned and barefoot, in the blue light of a window, bobby pins sprouting from chapped lips, looking at her face in an isosceles triangle of mirror whose scalpel-sharp edges depress but do not cut the pink skin of her fingertips. A web of lead ropes sags in the empty windowframe, a few lozenges of beveled glass still trapped in the interstices. Randy lifts his head slightly and looks downhill, into the corner of the room, and sees a great heap of swept shards. He rolls over, looks out the door and across the hallway and into what used to be Charlene's home office. Robin and Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe are sharing a double mattress in there, a shotgun and a rifle, a couple of big black cop flashlights, a Bible and a calculus textbook neatly arranged on the floor next to them.

The nightmare's feeling of panic, of needing to go somewhere and do something, subsides. Lying here in his ruined house listening to Amy's brush whistle through her hair, throwing off electrostatic snaps, is one of the calmer moments he's had.

"You just about ready to hit the road?" Amy says.

Across the hallway, one of the Shaftoe boys sits up without making any sound. The other opens his eyes, lifts his head, glances towards the weapons, lights, and Good Book, then relaxes again.

"I got a fire going out in the yard," Amy says, "and some water boiling. Didn't think it was safe to use the fireplace."

Everyone slept in their clothes last night. All they have to do is put their shoes on and piss out the windows. The Shaftoes move about the place faster than Randy does, not because they are more surefooted, but because they never saw this house when it was level and sound. But Randy lived here for years and years when it was, and his mind thinks it knows its way around the place. Going to bed last night, his biggest fear was that he would get up drowsily in the middle of the night and try to go downstairs. The house used to have a beautiful winding stairway which has now telescoped into the basement. Last night, by dint of pulling the U-Haul onto the front lawn and aiming its headlights directly in through windows (whose cracks and jags and facets refracted the light gorgeously), they were able to clamber into the basement and find a ten-foot aluminum extension ladder which they used to get into the upstairs. Once they had gotten up, they pulled the ladder up with them, like a drawbridge, so that even if looters did enter the downstairs, the Shaftoe boys would be able to sit at the top of what used to be the stairway and pick them off leisurely with the long guns (this scenario seemed plausible last night, in the dark, but now strikes Randy as a bumpkin's reverie).

Amy's turned some balusters from the veranda's railing into a nice bonfire in the front yard. She stomps a crushed saucepan back into shape with a small number of deftly aimed heel-strokes and cooks oatmeal. The Shaftoe boys throw whatever looks potentially useful into the back of the U-Haul, and check the oil in their hot rod.

All of Charlene's stuff is in New Haven now. In Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik's house, to be specific. He has generously offered to let her stay there while she looks for a house; Randy predicts she'll never leave. All of Randy's stuff is in Manila or in Avi's basement, and all of the disputed items are in a storage locker at the edge of town.

Randy spent most of yesterday evening cruising around town checking in on various old friends to see if they were all right. Amy went with him, taking a voyeuristic interest in this tour of his former life, and, from a social point of view, complicating things incalculably. In any case, they didn't make it back to the house until after dark, and so this is Randy's first chance to see the damage in full daylight. He orbits it again and again, amused, almost to the point of giggling, by how perfectly destroyed it is, taking pictures with a disposable camera he borrowed from Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe, trying to see if there is anything left that could conceivably be worth money.