edges.
Suddenly they are banking over Manila Bay, which is marked with endless streaks of brilliant red-some kind of algal bloom. Oil tankers trail long time-delayed rainbows that flourish in their wakes. Every cove is jammed with long skinny boats with dual outriggers, looking like brightly painted water skaters.
And then they are down on the runway at NAIA, Ninoy Aquino International Airport. Guards and cops of various stripes are ambling around with M-16s or pistol-handled pump shotguns, wearing burnooses fashioned from handkerchiefs clamped to the head with American baseball caps. A man dressed in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ dispensing mercy on a world of sinners. Sulfurous, fulminating tropical air begins to leak in through the jumbo's air vents. Everything moistens and wilts.
He is in Manila. He takes his passport out of his shirt pocket. It says,
RANDALL LAWRENCE WATERHOUSE.
This is how Epiphyte Corporation came into existence:
'I am channeling the bad shit!' Avi said.
The number came through on Randy's pager while he was sitting around a table in a grubhouse along the coast with his girlfriend's crowd. A place where, every day, they laser-printed fresh menus on 100% recycled imitation parchment, where oscilloscope tracings of neon-colored sauces scribbled across the plates, and the entrees were towering, architectonic stacks of rare ingredients carved into gemlike prisms. Randy had spent the entire meal trying to resist the temptation to invite one of Charlene's friends (any one of them, it didn't matter) out on the sidewalk for a fistfight.
He glanced at his pager expecting to see the number of the Three Siblings Computer Center, which was where he worked (technically, still does). The fell digits of Avi's phone number penetrated the core of his being in the same way that 666 would a fundamentalist's.
Fifteen seconds later, Randy was out on the sidewalk, swiping his card through a pay phone like an assassin drawing a single-edged razor blade across the throat of a tubby politician.
'The power is coming down from On High,' Avi continued. 'Tonight, it happens to be coming through me- you poor bastard.'
'What do you want me to do?' Randy asked, adopting a cold, almost hostile tone to mask sick excitement.
'Buy a ticket to Manila,' Avi said.
'I have to talk it over with Charlene first,' Randy said.
'You don't even believe that yourself,' Avi said.
'Charlene and I have a long-standing relationsh-'
'It's been ten years. You haven't married her. Fill in the fucking blanks.'
(Seventy-two hours later, he would be in Manila, looking at the One-Note Flute.)
'Everyone in Asia is wondering when the Philippines is finally going to get its shit together,' Avi said, 'it's the question of the nineties.'
(The One-Note Flute is the first thing you see when you make it through Passport Control.)
'I flashed on this when I was standing in line at Passport Control at Ninoy Aquino International Airport,' Avi said, compressing that entire name into a single, sharply articulated burst. 'You know how they have different lanes?'
'I guess so,' Randy said. A parallelpiped of seared tuna did a barrel roll in his gullet. He felt a perverse craving for a double ice-cream cone. He did not travel as much as Avi, and had only a vague idea of what he meant by
'You know. One lane for citizens. One for foreigners. Maybe one for diplomats.'
(Now, standing there waiting to have his passport stamped, Randy can see it clearly. For once he doesn't mind the wait. He gets in a lane next to the OCW lane and studies them. They are Epiphyte Corp.'s market. Mostly young women, many of them fashionably dressed, but still with a kind of Catholic boarding-school demureness. Exhausted from long flights, tired of the wait, they slump, then suddenly straighten up and elevate their fine chins, as if an invisible nun were making her way up the line whacking their manicured knuckles with a ruler.)
But seventy-two hours ago he hadn't really understood what Avi meant by lanes, so he just said, 'Yeah, I've seen the lane thing.'
'At Manila, they have a whole lane just for returning OCWs!'
'OCWs?'
'Overseas Contract Workers. Filipinos working abroad-because the economy of the Philippines is so lame. As maids and nannies in Saudi. Nurses and anesthesiologists in the States. Singers in Hong Kong, whores in Bangkok.'
'Whores in Bangkok?' Randy had been there, at least, and his mind reeled at the concept of exporting prostitutes to Thailand.
'The Filipino women are more beautiful,' Avi said quietly, 'and have a ferocity that makes them more interesting, to the innately masochistic business traveler, than all those grinning Thai bimbos.' Both of them knew that this was complete bullshit; Avi was a family man and had no firsthand experience whereof he spoke. Randy didn't call him on it, though. As long as Avi retained this extemporaneous bullshitting ability there was a better than even chance of all of them making fuck-you money.
(Now that he's here, it is tempting to speculate as to which of the girls in the OCW lane are hustlers. But he can't see that going anywhere but wrong, so he squares his shoulders and marches toward the yellow line.
The government has set up glass display cases in the concourse leading from Passport Control to the security barrier. The cases contain artifacts demonstrating the glories of pre-Magellan Filipino culture. The first one of these contains the
'See? The Philippines is innately hedged,' Avi said. 'You know how rare that is? When you find an innately hedged environment, Randy, you lunge into it like a rabid ferret going into a pipe full of raw meat.'
A word about Avi: his father's people had just barely gotten out of Prague. As Central European Jews went, they were fairly typical. The only thing about them that was really anomalous was that they were still alive. But his mother's people were unbelievably peculiar New Mexican crypto-Jews who had been living on mesas, dodging Jesuits, shooting rattlesnakes and eating jimsonweed for three hundred years; they looked like Indians and talked like cowboys. In his relations with other people, therefore, Avi dithered. Most of the time he was courtly and correct in a way that was deeply impressive to businesspeople-Nipponese ones expecially-but there were these eruptions, from time to time, as if he'd been dipping into the loco weed. Randy had learned to deal with it, which is why Avi called him at times like this.
'Oh, calm down!' Randy said. He watched a tanned girl rollerblade past him, on her way up from the beach. 'Innately hedged?'
'As long as the Philippines don't have their shit together, there'll be plenty of OCWs. They will want to communicate with their families-the Filipinos are incredibly family-oriented. They make Jews look like a bunch of alienated loners.'
'Okay. You know more about both groups than I do.'
'They are sentimental and affectionate in a way that's very easy for us to sneer at.'
'You don't have to be defensive,' Randy said, 'I'm not sneering at them.'
'When you hear their song dedications on the radio, you'll sneer,' Avi said. 'But frankly, we could take some pointers from the Pinoys on this front.'
'You are so close to being sanctimonious right now-'
'I apologize,' Avi said, with absolute sincerity. Avi's wife had been pregnant almost continuously for the four years they'd been married. He was getting more religiously observant daily and couldn't make it through a conversation without mentioning the Holocaust. Randy was a bachelor who was just about to break up with the chick he'd been living with.
