Flashback

3.02 Las Vegas, Nevada, and Beyond—Wednesday, Sept. 22

Five days of travel. Five days. These last five days seem more eventful to me, more lived, than my last five years. And when I say “lived,” I mean more filled with life defined in the rich, overflowing-with-consciously-realized-experience mode exemplified by only a few of my favorite literary characters such as, say, Alys, the Wife of Bath. So perhaps I’ve lived more in the last five days than I have in my last fifteen years. Or in my last fifty years.

Or perhaps I’ve never lived this fully before.

One reason I can write this with such cautious joy is that so far no one in our party has been harmed. By “party” I’m not sure if I’m talking about just Val and me, or Val and me and our drivers Julio and Perdita Romano, or Val, me, Julio, Perdita, and the hundreds of others in this truck convoy. In my joy and terror at being alive this week, I have become large. I contain multitudes.

It’s hard to believe that only two nights ago I was witnessing with my own aged eyes the spectacle that is Las Vegas—Las Vegas and all the joyfully riotous caravan encampments circled and sprawled across the torchlit desert beyond the wall that protects Las Vegas, Nevada, from the violent twenty-first-century cemetery that surrounds this last holdout of a twentieth-century city (but which so far does not intrude upon and which so far has not prevailed over Las Vegas’s own bright, improbable, tenuous, and surreal reality).

The high, transparent wall with its complement of beacons, lasers, banners, and warning lights began just to the south of where the 215 bypass used to come into Interstate 15. The wall continued beyond 215 up the west side of the city and out almost to Henderson to the east. McCarran Airport was deep inside the walled and protected part of the city, of course, as were all the great casinos.

From our encampment on a low rise southwest of the city, we were able to see the tower of the Stratosphere far to the north (with its roller coaster and other rides at the top still running) all the way to the Luxor near the south wall, the glass pyramid’s laser spotlight visibly stabbing into space during the day as well as night. But it was at night that Las Vegas was in its true element: the lights and searchlights and lasers of what had been the MGM Grand and the Mandalay Bay and the Excalibur and Paris and New York–New York. Some came complete with their somehow touching miniatures, the Statue of Liberty and the scaled-down Eiffel Tower. We could also see the curve of the Bellagio and not-quite-topless towers of Bally’s, Harrah’s, the Imperial Palace, Treasure Island, the Google Grand, and the Mirage towering over the low, midcentury clusters of Caesars Palace and the downtown Sahara, Riviera, and the old Circus Circus.

Just east of the airport were the lighted white domes of the Taj Mahal—120 percent scale of the original—but only the lower domes there were casinos and hotels; the main dome was the India-built reactor that cooled and lighted Las Vegas now that Hoover Dam was only a memory.

Since almost all of the small towns that once defied Nevada’s heat and dryness are abandoned now—the Mesquites and Tonopahs and Elys and Elkos and Battle Mountains and Pahrumps and Searchlights, everything up to the size of Reno and Carson City that had their own reactors but still had lost more than 80 percent of their populations—I could only imagine how brilliant Las Vegas must look from space when the terminator of night has been drawn across this part of the American West.

Beside the flickering, blazing lights inside the walled city itself—the very translucent walls, inhabited as they are now by hotel rooms and casinos of their own, glowing golden at night—there were myriad more lights encamped out on the desert: huge trucks by the thousands, their rig lights flashing, and in their lighted circles the giant campfires with wood hauled a thousand miles and more for just that purpose.

It struck me three nights ago while watching the celebrations outside the city walls of Las Vegas—the rodeos and fairs, the traveling circuses with their lighted Ferris wheels and roller coasters and rocket whips, the hundreds of taverns, pubs, and bars driven in or opened under a tent, the motorcycle and motocross races roaring past canvas whorehouses in dusty tent cities that were constantly tearing themselves down and rebuilding, an eternal Midway set without the walls of a city that is in itself a Midway for the millions of millionaires that somehow still inhabit the bankrupt Earth (my grandson Val tells me the names of the machines, the millionaires’ red-and-green-blinking, landing-light-blazing Learjets and Gulfstreams and Hawker Siddeleys and Falcons and Cessna Citation Excels and Challengers and supersonic Sukhoi Putin-Sokolis landing every few seconds at McCarran)—that Las Vegas, both inside the wall and out, was America’s single greatest exception to our new No Clusterfuck Rule of don’t-gather-in-crowds.

For Julio and Perdita Romano and the thousands of other truckers and their passengers celebrating out there on the cracked hardpan beyond the glowing Vegas walls, there was no fear of suicide bombers in their midst. The truckers—some of them Canadians southbound to Old Mexico, others Mexicans from south of the old border hauling their loads northbound to Canada, many of them American drivers headed north, south, east, west, or a combination of these—had come too far and worked too hard to get here to this day or two of rest and fun, the twenty-first century’s highway equivalent of America’s early-nineteenth-century Rendezvous for free trappers and Indians and the buyers of their beaver pelts, to ruin it with suicide bombings and political murders.

Such insanity was reserved for the rest of the world.

The 417 Peterbilt sleeper that Julio and Perdita own and operate is an incredible machine. The front of the cab with its two massive, upholstered UltraRide seats with the bank of controls facing the driver is their space. Val and I are allowed to ride on two comfortable jump seats behind and a little higher than the UltraRide seats. Behind our jump seats is a wide and comfortable bed for the Romanos—always perfectly made in the daytime and rarely used by both of them since one is usually driving—and above and behind that, separated by an accordion door, is a smaller bunk space up under the transparent air dam.

When Val and I are tucked in there and chatting in privacy before falling asleep—both Julio and Perdita tend to drive together far into the night before one or the other crawls into the bunk below—we can look up at a sky of undimmed stars. If we sit up in our comfortable cot-bed, we can look down and forward over the roof and hood of the Peterbilt at the highway rushing at us through the night.

For the first two days after our escape, Val said almost nothing, but now he is talking, making eye contact, and otherwise coming alive again. To be honest, this new Val—however shaken he has been by recent events that he’s still not willing to talk about in detail—is more like the interesting and intelligent boy who came to live with me more than five years ago. I had grown weary of the newer, sullen, uncommunicative teenager who seemed always on the brink of some inner violence.

Our last night in Los Angeles was a nightmare.

I was on the verge of either going out to search for Val or calling the police or his father—not sure whether to report him as missing or turn him in as a possible criminal—when Val rushed in and smashed my phone and we both watched the faces of his dead flashgang friends on the TV. There was no doubt that Val himself was in some sort of shock—he was paler than paper—but rather than it being a debilitating shock of the sort that would have made me or most people I know dysfunctional, this shock seemed to have turned the sixteen-year-old into a cold, robotic, but hugely efficient version of his father.

We did not have to hide in the railyards. Julio and Perdita Romano and their truck were already there with dozens of others and when I showed the Romanos the written letter of transit from Don Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa they allowed us to hide in the sleeping cab of their Peterbilt as police helicopters circled overhead and as Los Angeles burned behind us.

It was only the next day that I realized how profoundly lucky Val and I had been. The Romanos had already been paid. The little money I had left I was carrying in cash in my bag. Had the Romanos and other truckers not been honorable people, they could have left us behind that terrible Friday night or killed us on their way out of town, dumped our bodies, and no one in the world would have been the wiser.

As it was, because of the attempted assassination of Advisor Omura and the opening of the battle between reconquista forces and the city, there were highway patrol roadblocks before the 15 began its long climb toward Victorville. Julio Romano risked everything they had—not only their expensive truck but their very freedom—by taking Val and me and our luggage to the side of their Peterbilt and showing each of us where to hide in secret compartments set into the fuel tanks on opposite sides of the truck.

Even there, a touch of a switch might have released the liquefied natural gas which the trucks used as fuel into the hiding spaces and we would have been one less thing for the Romanos to worry about. Just something frozen and dead to dump in the desert. No threat to them and no loss of prepaid revenue.

But they were honorable people. After having the convoy papers provided by Emilio inspected and being passed through the highway patrol roadblocks, Julio and Perdita released us from the tiny spaces in the fuel tanks and led us back to the high seats in the Peterbilt cab and we rolled on with the convoy toward Barstow and the desert.

When either Julio or Perdita crawled into the rest area to watch their satellite TV, they allowed Val and me to watch with them. What we saw there was Los Angeles burning behind us.

The fighting was more terrible than either side—the state of California or the Nuevo Mexico reconquista cartels with their armies and gangs—could possibly have predicted. These were no mere riots. The police were not a factor and concentrated on staying out of the line of fire. Governor Lohan promised more National Guard troops to reinforce those being overrun throughout the city, but few commentators thought that this would do much good. When the governor threatened to petition the president to send in federal troops, Julio just laughed. This had been an all but empty threat for years; our federal troops were fighting in China and elsewhere for foreign masters.

But while the city and state forces had seriously underestimated the power of the reconquista forces—they seemed totally surprised by the amount of armor and artillery brought north from Old Mexico (some of which I’d seen parked under camouflage nets in the huge cemetery across from Emilio’s compound)—at the same time, Emilio’s and his spanic allies’ forces were obviously being surprised by blacks rising up in South Central, by Asians fighting in the western suburbs, by the mercenaries hired by the wealthy in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, the Mulholland highlands, and elsewhere, and by a score of other fighting cadres aligned with neither the state of California nor the forces of Nuevo Mexico. Because of this, the simple reconquista-versus–California National Guard battle over the future of Los Angeles almost immediately turned into a twenty-sided brawl. Los Angeles was becoming a purely Hobbesian state… every man pitted against every other man.

When I mentioned this to Julio and Perdita, they understood and agreed immediately. They’d both read Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. So much for my lifelong assumptions about truck drivers and their levels of education.

And speaking of education, Val is receiving an interesting one on this truckers’ convoy.

After his first night and day of being almost catatonic—and I’ll write more about that later—I saw Val begin to pay serious attention to his surroundings and the people in them.

During our two nights camped with scores of other eighteen-wheelers’ convoys in the desert outside the walled-off but still beckoning lights of Las Vegas, I noticed Val’s avid—almost hungry—interest in what the men and women around the campfires had to say. Poor Val… by law and by Department of Education fiat, he’s had to celebrate “diversity” (for diversity’s sake alone) almost every hour in school since his first day in kindergarten in Denver almost a dozen years ago. But he’d never really experienced diversity until this convoy. Val has grown up in two cities, Denver and Los Angeles, where neighborhoods are racial, ethnic, linguistic, and (more and more) religious fiefdoms, each sparring and warring for a larger share of some theoretical cake in an endless zero-sum game of politics, gangs, and outright warfare.

But during these five days and nights he’s seen and listened to “Gauge” Devereaux, a black man from the South who says openly that the return to the epithet “nigger” is a statement of failure by his race and the nation at large. Devereaux has been driving his big rig for thirty-eight years and has no plans to stop now just because the cities he delivers to have become separated by wider and wider tracts of chaos.

Val’s listened to the fireside stories of Henry Big Horse Begay, a Navajo who—with his wife, Laurette—has been driving his rig for twenty-six years and who defies any bureaucrat or army or roadside bandit to stop him. Henry laughs openly—his one missing top tooth making the others seem all the whiter—at the irony that the white men who put his people on reservations are having their Manifest Destiny rolled back like a cheap carpet, but I’m convinced that there is absolutely no malice in the man. He’s simply a student of history.

—It happens to every race and group and nation, Henry Big Horse Begay says, still laughing. The days of greatness roll in like some great, undeserved tide, are smugly celebrated by the lucky peoples—even as mine once did—as if they had earned it, which they had not, and then the tide ebbs and the nations and tribes and peoples find themselves standing there dumb and dumbfounded on the dry and garbage-strewn beach.

Strange to hear an ocean metaphor from a man who grew up in the deserts of Arizona.

Val listens to others like Julio and Perdita, who grew up in the teeming eastern cities but who had found happiness only on the open highways—or what is left of them—and to spanics such as the Valdezes, who were born in Mexico but who have driven American Interstates since the 1980s and who refuse allegiance to any clan or gang or nation that defines itself at the expense of outsiders. And then there are the Ellises, Jan and Bob and their three kids—the children being “cab schooled,” as Jan likes to say. They’re from the South, they’re evangelicals, but they’re also witty, clever, soft-spoken, open-minded (they say they consider proselytizing an intrusion on others and don’t flaunt their faith), and the three kids—according to Val, who spent a long afternoon with them—know more geography, history, astronomy, literature, and basic science than any of Val’s fellow high school juniors.

I sensed that Val was most interested in Cooper Jakes (called Old Jakes Brakes by the other truckers for some impenetrable reason)—an ancient philosopher more ancient and wise than I, easily in his 80s if not 90s, but also as thin, tough, resilient, and seemingly immortal as gristle. Cooper Jakes’s silhouette makes up in white beard what he lacks in body fat, and, in the tradition of all great prophets, his prodigious eyebrows are jet black. Those brows can, in an instant, become as cocked and intimidating as two aimed pistol muzzles. When he is angry, Cooper Jakes reminds me of Ahab.

But most of the time, Cooper is in a relaxed and humorous (however sardonic, especially on such subjects as politics and religion) mood. The old man has been driving large rigs (he says) since he was seventeen years old. He’s never had a wife, family, or home (he says) and has never wanted one. His cab has been his ark—his words—through all the “floods of shit” that have been dropped on America by a pissed-off God in his lifetime.

Val can’t seem to get enough of the old reprobate’s barbed but almost iambic commentaries. I watch Val’s gleaming eyes across the campfire and think of young Prince Hal in Eastcheap’s Boar’s-Head Tavern at the rhetorical feet of Falstaff. (I was one of those scholars who infinitely preferred Falstaff—a source of wit not only in himself but in others and a potential Aristotle/Socrates tutor of the true humanities to the young prince in training—to the wordy killing-machine-cum-lying-politician that Henry V became in Shakespeare’s work, however moving the much-trotted-out “band of brothers” St. Crispin’s Day speech may be.)

But I digress.

Val actually said something to me yesterday in a tone devoid of the contempt, guardedness, and sarcasm that have ruled all his speech in my presence for the last four years or so.

—I could be a trucker, Grandpa.

I said nothing at the time but I came close to weeping to hear those few unguarded words slip out. (Including, I admit, the childish “Grandpa” that I’ve missed so very much.) Val has not spoken of being or becoming anything—other than his unconscious but continuous attempt at becoming a black-hole source of disillusionment so unrelenting as to approach pure nihilism—since he was twelve years old.

Before I become too sentimental, I need to remind myself here that it is likely that my grandson killed someone last week. Or at least tried to kill someone.

He seemed almost in shock that last Friday night in Los Angeles when he saw the photograph of his dead friend William Coyne on the 3DHD screen. The only thing I could get out of him about the attack on Advisor Omura in the first forty-eight hours of our flight was his repeated statement—I was with those idiot fuckers, but I didn’t shoot at Omura, Leonard. I swear it.

But Val never said clearly that he hadn’t shot someone, and the few times I brought up the Coyne boy’s name, Val’s violent reaction—his gaze dropping, his head snapping to look in another direction, his entire body stiffening—suggested to me that something had happened between the two adolescents on that last night in Los Angeles.

Whatever the source of the trauma in L.A., Val dealt with it by sleeping most of the time we weren’t stopped for rest during those first few days or nights. Because of the way he slept—twitching, shaking—I thought he might be using flashback, but a cursory search of his duffel bag while he slept didn’t turn up any vials of the drug.

It did turn up a black pistol which I considered confiscating but decided to leave in his duffel. We might need it before this trip is over.

When Val was awake during the daylight hours on the third through fifth days of our exile, I listened in as he quizzed Julio and Perdita on the security details of our convoy.

It seems that our convoy consists of twenty-three eighteen-wheelers, some of which are armed with mini-guns and other serious weapons, while we’re also accompanied by four combat vehicles and a small recon-attack helicopter. The combat vehicles—I forget the details about their armament and such, but Val visibly devoured every caliber and horsepower and armor fact with great interest—are manned by mercenaries from a security company called TrekSec and paid for by these independent truckers or their firms.

Perdita showed us on their satellite nav system that another such convoy, made up of seventeen vehicles, is traveling about fifteen miles ahead of us and a much larger one is about twenty-four miles behind us on I-15. They keep in touch with one another.

According to Julio, the main problem on the Las Vegas–to-Mesquite-and-beyond-to–St. George stretch of I-15 is bandits, although the reconquista still make their occasional foray into the southern reaches of Nevada. Nuevo Mexico’s cartels’ repeated failures at adding Las Vegas to their territory is, according to Julio, forcing the reconquista military forays to be less and less frequent. He added that the increasingly effective anglo guerrilla raids around Kingman and Flagstaff have pretty effectively tied down the N.M. occupation forces over the past year or two.

Our immediate problem, Julio and Perdita showed us, lies just beyond the embattled and mostly abandoned town of Mesquite ahead where I-15 crosses from Nevada to Arizona and from the Pacific Time Zone into the Mountain Time Zone: the twenty-nine miles of Interstate that make their tiny cut across the northwest corner of Arizona and then into Utah and north have been wonderfully scenic and composed mostly of elevated highway, but bandits and warring U.S. and N.M. forces have dropped most of those bridges and elevated sections over the past decade.

Because of the Mormon Range and other mountains that run north and south along the state border like a sheer wall, the convoys will take an entire day picking their way along rubble-strewn makeshift surface roads—just ruts through the tumbled boulders and slabs of the former highway—along the Virgin River into Utah. Julio showed us satellite images of the winding canyon road where the trucks will be vulnerable to any bandit on the clifftops who wants to roll rocks down on us.

—Can’t we just go around? asked Val. Take a detour to the north?

Perdita showed us how there are no roads except desert tracks and dry gullies along the forty miles or so north of Mesquite to the tiny, abandoned towns of Carp and Elgin along the misnamed Meadow Valley Wash dry river, then almost a two-hundred-mile detour on old state roads 93 and 319 into Utah on their battered Highway 56.

—The twenty-nine miles in Arizona called the Diagonal of Death by truckers is slow and dangerous, said Julio. But it’s still faster than any of the half-assed detours. We’re still truckers. We need to get products to their destination on time.

So tonight we’re sleeping in a defensive circle off the highway just short of the abandoned town of Bunkerville. The name is appropriate, since a few military bunkers remain here.

A mile to the east, the mountains rise up like some terrible obstacle in one of the J.R.R. Tolkien–inspired movies. The opening for the Virgin River and the former I-15 looks like a dark and open maw—waiting.

We’ll be moving at first light. Perdita assured us that with the recon helicopter and our convoy’s firepower, there shouldn’t be a serious confrontation—just ten hours of bumping and jolting along in the truck’s lowest gears.

Val said to me tonight—

—This is like those old World War Two B-seventeen movies the Old Man and I used to watch. These convoys are like those packs of bombers huddled together for protection against German fighter planes.

It was the first time in several years that I’d heard Val mention his father without overt hostility.

The cooking fires were doused by 9 p.m. tonight and there was no frivolity around the campfires. The mood was somber. There was no bluster. Everyone knows that tomorrow will be one of the most dangerous parts of the voyage but there’s almost no talk of it. Plans and preparations have been made.

I’m terrified about tomorrow’s slow, exposed twenty-nine-mile gauntlet, but Val seems quietly excited… almost enthusiastic. The immortality of youth, I suppose.

Later tonight, when everyone had turned in, I talked to him after I saw him shutting off the little cell phone he’d brought along and removing the earbud.

I’d noticed the old phone our second night out and challenged Val about it—he had, after all, insisted that I throw away my phone because it might be tracked by authorities chasing him—and he’d explained how it had been his mother’s, and how all of the phone and GPS chips had long since been removed. Reluctantly, he told me that he listened to the daily diary function on it just to hear his mother’s voice.

This fact made my chest ache.

Val was willing to say more. I’m fairly certain that his good mood and talkativeness were a direct result of the marijuana joint that he’d joined Julio and Henry Big Horse Begay and Gauge Devereaux and Cooper Jakes in smoking just an hour earlier around the last campfire of the evening. It had been my impression that Val had been using a lot of flashback over the past few years and perhaps some stronger drugs such as cocaine from time to time—I wasn’t sure about the latter—but had never got in the habit of smoking pot with his friends.

So now, in our high cots under the clear Kevlarglas air dam with the stars bright above us—the surprisingly effective acoustic curtain drawn between our cots and the Romanos’ bed below—Val gave me a very un-Val-like loopy smile and showed me the phone.

—It was my mom’s, your… you know. So like I said, it doesn’t have any of the trackable, traceable chips left in it—I pulled them out myself five years ago—but it’s got her daily voice reminders and a lot of text diary that I’d like to read but can’t.

I nodded but felt uneasy. This conversation was as thin and fragile as a stray strand of cobweb. The slightest wrong word or tone from me would, I knew, sever it or simply blow it away. I heard myself say softly…

—Are you sure you want to hear her voice and private thoughts, Val? Sometimes grown-ups say things in private that they wouldn’t necessarily want to have shared with…

Val grunted and shook his head and I knew that if it weren’t for the friendly effects of the potent grass that Joe Valdez and his wife, Juanita, had brought up from Old Mexico, I’d be looking at Val’s angry back. Instead, he kept talking to me.

—Yeah, yeah, yeah… but I think in that written diary there may be the clue I need to know why my old man turned against her… maybe even killed her.

—Killed her!

I shouted and actually clapped both hands over my mouth. Val cringed and looked toward the closed curtain. But there was no noise from Julio and Perdita below.

Nor did Val turn his back to me. Not yet. His whisper now was a fast, hot hiss, devoid of any joint-assisted relaxation.

—Leonard, you’ve asked me about a thousand times why I hate my old man. The answer might be in that encrypted diary text. It’s the main reason I’ve kept the goddamn phone all these years.

—Val, you don’t hate your father …, I began.

—I do, goddammit. I hate the cocksucker’s guts and if we somehow manage to get to Denver alive, I’m going to track him down to whatever flashback cave he’s rotting away in and kick him awake and put a bullet in his guts…

I had no idea what to say to this madness so I said nothing. It turned out to be the only way I could have kept the agitated boy talking.

—He found out that Mom was doing something, Leonard, and I think he killed her. Or had her killed. I really do.

I started to say something like—But your mother died in an auto accident, Val”—but I knew at once that I would lose him with that. The conversation would end as suddenly as it had begun. I cleared my throat.

—What kind of things was she doing that would so anger your father?

Val seemed to fold in on himself until he was a mass of defensive knees, elbows, curved back as sharp as those elbows, and lowered head.

—I don’t know. But she was gone a lot in those last weeks—hell, months—before she was killed in that convenient auto accident. She was sneaking out a lot. When the Old Man was putting in double shifts down at the precinct, gone whole weekends—sometimes four or five days at a time—so was Mom. She used to have me stay with my friend Samuel’s weird, smelly old grandmother—Sheila—down the street when she was going to be away overnight. Sometimes for several nights in a row. And the Old Man never knew. Mom swore me to secrecy, Leonard. Imagine a parent swearing her ten-year-old kid to secrecy.

I thought about it. It didn’t sound like the way Dara, my daughter, the light of my life, had ever behaved before. Or would behave.

—What do you think she was doing, Val? Having an… affair?

I couldn’t believe that I was asking my sixteen-year-old grandson this question. But suddenly I wanted to know the truth as much as this tormented boy had for the past six years.

Val shrugged. He suddenly looked very sleepy.

—Yeah, I suppose. Probably with that fat slob of an assistant district attorney she worked for, Harvey Cohen. That whole last year, he was always picking Mom up at weird hours when the Old Man was away at work. And the Old Man was always away at work.

My mouth was very dry and my chest hurt now not from emotion but from the more alarming pain of an old man’s thrice-treacherous heart.

—So, Val, you think that Dara was having an affair with her employer, Harvey whoever, and your father found out and killed her? Or arranged for her to be killed in that automobile accident that also killed an old couple and a truck driver? Does that make sense, Val?

He glared at me now and I knew that he was sorry he’d said anything about the old cell phone. The pot and the closeness between us were wearing off.

—Yeah. And if you want to tell me that the Old Man wouldn’t hurt her, save your breath. You don’t know the Old Man. You don’t know cops.

I merely nodded at that. It was true. I’d never spent much time around police officers—or wanted to—and for all my visits when Val was a baby and I still lived in the area after Carol, my third wife, died, I really had never been comfortable talking to Detective Nick Bottom. So instead of defending a man I didn’t know, I said…

—Could I see the encrypted text?

I could feel Val’s reluctance to show the files to me, mixed with his anger at himself and me for saying as much as he had about something he’d kept secret for six years, but without letting go of the phone, he activated it, thumbed through icons, and held the screen up so I could see it in the Nevada darkness.

I looked for a long moment, only asking Val to thumb forward through the pages of text. He did so—gracelessly. Then he turned the phone off and thrust it away in his pocket. He rolled away from me, pulling the thin blanket high up on his bony shoulders, but I wasn’t quite finished with our conversation yet.

—It’s a word-or book-cipher, Val. Based on a five-letter key word.

The boy snorted.

—Tell me something I don’t know, old man.

I let the rudeness pass. Something like excitement was stirring in me. Those encrypted pages might include a message to me. Dara and I had loved sending coded messages to each other when she was little. It irritated Carol, but Dara and I continued doing so, even after Carol got sick.

—Perhaps I could help with…

But I’d let my enthusiasm show through. Val pulled the blanket higher and edged farther away on his cot, showing me his back again.

—I know the kind of words that Mom would’ve used for such a cipher. None of them work. And it doesn’t matter anyway, old man. We’re probably going to get killed in the canyon tomorrow anyway. It don’t matter. Nothing matters.

The sudden bad grammar was a parody of his father’s police-speak, although Nick Bottom didn’t speak that way either. I was tempted to say aloud the “Bullshit, you tiresome little twerp” I was thinking but stayed silent until I said softly…

—Carol.” It could be “Carol.” Her mother’s name.

Val did sound almost asleep as he answered groggily one last time.

—Nope. Tried it. I told you… I tried all the fucking five-letter words that would’ve meant something to her. It’s just gonna… stay… encrypted. Go… to sleep, Leonard. We gotta get up early to get shot at tomorrow. Let me sleep, for Chrissakes.

I let him sleep.

After about an hour of lying there looking up at the cold desert stars, I sat up silently. My eyes had adapted to the darkness and I could see the phone protruding from his pocket as Val lay there snoring rather more loudly than I’d heard before.

I knew the five-letter word. I was sure of it.

I started to reach for the phone but stopped. If possible, I wanted Val to give me permission to try the word and for us to watch the encrypted pages of Dara’s diary decrypt into readable text in front of us.

If possible. If it wasn’t possible, I’d take the phone away from him soon and read those pages for myself. For some reason I was sure that Dara’s last, secret message to the world was more important than the feelings of a surly sixteen-year-old.

I’ve written this in my own hand-written journal—hiding it away so Val won’t find it—and will go to sleep thinking of my daughter and of why she would have chosen the five-letter word that I am certain is the key to her final message to the world.