“I’m surprised it didn’t create an earthquake and bury all of you,” said Nick.
Oz smiled and inhaled smoke. “Oh, it did. It did. It took us nine days to dig our way out of the collapsed Tel Be’er Sheva cisterns and that premature entombment saved our lives. We were only a few hours on the surface when a U.S. military helicopter found us and flew us out to an aircraft carrier—those of us who’d survived the cave-in. I spend all of my waking, non-flashback time trying to capture the beauty of those explosions, Mr. Bottom.”
Stone crazy, thought Nick. Well, why shouldn’t he be? He said, “Through your poetry.” It was not a question.
“No, Mr. Bottom. I haven’t written a real poem since the day of the attack. I taught myself to paint and my cubie here is filled with canvases showing the light of the pleroma unleashed by the archons and their Demiurge that day. Would you like to see the paintings?”
Nick glanced at his watch. “Sorry, Mr. Oz. I don’t have the time. Just one or two more questions and I’ll be going. You were at Keigo Nakamura’s party on the night he was killed.”
“Is that the question, Mr. Bottom?”
“Yes.”
“You asked me that six years ago and I’m sure you know the answer. Yes, I was there.”
“Did you talk to Keigo Nakamura that evening?”
“You asked me that as well. No, I never saw the filmmaker during the party. He was upstairs—where he was murdered—and I was on the first floor all evening.”
“You didn’t have any… ah… trouble getting to the party?”
Oz lit a new cigarette. “No. It was a short walk. But that’s not what you mean, is it?”
“No,” said Nick. “I mean, you’re a resident of the refugee camp here. You’re not allowed to travel. How’d you just happen to walk over to Keigo Nakamura’s party?”
“I was invited,” said Oz, inhaling deeply on the new cigarette. “We’re allowed to wander a little bit, Mr. Bottom. No one’s worried. All of us refugee Jews have implants. Not the juvenile-offender kind, but the deep-bone variety.”
“Oh,” said Nick.
Oz shook his head. “The poison it releases wouldn’t kill us, Mr. Bottom. Just make us increasingly more ill until we return to the camp for the antidote.”
“Oh,” Nick said again. Then he asked, “The night of the murder, you left the party with Delroy Nigger Brown. Why?”
Oz exhaled smoke in a cough that might have been meant as a laugh. “Delroy supplied me with my flashback, Dete… Mr. Bottom. The guards here sell it to us, but they add fifty percent to the price. When I could, I bought it from Delroy Brown. He lives in an old Victorian house on the hill just west of the Interstate.”
Nick rubbed his cheek and realized that he’d forgotten to shave that morning. Oz’s reason made sense but it was still odd that Keigo Nakamura would have interviewed both Brown and Oz during the same last days of his life. Unless Brown had led Keigo to Oz. It probably didn’t really matter.
“I never understood why the U.S. government didn’t just let you Jewish refugees integrate into society here,” Nick said. “I mean, there are twenty-five million or so Mexicans here now and that group sure as hell doesn’t reflect the education and training of you ex-Israelis.”
“Ah,” said Danny Oz. “You are too kind, Mr. Bottom. But the U.S. government couldn’t just turn us loose and let us live with family members here in America. There were more than three hundred thousand Israeli survivors that came here, you remember. And with your economy and the Jobless Recovery now in its twenty-third year…”
“Still…,” began Nick.
Oz’s voice was suddenly sharp. Angry. “The U.S. government was and is terrified of angering the Global Caliphate, Mr. Bottom. The Caliphate is waiting to exterminate us, and what’s laughingly called the U.S. government is terrified of angering them. Grow up.”
Nick blinked as if slapped.
“You’re one of those who pretend as if the Caliphate and partitioned Europe don’t exist, aren’t you?” demanded Danny Oz. “One of those who ignore the fact that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in what’s left of your United States.”
“I don’t ignore anything,” Nick said stiffly. In truth, he did ignore the Caliphate and all foreign problems. What the hell did it matter to him? Dara had had some half sister disappeared into dhimmitude in France or Belgium or one of the other partitioned countries where sharia law predominated, but what the hell was that to him? Dara had never met the woman.
Oz smiled again. “Isn’t it interesting that they killed six million of us again, Mr. Bottom?”
Nick stared at the poet.
“It seems to be the magic number, doesn’t it?” said Oz. “The population of Israel at the time of the attack was somewhere around eight and a quarter million people, but more than two million of those were Israeli Arabs or non-Jewish immigrants. About a million of those Arab Israelis died with the target population, but it was still six million Jews who either died in the attacks, from the radiation shortly after—they were very dirty bombs, weren’t they, Mr. Bottom?—or from the invading Arab armies. Some four hundred thousand Jews incinerated in Tel Aviv–Jaffa. Three hundred thousand burned to ash in Haifa. Two hundred and fifty thousand in Rishon LeZiyyon. And so on. Jerusalem wasn’t bombed, of course, since that city—intact—was the reason for the attacks, both nuclear and military. Those six hundred thousand–some Jews were taken prisoner by the radiation-suited armies and just never seen again, although there are reports of a large canyon in the Sinai filled with corpses. What I’ll never understand was why the Samson Option wasn’t executed.”
“What’s that?” said Nick.
“I was a liberal, you understand, Mr. Bottom. I spent a good portion of my adult life protesting the policies of the state of Israel, marching for peace, writing for peace, and trying to identify with the poor, downtrodden Palestinian people—Gaza was more than decimated, by the way, with eighty percent fatalities when the fallout from the bomb that took out Beersheva—just two hundred thousand incinerated Jews—drifted to the north and east. But I wonder daily about the absence of the Samson Option I’d heard about my entire life… the rumored policy of the Israeli government, if attacked by weapons of mass destruction or if a successful invasion of the state of Israel was imminent, to use its own nukes to take out the capitals of every Arab and Islamic nation within reach. And Israel’s reach in those days, Mr. Bottom, was longer than one might think. Decades and decades ago, but after the first Israeli bombs were secretly built, a general named Moshe Dayan was quoted as saying ‘Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.’ But in the end, you see, we weren’t. We weren’t at all.”
“No,” said Nick. “You weren’t.”
He got up to go.
“I’ll see you to the gate,” said Danny Oz as he lit a new cigarette.
They walked out of the tent to find that storm clouds had come in from over the mountains. The rusted steel skeleton of the two-hundred-foot-tall Tower of Doom loomed over them. A rafting ride called Disaster Canyon had been all but dismantled for building materials behind them. From some tent or hovel or abandoned ride came that Jewish-sounding chanting or cry of grief again.