by Leah Thomas
He finally looked at me. Switched the car into first. My stomach roiled.
“I thought they were my friends,” I said.
“They are.”
I like to imagine that Owen ran out to the street as we pulled away, his hand outstretched.
But of course I could not see him.
Father has been apologizing to Lenz’s family. It is a family as small as mine. A family that is only a father, a man who wrings large hands and frowns. Father does not ask whether they want to press charges. Neither man says anything of the kind. Of course they would not do so in front of me.
God, does this waiting room haunt me. It looks like all waiting rooms.
I cannot talk. I scribble in this notebook. I hope that no one will speak to me. Half an hour ago, I met Lenz’s father. Afterward, I had to run to the restroom to vomit up the shameful bile in my stomach. I clung to the toilet bowl and gagged. The sound echoed and illuminated nothing so much as my own face, creased in self-disgust.
Because I have seen Lenz’s father before. I recognize those hands, of all things. I recognize them for their crevices. They are a baker’s hands. I knew then who Lenz was. How I made him scream as a child in the bakery. How I made him scream and scream at the nothingness of me. And suddenly Lenz’s hatred makes some sort of sense to me.
I left the room to sit in the hallway. Tried not to overhear my father or the baker.
I rested my elbow on my knees. My chin in my palm. Listened to the feet of the hospital staff as they passed by. The familiar swishing of scrubs and squeaking of plastic shoes. I listened and my throat burned, and I knew I was on the sidelines again, Ollie.
The lightest of footsteps drew near. A set of unfamiliar tennis shoes appeared.
“Budge over.” Fieke slumped into the chair beside me. Diminished without her boots.
I swallowed. “Thank you for coming.”
“Pffft. I didn’t want to. Owen wouldn’t stop tugging my arm and staring at me with his freak eyes, and finally I agreed to let him follow after his eyeless loser of a girlfriend. No offense, Brille.”
I felt her lean over to look at me. Why is the act of looking so vital to other people?
Why is it so vital to me? Because I can never look away?
I spent so long being unseen. Until you wrote me, no one would follow me to dark places.
Fieke wore a knitted sweater pocked with holes, and her eyes were always narrowed, but she was here. Someone normal might have hugged her.
“Owen’s in the bathroom, if you’re wondering. Took one look at your depressing face and slunk backward into a toilet stall to escape the overwhelming stench of self-pity.” She coughed, that old wheeze and something deeper. “Sorry it took us so long.”
I shook my head. “Please, no. Don’t apologize. I’m the one who can never apologize enough.”
“For what happened with Lenz? Or what you said to me before? Because yeah, you don’t know shit about what raised me, Moritz. It’s not only freaks who have wretched upbringings.”
“For that. For everything. For things I can’t even verbalize.”
I could hear the beeping of monitors all down the hallway, calling the surfaces of walls and floor and ceiling to life. Which were the sounds of Lenz?
I pressed the heel of my hand against my chin. Allowed my shaking fingers to cover my mouth.
“Brille, are you crying?”
“I’m eyeless,” I said. “I can’t cry.”
Fieke pulled my head onto her shoulder. “Of course you can.”
I had not spoken to my mother in weeks. She had not allowed me to leave the laboratory since the anechoic incident. Sometimes I heard her weak heartbeat as she passed through the hallway outside my room (my cell). She never told me whether her love for me existed or was infinite. More than ever she was unknowable. She would not look at me. Her feelings were never clear to me or anyone else.
You may think you do not know your mother because of her secrets, Ollie. But I knew my mother’s secrets and she was a stranger.
Doctors advised me to stay in a wheelchair during recovery. Advised me not to put further strain on my heart. Auburn-Stache treated me as he does you:
“Moritz, please eat.”
I lacked your witty retorts. I only slumped. I only shivered.
I had days like you’ve had, Ollie. Days when I did little more than sit alone in the cafeteria.
We had not done well on the last inspection. Hardly any countries sent representatives to visit; two frowning men and a woman with arms folded, who only yawned at what I recall as triple-armed and reptile-scaled and heartless infants. I had become a resident, but the other children were leaving. One by one, walked or wheeled away.
My mother knew that her work had not “progressed” in years. Perhaps the initiative’s funding was being cut. A lot of her staff had followed after Merrill.
Her broken children were not equipped to repair the world.
My mother was a distant woman, but I cannot believe that she was heartless. She did not kill the children she dismissed from the facility. She allowed Auburn-Stache to place them with their families. Or in facilities and foster homes across the world. In cabins in the woods across the sea, Oliver. She was not so monstrous as to murder her failures.
I think about her when I wake on weekend mornings. How far away she seemed even when she carried me, heart-to-heart, hundreds of Saturdays ago, to my car seat. Maybe it wasn’t the irregularity of her heartbeat that frightened me. Maybe it was the irregularity of her heart.
My mother did not feel in the way others do. She processed the echoes of feelings. Their resonance did not reach her until long after the events that inspired them. She did not realize the pain she caused until it had reverberated for years. Maybe she felt that realization when I died.
Maybe this was the real, human reason she did not look at me.
It was a November morning. I was sitting in the cafeteria with Dr. Auburn-Stache. He was helping me study for a test that would determine whether I could attend Gymnasium. I saw little point in it. I doubted I would ever leave the laboratory, let alone attend public school. I was by now aware of all the things I was not worthy of. He was always trying to make me feel like any other child. He encouraged me to get better at spelling, if I could not read. To get better at speaking, if I could not read.
I was reciting the answers to division equations to him and then, suddenly, I heard her absence. I said nothing of it. But as the day wore long and the remaining staff went about their business, dismantling machines and packing away equipment, no matter where I was in the hospital, I heard not a single pulse from her jarring heartbeat. At some point in the afternoon, Dr. Auburn-Stache asked:
“Moritz, have you seen her today?”
I shook my head. He told me to wait where I was. He ground his teeth as he left.
I began listening, as I was accidentally born to.
I wheeled down the hallways. Wheeled toward the elevator. Something gave me courage to ride that elevator down to the basement. There was only one place in the hospital that she could be. One place where I could not hear her.
I knew she was in the anechoic chamber.
The dreaded vault was open. I stood up from my wheelchair. Felt a sharp dagger in my chest, pulls at my stitches. Stepped toward the echoless void. The last thing I ever wanted was to reenter it.
And I couldn’t, Ollie. I couldn’t cross my power line.
But I knew she was lying inside it. I knew.
Dr. Auburn-Stache appeared beside me, as he tends to.
“What does she look like?” I said numbly. “I can’t see her body.”
“It isn’t there, Moritz,” he said. “She isn’t in there, kiddo.”
“How can I believe you?”
“I’m telling you. She’s not here, Moritz.”
“Then where is she?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. She’s gone.”
Dr. Auburn-Stache tried to lead me from
the room. I dislodged his grasp. He left me to find help.
I wanted to look in the chamber. I did not want to. I dared not.
Auburn-Stache returned. Trailed by the janitor who’d saved me from drowning.
“I appreciate this, Herr Farber. I’ll arrange somewhere more appropriate for him to stay as soon as possible.”
The janitor nodded. As we left the room, I could feel the vibrations of Dr. Auburn-Stache. He shook from head to foot.
How long did it take for the echoes of us to reach him, Ollie?
We left the laboratory through the parking garage. I would not return.
The man who would later adopt me did not speak. He treated me to silence. Why bother with quiet? The quiet illuminates nothing. It is nothingness; it does not carry. It should not mean a thing. Still, I heard it over the noise of the car and rested my face against the cold glass of the window.
When I began clutching at my lurching heart halfway through the journey, when Herr Farber saw me gasping in his passenger seat, clicking to see the walls, to find something close that still existed, he reached forward and switched on the stereo.
Bass and rhythmic speaking and horns. The first time I ever heard N.W.A, Ollie. Voices bidding me to express myself carried us from the darkness.
I have not missed the laboratory. I have no idea whether it still functions. I do not ask Dr. Auburn-Stache.
He visits me every few weeks, just as he visits you. Just as he visits other children like us. It is he who monitors the effectiveness of my pacemaker.
He still tells me my mother is not dead, Oliver. She did not have an excuse so rich as her demise to explain why I am without her. She simply left me behind and vanished into the world. Not unlike the way she often vanished into her thoughts.
The hospital room hadn’t begun to take on aspects of a second home. There were no photos on the nightstand. Few Get Well cards. Lenz was not well liked. Although he had been in this room for weeks, he had only been unconscious for a few hours after admission. He would be in the hospital for a while longer, to be sure that his lungs did not fill with fluid or become infected for a second time; he had fractured a rib after all. Perhaps his chest twinges as mine does.
He did not look half so thuggish as before, thin and propped on pillows. A tracheotomy tube dangling from his throat. Bandages around his skull. He no longer smelled of pumpernickel bread.
He did not want to see me. I did not want to see him. When I stepped around the curtain to face him, I wished that he would vanish as my mother did. But I can’t let him rot, Ollie.
He can’t even speak properly right now. He has been made temporarily as mute as Owen. I was nearly petrified by all he could not say.
Lenz tore his gaze from the window. I looked at him. I did not know how to begin.
“Lenz,” I said. “I don’t know how to begin.”
He shook his head. Closed his eyes.
“I am wary of words. I thought I might say ‘sorry,’ but … did you ever say it? When you smashed my face into the floor? When you did the same to Owen? The others?”
He opened his eyes. Looked right at me.
I took a deep breath. “Even so … I am sorry. I am sorry for all of us. All the time. Laboratory or bakery or basement apartment … or anywhere. I am sorry the world is frightening.”
I trailed off. Do not ask me if what I said made any impact on him. Perhaps he was plotting how best to beat me when he got back on his feet. Perhaps that is what I deserve.
But if he aims a fist at me this time, Oliver, I will peel off my goggles. I will duck, but I will not hit back. Not if I can ever help it.
“Ollie is better at speeches.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“That’s his gayboy crush from across the sea, if you were wondering,” said Fieke from the doorway. Owen was standing beside her. Fingers fluttering.
All we misfits blinked at one another in silence. But I could hear every heartbeat, every bothered breath. The awkward shuffling of our feet. Lenz’s hands clenching on his bedspread.
“What?” Fieke scowled at me.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were looking at me.”
Owen sighed.
“I am always looking at everyone. But since you’ve brought attention to it. Have we begun to, ah, clear the air? Should we all shake hands?”
“Fluff off,” Fieke said. Even Owen cringed. Lenz mustered the strength to give me the finger.
I was rushing things. Yet looking at us all, standing in one hospital room, bruised and battered with our aches of various origins, we were a comical bunch.
Perhaps you have seen a shit-com, Oliver. Perhaps I’ve shown you one.
Father waited in the hallway. I could hear that some of his anxiety had shifted. Had settled into the calmer depths of him. Was he relieved? His eyes widened when we met him. He blinked at Owen. At Fieke. Did he almost speak?
From nowhere, Frau Pruwitt rushed forth. A bat out of Hades! I nearly would have rather ducked back inside and dealt with Lenz’s glare again than face the sight of her toting books in her arms. It was as if she meant to beat me with them. Not steel, not titanium. Adamantium.
“You. You think any Gymnasium will have you if you’ve dropped out of Hauptschule?”
“I—” She deposited the stack of books into my arms. My shoulders sagged.
She flicked me on the nose. “The transfer assessment. It’s tomorrow morning at the Zentrumschule. Seven AM. You’ll be sitting the exam in a closed space, with audio to assist you. You. Will. Be. There. Any questions?”
Would she drag me to the test center by the ears?
“No questions. Thank you.”
“Good.” She showed her arched eyebrow to Fieke, who had the grace to cow a bit in her presence. She eyed Owen. He grabbed my hand. His palm was warm and welcome.
“And then, on Monday, you and your merry band of fools will be at school, and you’ll be completing community service in the library.”
Owen nodded.
Fieke chilled me with a smile: “Yes, ma’am. We’d be fluffin’ delighted.”
“Will I wake up soon?” I said, to no one in particular.
Will I, Ollie? Must I?
Moritz
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Confetti
Dear Moritz,
So much has happened to this lovesick hermit in the woods since I last wrote you. I hope you’re all right and I hope you passed your exam (I know you did, you clever doofus.) It was nice to see so much hope in your last letter.
Did you mean to put it there?
It was the day of the Halloween dance. Mom was out in the garage somewhere, probably. I hadn’t seen her since the power line fell. I hadn’t seen her since I hurt her, Moritz.
I was curled up under my blankets with my back to the door; I’d been lying like that for most of the past few days. I heard someone coming up the stairs.
I knew those twitching footsteps. I thought about jumping out of bed and slamming the door.
“What do you want,” I said, without turning.
“Ollie,” said Auburn-Stache, “I’ve been in the garage.”
“What?” I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. “Why? You want my permission to jab needles into Mom? Perform more tests? Throw her in a water tank? Make some more superhuman babies? Stick a microchip in her head?”
He sat down at the foot of the bed. He didn’t look surprised. He didn’t look anything. “It took so long for Moritz to tell you.”
“Yeah. Well. Maybe he didn’t want me realizing I trusted a monster.”
He frowned. “Call me a monster. But don’t say you can’t trust me. I pulled you from a burning building. I’ve bandaged you more times than either of us can count.”
“Are you trying to guilt me? You?”
He put his head in his hands. “No, Oliver. It’s just … I thought I had done right by you.”
“Again, I don’t know what you actually mea
n.”
“Your father was my intern, you know.” He pulled his hands away. “I put out an ad for a child therapist, and he applied while he was still a graduate student. It had hardly occurred to many of the staff that what these children needed was someone to care about their feelings.”
“Dad … was a therapist?” I forgot to sound angry. Therapists aren’t so different from social workers, Moritz. Therapists don’t cut people up. (Maybe I was relieved.)
“He hoped to be, Ollie.” Auburn-Stache cleared his throat. “By the time he arrived, I was thoroughly disheartened by our whole enterprise. I had seen the amazing prototype that was Moritz, but I had also seen our failures. I had seen disembodied lungs that cried for air. I saw … oh, kiddo. I saw things that should never have been.”
“Then … why did you keep working there?” I raised my head. “I thought you were a good person.”
“The initiative began as a gathering of scientific minds interested in stopping disease. We had such ambition in the beginning!” He put his finger up. “We were going to save lives! Cure all but death!” His finger curled inward. “The optimists dropped out early, when the first children emerged sickly. It wasn’t only the subjects who mutated, but the scientists. Suddenly I was surrounded by cold-eyed strangers who saw experiments rather than children. If I left … who would look after them? How many kids would drown? I have made mistakes, but I could not leave them.”
He couldn’t let you rot, Mo.
“Then your father joined us, smirking on a winter’s morning. Imagine it! Simply strolled right into my office with his hands in his pockets and asked me when he could meet everyone. I told him there would be a staff meeting later that afternoon.
“‘No,’ he said. ‘When can I meet the kids?’
“I took him to the children’s ward, somewhat dumbfounded. He crossed his arms behind his head and chattered about how excited he was to be working there, about the heavy snowfall, about his beautiful fiancée he had met on campus, a girl who played guitar and was expecting. When I unlocked the second door and we entered the ward in our protective suits, I expected him to recoil. Some of the specimens in those days were scarce recognizable as human beings. Some of them were radioactive. Others were not much more than wriggling feelers.