Flashback

After forty-five minutes dealing with voice-mail and holding (for some reason the LAPD played some sort of Turkish-sounding music in the background while people waited on hold; it sounded to Leonard like the wailing of crime victims), he finally got through to a police sergeant, waited another ten minutes while his call was transferred to Missing Persons, and then he was prompted for the facts. As soon as Leonard gave his grandson’s age as “sixteen” he heard the interest go out of the policeman on the other end. The final advice was—Wait a week. Call the parents of your grandson’s friends—ask them if the boy is there. If your grandson doesn’t come home by then, call us again.

Leonard had wanted to call the parents of Val’s friends, but the only boy in that group whose name he’d known was William Coyne. There were no Coynes in the ever-dwindling online phone book.

Hadn’t the boy, William, in that one time they’d met where the young Coyne was obviously shining Leonard on, said something almost condescending about his mother working for the Japanese Advisor? Or for the city in some liaison capacity with Omura’s staff?

Leonard had his phone search through all the online city official and Getty Castle directories but there was no Coyne listed anywhere. Wait… hadn’t Val said something last year about his friend Billy the C’s parents getting divorced? It had been part of a contemptuous spiel that Val had launched at Leonard about everyone Val knew being from broken homes. If she was divorced and back to her maiden name, what might it be in the Advisor’s staff directory?

Leonard had no clue. He gave up that avenue of search.

Finally, in early afternoon, Leonard left a note for Val to phone him if he came home before his grandfather returned and spent the afternoon on his bike, searching the downtown as far south as the 10, as far west as the roadblocks at Highland Avenue that kept him out of Beverly Hills, as far east as the reconquista checkpoints along Ramona, and north to Glendale.

Everywhere there were convoys of armored military vehicles—National Guard, Homeland Security, and even some regular Army. The smoke in the south was very thick. Los Angeles radio and local Internet news reported nothing out of the ordinary.

In the end, returning to their still-empty and dark basement apartment around 7 p.m., Leonard was beside himself with anger and concern.

Perhaps it was just the sight and diesel-stink of all the military vehicles he’d seen and madly pedaled out of the way of that day, but Leonard wondered if this increased belligerence and erratic behavior from Val were a result of him turning sixteen and having to face the draft now in less than a year. It was the last real discussion that Leonard and his grandson had really had, that afternoon of the boy’s lonely birthday “party.” Leonard was sure that Nick’s failure to call his son must have hurt Val deeply, but there was no discussion of that. Val’s questions that evening centered on the draft, possible ways to avoid it (there were essentially none for a healthy, white young American male who’d registered, as Val had, when the forms showed up on his phone screen), and about the various wars that American soldiers were fighting for India and Japan.

On that last query, Leonard had been less than helpful—he really had trouble understanding the NSEACPS hegemony, much less its war goals in China and elsewhere, and could only explain that sending the troops to fight for the financially more stable India and Nippon was one of America’s few sources of hard currency.

“Mr. Hartley at school says there was an old Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere almost a hundred years ago,” Val had said, “and that it had something to do with that big war fought then, but I didn’t quite understand the connection.”

The connection is irony, Leonard had thought, but he’d explained about the militarist Japanese Empire and its fancy name for its short rule over major parts of China, Malaysia, what was then called Indochina, and the Philippines and other islands of the South Pacific. He gave a quick explanation of how the Japanese during their rapid imperial expansion had touted their brutal military occupations as a throwing off of white imperial domination—which it certainly was—but only in exchange for a Japanese version of Hitler’s Master Race form of imperial conquest. “They were very close to adding Australia to their so-called co-prosperity sphere and would have done it if it hadn’t been for the Battle of Midway,” said Leonard but stopped when he saw the birthday boy’s eyes glazing over. Val was a reader, but he didn’t enjoy history the way his grandfather thought he should. As was true of most American high school students in this era of politicized curricular “relevance,” Val had never been made to place… say… the Civil War within a hundred years of its actual dates.