Cryptonomicon

"Then from Narita I just grabbed the next flight to SFO. Landed a couple hours after you. So I was surprised that you and I pulled into town here at the same time."

"I stopped over at a friend's house. And I took the scenic route." Randy closes his eyes for a moment, remembering those loose boulders on the Pacific Coast Highway, the roadway shaking beneath the tires of his Acura.

"See, when I saw your car, that's when I felt that God was with me, or something," Amy said. "Or with you."

"God was with me? How do you figure?"

"Well, first of all, I have to tell you that I left Manila not out of concern for you but out of burning rage, and a desire to just feed you your ass on a plate."

"I figured."

"It's not even clear to me that you and I constitute a potential couple. But you have started acting towards me in a way that indicates some interest in that direction, so you have certain obligations." Amy has now started to get pissed off and begun to move around the yard. The Shaftoe boys eye her warily from across their steaming oatmeal bowls, ready to Spring into action and wrestle her to the ground if she should fly out of control. "It would be just ... totally... unacceptable for you to make those kinds of representations to me and then jet off and cuddle with your California sweetheart without coming to me first and going through certain formalities, which would be awkward but which I would hope you would be man enough to endure. Right?"

"Absolutely right. Never felt otherwise."

"So you can imagine how it looked."

"I guess so. Assuming you have no faith in me whatsoever."

"Well, I'm sorry for that, but I will say that on the flight over I began to think that it wasn't your fault, that Charlene had somehow gotten to you."

"What do you mean, gotten to me?"

Amy looks at the ground. "I don't know, she must have some kind of hold over you."

"I think not." Randy sighs.

"Anyway, I thought that maybe you were just in the process of making a big, stupid mistake. So when I got on that plane in Tokyo I was just going to track you down and. . ." She draws a deep breath and mentally counts to ten. "But when I got off that plane I was to bootjust obsessed with this disgusting image of you getting back together with this woman who obviously was no damn good for you. And I felt that would be an unfortunate outcome for you. And I thought I was too late to do anything about it. So, when I got into town, and pulled around the corner and saw your Acura in the lane right there in front of me, and you talking on your cellphone--"

"I was leaving a message on your answering machine in Manila," Randy says. "Explaining that I was just coming here to pick up some papers and there'd been an earthquake only minutes before and so I might be a while."

"Well, I didn't have timeto check my messages, which were placed on my machine too lateto accomplish any useful purpose,"Amy says, "and so I had to go on an imperfect knowledgeof these events since no one had bothered to fill me in."

"So..."

"I felt that cooler heads should prevail."

"And therefore you ran me off the road?"

Amy looks a little disappointed. She takes a patient, Montessori-preschool-teacher tone of voice. "Now, Randy, think about priorities for just a minute. I could see the way you were driving."

"I was in a hurry to find out whether I was totally destitute, or merely bankrupt."

"But because of my imperfect knowledgeof the situation I thought maybe you were rushing into your poor little Charlene's arms. In other words, that the emotional stress of the earthquake might induce you to--who knows what, relationship-wise."

Randy presses his lips together and takes a huge breath through his nose.

"Compared to that, a little bit of sheet metal just was not very important to me. Of course, I know that a lot of guyswould just stand back and allow someone they cared about to do something extremely foolish and damaging, only so that everyone concerned could then drive off to a miserable and emotionally fucked-up future in perfect, shiny cars."

Randy can do nothing but roll his eyes. "Well," he says, "I am sorry that I blew up at you when I got out of the car."

"You are? Why, exactly? You shouldbe pissed off when a truck driver runs you off the road."

"I didn't know who you were. I didn't recognize you in this context. It did not occur to me that you would do what you did with the airplanes."

Amy laughs in a goofy, mischievous way that doesn't seem right here. Randy feels quizzical and mildly irritated. She looks at him knowingly. "I'll bet you never blew up at Charlene."

"That's right," Randy says.

"You didn't? In all those years?"

"When we had issues, we talked them out."

Amy snorts. "I'll bet you had really boring--" She stops herself.

"Boring what?"

"Never mind."

"Look, I think that in a good relationship, you have to have ways for working out any issues that might come up." Randy says reasonably.