“Do you still use flashback?” asked Nick. He knew the answer, but he was curious if Oz would admit to it.
The poet laughed. “Oh, yes, Mr. Bottom. More than ever. I spend at least eight hours a day under the flash these days. I’ll probably be flashing when this prostate cancer finally kills me.”
Where do you get all the fucking money for the drugs? was Nick’s thought. But instead of asking that, he nodded and said, “In the interview six years ago, I don’t believe you told me what you were flashing on. You said that Keigo hadn’t asked you… although I would have thought that this would have been his focus with all flashback users.”
“He didn’t ask me,” said Oz. “Which was decidedly odd. But then it was odd that he chose me to interview at all.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because, as you know, Keigo Nakamura was making a video documentary about Americans’ use of flashback. His entire theme and central metaphor were about the decline of a once-great culture that had turned its face away from the future and sunken into obsession with its own past—with three hundred and forty million individual pasts. But I’m not an American, Mr. Bottom. I’m Israeli. Or was.”
This question of why Keigo had chosen to talk to Oz hadn’t come up in the interview and Nick didn’t know if it was important or not. But it was definitely odd.
“So what do you flash on, Mr. Oz?”
The poet lit a new cigarette from the butt of the last and ground the dying one out. “I lost all of my extended family in the attack, Mr. Bottom. Both my parents were still alive. Two brothers and two sisters. All married. All with families. My young second wife and our young boy and girl—David was six, Rebecca eight. My ex-wife, Leah, with whom I was on good terms, and our twenty-one-year-old son Lev. All gone in twenty minutes of nuclear fire or murdered later by the Arab invaders in their cheap Russian-made radiation suits.”
“So you flash to spend time with them all,” Nick said wearily. He was supposed to go to Boulder later this afternoon for the interview with Derek Dean at Naropa, but right now he didn’t have the energy to drive that far, much less do another interview.
“Never,” said Danny Oz.
Nick sat up and raised an eyebrow.
Oz smiled with almost infinite sadness and flicked ashes. “I’ve never once used the drug to go back to my family.”
“What then? What do you flash on, Mr. Oz?” Nick should have added an If you don’t mind me asking or some such polite phrase, but he’d forgotten that he was no longer a cop. That forgetting hadn’t happened for a while.
“The day of the attack,” said Danny Oz. “I replay the day my country died over and over and over. Every day of my life. Every time I go under the flash.”
Nick must have shown his skepticism.
Oz nodded as if he agreed with the skepticism and said, “I was with an archaeologist friend at a site in southern Israel called Tel Be’er Sheva. It was believed to be the remains of the biblical town Be’er Sheva or Beersheba.”
Nick had never heard of it, but then he hadn’t read anything from the Bible for thirty years or more and knew very little about the geography. There was no longer any reason to know the geography of that dead zone.
“Tel Be’er Sheva was just north of the Havat MaShash Experimental Agricultural Farm,” said Oz.
Nick had certainly heard of that. Havat MaShash Experimental Agricultural Farm, everyone had learned after the destruction of Israel, had been the cover location for an underground Israeli biowar lab where the aerosol drug now called flashback had been developed and mass-produced. Evidently forms of the original drug had been a neurological experiment to be used for interrogations. It had escaped the Havat MaShash lab and was being sold in Europe and elsewhere in the Mideast months before the destruction of Israel.
Nick mentioned this coincidence of geography.
The poet Danny Oz shook his head. “I don’t think there was any biolab there, Mr. Bottom. I’d spent years with my archaeologist friends in that region. I had other friends who worked on and who helped administrate the real Havat MaShash Agricultural Farm. There was no secret underground installation. They just worked on agricultural stuff—the closest they probably ever came to a secret drug were the chemicals they used in improving pesticides so they wouldn’t harm the environment.”
Nick shrugged. Let Oz deny it if he wanted to. After the bombs fell, everyone knew that flashback had originated at the Havat MaShash biological warfare lab. Some felt that the nuclear attack had been, at least in part, a punishment for letting that drug escape, be copied, and sold.
Nick didn’t care one way or the other.
“What was a poet doing at an archaeological site?” he asked. Nick felt in his sport coat pocket for the small notebook he’d carried all his years as a detective, but it wasn’t there.
“I was writing a series of poems about time overlapping, the past and present coexisting, and the power of certain places which allow us to see that conjunction.”
“Sounds like sci-fi.”
Danny Oz nodded, squinted through the smoke, and flicked ashes. “Yes, it does. At any rate, I was at Tel Be’er Sheva for a few days with Toby Herzog, grandson of the Tel Aviv University archaeologist who first excavated the site, and his team. They’d found a new system of cisterns, deeper and more extensive even than the huge cisterns discovered decades ago. The site was famous for its water—deep wells and ancient cisterns riddled the deep rock—and the area had been inhabited since the Chalcolithic period, around 4000 BCE. ‘Be’er’ means ‘well.’ The town is mentioned many times in the Tanakh, often as a sort of ritual way of describing the extent of Israel in those days, such as being from ‘Be’er Sheva to Dan.’ ”
“So being underground at the dig saved your life,” Nick said impatiently.
Oz smiled and lit a new cigarette. “Precisely, Mr. Bottom. Have you ever wondered how ancient builders got light into their caves and deep diggings? Say at Ellora or Ajanta temple-caves in India?”
No, thought Nick. He said, “Torches?”
“Often, yes. But sometimes they did as we did at Tel Be’er Sheva—the generator Toby Herzog had brought was on the fritz—so his grad students aligned a series of large mirrors to reflect the sunlight down into the recesses of the cave, a new mirror at every twisting or turning. That’s how I saw the end of the world, Mr. Bottom. Nine times reflected on a four-by-six-foot mirror.”
Nick said nothing. Somewhere in a tent or hovel nearby an old man was either chanting or crying out in pain.
Oz smiled. “Speaking of mirrors, many are covered here today. My more Orthodox cousins are sitting shiva for their just-deceased rabbi—colon cancer—and I believe it’s time for seudat havra’ah, the meal of consolation. Would you like a hard-boiled egg, Nick Bottom?”
Nick shook his head. “So you told Keigo in the interview that you flashed only on your memories of looking at explosions in a mirror?”
“Nuclear explosions,” corrected Oz. “Eleven of them—they were all visible from Tel Be’er Sheva. And, no, I didn’t tell young Mr. Nakamura this because, as I said earlier, he never asked. He was more interested in asking about how extensive flashback usage was in the camp, how we purchased it, why the authorities allowed it, and so forth.”
Nick thought it was probably time to leave. This crazy old poet had nothing of interest to tell him.
“Have you ever seen nuclear explosions, Mr. Bottom?”
“Only on TV, Mr. Oz.”
The poet exhaled more smoke, as if it could hide him. “We knew Iran and Syria had nukes, of course, but I’m certain that Mossad and Israeli leadership didn’t know that the embryonic Caliphate had moved on to crude Teller-Ulum thermonuclear warheads. Too heavy to put on a missile or plane, but—as we all know now—they didn’t require missiles or planes to deliver what they’d brought us.” Perhaps sensing Nick’s impatience, Oz hurried on. “But the actual explosions are incredibly beautiful. Flame, of course, and the iconic mushroom cloud, but also an incredible spectrum of colors and hues and layers: blue, gold, violet, a dozen shades of green, and white—those multiple expanding rings of white. There was no doubt that day that we were witnessing the power of Creation itself.”