he can reach up and wipe it off. The boundary between Randy and his environment has been annihilated.
He gets out a big tube of heavy waterproof sunblock and greases his face, neck, arms, and the small patch of scalp on the top of his head where the hair is getting thin. Then he pulls on khakis, boat shoes, and a loose cotton shirt, and a beltpack containing his GPS receiver and a couple of other essentials like a wad of toilet paper and a disposable camera. He drops his key off at the front desk, and the employees all do double-takes and grin. The bellhops seem particularly delighted by his makeover. Or perhaps it is just that he is wearing leather shoes for once: topsiders, which he's always thought of as the mark of effete preppies, but which are actually a reasonable thing for him to wear today. Bellhops make ready to haul the front door open, but instead, Randy cuts across the lobby towards the back of the hotel, skirts the swimming pool, and walks through a line of palm trees to a stone railing along the top of a seawall. Below him is the hotel's dock, which sticks out into a small cove that opens onto Manila Bay.
His ride isn't here yet, so he stands at the railing for a minute. One side of the cove is accessible from Rizal Park. A few gnarly Filipino squatter types are lazing on the benches, staring back at him. Down below the breakwater, a middle-aged man, wearing only boxer shorts, stands in knee-deep water with a pointed stick, staring with feline intensity into the lapping water. A black helicopter makes slow, banking circles against a sugar-white sky. It is a Vietnam-vintage Huey, a wappity-wap kind of chopper that also makes a fierce reptilian hissing noise as it slithers overhead.
A boat materializes from the steam rising off the bay, cuts its engines, and coasts into the cove, shoving a bow wave in front of it, like a wrinkle in a heavy rug. A tall, slender woman is poised on the prow like a living figurehead, holding a coil of heavy rope.
The big satellite dishes on the roof of the PTA's building are pointed almost straight up, like birdbaths, because Manila is so close to the equator. On its stone walls, spackle is coming loose from the bullet and shrapnel craters into which it was troweled after the war. Window air conditioners centered in the building's Roman arches drip water onto the limestone balusters below, gradually melting them away. The limestone is blackened with some kind of organic slime, and pitted by the root systems of little plants that have taken root in them-probably grown from seeds conveyed in the shit of the birds that congregate there to bathe and drink, the squatters of the aerial realm.
In a paneled conference room, a dozen people are waiting, equally divided between table-sitting big wheels and wall-crawling minions. As Randy and Avi enter a great flurry of hand-shaking and card-presenting ensues, though most of the introductions zoom through Randy's short-term memory like a supersonic fighter blowing past shoddy Third World air defense systems. He is left only with a stack of business cards. He deals them out on his patch of table like a senescent codger playing Klondike on his meal tray. Avi, of course, knows all of these people already-seems to be on a first-name basis with most of them, knows their children's names and ages, their hobbies, their blood types, chronic medical conditions, what books they are reading, whose parties they have been going to. All of them are evidently delighted by this, and all of them, thank god, completely ignore Randy.
Of the half-dozen important people in the room, three are middle-aged Filipino men. One of these is a high-ranking official in the PTA. The second is the president of an upstart telecommunications company called FiliTel, which is trying to compete against the traditional monopoly. The third is the vice president of a company called 24 Jam that runs about half of the convenience stores in the Philippines, as well as quite a few in Malaysia. Randy has trouble telling these men apart, but by watching them converse with Avi, and by using inductive logic, he is soon able to match business card with face.
The other three are easy: two Americans and one Nipponese, and one of the Americans is a woman. She is wearing lavender pumps color-coordinated with a neat little skirt suit, and matching nails. She looks as if she might have stepped straight off the set of an infomercial for fake fingernails or home permanents. Her card identifies her as Mary Ann Carson, and claims that she is a V.P. with AVCLA, Asia Venture Capital Los Angeles, which Randy knows dimly as a Los Angeles-based firm that invests in Rapidly Developing Asian Economies. The American man is blond and has a hard-jawed quasi-military look about him. He seems alert, disciplined, impassive, which Charlene's crowd would interpret as hostility born of repression born of profound underlying mental disorder. He represents the Subic Bay Free Port. The Nipponese man is the executive vice president of a subsidiary of a ridiculously colossal consumer-electronics company. He is about six feet tall. He has a small body and a large head shaped like an upside-down Bosc pear, thick hair edged with gray, and wire-rimmed glasses. He smiles frequently, and projects the serene confidence of a man who has memorized a two-thousand-page encyclopedia of business etiquette.
Avi wastes little time in starting the videotape, which at the moment represents about seventy-five percent of Epiphyte Corp.'s assets. Avi had it produced by a hot multimedia startup in San Francisco, and the contract to produce it accounted for one hundred percent of the startup's revenue this year. 'Pies crumble when you slice them too thin,' Avi likes to say.
It starts with footage-pilfered from a forgotten made-for-TV movie-of a Spanish galleon making headway through heavy seas. Superimpose title: SOUTH CHINA SEA-A.D. 1699. The soundtrack has been beefed up and Dolbyized from its original monaural version. It is quite impressive.
('Half of the investors in AVCLA are into yachting,' Avi explained.)
Cut to a shot (produced by the multimedia company, and seamlessly spliced in) of a mangy, exhausted lookout in a crow's nest, peering through a brass spyglass, hollering the Spanish equivalent of 'Land ho!'
Cut to the galleon's captain, a rugged, bearded character, emerging from his cabin to stare with Keatsian wild surmise at the horizon. 'Corregidor!' he exclaims.
Cut to a stone tower on the crown of a green tropical island, where a lookout is sighting the (digitally inserted) galleon on the horizon. The lookout cups his hands around his mouth and bellows, in Spanish, 'It is the galleon! Light the signal fire!'
('The family of the guy who runs the PTA is really into local history,' Avi said, 'they run the Museum of the Philippines.')
With a lusty cheer, Spaniards (actually, Mexican-American actors) in conquistador helmets plunge firebrands into a huge pile of dry wood which evolves into a screaming pyramid of flame powerful enough to flash- roast an ox.
Cut to the battlements of Manila's Fort Santiago (foreground: carved styrofoam; background: digitally generated landscape), where another conquistador spies a light flaring up on the horizon. 'Mira! El galleon!' he cries.
Cut to a series of shots of Manila townsfolk rushing to the seawall to adore the signal fire, including an Augustinian monk who clasps his rosary-strewn hands and bursts into clerical Latin on the spot ('the family that runs FiliTel endowed a chapel at Manila Cathedral') as well as a clean-cut family of Chinese merchants unloading bales of silk from a junk ('24 Jam, the convenience store chain, is run by Chinese mestizos').
A voiceover begins, deep and authoritative, English with a Filipino accent ('The actor is the brother of the godfather of the grandson of the man who runs the PTA'). Subtitles appear on the bottom of the screen in Tagalog ('the PTA people have a heavy political commitment to the native language').
'In the heyday of the Spanish Empire, the most important event of the year was the arrival of the galleon from Acapulco, laden with silver from the rich mines of America-silver to buy the silks and spices of Asia, silver that made the Philippines into the economic fountainhead of Asia. The approach of the galleon was heralded by a beacon of light from the island of Corregidor, at the entrance of Manila Bay.'
Cut (finally!) from the beaming, greed-lit faces of the Manila townsfolk to a 3-D graphics rendering of Manila Bay, the Bata'an Peninsula, and the small islands off the tip of Bata'an, including Corregidor. The point of view swoops and zooms in on Corregidor where a hokily, badly rendered fire blazes up. A beam of yellow light, like a phaser blast in
The signal fire was an ancient and simple technology. In the language of modern science, its light was a form of
Cue that funky music. Cut to shots of teeming modern Manila. Shopping malls and luxury hotels in Makati.
