Flashback

Nick didn’t have to answer that, so he didn’t.

“I was curious if it bothered you, Bottom-san. This step down from being a great world power to being an impoverished nation, in debt to yourselves and to everyone else. This breaking-apart of the nation you knew as a child and grown man.”

Is he trying to provoke me? wondered Nick. If he was, it was a good time for it. Nick was so armored and strapped in and otherwise restrained that he couldn’t even get to the duffel bag of guns under his legs without going through half a dozen emergency escape procedures that Sato had lectured him on twice.

“We’re not the only country that’s had everything hit the fan in the past decade or two,” Nick said at last.

“Ahh, true. True.” Sato’s voice was all satisfied growl. “But surely no others have fallen so far so fast.”

Nick tried to shrug. “When I was a kid, my old man had a friend—I don’t know where they met, police academy, maybe—who’d been born in the Soviet Union and who watched that country implode and disappear in a few months. New flag. New anthem. Captured republics all escaped. Lenin’s embalmed corpse still in the tomb or mausoleum or whatever you call it in Red Square, but communism itself as dead and useless as Lenin’s waxy nuts.”

“Lenin’s waxy nuts,” repeated Sato as if in admiration of the phrase.

“So if the Russians could get through it without major trauma, why can’t we?” finished Nick.

“The Russians staged a… what do you call it, Bottom-san? A comeback. Of sorts.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Nick. “With new dictators like Putin running things, they were bound to try that energy blackmail of Western Europe and the military moved back into Georgia or wherever it was. But demographics were against them in the long run. Birthrate down. Alcoholism rampant. Their economy totally dependent on oil and gas.”

“But they had much oil and gas,” said Sato.

“So what?” said Nick. “They couldn’t beat the numbers… in the end. Just like we couldn’t beat the numbers here.”

“You are talking about the economy, Bottom-san? The entitlement programs that destroyed the dollar? Or immigration numbers? Or personal habits of no thrift?”

What the fuck is this, a seminar? wondered Nick. He also wondered if there was a recording device in this overpriced truck. But why would Mr. Nakamura be interested in the opinion of one of his hired hands? It’d be like recording the opinions of one of the gai-jin gardeners Nakamura hired to do the mowing at his estate. (He’d never allow Americans to work on his private gardens.)

Finally Nick said tiredly, “All the numbers. You have to understand, Sato, that I was born into a nation and society that had only known greater wealth, greater prosperity, and all sorts of what we thought of as progress in the life of every citizen except the oldest farts who remembered the first Great Depression. My old man’s generation couldn’t even imagine things getting worse. So when they—and we—had the money, we spent it. And after we didn’t have the money any longer, we still spent it.”

“Do you speak of individuals, Bottom-san? Or your government?”

“Yeah,” said Nick. “Both. Remember, I was just coming of age when we had the first sort of financial meltdown and unemployment mini-quakes—we thought it was the Big One, having no clue that the problems were just early tremors of something much worse—and the president we elected right then made it all worse… no, we all did… by passing those staggering entitlement programs that he knew, we all knew in our guts, that we couldn’t begin to pay for.”

“But Europe had such entitlement programs for generations,” said Sato. Entirermehn. Except for the pronunciation, Nick thought, the massive security chief was beginning to sound like a college prof trying to keep a dull conversation going with even duller students.

Nick laughed. “Yeah, and look where that got them!”

“Do you think much of European countries, Bottom-san?”

“Every goddamn hour and minute of my life, Hideki-san,” Nick said emphatically.

After a few minutes of silence, perhaps feeling sorry for the obviousness of his sarcasm, Nick added, “No. I don’t think hardly any of us Americans think about the Germans or French or those other poor fucks these days. They invited the tens of millions of Muslims into their house. They made the laws and sharia exceptions to their laws that ended up with them turning their cultures over to the Global Caliphate. Fuck ’em. Our attitude—my attitude—is the old saying, You buttered your bread, now sleep in it.”

“Buttered… your bread…,” Sato began hesitantly. Nick looked at the cabin monitor and could see the security chief’s large dark eyes shifting his way like beetles within the eye openings of the red samurai mask.

“Sorry,” said Nick. “Old joke that my wife and I used to make. It’s a dumb take on the saying You’ve made your bed, now sleep in it.”