Flashback

3.01 Los Angeles: Sunday, Sept. 12—Friday, Sept. 17

Professor emeritus George Leonard Fox sat in his tiny, cluttered, closet-sized excuse for an office, writing diary entries into a leather-bound blank book he’d owned for decades but had never written in until now.

How strange it was to be writing in longhand again! It reminded Leonard of the year he’d spent working on his dissertation—Negative Capability in the Minor Poetry of John Keats—with him scribbling madly on yellow legal pads into the wee hours of the morning and then waking to the sound of Sonja typing up his pages for review. Leonard tried to remember the approximate year… 1981. Reagan was the new president and he and Sonja and all the other graduate students and faculty were making fun of the man. Leonard had been twenty-three and Sonja nine years older and already, since he’d just begun a serious affair with a twenty-year-old undergraduate named Cheryl, destined to become Leonard’s ex-first wife. Or perhaps, he thought, that should be “first ex-wife.”

At any rate, the divorce he’d asked for had come through four months after his dissertation was successfully defended and his first PhD obtained. Sonja had resented that typing under false pretenses, as she put it. But somehow she’d forgiven him and the two had remained friends until her death in 1997.

Professor Emeritus George Leonard Fox couldn’t say the same about his other three wives. They were all still alive (although he’d recently heard that Nubia was all but lost to Alzheimer’s), but none of them had forgiven him for the marriages or his hypothetical offenses. Wait… perhaps Nubia had if she no longer even remembered who he was. Leonard stopped writing in his diary and imagined, with some irony, hunting her up at whatever overcrowded government repository for dementia victims she was stored in and reintroducing himself.

He shook his head. Sometimes he wondered if he was showing early signs of Alzheimer’s himself. (Although, he realized, at age seventy-four, the signs wouldn’t be all that early, would they?)

Val hadn’t come home the previous night. The boy had finally shown up as Leonard was finishing a late breakfast. His only response to his grandfather’s “Good morning” had been an irritated grunt. Then Val had gone straight to bed and slept most of the Sunday away.

Whatever was going on in the sixteen-year-old’s life, Leonard knew, was not going to be shared with his grandfather or any other adult. Leonard hated that aspect of his grandson’s personality. The sulky, pouty, rebellious, noncommunicative teenager pose was such a terribly tiresome cliché. If Leonard hadn’t seen the other side of the personality of his daughter’s only child—Val’s sensitivity (which he worked so hard to hide from his peers), his addiction to reading, his reluctance (at least as a younger child) to hurt other people—the aging ex-professor would have been sorely tempted to wash his hands of the boy and send him home, somehow, to his father.

Val’s father. Several times in recent weeks, Leonard had come close to phoning Nick Bottom. But each time he’d held off. The first reason for doing so was the simple fact of nonlocal calls having become so difficult and expensive again, after decades of cheap instant contact with anyone anywhere. Leonard remembered from his childhood when one of his parents would say to the other, “It’s a long-distance call,” as if that involved paying for a call to the moon.

The other reasons for Leonard’s hesitation were less obvious and petty: the fact that Nick Bottom had shown less and less interest in his son over the past five years; and finally the fact that Bottom was almost certainly still a serious flashback addict which, to Leonard, meant the person met the clinical description of malignant narcissist.

But still, he wrote in his diary, as the storm clouds continued to build over the Los Angeles basin, Leonard knew that he would have to do something.

He paused and flexed his aching right hand. Writing by hand, he realized now, aggravated his arthritis more than typing on a virtual keyboard. But speaking of clichés! “Storm clouds building”! Sonja would have chastised him in her strongest Swedish for that one.

But with heavier clouds of smoke filling parts of the sky over Los Angeles every day—first in the reconquista neighborhoods to the east and southeast, then in the Asian sections farther south and west and around UCLA, yesterday in the rich people’s walled and gated and patrolled enclaves to the west and up in the hills toward Mulholland Drive—it certainly looked as if storm clouds were building and growing darker by the day.

Leonard resumed his diary entry. He’d decided to visit Emilio at the address the older man had given him—no phone or e-mail number, just the address—before the next weekend if Val’s aberrant behavior continued and if the growing sense of imminent Armageddon in the city persisted. As risky and expensive as buying passenger fare into one of the truck convoys to Denver might seem, it was beginning to feel like a more prudent course than remaining in Los Angeles.

Leonard started the day with simple relief that Val went off to school. Later, Leonard phoned the district’s autocheck line and confirmed that his grandson was actually there.

He’d tried to talk to Val over the boy’s rushed breakfast—chugging a bottle of UltraCoke and grabbing a food bar—and Val’s only response had been “If you’re so worried about where I spend my time, you should have done a kid-finder implant on me.”

If Val had been his own son, Leonard would have. But he’d come to him from Denver when Val was almost eleven years old—and in shock and mourning after the sudden death of his mother and the new addiction of his father—and it seemed too late to Leonard to take the boy to the LAPD for a tracker implant.

Leonard spent too much of Monday trying to run various errands, including stocking up on nonperishable food they could take with them if they did indeed decide to make a run for it the following weekend. As he rode his bicycle around his neighborhood and Chinatown, he was struck again by how impossible it was to get much done—or at least done efficiently—in this brave new world he lived in.

Flashback, he thought, was the greatest culprit. Leonard foolishly went to his bank, a real bank, to attempt a non-ATM transaction, and of course there were no human tellers available. One of his bank’s main TV advertising points was that there would always be a minimum of two human tellers on duty during the bank’s four half-days when they were open to the public, but Mondays—one of those half-days—was endemic with flashback absenteeism. Leonard knew he should have known better than to try to bank with a person on a Monday.

The supermarket was also a trial. It took Leonard almost fifteen minutes in line to get into the store through the various CMRI portals, sniffer credit checks, and DNA-recognition booths. Once inside, the only nonshoppers in sight were the beetle-armored security people with their ebony helmets, reflective visors, and clunky automatic weapons. Leonard had seen enough versions of this future in the movies so popular during his middle-aged years that he should have been used to it before it actually arrived, but now, even after almost two decades of growing security presence, it still bothered him.

The absence of clerks meant that when Leonard noticed that the fresh produce section was filled with rotting vegetables due to brownouts and negligence, his only option was to phone an automated national number. Somewhere in that echoing, horribly lighted building poxed with black security camera bubbles, he suspected, was a human, living, breathing store manager. But that manager certainly wanted nothing to do with his patrons. And Leonard seriously doubted if the Los Angeles chain was still owned by anyone named Ralph.

He had to bike many blocks out of his way coming home from his day’s errands because of the constant chirping of his phone’s terrorist-incident alarms. Tibetan suicide bombers had detonated themselves in Chinatown; Aryan Brotherhood California separatists were engaging in a shootout with LAPD and Homeland Security tactical units near Echo Park.

Val did not come home that night until almost 3 a.m.

Leonard spent much of his day sitting in his study and sorting listlessly through the untidy stacks and piles of printouts of the various drafts of his huge failed and abandoned novel. Occasionally he would jot a note in his diary, usually questioning how a professor emeritus of English literature and classics could write so badly.

His goal, as he’d told Emilio and only a few others, had been to tell the story of the first third of this new century. But he realized, as he read pages and chapters of his abandoned work at random, all he’d done in his many drafts was to show his own ignorance. His characters were invariably victims of the social forces that had changed America and the world so much in the last twenty-five years, and their actions—such as they were (most of the drafts was just talk)—showed their own lack of understanding of those forces and their own impotence in the face of such change. In other words, his characters’ perceptions were as dulled and buffered by the illusions and comforts of forty years of campus life as Professor George Leonard Fox’s had been.

Leonard dropped pages as he read and had to smile. As he’d told Emilio, he’d attempted the ultimate authorial God-view of Leo Tolstoy and failed. In the end, he would have been happy to have achieved the minor godview of… say… Herman Wouk.

Leonard had read Wouk’s two magnum opuses, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, in the 1970s and had, along with all the other students and faculty he knew, dismissed them completely as middlebrow historical romances. Clumsy attempts to tell the story of the lead-up to World War II and the Holocaust, and the events themselves, in two huge volumes following scattered members of an American naval family—including the son’s Jewish wife, Natalie, who was shipped to Auschwitz with her Jewish intellectual uncle and her small child. “Wouk chewed more than he bit off,” he’d said wittily—not citing the real source—in an undergraduate course at Yale where the books had come up in some tangential discussion.

But Leonard now realized that Wouk—largely forgotten a third of the way through this following century—had known things about the world. The popular novels were rich with carefully observed detail, whether that applied to the clumsy machinery of a 1940s-era submarine or the more efficient bureaucratic machinery of the Holocaust. And Wouk wrote his forgotten masterpieces as if the salvation of his soul depended upon telling the tale of the Holocaust.

All Leonard’s various drafts of a novel had done was record his passive characters’ confusion—so perfectly matching his own—at why the world was changing for the worse around them.

Leonard tossed the stacks of manuscript into a large box and closed the top.

When had he realized that things in the United States of America were going in the wrong direction… not the wrong direction of a thousand intellectual crying-wolf outcries, the fashionable cries of Marx, Marcuse, Gramsci, Alinsky, and others… but really going to hell in a handbasket?

Recently, for reasons he couldn’t trace, he’d been remembering the early days of the Obama administration. Leonard had been married to his last wife, Nubia, then—certainly the least stressful of his four marriages. And although they were living in Colorado at the time, Leonard teaching at CU Boulder and Nubia heading up the African-American Womyn’s Studies Department at DU in Denver, she had insisted on returning to her hometown of Chicago to be there on the night Obama was elected in 2008. Nubia had been so certain that her candidate would win that she’d booked the flight to Chicago for both of them in August, the day after Obama was nominated at the Democratic Convention in Denver. Nubia had been a delegate at that convention.

They’d stayed at her mother’s house. Nubia’s three brothers and two sisters and all their spouses and kids were there to watch the returns and even before Obama reached the magic number of delegates, everyone had walked over to Grant Park for the final announcement and celebration.

Leonard remembered the cheering and the tears on Nubia’s—and his own—cheeks. Leonard had been ten years old when police attacked protesters in the park not too far from where Obama was acknowledging his victory that night, too young to pay much attention to the turbulent 1960s. This night, with the hundreds of thousands of people streaming into Grant Park and the cheering and weeping and hugging of strangers when the huge TV displays showed CNN announcing Obama reaching the critical delegate number, seemed to be both the past and future of Chicago and America.

Things had been dark, but they had all reached the Promised Land together.

That feeling had faded faster for Leonard than it had for Nubia over the next few years, which was one reason the marriage had ended earlier than it might otherwise have.

It was not that Leonard, an intellectual and proud member and even leader of his faculty tribe then in his early, healthy fifties, had suddenly turned into a closet Republican. No, during all of those years of violent change, Leonard had remained a believer—in hope, in change, in the important role the federal government needed to play in everything from enforcing climate-change regulations to taking control of health care and a thousand other facets of American life.

But over that decade and the next, as the recession seemed to be ending and then slid back into something far worse and seemingly never-ending, as the foreign wars ended in defeat and retreat, and as the government and its many entitlement programs bet wrong on the future and went broke—Leonard began to doubt.

Doubt whether those social decisions toward ever-increasing government deficit spending in the midst of Round One of the great global recession had been the wise thing to do.

Doubt whether America’s eventual retreat from the rising success of radical Islam’s influence around the world was the wisest course.

Doubt whether the United States of America should have claimed its new and more humble role in the second decade of the twenty-first century as “just one nation among many.” Despite Professor George Leonard Fox’s deeply entrenched intellectual skepticism about anything even remotely bordering on vulgar patriotism, hadn’t there been something unique about America… other than its oft-alluded-to offenses of racism, sexism, imperialism, and rampant capitalism?

As the second decade of the century ground on and ground so many people around the world down through bankruptcy, failure, and compromise with violent aggressors, Leonard began to wonder—and even express his questions to Nubia—whether there hadn’t truly been something exceptional to the old view and power of the United States after all.

“I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything more from someone born in the fucking nineteen-fifties,” Nubia had said shortly before she’d left him. “You’ll always live in the fucking nineteen-fifties, along with Senator George McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.”

He hadn’t corrected her on Joseph McCarthy’s first name. Nubia had been twenty-one years younger than Leonard. And beautiful. He missed her to this day.

But he’d thought her accusation unfair. He’d explained to her once that he didn’t have a very clear memory of the Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s since he’d been born in 1958. Leonard couldn’t even tell her about the love-peace-drugs-rock-music ’60s since he’d only been twelve years old when that decade ended.

He confessed that the actual world around his childhood had seemed… what? A more ordered time. A saner time. A safer time. Even a cleaner time, he realized.

But, he argued, as all progressive liberal Democrats and intellectuals argued to themselves about the time he’d married Nubia (he just turning fifty years old and the head of his English Department, his beautiful bride not quite thirty and struggling for power in her department), the nation would have been different for Obama if the right-wingers hadn’t left them with an economy that was crumbling and a foreign policy that was failing everywhere. (Except, when Leonard continued being honest with himself, he didn’t really remember exploding economies or disastrously failing foreign policies during his thirties and forties.)

Sometime around 2011 or 2012, before Nubia left him and he’d left Colorado to come teach at UCLA, Leonard had asked various professors of economics at CU what was going on with the recession that would not end and the continuing financial, real estate, fiscal, and other crises. (Leonard had never had the slightest interest in economics… refused to treat it as a real discipline for study, much less a science. But who else could he turn to at such times?)

Five or six of the top economists on the faculty had tried to explain the convulsions then just beginning in earnest in arcane—but hopeful—terms. Leonard had tried to follow the explanations and succeeded to some extent. But he’d remained unconvinced.

Then, by chance, at a party at a fellow classics professor’s home in the foothills above Boulder, Leonard had found himself having a drink with an ancient retired professor of economics who listened to Leonard’s question, then pulled a small laptop out of his briefcase. (Phones and computers were separate things in those days, as hard as that was to imagine.)

The wrinkled old prof, already three sheets to the wind from the Scotch whiskey he’d been drinking all evening, punched up a chart and showed it to Leonard. Later, he’d e-mailed it to the English lit professor so Leonard still had a hard copy of it around somewhere.

The old chart showed a continued 8 percent debt-growth scenario—starting in 2010—with the debt shown as percentage of GDP and based on different predictions of growth, ranging from -1 percent to a healthy (but never-achieved) +4 percent.

At that never-achieved 4 percent of growth, the national debt would have equaled the Gross Domestic Product—i.e., equaled 1.0 when debt was divided by GDP—by 2015. But of course, the economy hadn’t performed that well, and the actual ratio of debt to GDP had been closer to 1.2.

The old economist’s debt-growth scenario had shown that by 2035, even if the economy had grown 4 percent a year, the debt-to-GDP ratio would be 2.2. In truth, Leonard knew, the ratio was now more than 5.0 to 1.

The chart had ended with a prediction of debt to GDP being as low as 3.2 in 2045—if the country had actually grown that much—and as bad as 18.0 in 2045 at the -1 percent growth rate.

The United States would never reach that dismal 18-times-debt-to-gross-product ratio, Leonard knew. America had gone bankrupt years ago.

“Three other economists and I worked that chart up four years ago,” slurred the drunken old Libertarian. (Or so Leonard now suspected with some alarm.) “That’s just the goddamned debt outgrowing the goddamned GDP, just as it did in Japan, and now the dragon is here and devouring us. Understand?”

“No,” said Leonard. Although part of him did, even then.

“Here,” said the old economist and pulled up another chart.

It showed the risks of growing entitlement spending and had bar graphs demonstrating how mandatory entitlement spending—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all the hundreds of other federal programs—would exceed total government revenues sometime between 2030 and 2040.

The chart had been wrong, Leonard knew. In reality, mandated entitlement spending had exceeded total government revenues before 2022, about the time the nation was officially declared bankrupt.

“That was based on projected mandatory entitlement before Obama and the Democrats rammed through their stimulus bills and all the rest of their entitlements,” growled the old prof. “Notice that somewhere in the early twenty-thirties, our mandatory spending on entitlement programs will exceed our national GDP. By twenty-fifty, the damned interest on money borrowed to pay for entitlement programs—the old, smaller entitlement programs—will be greater than the GDP.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Leonard remembered saying. “That can’t happen.”

“It can’t?” said the old economist, breathing Scotch fumes into Leonard’s face.

“Certainly not. The president and Congress would never let it come to that.”

The old man across from him was trying to focus his gaze. “I know you. I’ve read about you. You’re hot shit in English lit. Well, tell me, Mr. E-Lit Hot Shit, where’s this country going to get the money to pay for these programs?”

“The economy will come back,” said Leonard.

“That’s what they said three years ago. And every single Wall Street recovery’s been as legless as a quadriplegic Iraq veteran. And the economy—never the same as Wall Street, you understand—is worse. Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Small businesses being taxed and bullied out of existence. Unemployment rising again. Hell, there’s a permanent unemployed class in this country again for the first time since the nineteen-thirties. Inflation returning with a vengeance, making everyone poorer by the day. Shoppers aren’t spending. Buyers aren’t buying. Banks aren’t lending. And China, who still holds most of our paper, coming apart at the seams. Their economy—their miracle eight-percent-growth-a-year economy—turned out to be a bigger sham and bubble than ours. Their ‘eight percent growth’ was a bunch of old Communists determining their economic growth by fiat ahead of time—and paying for it out of government funds—like a retail store operator counting his inventory as profit.”

Leonard hadn’t understood that at all. But he was following the news on what was happening to and in and around China. It was frightening.

“The president has a lot of smart people around him,” Leonard said, standing and getting ready to move away from the retired old fool.

“It’s too fucking late for smart people,” slurred the economist, his gaze going out of focus again. He looked at his empty Scotch glass and scowled as if he’d been robbed. “The smart people are the ones who’ve fucked up this country and the world for our grandkids, Mr. Hot Shit English Lit. Remember that.”

And, for some reason, Leonard had.

Val didn’t come home on Tuesday night nor on Wednesday morning. A little after noon, Leonard called the LAPD to report a missing child.

After forty-five minutes dealing with voice-mail and holding (for some reason the LAPD played some sort of Turkish-sounding music in the background while people waited on hold; it sounded to Leonard like the wailing of crime victims), he finally got through to a police sergeant, waited another ten minutes while his call was transferred to Missing Persons, and then he was prompted for the facts. As soon as Leonard gave his grandson’s age as “sixteen” he heard the interest go out of the policeman on the other end. The final advice was—Wait a week. Call the parents of your grandson’s friends—ask them if the boy is there. If your grandson doesn’t come home by then, call us again.

Leonard had wanted to call the parents of Val’s friends, but the only boy in that group whose name he’d known was William Coyne. There were no Coynes in the ever-dwindling online phone book.

Hadn’t the boy, William, in that one time they’d met where the young Coyne was obviously shining Leonard on, said something almost condescending about his mother working for the Japanese Advisor? Or for the city in some liaison capacity with Omura’s staff?

Leonard had his phone search through all the online city official and Getty Castle directories but there was no Coyne listed anywhere. Wait… hadn’t Val said something last year about his friend Billy the C’s parents getting divorced? It had been part of a contemptuous spiel that Val had launched at Leonard about everyone Val knew being from broken homes. If she was divorced and back to her maiden name, what might it be in the Advisor’s staff directory?

Leonard had no clue. He gave up that avenue of search.

Finally, in early afternoon, Leonard left a note for Val to phone him if he came home before his grandfather returned and spent the afternoon on his bike, searching the downtown as far south as the 10, as far west as the roadblocks at Highland Avenue that kept him out of Beverly Hills, as far east as the reconquista checkpoints along Ramona, and north to Glendale.

Everywhere there were convoys of armored military vehicles—National Guard, Homeland Security, and even some regular Army. The smoke in the south was very thick. Los Angeles radio and local Internet news reported nothing out of the ordinary.

In the end, returning to their still-empty and dark basement apartment around 7 p.m., Leonard was beside himself with anger and concern.

Perhaps it was just the sight and diesel-stink of all the military vehicles he’d seen and madly pedaled out of the way of that day, but Leonard wondered if this increased belligerence and erratic behavior from Val were a result of him turning sixteen and having to face the draft now in less than a year. It was the last real discussion that Leonard and his grandson had really had, that afternoon of the boy’s lonely birthday “party.” Leonard was sure that Nick’s failure to call his son must have hurt Val deeply, but there was no discussion of that. Val’s questions that evening centered on the draft, possible ways to avoid it (there were essentially none for a healthy, white young American male who’d registered, as Val had, when the forms showed up on his phone screen), and about the various wars that American soldiers were fighting for India and Japan.

On that last query, Leonard had been less than helpful—he really had trouble understanding the NSEACPS hegemony, much less its war goals in China and elsewhere, and could only explain that sending the troops to fight for the financially more stable India and Nippon was one of America’s few sources of hard currency.

“Mr. Hartley at school says there was an old Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere almost a hundred years ago,” Val had said, “and that it had something to do with that big war fought then, but I didn’t quite understand the connection.”

The connection is irony, Leonard had thought, but he’d explained about the militarist Japanese Empire and its fancy name for its short rule over major parts of China, Malaysia, what was then called Indochina, and the Philippines and other islands of the South Pacific. He gave a quick explanation of how the Japanese during their rapid imperial expansion had touted their brutal military occupations as a throwing off of white imperial domination—which it certainly was—but only in exchange for a Japanese version of Hitler’s Master Race form of imperial conquest. “They were very close to adding Australia to their so-called co-prosperity sphere and would have done it if it hadn’t been for the Battle of Midway,” said Leonard but stopped when he saw the birthday boy’s eyes glazing over. Val was a reader, but he didn’t enjoy history the way his grandfather thought he should. As was true of most American high school students in this era of politicized curricular “relevance,” Val had never been made to place… say… the Civil War within a hundred years of its actual dates.

Was Val running away because of the draft? Tens of thousands of pre-seventeen-year-old American kids did, Leonard knew.

But he still had almost eleven months. Certainly Val wasn’t so frightened of the draft and of fighting overseas that he’d act so recklessly now.

As if commenting on Leonard’s thoughts, the twenty-four-hour TV news channel he had babbling in the background—there were more than sixty on this basic sat subscription, one catering to almost every political stance imaginable—announced that “United Nations forces” had, after “fierce fighting with local rebels loyal to Chinese warlord Lǚ fěi Zhōngzhèng,” taken the key city of Langzhong. Leonard had no idea where Langzhong was nor did he ask his phone to find out. None of it mattered. He had a sudden flash of a kid born twenty years or so earlier than he’d been, before World War II, which Val thought of only as “that big war fought a hundred years or so ago,” moving pins on giant wall maps as battles raged and American and Allied forces moved closer to Berlin or Tokyo.

The “United Nations forces” always cited in the news reports about fighting in China these days simply meant American forces. India, Japan, and the Group of Five so dominated the expanded Security Council that the UN did their bidding without so much as a threat of a veto. When the fighting dealt with the Balkans, Africa, or the Caribbean, Leonard knew, “UN forces” meant the Russians, who were trying as hard as the Americans to earn some hard currency by hiring out their military.

Leonard sighed and shifted the small phone from one hand to the other. He realized that he was doing the Academic’s Shuffle—shifting his thought from real-world worries and fears, not to mention the need for rapid decision making, to vague historical musings and abstractions. It was almost 10:30 p.m. He would have to call Val’s father in Denver. He had no other choice. The boy might be injured or kidnapped or dead… lying in a ditch somewhere in one of the taped-off and unrepaired earthquake zones near the old freeways. It was precisely the kind of place where flashgangs such as Val’s loved to hang out.

Leonard realized that this moment was the first time he’d admitted to himself that Val was almost certainly running with a flashgang.

Sighing again, he lifted the phone to punch Nick Bottom’s number.

Val stomped in smelling of gasoline and something sharper, more astringent—gunpowder? Cordite?

The boy didn’t even look at his grandfather but went straight to his room. Deathcult Rock started blasting through the locked door.

Leonard marched angrily to that door and raised his fist to bang on it. Then he paused. What was he going to say to the boy that hadn’t been said? What ultimatum was he going to give that he hadn’t already given?

Leonard went back to his study and sat in the weak cone of light from the single desk lamp.

Tomorrow he’d go see Emilio. In the meantime, he could only hope that Val and his buddies would be caught in the act for some small crime they were committing. That way, if it were a first offense and since Val was a juvenile, the LAPD would implant a tracker in Val, and Leonard wouldn’t have to pay for it or the tracker software.

Leonard was ashamed of what he was thinking and wishing for. But he still wished it.

After Val left for school in the morning, Leonard went to find Emilio. He carried his life’s savings in cash in a canvas messenger bag slung over his shoulder.

Leonard rode his bicycle southeast from Echo Park past the Dodger Stadium Detention Center and under the Pasadena Freeway to where Sunset became Cesar Chavez Avenue. As the neighborhoods deteriorated, Leonard was certain that someone would rob him for the bicycle and end up with the more than a million new dollars in his messenger bag. The older Professor George Leonard Fox got, the more he was certain that the only real god was Bitch Irony.

No one robbed him during his cycling east.

By midmorning he was at the old Union Station, a landmark he loved—Leonard and his daughter Dara had once spent a weekend just watching old movies, most of them set in the 1930s to the 1950s, with major scenes shot in Union Station—and then south under the abandoned stretch of the 101. It was a hot day for September and Leonard was sweating through his white shirt by the time he reached his first roadblock where Santa Fe Avenue ran into East 4th Street.

East 4th was barricaded. On both sides of the street hung the large green-white-red tricolors of Nuevo Mexico. Unlike the former United States of Mexico flag designed in 1968, the eagle in the center of these flags was not wrestling with a snake and was facing forward. It wore a crown. Emilio had once explained that this flag was based on the 1821 flag of the First Mexican Empire, but the new eagle was so stylized that it reminded Leonard more of the FDR-era National Recovery Act eagle or—more ominously—of the stylized Nazi eagle.

He didn’t have time now to study the flags. Men armed with automatic weapons came out from behind the permanent barricades.

“¿Qué quieres, viejo?”

Professor George Leonard Fox didn’t appreciate the “old man” but he presented the card Emilio had given him and answered in a voice he managed to keep from quavering, “Exijo que me lleven a la casa de Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa.”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have used the verb “demand,” but it was too late now. One of the spanics started to laugh but his comrade holding the small card showed it to him and the laughter died.

“¿Por qué quieres ver a Don Fernández y Figueroa, gringo viejo?”

Leonard was tired of the smirks and insults. “Just take me there,” he said in English. “Don Fernández y Figueroa is expecting me.”

Five of the armed men conferred rapidly. Then the one with the card gestured Leonard toward a black Volkswagen G-wagen parked behind a barricade. “Come.”

Emilio lived in a huge old home just east of Evergreen Cemetery.

Actually, Leonard realized as his escort led him through layers of roadblocks and sentries, it was far more an armed compound than a home. Military vehicles with the crowned-eagle Nuevo Mexico flag painted on the sides filled the streets for blocks around. Across the street, the wall and fence surrounding the huge Evergreen Cemetery had been knocked down and Leonard could see scores more wheeled and tracked vehicles parked on the faded grass. In front of Emilio’s address, rows of large, black SUVs filled the street at roadblock angles. The compound’s walls were topped with embedded broken glass and multiple rolls of razor wire.

His guide was stopped half a dozen times inside the compound’s walls and in the house itself and each time the card was presented. Twice Leonard was frisked—aggressively, embarrassingly, thoroughly. It would have been absurdly easy for them to appropriate his bag of money, but other than a quick search through the rubber-banded stacks of bills, no one paid attention to his paltry life’s savings.

On all sides of the tiled foyer hallway clustered groups of men in various rooms. They were smoking, arguing, bent over maps, gesturing. Everyone seemed to be talking on cell phones even as they argued and gestured. His escort led him up two flights of stairs and down a broad hallway. Two men in civilian clothes but carrying automatic weapons stood guard outside the open doorway of a library. Again the card was presented by his guide. Leonard was frisked a third and final time and they opened the door wider and allowed him to enter. Again the searchers looked at his messenger bag full of bank notes and said nothing.

The room was impressive. Bookcases filled with leather-bound old tomes rose twelve feet on three sides of the library. The fourth wall was windows and through it Leonard could see and hear black helicopters landing in a paved area of several acres within the walls of the compound. Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa was sitting behind a broad desk. Opposite him was a bald man in his early fifties and Leonard could see at once that the two men were related. Both stood as he approached.

“Leonard,” said his Saturday-morning Echo Park chess partner of the past four years.

“Don Fernández y Figueroa,” said Leonard, bowing slightly in respect.

“No, no,” said the older man. “Emilio. I am Emilio. Allow me to introduce my son Eduardo. Eduardo, this is my chess and conversation partner of whom I have spoken with such respect, Professor Emeritus Dr. George Leonard Fox.”

Eduardo bowed his bald head. His voice was very soft. “Es un verdadero placer conocerlo, señor.”

“The pleasure is mine,” said Leonard.

Saying to Emilio, “I will see to the dispositions, Father,” Eduardo bowed toward Leonard again and left the room, shutting the tall door behind him.

Leonard felt his heart pounding. All these years he’d known that Emilio’s sons and grandsons must be important in the reconquista movement in California and Los Angeles, but now he realized that it was Emilio who was in charge. Why had this important—and dangerous—man wasted so many slow Saturday mornings with a retired classics/English lit professor?

Leonard had never noticed bodyguards in Echo Park on those mornings, but now he realized that they must have been there.

“You have decided to leave Los Angeles, my friend?” said Emilio, waving Leonard to the empty chair and taking his own seat behind the broad, empty desk. Outside the window, more helicopters were landing and taking off.

“Yes.”

“Bueno,” said Emilio. “It is a good time for such a move.” The older man hesitated a second, cleared his throat, and continued. “In two days—early Saturday morning, before dawn—the state of California will attempt to assassinate me here. They will use a Great White predator drone and will destroy this entire compound, hoping to kill me, my family, and everyone here.”

“Good God…”

“Sí,” said Emilio. “God is good. He allowed us to gain this valuable intelligence. My family and I shall not be here when the missiles strike. The forces of the reconquista are ready to respond. Within a week, all of the City of Angels will be under new leadership.”

Leonard had no idea what to say to this so he set the heavy messenger bag on the desk.

“One million three hundred thousand in new dollars,” he said in a strangely strangled voice. “My entire life’s savings. I kept only a small bit for expenses during the trip.”

Emilio did not look in the bag. He nodded courteously. “It is less than the usual price for two people being transported from here to Denver… you still wish to go to Denver, my friend?”

“Yes.”

“It is less than the usual price, but the convoy leader owes me a favor,” continued Emilio. The old man smiled, showing nicotine-stained teeth. “Also, our reconquista men and vehicles are providing security for this convoy. The convoy leader would not wish to alienate us over a few dollars one way or the other.”

“When does the convoy leave?” asked Leonard. He felt hollow, almost buoyant, as if he’d downed several strong drinks. This dialogue belonged in a movie, not in Professor George Leonard Fox’s life.

“Midnight Friday,” said Emilio. “Mere hours before the scheduled attack on my home. There will be twenty-three eighteen-wheelers in this convoy, some private vehicles, and, of course, our security vehicles. You and your grandson will ride in one of the large trucks. In the extended cab, of course.”

“Where do I go to find the convoy?” Leonard’s worry was that the rendezvous point would be too deep in East Los Angeles for Val and him to get there on bicycle or foot. Or at least get there alive.

“The old railyards off North Mission Road, just above where the One-oh-One runs into the Ten,” said Emilio. “You can get there easily by taking West Sunset past North Alameda to North Mission Road. There should be no roadblocks or checkpoints until you get to the railyards themselves. I have a letter of transit drafted and signed for you.”

Letter of transit, thought Leonard. He’d never heard that phrase outside of the movie Casablanca. Now Don Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa was reaching into his desk and drawing out and handing to him such a document. Emilio’s bold signature took up most of the width of the page.

The two men stood and Leonard used both his hands to shake Emilio’s liver-spotted, heavily veined, but still powerful hand. “Thank you, my good friend,” said Leonard. He was terrified and exhilarated and close to weeping.

Emilio called to him before he got to the door. “Your grandson… he will go with you?”

“He’ll go,” Leonard said grimly.

“Good. I doubt if we shall see each other again… at least in this life. Go with God, my dear friend.”

“And you,” said Leonard. “Good luck, Emilio.”

Outside in the hallway, his former guide and Emilio’s son Eduardo were waiting with three armed men.

Val came home early that evening, in time for dinner. As they ate their microwaved meal, Leonard told his grandson of the plan to leave at midnight of the next day. He did not phrase it as an option for the boy.

“I’m told the convoy will take about ten days to get to Denver,” finished Leonard. “You’ll see your father in a week and a half.”

Val looked at him calmly, almost appraisingly. Whatever objection he was going to raise, Leonard had the answer. If necessary, he would take Eduardo Emilio Fernández y Figueroa up on his offer to have two reconquista fighters come to Leonard’s home and carry Val to the midnight rendezvous point.

But surprisingly—amazingly—Val said, “Midnight Friday? A convoy to Denver? That’s a great idea, Leonard. What do we take with us?”

“Just what we can get in two small duffel bags,” replied his astonished grandfather. “And that includes our own food for the trip.”

“Great,” said Val. “I’ll go pack the few clothes I want to take. And a couple of books, I guess. Nothing else.”

Leonard still couldn’t believe it was going to be this simple. “You don’t have to go to school tomorrow,” he said. “And we can’t let anyone know we’re leaving, Val. Someone might try to stop us.”

“Yeah,” said the sixteen-year-old, his eyes slightly unfocused as if he were thinking about something else. “But no, I’ll go to school. I need to clean a few things out of my locker. But I’ll be home by nine tomorrow.”

“No later than nine!” said Leonard. He was afraid of what the boy might be doing with his friends on that final evening.

“No later than nine, Grandpa. I promise.”

Leonard could only blink. When was the last time that Val had called him Grandpa? He couldn’t recall.

Leonard spent the day sick with worry. The two duffels, packed full of food bars, canteens, fresh fruit, and a few clothes and books, sat near the kitchen door as if to mock the old man.

He’d started to phone Nick Bottom to tell him that they were coming and then put it off. He’d wait until they were actually on the road.

I don’t believe this was his actual thought. He’d believe it when they crossed the California line into Nevada.

Val came home a few minutes after eight o’clock. The boy’s clothes were filthy with mud and there was blood on his forehead and shirt. His eyes were wide.

“Leonard, give me your phone!”

“What? What’s wrong? What happened?”

“Give me your fucking phone!”

Leonard handed the phone to the crazed boy, wondering whom he was going to call and with what news. But Val smashed the phone under the heel of his heavy boot—once, twice, as many times as it took for the components to spill out. The boy grabbed the chip and ran out the door.

Leonard was too surprised to chase after him.

Val was back in three minutes. “I tossed it onto the back of a truck headed west,” he panted.

“Val, sit down. You’re bleeding.”

The boy shook his head. “Not my blood, Grandpa. Turn on the TV.”

The Los Angeles News Channel was in the middle of a special bulletin.

“… of a terrorist attack at the rededication of the Disney Center for the Performing Arts earlier this evening. Shots were fired at Advisor Daichi Omura, but the Advisor was not injured. We repeat, Advisor Omura was not injured during the terrorist attack, although two of his bodyguards were killed along with at least five of the terrorists. We have video now of…”

Leonard could no longer hear the announcer’s words. Or, rather, he could no longer make sense of them.

There on the screen were the dead faces of several of the terrorists. They were all boys. Their faces were blood-streaked, their dead eyes open and staring. The camera paused on the last dead face.

It was the face of young William Coyne.

Leonard turned in horror toward his grandson. “What have you done?”

Val had both duffels and was shoving one against his grandfather’s chest. “We gotta go, Leonard. Now.”

“No, we have to call the authorities… straighten this out…”

Val shook him with a strength that Leonard never would have imagined in the boy. “There’s nothing to straighten out, old man. If they catch me, they’ll kill me. Do you understand? We have to go!”

“The rendezvous at the railyard’s not until midnight…,” mumbled Leonard. His extremities were tingling and he felt dizzy. He realized that he was in shock.

“It doesn’t matter,” gasped Val as he splashed water from the kitchen sink onto his face, wiping the blood away with the small towel hanging on the washing machine. “We’ll hide there until it’s time. But we have to go… now!”

“The lights…,” said Leonard as Val dragged him out the back door.

Val said nothing as he tugged his grandfather to the bicycles and the old man and the boy began pedaling madly down the unlit alley.