by Schow, Ryan
“I’ll help you with that,” he said in a nurturing tenor she’d never heard him use before.
“Fine.”
“Good,” he said. “Six o’clock tonight?”
“Okay,” she whispered. “Thank you, Christian.”
“For you, my dear, I’d do almost anything.”
“Almost?”
“You heard me right, sugar tits.”
And with that, she laughed longer than she expected. When they hung up, she mentally prepared herself for round two with version four of the thing she squeezed out of her womb so long ago. She only hoped it would go better than it had this afternoon.
With a sigh, she started the Bentley and thought, a girl can hope.
The Piss of the Dying
1
Is this real?
Dr. Enzo Holland, formerly Dr. Wolfgang Gerhard, looked at his hands, these dripping red paws. They were slick with blood. In his right hand he held someone’s pulled-out eyeball. Between his thumb and forefinger, he pinched the bulbous little sphere. It wasn’t as squishy as he thought.
Is this real?
Gripped by the fog of insanity (how did I get here?) his brain couldn’t quite catch up with what his eyes were seeing.
He rolled his wrist, looking at the eyeball, staring with a sense of bewilderment at the shrunken pupil, the dying iris, and all the little shot blood vessels, wondering whose eye this belonged to.
Am I drunk? he wondered. Have I been drugged?
He couldn’t stop staring at the dangling optic nerve. It hung off the eye like a mouse tail, except it bore this consistency of twisted, bloody snot.
Revulsion left his guts feeling spongy. Do I have to puke? He tasted something gelatinous in his mouth. A glob of something rolling around his tongue. Blood? He spat out a slop of red.
Back to the eye. Revulsion loosened his fingers. The eye fell from his hand, plopped with a wet splat to the floor, which—for some reason—unbalanced him. The edges of his vision swam. He didn’t have any clothes on. Where am I?
The lab?
Auschwitz?
Dazed, he scanned the room, like he was delirious and suffering a psychotic meltdown. Blood was spilled all over the concrete floor. It was puddled and splashed everywhere. His eyes bounced to the body of a naked girl before him, her throat ripped open. His brain began to quake. Behind the ruined girl was a glass canister with pink gel holding the body of a naked girl. Is this the lab?
Is that Rebecca?
Her red hair stood in muted contrast with the bright red display of gore all around. What is my brain doing to me? Flashes of violence skittered about. Hunting. Kidnapping. The memory of him in the throes of a murderous rage.
Was that really me? Did I do that?
The room swam, then tilted. He staggered sideways, then drew his hands to his head. It was the sudden headache that sent him crashing to his knees. Like someone clubbed him with a sledge hammer over the head.
Screaming. His own. Tension so tight, almost a seizure persistence. He shook uncontrollably, a blathering of obscenities and unintelligible hysteria roaring like filth from his mouth.
His eyes snapped open; the room was gone. Like a TV that changed the channel on him. A fissure in his brain made him see his past, not as a memory, but as something real. Absolute stillness overcame him.
He was there. In the death camp, doing surgery: two four year olds.
The memory suffused him, stole him from the lab, kicked him back in time. A smile crept onto his face. He was staring at a white wall in his San Francisco lab, but his insane eyes saw nothing of the present moment. They saw only Guido and Nino. The two four year old kids lying side-by-side on the makeshift operating table for two.
Bits and pieces of his time with the children unraveled before his eyes, each as real as the blood soaked hands hanging at his sides.
He had cut them open, the kids. No anesthesia. They passed out from shock. They were two separate children (one a hunchback, one cute as can be), kids he yearned to make into Siamese twins.
For the next three days at Auschwitz (which felt like mere minutes in his head), he labored over the two of them, working to permanently join them together. Their veins, their arteries, their skin—all sewn together. He completed the unsanctioned procedure, but not to his satisfaction. He then returned them, screaming, to their mother. They were bound at the wrists and at their back. Gangrene had taken root. The way they stunk so bad from rot, he couldn’t give them any more of his time or energy.
The present version of the man who was once Josef Mengele, he started to scream because the children’s screams in his head was cracking the veneer of his sanity. He screamed and thrashed about, the Enzo Holland version of him.
His eyes, now cleared of the past, showed him only the present. He felt it before he saw it: the thing in his hand. A severed arm he launched at one of the canisters because his brain was twisting with madness. He wondered, where did I get that from? The arm hit the glass with a meaty thump, spattered red against the smooth surface. Frenzied, looking at the mess he created, he bent over, grabbed a nearby hand—severed as well—and pitched it at the wall. Slipping and squirming through the lake of blood, he pulled the guts from a girl he killed (did I do that?—did I gut her like this?), then he flung them like slop across the room. He kicked things, hurled obscenities, bawled and scratched at himself like a child.
Thrashing…hating…desperate to kill, to eat, to operate on someone, something…to poison the world…
Is this Auschwitz? San Francisco?
His eyes burned as he wondered if it was 1945 or 2015. The room trembled. He saw fire pits, burnt bodies, felt the rumble of the ground as the trains pulled in to Auschwitz (this is not Auschwitz!). The winter cold of seventy years ago felt like ice in his bones. He went still, blood pouring like tears from his eyes.
He saw the lab, saw something else.
The channel changed and it was no longer Auschwitz. His skin was swept cold by an invisible draft. His gore-splattered skin cinched into pebbles of gooseflesh. Crazy people don’t know they’re crazy, he thought. But I am. I know I am.
It’s happening.
The current TV channel of his many lives had him sitting in a chair in his private quarters in one of the many Air Force bases where he worked as Dr. Green. He was in the employ of the CIA at the time, a condition of his escape from Nazi Germany and the Nuremburg Military Tribunals by way of Project Paperclip. It was January, 1979 when a CIA officer knocked on his door and said he had to die.
The way this man, this CIA arschloch, this CIA asshole, looked right at him before breaking the news, his distaste was obvious. What he said with appalled delight was: “Dr. Green, or whatever you’re calling yourself these days, you’re going to die. It has to happen. It’s time.”
The man then proceeded to tell him he was going to be discovered floating dead in Sao Paolo. He told the doctor the best way to go was by drowning.
“And when is this going to happen?” he asked the officer. His mouth in San Francisco in 2015 said the same thing his mouth said back in 1979.
Banging a fist on his head, he told himself his body was not in the Air Force base; it was here in San Francisco, stripped naked and bloody. Yet his eyes remained inert, like he was watching an old film of himself he understood perfectly, but failed to understand at all. He was distant in every way possible from the real world. Mentally swept right out of this time.
“February 7,” the CIA man said. “This year.” 1979.
“And you want me to, what?” he asked. “Simply agree to this without protest?”
“You need to die,” the officer repeated. As if the matter were already closed.
On his knees in gore, the 2015 version of him in the lab lost in that fog of insanity, he surveyed the carnage he’d created. Seeing it, but not seeing it at all.
His mouth in today’s time reiterated what the spook from decades ago once said: “You need to die.” He said it like he was in a tran
ce. Like he was hypnotized.
“And how do you propose I agree to such a preposterous arrangement?” he had asked the officer.
“I’ll kill you myself, but it won’t be you. We’ll leak the news, start the stream of disinformation. It’s not the lie that matters. It’s the timing, and the manner by which the lie is spread.”
“Which is your specialty,” Dr. Green said. The CIA man nodded his head in acknowledgement. “And when they discover the body is not me?”
“Not me,” the mouth of Enzo Holland mumbled in the lab. His mouth bore a rich, coppery taste of blood. Not his own. It was the taste of someone he ate.
“We will arrange for your corpse to be unearthed,” the CIA officer replied. “Our asset will take a skin sample, do DNA testing and determine it is you because we will give them the preserved samples I will take from you today. We will release your DNA once the conspiratorial fever wanes. The world will breathe a sigh of relief.”
“Oh?” Dr. Green who was not yet Dr. Wolfgang Gerhard or Dr. Enzo Holland said. The man who had been Dr. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, he then said, “And why is that?”
“Because you are a sadistic monster,” the CIA agent said with such disgust, it was all Dr. Green could do not to smile. If only he knew what the doctor was really capable of, the CIA man would mind his manners.
“Monster,” Holland’s 2015 mouth said. It was an horrific word that echoed in the lab’s chambers. Holland felt the press of concrete into his knees, smelled the dead women’s warm guts around him, saw the blood-stained walls, the turned over lab equipment, the unbroken glass canisters with an unconscious girl (Rebecca) and the four men who didn’t matter.
“Specimens,” the mouth said. He was aware he said it, but not sure why he said it. The channel changed again, bringing him firmly back to the present time. To the orgy of carnage around him.
The door to the lab opened; a girl stood there saying nothing. She looked five, or six. So many girls, his sociopathic, depleted mind thought. All dead. All hacked to pieces. All failed operations, all of them failed mutations. A dozen memories exploded behind his eyes, making him moan with horror, causing the deepest craving, the most unrelenting need: girls with brown eyes he tried with chemicals to make blue; girls shoved into ice baths to see how long they would survive the hypothermia; girls with cut off arms he tried to sew onto other girls with cut off arms; girls having boys’ penises sewn onto their vaginas in the hopes of cross-compatible anatomy; girls he made sterile; girls—
“What are you doing?” the little girl finally asked.
He snapped out of the running loop of failures seared into his mind. Her face bore no emotion. It was just a voice from a body that seemed to have no feelings to spare.
The feeling she evoked made him think he was watching a horror show unfold. This pint-sized beauty with blazing eyes in a wrinkled white summer dress. This demon with raven-colored hair and a face as candied as sin.
“FUCK YOU!” he screamed.
He screamed this over and over again and she just stood there, staring at him with fire-rimmed eyes, not reacting one bit. At some point, his fury became unintelligible, guttural slurs. Holland was channeling the murderous cries of man before man invented language. He was uncivilized. Untamed.
He was beast.
Scowling at the girl whose name was Alice, his eyes raging, he saw not a child but his mother. That hateful wretch. He was a man before his mother, which was not real but surreal. A new channel. Standing before her, he was dressed in his Auschwitz uniform. Dark green tunic, polished boots, thumb rested on his pistol belt, his Death’s Head SS cap tilted to one side. His eyes were those of a corpse. A carcass. The vigor seared out of them from the fires of hate, from the stir of madness. He appraised her the same way he appraised the Jewish pigs being herded off the trains like cattle. When she said, “Love is a poison I will not let you ingest,” he flicked his hand.
“Links,” his voice barked in German to the child in the door. Left.
“Left is death,” the girl said. Her voice so sugary sweet, so innocent, so much like the candy he used to hand out in Auschwitz. Did she say that, or did he imagine that? How could she know?
Bloody hands skittered franticly down bare thighs, looking for pants pockets. WHERE IS MY CANDY?!?! In Auschwitz, he was always handing out candy to the kids. This girl, she needed candy. His eyes watered at the thought of not having any. It didn’t matter. All he knew was this child in the doorway needed to die.
Mother.
He had to make her dead like the others. He had to see what was inside her, what evil looked like resting bloody in his hands.
Glancing around, seeing the five or six or seven girls spread out dead and kicked around on the lab’s floor, not knowing why they were here, or how they came to be dead (you, Mengele), he felt his mother (this girl) needed to join them. It was the poisonous memories in his head talking. Whispering in hypnotic tones. Seducing him.
He spoke to the girl in German. It was a language far more brutal and appealing that the shitty English language he’d been forced to use. “Kommen sie hierher, kind,” he barked. Come here, child.
“Nein,” she said. No.
Did he really hear that?
“You can’t speak German!” the blood soaked man screamed in the hated English tongue.
“I can’t speak German,” the girl’s delicate voice said.
“Ich hasse euch!” I hate you.
“Why did you do that to all of those girls?” the one called Alice asked.
He stood, rising up off one knee, then the next. Pancake circles of blood marked his knees. The blood dripped in lines down the fronts of his shins. He started to walk toward her, his need a crushing, agonizing force. The ache to kill spooled in his head. Bloomed in his heart. Swam in honeyed currents in his loins.
In his mind, he saw her, the girl. He saw the way he would grab her by the throat, how he’d lift her in his hands. In his head he saw the bulging of her eyes, how when she couldn’t breathe, blood and pressure would explode the blood vessels in her eyes and urine would run down her leg. Ah, that smell. The piss of the dying. It was so sharp. So hot and satisfying.
He closed the distance between them by half, still entranced, his brain still switching between worlds. He was seeing his mother, making her into Alice, seeing the patients who seldom survived.
Nothing made sense beyond KILL.
All he could taste was the indomitable need to squeeze the life from this girl in the doorway. He felt her bones in his hands, his imagination was that powerful. He felt them breaking. A premonition. The clarity of the deranged. While she was dying, he tasted her warm breath on his lips. How the final expulsion of air smelled different from the all the rest.
Life from death.
KILL.
That’s when she tilted her head, then raised her hand and did something magical with her eyes. The pupils dilated wide, so wide they devoured all color from her irises. Then her skin grew paper thin, bluish and nearly transparent. The veins snaked dark against the greyish pallor of her cheeks giving her a demonic appearance.
Heat spread through him like fire, eating up all his need. He stopped moving. Seeing her, this little devil child, he had to kill her, but he couldn’t.
She wouldn’t let him.
His eyes flared. And he burned. Yet his will persisted. He took another step, but the heat ripped through him like flames consuming dead forests.
“Gerade von der Devil’s schoß sie sind,” he said. Straight from the Devil’s womb, you are.
His eye burst into flames. He stopped. The different worlds in his mind collapsed into one. The force of clarity rushed up to meet him. Alice was killing him.
“Killing me,” his mouth said.
She dropped her hand. He slapped the fire out of his eyeball, cursed her in English. A wicked heat scorched everything beneath his skin, his cornea still burning even as his body went to work repairing itself. He moaned and groaned, barely able
to stand. Turning from the child, he stumbled through the rivers of blood into the bathroom where he sat in the corner shaking until the healing was done.
Meat sauce ran red from his ears and nose. He threw up a chunk of flesh.
Within minutes, his head was clear. He was not in Auschwitz. Not standing before his mother ordering her death, not with the CIA man or mutilating his patients. Instead he was clearly, permanently there. In the lab. With Alice. He wondered, what is happening to me?
What happened?
2
Refusing to look in the bathroom mirror, he snatched the fluffy robe off a hook on the door, not caring that bloody handprints were now smeared into the bleached white fabric. When he was in the robe, when he pulled its belt tight, he walked into the main lab where Alice remained.
He knew he should be embarrassed, but he wasn’t.
Much to his satisfaction (if he could feel such a thing after spinning so recklessly through the old memories of past versions of himself), Alice stood stiff, but not like she’d been overtaken by evil spirits. She stood rigid with confidence. Seemingly unafraid.
There were things deeply wrong with him. He knew this. These murderous compulsions of his, they were overwhelming. Twice in the last forty eight hours, he found himself on a killing spree. He’d been wandering the streets of San Francisco at night, unable to suppress his bloodlust. He couldn’t help what he wanted to do, or what he eventually did. Even at the most murderous moments in his existence, he was no Jack the Ripper. He was a doctor. A geneticist. Adventurous enough, courageous enough to attempt the surgeries no other doctors were willing to attempt. This didn’t make him homicidal.
Did it?
“Thank you for what you did,” he finally told Alice. If she hadn’t burnt him, he might still be spinning.