by Rex Miller
Blackness again.
13
Bayou Ridge
Raymond Meara came back from the woods with maybe a half a rack of chainsawed oak, and broke his second sweat of the day unloading it, throwing the ash and gum off to one side. It was cold and the perspiration hurt the bad side of his face a little, so he turned and worked with his back more to the wind.
He split it all down into quarters, using a plain wedge and sledge, and then he took a maul and did the smaller pieces. He took a very sharp double-bitted axe out of the pickup and made a stack of kindling, and carried an armload into the house, hearing the phone make a ping as it quit ringing. It rang a second time while he was finishing up stoking the wood stove and he picked it up on the fourth ring.
“Yeah."
“Ray?"
“Hello.” It was Rosemary.
“I called a couple times before but I guess you was out."
“Yeah. I just came in."
“We gonna do somethin’ tonight?” she asked.
“I gotta go to the spillway meeting. You wanna go with me?"
“Sure. I reckon so."
“Then we'll come on out here when they finish,” he told her, unnecessarily. It was all they ever did beside go out to eat once in a while.
“All right. You gonna pick me up?"
“I'll be by about seven-thirty."
“What should I wear?"
“Clothes,” he said, hanging up. Rosemary was pretty. Divorced, with three small children, bleached blond hair, and a tight little shape lots of guys around Bayou City liked the looks of. Meara promised her nothing, and she didn't ask for much more. As long as they kept it that way he figured he'd enjoy her company. He picked her up in the driveway of the ramshackle trailer court where she had a mobile home.
“Hi,” she said excitedly, sliding in beside him. She seemed small and proud under her beauty-parlor hair.
“This'll bore the pants off ya,” he told her.
“Promises, promises.” Her mouth had a lot of mileage on it but she gave a smile easily. It was just that her eyes stayed in neutral.
“Atta way,” he said, reaching over and patting her leg. He felt pretty good. His back and face were acting up some but that wasn't anything. It smelled good in the pickup with the heat on, a mixture of soap scents, Rosemary's perfume, and truck smells. He didn't feel like getting out when they pulled up to the meeting hall.
By the time the meeting was over, Raymond wished he'd stayed in the truck. Some of the troubleshooters for the Clearwater Trench project tried to defuse and/or deflect every question with big, long-winded spiels about “hypothetical flooding scenario number thirteen,” and a lot of technical stuff about “reservoir gauging” and “overflow dispersement.” Nobody knew what the hell they were talking about. Finally he'd had enough and he stood up and they recognized him.
“My name's Meara. I got a farm right there in the spillway. You blow that levee, I'm wiped out. So are a bunch of other farmers in there. But look here: Clearwater Trench is dead bang over the New Madrid fault line. You're gonna’ set off a massive explosion right on top of the fault? How do you know you're not gonna’ trigger one of the worst earthquakes in history?"
“Come on,” the man chuckled patronizingly, “it's not like we were dropping a hydrogen bomb on it. We're just talking about cutting the levee."
“By cutting you mean blowing, and I know something about demolition. You people wanna’ pop the caps on three hundred tons of DBA-105P, some of the most powerful slurry-type explosive made. The truth is you really don't know what the reaction's going to be when you explode that much right on top of the fault line.
“What about scour? What about blue holes? Have you thought about that? What if the Mississippi diverts right through the hole you blow and here comes all that water, is the set-back levee gonna’ hold the entire force of the river? You have plans to evacuate all of Bayou City? You got that many helicopters and pontoon craft standing by? Any idea how fast that water's gonna’ come slammin’ in on top of these folks? Ever been in a real bad flash flood? That's nothing to what it'll be like. You got a lousy deal here.” Meara sat back down, red faced, his scar aglow like a white brand.
“I understand your concerns. And, no offense, you aren't exactly without a vested interest, considering the location of your farmland. However, all of these factors you mention are being looked at. We are going to study on all of this. Next?"
Ray felt helpless and trapped in the flow of something as certain and unavoidable as the tide.
“Rosemary James,” a man's voice said as they walked outside after the meeting. “I do declare, child. You're getting so pretty I can hardly stand it, you know that?” It was Milas Kehoe, a wealthy rancher and landowner. Meara's companion smiled and kept moving toward the truck, but Kehoe stepped in front of Meara and said softly, “Ray?"
“Yeah."
“What do you think?"
“I can't really say, man."
“Kinda’ makes that offer of mine look a little on the high side, now, don't it?” He doubled over and started roaring with laughter as if he'd told the funniest joke of all time. Meara just walked around him and went over to the pickup and climbed in beside Rosemary.
“What was all that about?” she asked.
He repeated the one-liner.
“Kehoe tried to buy the farm a couple of times. I guess that's his idea of humor, rubbing it in that the ground isn't worth as much now that it might get flooded."
“That's terrible."
“Oh, well,” he ground the ignition, “it was getting flooded with backwater every couple of years anyway. I guess that's why it's called the spillway, eh?"
Some dark, troubling thing was dogging his trail. He felt it close at hand, ominous and unswerving. Something bad was coming. It grated like a loud, unanswered phone, and Meara put the truck in gear and floored the accelerator, driving straight into its teeth.
Then and Now
Dr. Emil Shtolz
and Anna Kaplan
14
München—1944
The kindly looking physician in the white smock bids the two armed Waffen-SS guards to leave the room. They are the ones the patients whisper about, the ones they call Ignorant and Knowing behind their backs—Schoppen and Wissende. He nods in the direction of the operating bay and the nurse takes one end of the table and the two of them push the wheeled work surface, rather like a gurney, next to some lab equipment. He begins reading as she plugs tubes into vials and retorts, attaches electrodes. There is little sense of what is about to come.
He is glancing at a translation of a paper on gerontomorphises. His interests are wide and he studies the words with interest, feeling a light touch as a power cord brushes against his smock, hearing an almost inaudible “Excuse me, Herr Doktor.” He steps back a bit and looks up from his reading material. The patient's eyes are riveted on him. He smiles into the man's gaze.
“You're being a fine, cooperative patient.” Through the door he can hear Ignorant and Knowing laughing together out in the hallway, their voices loud and grating.
The man on the wheeled table, small, with salt-and-pepper hair visible where the head has not been shaved, makes a movement with his mouth like a grimace and the physician smiles again.
“Nothing to worry about,” the doctor begins to say, soothingly, as he feels something strike him. He looks down at the spit, gets a tissue, and wipes it from his white coat.
“Nazi pig,” the patient says, and curses him, telling him to lie in the ground and burn. The physician looks at the man sadly. “You treat us like animals because you have power now, but you will not live forever. I will go to my spiritual reward, but you, you will—"
The nurse places an object over the man's mouth and his words are muffled as he says, “rot in Hades. God will not forgive your crimes!"
The man in the white coat leans near and says in soft, gentle tones, “It will not help you to struggle,” as he observes the patient st
raining at the leather straps. “Listen to me a moment. It is only natural that you are afraid, that you feel hatred and fear. But please do not be afraid. This process will be virtually painless, I assure you.” The man's eyes look daggers at him. “You have no way of knowing how important you are. You're part of a scientific breakthrough that will someday benefit all mankind."
“You're wasting your breath, I'm afraid,” another man says, coming out of the operating bay and hearing his colleague. “I've tried to do the same thing with these people and they seem incapable of understanding."
“If they could only know. We're all making history together here."
“That's right. And of course no one wants to undergo surgery, however painless or scientifically valuable their contribution might be.” The younger physician moves into the bright light that floods the doorway. “But better here than in the Auschwitz Special Treatment Units, eh?"
The older physician nods and raises his bushy eyebrows in agreement. The young one turns, and the man on the table sees the sign of the devil on his face and his heart almost stops with fear. The younger one with the reddish-purple mark on his face, what the patients call the Tear of Satan, is the one they call the Boy Butcher.
“Just think,” he says to the wide-eyed patient, nodding to the anesthesiologist, “our contribution to medical science could be the one that leads to a new dawn for the race of man. Perhaps your name will live on for eternity. Bring the baby in,” he tells the nurse.
The three persons begin attaching more apparatus to the man who is strapped to the wheeled table. The younger physician begins to make marks on the patient's freshly shaved skull. In a very soft voice he tells the man what to expect, telling him in that manner he has that is at once solicitous and threatening.
“You will lose your sensitivity but you will not lose consciousness at first,” he says, almost in a lover's whisper. The bright light glints on bone saws and drills. “So don't be surprised at some slight discomfort as we begin the discorporation process.” The man on the table faints as the Boy Butcher whispers gentle words of unspeakable promise.
This is Riestermann's play-pretty, the younger physician thinks. Doomed to instant failure, of course. Uncle Hans, which is how he thinks of his avuncular mentor and benefactor, is caught up in a series of tests involving the discorporation of human infant brains, in which attempts are being made to keep fresh brain transplants living in a host. Literally countless animals and now babies have been unsuccessfully discorporated. The series clearly cannot succeed, yet Uncle Hans perseveres. This dead Jew will be nothing more than numbers in a ledger, lines on a graph. Number cipher cipher, of Adult Non-Aryan Male Host Subjects/Infant Brain cipher cipher. Empty, dead numbers.
Next week looks much more promising, he thinks. They will turn out a lot of skullcaps next week. That is their little joke between them. They make real skullcaps for the Jews here.
He does not see himself as a monster, this Boy Butcher. In Emil Shtolz's twisted mind he is the perfect Renaissance man, German by birth, Italian by spirit. A genius, they say, a young star of the Reich. Learned. Suave. An elitist who already is master of the operating room, the drawing room, or the bedroom. Especially the latter, where he can give free reign to the other Emil, the one to whom a tortured scream is music. In his mind he knows he is far above the laws that constrain lesser mortals, and even beyond the laws of God. Men like Emil are a law unto themselves.
When the operation is finished, he discards his cap, mask, gloves, and bloodied gown, and leaves the surgical bay, passing the lab annex and his office, and turning to walk quickly down the hallway. It has excited him, all the blood, the feeling of power when he exposes the brains, knowing that he and Uncle Hans are free to have their fun, all in the name of the program. He is very excited by the time he pulls his heavy ring of keys out, fumbling with the locked door of room number three.
“Hello, my darling,” he says, and the little girl runs to him, her arms outstretched.
15
The first premonition of what he would remember only as the bad times came a couple of weeks later, unexpectedly. He was in his office, reading, when the older doctor's voice caused the younger man to look up from his papers. He heard a nurse saying something to Herr Doktor, and Riestermann saying “Danke,” as he came around the corner and into view.
“Busy?” asked Riestermann.
“Just reading."
“Who have you scheduled for tomorrow, the host subject?"
“Um, I have Number Twelve."
“No. I don't want Twelve yet. Get that little one you like. What's her name?” Shtolz looked at the physician who'd become a mentor to him. “The little fair-skinned Jewess you're so partial to? Let's use her."
“We've discussed this,” Shtolz said, swallowing. “Don't you remember? Twelve is all prepared."
“Emil,” the old physician said softly, “I don't mind your little games. But you're growing attached to Number Three.” He stepped all the way into the small room and pulled the door shut behind him. “Pleasures of the flesh can become self-destructive when a person isn't careful. It's all right to indulge but the key is moderation,” he was almost whispering. Shtolz could feel himself reddening.
“I don't know what you mean.” The words caught in his throat.
“Let's not embarrass one another, Emil. I wouldn't say anything to you but,” he gestured toward the wall, “you know how things are around here. I'm just watching out for your welfare.” He smiled paternally. “Agree? Good.” He winked his Uncle Hans wink, opening the door and moving out into the hall.
Shtolz had the oddest sensation that he'd dreamed the moment between them. It was the closest the two had come to anything resembling an argument since Emil was brought into the program.
In spite of the degree of closeness imposed by the work they did, the empathic bond that two evil kindred spirits might establish, Riestermann was someone Shtolz was sure he'd never get to know. Nonetheless, the older normally treated him as an equal, a respected partner. He didn't give a damn which subject they hooked up to the brain tomorrow. Shtolz was sure he knew what this was about. It had come from those black-shirted dumbheads in the front office.
There was one officious swine in particular, a suspicious and excessively observant clerk type from, according to the grapevine, the complex on Prinz Albrechstrasse in Berlin. Eyes and ears for Internal Security, or the Staatspolizei, or even Himmler himself.
Emil understood the need, obviously, for the program not to be compromised. But this thing he felt for the little girl whom Hans Riestermann referred to coldly as Number Three, defied logic or regulations. She was something he had grown attached to.
He loved it when she would kiss his face, arching up on little tiptoes to “taste his strawberry,” touching her warm, moist lips to his birthmark. The way she was so quick to forgive his excesses when the heat of his perversions caused him to inflict pain.
He wanted to take his girlchild and escape from a world that he sensed was beginning to collapse. Politics had no meaning to Emil Shtolz. Science was everything. He would envy the progress of the program, so long as it lasted, as it transcended any lowly morality, but there were practical matters of survival to deal with, both his and the object of his passion's.
The Waffen-SS clinic was within a quick hop to the border and he was not one to be without ways and means. It would be easy, he thought, getting up decisively and leaving his office, turning down the hallway outside the laboratory annex. They'd expect him to head for Switzerland, which was enticingly close, but Poland was only the narrow width of Czechoslovakia from there. He could melt into the crowds with his beautiful love toy and soon the Tear of Satan would be forever obliterated.
He stopped before her room and removed his keys, unlocking the heavy security door. The hallway smelled of equal parts of fear, formaldehyde, and insanity, as he closed and locked the door behind him.
“Hello, my darling girl,” he said, waiting for the child to
run to him with outstretched arms as he had taught her.
“Hello, Papa,” she said. They kissed. There was only a bed, toilet, and a ceiling light fixture shrouded in steel mesh. The shelf of the old-fashioned water closet was several feet off the ground, nearly as high as he could reach. He gripped her tiny waist and with considerable effort sat her up on the shelf.
“Stand up on that, darling,” he told her.
She shook her head no, the long, beautiful hair gently falling against the smoothness of her perfect, blemishless, oval-shaped face. Not defying him, but afraid.
“Do what I say,” he coaxed her, gently, smiling with pleasure. He had learned she had a great fear of heights. "Do it!" he barked, putting some authority in his tone. “It's only a few feet off the floor. Just stand up."
He loved her pained expression as she forced herself to stand on the small ledge. Her hands were outstretched at either side, pressed against the wall.
“Please, Papa, let me come down now."
“I will, darling. That's what I want you to do. Come down,” he almost laughed with glee. “Put your hands out like this,” he said, showing her what he wanted. She complied instantly, but looked as if she were about to cry. “Jump into Papa's arms. Papa will catch you, you know that.” The girlchild trusted him. She stepped off like someone stepping into a shallow swimming pool.
“No, no,” he corrected, catching her thin body and sitting her back on the shelf in one motion, not even noticing the effort. “That's not it at all. I want you to dive into my arms, like a little bird.” The child, whose name was Marta, simply sat on the shelf, shaking in terror and confusion.
“Please,” she began, tears trickling down her face, making him even more resolved.
“Get up there, you vixen. Stand up! That's it. Put the arms again like so.... Now, dive into the air like a bird.” She was frozen to the spot. “Do it, you bitch, flap those wings and fly to Papa. Come on!"