Flashback

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