Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Attorney Alejandro opens the door and says something to the waiting guard, who leads them down a hallway toward another room. This one's bigger, and has a number of long tables, with little familial clusters of Filipinos scattered about. If these tables were ever intended to serve as barriers against physical contact, it has long been forgotten; it would take something more like the Berlin Wall to prevent Filipinos from showing affection for each other. So Amy is there, already striding around the end of one of the tables as a couple of guards pointedly look the other way (though their eyes dart back to check out her ass after she has blown by them). No dress this time. Randy predicts it will be a few years before he sees Amy in a dress again. Last time he did, his dick got hard, his heart pounded, he literally salivated, and then suddenly armed men were putting handcuffs on him.

Right now, Amy's in old jeans ripped out at the knee, a tank-top undershirt and a black leather jacket, better to accommodate her concealed weapons. Knowing the Shaftoes, they've probably gone to some very high Defcon level, the one just short of all-out nuclear exchange. Doug Shaftoe probably showers with a SEAL knife clenched in his teeth now. Amy, who normally goes for a low, one-armed, sidelong type of hug, now throws both arms up as if signaling a touchdown and crooks both elbows behind the nape of Randy's neck and lets him feel everything. The flesh of his lower belly can count the stitch-marks in Amy's appendectomy scar. So that he has a boner is probably about as obvious to her as that he smells bad. He might as well have one of those long fluorescent orange bicycle flags lashed to the shaft of his phallus and sticking up out of his pants.

She steps back, looks down at it, then very deliberately looks him in the eye and says, “How do you feel?” which being as it is the obligatory question of females, is hard to read—deadpan/ironic or just sweetly naive?

“I miss you,” he says, “and I apologize if my limbic system has misinterpreted your gesture of emotional support.”

She takes this levelly, shrugs, and says, “No need to apologize. It's all a part of you, Randy. I don't have to get to know you in pieces, do I?”

Randy resists the impulse to check his watch, which would be pointless because it has been confiscated anyway. She has undoubtedly set some kind of world speed record here, in the male/female conversation category, for working the subject around to Randy's own failure to be emotionally available. To do it in this setting displays a certain chutzpah that he cannot help but admire.

“You've talked to Attorney Alejandro,” she says.

“Yeah. I assume he's imparted to me whatever he was supposed to impart.”

“I don't have much more for you,” she says. Which on a pure tactical level means a lot. If the wreck had been found by the Dentist's minions, or their salvage work had been somehow interrupted, she'd say something. For her to say nothing means that they are probably hauling gold out of that submarine at this very moment.

So. She's busy working on the gold salvage operation, to which her contributions are no doubt vital. She has absolutely no specific information to impart to him about anything. So why has she made the long, alternately dull and dangerous trek to Manila? In order to do what exactly? It is one of these fiendish mind-reading exercises. She has her arms crossed over her bosom and is eyeing him coolly. Someone is trying to send you a message.

He suddenly gets the feeling that she's got him right where she wants him. Maybe she's the one who planted the heroin in his bag. It's a power thing, that's all.

A big slab of memory floats up to the surface of Randy's mind, like a floe calved off the polar icecap. He and Amy and the Shaftoe boys were in California, right after the earthquake, going through all the old crap in the basement looking for a few key boxes of papers. Randy heard Amy squealing with laughter and found her sitting in the corner on top of some old book boxes, reading a paperback novel by flashlight. She had uncovered a huge cache of paperback romance novels, none of which Randy had ever seen before. Bodice-rippers of the most incredibly cheesy sort. Randy assumed they'd been left behind by the house's previous owners until he flipped through a couple of them, checking the copyright dates: all from the years when he and Charlene were living together. Charlene must have been reading them at a rate of about one a week.

“Ooh baby,” Amy said, and read him a passage about a rugged but sensitive but tough but loving but horny but smart hero having his way with a protesting but willing but struggling but yielding tempestuous female. “God!” She frisbeed the book into a puddle on the basement floor.

“I always got the sense she had furtive reading habits.”

“Well, now you know what she wanted,” Amy said. “Did you give her what she wanted, Randy?”

And Randy has been thinking about that ever since. And when he got over his surprise that Charlene was a bodice-ripper addict, he decided it wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though in her circle, reading books like that would be tantamount to wearing a tall pointy hat in the streets of Salem Village, Mass. circa 1692. She and Randy had tried, awfully hard, to have an egalitarian relationship. They had spent money on relationship counseling trying to keep the egalitarian relationship alive. But she had become more and more angry, without ever giving him a reason, and he had become more and more confused. Eventually he stopped being confused and just got irritated, and tired of her. After Amy discovered those books in the basement, Randy slowly put a whole new and different story together in his head: that Charlene's limbic system was simply hooked up in such a way that she liked dominant men. Again, not in a whips and chains sense, just in the sense that in most relationships someone's got to be active and someone's got to be passive, and there's no particular logic to that, but there's nothing bad about it either. In the end, the passive partner can have just as much power, and just as much freedom.

Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous days of labor were unable to reveal.

Randy has this very strong feeling that Amy doesn't read bodice-ripper novels. She goes the other way. She can't tolerate surrendering to any one. Which makes it hard for her to function in polite society; she could not have been happy sitting at home during her senior year of high school, waiting for a boy to invite her to the prom. This feature of her personality is extremely prone to misinterpretation, so she bailed out. She would rather be lonely, and true to herself, and in control, in an out-of-the-way part of the world, with her music-by-intelligent-female-singer-songwriters to keep her company, than misinterpreted and hassled in America.

“I love you,” he says. Amy looks away and heaves a big sigh like, At last we're getting somewhere. Randy continues, “I've been infatuated with you ever since we met.”

Now she's back to looking at him expectantly.

“And the reason I've been slow to, uh, to actually show it, or do anything about it, is first of all because I wasn't sure whether or not you were a lesbian.”

Amy scoffs and rolls her eyes.

“… and later just because of my own reticence. Which is unfortunately part of me too, just like this part.” He glances down just for a microsecond.

She's shaking her head at him in amazement.

“The fact that the scientific investigator works fifty percent of his time by nonrational means is quite insufficiently recognized,” Randy says.