Flashback

3.03 I-25 and Denver: Friday, Sept. 24—Saturday, Sept. 25

Professor emeritus George Leonard Fox was seventy-four years old and knew that he might not see many more years of life, if any. If this adventure he and Val were on didn’t kill him soon, there were the cough and pain in his chest that his doctor had been worried about. The X-rays had been inconclusive, so the doctor had ordered a CT scan and an MRI to determine if it was cancer and, of course, with the National Health Service Initiative, neither test would cost Leonard a cent. But since the waiting time for both of those NHSI-covered procedures now ran to nineteen months and longer, Leonard suspected that he’d be dead from whatever was causing the pain and cough before he got the test. This was the way it had been for seniors without private wealth for many years now.

It was no one’s fault—Leonard had been an enthusiastic supporter of the original health reform bill that had guaranteed eventual government control of all health decisions—but sometimes the irony of it all, and the reminder of what his college mentor, Dr. Bert Stern, had called the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences, made Leonard smile a bit ruefully.

But however long he had to live, Leonard knew that he would never forget this last night of the truck convoy through Colorado.

Leonard had paid little attention to the Rocky Mountains during the years he’d lived and taught in Boulder, so this long night of crossing the mountainous part of Colorado held surprises for him.

He wished, of course, that Val weren’t riding separately all that day and night, first with the solo trucker Gauge Devereaux and then with Henry Big Horse Begay. Leonard was extremely anxious about what his grandson might do when they were reunited with Nick Bottom the next day in Denver and hoped he could allay the boy’s suspicions. And Leonard also needed to talk to Val about the password for the encrypted part of the text on his late daughter Dara’s phone. What Leonard wanted was to try the password he felt might be the correct one and read the encrypted file by himself—just in case it did contain something damning that would make his grandson even more intent on attacking Nick Bottom—but Val kept the battered old phone with him wherever he went.

After hours of this fruitless anxiety, Leonard tried to relax and talk to the driver, Julio Romano. Julio’s wife, Perdita, was asleep in the lower-rear sleeping compartment and her high-decibel but not unfeminine snoring came through the curtains as they moved closer to the Continental Divide.

Julio had wanted to talk politics and recent history and—after ascertaining that the driver seemed to be one of those rare fellows who could discuss such topics without losing their temper, even with amusement—Leonard had complied.

“Good,” said Julio earlier that night. “It’s not often that I get a tame professor of literature and classics in my cab. Do you prefer to be called Doctor or Professor?”

“Leonard, actually.”

“Well, good, Lenny. That’ll make things easier. But I won’t forget that you’re a professor emeritus.”

Normally, Leonard would have been irritated at anyone calling him Lenny—no one ever had—but coming from Julio, after Leonard had ascertained that the middle-aged driver wasn’t using the name as an insult, it sounded all right.

As the climb over Loveland Pass approached, Julio was leading a discussion on the decline of nations. Leonard was continually surprised at how well informed and literate the truck driver was.

“But I don’t think the United Kingdom chose decline,” Leonard was saying, trying hard not to slip into his lecturing-prof tone of voice. “After World War Two, it was just an inevitable outcome of Britain having bankrupted itself fighting the war… that and the people’s innate refusal to return to the prewar class system after five years of sharing hardships and scarcity.”

“So they fired Winston Churchill without so much as a thank-you-sir and chose socialism,” said Julio, shifting down several gears as the huge truck followed the convoy off I-70 before the blocked Eisenhower Tunnel and up the narrower, twisting Highway 6 rising toward the night sky.

“Well, yes,” said Leonard. He was a little anxious at the prospect of a discussion of “socialism” with a working man. All those working fellows he’d known, the few he’d known, found the word and concept toxic, sometimes reacting to it in violent ways.

“But the British Empire would have been finished no matter who they’d kept as prime minister or what system they’d adopted,” said Leonard, raising his voice slightly so he would be heard over the rising roar of the truck’s engine. “The scarcities would have been as real after the war, socialism or not.”

“Maybe,” said Julio Romano with a smile. “But remember what Churchill said.”

“What’s that?” asked Leonard. The first sharp turns were approaching and he grasped the padded armrest to his right more firmly.

“ ‘Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery,’ ” cited Julio. “I agree with old Winnie that once a society has declared that the sharing of misery is a virtue, then there’s going to be a lot of scarcity and misery in that culture’s future to share. Certainly you and I have lived through that change of outlook, Lenny.”

“Yes,” said Leonard. The red taillights of the trucks ahead of them kept swerving and disappearing with the sharp curves of Loveland Pass, as if the trucks were hurtling over the edge and out of sight down into the abyss. Leonard could see by their own truck’s headlights that the road was patched and broken and the guardrails to the side were largely missing or collapsed. There was nothing but Julio’s attention to his driving to keep them from hurtling through the gaps to a fiery death below. “Yes,” he said again, trying to regain the thread of the conversation, “but choosing a more… ah… communitarian approach to the rationing of scarcity and the social amelioration of misery does not necessarily mean that a culture has chosen decline.”

“But have you ever known a modern culture that chose socialism—the enforced redistribution of wealth of the sort we saw about twenty-five years ago, Lenny—that didn’t inevitably have to embrace decline? Decline as a world power? Decline in its people’s productivity and morale?” said Julio, shifting down three more gears and grappling the wheel hard right and then hard left again as the narrow road rose sharply and twisted even more sharply.

“Perhaps not,” said Leonard. He was eager not to force an argument on this section of highway, no matter how jovial and relaxed Julio sounded.

With his free hand, Leonard grasped the hard dashboard. Amazingly, snowfields were appearing in the starlight and moonlight on either side of the narrow highway. It was only September! Leonard had forgotten how early snow could come to the high country of Colorado.

“Lenny, you’re the professor. Wasn’t it Tocqueville who said—‘Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word—equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude’? I think it was de Tocqueville. I still read him on long hauls when Perdita’s driving and I can’t sleep.”

“Yes, I think it was Tocqueville,” managed Leonard. They were approaching the summit. Their convoy was taking up every inch of the damaged, pavement-heaving, narrow road. If a vehicle came the other way, headed west, Leonard could imagine all twenty-three trucks of their convoy hurtling over the edge. Above them, something looking like a row of giant white posts or skinny headstones ran north and south along the Continental Divide. It took a minute for Leonard to realize that these were the mostly abandoned wind turbines from the short-lived “Green” era. It was a spectral sight in the night.

“Lenny, I’m sure you can remember the year—maybe the exact day, perhaps—when the majority of American citizens were no longer paying taxes on April fifteenth but were still voting in entitlements for themselves. The tipping point, as it were.”

“I can’t say I do remember, Julio,” said Leonard.

“The election year of two thousand eight we were almost there. The election year of twenty-twelve we were there. And in twenty-sixteen we were beyond that tipping point and have never gone back,” said Julio as the truck growled in its lowest gear to reach the summit of the pass.

“Does this relate to something?” asked Leonard. He’d met a few men like Julio Romano—autodidacts who thought of themselves as intellectuals. The type always had an amazing memory and had read their translations of Plato, Thucydides, Dante, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche. What they didn’t know was that their counterparts in academia—the real intellectuals—had read these authors in the original Greek, Latin, Italian, and German. Leonard’s opinion of autodidacts was that most of the poor devils had a fool for a student and a poseur for a teacher.

They were passing between the Continental Divide wind turbines now, all inactive, and Leonard realized that the things were taller than he’d thought—each easily four hundred feet high. The scarred white pillars sliced the starry sky into cold sections.

“You know, Julio,” he said to change the topic, “there’s an odd thing about your and Perdita’s first names. And your last name as well. Julio Romano was…”

“A sculptor from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale,” said the driver, his broad grin glowing whitely in the dash lights. “The only artist of his day that Shakespeare ever cited by name. I know. Act Five, a celebratory dinner is supposed to be held in the presence of a lifelike statue of Hermione, Leontes’ dead wife—‘ a piece many years in doing and now newly perform’d by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape.’ Weird, huh, Lenny?”

“But an anachronism in Shakespeare’s day,” Leonard couldn’t stop himself from pointing out. The old academic could allow one anachronism to pass without challenge, but not two in one night. “The Julio Romano was a reference to Giulio Romano, an Italian artist from the early and midsixteenth century. But why Shakespeare would have cited Romano as a great artist—and a sculptor—is a mystery. I don’t believe he was even a sculptor.”

They were crossing the broad, snow-covered plateau of the summit. The headlights of trucks ahead of them illuminated a battered but still-standing sign—SUMMIT, 3,655 m., 11,190 ft. Julio shifted gears as the truck prepared for an even more tortuous descent on the eastern side of the Continental Divide. Behind them, the idle wind turbines receded like so many white columns holding up the dome of the brilliant night sky.

“Actually, Lenny,” said Julio, “that Giulio Romano was a sculptor, so the early Shakespeare scholars were wrong about that. In Vasari’s Lives of Seventy of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, not translated until eighteen-fifty, there were two Latin epitaphs for Romano that showed he was an architect and rather famous sculptor as well as a painter. Shakespeare would have heard of him as a sculptor, it turns out.”

“I stand corrected,” said Leonard. The descent, he now knew, was going to be many times more terrifying than the climb to the summit.

“I only know because I share the name,” said Julio. “My father was a professor of art history at Princeton.”

“Really?” said Leonard and immediately wished that he hadn’t put so much amazement in his voice.

“Yeah, really,” said Julio with another grin as he downshifted rapidly and wrestled the wheel hard left. Beyond the emptiness where the missing guardrail should be only inches to their right, there was only more emptiness for a mile or more to rocks below. “But I know what you were thinking… how odd it is that I married a woman named Perdita, since Perdita is King Leontes’ long-lost daughter with whom he’s also reunited, before the statue of his wife, Hermione, comes to life. I mean, what are the odds that Julio Romano from The Winter’s Tale would marry a Perdita named after a character in the same play?”

“Was she?” managed Leonard, hanging on to armrest and dashboard as if his life depended on his grip. “Named after Shakespeare’s Perdita, I mean?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely.” Julio grinned at the highway ahead. “Her parents were both Shakespeare scholars. Her father, R. D. Bradley, met Perdita’s mother, Gail Kern-Preston, at a conference in Zurich that accepted papers exclusively on The Winter’s Tale.”

“The R. D. Bradley and Gail Kern-Preston?” gasped Leonard. For a moment he was too astonished to be terrified.

“Yeah.” Julio turned the bright grin toward Leonard. “Perdita’s mommy kept publishing under her maiden name after she got married. I guess scholars are like movie stars in that way… they build up too much equity under the original names to change them for a stupid little thing like marriage.”

Leonard had to smile at that. Two of his wives—his first, Sonja Ryte-Jónsdóttir, and his fourth and last one, Nubia Weusi—had felt that way. Leonard had certainly understood at the time, especially since both were better known in their respective fields and specialties than he was.

“So did you and Perdita meet at some sort of academic conference?” asked Leonard.

Julio chuckled. “Sort of. We met at a We’re-Free-Truckers, You-Fuckers Peterbilt Convention in Lubbock, Texas. I heard that there was this woman at the tattoo stall getting an image of Cerberus tattooed on her ass—two dog’s heads on her left cheek, one on her right—and I had to see that. It was Perdita, of course, twenty-three years old, been an independent trucker her own self for four years already, and was looking for fun or a fight that weekend. I took her out for a shot with a beer back afterwards, to help dull the pain, I said. We got the name thing with each other right away, both realized that the other’s parents had been into the Winter’s Tale scholar thing, and we both sort of figured that we were destined either to be enemies or mates. After a week or so on the road, during which I got to admire her Cerberus, we chose mates.”

“O seclum insipiens et inficetum,” muttered Leonard, not realizing that he’d spoken aloud. O stupid and tasteless age.

“Yeah, exactly,” laughed Julio. “True in his day and true in ours. I love Catullus. Especially when he said they make a desert and call it peace. We’ve seen that in our lifetimes too, haven’t we, Lenny?”

The “make a desert and call it peace” line was by Tacitus, but Leonard did not choose to correct his new friend. “Yes. Well, Julio, I’m getting a bit sleepy…” Leonard shifted in the deeply upholstered seat, setting his hands on his shoulder harness and the heavy center clasp. The trucks ahead of them seemed to be diving ever more steeply into the darkness of the broad canyon on this side of the Divide.

“Yes, absolutely, Lenny, you need to get some sleep. We’ll be pulling into Denver midmorning or so—before noon, certainly. But can I ask you just one more question before you head up to the bunk?” The driver laughed, a bit ruefully, Leonard thought. “Who knows when I’ll have another professor-emeritus intellectual in my cab.”

“Certainly,” said Leonard, taking his hands off the seat belt. “One question. I’ve enjoyed tonight’s conversation. But you’ll have to pardon me if my answer is short. I’m feeling my years these days… also feeling all the sleep I’ve missed this week.”

“Of course,” said Julio Romano. His right hand and left leg seemed to move without thought when he performed the complex actions needed to shift down several gears. The big rig moaned its response to him. Brake lights winked in the convoy ahead and Leonard could already smell the overheated brakes on some of the other trucks ahead or behind.

“Lenny, are you a Jew?”

Leonard felt as if he’d been slapped in the face. Not necessarily an insulting or aggressive slap, but the kind a doctor might give to bring someone to full consciousness. In all his life—seventy-four long years—no one had ever asked him that question. The only one of his four wives he’d told was Carol, his third wife. For a second Leonard was sure that this truck driver was no lonely, earnest autodidact—no highway semi-intellectual in the making as he’d generously thought a few minutes earlier—but, rather, just another redneck asshole.

Julio hadn’t even worded it politely, as in “Are you Jewish?” He’d used the casual anti-Semite’s “Are you a Jew?” Leonard suddenly felt fully awake. Not angry or alarmed yet, just very, very alert.

“Yes,” he said tightly. “I’m a Jew. Or at least from a long line of Jews. I’ve never practiced the religion. My grandfather changed his name when he came to the United States after World War One.”

“What was it originally?”

“Fuchs. Evidently it was a German variant of the English name Fox. Reportedly, red hair ran in the family and the men on my grandfather’s side of the family were supposedly very cunning. Because Fuchs sounds too much like the f-word in English, some Jews added a suffix—Fuchsman or some such—but German-sounding names also weren’t that popular right after the Great War, so my grandfather just used the cognate form Fox when he arrived.” Leonard realized that he was talking too much and fell quiet.

Julio was nodding—not as if a suspicion had been confirmed, but the way someone does when an almost unnecessary preliminary was out of the way.

“So was that the question?” asked Leonard. He didn’t succeed in keeping the edge out of his voice and he didn’t really care.

“No,” said Julio, who showed no sign of hearing any irritation. “You see, Lenny, you’re a Jew and a university left-wing intellectual, so it’s really important for me to get your take on one issue.”

“What’s that?” Now Leonard’s voice had no edge. It just sounded unutterably tired, even to himself.

“A lot of people think that Israel was destroyed because it had let the flashback drug they’d invented escape from the secret Havat MaShash lab hidden in the southern desert there in Israel,” said Julio.

Leonard had also heard this “fact” since the destruction of Israel, but it wasn’t a question and he had no comment on it.

“What I need to know, Lenny,” said the driver, sounding a bit breathless, “is what you think.”

“What I think? About what?”

“About the destruction of Israel. What you think as a Jew, I mean. A Jew as well as a liberal and intellectual.”

“I’ve been in synagogues exactly four times in my life, Julio,” Leonard said softly. “Three times it was for some friend’s son’s bar mitzvah. Once it was for a memorial service for another friend who died. None of these friends and acquaintances had any idea I was Jewish, especially the first ones, who had to show me how to wear the kippah or yarmulke—the skullcap. I’m the wrong Jew to ask.”

“But you have an opinion,” persisted the truck driver. Leonard could see that Julio was also very tired. The pouches under the pudgy driver’s eyes were almost as blue-black as the dark dropoffs on either side of the descending highway.

“Yes, like almost everyone else, I have an opinion about the destruction of Israel,” said Leonard. “As someone said even before that day—and I apologize, I forget who said it, my memory is that of an old man’s and is not as sharp as yours, Julio—‘The day that Israel is destroyed is the day that the world’s true holocaust shall begin.’ ”

“That’s not biblical?” asked Julio. “It sounds biblical.”

“I am sure it’s not. It may have been said by one of Israel’s last leaders. I really can’t recall. Is that all, Julio?”

“But, Lenny…” The man was struggling toward something, with something. “One last question. How did you feel about the American president… presidents, really… and Congresses who turned against Israel… abandoned it long before the attack?”

Professor George Leonard Fox took a breath. He was the man who—even when he was a boy—was incapable of striking another person. He’d studied pacifism as a philosophy for more than six decades, and while he knew it could not be an answer to the world’s problems, he still admired it beyond most other efforts at human sanity.

“Julio,” he said quietly, “I wish those presidents and senators and representatives had been hanged from lampposts all over Washington. And I wish to the God of Abraham that the state of Israel had responded the way it had said it would and turned Iran, Syria, and the other embryonic Caliphate states into a vast wasteland of nuclear glass, instead of dying passively the way it did. I’m tired, Julio. Tonight’s talk has been interesting—I’ll remember it—but I’m going to bed now.”

“Good night, Professor Fox.”

“Good night.”

Leonard climbed up the short ladder to his topside bunk. Perdita’s soft snores came through the curtain below but when Leonard drew his own curtain, they were all but inaudible.

He wished that Val had spent this last night in the truck so they could talk about tomorrow. Leonard was terrified that the boy was going to kill his father.

The curse of Cain killing his brother and Abraham being willing to kill his son, he thought tiredly. And I gave it to him.

Leonard got out of his clothes and struggled into the flannel pajamas he’d brought with him. The world was ending, the police and Homeland Security and FBI and who knows what other agencies were chasing Val—and thus Val’s grandfather—and he was careful to bring along his flannel pajamas and slippers and to brush his teeth every night and morning.

Life goes on. It was something every Jew knew in his DNA.

Leonard was very tired, but he was also more lonely than he had been in many years.

Feeling guilty, the old man switched on a small flashlight, unzipped Val’s duffel, and pawed through the few contents. Dara’s phone was gone, of course, along with the Beretta pistol, but Leonard already knew that. In a zippered side compartment that he hadn’t noticed earlier, Leonard found five flashback inhaler vials. Four were empty. Only a single one-hour vial remained.

Feeling even more guilty—it must be a cardinal crime among addicts and criminals, he was sure, to rifle another man’s stash—Leonard crawled under the covers, concentrated on the hour he wanted to relive, broke the seal, and inhaled the aerosol drug.

Leonard knew that it was a quickly learned skill, this focusing on a specific memory to target the flashback so that specific times could be relived. He imagined that Val and other common users had it down to a science; they must be able to relive an experience starting on almost the exact moment or precise second. It had been a long time since Professor Emeritus George Leonard Fox had tried to use the drug. He was nervous. All he wanted this long, dark, lonely night was to spend one hour with his darling third wife—and only true wife, he always secretly thought—Carol.

He wasn’t sure as he tried to focus his memory whether to spend one of her birthday nights with her—she always loved to celebrate her birthday with him—or perhaps an hour from just after they were married, or perhaps even before they married, when they took those long walks together. He panicked even as he tried to focus in the second he had to inhale.

For the next hour, Leonard had to relive a painful root canal from his late fifties. The dentist had been brusque, rough, and unsympathetic. The anesthesia hadn’t seemed to work well. Leonard’s lifelong fear of choking had added to the pain and anxiety. His pain and fear then added to his pain and fear now reliving the hour. But there was no turning back with flashback, he knew. Once started, the vial amount of a relived experience would not be changed, escaped, or denied.

It serves me right, he thought as the hour of horror moved slowly, glacially, through the night. It’s my own fault. I deserve this punishment for stealing the boy’s flashback and for trying to escape reality by communing with my dead. We should respect our dead through memory, not through pharmaceuticals. I deserve this.

Yes, thought Leonard with a wincing smile, he felt very much the Jew this night.

Dropped off a little before 11 a.m. near Union Station just off I-25 in the LoDo section of Denver, Val and Leonard began walking. They had spent only eight days with the caravan, but it had felt like much longer to Leonard and it felt strange to him now not to be continuing on with the truckers. He felt somewhat abandoned and he imagined Val did as well.

Both of them were tired and grumpy but his grandson’s usual surliness seemed to be tempered by excitement. Before the boy remembered that he didn’t communicate important things to his grandfather, he’d blurted out Henry Big Horse Begay’s promise to take Val with him if the boy had acquired a counterfeit NICC by the time Begay was scheduled to return on October 27. Val showed Leonard the slip of paper with the Denver card counterfeiter’s name, address, and phone number. There was a second man’s name and number and a street address scrawled beneath the first one.

“That’s the best NICC guy that Begay knows, period, supposedly does cards that no one can tell from the real things, but he’s not even in the country. He lives in Austin or someplace like that in Texas, so I don’t know why he gave me that name. I need to find two hundred old bucks and see this guy on South Broadway here in Denver.” Val hurried to take the folded card back.

Leonard didn’t have to point out that the old-dollar equivalent of $300,000 in new bucks was as far away as the pale scythe of moon that still hung above the mountains in the blue sky.

The day was warm for late September, almost summer-like, and the blue sky was cloudless. The leaves on the few trees along the streets in this old section of town looked as tired and dusty as the two pedestrians, but hadn’t yet begun to change color. Leonard remembered autumn days like this when he’d lived in nearby Boulder, the aspen leaves getting brittle enough to rattle in the breezes, the blue skies darkening toward that unmatchable blue of a Colorado October, and the thin air free from even the slightest hint of the humidity that so often hung over Los Angeles.

The two plodded to Blake Street and then turned right and walked three short blocks to Speer Boulevard. They argued about what to do next. Val wanted to see his old house and neighborhood near Cheesman Park, but that was miles east of here and certainly a dead end. Nick had sold that house and moved out just after he’d sent Val to Los Angeles more than five years ago. Even the neighbors Val had known as a boy were probably gone… either gone, Leonard pointed out, or already alerted by the FBI or Homeland Security to be on the lookout for Val.

“We should walk to the Cherry Creek Mall Condos, where your father lives,” said Leonard as they turned left onto the so-called Cherry Creek Trail.

“The FBI will be watching there too,” said Val.

“Yes,” said Leonard. “But with luck your father will shelter us from them.”

The old man and boy walked southeast a couple of blocks to a point just beyond Larimer Street where the pedestrian walkway ducked under North Speer Boulevard and ran along the banks of Cherry Creek to a point at which the river meandered between the lanes of the busy divided boulevard.

It was about four miles to his son-in-law’s condominium complex and after the first mile or so, Leonard wasn’t sure he was going to make it. He collapsed onto a bench by the walkway and Val fidgeted nearby.

When Leonard had lived in Colorado a couple of decades earlier, the area along Cherry Creek had been known for its homeless—at least one bearded man per intersection holding up a cardboard sign—and the less visible homeless sleeping under the many overpasses along the sunken pedestrian walkway. Now, he realized, there were thousands of homeless—entire families—permanently living along the banks of this small river. They didn’t seem threatening because the walkways on both sides of the river were a constant stream of bicycle traffic heading toward and away from Denver’s downtown. Businessmen and -women in expensive suits pedaled by, their briefcases in baskets attached to the handlebars.

But now that they’d stopped for a moment, the homeless men along the banks and in the shadows of the overpass they’d just walked under began taking notice of them.

“We’d better get going,” whispered Val.

Leonard nodded but didn’t rise immediately. He was very tired. And all during their walk so far, he’d kept raising his hands to feel his teeth through his cheeks, as if his flashback root-canal torture the night before had been real. “My bag is heavy,” he said at last, hating the hint of a whine he heard.

“Leave it,” said Val, tugging at his grandfather’s arm. Four men were ambling over from the shadows.

“I can’t leave it,” said Professor Emeritus George Leonard Fox, sounding shocked. “My pajamas are in it.”

Val got his grandfather to his feet and moving again and the four homeless men lost interest and went back to their bedrolls in the shade. Val said, “One of the motherfuckers in the convoy broke into my bag sometime last night and stole one of my last vials of flash. Can you believe it, Grandpa?”

“That’s terrible,” said Leonard.

They continued south along the river walk. The homeless men in the shadows under the overpasses backed away from Val in a way that made Leonard realize that his grandson was becoming a man.

“If we had a usable phone,” said Leonard, “we could call your father. He could come pick us up.”

“We don’t have a phone,” said Val.

“If there were still public phones, we have enough on my NICC to make a local call.”

“There aren’t any public phones, Grandpa. And you have to remember that we can’t use our cards.”

“I’m just saying that if they had phones and if those phones took change—if we still used coins—then we could phone and save ourselves this walk.”

“If we had some ham, we could have a ham and cheese sandwich,” said Val. “If we had some cheese.”

Leonard blinked. It was the first sign of humor, however sarcastic, that he’d heard from his grandson in a long time. He realized that something Begay had promised the boy—a chance, however remote, of joining the free truckers’ convoy—had brought Val out of the darkness. At least partway.

“If buses still ran, we could take a bus,” said Leonard. “Four miles is a perfect distance for a city bus.”

Val said nothing to that. Suicide bombers loved American buses in the same way that Palestinian terrorists had loved buses in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities decades ago. Subways and elevated trains still ran in major American cities because people and packages could be screened—with a fair degree of efficiency, even given the bad news of one or more explosions a month around the country—but buses were not defensible. Leonard thought that it had been a major retreat from civilization when American cities had given up on their bus systems.

Val’s small duffel bag had a strap on it and the boy put the strap over his shoulder, turned around, and took the heavier duffel from his grandfather. He didn’t say a word. They walked on with Val just a step ahead, but Leonard noticed that the boy kept his right hand free. The pistol was in his belt on the left side under his jacket.

Leonard found himself wishing that he’d fled his home and Los Angeles while wearing his sneakers rather than these dress shoes. His feet were already swollen to the point that it hurt to walk. Leonard had thought that his half-mile walk to Echo Park every day had kept him in shape, but obviously not.

The last news about Los Angeles he’d heard in Julio and Perdita’s truck that morning had said that the worst of the fighting in the city and suburbs was over and that the reconquista military forces were falling back along I-5 toward San Diego. The California National Guard and various anglo paramilitary groups had reestablished control of I-5 and the coastal corridor all the way from Long Beach to Encinitas. It was being announced as a major defeat for Nuevo Mexico expansion.

Leonard had mixed feelings about all this. As an amateur historian as well as classicist, he knew the injustice of southwestern states being taken from Mexico in the 1840s. But he was also one of the few people he knew who were old enough to remember the 1992 L.A. riots after the police who’d beaten a man named Rodney King were acquitted. In less than a week of rioting, thousands of fires were set—many of the burned-out areas still had not been rebuilt, forty years later—and more than fifty people had died with a couple of thousand injured.

Leonard had thought of those riots that morning when he’d heard details of how an entire company of reconquista infantry in armored personnel carriers had been pulled from their vehicles and beaten and killed by a mob at the same place in South Central L.A.—the intersection of Florence and South Normandie avenues—where truck drivers and other innocents had been pulled from their vehicles and attacked in 1992. In this case, according to NPR, more than two hundred reconquista fighters were dead and the black rioters had moved into East L.A., burning everything they came across in the wake of the Nuevo Mexican forces’ retreat.

This upset Leonard. He wondered how his friend Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa and Emilio’s son Eduardo were. He wished them well. There was no doubt in George Leonard Fox’s mind that even though he’d demanded payment, Emilio had saved Val’s life—and perhaps Leonard’s as well—by getting them out of Los Angeles nine days ago.

Leonard noticed that Val had led them up a flight of steps out of the sunken Cherry Creek walkway and onto the street-level sidewalk that ran alongside Speer Boulevard. There were fewer bicyclists on the pathway below, Leonard saw, and many more homeless filling the path and riverside banks.

He’d just been thinking about the Alamo—he’d once proofread a friend’s essay about Texas’s Alamo and the fighting of February–March 1836, where Travis, Crockett, Bowie, and the others had died at the hands of General Santa Anna, the essay focusing on the failure in leadership of Sam Houston, Austin, and the other self-named Texians—so he was surprised to see the greensward of Denver’s Alamo Placita Park across the street to the north. On the south side of the boulevard was the smaller Hungarian Freedom Park.

There were hundreds of hovels and tattered tents in both parks, but especially in the Hungarian Freedom Park just to their right, and many more hundreds of the homeless, mostly men, milling around.

Val dropped back next to Leonard. “Stay close to me, Grandpa.”

A group of the lean, angry-looking men, perhaps twenty-five or so, crossed the busy street to the median sidewalk and began following them.

Speer Boulevard turned into East First Avenue here and ran due east and west. To their right now was a high fence shutting off access to what had once been the Denver Country Club with its extensive grounds. Cherry Creek disappeared into that forbidden area.

Across the street to the north was one of the oldest wealthy areas of Denver with shaded streets and what had once been multimillion-old-dollar homes, small estates, really, set back on deep lawns. Now those houses were in ruins, many burned down, others occupied by street people or turned into low-quality flashcaves.

The group of men behind them rushed to cross South Downing Street and catch up to them.

Val dropped Leonard’s duffel bag, turned around, and removed the Beretta pistol from his belt.

The group of men stopped about thirty feet away. They launched curses and one threw a small rock from the street, but—still cursing and flashing obscene gestures—they turned around and headed back toward the Hungarian Freedom Park.

Leonard found that he was having some trouble breathing as Val tucked the pistol back into his belt, picked up his grandfather’s duffel bag, and, gripping Leonard’s elbow firmly, moved him more quickly down the sidewalk outside the country club barriers.

“I’m surprised they didn’t have guns themselves,” managed Leonard when he could talk. He kept glancing back over his shoulder.

“If they had guns,” said Val, “they wouldn’t be homeless. And we’d be dead. Let’s keep moving.”

Passing the entrance to the country club, Leonard’s heart pounding from the exertion and adrenaline in his system, he looked into the grounds and saw blue tents pitched everywhere on what had been the tennis courts and an eighteen-hole golf course behind the large main buildings. In the few clear areas, those large swivel-wing planes the military called VTOLs or… what was it?… Ospreys were lined up, their engines and propellers aimed skyward.

“I wonder what…,” he began.

“Keep walking, Grandpa. We’re almost there.”

Leonard’s son-in-law’s shopping-mall-turned-cubies took up a very long and wide city block, with the river at its backside. High fences and razor wire between the former mall’s parking garage and the river kept squatters from taking up residence along the banks. Across Cherry Creek to the south, Leonard and Val could see more expensive condominium complexes guarded by more razor wire, gun positions, gates, and private security guards. This side of the river was more problematic.

Leonard remembered Cherry Creek as one of the most upscale shopping districts in Colorado. Now the two-to four-story buildings across First Avenue from Nick Bottom’s mall-condo complex were a maze of stall shops and burned-out structures left over from old rioting or turf wars. None of the high-end shops had made it through the last decade.

So much depends upon maintenance, Leonard was thinking. Decades ago, before the Day It All Hit The Fan, there’d been a book and TV series about what the world would be like if human beings suddenly disappeared; not died off, just… disappeared. It had fascinated Leonard, who’d still been teaching his Shakespeare and Chaucer then.

What he hadn’t really understood until that TV program—he never did read the book it was based on—was that the physical web of modern life was so dependent upon almost constant maintenance. Leonard had always imagined, in the few apocalyptic visions he’d had, that cities would stay pretty much the way they were for years, decades, a century perhaps, until weeds, grass, trees, and wild animals began to intrude upon the urban landscape. But no, that turned out not to be the case. The program had shown how service tunnels, subways, and the rest of the subterranean parts of a major city like New York would be underwater within a day without human intervention and maintenance. The flooding alone would soon result in high-pressure explosions of pipelines, basements of tall buildings submerged, foundations undercut, and an amazingly rapid dissolution of the urban grid.

Humans weren’t gone in the United States—far from it—but the national sense of having given up, linked to the ubiquitous use of flashback to the point that very few people were actually doing their jobs at any given moment, had created a similar breakdown of infrastructure.

Leonard’s son-in-law’s cubie was in a huge fortified, windowless concrete mass. It was on the wrong side of the tracks—or in this case, the wrong side of the river—and it hulked there like a sightless Fort Apache deep in Indian territory. During the day, Leonard saw, people lived and shopped for basic items and moved through the ruined blocks of what had been the North Cherry Creek shopping area across the broad street, but at night it must be a nightmare for unarmed civilians.

On the river side of the building, the gaps in the once-open parking garage had been covered with electrified fencing. The fenced-off, grassless, muddy riverbanks were under video surveillance from the condo complex. The west end of the building was bordered by the private drive to the parking garage. Any car approaching that parking garage had to pass through automated gates, a bang box—a concrete structure designed to search automobiles and contain the explosions if they were rigged with bombs—and then through another inner gate and only then up the ramp into the garage.

The north-facing front of the Cherry Creek Mall Condominiums had main doors of windowless steel. Surveillance video-cam bubbles looked down from above those impenetrable doors.

Leonard and Val had crossed First Avenue and paced back and forth for the two blocks facing the mass of the mall.

“If we could just phone,” Leonard said. He had to sit down.

“Be quiet, Grandpa,” snapped Val. They’d been staying in the shadows, hiding their faces from the higher-surveillance video-camera bubbles hung like cheap jewelry along the front of the mall. “You’re going to have to go in and see if the Old Man is home.”

“Me?” said Leonard. “Alone? Aren’t you coming?”

“The Denver cops are looking for me. We heard on the truck radio all the names of the guys I hung around with, so there has to be some sort of bulletin out on me. Probably FBI and DHS looking for me too. They figure the first place I’d come is here… and here I am. But they might not be looking for you, Leonard.”

He’d never liked it when Val called him by his first name. “They might be looking for me as well.”

Val shrugged. “But Nick Bottom’s still our best chance. He’s a stinking flash addict, but he may still have some contacts with the Denver PD. Or at least know how to get us out of town. Building security probably won’t let you past the lobby or security airlock or whatever they have in there, but if they don’t detain you and call the cops right away, they’ll probably let you phone up to the Old Man’s cubie in there. If they do grab you, just tell them that you got out of L.A. but haven’t seen me.”

“They’d never believe that I left Los Angeles without you,” said Leonard.

Val shrugged. The silence stretched.

“And you assume your father will be home in the middle of the day?” Leonard finally said. His voice was not completely steady.

“The Old Man’s a flashback addict,” snapped Val. “Flashers are almost always home—unless they’re in a flashcave somewhere.”

“If he is there, and if they don’t detain me and call the police, what do you want me to tell your father?”

“Tell him I’m here and that he should come out to talk to me. Tell him to bring two hundred bucks in cash—old bucks. If he doesn’t have that much in cash, we can go to an ATM together. There are still a few of those things left.”

Leonard didn’t know whether hearing this made him want to laugh or weep. “That’s what this is about? Getting money from your father? So you can get that forged Teamsters NICC and be a trucker?”

“Yeah.”

“What about your anger at him, Val?”

“Well, fuck that. It doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t know what went down between him and Mom and I don’t really care anymore. If he’s there—if he hasn’t spent every last cent he has on flashback—have him come out to meet me and bring the two hundred old bucks in cash. You can tell him that I’ll never bother him again after I get the money. I figure that after sending me into exile for five fucking years, he owes me at least that much.”

Leonard shook his head. He paused, then said: “I may have the password to the encrypted text on your mother’s phone, Val. I’ve thought of several possibilities.”

The boy’s head snapped up. “Does that matter now?”

“It might.” Leonard didn’t know if it mattered or not. And even though he’d known his darling daughter well when they’d lived together, odds were against him actually guessing the password she’d chosen. Dara had been extremely intelligent: she’d have known that a near-random mixture of letters and numerals would have been the most secure password she could have chosen. Leonard was almost certainly being sentimental and foolish when he thought he might have guessed the five-letter word.

“I’m not thinking anymore that the Old Man actually had her killed,” muttered the boy. “I just hated it when he didn’t cry when she died. He didn’t cry at the funeral or when we cleaned out her stuff. The sonofabitch never showed the slightest bit of emotion. Then he shipped me off and… well, I guess I was a little nuts for a while. I just want whatever money he’ll give me and then I’ll go somewhere where I never have to see him again as long as I live.”

Leonard began to speak but bit his lip instead. “Will you give me my daughter’s phone then? I want to read her text diary.”

“If you get the Old Man out here and he brings money so I can find the card guy, you can have the goddamned phone, Grandpa. Now go on.”

The condominium lobby where Leonard’s son-in-law lived was a bulletproof, blastproof vault. Surveillance cameras watched. Inner doors were metal and multilayered. One was supposed to speak to a microphone and video camera next to a screen that showed a 3DHD video loop of flowered meadows, grazing deer, and eagles floating in a blue sky, all these images laid over inspirational music that would kill a diabetic.

A man’s voice came from the grill: “Welcome to the Cherry Creek Mall Condominiums. Can we help you?”

Leonard said that he wanted to talk to Mr. Nick Bottom.

There was a hesitation and the voice said, “Please stay where you are. Someone will be right down.”

Leonard panicked. They were calling the cops. They’d called building security and someone was coming to grab him until the police arrived.

Leonard moved quickly to the heavy outer doors and tried one. It opened. He knew the people watching him on video could lock it from their control center, so they weren’t holding him prisoner, which they certainly would have done if the goal was to arrest him. Looking out the door, he couldn’t see Val across the street but traffic moved up and down First Avenue.

Leonard closed the door and waited, his old heart pounding and the constant flower of pain in his chest unfolding to something the size of a fist. It wasn’t his heart, he knew. It was something growing—and becoming more painful—in his left lung. George Leonard Fox felt mortality press down on his shoulders like a lead collar.

The inner door opened and a stolid, heavily muscled older man in a simple black security uniform came through. He carried a radio and other paraphernalia on his belt, but no gun.

“You’re Dr. Fox?” said the man, offering his hand. “I’m Gunny G., the head of security for Cherry Creek Mall Condominiums.”

Leonard shook the offered hand. The man’s fingers were short, blunt, and wide, but shaking the man’s broad callused palm was like grasping a relatively smooth-barked tree.

“Mr. Bottom asked me to watch for you and your grandson,” said Gunny G.

We’re under arrest, thought Leonard.

“… and to escort you both to his quarters and make sure you’re comfortable,” finished the security man. Leonard noticed that this Gunny G. person’s face was a lunar-terrain map of subtle white scars under the permanent tan.

“When did my son-in-law talk to you about us?”

“This morning, sir. Before he left.”

“So he’s out right now?” Leonard said stupidly. If one of his students had responded this way, he would have put a tiny “n”—for “nullwit”—next to the student’s name in his attendance book, just to save time when the grading period came around.

Gunny G. nodded. “But Mr. Bottom said that he’d be back this afternoon or early evening and asked me personally to make sure you and your grandson were comfortable.”

“How did you recognize me?” asked Leonard, his voice not quite feeble but certainly sounding lost.

“Mr. Bottom showed me photos, sir,” said the security chief with a smile. “Do you have luggage? I’ll be happy to carry it as we head upstairs.”

Upstairs to the holding cell, thought Leonard. He was so frightened that it was almost funny.

“My grandson has our luggage,” he murmured, almost as if the real world still existed. “Perhaps we’ll come back later.”

Could they outrun the authorities? Leonard knew that he couldn’t. He couldn’t even outhobble them.

Gunny G.—what kind of name was that?—reached into his shirt pocket, removed a slip of paper, and said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Fox. I forgot that Mr. Bottom asked me to give you this.”

The note read—Leonard and Val—I’m glad you’re safe. Please trust this man. He’ll let you into my cubie. I’ll be home later today—Saturday. It’s imperative that I see you. I’ve left cafeteria chits on the table in my room if you’re hungry or thirsty. See you soon.—Nick.”

There was a hastily scribbled postscript: “Gunny G. will phone to inform me that you’ve arrived.”

Leonard had no idea if it was his son-in-law’s handwriting since he’d never seen Nick’s handwriting. He put the note in his pocket, more confused than ever.

“I’ll go get my grandson and the luggage,” he said at last. His words echoed in the blastproof tomb of an entry box.

“Very good, Dr. Fox,” said the square-faced security chief. “I’ll wait here for you.”

Val wasn’t waiting for him across the street where he’d left him, but at the west end of the condo building. Leonard told him the situation.

The boy frowned at the huge structure. “It sounds fishy to me, Grandpa.”

“Yes,” agreed Leonard. “But they let me leave to get you.”

“They want me, Grandpa. Maybe there’s a reward for me. Omura might have offered one.”

“Yes, but…” Leonard showed him the note again. “Is this your father’s handwriting, Val?”

The boy frowned. “I think so. I’m not sure. It’s been so long since…” He squinted up at the afternoon sun, crumpled the note, and tossed it away. “They’ll want to take my gun away.”

“Yes, I’m sure building security will demand that,” said Leonard. “There was a notice next to the TV screen that…”

“They can’t have my gun,” said Val.

“I’m sure they will return it when we leave.”

Val smiled. “Come with me, Grandpa.”

To the west of the huge mall building and beyond the private drive that paralleled the parking garage, an old paved bicycle path ran down to the river, where a small bridge had once crossed Cherry Creek. The bike and pedestrian path resumed on the south side of the river, but someone had blown up the narrow span. Val led his grandfather to the west side of the ruined bridge where they were out of sight of the condo’s many cameras. The creek was too high under this bridge to allow for the homeless to huddle or camp there.

Leonard watched as Val took two rocks, using one as a hammer and one as a sort of chisel, and pounded at the rusted cap on an old pipe extruding from the riverbank. The cap popped off with a screech of rusted metal. Whatever had once flowed through the small pipe flowed no more. The inside was dirt and cobwebs. Val reached into his duffel, pulled out one of his T-shirts, removed the Beretta pistol from his belt, and wrapped it and several magazines of ammunition with it. After stuffing the bundle wrist deep into the pipe, he used the two stones to pound the pipe lid back into place.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Leonard was amazed at how tiny Nick Bottom’s cubie was and how loud the neighbors in the former storefront were. There was room only for the bed, a tiny desk and cheap chair, a small bathroom with toilet and shower, and an even smaller closet.

Leonard lay back on the bed, breathing shallowly, while Val paced like a predator in an undersized cage.

“The chits are there,” said Leonard. “We could go back to that cafeteria the Gunner person showed us and have some lunch. It’s been a long time since that breakfast with the convoy.”

Val said nothing as he looked through his father’s small desk. The single drawer was empty except for a remote and flexible generic keyboard mat for the TV. Normally, Leonard knew, the resident’s phone would operate the TV and its computer functions.

Val then looked through the closet, going through his father’s hanging shirts, trousers, and sport coats. He pulled a mass of rope and webbing out of the corner. “What the hell’s this stuff?”

“Your father must have taken up climbing as a sport,” said Leonard, noting the metal-clip carabiners and ascender-handgrips that had been called jumars back in the last century.

“Like hell,” said Val. “I’ll bet you anything that this is the Old Man’s way off the roof if something goes bad in here. See this?” He held up a small rectangular bundle of orange-and-black nylon.

“What is it, Val?”

“Some sort of flotation device,” said his grandson. “Maybe a belly boat like fishermen use. The Old Man rappels down off the roof into that grassy area, inflates this thing, and paddles his ass across the river.”

“It’s wise to take precautions in case of fire…,” began Leonard.

Val barked a laugh and started going through the built-in wall drawers.

“Your father won’t like it that you’re invading his privacy,” said Leonard.

“My… father… can kiss my serene ass on my couch of many colors,” said the boy. “If I find the money, I’m out of here.” He tossed some flashback vials onto the bed from where they’d been tucked under clean underwear.

“You wouldn’t even wait to say hello to your father?”

“No.”

Val looked under the bed, behind the big flatscreen, in the toilet tank and shower. He came back into the room, looked at the cubie’s rifled-through drawers, and muttered, “Wait. I remember when they used to try to hide stuff from me in the house…”

Val pulled out the drawers and dumped their contents on the floor. He flipped the upside-down drawers onto the bed, waving Leonard aside. There were stacks of colored folders attached by duct tape to the underside of each drawer.

“Hey,” said the boy.

“It doesn’t look like money,” said Leonard. “And your father will be furious when he comes home and finds…”

Val had torn away the tape and was stacking the many dossiers on the nearby desk. First he flipped through the pages—obviously hunting for cash—but then sorted through the files, arranged them in some order, and began reading.

“Jesus Christ,” breathed the boy.

“What is it?”

Without speaking, Val tossed the folder he’d just read through to his grandfather. He did not look up from reading the second one. “Jesus Christ,” he said again.

Leonard began reading with perhaps the worst sinking feeling he’d ever had outside of the day his wife Carol had come home to tell him she had ovarian cancer.

These were photocopies of some sort of grand jury report. All the evidence, photostats, phone records, and other information led to one conclusion—that five and a half years ago, Major Crimes Unit Detective First Grade Nick Bottom had learned that his wife was having an affair with a Denver assistant district attorney named Harvey Cohen and had arranged to have them both killed in what would appear to be a highway accident.

“Jesus Christ,” whispered Dr. George Leonard Fox.

Val finished speed-reading through the last dossier, stood up, pulled the coiled climbing rope from his father’s closet, and dumped it on the floor. He opened his own duffel bag and started pulling things out even while he emptied the pockets of his own jacket.

Leonard realized that the boy was stuffing his pockets with magazines for the pistol and with handfuls of bullets.

Then Val threw the coils of climbing rope and carabiners over his shoulder, walked out the door, and disappeared into the warren of cubies in the former Baby Gap.

“Val!” Leonard ran to the outer door of the store and shouted after the boy, but his grandson was out of sight, probably down the frozen escalator or around the bend in the mall mezzanine.

Leonard pivoted in helpless circles. What could he do? He could phone the Gunny G. security person and tell him to stop Val from leaving, but of course there was no phone in Nick Bottom’s mess of a cubie. Leonard’s chest hurt from his short run from the cubie; he could never catch Val in time.

The old man went to the railing and looked down to the first level of what had once been a bright and upscale shopping mall. Garbage bags were stacked outside of all the grimy-windowed and grubby-tiled former storefronts, and the place stank. If it hadn’t been for the little light coming through dirt-crusted skylights—a few of them propped open above—the mall would have been dark and airless.

“My God, my God,” whispered Leonard. He felt almost certain that Val had gone out to retrieve his pistol and that his grandson would be stalking around outside, waiting for his father to return. Whether on foot or in a car, Nick Bottom would be a target.

Leonard was almost back to the cubie when he heard thuds and the sound of breaking glass. Oh my God, they’ve hurt Val! He ran back out onto the mezzanine, but there was still no one in sight and everything looked normal. Leonard would have stayed there until someone came out to explain what the noise had been, but his chest simply hurt too much.

Gasping for air, Leonard returned to Nick Bottom’s cubie, shoved aside the empty drawers, and sat on the bed. His chest hurt so much that he thought he might faint.

He forced himself up and walked to the desk, looking down at the heap of dossiers.

Val had emptied his pockets of everyday things—penknife, a notebook, other detritus—to make room for the pistol magazines and loose ammunition he’d taken with him. There on the desk was Leonard’s daughter Dara’s cell phone, set down and forgotten by Val in his hurry. With shaking hands, he sat on the bed and activated the few functions that still worked on the phone, clicking to the private text and massive video files.

The demand for the five-letter-digit password came up.

Remembering his lovely, elfin daughter telling her Shakespeare-scholar father why she’d fallen in love with a man with the absurd name of Nick Bottom, Leonard thumbed in the letters—d-r-e-a-m.

The encryption fell away. Leonard opened the video files first but this wasn’t a video diary by his daughter: people whom Leonard could not identify were staring into a camera, obviously a much higher-quality camera than the one on Dara’s phone, and talking about their use of flashback. The video files were huge, but skipping around in them just showed more men and women speaking into the camera. There was no sight of Dara, and Leonard couldn’t imagine why this stuff was on her phone.

One hand massaging his aching chest, Leonard closed the video files and opened the encrypted text files. This was by his daughter—a private diary kept by Dara between the late spring and early autumn of her last full year of life. It was password-protected but Leonard guessed Kildare—the name of Dara’s parakeet when she was eight years old—and the file opened. He read quickly, keying the daily entries faster and faster until he reached the last one, recorded just one day before her death.

“My God, my God,” Leonard said again, his voice filled with infinitely more terror and astonishment.

This changed everything. It made the hundreds of pages of the grand jury indictment information in the dossiers accusing Nick of murder nothing more than a sad joke. It changed everything.

He had to get to a phone and call Nick no matter what the consequences of the police tracing the call. He had to find and stop Val. He had to…

Leonard felt the sudden pain in his chest expand, a pain much more intense than the mere flower-fist of discomfort he was used to, until the pain became a widening cloak of darkness that first fluttered about him like a black bat and then settled tight around him, cutting off his vision and breathing.

I have to stay conscious, thought Leonard. I have to tell Nick. I have to tell Val. I have to tell everyone…

He did not feel himself fall.