Flashback

hired hands? It’d be like recording the opinions of one of the gai-jin gardeners Nakamura hired to do the mowing at his estate. (He’d never allow Americans to work on his private gardens.)

Finally Nick said tiredly, “All the numbers. You have to understand, Sato, that I was born into a nation and society that had only known greater wealth, greater prosperity, and all sorts of what we thought of as progress in the life of every citizen except the oldest farts who remembered the first Great Depression. My old man’s generation couldn’t even imagine things getting worse. So when they—and we—had the money, we spent it. And after we didn’t have the money any longer, we still spent it.”

“Do you speak of individuals, Bottom-san? Or your government?”

“Yeah,” said Nick. “Both. Remember, I was just coming of age when we had the first sort of financial meltdown and unemployment mini-quakes—we thought it was the Big One, having no clue that the problems were just early tremors of something much worse—and the president we elected right then made it all worse… no, we all did… by passing those staggering entitlement programs that he knew, we all knew in our guts, that we couldn’t begin to pay for.”

“But Europe had such entitlement programs for generations,” said Sato. Entirermehn. Except for the pronunciation, Nick thought, the massive security chief was beginning to sound like a college prof trying to keep a dull conversation going with even duller students.

Nick laughed. “Yeah, and look where that got them!”

“Do you think much of European countries, Bottom-san?”

“Every goddamn hour and minute of my life, Hideki-san,” Nick said emphatically.

After a few minutes of silence, perhaps feeling sorry for the obviousness of his sarcasm, Nick added, “No. I don’t think hardly any of us Americans think about the Germans or French or those other poor fucks these days. They invited the tens of millions of Muslims into their house. They made the laws and sharia exceptions to their laws that ended up with them turning their cultures over to the Global Caliphate. Fuck ’em. Our attitude—my attitude—is the old saying, You buttered your bread, now sleep in it.”

“Buttered… your bread…,” Sato began hesitantly. Nick looked at the cabin monitor and could see the security chief’s large dark eyes shifting his way like beetles within the eye openings of the red samurai mask.

“Sorry,” said Nick. “Old joke that my wife and I used to make. It’s a dumb take on the saying You’ve made your bed, now sleep in it.”

“Ahhh,” said Sato but the syllable did not suggest real enlightenment.

Finally… “But how do you feel about all this change, Bottom-san?”

Nick sighed. For whatever reason—and perhaps it was Mr. Nakamura’s curiosity—Sato really wanted to know his fucking feelings. If he hadn’t been strapped and clamped and armored in place, Nick might have left the room then, but the room was moving at forty-eight miles per hour at the moment. Their next town, he saw by the GPS display, would be Las Vegas… Las Vegas, New Mexico, not the Nevada gambling town.

“I feel like almost the full second half of my life has been a goddamned nightmare,” said Nick. “I expect to wake up any day and find out it has all been a fucking nightmare… that Hawaii didn’t secede and you Japs didn’t take it over after them being a monarchy again for six lousy years. That Dara and I could honeymoon there again if we wanted to. That Santa Fe was just a quaint town in a neighboring state with good food and some good art, rather than being a place run by bandits where someone stuck a six-inch blade in my bowels.

“I expect to wake up and see that I live in a country that projects power in the world for good reasons—to find justice there—rather than watch us send our children, my kid next year, Sato, to battlefields we can’t pronounce where they die fighting battles for you Japs… and not even for your goddamned country, but for your zaibatsu or keiretsu or whatever you call those damned teams of corporations that really run Japan these days.

“I expect to wake up and be able to walk down the street of my own city in my own country without being afraid that some goddamned jihadist kid is going to explode a suicide vest on me for no sane reason and where I can go to a Rockies game on a summer evening without worrying about bombers and snipers. I expect to wake up and find that the money I saved could actually buy something—like a plane trip somewhere, or a driving vacation— and that my wife is still alive to go with me.

“But the nightmare’s real. The bad dream is the reality, and everything good that we dreamed about—Dara and me, my whole fucking country—that’s gone, history, a fading dream.”

Nick was breathing hard when he finally fell silent. His cheeks were wet with what he hoped to Christ was sweat.

“This is why you take flashback, Bottom-san?” Sato said softly.

“You bet your ass it’s why I take flashback, Hideki-san,” answered Nick. “And it’s why half the cops I used to know have swallowed their guns.”

“Swallowed their… ahh, yes,” said Sato.

Nick shook his head as much as he could within his helmet and armor mask. Sato asks him three or four obvious, stupid questions and has former homicide detective Nick Bottom blubbering—or at least sweating—like a little girl. It was pathetic. It made Nick realize—or at least be reminded of—what a wreck he was. All he wanted to do right now was to get back to his cubie in the corner of the old Baby Gap, lock his door, and settle into several hours of flash.

He said to Sato, “But Japan has changed, too, hasn’t it?”

“Ah, yes, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “In the past years of upheaval everywhere, Nippon has shrugged off this shell of culture and government forced on it by MacArthur and the occupying Americans after the lost war and has returned to its natural form of hierarchy and government.”

“Which is what?” asked Nick. “Rule by the family and strongman who wins the constant battle between the zaibatsu or keiretsu teams of companies we were talking about?”

“Hai,” grunted Sato. “Yes, Bottom-san. More or less. In that sense, Nippon has thrown off the uncomfortable pretense of democracy forced upon us—a cultural form that never fit us—and returned to something like the bakufu or tent-office or Shogunate, the seii taishogun form of strong military-industrial leader that ruled Nippon for so many generations.”

“During your Middle Ages,” said Nick, not completely hiding the sneer in his tone.

“Yes, Bottom-san. Our Middle Ages which continued until you Americans forced our island and culture to open to the world, almost to the twentieth century. But be cautious in your contempt, Bottom-san. Seii taishogun means ‘great general who subdues eastern barbarians.’ ”

“That’s us,” said Nick. “The gai-jin. The foreign devils.”

“Hai. Foreign but not devils. That is the way the Chinese think and speak. They, the Chinese, are the greatest racists in the world. Not the Nipponese. Gai-jin may translate best simply to ‘the outside persons.’ ”

“Meanwhile, your boss, Mr. Nakamura, wants to be a modern Shogun.”

“Of course. As do the heads of the Munetaka, Morikune, Toyoda, Omura, Yoritsugo, Yamahsita, and Yoshiake keiretsu.”

“There’s an Omura as Advisor in California and a Yoritsugo Advisor in the Midwest somewhere—Indiana and Illinois?”

“Hai, Bottom-san. And Ohio.”

“So being a Federal Advisor here in the States is a big step toward seizing the Shogunate in Japan?”

“It can be, yes. Depending upon whether the Advisor and head of the keiretsu clan succeeds or fails here. Whether he gains honor or loses it. For you see, this is another thing that has returned in recent decades—the ancient and long-forgotten but deeply embedded centrality of honor and courage and sacrifice. The bushido, the way of the warrior that demands honor unto death, reigns once again in the thoughts and actions of many Nipponese.”

“Including whaddyoucallit, seppuku—ritual suicide—if you fail.”

“Oh, yes.”

“But what’s the point?” said Nick.