Oz said, “As enjoyable as literary criticism connected to your name is, Mr. Bottom, I imagine you want to ask me a few questions.”
“Just a few,” said Nick, realizing that his hand was already on the butt of the pistol under his loose shirt. It took an effort to relax his grip and bring the sweaty hand back up to the table. “Mostly I just wanted to see if you remembered anything else about the interview with Keigo Nakamura.”
Oz shook his head. “Totally banal… both the questions and my answers, I mean. Young Mr. Nakamura was interested in us… in me… in all of the Israeli refugees here, only in terms of our flashback use.”
“And you told him that you did use flashback,” said Nick.
Oz nodded. “One thing I was curious about six years ago but was too nervous to ask about, Mr. Bottom. You questioned all of us who’d been interviewed by Keigo Nakamura in his last days with a focus on what questions he’d asked in the interviews. Why didn’t you just view the video he shot? Or were you testing our memory for some reason? Or our honesty?”
“The camera and memory chips were stolen when Keigo Nakamura was murdered that night,” said Nick. “Other than some scribbled prep notes and the memory of some of his assistants, we had no idea what questions he asked you and the others in the final four days of interviews.”
“Ah,” said Oz. “That makes sense. You know, one thing that Keigo Nakamura asked me that I don’t believe I remembered in the police interviews years ago… it just came to me recently… he asked me if I would use F-two.”
“F-two?” said Nick, shocked. “Did he act as if he thought it was real?”
“That’s the strange thing, Mr. Bottom,” said Oz. “He did.”
F-two, Flashback-two, had been a rumor for more than a decade now. It was supposed to be an improvement on the drug flashback where one could not only relive one’s actual past, but live fantasy alternatives to one’s past reality. Those who kept insisting that the drug would appear on the streets any day now, and who had insisted this for almost fifteen years, said that F-two was a mixture of regular flashback and a complex hallucinogenic drug that keyed on endorphins, so the F-two fantasies would always be pleasurable, never nightmares. One would never feel pain in an F-two dream.
F-two believers compared the mythical drug to splicing an existing film—or editing video with special digital effects—so that the memories currently available to be relived through all one’s senses via flashback would be a sort of raw material for happy dreams with all of the sight, smell, taste, and touch of flashback, but directed by one’s fantasies. Until Nick had realized that F-two really was a myth, that it had never appeared on the street anywhere in the world, he’d imagined using it himself so that he could not only relive his past with Dara but live a new, imagination-structured future with her.
“What’d you tell Keigo when he asked?” said Nick.
“I said that I didn’t believe there ever was going to be a drug like F-two,” said Oz, inhaling deeply as he smoked, holding the smoke in, and exhaling almost regretfully. “And I told him that if there were such a drug in the future, I almost certainly wouldn’t use it, since I produced enough fantasies in my own mind. I told him that I used flashback to remember a single memory… over and over.” The poet’s cigarette was mostly ash now. “You might say that I’m obsessive.”
“Do you still use flashback?” asked Nick. He knew the answer, but he was curious if Oz would admit to it.
The poet laughed. “Oh, yes, Mr. Bottom. More than ever. I spend at least eight hours a day under the flash these days. I’ll probably be flashing when this prostate cancer finally kills me.”
Where do you get all the fucking money for the drugs? was Nick’s thought. But instead of asking that, he nodded and said, “In the interview six years ago, I don’t believe you told me what you were flashing on. You said that Keigo hadn’t asked you… although I would have thought that this would have been his focus with all flashback users.”
“He didn’t ask me,” said Oz. “Which was decidedly odd. But then it was odd that he chose me to interview at all.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because, as you know, Keigo Nakamura was making a video documentary about Americans’ use of flashback. His entire theme and central metaphor were about the decline of a once-great culture that had turned its face away from the future and sunken into obsession with its own past—with three hundred and forty million individual pasts. But I’m not an American, Mr. Bottom. I’m Israeli. Or was.”
This question of why Keigo had chosen to talk to Oz hadn’t come up in the interview and Nick didn’t know if it was important or not. But it was definitely odd.
“So what do you flash on, Mr. Oz?”
The poet lit a new cigarette from the butt of the last and ground the dying one out. “I lost all of my extended family in the attack, Mr. Bottom. Both my parents were still alive. Two brothers and two sisters. All married. All with families. My young second wife and our young boy and girl—David was six, Rebecca eight. My ex-wife, Leah, with whom I was on good terms, and our twenty-one-year-old son Lev. All gone in twenty minutes of nuclear fire or murdered later by the Arab invaders in their cheap Russian-made radiation suits.”
“So you flash to spend time with them all,” Nick said wearily. He was supposed to go to Boulder later this afternoon for the interview with Derek Dean at Naropa, but right now he didn’t have the energy to drive that far, much less do another interview.
“Never,” said Danny Oz.
Nick sat up and raised an eyebrow.
Oz smiled with almost infinite sadness and flicked ashes. “I’ve never once used the drug to go back to my family.”
“What then? What do you flash on, Mr. Oz?” Nick should have added an If you don’t mind me asking or some such polite phrase, but he’d forgotten that he was no longer a cop. That forgetting hadn’t happened for a while.
“The day of the attack,” said Danny Oz. “I replay the day my country died over and over and over. Every day of my life. Every time I go under the flash.”
Nick must have shown his skepticism.
Oz nodded as if he agreed with the skepticism and said, “I was with an archaeologist friend at a site in southern Israel called Tel Be’er Sheva. It was believed to be the remains of the biblical town Be’er Sheva or Beersheba.”
Nick had never heard of it, but then he hadn’t read anything from the Bible for thirty years or more and knew very little about the geography. There was no longer any reason to know the geography of that dead zone.
“Tel Be’er Sheva was just north of the Havat MaShash Experimental Agricultural Farm,” said Oz.
Nick had certainly heard of that. Havat MaShash Experimental Agricultural Farm, everyone had learned after the destruction of Israel, had been the cover location for an underground Israeli biowar lab where the aerosol drug now called flashback had been developed and mass-produced. Evidently forms of the original drug had been a neurological experiment to be used for interrogations. It had escaped the Havat MaShash lab and was being sold in Europe and elsewhere in the Mideast months before the destruction of Israel.
Nick mentioned this coincidence of geography.
The poet Danny Oz shook his head. “I don’t think there was any biolab there, Mr. Bottom. I’d spent years with my archaeologist friends in that region. I had other friends who worked on and who helped administrate the real Havat MaShash Agricultural Farm. There was no secret underground installation. They just worked on agricultural stuff—the closest they probably ever came to a secret drug were the chemicals they used in improving pesticides so they wouldn’t harm the environment.”
Nick shrugged. Let Oz deny it if he wanted to. After the bombs fell, everyone knew that flashback had originated at the Havat MaShash biological warfare lab. Some felt that the nuclear attack had been, at least in part, a punishment for letting that drug escape, be copied, and sold.
Nick didn’t care one way or the other.
“What
was a poet doing at an archaeological site?” he asked. Nick felt in his sport coat pocket for the small notebook he’d carried all his years as a detective, but it wasn’t there.
“I was writing a series of poems about time overlapping, the past and present coexisting, and the power of certain places which allow us to see that conjunction.”
“Sounds like sci-fi.”
Danny Oz nodded, squinted through the smoke, and flicked ashes. “Yes, it does. At any rate, I was at Tel Be’er Sheva for a few days with Toby Herzog, grandson of the Tel Aviv University archaeologist who first excavated the site, and his team. They’d found a new system of cisterns, deeper and more extensive even than the huge cisterns discovered decades ago. The site was famous for its water—deep wells and ancient cisterns riddled the deep rock—and the area had been inhabited since the Chalcolithic period, around 4000 BCE. ‘Be’er’ means ‘well.’ The town is mentioned many times in the Tanakh, often as a sort of ritual way of describing the extent of Israel in those days, such as being from ‘Be’er Sheva to Dan.’ ”
“So being underground at the dig saved your life,” Nick said impatiently.
Oz smiled and lit a new cigarette. “Precisely, Mr. Bottom. Have you ever wondered how ancient builders got light into their caves and deep diggings? Say at Ellora or Ajanta temple-caves in India?”
No, thought Nick. He said, “Torches?”
“Often, yes. But sometimes they did as we did at Tel Be’er Sheva—the generator Toby Herzog had brought was on the fritz—so his grad students aligned a series of large mirrors to reflect the sunlight down into the recesses of the cave, a new mirror at every twisting or turning. That’s how I saw the end of the world, Mr. Bottom. Nine times reflected on a four-by-six-foot mirror.”
Nick said nothing. Somewhere in a tent or hovel nearby an old man was either chanting or crying out in pain.
Oz smiled. “Speaking of mirrors, many are covered here today. My more Orthodox cousins are sitting shiva for their just-deceased rabbi—colon cancer—and I believe it’s time for seudat havra’ah, the meal of consolation. Would you like a hard-boiled egg, Nick Bottom?”
Nick shook his head. “So you told Keigo in the interview that you flashed only on your memories of looking at explosions in a mirror?”
“Nuclear explosions,” corrected Oz. “Eleven of them—they were all visible from Tel Be’er Sheva. And, no, I didn’t tell young Mr. Nakamura this because, as I said earlier, he never asked. He was more interested in asking about how extensive flashback usage was in the camp, how we purchased it, why the authorities allowed it, and so forth.”
Nick thought it was probably time to leave. This crazy old poet had nothing of interest to tell him.
“Have you ever seen nuclear explosions, Mr. Bottom?”
“Only on TV, Mr. Oz.”
The poet exhaled more smoke, as if it could hide him. “We knew Iran and Syria had nukes, of course, but I’m certain that Mossad and Israeli leadership didn’t know that the embryonic Caliphate had moved on to crude Teller-Ulum thermonuclear warheads. Too heavy to put on a missile or plane, but—as we all know now—they didn’t require missiles or planes to deliver what they’d brought us.” Perhaps sensing Nick’s impatience, Oz hurried on. “But the actual explosions are incredibly beautiful. Flame, of course, and the iconic mushroom cloud, but also an incredible spectrum of colors and hues and layers: blue, gold, violet, a dozen shades of green, and white—those multiple expanding rings of white. There was no doubt that day that we were witnessing the power of Creation itself.”
“I’m surprised it didn’t create an earthquake and bury all of you,” said Nick.
Oz smiled and inhaled smoke. “Oh, it did. It did. It took us nine days to dig our way out of the collapsed Tel Be’er Sheva cisterns and that premature entombment saved our lives. We were only a few hours on the surface when a U.S. military helicopter found us and flew us out to an aircraft carrier—those of us who’d survived the cave-in. I spend all of my waking, non-flashback time trying to capture the beauty of those explosions, Mr. Bottom.”
Stone crazy, thought Nick. Well, why shouldn’t he be? He said, “Through your poetry.” It was not a question.
“No, Mr. Bottom. I haven’t written a real poem since the day of the attack. I taught myself to paint and my cubie here is filled with canvases showing the light of the pleroma unleashed by the archons and their Demiurge that day. Would you like to see the paintings?”
Nick glanced at his watch. “Sorry, Mr. Oz. I don’t have the time. Just one or two more questions and I’ll be going. You were at Keigo Nakamura’s party on the night he was killed.”
“Is that the question, Mr. Bottom?”
“Yes.”
“You asked me that six years ago and I’m sure you know the answer. Yes, I was there.”
“Did you talk to Keigo Nakamura that evening?”
“You asked me that as well. No, I never saw the filmmaker during the party. He was upstairs—where he was murdered—and I was on the first floor all evening.”
“You didn’t have any… ah… trouble getting to the party?”
Oz lit a new cigarette. “No. It was a short walk. But that’s not what you mean, is it?”
“No,” said Nick. “I mean, you’re a resident of the refugee camp here. You’re not allowed to travel. How’d you just happen to walk over to Keigo Nakamura’s party?”
“I was invited,” said Oz, inhaling deeply on the new cigarette. “We’re allowed to wander a little bit, Mr. Bottom. No one’s worried. All of us refugee Jews have implants. Not the juvenile-offender kind, but the deep-bone variety.”
“Oh,” said Nick.
Oz shook his head. “The poison it releases wouldn’t kill us, Mr. Bottom. Just make us increasingly more ill until we return to the camp for the antidote.”
“Oh,” Nick said again. Then he asked, “The night of the murder, you left the party with Delroy Nigger Brown. Why?”
Oz exhaled smoke in a cough that might have been meant as a laugh. “Delroy supplied me with my flashback, Dete… Mr. Bottom. The guards here sell it to us, but they add fifty percent to the price. When I could, I bought it from Delroy Brown. He lives in an old Victorian house on the hill just west of the Interstate.”
Nick rubbed his cheek and realized that he’d forgotten to shave that morning. Oz’s reason made sense but it was still odd that Keigo Nakamura would have interviewed both Brown and Oz during the same last days of his life. Unless Brown had led Keigo to Oz. It probably didn’t really matter.
“I never understood why the U.S. government didn’t just let you Jewish refugees integrate into society here,” Nick said. “I mean, there are twenty-five million or so Mexicans here now and that group sure as hell doesn’t reflect the education and training of you ex-Israelis.”
“Ah,” said Danny Oz. “You are too kind, Mr. Bottom. But the U.S. government couldn’t just turn us loose and let us live with family members here in America. There were more than three hundred thousand Israeli survivors that came here, you remember. And with your economy and the Jobless Recovery now in its twenty-third year…”
“Still…,” began Nick.
Oz’s voice was suddenly sharp. Angry. “The U.S. government was and is terrified of angering the Global Caliphate, Mr. Bottom. The Caliphate is waiting to exterminate us, and what’s laughingly called the U.S. government is terrified of angering them. Grow up.”
Nick blinked as if slapped.
“You’re one of those who pretend as if the Caliphate and partitioned Europe don’t exist, aren’t you?” demanded Danny Oz. “One of those who ignore the fact that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in what’s left of your United States.”
“I don’t ignore anything,” Nick said stiffly. In truth, he did ignore the Caliphate and all foreign problems. What the hell did it matter to him? Dara had had some half sister disappeared into dhimmitude in France or Belgium or one of the other partitioned countries where sharia law predominated, but what th
e hell was that to him? Dara had never met the woman.
Oz smiled again. “Isn’t it interesting that they killed six million of us again, Mr. Bottom?”
Nick stared at the poet.
“It seems to be the magic number, doesn’t it?” said Oz. “The population of Israel at the time of the attack was somewhere around eight and a quarter million people, but more than two million of those were Israeli Arabs or non-Jewish immigrants. About a million of those Arab Israelis died with the target population, but it was still six million Jews who either died in the attacks, from the radiation shortly after—they were very dirty bombs, weren’t they, Mr. Bottom?—or from the invading Arab armies. Some four hundred thousand Jews incinerated in Tel Aviv–Jaffa. Three hundred thousand burned to ash in Haifa. Two hundred and fifty thousand in Rishon LeZiyyon. And so on. Jerusalem wasn’t bombed, of course, since that city—intact—was the reason for the attacks, both nuclear and military. Those six hundred thousand–some Jews were taken prisoner by the radiation-suited armies and just never seen again, although there are reports of a large canyon in the Sinai filled with corpses. What I’ll never understand was why the Samson Option wasn’t executed.”
“What’s that?” said Nick.
“I was a liberal, you understand, Mr. Bottom. I spent a good portion of my adult life protesting the policies of the state of Israel, marching for peace, writing for peace, and trying to identify with the poor, downtrodden Palestinian people—Gaza was more than decimated, by the way, with eighty percent fatalities when the fallout from the bomb that took out Beersheva—just two hundred thousand incinerated Jews—drifted to the north and east. But I wonder daily about the absence of the Samson Option I’d heard about my entire life… the rumored policy of the Israeli government, if attacked by weapons of mass destruction or if a successful invasion of the state of Israel was imminent, to use its own nukes to take out the capitals of every Arab and Islamic nation within reach. And Israel’s reach in those days, Mr. Bottom, was longer than one might think. Decades and decades ago, but after the first Israeli bombs were secretly built, a general named Moshe Dayan was quoted as saying ‘Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.’ But in the end, you see, we weren’t. We weren’t at all.”