The Economy of Light

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The Economy of Light Page 10

by Jack Dann


  He nodded.

  “Rechts.”

  But I made the next selection myself.

  I sent Dr. Bostroem to the crematorium.

  The truce was over.

  * * * *

  Moments, hours, or an eternity later, I staggered backward as a blast of burning, coruscating light blinded me; and then the blessed weight of total, numbing, humane darkness suffocated me.

  Snuffed me out like a candle.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE DETERMINISM OF DARKNESS

  When I awoke, I was back in Mengele’s house, lying in a four-poster bed.

  I looked up at the gauzy mosquito netting, listened to the high-pitched whirring of occasional insects, and breathed deeply. My heart was beating wildly. Surely it was the dream, the nightmare somehow waking me up in the midst of REM sleep. I was lying on top of the embroidered snow white coverlet. I was dressed in the same slacks and shirt I had worn to accompany Mengele into the rainforest. I was unwashed and sweaty, my hair was greasy, and I stank of wood smoke and something else: the faint smell of ash. I sat up, half-expecting Mengele to be sitting and smoking in the stuffed chair across the room. I called for Gata, Mengele’s aide—or was he Mengele’s servant? He was the half young half old Indian who had given me the drug when I was in the rainforest with Genaro; and I remembered that when I was ill and feverish and lit with force-fed hallucinogens, I had imagined that Gata and Genaro were somehow one and the same. Superimposed, one over the other.

  I called for my nurse, the bare breasted Indian woman with the wide face and heavy body painted in red circles. But I was alone. I could hear distant voices, but could not make them out. I shuddered, remembering my nightmare of being Mengele, remembering how it felt to be Mengele, to stand on the ramp in Auschwitz and select Jews and gypsies for death; and even now, I could remember all the details of Mengele’s personal and private past, a lifetime of details. I could remember his memories as if they were my own.

  I panicked and ran to the bathroom to make sure it would be my face staring out at me from the mirror. Indeed, it was my face, not Mengele’s; my face without a mark of the wild fire, the pemphigus that had disfigured it. Although I was exhausted and cotton-mouthed, I felt strong and healthy. The cancer was gone; I knew that was so; and in its place, nesting and nestling within me in the darkness was a great tumor of sin, mirror-memory, and obligation.

  I had a sudden and terrible sense of foreboding, of déjà-vu.

  * * * *

  I made my way out of the bedroom and into the hallway. I remembered the way to Mengele’s office...down a flight of stairs, across an eternity of thick gray-black carpet, a faint smell of antiseptic in the air. The door to Mengele’s room was still ajar, and I walked in. Everything was as I had dreamed it earlier...as I had experienced it earlier, and my heart was a metronome beating fast in my throat, beating out the rhythm of my blood; and I approached Mengele’s desk. I knew every object in the room, every book in the mahogany bookcases, the history and provenance of every curiosity, statue, and treasure.

  And I knew Mengele.

  I closed my eyes tight, then opened them again, hoping to change what was before me: Mengele was sprawled over his desk, his nose and face broken, his forehead resting on the leather framed blotter, which was stained and sticky with blood. The back of his head was shattered; the smell of blood was crisp and fresh and acrid.

  I had killed him, and he had accepted the bullets.

  No amount of closing my eyes would change anything.

  “So it is done. You have both decided.”

  I jumped at the sound.

  Gata stood in the doorway, incongruously dressed as in western clothes: tan trousers, white shirt, and a blue jacket. His heavy featured face was still divided into old and young, but the aged half was softer somehow, less withered.

  “When did you find him?” I asked.

  “As you did.”

  “Just now, this minute?”

  He made the hnrung sound, sighed, and nodded.

  I leaned across the desk and gingerly, gently touched Mengele’s hand, which was cold. “But did you know what happened before...now?” I asked Gata, who looked hard at me.

  “I saw what you might do, Meester; but the Doutor, only he knew what he would do. He told me a little, though....”

  “What?” I asked.

  “That if you both did this”—he gestured toward Mengele—“then you would become the Doutor.”

  “I am no doctor.”

  “Ah, but you know how now, don’t you, Meester? Now you can remember. He said it would all come to you. All his memories.”

  “And what else did he tell you?” I asked.

  “That I was to help you, and then I would be free to go.”

  “And me?”

  He shrugged. “You can go now.”

  “But not be free.”

  Gata laughed, something I had not heard him do before. It was a shrill, almost girlish sound. “You have him now, Meester, just as he had you before. You can do what you will; you are the Doutor now. Now if you will be pleased to go back to your room and rest, I will take care of this” He gestured at Mengele. “Then I will introduce you to the other doctors and nurses and brujos in the clinic.”

  “Is there a minister on the premises who can conduct a proper service?”

  Another girlish laugh: Gata seemed quite lighthearted about the death of his master. “No, it is not necessary,” he said, making a quick, fluttering gesture with his hand—a gesture used in the camps: the sign of smoke rising from the crematoria.

  I took a sharp breath, remembering.

  “The Doutor left instructions what was to be done. We have the facilities.”

  And as I turned to leave, Gata said, “There is one other thing the Doutor left for you, Meester,” and he gave me a book.

  Fiat Lux.

  Mengele’s diary.

  * * * *

  I took the book back to my room and wrote an entry in the diary, and then I slept. Weighted down with memory, I dreamed of Onca, fat, bountiful, natural Onca. I dreamed of her heavy legs and thighs, her large earth mother breasts. I dreamed of the glassy manioc gruel and ice cream she made for me, which numbed me, chilled me like ether until all pain was distant...cold and distant as Mengele’s memories.

  And then my dreams spoke to hers.

  “Onca....”

  “Do not worry, Meester. You will help people until you are okay.”

  “Onca....”

  “Have you got old yet?”

  “I....”

  “I can see you, Meester. You will be old, but all the way, not half one half other. Now you are a claro sonhador. Now you will live your dream right to the end.”

  “Onca....”

  “Thank you for giving me my Genaro back...Doutor.”

  “You’re welcome,” I whispered as I slept and dreamed Mengele dreams.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JACK DANN is a multiple award-winning author who has written or edited over seventy-five books, including the groundbreaking novels Junction, Starhiker, The Man Who Melted, The Memory Cathedral—which was an international bestseller—the Civil War novel The Silent, and Bad Medicine, which has been compared to the works of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, and called “the best road novel since the Easy Rider days.”

  Dann’s work has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Castaneda, Ray Bradbury, J. G. Ballard, Mark Twain, and Philip K. Dick. Dick, the author of the stories from which the films Blade Runner and Total Recall were made, wrote that “Junction is where Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven and Tony Boucher’s ‘The Quest for Saint Aquin’ meet...and yet it’s an entirely new novel.... I may very well be basing some of my future work on Junction.” Best selling author Marion Zimmer Bradley called Starhiker “a superb book...it will not give up all its delights, all its perfections, on one reading.”

  Library Journal has called Dann “...a true poet who can create pictures
with a few perfect words.” Roger Zelazny thought he was a reality magician, and Best Sellers has said that “Jack Dann is a mind-warlock whose magicks will confound, disorient, shock, and delight.” The Washington Post Book World compared his novel The Man Who Melted with Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal.

  His books have been widely translated, and his short stories have appeared in Playboy, Omni, Penthouse, Asimov’s, “Best of” collections in Australia, the United States, and Great Britain, and other major magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of the anthology Wandering Stars, one of the most acclaimed American anthologies of the 1970s, and several other well-known anthologies such as More Wandering Stars. Wandering Stars and More Wandering Stars have recently been reprinted in the U.S. Dann also edited the multi-volume Magic Tales series with Gardner Dozois and is a consulting editor for Tor Books.

  He is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (twice), the Ditmar Award (four times), the World Fantasy Award, the Peter McNamara Achievement Award, the Peter McNamara Convenors Award for Excellence, and the Premios Gilgamés de Narrativa Fantástica award. Dann has also been honored by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight).

  High Steel, a novel co-authored with Jack C. Haldeman II, was published in 1993 by Tor Books. Critic John Clute called it “a predator...a cat with blazing eyes gorging on the good meat of genre. It is most highly recommended.” Dann is currently writing Ghost Dance, the sequel to High Steel, with Jack Haldeman’s widow, author Barbara Delaplace.

  Dann’s major historical novel about Leonardo da Vinci—entitled The Memory Cathedral—was published to rave reviews. It has been published in over ten languages to date. It won the Australian Aurealis Award, was #1 on The Age bestseller list, and a story based on the novel was awarded the Nebula Award. The Memory Cathedral was also shortlisted for the Audio Book of the Year, which was part of the Braille & Talking Book Library Awards.

  Morgan Llewelyn called The Memory Cathedral “a book to cherish, a validation of the novelist’s art and fully worthy of its extraordinary subject.” The San Francisco Chronicle called it “A grand accomplishment,” Kirkus Reviews thought it was “An impressive accomplishment,” and True Review said, “Read this important novel, be challenged by it; you literally haven’t seen anything like it.”

  Dann’s novel about the American Civil War, The Silent, was chosen as one of Library Journal’s ‘Hot Picks’. Library Journal wrote: “This is narrative storytelling at its best—so highly charged emotionally as to constitute a kind of poetry from hell. Most emphatically recommended.” Peter Straub said “This tale of America’s greatest trauma is full of mystery, wonder, and the kind of narrative inventiveness that makes other novelists want to hide under the bed.” And The Australian called it “an extraordinary achievement.”

  His novel Bad Medicine (titled Counting Coup in the U.S.), a contemporary road novel, has been described by The Courier Mail as “perhaps the best road novel since the Easy Rider Days.”

  Dann is also the co-editor (with Janeen Webb) of the groundbreaking Australian anthology, Dreaming Down-Under, which Peter Goldsworthy called “the biggest, boldest, and most controversial collection of original fiction ever published in Australia.” It won Australia’s Ditmar Award and was the first Australian book ever to win the World Fantasy Award. His anthology, Gathering the Bones, of which he is a co-editor, was included in Library Journal’s Best Genre Fiction of 2003, and was shortlisted for The World Fantasy Award. His anthology, Wizards, co-edited with Gardner Dozois, and titled Dark Alchemy in the UK and Australia, made the Waldenbooks/Borders bestseller list, and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. He has also edited a sequel to Dreaming Down-Under: Dreaming Again. The influential Bookseller+Publisher gave Dreaming Again a five star rating and wrote: “Here are stories that engage with the building blocks of our culture and others that give shape to our shared darkness and light. Dreaming Again is at once quintessentially Australian and enticingly other. If you read short fiction you’ll want this collection. If you don’t, this is a reason to start.”

  His most recent anthologies are Dreaming Again, The Dragon Book (with Gardner Dozois), Australian Legends (with Jonathan Strahan), and Ghosts by Gaslight (with Nick Gevers).

  Dann’s stories have been collected in Timetipping, Visitations, and the retrospective short story collection Jubilee: the Essential Jack Dann. The West Australian said it was “Sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, erudite, inventive, beautifully written and always intriguing. Jubilee is a celebration of the talent of a remarkable storyteller.” His collaborative stories can be found in his collection The Fiction Factory.

  The West Australian called Dann’s recent novel, The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean, “an amazingly evocative and utterly convincing picture of the era, down to details of the smells and sensations—and even more importantly, the way of thinking.” Locus wrote: “The Rebel is a significant and very gripping novel, a welcome addition to Jack Dann’s growing oeuvre of speculative historical novels, sustaining further his long-standing contemplation of the modalities of myth and memory. This is alternate history with passion and difference.” A companion James Dean short story collection entitled Promised Land has also been published in Great Britain, as has Dann’s most recent short novel, The Economy of Light.

  As part of its Bibliographies of Modern Authors Series, The Borgo Press has published an annotated bibliography and guide entitled The Work of Jack Dann. An updated second edition is in progress. Dann is also listed in Contemporary Authors and the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series; The International Authors and Writers Who’s Who; Personalities of America; Men of Achievement; Who’s Who in Writers, Editors, and Poets, United States and Canada; Dictionary of International Biography; the Directory of Distinguished Americans; Outstanding Writers of the 20th Century; and Who’s Who in the World. His recently published autobiography is entitled Insinuations.

  Dann lives in Australia on a farm overlooking the sea, and ‘commutes’ back and forth to Los Angeles and New York. He is married to the writer Janeen Webb.

  His website is jackdann.com. You can also follow him on Twitter @jackmdann

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JACK DANN

  Da Vinci Rising

  The Diamond Pit: A Science Fiction Novel

  The Economy of Light

  Jubilee

 

 

 


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