Apparatus 33: Dead Man Switch

by Lawston Pettymore

  She moved a table with a top that folded down to serve the wine, revealing an object on the fireplace hearth I had not noticed when I first walked in. It was a German Shepherd heeling in permanent obeisance. It had been stuffed and mounted. I check another mental box: Geronimo the dog. Again, the meager insouciance I had mustered since arriving drained away like the wine in the broken bottle on the porch.

  The man, perhaps himself a poker player, noticed the change in my face as I stared at the mounted German Shepherd. Thinking I might be admiring his handiwork, he asked if I liked it and explained that his side hobby, aside from growing grapes, was taxidermy. Another box checked: Taxidermy. This Damastes was the right Gorgass, which is to say, Todtenhausen. My heartbeat increased, but so did my resolve.

  Kathe pulled the cork on her randomly picked bottle. No explosion. She poured three demitasses. Todtenhausen performed the usual ritual of sniffing, slurping, testing the brix, and examining the legs, and a look of perplexity crossed his face. Another sniff and another sip before asking me to confirm that this wine was from California, a region not yet known as a world-class wine producer. As he examined the label, I assured him that it was, my composure beginning to slip again wondering if Halina had made a label forgery error.

  But if the label had not raised Todtenhausen’s skepticism, it was certainly the wine itself. He declared in German to the housekeeper that this was certainly a Bavarian Gewürztraminer. He doubted it came from California, and he asked her to get another bottle so he could compare. The chances of her grabbing a benign bottle of actual wine were stacked against the room, now four in ten, 40%. If this bottle did not explode when she opened it, the others certainly will in another sixty minutes, unless I stop the dead-man switch timer.

  This bottle was opened uneventfully, with little ceremony. There was no explosion, no bouquet of manure and engine fuel. But this viticulture roulette had to stop now. The next bottle would have a sixty-seven percent chance of being loaded.

  Todtenhausen declared with certainty that this was a German grape, if not actual German fermented wine being counterfeited as Californian. He looked at me, struggling for the right English word.

  “…Erstaunt? How do you say?”

  “Gobsmacked?” I offered just as I realized I had fallen into a trap. This sly fellow was checking boxes of his own. He glanced at Kathe, who took a noticeable breath after I had stupidly responded and nodded her head in silent acknowledgment.

  They both turned to me with stares that went from amused, to annoyed, and then to blank. She whispered something in Todtenhausen’s ear and left the room.

  He watched her leave and then, turning to me, smiled. The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed indicating that it was three in the afternoon. I had set a two-hour timer thirty minutes before. Unless I rotated the cork out of its armed position, all six of the fertilizer bomb bottles would detonate in ninety minutes.

  Todtenhausen set down the demitasse, folded his hands over his lap, and sat back in his chair, addressing me as a parent would a disappointing child.

  “So, are you the twin? The one with whom Mengele was so infatuated?” He asked me. He had put the pieces together quickly.

  I began to compose my denials, pretended outrage and indignity that the Californians had tricked me with their counterfeit wine, and started to make my way to the car, explaining that they could of course keep the remaining bottles. I pushed myself out of the chair, turned to leave, but found Kathe blocking the arched entrance to the room, wearing her swastika wimple, her eyes sparkling. With a hint of a smile on her face, her weight on one foot, and one arm across her waist holding the elbow of the other arm, I saw a syringe in her upright hand, squirting a small jet of some clear fluid into the air, ready to conduct business.

  I would never know if she used that syringe—I was several centimeters taller, and a couple of kilograms heavier, so I could have taken her down had that needle come any closer. But I would never know. It was the syringe I felt enter my neck from behind that sent me to the floor, my legs collapsing under me, paralyzed.

  Someone caught my fall. Todtenhausen admonished me or Kathe. “No bruises, Liebchen. They’re almost impossible to remove.”

  The ceiling bobbed and weaved. I was being carried away. Kathe held my legs, he carried my heavier torso at the shoulders, and with a gentle swing, placed my limp body a gurney they kept on hand for whatever purpose-from-hell I could not imagine. What crosses one’s mind when it should be processing fight-or-flight options can evidently be highly inappropriate, and the thought that crossed mine was that Kathe ran Absinto as a bed-and-breakfast, and the gurney was used to adjust guests as necessary to fit the furniture.

  Out of the corner of my eyes I watched, with inexplicable calm, Todtenhausen preparing an IV drip and insert the needle in my wrist. I felt nothing, but I could see Kathe scissoring off my shirt, pants, and boxers, then my shoes and socks. Unless my mind had conjured a nightmare, I recall her flicking my cock contemptuously, pinching it, and saying something about it being uncircumcised causing Todtenhausen to laugh.

  The IV drip brought a ringing in my ears, a taste of metal in my mouth, and the smell of almonds in my nose. Then my vision collapsed, and I felt as if I was entering a tunnel, a deadly silent tunnel, like the passage to an unlit catacomb.

  Nicolaus: Zugzwang

  Chimes from the grandfather clock in the hall answered one of the urgent questions lingering in my head. I had been out for an hour. The other urgent question was: what had Hitler’s taxidermist and his concubine done to me?

  During that time, either of them could have easily killed me. So I concluded that Todtenhausen had to be in the middle of any number of his other pet procedures. Then I sensed him nearby, sitting on a stool that glided up and down along my nude torso, probably on rollers. Kathe was hovering above my mid-section, handing him instruments and assembling a pump and a yellow rubber hose, the kind used in funeral homes to prepare a corpse for viewing. The remark that Todtenhausen made an hour ago about “bruising” came to my mind.

  In this case, I would not need to last more than thirty minutes before Halina’s dead man switch settled the matter for the entire casita, all its occupants, and regrettably, some of the campaneros tending to the vines as well.

  Whatever cocktail was being dripped into my wrist from the bag above my head, it induced a remarkable sense of calm, a comfort almost, having also robbed me of my ability to move or feel. The only tactile sensation was the scraping, so distant it could have been in another room, and the easing of tautness I surmised was Todtenhausen cutting tendons and muscle. My head was restrained but my eyes could move a bit, so I caught my reflection in the glass door of the cherry wood bookcase that filled the entire wall of the casita’s library. I was on my back, naked, with my arms pinned behind me, and my feet and palms flat on the floor forming a bench. Or, as Kathe was clarifying in jocular conversation with Todtenhausen, a sex device for women called a sybian.

  “Of course, Liebchen,” was his answer. “A vibrating cock that will never go soft. My passionatta of taxidermy. Likely the first female that this cock has ever entered,” Todtenhausen mused.

  Kathe laughed, smacking her lips playfully.

  “Ooh. Er ist virgin!”

  Todtenhausen laughed, then glancing at me and noticing that I was awake, he sensed that the wheels in my head were cranking away to piece together the missing events.

  Todtenhausen smiled, speaking German. “Hello sleepy head. It is Nicolaus, correct? I don’t remember your brother’s name. What?” Kathe provided the answer.

  “Oh, yes. Your twin was Pyotr. Such an excellent apparatus.” Todtenhausen began pumping fluids from me while Kathe covered her nose. Todtenhausen seemed unaffected. I had no sense of smell or taste. My five senses were being reduced one by one, now only sight and sound remaining.

  “You know, the idea first came to me when I was—I’m not ashamed to say—er, gobsmacked, utterly speechless the first time I saw von
Braun’s magnificent Aggregat 4. The A4 he called it. Goebbels liked to call it the V2. It was a vast, aluminum phallus, with elegant, swan-like contours… it laid on its side, densely packed with the plumbing of spaceflight like a tin of sardines. Its outer cladding was removed, and it laid bare, its tubular and bulbous entrails bulging everywhere. There were bundles of nerves, parallel rows of tendons, lymph, bladders, arteries and veins of all diameters and lengths. I mean, it was all metal and rubber, but it was like looking into a man’s bowels.

  “So, there she laid, a dissected, like a clockwork dinosaur, but a dinosaur from some future version of Earth, tame for the moment, like you are right now. Nevertheless, one spoke in whispers around this Behemoth, this Leviathan, almost fearing it to awaken at any moment, angry and uncontrollable as in the book of Job.”

  He stopped his monologue for a moment. Then he sat back and lit a cigarette. He exhaled the first smoke towards the ceiling at which my gaze was permanently affixed.

  “In a way, I envy you, Nicolaus. You and Pyotr will exist in useful ways long after I’m gone.”

  He moved the hose and a plunger mechanism. The pumping resumed.

  “Did you know that ‘taxidermy’ comes from the Latin ‘to move flesh’? Did you know that?”

  He was sewing something on me now using dark, thick thread and a needle the size of an orchestra baton. He even waved it about to what I just then recognized was music coming from a record player somewhere in the room.

  “It’s good to speak German again with someone other than Kathe. She’s useful, even pretty, but not what you would call cultured. Did you know, she never went to gymnasium? No? You didn’t know that?”

  He used scissors to cut some thread.

  “The German language is the lubricant for inspired men of pure blood, of great artists and engineers. Wagner, after all, could have written operas in any language, but he chose…”

  He paused, lost in a memory, as he did many more times during this procedure. The tall clock in the hallway chimed. Thirty minutes to go. Halina will have the last word in this conversation, though it was neither her nor my intention to be among the victims. With no capacity for speech, I could not tell him about the dead man switch in the wine bottle detonator, even if I wanted to.

  Zugzwang.

  “Anyway, where was I? Taxidermy. The most realistic result, when the skin drapes naturally and joints look naturalistic, is obtained by keeping the subject alive for as long as possible, and letting the body fall into the desired pose as it would if still alive. The human body has almost two square meters of skin, so I have a lot of work to do on you. No doubt you admired my work with Geronimo?”

  I heard some snipping. He picked some tobacco off his tongue.

  “Was Mengele right about you? Simply by measuring your head’s ratio or something, he declared you would become a faggot. An amazing man. And a more amazing surgeon.”

  He did more sewing, pulling a knot in the coarse thread tight.

  “You know, Mengele was Albrect Durer with a scalpel. Do you know Durer? Of course you do. You are cultured. I can tell.”

  “A great artist. His medium skill was carving bas-relief in wood. It’s true. He cut wood with a knife, but with uncanny dexterity. Born in 1470, died in 1529, or something close to those dates. German of course…”

  “Mengele taught me how to remove non-critical tissue leaving only muscles, tendons, veins, arteries, all of them still working. And without a drop of blood. Just like I’m doing now. I really wish you could see this. You would be amazed. And they call him the ‘Angel of Death.’ He was an angel. A very sweet guy really.”

  Kathe laughed.

  “I know. I have complained to Kathe about his fame. Perhaps when all the Jews are gone, I’ll be an angel too.”

  Kathe frowned.

  “Tut-tut, Kathe. You can be an angel too. You can be a third angel.”

  Kathe smiled. Todtenhausen continued sewing and my flesh continued moving. The grandfather clock chimed melodically on a quarter past the hour.

  Fifteen minutes remained.

  “You have a beautiful body, Nicolaus. Well taken care of. I’d be attracted to you also if I were homosexual.”

  Todtenhausen continued, unaware of the countdown. I myself was uncertain that the detonators would work, or if they had already been discovered.

  “So, Werner wanted to park something spectacular in orbit for a thousand years. To celebrate the thousand-year Reich. I suggested it to be in revenge for the fall of the Reich instead. That was defeatist talk, so I didn’t push it. Instead, I counter-proposed something less ambitious, and something we would be alive to enjoy, such as Adolf’s hundredth birthday in April of 1989. A manmade shooting star everyone on the planet could witness. Wouldn’t that have been marvelous? There were other ideas.”

  Todtenhausen set down his tools and smiled smugly to my otherwise paralyzed face.

  “How naive we were. Someone at Die Kuppel, I forget his name, wanted to send excavators to the moon to carve Adolf’s initials in the rock or whatever the surface is made of. He wanted it large enough to be seen every night from Earth! Wouldn’t that have been grand?”

  He handed a tool that looked like pliers to Kathe. She handed him the lit cigarette from the nearby ashtray, from which he took a drag, and handed it back. They had done this before. This was choreography.

  “But of course, the Jews stopped all of that, and von Braun went to work in Jew America, taking his moon machine with him. That scheißkerl 32could see air, but he could not see cost benefit.”

  “All he accomplished for each 90,000 Reichsmark rocket was to inconvenience a family of London bakers or tobacconists. And they were probably not even Jews. The Jews were in the financial district, not the grocery square where one has to actually perform a day’s work.”

  He stabbed out the remaining portion of the cigarette, the embers winking out one last spiral of smoke towards the wooden plank ceiling. My mind being at such chemically induced peace, I noticed for the first time the hand-carved and painted embellishments on the exposed joists of the roughhewn local timbers. Though coated in grease of cigarette smoke, I could make out German coats-of-arm carved in bas-relief, and the suspended chandeliers made from the horns of local sporting bock.

  He poured a yellow-brown fluid from a metal cannister into his hand and rubbed it into my bare flesh.

  “This is Drager’s cavity embalming fluid. Some people prefer Pfennig’s, but I say no. Drager’s is best. I can spot a mounting that used Pfennig’s from across the room. Drager’s is much better for preserving human skin. It’s German of course.”

  He screwed the cap back on the cannister; my flesh had evidently received enough of the wondrous Drager’s.

  “You’re probably wondering about your brother, and I must tell you that the numbers broadcasting from Wermut as it comes in range each orbit tell a remarkable story. You must be very proud of him, no doubt?”

  “Hmm?” He patted something he had sewn up on me and smiled in satisfaction with himself.

  I heard a shuffling sound and the scraping of furniture on the wooden floor in the background.

  “Oh, look. Tea. Do you take schnapps? Oh, sorry. I’ve disconnected those muscles already. Sorry I can’t offer you any.”

  Todtenhausen slurped some tea onto his tongue. Savored it. Set the cup down, admiring his work.

  “See that? Almost finished. Taxidermy makes me hungry. Kathe, what are we having for supper tonight? Can we have your hearts-of-goose in wine sauce? We can use the wine Nicolaus brought. It’s only good for marinade anyway.”

  He looked at me. “She makes an amazing hearts-of-goose.”

  He stood up and, wiping his hands on a bloody apron around his waist, over a spotless lab coat, addressed his last words to me.

  “So, while you are still able to hear, you must know that you were both being trained to fly the Wermut warhead to orbit. That is all. Nothing to do with polio which you didn’t even have in the firs
t place.”

  The grandfather clock ticked loudly. Not yet, I thought to myself. I needed to know about Pyotr.

  “You see I had no choice, yes? We could not enlarge the cavity of the warhead enough for a mechanical autopilot, but I could modify a human pilot, no larger than a nine-year old, to fit the cavity.

  The grandfather clock ticked away our lives.

  “So, Kathe and I quickly modified your brother to lie on the upholstered pallet, which was the best position for the high g-forces of rocket flight. Like the ones in the training modules, but about half the size. You remember those?”

  Any minute now.

  “You see, as long as I am alive, I will keep Wermut in orbit. Kathe will recite numbers when the Wermut warhead is within range to disarm the automatic reentry sequence. But, and your people must know this, if I were to be killed or captured, Kathe will not broadcast those numbers, either from here or from a repeater in Czechoslovakia, and Wermut will engage the reentry sequence on its own.”

  “Verstehen33?” That smug smile appeared again.

  The grandfather clock chimed thirty minutes past the hour. Time now for Halina’s sculpture to tell its story, as they always do. The fireball consumed and converted the fine collection of stuffed animals and all other forms of organic flesh, including mine, Kathe’s, and Todtenhausen’s into constituent gasses, stripped of electrons, sending me to that place where me must all go someday, for a fraction of a second, a place between what you, as a living person, know now, and the rest of us must visit briefly for a fraction of a second, less time than it takes for a photon to travel from the grapes, glistening on it vine out the window, to my eye, but just long enough for me to recall all of these events that I share with you now.