At any rate, the divorce he’d asked for had come through four months after his dissertation was successfully defended and his first PhD obtained. Sonja had resented that typing under false pretenses, as she put it. But somehow she’d forgiven him and the two had remained friends until her death in 1997.
Professor Emeritus George Leonard Fox couldn’t say the same about his other three wives. They were all still alive (although he’d recently heard that Nubia was all but lost to Alzheimer’s), but none of them had forgiven him for the marriages or his hypothetical offenses. Wait… perhaps Nubia had if she no longer even remembered who he was. Leonard stopped writing in his diary and imagined, with some irony, hunting her up at whatever overcrowded government repository for dementia victims she was stored in and reintroducing himself.
He shook his head. Sometimes he wondered if he was showing early signs of Alzheimer’s himself. (Although, he realized, at age seventy-four, the signs wouldn’t be all that early, would they?)
Val hadn’t come home the previous night. The boy had finally shown up as Leonard was finishing a late breakfast. His only response to his grandfather’s “Good morning” had been an irritated grunt. Then Val had gone straight to bed and slept most of the Sunday away.
Whatever was going on in the sixteen-year-old’s life, Leonard knew, was not going to be shared with his grandfather or any other adult. Leonard hated that aspect of his grandson’s personality. The sulky, pouty, rebellious, noncommunicative teenager pose was such a terribly tiresome cliché. If Leonard hadn’t seen the other side of the personality of his daughter’s only child—Val’s sensitivity (which he worked so hard to hide from his peers), his addiction to reading, his reluctance (at least as a younger child) to hurt other people—the aging ex-professor would have been sorely tempted to wash his hands of the boy and send him home, somehow, to his father.
Val’s father. Several times in recent weeks, Leonard had come close to phoning Nick Bottom. But each time he’d held off. The first reason for doing so was the simple fact of nonlocal calls having become so difficult and expensive again, after decades of cheap instant contact with anyone anywhere. Leonard remembered from his childhood when one of his parents would say to the other, “It’s a long-distance call,” as if that involved paying for a call to the moon.
The other reasons for Leonard’s hesitation were less obvious and petty: the fact that Nick Bottom had shown less and less interest in his son over the past five years; and finally the fact that Bottom was almost certainly still a serious flashback addict which, to Leonard, meant the person met the clinical description of malignant narcissist.
But still, he wrote in his diary, as the storm clouds continued to build over the Los Angeles basin, Leonard knew that he would have to do something.
He paused and flexed his aching right hand. Writing by hand, he realized now, aggravated his arthritis more than typing on a virtual keyboard. But speaking of clichés! “Storm clouds building”! Sonja would have chastised him in her strongest Swedish for that one.
But with heavier clouds of smoke filling parts of the sky over Los Angeles every day—first in the reconquista neighborhoods to the east and southeast, then in the Asian sections farther south and west and around UCLA, yesterday in the rich people’s walled and gated and patrolled enclaves to the west and up in the hills toward Mulholland Drive—it certainly looked as if storm clouds were building and growing darker by the day.
Leonard resumed his diary entry. He’d decided to visit Emilio at the address the older man had given him—no phone or e-mail number, just the address—before the next weekend if Val’s aberrant behavior continued and if the growing sense of imminent Armageddon in the city persisted. As risky and expensive as buying passenger fare into one of the truck convoys to Denver might seem, it was beginning to feel like a more prudent course than remaining in Los Angeles.
Leonard started the day with simple relief that Val went off to school. Later, Leonard phoned the district’s autocheck line and confirmed that his grandson was actually there.
He’d tried to talk to Val over the boy’s rushed breakfast—chugging a bottle of UltraCoke and grabbing a food bar—and Val’s only response had been “If you’re so worried about where I spend my time, you should have done a kid-finder implant on me.”
If Val had been his own son, Leonard would have. But he’d come to him from Denver when Val was almost eleven years old—and in shock and mourning after the sudden death of his mother and the new addiction of his father—and it seemed too late to Leonard to take the boy to the LAPD for a tracker implant.
Leonard spent too much of Monday trying to run various errands, including stocking up on nonperishable food they could take with them if they did indeed decide to make a run for it the following weekend. As he rode his bicycle around his neighborhood and Chinatown, he was struck again by how impossible it was to get much done—or at least done efficiently—in this brave new world he lived in.
Flashback, he thought, was the greatest culprit. Leonard foolishly went to his bank, a real bank, to attempt a non-ATM transaction, and of course there were no human tellers available. One of his bank’s main TV advertising points was that there would always be a minimum of two human tellers on duty during the bank’s four half-days when they were open to the public, but Mondays—one of those half-days—was endemic with flashback absenteeism. Leonard knew he should have known better than to try to bank with a person on a Monday.
The supermarket was also a trial. It took Leonard almost fifteen minutes in line to get into the store through the various CMRI portals, sniffer credit checks, and DNA-recognition booths. Once inside, the only nonshoppers in sight were the beetle-armored security people with their ebony helmets, reflective visors, and clunky automatic weapons. Leonard had seen enough versions of this future in the movies so popular during his middle-aged years that he should have been used to it before it actually arrived, but now, even after almost two decades of growing security presence, it still bothered him.
The absence of clerks meant that when Leonard noticed that the fresh produce section was filled with rotting vegetables due to brownouts and negligence, his only option was to phone an automated national number. Somewhere in that echoing, horribly lighted building poxed with black security camera bubbles, he suspected, was a human, living, breathing store manager. But that manager certainly wanted nothing to do with his patrons. And Leonard seriously doubted if the Los Angeles chain was still owned by anyone named Ralph.
He had to bike many blocks out of his way coming home from his day’s errands because of the constant chirping of his phone’s terrorist-incident alarms. Tibetan suicide bombers had detonated themselves in Chinatown; Aryan Brotherhood California separatists were engaging in a shootout with LAPD and Homeland Security tactical units near Echo Park.