by Terry Carr
My disposition to the business was similar to that of someone who is faced with the prospect of crossing a puddle too large to leap; he must plot a course between the shallow spots and then skip on tiptoe from point to point, landing as lightly as possible in order to avoid a contaminating splash. It was my intent to soar above decay, to touch down only in those places as yet unspoiled. Some of the planes I ferried carried cargos, which I did not rigorously inspect; others I delivered to their owners, however far away their homes. The farther away the better, to my mind. By my reckoning I have spent fifteen months in propeller-driven aircraft over water, a good portion of this over the North Atlantic; and so, when I was offered a substantial fee to pilot a twin-engine Beechcraft from Miami to Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, it hardly posed a challenge.
From the outset, though, the flight proved to be anything but unchallenging: The Beechcraft was a lemon. The right wing shimmied, the inside of the cabin rattled like an old jalopy, and the radio was constantly on the fritz, giving up the ghost once and for all as I crossed into Paraguayan airspace. I had to set down in Guayaquil for repairs to the electrical system, and then, as I was passing over the Gran Chaco—the great forest that sprawls across western Paraguay, a wilderness of rumpled, dark green hills—the engines died.
In those first seconds of pure silence before the weight of the world dragged me down and the wind began ripping past, I experienced an exhilaration, an irrational confidence that God had chosen to make an exception of me and had repealed the law of gravity, that I would float the rest of the way to Asuncion. But as the nose of the plane tipped earthward and a chill fanned out from my groin, I shook off this notion and started fighting for my life. A river—the Pilcomayo—was glinting silver among the hills several miles to my left; I banked into a glide and headed toward it. Under ordinary conditions I would have had time to pick an optimal stretch of water, but the Beechcraft was an even worse glider than airplane, and I had to settle for the nearest likely spot: a fairly straight section enclosed by steep, piney slopes. As I flashed between the slopes, I caught sight of black-roofed cottages along the shore, a much larger house looming on the crest. Then I smacked down, skipping like a stone for at least a hundred yards. I felt the tail lift, and everything became a sickening whirl of dark green and glare, and the hard silver light of the river came up to shatter the windshield.
I must have regained consciousness shortly after the crash, for I recall a face peering in at me. There was something malformed about the face, some wrongness of hue and shape, but I was too dizzy to see clearly. I tried to speak, managed a croak, and just this slight effort caused me to lose consciousness again. The next thing I recall is waking in a high-ceilinged room whose size led me to believe that I was inside the large house I had noticed atop the slope. My head ached fiercely, and when I put a hand to my brow I found it to be bandaged. As soon as the aching had diminished, I sat up and looked around. The decor of the room had a rectitude that would have been appropriate to a mausoleum. The walls and floors were of gray marble inscribed by veins of deeper gray; the door—a featureless rectangle of ebony—was flanked by two black wooden chairs; the bed itself was spread with a black silk coverlet. I assumed the drapes overhanging the window to be black also, but on closer inspection I discovered that they were woven of a cloth that under various intensities of light displayed many colors of darkness. These were the only furnishings. Carefully, because I was still dizzy, I walked to the window and pulled back the drapes. Scattered among the pines below were a dozen or so black roofs—tile, they were—and a handful of people were visible on the paths between them. There was a terrible, slow awkwardness to their movements that brought to mind the malformed face I had seen earlier, and a nervous thrill ran across the muscles of my shoulders. Farther down the slope the pines grew more thickly, obscuring the wreckage of the plane, though patches of shining water showed through the boughs.
I heard a click behind me, and turning I saw an old man in the doorway. He was leaning on a cane, wearing a loose gray shirt that buttoned high about his throat, and dark trousers—apparently of the same material as the drapes; he was so hunched that it was only with great difficulty he was able to lift his eyes from the floor (an infirmity, he told me later, that had led to his acquiring an interest in entomology). He was bald, his scalp mottled like a bird’s egg, and when he spoke the creakiness of his voice could not disguise a thick German accent.
“I’m pleased to see you up and about, Mr. Phelan,” he said, indicating by a gesture that I should sit on the bed.
“I take it I have you to thank for this,” I said, pointing to my bandage. “I’m very grateful, Mr…?”
“You may call me Dr. Mengele.” He shuffled toward me at a snail’s pace. “I have of course learned your name from your papers. They will be returned to you.”
The name Mengele, which had the sound of a dull bell ringing, was familiar; but I was neither Jewish nor a student of history, and it was not until after he had examined me, pronouncing me fit, that I began to put together the name and the facts of his age, his accent, and his presence in this remote Paraguayan village. Then I remembered a photograph I had seen as a child: a fleshy, smiling man with dark hair cut high above his ears was standing beside a surgical table, where lay a young woman, her torso draped by a sheet; her legs were exposed, and from the calves down all the flesh had been removed, leaving the skeleton protruding from the bloody casings of her knees. Josef Mengele in his surgery at Auschwitz had read the caption. That photograph had had quite an effect on me, because of its horrific detail and also because I had not understood what scientific purpose could have been served by this sort of mutilation. I stared at the old man, trying to match his face with the smiling, fleshy one, trying to feel the emanation of evil; but he was withered and shrunken to the point of anonymity, and the only impression I received from him was of an enormous vitality, a forceful physical glow such as might have accrued to a healthy young man.
“Mengele,” I said. “Not…”
“Yes, yes!” he said impatiently. “That Mengele. The mad doctor of the Third Reich. The monster, the sadist.”
I was repelled, and yet I did not feel outrage as I might have had I been Jewish. I had been born in 1948, and the terrors of World War II, the concentration camps, Mengele’s hideous pseudo-scientific experiments, they had the reality of vampire movies for me. I was curious, intensely so, in the way a child becomes fascinated with a crawling thing he has turned up from beneath a stone: he is inclined to crush it, but more likely to watch it ooze along.
“Come with me,” said Mengele, shuffling toward the door. “I can offer you dinner, but afterward I’m afraid you must leave. We have but one law here, and that is that no stranger may pass the night within our borders.” I had not observed any roads leading away from the village, and when I asked if I might have use of a radio, he laughed. “We have no communication with the outside world. We are self-sufficient here. None of the villagers ever leave, and rarely do we have visitors. You will have to make your way as best you can.”
“Are you saying I’ll have to walk?” I asked.
“You have no choice. If you head south along the river, some twenty or twenty-five kilometers, you will reach another village and there you will find a radio.”
The prospect of being thrown out into the Gran Chaco made me even less eager for his company, but if I were going on a twenty-five-kilometer hike I needed food. His pace was so slow that our walk to the dining room effectively constituted a tour of the house. He talked as we went, telling me—surprisingly enough—of his conversion to Nazism (National Socialism, he termed it) and his work at the camps. Whenever I asked a question he would pause, his expression would go blank, and after a moment he would pose a complicated answer. I had the idea that his answers were pre-rehearsed, that he had long ago anticipated every possible question and during those pauses he was rummaging through a file. In truth I only half listened to him, being disconcerted by the hou
se. It seemed less a house than a bleak mental landscape, and though I was accompanied by the man whose mind it no doubt reflected, I felt imperiled, out of my element. We passed room after room of gray marble and black furnishings identical to those I have already noted, but with an occasional variant: a pedestal supporting nothing but an obsidian surface; a bookshelf containing rows of black volumes; a carpet of so lusterless and deep a black that it looked to be an opening into some negative dimension. The silence added to my sense of endangerment, and as we entered the dining room, a huge marble cell distinguished from the other rooms by a long ebony table and an iron chandelier, I forced myself to pay attention to him, hoping the sound of his voice would steady my nerves. He had been telling me, I realized, about his flight from Germany.
“It hardly felt like an escape,” he said. “It had more the air of a vacation. Packing, hurried goodbyes, and as soon as I reached Italy and met my Vatican contact, it all became quite relaxing. Good dinners, fine wines, and at last a leisurely sea voyage.” He seated himself at one end of the table and rang a small black bell: it had been muffled in some way and barely produced a note. “It will be several minutes before you are served, I fear,” he went on. “I did not know when you would be sufficiently recovered to eat.”
I took a seat at the opposite end of the table. The strangeness of the environment, meeting Mengele, and now his reminiscences, all coming on the heels of my crash… it had left me fuddled. I felt as if I were phasing in and out of existence; at one moment I would be alert, intent upon his words, and the next I would be wrapped in vagueness and staring at the walls. The veins of the marble appeared to be writhing, spelling out messages in an archaic script.
“This house,” I said suddenly, interrupting him. “Why is it like it is? It doesn’t seem a place in which a man—even one with your history—would choose to live.”
Again, that momentary blankness. “I believe you may well be a kindred spirit, Mr. Phelan,” he said, and smiled. “Only one other has asked that particular question, and though he did not understand my answer at first, he came to understand it as you may someday.” He cleared his throat. “You see, several years after I had settled in Paraguay I underwent a crisis of conscience. Not that I had regrets concerning my actions during the war. Oh, I had nightmares now and again, but no more than such as come to every man. No, I had faith in my work, despite the fact that it had been countenanced as evil, and as it turned out, that work proved to be the foundation of consequential discoveries. But perhaps, I thought, it was evil. If this were the case, well, I freely admitted to it… and yet I had never seen myself as an evil man. Only a committed one. And now the focus of my commitment—National Socialism—had failed. It was inconceivable to me, though, that the principles underlying it had failed, and I came to the conclusion that the failure could probably be laid to a misapprehension of those principles. Things had happened too fast for us. We had always been in a hurry, overborne by the needs of the country; we had been too pressured to act coherently, and the movement had become less a religion than a church. Empty, pompous ritual had taken the place of contemplated action. But now I had no pressure and all the time in the world, and I set out to understand the nature of evil.”
He sighed and drummed his fingers on the table. “It was a slow process. Years of study, reading philosophy and natural history and cabalistic works, anything that might have a bearing on the subject. And when finally I did understand, I was amazed that I had not done so sooner. It was obvious! Evil was not—as it had been depicted for centuries—the tool of chaos. Creation was the chaotic force. Why, you can see this truth in every mechanism of the natural world, in the clouds of pollen, the swarms of flies, the migrations of birds. There is precision in those events, but they are nonetheless chaotic. Their precision is one born of overabundance, a million pellets shot and several dozen hitting the mark. No, evil was not chaotic. It was simplicity, it was system, it was the severing stroke of a knife. And most of all, it was inevitable. The entropic resolution of good, the utter simplification of the creative. Hitler had always known this, and National Socialism had always embodied it. What were the blitzkrieg and the concentration camps if not tactical expressions of that simplicity? What is this house if not its esthetic employment?” Mengele smiled, apparently amused by something he saw written on my face. “This understanding of mine may not strike you as revelatory, yet once I did understand everything I had been doing, all my researches began to succeed whereas previously they had failed. By understanding, of course, I do not mean that I merely acknowledged the principle. I absorbed it, I dissolved in it, I let it rule me like magic. I understood!”
I am not sure what I might have said—I was revolted by the depth of his madness, his iniquity—but at that moment he turned to the door and said, “Ah! Your dinner.” A man dressed in the same manner as Mengele was shuffling across the room, carrying a tray. I barely glanced at him, intent upon my host. The man moved behind my chair and, leaning in over my shoulder, began to lay down plates and silverware. Then I noticed his hand. The skin was ashen gray, the fingers knobbly and unnaturally long—the fingers of a demon—and the nails were figured by half-moons of dead white. Startled, I looked up at him.
He had almost finished setting my place, and I doubt I stared at him for more than a few seconds, but those seconds passed as slowly as drops of water welling from a leaky tap. His face had a horrid simplicity that echoed the decor of the house. His mouth was a lipless slit, his eyes narrow black ovals, his nose a slight swelling perforated by two neat holes; he was bald, his skull elongated, and each time he inclined his head I could see a ridge of bone bisecting the scalp like the sagittal crest of a lizard. All his movements had that awful slowness I had observed in the people of the village. I wanted to fling myself away from the table, but I maintained control and waited until he had gone before I spoke.
“My God!” I said. “What’s wrong with him?”
Mengele pursed his lips in disapproval. “The deformed are ever with us, Mr. Phelan. Surely you have seen worse in your time.”
“Yes, but.…”
“Tell me of an instance.” He leaned forward, eager to hear.
I was nonplused, but I told him how one night in New York City—my home—I had been walking in the East Village when a man had come toward me from the opposite corner; his collar had been turned up, his chin tucked in, so that most of his face was obscured; yet as he had passed, the flare of the streetlight had revealed a grimacing mouth set vertically just beneath his cheekbone, complete with tiny teeth. I had not been able to tell if he had in addition a normal mouth, and over the years I had grown uncertain as to whether or not it had been a hallucination. Mengele was delighted and asked me to supply more descriptive details, as if he planned to add the event to his file.
“But your servant,” I asked. “What of him?”
“Merely a decoration,” he said. “A creature of my design. The village and the woods abound with them. No doubt you will encounter a fair sampling on your walk along the Pilcomayo.”
“Your design!” I was enraged. “You made him that way?”
“You cannot have expected my work to have an angelic character.” Mengele paused, thoughtful. “You must understand that what you see here, the villagers, the house, everything, is a memorial to my work. It has the reality of one of those glass baubles that contain wintry rural scenes and when shaken produce whirling snowstorms. The same actions are repeated over and over, the same effects produced. There is nothing for you to be upset about. The people here are content to serve me in this fashion. They understand.” He pointed to the plates in front of me. “Eat, Mr. Phelan. Time is pressing.”
I looked down at the plates. They were black ceramic. One held a green salad, and the other slices of roast beef swimming in blood. I have always enjoyed rare beef, but in that place it seemed an obscenity. Nonetheless, I was hungry, and I ate. And while I did, while Mengele told me of his work in genetics—work that had created mon
strosities such as his servant—I determined to kill him. We were natural enemies, he and I. For though I had no personal score to settle, he exulted in the dissolution that I had spent most of my postwar life in avoiding. It was time, I thought, to do more than avoid it. I decided to take the knife with which I cut my beef and slash his throat. Perhaps he would appreciate the simplicity.
“Naturally,” he said, “the creation of grotesques was not the pinnacle of my achievements. That pinnacle I reached nine years ago when I discovered a means of chemically affecting the mechanisms that underlie gene regulation, specifically those that control cell breakdown and rebuilding.”
Being no scientist, I was not sure what he meant. “Cell breakdown?” I said. “Are you…”
“Simply stated,” he said, “I learned to reverse the process of aging. It may be that I have discovered the secret of immortality, though it is not yet clear how many treatments the body will accept.”
“If that’s true, why haven’t you treated yourself?”
“Indeed,” he said with a chuckle. “Why not?”
There was no doubt in my mind that he was lying about his great triumph, and this lie—which put into an even darker perspective the malignancy of his work, showing it to be purposeless, serving no end other than to further the vileness of his ego—this lie firmed my resolve to kill him. I gripped the knife and started to push back my chair; but then a disturbing thought crossed my mind. “Why have you revealed yourself to me?” I asked. “Surely you know that I’m liable to mention this to someone.”
“First, Mr. Phelan, you may never have a chance to mention it; a twenty-five-kilometer walk along the Pilcomayo is no Sunday stroll. Second, whom would you tell? The officialdom of this country are my associates.”
“What about the Israelis? If they knew of this place, they’d be swarming all over you.”