Flashback

ordered time. A saner time. A safer time. Even a cleaner time, he realized.

But, he argued, as all progressive liberal Democrats and intellectuals argued to themselves about the time he’d married Nubia (he just turning fifty years old and the head of his English Department, his beautiful bride not quite thirty and struggling for power in her department), the nation would have been different for Obama if the right-wingers hadn’t left them with an economy that was crumbling and a foreign policy that was failing everywhere. (Except, when Leonard continued being honest with himself, he didn’t really remember exploding economies or disastrously failing foreign policies during his thirties and forties.)

Sometime around 2011 or 2012, before Nubia left him and he’d left Colorado to come teach at UCLA, Leonard had asked various professors of economics at CU what was going on with the recession that would not end and the continuing financial, real estate, fiscal, and other crises. (Leonard had never had the slightest interest in economics… refused to treat it as a real discipline for study, much less a science. But who else could he turn to at such times?)

Five or six of the top economists on the faculty had tried to explain the convulsions then just beginning in earnest in arcane—but hopeful—terms. Leonard had tried to follow the explanations and succeeded to some extent. But he’d remained unconvinced.

Then, by chance, at a party at a fellow classics professor’s home in the foothills above Boulder, Leonard had found himself having a drink with an ancient retired professor of economics who listened to Leonard’s question, then pulled a small laptop out of his briefcase. (Phones and computers were separate things in those days, as hard as that was to imagine.)

The wrinkled old prof, already three sheets to the wind from the Scotch whiskey he’d been drinking all evening, punched up a chart and showed it to Leonard. Later, he’d e-mailed it to the English lit professor so Leonard still had a hard copy of it around somewhere.

The old chart showed a continued 8 percent debt-growth scenario—starting in 2010— with the debt shown as percentage of GDP and based on different predictions of growth, ranging from -1 percent to a healthy (but never-achieved) +4 percent.

At that never-achieved 4 percent of growth, the national debt would have equaled the Gross Domestic Product—i.e., equaled 1.0 when debt was divided by GDP—by 2015. But of course, the economy hadn’t performed that well, and the actual ratio of debt to GDP had been closer to 1.2.

The old economist’s debt-growth scenario had shown that by 2035, even if the economy had grown 4 percent a year, the debt-to-GDP ratio would be 2.2. In truth, Leonard knew, the ratio was now more than 5.0 to 1.

The chart had ended with a prediction of debt to GDP being as low as 3.2 in 2045— if the country had actually grown that much—and as bad as 18.0 in 2045 at the -1 percent growth rate.

The United States would never reach that dismal 18-times-debt-to-gross-product ratio, Leonard knew. America had gone bankrupt years ago.

“Three other economists and I worked that chart up four years ago,” slurred the drunken old Libertarian. (Or so Leonard now suspected with some alarm.) “That’s just the goddamned debt outgrowing the goddamned GDP, just as it did in Japan, and now the dragon is here and devouring us. Understand?”

“No,” said Leonard. Although part of him did, even then.

“Here,” said the old economist and pulled up another chart.

It showed the risks of growing entitlement spending and had bar graphs demonstrating how mandatory entitlement spending—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all the hundreds of other federal programs—would exceed total government revenues sometime between 2030 and 2040.

The chart had been wrong, Leonard knew. In reality, mandated entitlement spending had exceeded total government revenues before 2022, about the time the nation was officially declared bankrupt.

“That was based on projected mandatory entitlement before Obama and the Democrats rammed through their stimulus bills and all the rest of their entitlements,” growled the old prof. “Notice that somewhere in the early twenty-thirties, our mandatory spending on entitlement programs will exceed our national GDP. By twenty-fifty, the damned interest on money borrowed to pay for entitlement programs—the old, smaller entitlement programs—will be greater than the GDP.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Leonard remembered saying. “That can’t happen.”

“It can’t?” said the old economist, breathing Scotch fumes into Leonard’s face.

“Certainly not. The president and Congress would never let it come to that.”

The old man across from him was trying to focus his gaze. “I know you. I’ve read about you. You’re hot shit in English lit. Well, tell me, Mr. E-Lit Hot Shit, where’s this country going to get the money to pay for these programs?”

“The economy will come back,” said Leonard.

“That’s what they said three years ago. And every single Wall Street recovery’s been as legless as a quadriplegic Iraq veteran. And the economy—never the same as Wall Street, you understand—is worse. Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Small businesses being taxed and bullied out of existence. Unemployment rising again. Hell, there’s a permanent unemployed class in this country again for the first time since the nineteen-thirties. Inflation returning with a vengeance, making everyone poorer by the day. Shoppers aren’t spending. Buyers aren’t buying. Banks aren’t lending. And China, who still holds most of our paper, coming apart at the seams. Their economy—their miracle eight-percent-growth-a-year economy—turned out to be a bigger sham and bubble than ours. Their ‘eight percent growth’ was a bunch of old Communists determining their economic growth by fiat ahead of time—and paying for it out of government funds—like a retail store operator counting his inventory as profit.”

Leonard hadn’t understood that at all. But he was following the news on what was happening to and in and around China. It was frightening.

“The president has a lot of smart people around him,” Leonard said, standing and getting ready to move away from the retired old fool.

“It’s too fucking late for smart people,” slurred the economist, his gaze going out of focus again. He looked at his empty Scotch glass and scowled as if he’d been robbed. “The smart people are the ones who’ve fucked up this country and the world for our grandkids, Mr. Hot Shit English Lit. Remember that.”

And, for some reason, Leonard had.

WEDNESDAY

Val didn’t come home on Tuesday night nor on Wednesday morning. A little after noon, Leonard called the LAPD to report a missing child.

After forty-five minutes dealing with voice-mail and holding (for some reason the LAPD played some sort of Turkish-sounding music in the background while people waited on hold; it sounded to Leonard like the wailing of crime victims), he finally got through to a police sergeant, waited another ten minutes while his call was transferred to Missing Persons, and then he was prompted for the facts. As soon as Leonard gave his grandson’s age as “sixteen” he heard the interest go out of the policeman on the other end. The final advice was—Wait a week. Call the parents of your grandson’s friends—ask them if the boy is there. If your grandson doesn’t come home by then, call us again.

Leonard had wanted to call the parents of Val’s friends, but the only boy in that group whose name he’d known was William Coyne. There were no Coynes in the ever-dwindling online phone book.

Hadn’t the boy, William, in that one time they’d met where the young Coyne was obviously shining Leonard on, said something almost condescending about his mother working for the Japanese Advisor? Or for the city in some liaison capacity with Omura’s staff?

Leonard had his phone search through all the online city official and Getty Castle directories but there was no Coyne listed anywhere. Wait… hadn’t Val said something last year about his friend Billy the C’s parents getting divorced? It had been part of a contemptuous spiel that Val had launched at Leonard about everyone Val knew being from broken homes. If she was divorced and back to her maiden name, what might it be in the Advisor’s staff directory?

Leonard had no clue. He gave up that avenue of search.

Finally, in early afternoon, Leonard left a note for Val to phone him if he came home before his grandfather returned and spent the afternoon on his bike, searching the downtown as far south as the 10, as far west as the roadblocks at Highland Avenue that kept him out of Beverly Hills, as far east as the