Flashback

Lying back on his cot, the IV feed loose enough that it wouldn’t get in the way in case he needed to reach for his pistol, Nick lifted the first twenty-hour vial, visualized his memory trigger point, broke the seal, and inhaled deeply.

3.00 Echo Park, Los Angeles—Saturday, Sept. 11

Professor emeritus George Leonard Fox, PhD, moved slowly into the park, taking care not to trip, not to fall, not to break his increasingly brittle bones. It made him smile. It’s come to this, he thought. It’s why old people hobble. To protect their brittle bones. And there now, with the grace or curse of God, am I.

He realized he was being petulant and banished the childish emotion in return for increased vigilance as he slowly worked his way—but not hobbling, not yet, not quite—across the broken paving stones into the park. At age seventy-four Dr. George Leonard Fox had not yet begun using a cane or walking stick and he’d be damned if he’d hurt himself today so that he had to start using one. Broken flashback vials crunched underfoot but Leonard ignored the sound.

It was early, just after 7 a.m., and the air in Echo Park was relatively cool, the skies above a clear blue, the remaining tables and benches in the park damp with dew. During the weekday and weekend nights, countless gangs stabbed and shot each other for—for what? wondered Leonard. For possession of the park turf for a few hours? For status? For the fun of it?

For a man who had spent almost his entire lifetime struggling to understand things, Leonard realized that as he approached death from old age, should he be so lucky, he understood less and less.

But he understood that during the mornings on Saturdays and Sundays, the park belonged to old men such as himself.

Leonard raised his eyes from the treacherous sidewalk and saw that his friend Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa had staked out their favorite concrete chess table and was already setting up the chess pieces he’d brought.

“Buenos días, mi amigo,” said Leonard as he approached the table.

“Good morning, Leonard,” said Emilio with a smile.

The two spoke in Spanish or English on alternate Saturdays and Leonard had forgotten that it had been Spanish the previous week. How could he have forgotten? He’d had to struggle to remember the word “impoverishment”—empobrecimiento had been what Emilio had finally provided—so was he now showing the memory-loss effects of Alzheimer’s as well as trouble with balance and fear for his brittle bones?

Leonard smiled and tapped Emilio’s closed left fist. It was a black piece. Emilio got to be white again. He won the tap about three times out of four and always preferred to be white and to go first. Emilio sat on the concrete bench—the chessboard was already set up properly for him to be white from that side—and Leonard carefully took his place across from him. They used no chess clocks in their friendly games.

Emilio opened with his inevitable conservative pawn move. Leonard answered the opening with the same pawn move with which he always responded. The game moved into its predictable early stages and the men could relax and talk while they played.

“How goes your novel, Leonard?” Emilio asked the question as he was lighting a cigarette. Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa—the old man insisted that his grandfather had stolen the full family name from a character in a John Wayne movie—smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. Yet Emilio had been born in 1948, a full decade before Leonard, and was approaching his eighty-fourth birthday with no apparent worries about brittle bones, lung cancer, or anything else.

By his own admission, Emilio had lived a mostly charmed life. Coming as an illegal immigrant to California as a young man in the late 1960s, he’d made enough money as a translator and sometimes accountant to return to Mexico, get married, and then earn his master’s degree and PhD at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. He then taught Spanish literature there and at IPN, the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, for years until—at about the time of his retirement—two of his sons and three of his grandsons were killed in battles between the drug cartels and Mexican federal police.