Cryptonomicon

It takes them several hours to make their way up the street and into the Church of St. Agustin. A bunch of Nips have barricaded themselves inside the place along with what sounds like every hungry infant and irritable two-year-old in Manila. The church is just one side of a large compound that includes a monastery and other buildings. Many of the structures have been torn open by artillery fire. The treasures hoarded in that place by the monks over the course of the last five hundred years have tumbled out into the street. Blown all over the neighborhood like shrapnel, and commingled with the bayoneted corpses of Filipino boys, are huge oil paintings of Christ being scourged, fantastic wooden sculptures of the Romans hammering the spikes through his wrists and ankles, marbles of Mary holding the dead and mangled Christ in her lap, tapestries of the whipping post and the cat o' nine tails in action, blood coursing out of Christ's back through hundreds of parallel gouges.

The Nips still inside the church defend its main doors with the suicidal determination that Shaftoe has begun to find so tedious, but thanks to The General's artillery, there are plenty of other ways, besides doors, to get into the place now. So it is that, even while a company of American infantry mount a frontal assault on the main entrance, Bobby Shaftoe and his Huks, Goto Dengo, The General, and his aides are already kneeling in a little chapel in what used to be part of the monastery. The padre leads them through a couple of extremely truncated prayers of thanksgiving and baptizes Goto Dengo with water from a font, with Bobby Shaftoe taking the role of beaming parent and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur serving as godfather. Shaftoe later remembers only one line of the ceremony.

"Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?" says the padre.

"I do!" says MacArthur with tremendous authority even as Bobby Shaftoe is muttering, "Fuck yes!" Goto Dengo, nods, gets wet, and becomes a Christian.

Bobby Shaftoe excuses himself and goes wandering through the compound. It seems as big and crazy as that Casbah in Algiers, all gloomy and dusty on the inside, and filled with still more La Pasyon art, made by artists who had obviously witnessed whippings firsthand, and who didn't need any priest spouting little homilies about the glamor of Evil. He goes up and down the great stairway once, for old time's sake, remembering the night Glory took him here.

There is a courtyard with a fountain in the center, surrounded by a long shaded gallery where Spanish friars could stroll in the shade and look out over the flowers and hear the birds singing. Right now the only things singing are shells passing overhead. But little Filipino kids are running races up and down the gallery, and their mothers and aunts and grannies are encamped in the courtyard, drawing water from the fountain and cooking rice over piles of burning chair legs.

A grey-eyed two-year-old with a makeshift bludgeon is chasing some bigger kids down a stone arcade. Some of his hairs are the color of Bobby's and some are the color of Glory's, and Bobby Shaftoe can see Glory-ness shining almost fluoroscopically out of his face. The boy has the same bone structure that he saw on the sandbar a few days ago, but this time it is clothed in chubby pink flesh. The flesh admittedly bears bruises and abrasions. No doubt honorably earned. Bobby squats down and looks the little Shaftoe in the eye, wondering how to begin to explain everything. But the boy says, "Bobby Shaftoe, you have boo boos," and drops his club and walks up to examine the wounds on Bobby's arm. Little kids don't bother to say hello, they just start talking to you, and Shaftoe figures that's a good way to handle what would otherwise be pretty damn awkward. The Altamiras have probably been telling little Douglas M. Shaftoe, since the day he was born, that one day Bobby Shaftoe would come in glory from across the sea. That he has now done so is just as routine and yet just as much of a miracle as that the sun rises every day.

"I see that you and yours have displayed adaptability and that is good," says Bobby Shaftoe to his son, but sees immediately that he's not getting through to the kid at all. He feels a need to get something into the kid's head that is going to stick, and this need is stronger than the craving for morphine or sex ever was.