Cryptonomicon

"And you don't consider ramming your car a good way, I'll bet."

"I can think of some problems with it."

"And you had ways of working out your problems with Charlene that were very sophisticated. No voices were ever raised. No angry words exchanged."

"No cars rammed."

"Yeah. And that worked, right?"

Randy sighs.

"How about that thing that Charlene wrote about beards?" Amy asks.

"How did you know about that?"

"Looked it up on the Internet. Was that an example of how you guys worked out your problems? By publishing totally oblique academic papers blasting the other person?"

"I feel like having some oatmeal."

"So don't apologize to me for blowing up at me."

"That oatmeal would really hit the spot."

"For having, and showing, emotion."

"Chow time!"

"Because that's what it's all about. That's the name of the game, Randy boy," she says, pulling abreast of him and whacking him between the shoulder blades in a gesture inherited from her dad. "Mmm, that oatmeal does smell good."

***

The caravan pulls out of town a little after noon: Randy leading the way in his damaged Acura, Amy sitting in the passenger seat with her bare, tanned feet up on the dashboard, spoked with white lines from the straps of her high-tech sandals, oblivious to the danger (alluded to by Randy) of her legs being snapped by an air bag deployment. The souped-up Impala is driven by its owner of record and chief engineer, Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe. Bringing up the rear, the almost totally empty U-Haul truck, driven by Robin Shaftoe. Randy has that moving-through-syrup feeling he gets when enacting some emotionally huge transition in his life. He puts Samuel Barber's Adagio for Stringson the Acura's stereo and drives very slowly down the main street of the town, looking all around at the remains of the coffeehouses, bars, pizza places, and Thai restaurants where, for many years, he prosecuted his social life. He should have performed this little ceremony before he first left for Manila, a year and a half ago. But then he fled as if from the scene of a crime, or, at least, a grotesque personal embarrassment. He only had a day or two before he got on the plane, and he spent most of it on the floor of Avi's basement, dictating whole swathes of the business plan into a microcassette recorder, as opposed to typing them, because his hands had gone carpal.

He never even properly said good-bye to most of the people he knew here. He did not speak to them, and barely thought of them, until yesterday evening, when he pulled up in front of their skewed and occasionally smoking homes in his crumpled and U-Haul-orange-streaked car with this strange, wiry, tanned woman who, whatever strengths and shortcomings she might have, was not Charlene. So, taking everything into account, it was not precisely the way that Emily Post would have orchestrated a reunion with out-of-touch friends. The evening's tour is still a flurry of odd, emotionally charged images in his memory, but he's beginning to sort it out a little, to run the numbers as it were, and he would say that of the people he ran into yesterday--people he had exchanged dinner invitations with and loaned tools to, people whose personal computers he had debugged in exchange for six-packs of good beer, whom he had seen important movies with--that at least three-quarters of these people have really no interest whatsoever in seeing Randy's face again as long as they live, and were made to feel intensely awkward by his totally unexpected reappearance in their front yards, where they were throwing impromptu parties with salvaged beer and wine. This hostility was pretty strongly gender-linked, Randy is sad to conclude. Many of the females wouldn't talk to him it all, or would come near him only the better to fix him with frosty glares and appraise his presumed new girlfriend. This only stands to reason, since, before she left for Yale, Charlene had the better part of a year to popularize her version of events. She has been able to structure the discourse to her advantage, just like a dead white male. No doubt Randy has been classified as an abandoner, no better than the married man who up and walks out on his wife and children--never mind that he was the one who wanted to marry her and have kids with her. But his whining alert starts to buzz when he thinks about that, so he backs up and tries another path.