Flashback

”

Sato shook his massive head. “I was thinking of calling for a taxi.”

“I don’t want your goddamned Honda electric, Hideki-san.”

“Mr. Nakamura thought it might be more reliable than your current vehicle for your…”

“I said I didn’t want your fucking Honda!” shouted Nick. His head was pounding with pain and the shouting made it worse. “Give me a ride home if you want, but I’ll use my own car.”

“As you wish,” said Sato and waved Nick ahead of him through the door. The two men clattered down the wide stairway. Sato got them through the lower door and they crossed the cold, empty living area without speaking.

Outside, Sato handed the physical key for the outside door to one of the two Japanese men waiting. It was still raining.

Before getting into the passenger side of the Honda, Nick looked east down the street as if Dara might still be standing there.

What are you bastards up to? he wondered as he felt the car bob to Sato’s weight. Nick ran both palms across the roof of the car and rubbed the cold water into his face before sliding into the passenger seat. Every part of Nick that could hurt did hurt, including his heart.

Neither man spoke during the fifteen-minute ride to Cherry Creek.

As Nick was getting out of the car at the shopping mall condos, Sato said softly, “Bottom-san, please to understand, if you call me ‘motherfucker’ again, I shall be forced to kill you.”

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

SUNDAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MONDAY

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

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

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

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

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

The supermarket was also a trial. It took Leonard almost fifteen minutes in line to get into the store through