Pain Killers (40 page)

“Thank you, honey,” said Tina.

Rasta Jim put his hands up, conciliatory. “Don’t explain. I’ve been following you since the museum.”

He opened the door wider. A Mexican vendor rolled up in his corn-on-the-cob cart and peeked in. A small crowd of curious faces pressed behind him, some munching carne asada, others eating pineapple on a stick. I recognized the cart. Jesus…

I’d thought we’d driven a hundred miles. But we were only on Avenue Sixty, about ten blocks from the pound, maybe a mile or two from the Southwest Museum, where I’d left my car a few thousand years ago.

“Baby,” Tina whispered. I moved into her kiss, cells still humming with hormone-triggered empathy. I was astonished—and maybe ashamed—that I’d managed to forget myself in front of an audience. Let alone one that included a digital camera and Josef Mengele.

Mengele!

I swung back in time to hear the shot and see the bullet explode from the White Rasta’s throat. In the back of his neck and out his Adam’s apple. A through-and-through.

But I couldn’t see the Angel of Death. Instead, expressionless as ever under his state-framed black eyeglasses, Bernstein stepped sideways into view, where Rasta Jim had just been shot. He worked his jaw at the sight of Tina. For a moment, affection for the neo-Nazi bloomed inside me. Despite the fact that he’d just killed a man I liked. Despite the fact that he had been with Tina two nights before. Clearly, not all of the oxytocin mist had left my system. I had to restrain myself from grabbing the Aryan killer in a bear hug. That oxytocin delivered the love.

“You didn’t have to do that!” I cried.

“Do what?” Bernstein spoke quietly. “Do’s over. We talkin’ ’bout
done.
This is goin’ down how it’s gonna go down.”

I spotted Mengele pinning himself to the side wall of the van, trying to hide by the door. No one would see him until they stepped onboard. His palsy had progressed to a steady fluttering. He was either pointing his gun at Tina or trying to swat flies.

I figured I could block him long enough to shove her out to safety. But before I did anything, another voice boomed into the van.

“Boychick, what did you do?” Harry Zell shambled up to Bernstein, grabbed his face by the cheeks and kissed him on the forehead. When he noticed me, he pointed and roared. “You! Did you think you could double-fuck Harry Zell?”

“What are you talking about? You wanted me to find out if this freak is Mengele? Like you didn’t know? There’s been a whole other movie running since you hired me, hasn’t there, motherfucker?”

“You should know,” said Zell. “You’re starring in it.”

“Enough!” Tina banged on the van wall. Whirling red and blue lights swept in and out of the open door. “You jerks want to stop measuring dicks? Somebody just put a fed in the ground, and his friends are here.”

Zell hoisted his heavy bulk into the van, followed by a shirtless Bernstein. The Nazi-inked Jew started to close the door, but somebody pushed it open again. That’s when I spotted the smaller figure, in mask and protective suit that hid his face, sitting very still on the bench. The reverend was slumped against it, bleeding from his middle.

Hazmat man said nothing. He remained still when an arm curled around my throat from behind and plunged in a syringe. It was oddly painless. I remember thinking, as soft black smoke began to fill my skull,
What is that, my thyroid? Mengele always goes for the glands.
I was almost grateful to go unconscious again. At least he didn’t hit me on the head again. That wound was almost beginning to heal. And I still felt a lot of oxy-love.

The last thing I saw was a pair of little hands making a church and steeple.

In the baby dream, I stand on the platform, quirt slapping smartly off the tops of one polished boot. Steam billows from the guts of the train as it slows. The stench arrives before the cargo itself. An acrid air-bath of urine, rank sweat and feces infuses the clean wind from the forest with something secretly sweet. My eyes tear, not from that stink of confinement, nor from that pink-black nonstop meat smoke belching from the towers. From sheer joy.

I touch a manicured finger to the high starched collar of my uniform. Breathe. Feel the tingling in my groin. The sky looks ready to drip lead. My boots shine. I sniff the lavender water sprinkled on my collar.

Now the labored hissing slows. A final gasping blast escapes from the train’s brakes. Nothing else will escape. I could kiss every battered slat in the freight car.

“
Soldaten! Die Tore!”
(“Guards! Doors!”)

I clap once. Twice. The officers nearest, bull-necked blond boys, hop to. One snaps the lock off the sliding doors. The second wrestles with the handle, frozen in place. It gives with a violent
clack.

Before they slide the giant doors open, I can see, through the myriad ragged holes—metal clawed apart or chewed—shining eyes in the dark. Each car a rolling constellation of fear, full of germs with faces.

I raise my chin, legs apart, boots planted firmly on Reich-occupied earth. Ready to select. My favorite moment.

Except—is the God that does not exist taunting me?—except instead of men, women and children, the usual clutching families, there is nothing inside the train but babies. Babies. Their faces the faces of old men. Pain-suckled, wizened; giant, hollow eyes accusing. A mountain of babies topples and spills over the siding, onto the tracks, out to the platform itself. As each hideous infant hits the earth it begins to crawl toward me. Together, they form a single mewling, vicious mass. And yet—

The guards shout, as if nothing were out of order.
“Beeilt euch! Komm Schon!”
(”Move it! Come on, get out!”)As if this infant militia were the norm. The guards scream what they always scream.
“Bewegt eure dreckigen jüdische arsche!”
(“Move your filthy Jewish asses!”)

I step backward, appalled. Unable to take my eyes off those awful, obscene features. Old men’s heads on naked infants whose genitalia, too, are fully grown. Organs the size of plucked chickens drag through dirty snow as they crawl in my direction.

I back away, swinging my quirt, to no avail. I kick, and the crunch of boot through skull stops nothing. I stomp and I stomp. There are so many, I cannot step. They are a moving carpet. I try but cannot wipe the smear of baby-face from under my sole, nor knock off the clumping brain and eye that clogs my boot heel. They surround me now. A tiny ragged fist grabs my pant leg. A second pinches.

“Hör auf!”

I unsnap my holster. Remove my Mauser. Point it at the crawling army.

“I’ll shoot! I’ll shoot! You think I won’t!”

But babies are not men.

I fire. The first swollen head explodes. But what does death mean to a newborn? They are not afraid to die. It is useless. They are braver than men. The baby beside him does not shudder. Does not slow.

“Zuruck! Zuruck, ihr dreckigen giftzwerg!”
(“Get back! Get back, you filthy poison dwarves!”

My starched collar wilts. The sun leaks blood. Why do they hate me? You want to know the biggest serial killer in the world? It is life! The second we are born, life starts sharpening its claws. Life is there laughing.

“Americans!”

Suddenly I hear him.

“The Norse gods lived for eternity. But Americans don’t care about racial purity—they want thinner thighs.”

That wheedling voice penetrates my skull. The doctor is not in my dream—he is
here.

I wake up annoyed—actually just
dreaming
I’m awake—and discover I am not the Seletor. I am a baby. And I am crying because something happened to me. A pain like teeth in my scrotum. A rat? Another feral tot?

“NO!”

I bolt upright. Or try to. I rise up half an inch, then stop, restrained by the fat leather strap across my chest and arms. I am flat on my back. On a gurney. Or no.
Worse.
An operating table. But—scarier than the pain—now there is no pain. There is no feeling at all.

I blink upward. The water stains and fluorescent lights are familiar. In drug class, I stared at the ceiling when I had nothing to say. It was an old cop trick—it made you look thoughtful while a perp squirmed. Now
I
was the squirming party. Mengele’s respect-craving old-man voice leaked into my ear like mercury. “If America wanted to keep from being overrun by immigrants, they’d sterilize them at the border. How? I have the solution. Radioactive benches. In the camp, we could do fifty at a time. I know; I invented the benches. Give the folks a form to fill out, a few bowls of chips, and by the time they list all their relatives and their favorite dinner, their ability to reproduce—to make what you call ‘anchor babies’—has been zapped. Ten minutes, with no immediate side effects. In the beginning, true, there was some burning. Yes,
flames.
But I, Mengele, smoothed out the kinks!”

Jesus.
I’d been dreaming I was
him,
dreaming that
he
was a baby—a baby
he
killed. Somehow it made sense when I was dreaming it…. Maybe I had some kind of oxytocin fallout.

I strained to see down the length of my body—and made out only white. My knees, apparently, were bent and spread and—this wasn’t good!—I was in stirrups. Like a woman visiting her gynecologist. Tina used to say she never understood women who felt violated at their gynecologist.
“If that’s being violated, I don’t know what you call my daddy’s moves….”
But to feel violated you had to feel. And I felt nothing.

The worm of panic swelled to an electric eel in my chest. My toes tented the sheet high over my middle. I couldn’t see under and I could barely see around. On either side of the Linen Curtain, I made out faces. I sensed, though their features blurred, that they were staring raptly, maybe with horror, at what I couldn’t see. But why was everything a blur? I fought back waves of fear. A tsunami of worst-case scenarios. Beyond the mystery between my thighs, my eyes. I knew too much about Mengele. Now I wished I didn’t. Wished I had thrown the mad old man out of my house when he blindsided me, ripped his phony pictures up and thrown them in his face. But it was too late. Because I knew: those on whom Mengele bestowed blue eyes he also left half-blind.

I rolled my head back, opened my mouth to scream. A hand clamped my mouth before I could. I recognized the texture. The scent. This missing divot under her thumb. Tina. But how? Why? Thankfully—or not—the more I blinked, the more my vision unblurred. The world looked more waxen than I remembered. More disturbing was the breeze that tickled my wishboned and elevated thighs.
Was someone touching me?
I tried to wriggle and reencountered my restraints. I still did not see Mengele. I heard him, on the other side of the sheet tent, but the flicker of the overhead fluorescents distracted me. Somehow I was confusing sound and light. Maybe my brain had been tampered with. Then I heard a pair of words and that made me forget my brain. At least I thought I heard them—and tried to scream them back against the palm on my mouth.

“Sex change!” The palm pressed hard, then softened.

Had it happened? Was it about to happen? Would I be out of surgery if I’d had a lop job?

I wondered if I had a vagina and thought of Hemingway. Not Papa, Gregory.
Gig.
His youngest son. Who had a sex change in Florida, when he was sixty, then got drunk by himself to celebrate and ended up dead in the Biscayne County women’s jail. Ask not for whom the bell tolls…. Ask who surgically removed your bell.

“Turn on the TV, the first thing you see is a doctor selling a pill designed to make men bigger between their legs. Between their legs!”

Mengele’s forced jocularity only made him sound more Teutonic and hectoring.

“You Americans and your size fixation. With your Extenze and your MaxiDerm. Let me tell you about
my
breakthrough, gentlemen. What I am about to tell you will revolutionize the penile implant industry.”

He paused, and I could almost hear the noxious slurp of his tongue on the rogue hairs of his mustache. “Let me put it in terms you Americans will understand. It is not the length of the baseball bat—it is the size of the baseball balls!”

Whoever he was talking to was silent. I groaned. It wasn’t bad enough I was strapped down with my legs up and my ass and package on view to an audience in San Quentin. The Angel of Death was
tummling
. Trying to make a joke. And he was tanking. His spiel sounded stiff and memorized, a parody, if it’s possible—or even morally advisable—to parody a genocidal murderer.

“The size of baseballs!” Dr. Mengele repeated, doing his own little callback. “This is true!”

“Say what?” came a voice I recognized as Colfax. “I’m supposed to forget my cannon and get my ammo bag all swoll?”

“You are not listening!”
Now the doctor was angry. I hoped he didn’t have a scalpel in his hand. “I myself conducted studies at Auschwitz and the women’s high-security unit in Lexington, Kentucky.”

“They closed that down in nineteen eighty-eight!” Was that the warden?

“I had nothing to do with that!” Mengele protested, getting right back on message. “What I am telling you can make all of you supermen! My work with anthropologic brain sensors reveals that the female is conditioned—in her primordial mind—to mate with the largest pair of testicles. The most
voluminous.
This is the discovery that can change the life of every man. Our species needs the pomegranate with the most seeds.”

What had he done to me?

Every possibility burned like battery acid in my brain. I felt a dull thud somewhere between my legs. Had Josef Mengele numbed my privates and had his surgical way with them? Had he added or subtracted? Or had—
no, God!
—had he engineered one of his patented man-to-animal, animal-to-man transplants? Was I the before or the after?

“Mmmpphh!”

Tina clamped my mouth in warning. Why didn’t she say something?