Flashback

1.07 Six Flags Over the Jews—Monday, Sept. 13

There was a man crucified above the iron gates of the Denver Country Club but it didn’t slow Nick down in his Monday-morning commute up Speer Boulevard to Six Flags Over the Jews. The phone news had no identity on the crucified man and there was no announcement yet on the reason for his crucifixion. Traffic moved briskly and Nick had to flog the gelding to keep up, getting only the briefest glimpse to his left of various emergency vehicles around the entrance and cops on ladders. The once -expensive and -exclusive country club hadn’t been a country club for some years now and the golf course and tennis courts were covered with several hundred windowless blue tents of the sort the UN liked to bring in to Third World countries after tsunamis or plague. No one that Nick knew was aware of the purpose for these tents here at the club—or, for that matter, which country or corporation owned the country club these days—and no one seemed to care, including Nick.

He’d used all the flashback Sato had given him and slept all Sunday afternoon and Sunday night. This sort of full-systems crash happened often with heavy flashback users; the drug’s effect seemed like sleep, down to the rapid eye movements, but it wasn’t sleep. At least not the kind of deep sleep the human brain required. So once every couple of weeks, flashback users crashed and slept for twenty-four hours or more.

Except for a headache that felt like the world’s worst hangover, Nick had to admit that he felt more refreshed.

The problem was that nothing around him—not Speer Boulevard with its overhanging trees, not the thrumming traffic in the two peasant lanes or the skateboard-low humming hydrogen-car traffic in the VIP lane, not the hundreds of makeshift shacks along the trickling course of Cherry Creek sunken between the bikepaths fifteen feet below the level of the street—seemed real. This had been the case for at least five years now but it seemed worse this month. The flashback hours with Dara were real; this nonsense interlude with Sato or improvising bad lines with the bit players in this poorly written, poorly lit, poorly acted play was certainly not real.

But what was confusing Nick Bottom now was his multiple use of flashback. He’d used it to review the interview with Danny Oz almost six years ago. He’d used it, as he had every day for the past five and a half years, to spend time with his dead wife.

But he’d also used hours of the drug to try to find out where Dara might have been on the night that Keigo Nakamura was killed.

He’d been out on a stakeout on Santa Fe Drive that night, down on the edge of the reconquista no-man’s-land there, sitting in the backseat of an unmarked patrol car as the two detectives up front watched the home of a local warlord who, they knew, was moving guns and drugs into the city. As a Major Crimes day-shift detective, Nick Bottom had had no business in the backseat of that particular unmarked car on that particular stakeout on that particular night, but in that first year after his promotion he’d had the stupid idea that he could do his white-collar downtown detective work while still staying fully in touch with the mean streets and their denizens, both crook and cop.

He couldn’t. It had been a stupid idea.

The two detectives sitting in the front seat that night—Cummings, the detective third grade with seven years in as a patrol officer but less than a year’s experience as detective, and Coleman, a twenty-five-year veteran in the DPD and nine years a detective first grade (the same grade as Nick)—had let him know that night that he was as useless and unwelcome as the proverbial tit on an equally proverbial boar.

Nick had been there anyway, shivering in the chill—they’d shut off the batteries to conserve power—and breathing in the well-known stakeout smell of sweat and old-car vinyl and coffee breath and the occasional silent but deadly fart from the front seat. God help him, he’d loved it the years he worked the street.

The flashback reliving of that hour had reminded Nick that he’d phoned Dara a little before midnight. He’d meant to phone earlier, but he’d been out at a corner all-night bodega getting coffee for Coleman and Cummings then. As it was, she didn’t pick up. It had surprised Nick, but it hadn’t worried him. When he was working on the street, she always left her phone on. That afternoon—he remembered this only through the flashback reliving of the hour around midnight—he’d told her he’d be working late, but he hadn’t told her that he’d be on the street. She often turned her phone off when she knew he was safe doing office work at Central Division.

That night, Nick now remembered, he’d gotten about three hours’ sleep on the couch at DPD CD and had been wakened when the call came in from the division commander, turning the Keigo murder case over to him and his partner, K. T. Lincoln. The word was that the responding detectives didn’t have boots high enough for this sort of politically charged case. Nick was still a department golden boy then; K. T. Lincoln brought some nice racial, gender, and sexual-orientation balance to the whole thing. (The commander admitted that he would have assigned a Japanese detective to the case, if they’d had a Jap with a gold shield, which they didn’t. In fact, the commander confessed, the entire Denver Police Department had only one officer of Japanese descent, and she was a rookie patrol officer taking her lumps and learning over in the Five Corners area. Nick Bottom and K. T. Lincoln would have to do.)

Nick had used a fifteen-minute vial of flashback reliving his call to Dara that morning. She’d been strangely unexcited about his news, even though closing the case could have meant a huge boost in his career. As assistant to a Denver ADA, she knew about such things. She sounded tired, even drugged. When Nick mentioned that he’d tried to call her around midnight the night before, there’d been a pause—more noticeable to the second-Nick reliving the moment via flashback than to the caffeine-jazzed real-time Nick that morning—and she’d said she’d taken a pill and turned off the phone and gone to bed early.

The three seconds’ worth of video image of Dara’s face across the street from Keigo’s apartment that night haunted Nick more than anything had since she’d died. He’d downloaded the video file into his phone and watched it a dozen times, using his wall-wide HD3D display in his cubie for the clearest image, and sometimes he was certain it was Dara; other times he was even more certain that it wasn’t—that it was a woman who didn’t even really look like Dara.

He’d also done three more fifteen-minute flashes of the phone conversation with her on the morning he’d told her about the Keigo murder, then flashed and reflashed an hour of the first time he’d seen her that next evening.

Did she seem false that evening? Did she seem to be hiding something from him?

Was he losing his mind?

Had he lost it long ago?

What everyone now called Six Flags Over the Jews was just to the left of the overpass where Speer Boulevard met I-25. Across the highway on the hill to the southwest of the sprawling complex loomed the Mile High Homeland Security Detention Center.

Nick had been vaguely curious why they called the amusement-park-turned-refugee-center Six Flags, since the company that ran the other Six Flags amusement parks only owned this one for about ten years right at the beginning of the century. For more than a century before that and for some years after the brief Six Flags era, the park had been called Elitch Gardens.

There were no gardens in sight now as Nick turned into the huge, empty parking area and followed concrete blast shields toward the first of several security checkpoints.

Nick knew about the old Elitch Gardens because of his grandfather. Nick’s father, who’d died when Nick was fifteen, had been a state patrol officer. Nick’s earliest memory of his old man was of his pistol, a large Smith & Wesson revolver. Nick’s father hadn’t died in a shootout (like Nick, he’d never fired his weapon in the line of duty), but in an accident on I-25 not two miles from where Nick’s wife, Dara, and her boss, Assistant District Attorney Harvey Cohen, had died. Nick’s father had pulled over to help a stranded motorist and a drunken sixteen-year-old driver had swerved onto the shoulder and killed him.

Nick’s grandfather had been a bus driver in the city and his great-grandfather had been a motorman on the old trolleys that connected Denver and its suburbs and nearby towns before cars forced them out. From Grandpa Nicholas, Nick had heard lovely tales of the old Elitch Gardens, whose motto for decades was Not to See Elitch’s Is Not to See Denver.

First opened in 1890, the original Elitch Gardens had been miles away from the downtown to the west, out at 38th Avenue and Tennyson Street in a suburb that was more like a separate village. That first Elitch Gardens, while growing, had kept its trees, extensive flower gardens, and shaded picnic areas where guests could eat lunches they’d packed for themselves. For forty years or so it had a zoo and for a century it boasted the Theater at the Gardens, first offering summer-stock performances and then, later in the twentieth century, visiting movie and TV stars. By the 1930s, Elitch’s had added the Trocadero Ballroom for dancing and visiting jazz groups and big bands and Nick’s grandfather had mentioned listening to An Evening at the Troc weekly national radio broadcast. Sometime in the 1950s the owners had added a Kiddieland with its little open-wheel race cars, two-seat rocket planes, and real floating “motorboats,” and although big amusement parks had catered almost exclusively to adults up until then, Elitch’s Kiddieland was a huge hit.

In 1994, Elitch’s had moved to its present location near the downtown and two years later had been purchased by the corporation that operated other Six Flags parks across America. The new owners abandoned grass and gardens for cement and concrete, Kiddieland and slow sky rides for ever more inverted-high-g screaming rides, and entrance prices that required a bank loan for a family. When Six Flags sold it sometime around 2006, the new company, although restoring the name Elitch Gardens, finished the job of destroying the last vestige of gardens and enjoyment for anyone other than the seriously adrenaline-addicted.

Nick knew all this detail because his grandfather and mother both had used Elitch’s as a metaphor for America in the last part of the twentieth century and early part of the twenty-first—abandoning shade and gardens and grace and affordable family fun for overpriced sun-glaring terror at six g’s inverted.

Well, thought Nick as he parked the car and walked toward the checkpoint across the cracked, heaving, and weed-strewn parking pavement, America had got all the terror it could ever have hoped for.

The security people at the entrance checkpoint were ex-DPD and remembered Nick and treated him well, and the magical black card that Nakamura had recently sent to him via Sato settled all other issues. One of the guards phoned ahead to alert Danny Oz to be ready for a visitor and even led Nick through the thick maze of hovels, tents, abandoned amusement park rides, and open-air kiosks.

“It looks like they have everything right in here,” said Nick, just to make conversation.

“Oh, yeah,” said the guard, a retired patrolman named Charlie Duquane, “the camp’s pretty self-sufficient. They have their own doctors and dentists and psychiatrists and a decent medical clinic. They’ve even got six synagogues.”

“What’s the resident count?”

“Around twenty-six thousand,” said Charlie. “Give or take a couple a hundred.”

The resident count six years ago had been a little over thirty-two thousand. Nick knew that many of the Israeli refugees were older and cancer was rampant in all the camps. Almost none were released into the general population.

He met with the poet in an otherwise empty mess tent under the rusting steel coils and pillars of some upside-down high-speed scream ride.

The hand behind the handshake was listless, clammy, bony, and weak. Nick had just seen Danny Oz in his flashback preparation and in the 3D crime-scene re-creation back at Keigo Nakamura’s LoDo apartment complex and there was no doubt that the man had aged horribly in the past six years. Oz had been thin and graying and vaguely tubercular-looking six years ago in a properly poetic way, his hair already turned mostly gray in his early fifties, but there had been a coiled-spring energy to the thin figure then and the eyes had been as animated as the poet’s conversation. Now he was an animated corpse: skin and eyes a jaundiced yellow; gray hair as yellowed as the teeth of the heavy smoker; laugh lines and somewhat attractive scholarly wrinkles transformed to grooves and furrows in skin pulled far too tight over an eagerly emerging skull.

Nick knew that Danny Oz had come out of what the Jews called the Second Holocaust with some sort of radiation-induced cancer (all eleven of the bombs had been made very dirty indeed by the True Believers who’d built them), but he couldn’t remember what kind of cancer it was.

It didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it was slowly killing the poet.

“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Detective Bottom. Did you ever catch young Mr. Nakamura’s killer?”

“No ‘Detective’ before my name any longer, Mr. Oz,” said Nick. “They fired me from the force more than five and a half years ago. And no, they’re no closer to getting Keigo Nakamura’s killer than they were six years ago.”

Danny Oz drew deeply from his cigarette—Nick belatedly realized that it was cannabis, possibly for the cancer pain—and squinted through exhaled smoke. “If you’re not with the police any longer, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, Mr. Bottom?”

Nick explained that he’d been hired by the victim’s father while he noticed that, even allowing for the joint and the possibility that they’d wakened Oz for this visit, the poet’s eyes were too unfocused, set in a stare above and beyond Nick’s right shoulder. Nick recognized that kind of thousand-yard stare from those mornings when he decided to shave. Danny Oz was using a lot more flashback than he’d been on six years ago.

“So do we go through the same questions as six years ago or come up with new ones?” asked Danny Oz.

“Have you thought of anything else that might be of help, Mr. Oz?”

“Danny. And no, I haven’t. You and your fellow investigators are still going on the assumption that it was something that came up during his video interviews that got Keigo Nakamura killed?”

“There aren’t any ‘fellow investigators,’ ” said Nick with a ghost of a smile. “And I don’t have anything as elegant or advanced as a theory. Just going over old ground, I’m afraid.”

“Well, it’s still a pleasure to talk to a character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” said Oz. “And I’ve often thought of what you told me.”

“What’s that?”

“That you didn’t know that you were a character in Shakespeare’s play until your wife told you.”

Nick did grin now. “You have a damned good memory, Mr… Danny.” Unless you flashed on our last meeting, too. But why would you waste money and drug for that? To keep your story straight? “But Dara wasn’t my wife yet when she broke the news of the other Nick Bottom to me. We were dating… sort of. She was an undergraduate and I was already a cop, going back to school to get hours toward my master’s degree.”

“How did you take the news? Of your ears and possible sexual intimacy with the Queen of the Fairies, I mean.”

“I dealt with it,” said Nick. “It was the other Nick Bottom’s vision—or what he said was a dream-vision he’d awakened from—that Dara was interested in. She thought that I had just such a joyous awakening… an epiphany, she called it… in my future. That first night on our date, she recited almost the entire passage from the play from memory. I was very impressed.”

Danny Oz smiled, drew deeply from the joint, and stubbed it out in a coffee can lid he was using as an ashtray. He lit another cigarette—a regular one this time, which seemed to please him more—and squinted through the smoke as he recited:

“When my cue comes, call me and I will answer. My next is ‘Most fair Pyramus.’ Heigh-ho! Peter Quince? Flute the bellows-mender? Snout, the tinker? Starveling? God’s my life! Stolen hence, and left me asleep! I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, or his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.”

Nick felt something like a hot electric shock run through his system. He’d never heard those words spoken aloud by anyone but Dara. “As I said, you’ve got one hell of a memory, Mr. Oz,” he said.

The older man shrugged and drew deeply on his cigarette, as if the smoke were holding back his pain. “Poets. We remember things. That’s part of what makes us poets.”

“My wife had one of your books,” said Nick and was immediately and painfully sorry he’d brought it up. “One of your books of poetry, I mean. In English. She showed it to me after I interviewed you six years ago.”

Less than three months before she died.

Danny Oz smiled slightly, waiting.

Realizing that he had to say something about the poems, Nick said, “I don’t really understand modern poems.”

Now Oz’s smile was real, showing the large, nicotine-stained teeth. “I’m afraid my verse never attained modernity, Detective… I mean, Mr. Bottom. I wrote in the epic form, old in Homer’s day.”

Nick showed his palms in surrender.

“Did you and your wife,” began Oz, “on your first date, I mean, get into what Shakespeare’s Bottom was talking about in that passage?”

The Santa Fe knife wounds deep in Nick Bottom’s deeper belly muscles were hurting as if they were new, shooting threads of fire deeper into him. Why the goddamn hell had he brought up Dara and that fucking passage from the play? Oz wouldn’t even know that Dara was dead. Nick’s belly clenched in anticipation of what the dying poet might say next. He hurried to fill the silence before Oz could speak.

“Yeah, sort of. My wife was the English major. We both thought it was weird that Bottom waking from his dream had his senses all mixed up. You know—the eye hath not heard, the ear hath not seen, the hand is not able to taste—all that stuff. We decided Bottom’s dream had messed up his senses, like that real disease of the nerves… whatchamacallit.”

“Synesthesia,” said Danny Oz, tipping ashes into the coffee can lid. Another brief flick of what could have been a wry, self-mocking smile. “I only know the word because it’s the same one used in writing where a metaphor uses terms from one kind of sense impression to describe another, like… oh… a ‘loud color.’ Yes, that was very strange and Shakespeare uses synesthesia again later in the play when the actors in the play-within-a-play ask Theseus, the Duke of Athens, whether he’d prefer to ‘hear’ a bergamask dance or ‘see’ an epilogue.”

“I don’t really understand any of that literary stuff,” said Nick. He wondered if he should just abort the interview and stand up and walk away.

Oz persisted. His pain-filled eyes seemed to catch a new gleam of interest as he squinted through the smoke. “But it is very queer, to use an old word that’s coming back into proper usage. Bottom says at the end of his dream-epiphany speech that after his friend Peter Quince turns the revelation in his, Bottom’s, dream into a ballad, ‘I shall sing it at her death.’ But whose death? Who is the ‘she’ who will be dying?”

The knife twisted in Nick Bottom’s bowels. He spoke through gritted teeth. “Whatshername. The character who dies in the play the Bottom guy is putting on in front of the Duke.”

Danny Oz shook his head. “Thisbe? No, I think not. Nor is he speaking of the death of Titania, the fairy queen that Bottom may have slept with. The woman at whose death he’ll be singing this all-important ballad is a total mystery… something above or outside the play. It’s like a clue to a Shakespearean mystery that no one has noticed.”

Ask me if I give a fucking shit, Nick thought fiercely. Surely the older man could see Nick’s pain even through his own smugness and smoke. But the thousand-yard stare seemed more focused on Nick and at ease than at any time before. Nick was very aware of the 9mm semiautomatic pistol on his hip. If he shot Danny Oz in the head today, both he and the poet would feel better.

Oz said, “As enjoyable as literary criticism connected to your name is, Mr. Bottom, I imagine you want to ask me a few questions.”

“Just a few,” said Nick, realizing that his hand was already on the butt of the pistol under his loose shirt. It took an effort to relax his grip and bring the sweaty hand back up to the table. “Mostly I just wanted to see if you remembered anything else about the interview with Keigo Nakamura.”

Oz shook his head. “Totally banal… both the questions and my answers, I mean. Young Mr. Nakamura was interested in us… in me… in all of the Israeli refugees here, only in terms of our flashback use.”

“And you told him that you did use flashback,” said Nick.

Oz nodded. “One thing I was curious about six years ago but was too nervous to ask about, Mr. Bottom. You questioned all of us who’d been interviewed by Keigo Nakamura in his last days with a focus on what questions he’d asked in the interviews. Why didn’t you just view the video he shot? Or were you testing our memory for some reason? Or our honesty?”

“The camera and memory chips were stolen when Keigo Nakamura was murdered that night,” said Nick. “Other than some scribbled prep notes and the memory of some of his assistants, we had no idea what questions he asked you and the others in the final four days of interviews.”

“Ah,” said Oz. “That makes sense. You know, one thing that Keigo Nakamura asked me that I don’t believe I remembered in the police interviews years ago… it just came to me recently… he asked me if I would use F-two.”

“F-two?” said Nick, shocked. “Did he act as if he thought it was real?”

“That’s the strange thing, Mr. Bottom,” said Oz. “He did.”

F-two, Flashback-two, had been a rumor for more than a decade now. It was supposed to be an improvement on the drug flashback where one could not only relive one’s actual past, but live fantasy alternatives to one’s past reality. Those who kept insisting that the drug would appear on the streets any day now, and who had insisted this for almost fifteen years, said that F-two was a mixture of regular flashback and a complex hallucinogenic drug that keyed on endorphins, so the F-two fantasies would always be pleasurable, never nightmares. One would never feel pain in an F-two dream.

F-two believers compared the mythical drug to splicing an existing film—or editing video with special digital effects—so that the memories currently available to be relived through all one’s senses via flashback would be a sort of raw material for happy dreams with all of the sight, smell, taste, and touch of flashback, but directed by one’s fantasies. Until Nick had realized that F-two really was a myth, that it had never appeared on the street anywhere in the world, he’d imagined using it himself so that he could not only relive his past with Dara but live a new, imagination-structured future with her.

“What’d you tell Keigo when he asked?” said Nick.

“I said that I didn’t believe there ever was going to be a drug like F-two,” said Oz, inhaling deeply as he smoked, holding the smoke in, and exhaling almost regretfully. “And I told him that if there were such a drug in the future, I almost certainly wouldn’t use it, since I produced enough fantasies in my own mind. I told him that I used flashback to remember a single memory… over and over.” The poet’s cigarette was mostly ash now. “You might say that I’m obsessive.”

“Do you still use flashback?” asked Nick. He knew the answer, but he was curious if Oz would admit to it.

The poet laughed. “Oh, yes, Mr. Bottom. More than ever. I spend at least eight hours a day under the flash these days. I’ll probably be flashing when this prostate cancer finally kills me.”

Where do you get all the fucking money for the drugs? was Nick’s thought. But instead of asking that, he nodded and said, “In the interview six years ago, I don’t believe you told me what you were flashing on. You said that Keigo hadn’t asked you… although I would have thought that this would have been his focus with all flashback users.”

“He didn’t ask me,” said Oz. “Which was decidedly odd. But then it was odd that he chose me to interview at all.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because, as you know, Keigo Nakamura was making a video documentary about Americans’ use of flashback. His entire theme and central metaphor were about the decline of a once-great culture that had turned its face away from the future and sunken into obsession with its own past—with three hundred and forty million individual pasts. But I’m not an American, Mr. Bottom. I’m Israeli. Or was.”

This question of why Keigo had chosen to talk to Oz hadn’t come up in the interview and Nick didn’t know if it was important or not. But it was definitely odd.

“So what do you flash on, Mr. Oz?”

The poet lit a new cigarette from the butt of the last and ground the dying one out. “I lost all of my extended family in the attack, Mr. Bottom. Both my parents were still alive. Two brothers and two sisters. All married. All with families. My young second wife and our young boy and girl—David was six, Rebecca eight. My ex-wife, Leah, with whom I was on good terms, and our twenty-one-year-old son Lev. All gone in twenty minutes of nuclear fire or murdered later by the Arab invaders in their cheap Russian-made radiation suits.”

“So you flash to spend time with them all,” Nick said wearily. He was supposed to go to Boulder later this afternoon for the interview with Derek Dean at Naropa, but right now he didn’t have the energy to drive that far, much less do another interview.

“Never,” said Danny Oz.

Nick sat up and raised an eyebrow.

Oz smiled with almost infinite sadness and flicked ashes. “I’ve never once used the drug to go back to my family.”

“What then? What do you flash on, Mr. Oz?” Nick should have added an If you don’t mind me asking or some such polite phrase, but he’d forgotten that he was no longer a cop. That forgetting hadn’t happened for a while.

“The day of the attack,” said Danny Oz. “I replay the day my country died over and over and over. Every day of my life. Every time I go under the flash.”

Nick must have shown his skepticism.

Oz nodded as if he agreed with the skepticism and said, “I was with an archaeologist friend at a site in southern Israel called Tel Be’er Sheva. It was believed to be the remains of the biblical town Be’er Sheva or Beersheba.”

Nick had never heard of it, but then he hadn’t read anything from the Bible for thirty years or more and knew very little about the geography. There was no longer any reason to know the geography of that dead zone.

“Tel Be’er Sheva was just north of the Havat MaShash Experimental Agricultural Farm,” said Oz.

Nick had certainly heard of that. Havat MaShash Experimental Agricultural Farm, everyone had learned after the destruction of Israel, had been the cover location for an underground Israeli biowar lab where the aerosol drug now called flashback had been developed and mass-produced. Evidently forms of the original drug had been a neurological experiment to be used for interrogations. It had escaped the Havat MaShash lab and was being sold in Europe and elsewhere in the Mideast months before the destruction of Israel.

Nick mentioned this coincidence of geography.

The poet Danny Oz shook his head. “I don’t think there was any biolab there, Mr. Bottom. I’d spent years with my archaeologist friends in that region. I had other friends who worked on and who helped administrate the real Havat MaShash Agricultural Farm. There was no secret underground installation. They just worked on agricultural stuff—the closest they probably ever came to a secret drug were the chemicals they used in improving pesticides so they wouldn’t harm the environment.”

Nick shrugged. Let Oz deny it if he wanted to. After the bombs fell, everyone knew that flashback had originated at the Havat MaShash biological warfare lab. Some felt that the nuclear attack had been, at least in part, a punishment for letting that drug escape, be copied, and sold.

Nick didn’t care one way or the other.

“What was a poet doing at an archaeological site?” he asked. Nick felt in his sport coat pocket for the small notebook he’d carried all his years as a detective, but it wasn’t there.

“I was writing a series of poems about time overlapping, the past and present coexisting, and the power of certain places which allow us to see that conjunction.”

“Sounds like sci-fi.”

Danny Oz nodded, squinted through the smoke, and flicked ashes. “Yes, it does. At any rate, I was at Tel Be’er Sheva for a few days with Toby Herzog, grandson of the Tel Aviv University archaeologist who first excavated the site, and his team. They’d found a new system of cisterns, deeper and more extensive even than the huge cisterns discovered decades ago. The site was famous for its water—deep wells and ancient cisterns riddled the deep rock—and the area had been inhabited since the Chalcolithic period, around 4000 BCE. ‘Be’er’ means ‘well.’ The town is mentioned many times in the Tanakh, often as a sort of ritual way of describing the extent of Israel in those days, such as being from ‘Be’er Sheva to Dan.’ ”

“So being underground at the dig saved your life,” Nick said impatiently.

Oz smiled and lit a new cigarette. “Precisely, Mr. Bottom. Have you ever wondered how ancient builders got light into their caves and deep diggings? Say at Ellora or Ajanta temple-caves in India?”

No, thought Nick. He said, “Torches?”

“Often, yes. But sometimes they did as we did at Tel Be’er Sheva—the generator Toby Herzog had brought was on the fritz—so his grad students aligned a series of large mirrors to reflect the sunlight down into the recesses of the cave, a new mirror at every twisting or turning. That’s how I saw the end of the world, Mr. Bottom. Nine times reflected on a four-by-six-foot mirror.”

Nick said nothing. Somewhere in a tent or hovel nearby an old man was either chanting or crying out in pain.

Oz smiled. “Speaking of mirrors, many are covered here today. My more Orthodox cousins are sitting shiva for their just-deceased rabbi—colon cancer—and I believe it’s time for seudat havra’ah, the meal of consolation. Would you like a hard-boiled egg, Nick Bottom?”

Nick shook his head. “So you told Keigo in the interview that you flashed only on your memories of looking at explosions in a mirror?”

“Nuclear explosions,” corrected Oz. “Eleven of them—they were all visible from Tel Be’er Sheva. And, no, I didn’t tell young Mr. Nakamura this because, as I said earlier, he never asked. He was more interested in asking about how extensive flashback usage was in the camp, how we purchased it, why the authorities allowed it, and so forth.”

Nick thought it was probably time to leave. This crazy old poet had nothing of interest to tell him.

“Have you ever seen nuclear explosions, Mr. Bottom?”

“Only on TV, Mr. Oz.”

The poet exhaled more smoke, as if it could hide him. “We knew Iran and Syria had nukes, of course, but I’m certain that Mossad and Israeli leadership didn’t know that the embryonic Caliphate had moved on to crude Teller-Ulum thermonuclear warheads. Too heavy to put on a missile or plane, but—as we all know now—they didn’t require missiles or planes to deliver what they’d brought us.” Perhaps sensing Nick’s impatience, Oz hurried on. “But the actual explosions are incredibly beautiful. Flame, of course, and the iconic mushroom cloud, but also an incredible spectrum of colors and hues and layers: blue, gold, violet, a dozen shades of green, and white—those multiple expanding rings of white. There was no doubt that day that we were witnessing the power of Creation itself.”

“I’m surprised it didn’t create an earthquake and bury all of you,” said Nick.

Oz smiled and inhaled smoke. “Oh, it did. It did. It took us nine days to dig our way out of the collapsed Tel Be’er Sheva cisterns and that premature entombment saved our lives. We were only a few hours on the surface when a U.S. military helicopter found us and flew us out to an aircraft carrier—those of us who’d survived the cave-in. I spend all of my waking, non-flashback time trying to capture the beauty of those explosions, Mr. Bottom.”

Stone crazy, thought Nick. Well, why shouldn’t he be? He said, “Through your poetry.” It was not a question.

“No, Mr. Bottom. I haven’t written a real poem since the day of the attack. I taught myself to paint and my cubie here is filled with canvases showing the light of the pleroma unleashed by the archons and their Demiurge that day. Would you like to see the paintings?”

Nick glanced at his watch. “Sorry, Mr. Oz. I don’t have the time. Just one or two more questions and I’ll be going. You were at Keigo Nakamura’s party on the night he was killed.”

“Is that the question, Mr. Bottom?”

“Yes.”

“You asked me that six years ago and I’m sure you know the answer. Yes, I was there.”

“Did you talk to Keigo Nakamura that evening?”

“You asked me that as well. No, I never saw the filmmaker during the party. He was upstairs—where he was murdered—and I was on the first floor all evening.”

“You didn’t have any… ah… trouble getting to the party?”

Oz lit a new cigarette. “No. It was a short walk. But that’s not what you mean, is it?”

“No,” said Nick. “I mean, you’re a resident of the refugee camp here. You’re not allowed to travel. How’d you just happen to walk over to Keigo Nakamura’s party?”

“I was invited,” said Oz, inhaling deeply on the new cigarette. “We’re allowed to wander a little bit, Mr. Bottom. No one’s worried. All of us refugee Jews have implants. Not the juvenile-offender kind, but the deep-bone variety.”

“Oh,” said Nick.

Oz shook his head. “The poison it releases wouldn’t kill us, Mr. Bottom. Just make us increasingly more ill until we return to the camp for the antidote.”

“Oh,” Nick said again. Then he asked, “The night of the murder, you left the party with Delroy Nigger Brown. Why?”

Oz exhaled smoke in a cough that might have been meant as a laugh. “Delroy supplied me with my flashback, Dete… Mr. Bottom. The guards here sell it to us, but they add fifty percent to the price. When I could, I bought it from Delroy Brown. He lives in an old Victorian house on the hill just west of the Interstate.”

Nick rubbed his cheek and realized that he’d forgotten to shave that morning. Oz’s reason made sense but it was still odd that Keigo Nakamura would have interviewed both Brown and Oz during the same last days of his life. Unless Brown had led Keigo to Oz. It probably didn’t really matter.

“I never understood why the U.S. government didn’t just let you Jewish refugees integrate into society here,” Nick said. “I mean, there are twenty-five million or so Mexicans here now and that group sure as hell doesn’t reflect the education and training of you ex-Israelis.”

“Ah,” said Danny Oz. “You are too kind, Mr. Bottom. But the U.S. government couldn’t just turn us loose and let us live with family members here in America. There were more than three hundred thousand Israeli survivors that came here, you remember. And with your economy and the Jobless Recovery now in its twenty-third year…”

“Still…,” began Nick.

Oz’s voice was suddenly sharp. Angry. “The U.S. government was and is terrified of angering the Global Caliphate, Mr. Bottom. The Caliphate is waiting to exterminate us, and what’s laughingly called the U.S. government is terrified of angering them. Grow up.”

Nick blinked as if slapped.

“You’re one of those who pretend as if the Caliphate and partitioned Europe don’t exist, aren’t you?” demanded Danny Oz. “One of those who ignore the fact that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in what’s left of your United States.”

“I don’t ignore anything,” Nick said stiffly. In truth, he did ignore the Caliphate and all foreign problems. What the hell did it matter to him? Dara had had some half sister disappeared into dhimmitude in France or Belgium or one of the other partitioned countries where sharia law predominated, but what the hell was that to him? Dara had never met the woman.

Oz smiled again. “Isn’t it interesting that they killed six million of us again, Mr. Bottom?”

Nick stared at the poet.

“It seems to be the magic number, doesn’t it?” said Oz. “The population of Israel at the time of the attack was somewhere around eight and a quarter million people, but more than two million of those were Israeli Arabs or non-Jewish immigrants. About a million of those Arab Israelis died with the target population, but it was still six million Jews who either died in the attacks, from the radiation shortly after—they were very dirty bombs, weren’t they, Mr. Bottom?—or from the invading Arab armies. Some four hundred thousand Jews incinerated in Tel Aviv–Jaffa. Three hundred thousand burned to ash in Haifa. Two hundred and fifty thousand in Rishon LeZiyyon. And so on. Jerusalem wasn’t bombed, of course, since that city—intact—was the reason for the attacks, both nuclear and military. Those six hundred thousand–some Jews were taken prisoner by the radiation-suited armies and just never seen again, although there are reports of a large canyon in the Sinai filled with corpses. What I’ll never understand was why the Samson Option wasn’t executed.”

“What’s that?” said Nick.

“I was a liberal, you understand, Mr. Bottom. I spent a good portion of my adult life protesting the policies of the state of Israel, marching for peace, writing for peace, and trying to identify with the poor, downtrodden Palestinian people—Gaza was more than decimated, by the way, with eighty percent fatalities when the fallout from the bomb that took out Beersheva—just two hundred thousand incinerated Jews—drifted to the north and east. But I wonder daily about the absence of the Samson Option I’d heard about my entire life… the rumored policy of the Israeli government, if attacked by weapons of mass destruction or if a successful invasion of the state of Israel was imminent, to use its own nukes to take out the capitals of every Arab and Islamic nation within reach. And Israel’s reach in those days, Mr. Bottom, was longer than one might think. Decades and decades ago, but after the first Israeli bombs were secretly built, a general named Moshe Dayan was quoted as saying ‘Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.’ But in the end, you see, we weren’t. We weren’t at all.”

“No,” said Nick. “You weren’t.”

He got up to go.

“I’ll see you to the gate,” said Danny Oz as he lit a new cigarette.

They walked out of the tent to find that storm clouds had come in from over the mountains. The rusted steel skeleton of the two-hundred-foot-tall Tower of Doom loomed over them. A rafting ride called Disaster Canyon had been all but dismantled for building materials behind them. From some tent or hovel or abandoned ride came that Jewish-sounding chanting or cry of grief again.

Nearing the gate, Danny Oz said, “Please give my best to your wife, Dara, Mr. Bottom.”

Nick whirled. “What?”

“Oh, didn’t I mention it? I met her six years ago. A delightful woman. Please give her my warmest regards.”

The 9mm Glock was in Nick’s hand in an instant, the muzzle pressed against Danny Oz’s temple as Nick slammed into the frail poet, shoving him up against a metal stanchion, Nick’s forearm tight and heavy across Oz’s throat. “What the fuck are you talking about? Where did you meet her? How?”

The pistol had gotten the old poet’s attention, but Nick could see something like eagerness in the man’s eyes. He wanted Nick to pull the trigger. That was fine with Nick.

“I… met her… I… can’t talk… with your… forearm…”

Nick let up the pressure on his forearm slightly and increased the pressure on the muzzle of the Glock. The circle of steel had broken the parchment-brittle skin on the dying man’s forehead.

“Talk,” said Nick.

“I met Mrs. Bottom on the day that Keigo Nakamura interviewed me,” said Oz. “She was here about an hour and I introduced myself and…”

“My wife was here with Keigo Nakamura?” Nick thumbed the hammer back.

“No, no… at least I don’t believe so. She and a man were standing back with the crowd but apart from it slightly, watching the interview—which was done quite publicly, you understand, so the old merry-go-round would be in the background of the shot.”

“Who was the man with her?”

“I have no idea.”

“What did he look like?”

“Short, heavy, early middle age, almost bald. He carried a beat-up old briefcase and had a mustache and wore old-fashioned glasses. The kind without the rims.”

Nick knew who that was—Harvey Cohen, the assistant district attorney for whom Dara had worked as executive assistant. But why the hell were those two here at Six Flags Over the Jews on the day that Keigo Nakamura interviewed Oz?

“Did you see the woman you thought was my wife talking to Keigo or his people?”

“No,” said Oz.

“What did she say to you when you introduced yourself?”

“Just how interesting the interview had been, how nice the day was for October… small talk. But when she said that her name was Dara Fox-Bottom, we discussed A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She said that her husband was a detective for the Denver Police Department.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you mention meeting her when I interviewed you six years ago?” demanded Nick, pressing the muzzle of the Glock even deeper into Oz’s bleeding forehead.

“It didn’t seem appropriate then,” gasped Oz, still having trouble breathing even though Nick had let up most of the pressure from his forearm. “There was that woman detective with you when you interviewed me… I mean, I didn’t think there was anything wrong about your wife being here during a workday with that short, balding gentleman, but since I was a suspect in Keigo Nakamura’s murder, I thought it best then not to mention it.”

“Why mention her now, then?” demanded Nick. His finger was on the trigger, not the trigger guard.

“Because of our conversation today… about Bottom’s dream,” said Oz. “Shoot me if you’re going to shoot me, Mr. Bottom. But otherwise let me go.”

A minute later, Nick did. There was nothing else to find out. It was starting to rain when Nick turned his back on the dying Jew and on all the other dying Jews and left the camp.

Out in the parking lot next to Nick’s gelding, Hideki Sato was waiting. Nick ignored the security man and got in his car, slammed the door shut, and thumbed the ignition.

Nothing. The gauges showed a flat charge. The car was totally dead, even though the batteries should have given him another dozen miles or so today.

“Fuck,” screamed Nick Bottom. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

He was out of the car and clicking off the safety of the Glock. Sato stepped back behind his own vehicle.

Nick put five shots through the hood into the batteries and long-emasculated engine, six shots through the windshield, and four more shots into the front tires and hood again. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

He kept squeezing the trigger but the hammer fell on an empty chamber.

Four guards came running from the entrance gate, their visors down and automatic weapons raised. Sato held up his badge and waved them away. Nick turned the Glock toward Sato but the slide was back, magazine empty.

Sato was looking at Nick’s gelding. The car was emitting some sort of murdered-battery ticking from under the hood and there came a dying hiss from the deflating tires.

“I have always wanted to do that to a car,” said Sato. He turned to Nick. “Having a bad day, are we?”