Flashback

“Yeah, he did,” said Nick, getting ready to swing his cast over the edge of the cot to the floor. He could use some help hobbling and he wasn’t going to wait for the Texas Ranger nurse. Might as well put Val to some use while he was still close by. “He really did.”

0.00

Nick floated in green weightlessness.

Nick floated in no-space, no-time. He was coming up from the smell of canvas walls and grass floor of the tent in Texas, away from his son and father-in-law, up into the real world of no-world.

Nick’s eyelids were sutured, but not quite shut. His eardrums were punctured, but not quite without hearing.

Nick floated with his lungs full of oxygen-rich liquid. They had drowned him into this death-life. They had not removed his eyes. They had not removed his optic nerves. It was punishment.

White-coated shapes, distorted in shape and size, moved in the nonliquid spaces outside his tank. Occasionally a greentinted and lens-distorted semihuman face would peer in at him in the intervals when he was up and out of his dreams.

NCAR.

NCAR.

The basement of the floating dead in NCAR.

Nakamura Center for Advanced Research.

And Nick Bottom’s punishment was to have his eyes, to have his shattered eardrums, to be brought up from the Flashback-two dreams from time to time.

Dara was dead. Val was dead, murdered on that Saturday in September. Leonard was dead. Nick wanted to be dead but they would not let him die. This was Nakamura’s punishment, Sato’s punishment, for opposing their Shogunate will.

Nick’s world was dead.

Except for this dream-fantasy happy-ending world into which they submerged and resubmerged him like a kitten being drowned again and again.

Nick floated like a white, bloated dead thing. But he dreamt on. And between the dreams… this…

He felt the feeding tubes and catheters boring into his body like barb-burrowing eels. He felt his muscles gone flaccid and rotting away like white mushrooms in the thick fluid. He stared out through sutures at a green world.

He had dreamt he was a man. The dream, Bottom’s dream, had brought them together briefly. But she was gone. And he was not allowed to follow.

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, or his heart to report, what my dream was… I shall sing it at her death.

Nick Bottom floated in the NCAR green tank of thick liquid and the drug entered his body and carried him back to his dream.

1.21 San Antonio, Republic of Texas—Saturday, Feb. 26

Nick awoke gasping and sweating from his nightmare.

It was the old nightmare. The recurring nightmare. The NCAR nightmare.

He got out of his barracks bed, peeled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt, and flung it across the bedroom. He went into the tiny bathroom wearing only his boxer shorts, splashed water on his face and neck, and toweled himself off.

He walked into his kitchen and looked out the window as the sun was rising. Nick was on the tenth floor of the Texas Rangers barracks in San Antonio, formerly the Menger Hotel on East Crockett Street, and he didn’t like it that the Alamo was right across the street in the plaza named after it, the resurrected old mission visible in all its stony reality. He didn’t like it because he’d dreamt about it once—the Camaro dream—and Nick Bottom no longer trusted dreams.

He watched the sun touch the curved-bedstead gray-stone top of the Alamo.

His T-shirt off, Nick looked down at his body. It carried its scars: the wounds in his belly from the knifing in Santa Fe years ago; the scars on his leg from when they’d set the broken bone there five months ago in Texline; the lesser scars on his face and hands and back.

But it was the tiny spiderweb of scars on his deeply tanned left forearm that drew Nick’s attention now.

He went back to the bedroom and came back into the kitchen with the switchblade knife that was part of his Ranger kit. Many of the men carried huge knives—some actual Bowie knives—but Nick carried only this city switchblade, as sharp as a scalpel. He’d brought iodine and rubbing alcohol from the bathroom.