Flashback

“You could skip writing the novel and just write an equivalent to Tolstoy’s epilogue to War and Peace,” said Emilio. “You know—themes such as the fact that forces in history act beyond human reason, that none of us are free but consciousness creates in each of us the illusion of freedom and free will, that since free will is an illusion, history must find its true laws, and that even personality depends upon time, space, emotion, and causality.”

“That would be a treatise,” said Leonard, watching Emilio bring his other rook into play through traffic. “Not a novel.”

“No one reads novels anymore anyway, Leonard.”

“I know,” said Leonard, taking out Emilio’s first protective rook with his own bishop. “Check.”

Emilio frowned. It was too late to castle and he’d been profligate with the movement of his pawns and power pieces, leaving the royal hearth relatively unprotected. He abandoned his attack for a moment and swung his bishop back into a protective position.

“Check,” Leonard said again after he’d taken the bishop with his own bishop.

Emilio grunted and finally used his torpid knight to take Leonard’s bishop—Leonard had been prepared for the swap since Emilio depended more on his bishops—and now all pretense of formal defensive and offensive positions on the board melted away in a chaos of oddly placed pieces. Their games, so formal at the outset, almost always degraded into amateur play this way.

“It’s an age of treatises at least,” said Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa.

“It’s an age of Zeitstil,” Leonard said sharply.

Emilio knew the context of the phrase—the style of the times”—and they’d discussed it more than once. The German intellectual Ernst Jünger had used that phrase in his Kaukasische Aufzeichnungnen secret notebooks during Hitler’s reign. Leonard despised the memory of Jünger—at least the World War II Jünger rather than the more outspoken Cold War Jünger—because the German had, as Leonard had, decided it was enough to secretly despise and ridicule Hitler rather than openly oppose tyranny. Zeitstil—the style of the times”—was Jünger’s way of describing the use of euphemism and double-talk by those in power to wreck the very language that those in power had usurped. Jünger had seen it in 1930s and ’40s Germany; Leonard had watched it during his lifetime in America. Neither had acted.

“LTI,” whispered Emilio. It stood for Lingua tertii imperii—Jünger’s code phrase, borrowed from Victor Klemperer, for “Language of the Third Empire” and a bitter scholarly pun. “It has always been with us.”

Leonard shook his head. His knights were advancing against Emilio’s scattered defenses now.

“Not always. Not like this.”

“So your new War and Peace would have neither real war nor real peace in it, my friend. Only the confusion of our era and its language.”

“Yes,” said Leonard. Emilio had attempted defense by rook and now Leonard’s bishop swept across the board to take that rook.

“Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant,” said Emilio.

“Yes,” Leonard said again. The first time he’d heard that quote from Tacitus—They make a desert and call it peace”—he’d been a freshman in college and the four words had struck him in the forehead like a fist. They still did.

“Check,” said Leonard. “Checkmate.”

“Ah, yes, very nice, very nice,” muttered Emilio. He stubbed out his cigarette and lit a new one, leaning back and crossing his arms. “Something is bothering you, my friend. Your grandson?”

Leonard took three slow breaths and began rearranging the pieces for a new game before answering.

“Yes. Val’s missed school all this week—I get the autocalls from the high school—and he comes in during the wee hours, sleeps late, and won’t talk to me. He’s not the boy he used to be.”

“Perhaps he is becoming the man he is going to be,” Emilio said softly.

“I hope not,” said Leonard. “This is a dark phase for him. He’s angry, resentful at everything—especially me—and, I think, using a lot of flashback.”

“You’ve found the vials?”

“No. I just have a strong feeling he’s doing the drug with his friends.”

The two old men had discussed flashback many times. How could they not? Emilio insisted that he had never tried it; he preferred memory to a false, chemical reliving of things. Besides, he said, when a man is in his eighties, he cannot give up time from real living for so many minutes of “reliving.” Leonard had admitted that he’d used flashback a few times, years before, but didn’t like how it made him feel. Nor, he admitted, were there any people or times so important to him that he would pay so much money to relive his time with them. “One of the benefits—or drawbacks, perhaps—of being married four times,” he’d said to Emilio.