Like a client of one of your less reputable pufferfish sushi chefs, Randy Waterhouse does not move from his assigned seat for a full ninety minutes after the jumbo leaves Ninoy Aquino International Airport. A can of beer is embedded in the core of his spiraled hand. His arm lies on the extra-wide Business Class armrest, a shank on a slab. He does not turn his head, or turret his eyeballs, even, to look out the window at northern Luzon. All that’s out there is jungle, which has two sets of connotations going for it now. One is the spooky Tarzan/Stanley & Livingstone/"The horror, the horror"/natives-are-restless/Charlie’s out there somewhere waiting for us kind. The second is the more modern and enlightened sort of Jacques Cousteauian teeming repository-of-brilliant-and-endangered-species lungs-of-the-planet kind. Neither really works for Randy anymore, which is why despite the state of hibernatory torpor he shunted into the moment his ass impacted on the navy blue leather of the seat, he feels a little spike of irritation every time one of the other passengers, peering out a window, pronounces the word "jungle." To him, it is just a shitload of trees now, trees going on for miles and miles, up the little hilly-willies and down the little hilly willies. It is easy, now, for him to understand tropical denizens’ shockingly frank and blunt craving to drive through this sort of territory in the largest and widest available bulldozers (the only parts of his body that move during the first hour and a half of the flight are certain facial muscles which pull the corners of his mouth back into an ironic rictus when he imagines what Charlene would think of this—it is just too perfect—Randy goes off on a Business Foray and comes back identifying with people who bulldoze rainforests). Randy wants to bulldoze the jungle, all of it. Actually, thermonuclear weapons, detonated at a suitable height, would do the job faster. He needs to rationalize this urge. He will do so, as soon as he solves the running-out-of-planetary-oxygen problem.