Heinrich could feel them slipping away. What would become of him if he lost his command?
“We shall colonize. We shall indoctrinate our boys with the laws of the SS-organization. I consider it to be absolutely necessary to the life of our peoples, that we should not only impart the meaning of ancestry, grandchildren and future, but feel these to be a part of our being. Without there being any talk about it, without our needing to make use of rewards and similar material things, it must be a matter of course that we have children. It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial super-stratum of the Germanic people.”
Heinrich had spent his childhood staring up at the stone castle at Burg Trusnitiz on the high hill. He’d fantasized about a brotherhood of Teutonic knights who gave their blood defending the sacred soil of their homeland from invaders who had no notion of the necessity for honor, duty, and purity. Now he had his own brotherhood of dark knights who he hoped might one day thrill the world with their power. Without his SS he would be less than nothing.
“We want to be worthy of being permitted to be the first SS-men of the Führer, Adolf Hitler, in the long history of the Germanic people, which stretches before us. Now let us remember the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, who will create the Germanic Reich and will lead us into the Germanic future.
“Our Führer Adolf Hitler.
“Sieg Heil!
“Sieg Heil!
“Sieg Heil!”
They all stood, saluting. Heinrich could see how the ragged child who had first intruded upon his speech now lay beneath their polished boots, falling into bits too fine, he hoped, for history to hold them.
It was the curse of the great to have to walk over corpses.
And deep inside, Daniel prayed let me out let me out let me out.
12
STRIPED PAJAMAS. GORDON had had a couple of pairs. His favorites, with the red stripes. Not like the blue stripes on the uniforms the Jews wore. His stripes had been narrower. And of course they hadn’t had the two superimposed yellow triangles making the Star of David. Still, Daniel wished now he hadn’t bought them for his son. Now he couldn’t think of them as anything but uniforms for the sleep walkers, for the walking dreamers, the soon-to-be-dead.
Daniel and Elena had recognized that something was wrong, although they rarely put that worry into words. Gordon was less active than his classmates, more reticent to enter into the almost mindless, almost violent play of other boys his age. Although he clearly wanted to—Daniel could see it in his dark eyes, the vague shininess they took on when he saw the other boys playing. Daniel recognized the desire to be a “real” boy, all boy, the kind of boy everybody loved.
Before the diagnosis Daniel had taken Gordon’s reticence for shyness. He saw it as his job to draw his son out of his shell. For about six months when Gordon had been six or seven, the normally affectionate boy had become squirmy, stubborn, and reluctant to be held.
“It’s natural,” Elena had said. “My sister’s kids went through the exact same thing.”
“Maybe. I’m not so sure.” Daniel’s strategy had been to rough-house with his son, wrestling, grabbing, pretending to be a cowboy astride his horse. Daniel as the bull had been an angry force of nature.
Gordon waved the giant beach towel in Daniel’s face. Elena had sewn a picture of an enormous frog on it. Daniel aimed his head with its imaginary horns at the frog’s round belly.
“Here, Daddy‑bull! Come get me!”
Daniel crawled on all fours as fast as he could beneath the towel, shoulders and butt thrashing. “Snort! Snort!”
“Daddy‑bull’s got a cold!” Gordon leaped onto Daniel’s back, clutching his T-shirt at the shoulders, digging his small hands into Daniel’s sides, giggling. “I’m beatin up Daddy! Hey, I’m beatin him up!” Gordon liked the game more and more as he grew older, playing his part even more aggressively.
And Daniel encouraged it. He was even rougher in his play, as if to demonstrate to his small son how much the boy could actually handle, that there was no reason to be afraid.
“Wrestle, Daddy! Wrestle!” Daniel pulled Gordon off his back, laughing, put him on the floor beneath him, straddled him and began tickling. Gordon squirmed with uncontrollable laughter.
“That’s probably enough, Dan,” Elena said from the kitchen. “You’re getting him all worked up.”
It was a guy thing, he supposed. Not that girls couldn’t play as aggressively as boys, but it seemed that more frequently they knew when to stop. A father and his son, that was just two boys playing together, not knowing when to stop. And sometimes the games lasted a lifetime.
Daniel tickled more insistently, then bent over, wrapping his arms around Gordon, trying to hold him more tightly, kissing him on the cheek, clutching him with a strange sort of desperation, kissing the boy’s small hands, and before he knew it he had taken his son’s upper arm into his mouth, as he had at other times‑‑playing “lion” or “monster,” and Gordon was giggling so, and Daniel thought about biting him, thinking how adults were always telling kids “I could just eat you,” and he tasted the salt, and stopped.
Gordon’s giggles faded, and he stared at Daniel with those shiny black eyes as if waiting to see what Daniel was going to do next. Daniel didn’t know himself. He loved this little boy so much he just had to step away before he ate him all up.
After the heart diagnosis Daniel would think back to this little wrestling match and shudder. He would remember the grunting sounds his son used to make, and his puffy eyes, and how he used to think Gordon must have allergies, terrible, persistent allergies. Later he and Elena would work out their shifts so that one of them could be with Gordon at all times. It all accumulated, there was so much to think about, and they became estranged. They hardly knew each other anymore. If only Gordon hadn’t gotten sick, but he’d always been sick, hadn’t he, since the day he was born? They just hadn’t known. And Daniel, and Daniel could have just eaten him up, eaten him up.
Later, in another life, in a scenario in which he floated in and out of the mind of Albert Fish, apprehended 1934, who had killed‑-and oftentimes eaten‑‑a dozen or so children, he would think how the desperation, the hunger, was all‑pervasive and inescapable.
ONE MORNING DANIEL woke up to discover Gandhi sitting on the edge of his bunk. From this angle he looked as small and fragile as a child. “We let you sleep in. You’ve been having a particularly hard time of it lately, I think,” he said. “Alan didn’t come back from his last scenario.”
Daniel sat up quickly, blinking. Alan? Bogart. He had no idea what to say. But it wasn’t as if they were actually friends, any of them. “Are you sure, Walter? Maybe he’s just late. Sometimes we’re late coming back.”
Gandhi shook his head. “Never this late. If you’re this late you’re not coming back.” He looked down, closed his eyes as if offering up a prayer. “Well, I just thought you’d like to know, for when you didn’t see him.” He started to get up.
“What do you think happens to them, Walter, when they don’t come back?”
Gandhi shrugged. “Some of the fellows, they say the roaches execute them, that it’s like a trial, and then they’re executed.” He shook his head. “In our situation, people believe anything. I think sometimes they have heart attacks. It’s a lot of stress. I’ve always wondered if the roaches screened for high blood pressure before they took us. Probably not. And sometimes I think they go crazy, afterwards. Not hard to believe, is it? That’s what happened to the werewolf, I suppose. Maybe there’s a ward full of them someplace, unless the roaches put them out of their misery, unless they want to study them, like with the werewolf. That would be the humane thing, under the circumstances. Not an execution, exactly. Euthanasia.”
Gandhi got up and walked toward some of the others gathered nearby. His small bare feet made no sound. He seemed to barely have a presence. That slight, tentative profile, made Daniel ache for Gordon.
Unexplained disappearances
had happened several times since he’d been in Ubo, but never to anyone Daniel actually knew. Joining the others, talking to them—however little it might do—was the decent thing.
He had reached the group, taking his position beside Falstaff, when a peculiar thing occurred. The lights blinked. He might have thought it was just his own eyes blinking, but from the look on the others’ faces he knew that wasn’t the case.
Except for Falstaff. Falstaff looked thunderstruck, appalled.
But the truly peculiar thing was the momentary hallucination or crazy notion he had during that blink. He saw skin melted away, and something not bone underneath. And metal prostheses of some sort, as if they’d all been maimed. He couldn’t be sure if the others had seen the same thing, but they all looked uncomfortable. And Falstaff, Falstaff looked sick.
It would be impossible to say whether the interruption in power had anything to do with it, but there were no scenarios for the rest of the day. Daniel had never seen so many men in the barracks or in the waiting room, and they all acted as if they weren’t quite sure what to do with themselves. There was much staring off into space, staring at each other, visual and hands-on inspection of their own bodies. Daniel himself felt compelled to wave his own hand in front of his face, fingers spread, moving it fast, then slow, trying to make himself aware of the point at which it blurred and whether that matched experiences he’d had of similar actions on earth.Maybe this was related to the slight shimmer he’d noticed around the roaches, like the visible distortions of air on a hot summer day.
The roaches themselves were scarce. None had appeared in the observation windows all day, and Daniel had had only a brief glimpse of a guard in the outside corridor. Some crisis must have occurred—he just hoped it wouldn’t make life for the residents more difficult.
By afternoon nervous energies were spilling over into small quarrels and shoving matches, usually because someone had been staring too long or chosen to extend his physical examinations beyond his own body. Usually it was Falstaff who broke these quarrels up.
FOR SEVERAL NIGHTS in a row the werewolf howled incessantly, his voice transitioning from a low, dream-entrapped groan to an ear-splitting hysteria. Periodically Daniel would climb out of bed and find Lenin or Gandhi sitting on the edges of their bunks, hanging their heads wearily, or walking around in the gray-dark, listening, not knowing what to do. The next day they’d all be groggy and staggering, except for Falstaff, who apparently refused to let it bother him.
They rarely spoke about it during the day. He supposed they all just hoped it would get better.
But on the sixth night of the howling, the raw-throated screams, Gandhi and Lenin and Daniel were standing, staring at each other, with occasional glances at Falstaff’s snoring and immobile mass. “Let’s put a stop to it,” Lenin said. “Let’s go find the beast.”
“How are we going to stop it?” Daniel sat back down on his bed.
“Who knows? Give him what he wants, maybe.” Gandhi sounded spent, aggravated. “Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep I wander around. It’s strange, but I almost never encounter the roaches that late anymore. Maybe they’re short-handed.”
“Or they’re hiding, waiting for us to overstep our bounds.” Lenin threw up his hands. “Not that it matters. I’d try anything at this point.” He started off toward the wide door at one end of the barracks, the “roach door.” “Be bold, gentlemen,” he called back.
Gandhi glanced at Falstaff’s sleeping mass. “Should we wake him?” But Lenin was almost to the dim outline of doorway. Daniel and Gandhi stumbled into each other, then hurried after him and into a series of increasingly damaged hallways, down neglected staircases, Daniel fought to keep his nerve. At least the spaces they travelled through were generally, if dimly, lit. The walls throughout the structure had been equipped with shallow baseboards that glowed in the dark, casting the surfaces with a pale blue. Some of the larger rooms had matching parallel ceiling borders in white. The resulting light showcased wall after wall of damage and corruption.
Navigation was inexact, based on whatever directional clues the werewolf’scries provided. They let Lenin take the lead. Daniel didn’t know that Lenin possessed any more understanding of the building than the rest of them, but at least he showed confidence. The werewolf continued to moan and whimper, scream and howl, the perceivable origins of these sounds complicated by the echoing emptiness in this part of the building.
For a time they shuffled their way across floors inches deep in wall and ceiling fragments that rattled and clacked against their shoes. “Who knew concrete would turn out to be a universal building material?” Gandhi said at one point, underlining a detail that had been nagging Daniel. For all their alienness, the roaches appeared to have problem-solved in a way not that different from human beings.
They descended several floors, but to Daniel’s ears they were no closer to the werewolf, who now alternated whining complaints with a rhythmic shrieking as if he were being stabbed. It increasingly troubled Daniel that they hadn’t seen a single roach, and he wondered if perhaps they were going where the roaches wanted them to go.
But then they saw one asleep in a far corner, surrounded by empty brown drink bottles. They walked slowly, watching where they put their feet, until they were past.
They came into a large area lined on one wall with broken windows. Encroaching vegetation had covered part of the floor and traced the walls. “Perhaps we should go back,” Lenin said softly.
“I want to finish this,” Daniel said, and no one disagreed.
The fractured window frames allowed moonlight to flood the space, providing a different view of the city than any he had had before. He was immediately drawn there, walking over a floor dotted with shrapnel pits and larger sections where the tile appeared to have been completely scraped to the subfloor. The wall beside and under the window frame looked unstable so he kept a couple of steps back. When he peered down through the frame he could see a great pile of debris several stories in height banking the base of the building. More ruins spilled out of a huge hole caved in the outer wall. Thick, woody vines had pushed their way into the hole and webbed the exterior, some tendrils snaking into the destroyed windows in front of him.
In the distance he could see a few standing structures within the rubble at the edge of the tumbledown city, and beyond that the red of fires and boiling black smoke. Faint traces of shouts or maybe screams floated in the air, but he might have imagined them.
“Someone’s done a mural,” Gandhi said behind him.
Daniel turned and moved toward the back wall, the mural revealing itself gradually in the unobstructed moonlight. Bullet holes speckled parts of it, and one portion nearest the door had been heavily damaged by fire. “It’s religious, I think,” he said, although he wasn’t sure why he thought so. “And it’s crude—I don’t think anyone professional did this.”
It was a city scape, ill-proportioned or from a severely distorted perspective. Central to the painting were the rooftops, seen from above, squares and rectangles distorted, with tiny human forms clinging desperately. It was a mix of paints and drawing media, markers, anything that might register on the wall, so some parts had faded to near invisibility while other portions were still quite vivid, as if an observer had precisely recalled only certain details and allowed the others to recede into a blur of forgetfulness.
“What are those larger beings?” Gandhi pointed at several figures, glowing and unrecognizable, floating above the rooftops.
“I believe they’re meant to be angels, the way they observe everything,” Lenin said.
Daniel thought they were meant to represent people, or what people someday hoped to be, but he might be wrong. They all might be wrong.
The buildings in the mural were bent, wobbly, snaky things, more like giant square hoses with windows than proper rigid architecture. Down at the base of these surreally twisted high rises lay—‘pandemonium’ was the word that came to mind. Dark figures danced in
joy or agony, their bodies shiny and broken like those of insects, vehicles smashed and fires spreading as a frightful mania travelled through the streets.
“It’s an unhappy picture painted by an unhappy person,” Gandhi said.
The howl beneath their feet shook the floor. Gandhi stamped his foot. Even though the gesture made but a small sound, another howl returned. “Just one level down, I’d say.”
They moved on. Daniel lingered to touch the art piece. The lines and colors had been rubbed and gouged in, as if drawn with great passion, with a need for the mural to last. At the bottom of the images, just above the floor, was a border of larger figures in panicked poses, as if desperate to escape the destruction. They were humanoid for the most part, but the occasional stick figure had gears, pinions, pulleys—it was some sort of mechanical creature. All of them looked panicked, all of them persecuted in this strangely detailed Hell. Who would have drawn this, and when? Had there always been residents? This experiment, or study, whatever it was, might have been going on for decades. He looked through the window at the shambling sprawl beyond, and wondered if something out there had inspired this.
As he turned back, his shoes kicked up rubble on the floor. Something white and shiny, torn, lettered. “... Psych...”
“This world is grown old.”Shakespeare’s Falstaff had said that, but Daniel could imagine those words coming out of his large acquaintance’s mouth. It seemed an appropriate title for a painting such as this. Perhaps they had made a mistake in not awakening Falstaff and dragging him down here.
The howls gained force and volume again as the menmoved through the next level down. The werewolf must have heard their approach and wanted to make sure he could be located. But the howls didn’t feel like cries for help exactly, more like some mindless complaint. Finally, off a long and empty corridor, they found the door with the sound of intense scratching on the other side.
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