Apparatus 33: Dead Man Switch

by Lawston Pettymore

  Zerrissen walked cautiously in the shard of light from the hallway partially illuminated the jumble of contents within, consisting of a broken chair, a three-legged table propped up by books of physics and electronics he had acquired over the years for amusement. The concern was what might be lurking in the shadows.

  His hand found and twisted the rotary switch on the single lamp that served the whole studio, consisting of the kitchen, the table, a toilet behind a curtain, and his pallet style bed. The light sent roaches fleeing to the corners and framed the one bit of color in the room: a young man in a tailored suit of blue gabardine, jacket unbuttoned, loose collar, no tie. The top three buttons undone, exposing hairless, toned pectorals. It was Nicolaus, making himself at home, enjoying a glass of something red from a bottle he had obviously brought for the occasion, uncorked. He held his finger to his lips, and turned on the radio, which, in a few seconds, began broadcasting a football match.

  “You don’t have a television.” Nicolaus sat in a such a manner to avoid touching anything, almost levitating, stating the obvious.

  Zerrissen glanced around and shrugged. “I don’t do a lot of entertaining. You may want to bring one next time you break in, which, by the way, you’re always welcome to do if you bring your own liquor.”

  “Oh. This is wine.” Nicolaus held up the bottle and examined its label. “French. Very drinkable. Would you like some?”

  Zerrissen fished for a glass in the dish-filled sink, wiped it out, and stuck it out to Nicolaus. After a little wine culture ceremony, Nicolaus eased back into the issue that he had left with Zerrissen.

  “So, have you given any thought to how you might get all three of us across the border?”

  “Three? I thought it was just Halina.”

  “Developments. Things have changed.”

  “You mean the Wall?”

  “The reason for the Wall, yes.”

  “Oh? Did you steam open someone’s mail or peep a bathroom window?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “I’m listening.” Zerrissen said with a frown.

  “The Soviets found Die Kuppel. They are… trying to make sense of it.”

  “I didn’t know they had lost it. I could have told them where to look.” The attempt at humor did not land the way Zerrissen intended.

  “You might just get that chance. A name you will recognize surfaced in their search for answers. Are you ready?”

  “Still listening.”

  “Todtenhausen. He escaped to South America using the identity papers of Helmut Gorgass.”

  Zerrissen furrowed his eyebrows at this news, disappointing, but not surprising.

  “How do you know these things?”

  “It’s better for you if you don’t know. The KGB will bring anyone connected with Die Kuppel to Moscow for, you know, a conversation.”

  “I don’t want to go to Moscow to have a conversation with anyone.”

  “Nor do I.”

  Nicolaus sipped the wine as he visualized the KGB accommodations, somewhat better for him, perhaps, than for Zerrissen. Or maybe not.

  “Can you at least tell me how much time we have?”

  Nicolaus scratched his chin with one hand, and refilled Zerrissen’s glass with the other before answering.

  “You’re safe for two months. I can probably buy you another two months with various pranks and tricks.”

  “So, four months. And yourself? Are you at risk?”

  “Same answer. Anyone with the word Die Kuppel in their file is at risk.”

  “So, Halina also?”

  “Yes.”

  Zerrissen emptied his glass with a gulp and held it out for refill. “What now? How do you intend to spend your four months?”

  Nicolaus rationed out a bit more into Zerrissen’s glass. “All things considered; this changes nothing. Halina and I are leaving one way or another. You will join us if you want to avoid some unpleasantness.”

  Zerrissen drained the glass, savoring the last few drops. It went down much easier than vodka.

  “Forget your ducts. Take the simplest path. Cross into Czechoslovakia, and from there, into West Germany.”

  “And the land mines?”

  “Pick your way across using a mine detector. I can make you a nice one.”

  “Mine detector” Nicolaus echoed flatly.

  “Yep. I can make you one in, say, two days.”

  “And the electric fence?”

  “Don’t touch it.”

  “Aha. Ok. And the armed guards with dogs on patrol?”

  “Do you want the detectors or not?”

  “I have to say, Raynor, I’m a little disappointed. You’re literally a rocket scientist. And this is your best idea? What terrible ideas did you reject?”

  “Rockets. And dirigibles. What I was left with was mine detector.”

  Nicolaus was thoughtful for a moment before responding. “Rockets? The border guards will not be expecting that…”

  “Oh. Hell. No. Even you cannot acquire the materials - sugar, ceramics, magnesium, the gyroscopes, not to mention the cryogenics and metallurgy… And rockets explode the first few times. You saw that with your own eyes. No. Even though I know how, I’m not going to build you a machine to blow you up and burn down half of Berlin.”

  Nicolaus was not exactly disappointed; the notion was far-fetched, but he did not appreciate Zerrissen’s tone and responded with silence, drumming his fingers on the table, petulantly pulling the wine bottle back, out of Zerrissen’s reach.

  Seeing how this was going to be, Zerrissen sighed in exasperation. “Seriously, all the remaining options have been tried. The guards have checkmated all the other strategies that exist.”

  Nicolaus rubbed his cheeks, gazed out a corner of the window where the foil had been torn away, staring into the islands of light, illuminated road crews at multiple points around the city, working around the clock to secure all exits. What would Pyotr do? He was better at puzzles.

  They both reflected on the issues for a moment, allowing the sound from the radio to penetrate their thoughts. Nicolaus asked himself again, what would Pyotr do? Before breaking the silence.

  “So, no rocket…” Then, as if Pyotr were whispering in his ear, “Then a submarine.”

  Zerrissen straightened, not sure if Nicolaus was joking. “Submarine? Well, they won’t be expecting that. No one has escaped Germany by submarine in over two decades. Might be a little conspicuous launching it though. Why not just launch a raft?”

  Nicolaus warmed to the idea. “Think about it. We build it in your shop, send it to the Spree through the drain tunnel, staying under water down stream, we get out when we hit the Netherlands, plea for asylum.”

  Zerrissen scoffed. He can’t hold his wine. Wasted that portion of the bottle.

  “I have no access to those kinds of materials. Steel for the hull? Lead and copper for batteries? How much oxygen for a 10-hour journey to the North Sea? No one east of the Spree can get that stuff, including the Soviets. Please. No pipe dreaming. Lives are at stake. Submarines? Listen to yourself.”

  Nicolaus looked away, gazing instead out the smudged window at the demolition crews boarding up the condemned buildings, using picks and backhoes to excavate the length of Muntenstrasse to reclaim the precious copper wiring laid down by the Reich decades before, as well as lead water pipes, and excellent Krupp steel sewer pipes. They might have also realized that the pipes were large enough for defectors to crawl through and into the River Spree.

  “You said ‘pipes’, right?” Nicolaus rubbed absently the back of his neck, feeling phantom dandelion seeds blowing against his skin.

  A Cock or Two

  Zerrissen was awakened by as shaft of afternoon sun glaring through the torn corner of foil over his window, having passed out in the chair, never making it to the bed. Nicolaus was gone, leaving him to wonder if the conversation was real or a hallucination, and whether he had committed to making a three-man river submarine. He felt the
hangover worse than usual. Muntenstrasse was currently impassable, in worse condition than any car ever brought in for repair. He will not open the shop today.

  We pretend to work while the State pretends to pay us he thought to himself

  He rubbed his temples to massage away the headache and recalled the dreams the sunlight had interrupted. He dreamt of solving problems of buoyancy, pressure, hydrodynamic drag, thrust, and energy states. Problems of oxygen consumption, conversion, Boyles law, Newtonian laws of thermodynamics. Problems of trigonometric navigation.

  This was the engineering he regretted leaving behind, scratching an intellectual itch that the repair of automobiles and appliances could not reach. Maybe going to the shop will help the hangover, and he could at least scratch out some numbers to prove to Nicolaus to give up on the idea of a river U-boat.

  Zerrissen picked his way between trenches, through blocks, pulleys, and the rubble left by the road workmen laboring to extract anything that looked like a reclaimable metal. When he arrived at the barn-doors of the garage section of his shop, he was greeted by workmen carrying everything away. Zerrissen raised his hand in protest, but before he could utter a single word, one of the workmen handed Zerrissen an official looking document. It was an order from some bureaucrat at the Central Committee condemning the property, with a terse explanation that he can resume operations at a similar shop 100 meters up the street, where the shops contents were now being carried.

  Arguably it all belonged to the State, so he could not object too vehemently. Last to be loaded was his usual workbench and his favorite tools. He picked the piston ashtray and one-station radio off the top as it paraded by. The men carrying the bench, stopped, looked at each other, but before they could scold him, Zerrissen opened a drawer and pulled out a vodka flask, setting it on the bench in the spot left by the ash tray he had just plucked. The movers thought this a suitable trade, and the workbench joined the rest of the items marching their way down the street.

  He studied the paper as he walked in the direction of the new venue, one of the movers handed him a box of carburetor parts from his old shop, with an as-long-as-you’re-going-that-way scowl.

  The accretion of junk in the old location was organized chaos twenty years in the making. Sorting through the new piles the workmen dumped unceremoniously here will take nearly as long.

  He kicked through the objects in his new shop, some he had not seen in decades, until he saw two large unfamiliar cylinders, poised like obelisks, silhouetted against the high windows. As he approached, dwarfing him by a full meter high, he recognized them as erstwhile sewer pipes, standing now with more dignity than ever before laying sideways in their former employ, with an inner diameter of one meter and a wall thickness of one centimeter. Each one was encrusted in mud on the outside, and an accretion of black substance and a fragrance one expects from twenty years of draining sewage.

  Zerrissen pulled off a note written in grease pencil by a neat hand on a piece of cardboard stuck to mud coating one of the pipes with a screwdriver.

  “These are gifts from the German people for our project.” Signed, simply “N”.

  What was this project to which Nicolaus referred? Am I building a rocket or a U-boat? He honestly could not remember.

  Krupp steel tubes, Zerrissen irreverently thought to himself, they look like two giant dildoes.

  When Zerrissen saw Nicolaus again, Nicolaus emerged from the shadows, as was his habit, but this time in more casual clothes that flew off the pages of a fashion magazine from the West. Shortly after him, Halina appeared in the same clothes as the last time. Her black eye was healing. Standing next to the sartorial Nicolaus, this woman-creature looked like an unmade bed.

  And then there was the large white bird perched on his left shoulder, pirate style. Large feathers on its head opened like flower petals or an umbrella, revealing pastel pinks layer, like shingles on a roof. It bobbed and weaved its head to take in this new environment.

  “There’s something new about, you, Nicolaus. Can’t quite place it. Hm. Maybe it’s the bird.”

  “This is Buttercup” Nicolaus said as if that would explain everything. Buttercup focused silently, even suspiciously, on Zerrissen, the black bead of an eye on each side of its head dilating larger and smaller to bring his face into focus, committing it to memory.

  Nicolaus walked over to the workbench and fashioned a horizontal perch out of a tie rod and two empty oil cans. The bird stepped off his shoulder and on to Nicolaus’ right hand to be placed onto it where it seemed quite comfortable. Then it started speaking.

  “What are you doing? Tickle tickle? My name is Buttercup.”

  Nicolaus guessed at the perplexed, even vexed look on Zerrissen’s face. “Don’t worry. Buttercup will live in your old shop. It chatters away to create the impression you’re still there while we work in peace here.”

  “Create the impression for whom?”

  “The agents who check in listen on the microphones in your workshop from time to time.”

  “I won’t ask how you know that.”

  “Exactly.”

  Comfortable on its ad hoc perch, the bird spoke with a grainy, but perfectly understandable proper German,

  “I’m a pretty bird. What are you doing?”

  Halina clapped her hands, did a little hop, and smiled.

  Zerrissen stared, not sure if the bird expected an answer, but the bird appeared to prefer monologue. Halina stroked the bird’s head, which it evidently enjoyed, leaning into her palm. Then, Nicolaus offering it something in his hand. It was a cigarette butt that the bird carefully reached out for with one claw, while shifting its weight to its other leg. Zerrissen had never really studied or noticed before how oddly shaped parrot claws were. They looked like a combination spanner and long nose pliers.

  Just as Buttercup was about to take possession of the cigarette butt, Nicolaus pulled it away. Its headdress of feathers shot up, bobbing its head in exaggerated loops, and from its throat spewed the sort of street expressions one would ordinarily expect to hear only in a Stasi gulag.

  “I will fuck your mother in her ass! I will fuck your sister and then fuck your father.”

  Zerrissen reached over instinctively to cover the creature’s mouth, but Nicolaus reached out to stop him.

  Buttercup stepped back with its beak wide open. “Get away from me you faggot. Help! Child molester!”

  And then, creating an image for the enjoyment of the Stasi eavesdroppers, it screamed, “Take your dick out of that boy’s mouth. Squawk! Squawk!”

  You could not offer, and then deny, a talking bird its favorite treat, unless your goal was to entertain the Stasi stooges on the other end of the microphone, as they recorded every word verbatim.

  With his hands over his ears, Zerrissen yelled over the din, “How do you turn it off, for Christ’s sake?”

  Nicolaus took the lit cigarette from Zerrissen’s ashtray, presented it to Buttercup, who then gingerly took hold of the unlit end with its claw, and expertly inserted it into its beak. The feathers came down. Buttercup paced back and forth on the perch, puffing in blessed silence, occasionally standing on one leg to grab hold of the cigarette and rotate it. Sometimes it held it out to examine the lit end, tapping it against the perch to shake off ashes if need be. In addition to a bad sense of social propriety, Buttercup had a very bad nicotine habit.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?” asked Zerrissen, gesturing towards the obscene bird.

  “You know, I really don’t have any idea. I know nothing about birds.”

  Buttercup whistled the universal ‘wolf whistle’ known the world over for its salaciousness. Loudly.

  “Avoid Buttercup’s beak. It has a bite force of over twenty-five kilograms per square centimeter, it can easily bite to the bone like bolt cutters. You will need stitches.”

  The short cigarette fell from its beak and Buttercup flew into a rage. This time the topic revolved around asses. So many asses.

  His ears overwhelm
ed by profanities, Zerrissen looked away to Nicolaus. Nicolaus produced a small bottle from his pocket, like those they hand out on airplanes, twisted off the cap and put it in front of Buttercup. The bird went silent, leaned down, and picked up the open bottle with its beak, tilted his head up slightly to let a small bit of the contents onto its tongue.

  Zerrissen dared not touch the bottle but leaned in to read the label. It was bourbon. American bourbon. Buttercup was also a lush.

  With the bird sated, and perhaps on its way to inebriation, Zerrissen returned to the more urgent subject.

  “Just so we’re clear. You want a three-person sewer pipe submarine?”

  Nicolaus confirmed. “Yes. A three-person submarine.”

  “In four months?”

  “Or less.”

  “Question”

  “I’m sure you have many. So do I. What is your question?”

  “Where do you want the torpedoes?”

  Water Witch and Divining Rod

  “If your ducts are still there,” Zerrissen observed with his usual dim view of things, “I promise you they’re all silted in and impassable.”

  “Only one way to find out. I need to know what my options are.”

  Zerrissen sighed in resignation.

  The floor area was not large, but to keep empty-hole-digging to a minimum, Zerrissen fashioned a transit from a muffler pipe and spirit level, not as good as a theodolite, but good enough, to calibrate the real world to the representation on the plat map. Satisfied with his measurements, Zerrissen measured and spray-painted parallel lines on the ground where he calculated the sides of the particular duct passing under this building should be.

  Nicolaus took the first shift of excavation, dug a one-meter diameter hole through the densely packed earthen floor down to 30 centimeters before hitting concrete slab.

  He hopped out of the hole, handed the shovel to Zerrissen.

  “There’s your duct.”

  “I like how it’s my duct now.”

  Halina, back from class, sidled up beside Nicolaus, Buttercup on her head bobbing up and down in time to the music on the radio, its shift at the old shop finished for the day.