'Normally it doesn't do that,' Avi says. 'I had it set to its maximum alert status.'
'What's the worst that could happen? Someone would steal your car and the insurance company would buy you a new one?'
'I couldn't care less if it gets stolen. The worst that could happen would be a car bomb, or, not quite as bad, someone putting a bug in my car and listening to everything I say.'
Avi drives Randy over the San Andreas Fault to his place in Pacifica, which is where Randy stores his car while he's overseas. Avi's wife Devorah is in at the doctor's for a routine prenatal and all the kids are either at school or being hustled around the neighborhood by their tag-team duo of tough Israeli nannies. Avi's nannies have the souls of war-hardened Soviet paratroopers in the bodies of nubile eighteen-year-old girls. The house has been utterly abandoned to kid-raising. The formal dining room has been converted to a nanny-barracks with bunk beds hammered together from unfinished two-by-fours, the parlor filled with cribs and changing-tables, and every square centimeter of cheap shag carpet in the place has been infused with a few dozen flakes of glitter, in various festive colors, which if they even cared about getting rid of it could only be removed through direct microsurgical extraction, one flake at a time. Avi plies Randy with a sandwich of turkey bologna and ketchup on generic Wonderoid bread. It is still too early in Manila for Randy to call Amy and make amends for whatever he did wrong. Down below them, in Avi's basement office, a fax machine shrieks and rustles like a bird in a coffee can. A laminated CIA map of Sierra Leone is spread out on the table, peeking out here and there through numerous overlying strata of dirty dishes, newspapers, coloring books, and drafts of the Epiphyte(2) Business Plan. Post-it notes are stuck to the map from place to place. Written on each note, in Avi's distinctive triple-ought Rapidograph drafting-pen hand, is a latitude and longitude with lots of significant digits, and some kind of precis of what happened there: '5 women, 2 men, 4 children, with machetes-photos:' and then serial numbers from Avi's database.
Randy was a little groggy on the drive over, and was irritable about the inappropriate daylight, but after the sandwich his metabolism tries to get into the spirit of things. He has learned to surf these mysterious endocrinological swells. 'I'm going to get going,' he says, and stands.
'Your overall plan, again?'
'First I go south,' Randy says, superstitiously not even wanting to utter the name of the place where he used to live. 'For no more than a day, I hope. Then jet lag will land on me like a plunging safe and I will hole up somewhere and watch basketball through the vee of my feet for maybe a day. Then I head north to the Palouse country.'
Avi raises his eyebrows. 'Home?'
'Yeah.'
'Hey, before I forget-could you look for information on the Whitmans while you're up there?'
'You mean the missionaries?'
'Yeah. They came out to the Palouse to convert the Cayuse Indians, who were these magnificent horsemen. They had the best of intentions, but they accidentally gave them measles. Annihilated the whole tribe.'
'Does that really land within the boundaries of your obsession? Inadvertent genocide?'
'Anomalous cases have heightened utility in that they help us delineate the boundaries of the field.'
'I'll see what I can find about the Whitmans.'
'May I inquire,' Avi says, 'why you are going up there? Family visit?'
'My grandmother is moving to a managed care facility. Her children are convening to divide up her furniture and so on, which I find a little ghoulish, but it's nobody's fault and it has to be done.'
'And you are going to participate?'
'I am going to avoid it as much as I can, because it's probably going to be a catfight. Years from now, family members will still not be speaking to each other because they didn't get Mom's Gomer Bolstrood credenza.'
'What is it with Anglo-Saxons and furniture? Could you explain that to me?'
'I am going because we found a piece of paper in a briefcase in a sunken Nazi submarine in the Palawan Passage that says, 'WATERHOUSE-LAVENDER ROSE.''
Avi looks baffled now, in a way that Randy finds satisfying. He gets up and climbs into his car and starts driving south, down the coast, the slow and beautiful way.
Chapter 64 ORGAN
Lawrence Waterhouse's libido is suppressed for about a week by the pain and swelling in his jaw. Then the pain and swelling in his groin surges into the fore, and he begins searching his memories of the dance, wondering if he made any progress with Mary cCmndhd.
He wakes up suddenly at four o'clock one Sunday morning, clammily coated from his nipples to his knees. Rod is still sleeping soundly, thank god, and so if Waterhouse did any moaning or calling out of names during his dream, Rod's probably not aware of it. Waterhouse begins trying to clean himself off without making a lot of noise. He doesn't even want to think about how he's going to explain the condition of the sheets to Who Will Launder Them. 'It was completely innocent, Mrs. McTeague. I dreamed that I came downstairs in my pajamas and that Mary was sitting in the parlor in her uniform, drinking tea, and she turned and looked me in the eye, and then I just couldn't control myself and aaaaAAAHHH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! And then I woke up and just look at the mess.
Mrs. McTeague (and other old ladies like her all around the world) does the laundry only because it is her role in the giant Ejaculation Control Conspiracy which, as Waterhouse is belatedly realizing, controls the entire planet. No doubt she has a clipboard down in the cellar, next to her mangle, where she marks down the frequency and volume of the ejaculations of her four boarders. The data sheets are mailed into some Bletchley Park type of operation somewhere (Waterhouse guesses it's disguised as a large convent in upstate New York), where the numbers from all round the world are tabulated on Electrical Till Corporation machines and printouts piled up on carts that are wheeled into the offices of the high priestesses of the conspiracy, dressed in heavily starched white raiments, embroidered with the emblem of the conspiracy: a penis caught in a mangle. The priestesses review the data carefully. They observe that Hitler still isn't getting any, and debate whether letting him have some would calm him down a little bit or just give him license to run further out of control. It will take months for the name of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse to come to the top of the list, and months for orders to be sent out to Brisbane-and even then, the orders may condemn him to another year of waiting for Mary cCmndhd to show up in his dreams with a teacup.
Mrs. McTeague, and other ECC members (such as Mary cCmndhd and basically all of the other young women) are offended by easy girls, prostitutes, and whorehouses, not for religious reasons, but because they provide a refuge where men can have ejaculations that are not controlled, metered, or monitored in any way. Prostitutes are turncoats, collaborators.
All of this comes into Waterhouse's mind as he lies in his damp bed between four and six o'clock in the morning, considering his place in the world with the crystalline clarity that can only be obtained by getting a good night's sleep and then venting several weeks' jism production. He has reached a fork in the road.
Last night, before Rod turned in, he shined his shoes, explaining that tomorrow morning he had to be up bright and early for church. Now, Waterhouse knows what that means, having spent many a Sabbath on Qwghlm, cringing and blushing under the glares of the locals, who were outraged that he appeared to be running the huffduff equipment on the day of rest. He has seen them shuffling into their morbid, thousand-year-old black-stone chapel on Sunday mornings for their three-hour services. Hell, Waterhouse even
Going to church with Rod would mean giving in to the ECC, becoming their minion. The alternative is the whorehouse.
Even though he grew up in churches, raised by church people, Waterhouse (as must be obvious by this point) never really understood their attitudes about sex. Why did they get so hung up on that one issue, when there were others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence?
