A few days later he was talking to this oral surgeon, who was indeed young and conspicuously bright and had more in common with other brilliant people Randy had known-mostly hackers-than he did with other oral surgeons. He drove a pickup truck and kept fresh copies of
When he finally turned to face Randy, he had this priestlike aura about him, a kind of holy ecstasy, a feeling of cosmic symmetry revealed, as if Randy's jaw, and his brilliant oral-surgery brain, had been carved out by the architect of the Universe fifteen billion years ago specifically so that they could run into each other, here and now, in front of this light box. He did not say anything like, 'Randy let me just show you how close the roots of this one tooth are to the bundle of nerves that distinguishes you from a marmoset,' or 'My schedule is incredibly full and I was thinking of going into the real estate business anyway,' or 'Just a second while I call my lawyer.' He didn't even say anything like, 'Wow, those suckers are really in deep.' The young brilliant oral surgeon just said, 'Okay,' stood there awkwardly for a few moments, and then walked out of the room in a display of social ineptness that totally cemented Randy's faith in him. One of his minions eventually had Randy sign a legal disclaimer stipulating that it was perfectly all right if the oral surgeon decided to feed Randy's entire body into a log chipper, but this, for once, seemed like just a formality and not the opening round in an inevitable Bleak House-like litigational saga.
And so finally the big day came, and Randy took care to enjoy his breakfast because he knew that, considering the nerve damage he was about to incur, this might be the last time in his life that he would be able to taste food, or even chew it. The oral surgeon's minions all looked at Randy in awe when he actually walked in the door of their office, like
'Well,' said Randy, 'I have a lot more experience with UNIX than with NT, but from what I've seen, it appears that NT is really a decent enough operating system, and certainly more of a serious effort than Windows.' He paused to draw breath and then noticed that suddenly everything was different. The oral surgeon and his minions were still there and occupying roughly the same positions in his field of vision as they had been when he started to utter this sentence, but now the oral surgeon's glasses were askew and the lenses misted with blood, and his face was all sweaty, and his mask flecked with tiny bits of stuff that very much looked like it had come from pretty far down in Randy's body, and the air in the room was murky with aerosolized bone, and his nurses were limp and haggard and looked like they could use makeovers, face-lifts, and weeks at the beach. Randy's chest and lap, and the floor, were littered with bloody wads and hastily torn-open medical supply wrappers. The back of his head was sore from being battered against the head-rest by the recoil of the young brilliant oral surgeon's cranial jack- hammer. When he tried to finish his sentence ('so if you're willing to pay the premium I think the switch to NT would be very well advised') he noticed that his mouth was jammed full of something that prevented speech. The oral surgeon pulled his mask down off his face and scratched his sweat-soaked beard. He was staring not at Randy but at a point very far away. He heaved a big, slow sigh. His hands were shaking.
'What day is it?' Randy mumbled through cotton.
'As I told you before,' the brilliant young oral surgeon said, 'we charge for wisdom tooth extractions on a sliding scale, depending on the degree of difficulty.' He paused for a moment, groping for words. 'In your case I'm afraid that we will be charging you the maximum on all four.' Then he got up and shambled out of the room, weighed down, Randy thought, not so much by the stress of his job as by the knowledge that no one was ever going to give him a Nobel prize for what he had just accomplished.
Randy went home and spent, about a week lying on his couch in front of the TV eating oral narcotics like jellybeans and moaning with pain, and then he got better. The pressure in his skull was gone. Just totally gone. He cannot even remember now what it used to feel like.
Now as he rides in the police car to his new private jail cell, he remembers the whole wisdom-tooth- extraction saga because of its many points in common with what he just went through emotionally with young America Shaftoe. Randy's had a few girlfriends in his life-not many-but all of them were like oral surgeons who just couldn't cut the mustard. Amy's the only one who had the skill and the sheer balls to just look at him and say 'okay' and then tunnel into his skull and come back with the goods. It was probably exhausting for her. She will extract a high price from him in exchange. And it will leave Randy lying around moaning with pain for a good long while. But he can tell already that the internal pressure has been relieved and he is glad, so glad, that she came into his life, and that he finally had the good sense and, arguably, guts to do this. He completely forgets, for a few hours, that he has been marked for death by the Philippine government.
From the fact that he's in a car, he infers that his new, private cell is in a different building. No one explains anything to him because he is, after all, a prisoner. Since the bust at NAIA he's been in a jail down south, a newish concrete-block number on the edge of Makati, but now they are taking him north into older parts of Manila, probably into some more stylish and gothic prewar facility. Fort Santiago, on the banks of the Pasig, had cells that were in the intertidal zone, so that prisoners locked into them at low tide would be dead by high. Now it's a historical site, so he knows they're not headed there.
The new jail cell is indeed in a big scary old building somewhere in the torus of major governmental institutions that surrounds the dead hole of Intramuros. It is not in, but it is right next to, a major court building. They drive through alleys among these big old stone buildings for a while and then present credentials at a guardhouse and wait for a big iron gate to be rolled aside, and then they drive across a paved courtyard that hasn't been swept out in a while and present more credentials and wait for an actual portcullis to be winched up, clearing an orifice that ramps them down beneath the building itself. Then the car stops and they are abruptly surrounded by men in uniforms.
The process is uncannily like pulling up to the main entrance of an Asian business hotel, except that the men in the uniforms carry guns and don't offer to tote Randy's laptop. He has a chain around his waist and manacles attached to that chain in front, and leg chains that shorten his stride. The chain between his ankles is supported in the middle by another chain that goes up to his waist so that it will not scrape the ground as he walks. He has just enough manual dexterity to grip the laptop and keep it pressed up against his lower abdomen. He's not just any chained wretch, he is a digital chained wretch, Marley's Ghost on the Information Superhighway. That a man in his situation is being allowed to have the laptop is so grotesquely implausible that it causes him to doubt even his own supremely cynical assessment of it, namely that Someone-presumably the same Someone who is Sending Him a Message-has already discovered that everything on the hard drive is encrypted, and is now trying to gull him into firing the machine up and using it so that-so that what? Maybe they've rigged up a camera in his cell and will be peering over his shoulder. But that would be easy for him to defeat; he just has to not be completely stupid.
The guards lead Randy down a corridor and through some prisoner check-in stuff that doesn't really apply to him since he has already filled out the forms and turned over his personal effects at another jail. Then the great big scary metal doors commence, and corridors that don't smell so good, and he hears the generalized hubbub of a jail. But they take him past the hubbub and into other corridors that seem to be older and less used, and finally through an old-fashioned jailhouse door of iron bars and into a long vaulted stone room containing a single row of maybe half a dozen cells, with a guard's passageway running along past the doors of the iron cages. Like a theme- park simulacrum of a jail. They take him all the way down to the last cell and put him there. A single iron bedstead awaits him, a thin cotton mattress with stained but clean sheets and an army blanket folded and stacked on top of it. An old wooden filing cabinet and folding chair have been moved into the cell and placed in one corner, right against the stone wall that is the terminus of this long room. The filing cabinet is evidently meant to serve as
