“ ‘Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery,’ ” cited Julio. “I agree with old Winnie that once a society has declared that the sharing of misery is a virtue, then there’s going to be a lot of scarcity and misery in that culture’s future to share. Certainly you and I have lived through that change of outlook, Lenny.”
“Yes,” said Leonard. The red taillights of the trucks ahead of them kept swerving and disappearing with the sharp curves of Loveland Pass, as if the trucks were hurtling over the edge and out of sight down into the abyss. Leonard could see by their own truck’s headlights that the road was patched and broken and the guardrails to the side were largely missing or collapsed. There was nothing but Julio’s attention to his driving to keep them from hurtling through the gaps to a fiery death below. “Yes,” he said again, trying to regain the thread of the conversation, “but choosing a more… ah… communitarian approach to the rationing of scarcity and the social amelioration of misery does not necessarily mean that a culture has chosen decline.”
“But have you ever known a modern culture that chose socialism—the enforced redistribution of wealth of the sort we saw about twenty-five years ago, Lenny—that didn’t inevitably have to embrace decline? Decline as a world power? Decline in its people’s productivity and morale?” said Julio, shifting down three more gears and grappling the wheel hard right and then hard left again as the narrow road rose sharply and twisted even more sharply.
“Perhaps not,” said Leonard. He was eager not to force an argument on this section of highway, no matter how jovial and relaxed Julio sounded.
With his free hand, Leonard grasped the hard dashboard. Amazingly, snowfields were appearing in the starlight and moonlight on either side of the narrow highway. It was only September! Leonard had forgotten how early snow could come to the high country of Colorado.
“Lenny, you’re the professor. Wasn’t it Tocqueville who said—‘Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word—equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude’? I think it was de Tocqueville. I still read him on long hauls when Perdita’s driving and I can’t sleep.”
“Yes, I think it was Tocqueville,” managed Leonard. They were approaching the summit. Their convoy was taking up every inch of the damaged, pavement-heaving, narrow road. If a vehicle came the other way, headed west, Leonard could imagine all twenty-three trucks of their convoy hurtling over the edge. Above them, something looking like a row of giant white posts or skinny headstones ran north and south along the Continental Divide. It took a minute for Leonard to realize that these were the mostly abandoned wind turbines from the short-lived “Green” era. It was a spectral sight in the night.
“Lenny, I’m sure you can remember the year—maybe the exact day, perhaps—when the majority of American citizens were no longer paying taxes on April fifteenth but were still voting in entitlements for themselves. The tipping point, as it were.”
“I can’t say I do remember, Julio,” said Leonard.
“The election year of two thousand eight we were almost there. The election year of twenty-twelve we were there. And in twenty-sixteen we were beyond that tipping point and have never gone back,” said Julio as the truck growled in its lowest gear to reach the summit of the pass.
“Does this relate to something?” asked Leonard. He’d met a few men like Julio Romano—autodidacts who thought of themselves as intellectuals. The type always had an amazing memory and had read their translations of Plato, Thucydides, Dante, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche. What they didn’t know was that their counterparts in academia—the real intellectuals—had read these authors in the original Greek, Latin, Italian, and German. Leonard’s opinion of autodidacts was that most of the poor devils had a fool for a student and a poseur for a teacher.
They were passing between the Continental Divide wind turbines now, all inactive, and Leonard realized that the things were taller than he’d thought—each easily four hundred feet high. The scarred white pillars sliced the starry sky into cold sections.
“You know, Julio,” he said to change the topic, “there’s an odd thing about your and Perdita’s first names. And your last name as well. Julio Romano was…”
“A sculptor from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale,” said the driver, his broad grin glowing whitely in the dash lights. “The only artist of his day that Shakespeare ever cited by name. I know. Act Five, a celebratory dinner is supposed to be held in the presence of a lifelike statue of Hermione, Leontes’ dead wife—‘ a piece many years in doing and now newly perform’d by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape.’ Weird, huh, Lenny?”
“But an anachronism in Shakespeare’s day,” Leonard couldn’t stop himself from pointing out. The old academic could allow one anachronism to pass without challenge, but not two in one night. “The Julio Romano was a reference to Giulio Romano, an Italian artist from the early and midsixteenth century. But why Shakespeare would have cited Romano as a great artist—and a sculptor—is a mystery. I don’t believe he was even a sculptor.”
They were crossing the broad, snow-covered plateau of the summit. The headlights of trucks ahead of them illuminated a battered but still-standing sign—SUMMIT, 3,655 m., 11,190 ft. Julio shifted gears as the truck prepared for an even more tortuous descent on the eastern side of the Continental Divide. Behind them, the idle wind turbines receded like so many white columns holding up the dome of the brilliant night sky.
“Actually, Lenny,” said Julio, “that Giulio Romano was a sculptor, so the early Shakespeare scholars were wrong about that. In Vasari’s Lives of Seventy of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, not translated until eighteen-fifty, there were two Latin epitaphs for Romano that showed he was an architect and rather famous sculptor as well as a painter. Shakespeare would have heard of him as a sculptor, it turns out.”
“I stand corrected,” said Leonard. The descent, he now knew, was going to be many times more terrifying than the climb to the summit.
“I only know because I share the name,” said Julio. “My father was a professor of art history at Princeton.”
“Really?” said Leonard and immediately wished that he hadn’t put so much amazement in his voice.
“Yeah, really,” said Julio with another grin as he downshifted rapidly and wrestled the wheel hard left. Beyond the emptiness where the missing guardrail should be only inches to their right, there was only more emptiness for a mile or more to rocks below. “But I know what you were thinking… how odd it is that I married a woman named Perdita, since Perdita is King Leontes’ long-lost daughter with whom he’s also reunited, before the statue of his wife, Hermione, comes to life. I mean, what are the odds that Julio Romano from The Winter’s Tale would marry a Perdita named after a character in the same play?”
“Was she?” managed Leonard, hanging on to armrest and dashboard as if his life depended on his grip. “Named after Shakespeare’s Perdita, I mean?”
“Oh, yeah, absolutely.” Julio grinned at the highway ahead. “Her parents were both Shakespeare scholars. Her father, R. D. Bradley, met Perdita’s mother, Gail Kern-Preston, at a conference in Zurich that accepted papers exclusively on The Winter’s Tale.”
“The R. D. Bradley and Gail Kern-Preston?” gasped Leonard. For a moment he was too astonished to be terrified.
“Yeah.” Julio turned the bright grin toward Leonard. “Perdita’s mommy kept publishing under her maiden name after she got married. I guess scholars are like movie stars in that way… they build up too much equity under the original names to change them for a stupid little thing like marriage.”
Leonard had to smile at that. Two of his wives—his first, Sonja Ryte-Jónsdóttir, and his fourth and last one, Nubia Weusi—had
felt that way. Leonard had certainly understood at the time, especially since both were better known in their respective fields and specialties than he was.
“So did you and Perdita meet at some sort of academic conference?” asked Leonard.
Julio chuckled. “Sort of. We met at a We’re-Free-Truckers, You-Fuckers Peterbilt Convention in Lubbock, Texas. I heard that there was this woman at the tattoo stall getting an image of Cerberus tattooed on her ass—two dog’s heads on her left cheek, one on her right—and I had to see that. It was Perdita, of course, twenty-three years old, been an independent trucker her own self for four years already, and was looking for fun or a fight that weekend. I took her out for a shot with a beer back afterwards, to help dull the pain, I said. We got the name thing with each other right away, both realized that the other’s parents had been into the Winter’s Tale scholar thing, and we both sort of figured that we were destined either to be enemies or mates. After a week or so on the road, during which I got to admire her Cerberus, we chose mates.”
“O seclum insipiens et inficetum,” muttered Leonard, not realizing that he’d spoken aloud. O stupid and tasteless age.
“Yeah, exactly,” laughed Julio. “True in his day and true in ours. I love Catullus. Especially when he said they make a desert and call it peace. We’ve seen that in our lifetimes too, haven’t we, Lenny?”
The “make a desert and call it peace” line was by Tacitus, but Leonard did not choose to correct his new friend. “Yes. Well, Julio, I’m getting a bit sleepy…” Leonard shifted in the deeply upholstered seat, setting his hands on his shoulder harness and the heavy center clasp. The trucks ahead of them seemed to be diving ever more steeply into the darkness of the broad canyon on this side of the Divide.
“Yes, absolutely, Lenny, you need to get some sleep. We’ll be pulling into Denver midmorning or so—before noon, certainly. But can I ask you just one more question before you head up to the bunk?” The driver laughed, a bit 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 willi
ng 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.