Flashback

3.00 Echo Park, Los Angeles—Saturday, Sept. 11

Professor emeritus George Leonard Fox, PhD, moved slowly into the park, taking care not to trip, not to fall, not to break his increasingly brittle bones. It made him smile. It’s come to this, he thought. It’s why old people hobble. To protect their brittle bones. And there now, with the grace or curse of God, am I.

He realized he was being petulant and banished the childish emotion in return for increased vigilance as he slowly worked his way—but not hobbling, not yet, not quite—across the broken paving stones into the park. At age seventy-four Dr. George Leonard Fox had not yet begun using a cane or walking stick and he’d be damned if he’d hurt himself today so that he had to start using one. Broken flashback vials crunched underfoot but Leonard ignored the sound.

It was early, just after 7 a.m., and the air in Echo Park was relatively cool, the skies above a clear blue, the remaining tables and benches in the park damp with dew. During the weekday and weekend nights, countless gangs stabbed and shot each other for—for what? wondered Leonard. For possession of the park turf for a few hours? For status? For the fun of it?

For a man who had spent almost his entire lifetime struggling to understand things, Leonard realized that as he approached death from old age, should he be so lucky, he understood less and less.

But he understood that during the mornings on Saturdays and Sundays, the park belonged to old men such as himself.

Leonard raised his eyes from the treacherous sidewalk and saw that his friend Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa had staked out their favorite concrete chess table and was already setting up the chess pieces he’d brought.

“Buenos días, mi amigo,” said Leonard as he approached the table.

“Good morning, Leonard,” said Emilio with a smile.

The two spoke in Spanish or English on alternate Saturdays and Leonard had forgotten that it had been Spanish the previous week. How could he have forgotten? He’d had to struggle to remember the word “impoverishment”—empobrecimiento had been what Emilio had finally provided—so was he now showing the memory-loss effects of Alzheimer’s as well as trouble with balance and fear for his brittle bones?

Leonard smiled and tapped Emilio’s closed left fist. It was a black piece. Emilio got to be white again. He won the tap about three times out of four and always preferred to be white and to go first. Emilio sat on the concrete bench—the chessboard was already set up properly for him to be white from that side—and Leonard carefully took his place across from him. They used no chess clocks in their friendly games.

Emilio opened with his inevitable conservative pawn move. Leonard answered the opening with the same pawn move with which he always responded. The game moved into its predictable early stages and the men could relax and talk while they played.

“How goes your novel, Leonard?” Emilio asked the question as he was lighting a cigarette. Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa—the old man insisted that his grandfather had stolen the full family name from a character in a John Wayne movie—smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. Yet Emilio had been born in 1948, a full decade before Leonard, and was approaching his eighty-fourth birthday with no apparent worries about brittle bones, lung cancer, or anything else.

By his own admission, Emilio had lived a mostly charmed life. Coming as an illegal immigrant to California as a young man in the late 1960s, he’d made enough money as a translator and sometimes accountant to return to Mexico, get married, and then earn his master’s degree and PhD at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. He then taught Spanish literature there and at IPN, the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, for years until—at about the time of his retirement—two of his sons and three of his grandsons were killed in battles between the drug cartels and Mexican federal police.

When the cartel-federal battles reached the level of real civil war and more than twenty-three million Mexicans, cartels included, flowed north into the United States within a period of less than seven months, five of Emilio’s surviving sons and eight of his grandsons joined the tsunami as leaders in the emerging reconquista effort separating the nascent Nuevo Mexico from much of the chaotic, cartel-controlled old Mexico. Professor Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa came north with his sons and grandsons and great-grandsons and most of his granddaughters and their families, returning to the United States—what was left of it—where he’d earned his original stake for his education and where he’d visited so many times as a respected academic.

Leonard had met Dr. Fernández y Figueroa in September of 2001, at a very high-profile literary conference at Yale. Both scholars had been presented to the conference as experts on the novels of Gabriel Gárcia Márquez, the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. It took less than an hour of panel discussion for Dr. George Leonard Fox to retreat on each of these fronts, deferring to the expertise of Professor Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa.

On the third day of that conference, aircraft hijacked by al Qaeda jihadists had flown into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, and it had been the ensuing private conversations between Leonard and Emilio that had set the basis for their friendship in Los Angeles that endured more than three decades later.

Leonard sighed and said, “My novel is stuck, Emilio. My idea was for it to be a War and Peace overview of the last forty years, but I can’t get beyond September 2008. I simply don’t understand that first financial crisis.”

Emilio smiled, exhaled smoke, and moved his bishop aggressively.

“Perhaps Proust should be your model, Leonard, and not Tolstoy.”

Leonard blocked the bishop’s line of attack by moving one of his pawns a single square. The pawn was protected by his knight.

After his initially conservative moves, Emilio would become overly aggressive through the use of a combination of his bishops and rooks, almost always at the expense of his other pieces. Leonard preferred his knights and a solid defense.

“No, Emilio, even if I had a magical madeleine, telling my own life interweaved with the events of the last decade would illuminate almost nothing. I wasn’t on this planet. I was on university campuses.”

Leonard had noticed a turning point when the nation and world started heading for hell… or at least his part of it. He had been teaching in both the classics and English departments at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the 1990s when the university—under a sort of blackmail from the instructor in question—appointed a fake scholar, fake Native American, fake professor (but true hater) named Ward Churchill to be head of their newly created Ethnic Studies Department. It had been a surrender to absolute political correctness—a term already inextricably intertwined with the term “university”—and a surrender to a type of rabid mediocrity. When he had returned from the Yale conference after 9-11 to find that this Ward Churchill had written an essay comparing the victims in the World Trade Center and Pentagon to “little Eichmanns,” it hadn’t surprised Professor George Leonard Fox. His students—the few English majors and even fewer classics majors—seemed to move apologetically through the hallways at CU, clinging to the walls, while Churchill’s Ethnic Studies students—tattooed, multiply pierced, their fists commonly raised in anger—would stride like Gestapo.

“No,” said Leonard again, “I don’t have even a Proustian ghost of a life to write about. I wanted to document the era we’ve both lived through as broadly and brilliantly as Tolstoy documented his. I just don’t know anything, understand anything… not war, not peace, not finances, not economics, not politics. Nothing.”

Emilio chuckled, coughed, and moved a rook five squares forward to support both his bishops in an attempted pincers move.

“Tolstoy once said that War and Peace was not meant to be a novel at all.”

“Well,” said Leonard, bringing his other knight into play, “then I’ve equaled Tolstoy. My mess of pages isn’t a novel either.”

Emilio’s bishop, protected by his rook, captured one of Leonard’s pawns.

“Check,” said Emilio.

Leonard calmly moved the knight he’d had in waiting, protecting his king and threatening Emilio’s bishop. It was a… Leonard blushed at even thinking the term… Mexican standoff.

“You could skip writing the novel and just write an equivalent to Tolstoy’s epilogue to War and Peace,” said Emilio. “You know—themes such as the fact that forces in history act beyond human reason, that none of us are free but consciousness creates in each of us the illusion of freedom and free will, that since free will is an illusion, history must find its true laws, and that even personality depends upon time, space, emotion, and causality.”

“That would be a treatise,” said Leonard, watching Emilio bring his other rook into play through traffic. “Not a novel.”

“No one reads novels anymore anyway, Leonard.”

“I know,” said Leonard, taking out Emilio’s first protective rook with his own bishop. “Check.”

Emilio frowned. It was too late to castle and he’d been profligate with the movement of his pawns and power pieces, leaving the royal hearth relatively unprotected. He abandoned his attack for a moment and swung his bishop back into a protective position.

“Check,” Leonard said again after he’d taken the bishop with his own bishop.

Emilio grunted and finally used his torpid knight to take Leonard’s bishop—Leonard had been prepared for the swap since Emilio depended more on his bishops—and now all pretense of formal defensive and offensive positions on the board melted away in a chaos of oddly placed pieces. Their games, so formal at the outset, almost always degraded into amateur play this way.

“It’s an age of treatises at least,” said Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa.

“It’s an age of Zeitstil,” Leonard said sharply.

Emilio knew the context of the phrase—the style of the times”—and they’d discussed it more than once. The German intellectual Ernst Jünger had used that phrase in his Kaukasische Aufzeichnungnen secret notebooks during Hitler’s reign. Leonard despised the memory of Jünger—at least the World War II Jünger rather than the more outspoken Cold War Jünger—because the German had, as Leonard had, decided it was enough to secretly despise and ridicule Hitler rather than openly oppose tyranny. Zeitstil—the style of the times”—was Jünger’s way of describing the use of euphemism and double-talk by those in power to wreck the very language that those in power had usurped. Jünger had seen it in 1930s and ’40s Germany; Leonard had watched it during his lifetime in America. Neither had acted.

“LTI,” whispered Emilio. It stood for Lingua tertii imperii—Jünger’s code phrase, borrowed from Victor Klemperer, for “Language of the Third Empire” and a bitter scholarly pun. “It has always been with us.”

Leonard shook his head. His knights were advancing against Emilio’s scattered defenses now.

“Not always. Not like this.”

“So your new War and Peace would have neither real war nor real peace in it, my friend. Only the confusion of our era and its language.”

“Yes,” said Leonard. Emilio had attempted defense by rook and now Leonard’s bishop swept across the board to take that rook.

“Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant,” said Emilio.

“Yes,” Leonard said again. The first time he’d heard that quote from Tacitus—They make a desert and call it peace”—he’d been a freshman in college and the four words had struck him in the forehead like a fist. They still did.

“Check,” said Leonard. “Checkmate.”

“Ah, yes, very nice, very nice,” muttered Emilio. He stubbed out his cigarette and lit a new one, leaning back and crossing his arms. “Something is bothering you, my friend. Your grandson?”

Leonard took three slow breaths and began rearranging the pieces for a new game before answering.

“Yes. Val’s missed school all this week—I get the autocalls from the high school—and he comes in during the wee hours, sleeps late, and won’t talk to me. He’s not the boy he used to be.”

“Perhaps he is becoming the man he is going to be,” Emilio said softly.

“I hope not,” said Leonard. “This is a dark phase for him. He’s angry, resentful at everything—especially me—and, I think, using a lot of flashback.”

“You’ve found the vials?”

“No. I just have a strong feeling he’s doing the drug with his friends.”

The two old men had discussed flashback many times. How could they not? Emilio insisted that he had never tried it; he preferred memory to a false, chemical reliving of things. Besides, he said, when a man is in his eighties, he cannot give up time from real living for so many minutes of “reliving.” Leonard had admitted that he’d used flashback a few times, years before, but didn’t like how it made him feel. Nor, he admitted, were there any people or times so important to him that he would pay so much money to relive his time with them. “One of the benefits—or drawbacks, perhaps—of being married four times,” he’d said to Emilio.

Now Leonard expected to hear something philosophical from his older Mexican friend, perhaps consoling, but instead Emilio said, “A local spanic girl, Maria Hernandez, was raped yesterday while on her way to school. She had a—doubtful—reputation, but her father and brothers and the local reconquista militia have vowed to kill the boys who did it.”

“The boys?” asked Leonard. His voice was so hollow that it seemed to echo in his own ears.

“A gang of eight or nine anglo boys,” said Emilio. “Almost certainly one of these flashgangs we hear about every day now. They did it so they could redo it over and over.”

Leonard licked his lips. “If you’re thinking Val… no, not possible. Not Val. As angry and troubled as he is… no, not Val. Not rape. Never.”

Emilio peered at his fellow academic and chess partner with sad eyes. “The girl—Maria—knew one of the boys who raped her. An anglo student from her school who likes to call himself Billy the Kid. A certain William Coyne.”

Professor Emeritus George Leonard Fox thought that he might be physically ill. He’d met very few of Val’s friends over the five years since Nick had sent his grandson to live with him, but the always smiling, respectful, courteous, and, somehow, Leonard knew from forty years of teaching, Eddie Haskell–devious Billy Coyne had been one who’d been to the house often.

“I think I have to get Val out of this city,” said Leonard. Emilio had moved his white pawn forward, starting the second game, but Leonard wasn’t focusing on it.

“Sí, it might be a good idea, my friend. Do you have the money for the airfare?”

Leonard laughed bitterly. “With fares now going for more than a million new bucks per ticket for a Los Angeles–to-Denver flight? Hardly.”

“His father, perhaps? He was able to pay the boy’s fare here five years ago.”

Leonard shook his head. “Nick used almost all of my daughter’s life-insurance money to buy that ticket.”

“But he was a policeman…”

“Was,” said Leonard. “He’s nothing more than a flashback addict now. I used to have Val phone him monthly, but now Val doesn’t want to speak to his father and Nick doesn’t return my calls when I leave a message. I think he’s forgotten that he has a son.”

“Are there other relatives?”

Lost in thought, Leonard shook his head again. “You know about my family, Emilio. Four marriages over all those years but only three daughters. Dara dead in that Denver car accident. Kathryn married that French Muslim and moved to Paris more than twenty years ago—she’s lost in dhimmitude there. Under the veil, as they say. I haven’t heard from her at all in fifteen years. Eloise calls me from New Orleans three times a year—always to borrow money. She and her husband are both flash addicts. Neither has a job. The three ex-wives I loved are dead; the one I learned to hate—and who always hated me—is alive and rich and wouldn’t take a phone call from me, much less my grandson from another wife.”

“So,” said Emilio, “the father.”

“Yes. The father. Val says that he hates his father—when he says anything at all about him—but it would still be for the best, I think. And it would only be for eleven months until Val goes into the army. This city is getting too dangerous for the boy.”

Emilio was looking at Leonard with a mournful expression. “It may soon be too dangerous for you as well, my friend. You should both go. Soon. Very soon.”

Leonard blinked out of his reverie, all thoughts of chess gone. “What are you telling me, Emilio? What do you know?”

The older man sighed, raised his ivory-handled cane from where it was propped against their table, and leaned his weight on it. “The forces of La Raza and reconquista are very restless. There may be an effort to seize all power in Los Angeles soon.”

Leonard laughed out of sheer surprise. The two rarely discussed politics per se. “Seize power?” he said too loudly. “Don’t the spanics already run everything in L.A. except a few neighborhoods? Isn’t it already a law that the mayor must be spanic?”

“Spanic, yes. But not true reconquista, Leonard. Not governing all of Los Angeles as a province of Nuevo Mexico. This is… coming.”

Leonard could only stare. Finally he said, “That would mean civil war in the streets.”

“Yes.”

“How much… how much time do we have?”

Emilio leaned more heavily on his cane, his doleful expression becoming even sadder. Leonard was reminded of his Cervantes and the Knight of the Woeful Countenance.

“If you and your grandson can go, you should go… soon,” whispered Emilio. He took a business card and a beautiful fountain pen from his pocket and wrote something on the card in Spanish and handed it across the table. Leonard could see that the card showed only Emilio’s name and an address about two miles east of Echo Park—he’d never asked Emilio where he lived—and a brief handwritten sentence telling anyone who read the note to allow this man to pass, that he was a friend, and to convey him to the address on the card. The signature was Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa.

“But how?” asked Leonard, folding the card carefully and setting it in his billfold. “How?”

“There are the convoys, both the eighteen-wheeler truck convoys that sometimes carry paying passengers and the groups of motorists who band together.”

“I don’t own a car.” Leonard was feeling the kind of vertigo that he’d always thought must assail a man just before a stroke or massive coronary. The heat of the September sun was suddenly too much to bear.

“I know.”

“The checkpoints and roadblocks…”

“Come see me at that address when you are certain that the two of you are leaving,” Emilio said in Castilian Spanish. “Something may be arranged.”

Leonard set his hands flat on the concrete chess table and stared at the liver spots and raised veins, at the knuckles swollen with arthritis. Were these his hands? How could they be?

“Do you remember what the Roman legionnaire Flaminius Rufus said about the City of the Immortals in Borges’s story ‘The Immortal’?” Emilio asked, speaking in English again.

“Flaminius Rufus? I… no. I mean, yes, I remember the story, but I don’t… no.”

“Borges had his legionnaire say that the city is ‘so horrible that its mere existence… contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars.’ ”

Leonard stared at the older man. He had no idea what Emilio was talking about.

“That is how the Nuevo Mexico reconquista warriors view the remaining gringo and Asian parts of Los Angeles, my friend,” said Emilio. “There will be much blood shed. And soon. And if your grandson had anything to do with the rape of Maria Hernandez, he will not live long enough even to see the shedding of this blood throughout the City of Angels. Get out if you can, Leonard. Take your grandson. Go.”