Nick felt something like a hot electric shock run through his system. He’d never heard those words spoken aloud by anyone but Dara. “As I said, you’ve got one hell of a memory, Mr. Oz,” he said.
The older man shrugged and drew deeply on his cigarette, as if the smoke were holding back his pain. “Poets. We remember things. That’s part of what makes us poets.”
“My wife had one of your books,” said Nick and was immediately and painfully sorry he’d brought it up. “One of your books of poetry, I mean. In English. She showed it to me after I interviewed you six years ago.”
Less than three months before she died.
Danny Oz smiled slightly, waiting.
Realizing that he had to say something about the poems, Nick said, “I don’t really understand modern poems.”
Now Oz’s smile was real, showing the large, nicotine-stained teeth. “I’m afraid my verse never attained modernity, Detective… I mean, Mr. Bottom. I wrote in the epic form, old in Homer’s day.”
Nick showed his palms in surrender.
“Did you and your wife,” began Oz, “on your first date, I mean, get into what Shakespeare’s Bottom was talking about in that passage?”
The Santa Fe knife wounds deep in Nick Bottom’s deeper belly muscles were hurting as if they were new, shooting threads of fire deeper into him. Why the goddamn hell had he brought up Dara and that fucking passage from the play? Oz wouldn’t even know that Dara was dead. Nick’s belly clenched in anticipation of what the dying poet might say next. He hurried to fill the silence before Oz could speak.
“Yeah, sort of. My wife was the English major. We both thought it was weird that Bottom waking from his dream had his senses all mixed up. You know—the eye hath not heard, the ear hath not seen, the hand is not able to taste—all that stuff. We decided Bottom’s dream had messed up his senses, like that real disease of the nerves… whatchamacallit.”
“Synesthesia,” said Danny Oz, tipping ashes into the coffee can lid. Another brief flick of what could have been a wry, self-mocking smile. “I only know the word because it’s the same one used in writing where a metaphor uses terms from one kind of sense impression to describe another, like… oh… a ‘loud color.’ Yes, that was very strange and Shakespeare uses synesthesia again later in the play when the actors in the play-within-a-play ask Theseus, the Duke of Athens, whether he’d prefer to ‘hear’ a bergamask dance or ‘see’ an epilogue.”
“I don’t really understand any of that literary stuff,” said Nick. He wondered if he should just abort the interview and stand up and walk away.
Oz persisted. His pain-filled eyes seemed to catch a new gleam of interest as he squinted through the smoke. “But it is very queer, to use an old word that’s coming back into proper usage. Bottom says at the end of his dream-epiphany speech that after his friend Peter Quince turns the revelation in his, Bottom’s, dream into a ballad, ‘I shall sing it at her death.’ But whose death? Who is the ‘she’ who will be dying?”
The knife twisted in Nick Bottom’s bowels. He spoke through gritted teeth. “Whatshername. The character who dies in the play the Bottom guy is putting on in front of the Duke.”
Danny Oz shook his head. “Thisbe? No, I think not. Nor is he speaking of the death of Titania, the fairy queen that Bottom may have slept with. The woman at whose death he’ll be singing this all-important ballad is a total mystery… something above or outside the play. It’s like a clue to a Shakespearean mystery that no one has noticed.”
Ask me if I give a fucking shit, Nick thought fiercely. Surely the older man could see Nick’s pain even through his own smugness and smoke. But the thousand-yard stare seemed more focused on Nick and at ease than at any time before. Nick was very aware of the 9mm semiautomatic pistol on his hip. If he shot Danny Oz in the head today, both he and the poet would feel better.
Oz said, “As enjoyable as literary criticism connected to your name is, Mr. Bottom, I imagine you want to ask me a few questions.”
“Just a few,” said Nick, realizing that his hand was already on the butt of the pistol under his loose shirt. It took an effort to relax his grip and bring the sweaty hand back up to the table. “Mostly I just wanted to see if you remembered anything else about the interview with Keigo Nakamura.”
Oz shook his head. “Totally banal… both the questions and my answers, I mean. Young Mr. Nakamura was interested in us… in me… in all of the Israeli refugees here, only in terms of our flashback use.”
“And you told him that you did use flashback,” said Nick.
Oz nodded. “One thing I was curious about six years ago but was too nervous to ask about, Mr. Bottom. You questioned all of us who’d been interviewed by Keigo Nakamura in his last days with a focus on what questions he’d asked in the interviews. Why didn’t you just view the video he shot? Or were you testing our memory for some reason? Or our honesty?”
“The camera and memory chips were stolen when Keigo Nakamura was murdered that night,” said Nick. “Other than some scribbled prep notes and the memory of some of his assistants, we had no idea what questions he asked you and the others in the final four days of interviews.”
“Ah,” said Oz. “That makes sense. You know, one thing that Keigo Nakamura asked me that I don’t believe I remembered in the police interviews years ago… it just came to me recently… he asked me if I would use F-two.”
“F-two?” said Nick, shocked. “Did he act as if he thought it was real?”
“That’s the strange thing, Mr. Bottom,” said Oz. “He did.”
F-two, Flashback-two, had been a rumor for more than a decade now. It was supposed to be an improvement on the drug flashback where one could not only relive one’s actual past, but live fantasy alternatives to one’s past reality. Those who kept insisting that the drug would appear on the streets any day now, and who had insisted this for almost fifteen years, said that F-two was a mixture of regular flashback and a complex hallucinogenic drug that keyed on endorphins, so the F-two fantasies would always be pleasurable, never nightmares. One would never feel pain in an F-two dream.
F-two believers compared the mythical drug to splicing an existing film—or editing video with special digital effects—so that the memories currently available to be relived through all one’s senses via flashback would be a sort of raw material for happy dreams with all of the sight, smell, taste, and touch of flashback, but directed by one’s fantasies. Until Nick had realized that F-two really was a myth, that it had never appeared on the street anywhere in the world, he’d imagined using it himself so that he could not only relive his past with Dara but live a new, imagination-structured future with her.
“What’d you tell Keigo when he asked?” said Nick.
“I said that I didn’t believe there ever was going to be a drug like F-two,” said Oz, inhaling deeply as he smoked, holding the smoke in, and exhaling almost regretfully. “And I told him that if there were such a drug in the future, I almost certainly wouldn’t use it, since I produced enough fantasies in my own mind. I told him that I used flashback to remember a single memory… over and over.” The poet’s cigarette was mostly ash now. “You might say that I’m obsessive.”