Dan Simmons - Flashback

“Good morning, Leonard,” said Emilio with a smile.

The two spoke in Spanish or English on alternate Saturdays and Leonard had forgotten that it had been Spanish the previous week. How could he have forgotten? He’d had to struggle to remember the word “impoverishment”— empobrecimiento had been what Emilio had finally provided—so was he now showing the memory-loss effects of Alzheimer’s as well as trouble with balance and fear for his brittle bones?

Leonard smiled and tapped Emilio’s closed left fist. It was a black piece. Emilio got to be white again. He won the tap about three times out of four and always preferred to be white and to go first. Emilio sat on the concrete bench—the chessboard was already set up properly for him to be white from that side—and Leonard carefully took his place across from him. They used no chess clocks in their friendly games.

Emilio opened with his inevitable conservative pawn move. Leonard answered the opening with the same pawn move with which he always responded. The game moved into its predictable early stages and the men could relax and talk while they played.

“How goes your novel, Leonard?” Emilio asked the question as he was lighting a cigarette. Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa—the old man insisted that his grandfather had stolen the full family name from a character in a John Wayne movie—smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. Yet Emilio had been born in 1948, a full decade before Leonard, and was approaching his eighty-fourth birthday with no apparent worries about brittle bones, lung cancer, or anything else.

By his own admission, Emilio had lived a mostly charmed life. Coming as an illegal immigrant to California as a young man in the late 1960s, he’d made enough money as a translator and sometimes accountant to return to Mexico, get married, and then earn his master’s degree and PhD at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. He then taught Spanish literature there and at IPN, the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, for years until—at about the time of his retirement—two of his sons and three of his grandsons were killed in battles between the drug cartels and Mexican federal police.

When the cartel-federal battles reached the level of real civil war and more than twenty-three million Mexicans, cartels included, flowed north into the United States within a period of less than seven months, five of Emilio’s surviving sons and eight of his grandsons joined the tsunami as leaders in the emerging reconquista effort separating the nascent Nuevo Mexico from much of the chaotic, cartel-controlled old Mexico. Professor Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa came north with his sons and grandsons and great-grandsons and most of his granddaughters and their families, returning to the United States—what was left of it—where he’d earned his original stake for his education and where he’d visited so many times as a respected academic.

Leonard had met Dr. Fernández y Figueroa in September of 2001, at a very high-profile literary conference at Yale. Both scholars had been presented to the conference as experts on the novels of Gabriel Gárcia Márquez, the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. It took less than an hour of panel discussion for Dr. George Leonard Fox to retreat on each of these fronts, deferring to the expertise of Professor Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa.

On the third day of that conference, aircraft hijacked by al Qaeda jihadists had flown into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, and it had been the ensuing private conversations between Leonard and Emilio that had set the basis for their friendship in Los Angeles that endured more than three decades later.

Leonard sighed and said, “My novel is stuck, Emilio. My idea was for it to be a War and Peace overview of the last forty years, but I can’t get beyond September 2008. I simply don’t understand that first financial crisis.”

Emilio smiled, exhaled smoke, and moved his bishop aggressively.

“Perhaps Proust should be your model, Leonard, and not Tolstoy.”

Leonard blocked the bishop’s line of attack by moving one of his pawns a single square. The pawn was protected by his knight.

After his initially conservative moves, Emilio would become overly aggressive through the use of a combination of his bishops and rooks, almost always at the expense of his other pieces. Leonard preferred his knights and a solid defense.

“No, Emilio, even if I had a magical madeleine, telling my own life interweaved with the events of the last decade would illuminate almost nothing. I wasn’t on this planet. I was on university campuses.”

Leonard had noticed a turning point when the nation and world started heading for hell… or at least his part of it. He had been teaching in both the classics and English departments at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the 1990s when the university—under a sort of blackmail from the instructor in question—appointed a fake scholar, fake Native American, fake professor (but true hater) named Ward Churchill to be head of their newly created Ethnic Studies Department. It had been a surrender to absolute political correctness—a term already inextricably intertwined with the term “university”—and a surrender to a type of rabid mediocrity. When he had returned from the Yale conference after 9-11 to find that this Ward Churchill had written an essay comparing the victims in the World Trade Center and Pentagon to “little Eichmanns,” it hadn’t surprised Professor George Leonard Fox. His students—the few English majors and even fewer classics majors—seemed to move apologetically through the hallways at CU, clinging to the walls, while Churchill’s Ethnic Studies students—tattooed, multiply pierced, their fists commonly raised in anger—would stride like Gestapo.

“No,” said Leonard again, “I don’t have even a Proustian ghost of a life to write about. I wanted to document the era we’ve both lived through as broadly and brilliantly as Tolstoy documented his. I just don’t know anything, understand anything… not war, not peace, not finances, not economics, not politics. Nothing.”

Emilio chuckled, coughed, and moved a rook five squares forward to support both his bishops in an attempted pincers move.

“Tolstoy once said that War and Peace was not meant to be a novel at all.”

“Well,” said Leonard, bringing his other knight into play, “then I’ve equaled Tolstoy. My mess of pages isn’t a novel either.”

Emilio’s bishop, protected by his rook, captured one of Leonard’s pawns.

“Check,” said Emilio.

Leonard calmly moved the knight he’d had in waiting, protecting his king and threatening Emilio’s bishop. It was a… Leonard blushed at even thinking the term… Mexican standoff.

“You could skip writing the novel and just write an equivalent to Tolstoy’s epilogue to War and Peace, ” said Emilio. “You know—themes such as the fact that forces in history act beyond human reason, that none of us are free but consciousness creates in each of us the illusion of freedom and free will, that since free will is an illusion, history must find its true laws, and that even personality depends upon time, space, emotion, and causality.”

“That would be a treatise,” said Leonard, watching Emilio bring his other rook into play through traffic. “Not a novel.”

“No one reads novels anymore anyway, Leonard.”

“I know,” said Leonard, taking out Emilio’s first protective rook with his own bishop. “Check.”

Emilio frowned. It was too late to castle and he’d been profligate with the movement of his pawns and power pieces, leaving the royal hearth relatively unprotected. He abandoned his attack for a moment and swung his bishop back into a protective position.