Stormfuhrer (11 page)

When he was in the game, she was right there, alive.  When his avatar touched her, he touched her.  Back in the hospital barracks, when she scorned him, he could swear that he knew her scent, could now sense her thoughts from the detailed expressions of her face. 

He put the black helmet back on.  His eyes readjusted to the dark vision and his ears to the tiny chirping sounds of the German night, emitted from the living trees and the growing fields surrounding the camp. 

She was looking at him now from the bunk, her eyes squinting and eyebrows pulled down slightly.  It must have been strange for her to see the character that Richard played, Heinrich, staring forward, stock still, saying nothing for those few moments while Richard’s helmet had been off.  The character
was
active when Richard wasn’t active in the browser--except perhaps when Mauer was sleeping.  Luckily, the browser had stayed active the whole time the helmet had been removed.

Richard had decided to rule out the possibility that another actual person had been using his own avatar.  He had no evidence from his experiences with helping students with their avatars that two users could occupy the same avatar, even at different times.  And, after all, wouldn’t that other user kick him off when
he
took over?  Why was Richard always in control when he entered the browser if some other person was already using the avatar?  No, this
must
be the character that he alone was meant to play, this Heinrich Mauer, this computer-generated demon.

Richard hated this other self, this Heinrich, his alter-ego, his antithesis.  He was certain now that this scumbag of a character had control when Richard himself wasn’t active in the browser.  It had its own personality, antithetical to his.  This avatar, in the time Richard wasn’t him, was self-destructive and had cost him his rank.  No, he had cost him
much
more.  How could she be made to believe that two men lived, alternately, in one body?  That he, Richard, bore no responsibility for what had happened to her?

He shook his head. “Take a walk with me.”

“To the showers?” she remarked with clear derision in her voice.

“
To a place between the barracks, where the searchlights don't reach.  I won’t hurt you.”

“
I can’t.  I’ll freeze to death.”  It was clearly a very cold night.

“
You’re freezing now.  Bring your blanket.”

Richard, as Heinrich, led Savina out of the barrack and several rows of buildings away to a dark area.  There was a spindly tree that somewhat shadowed them even from the bright moon.  Most of its leaves had been stripped off, probably eaten.  Her thin, dark blanket wrapped around her and his dark coat made them both all but invisible.

“Now, I want you to listen carefully.  I’m not that pig Heinrich Mauer.  I’m somebody else.  I’m an American.  My name is Richard Hayes.”

“
Why are you playing this game?”

“
What game?”  He was confused.  For a moment he thought she was referring to
the
Game.  She looked at him questioningly.

She continued, “You seem to have some special interest in me.  And it’s physical.  I get it.  But then sometimes, you want more, something else?  What is it that you want?”  She started to cry.  “I know what
I
want.  I want you to leave me alone.”  Her hands and a piece of her blanket covered her face.  “Why are you doing this?”

“
You don’t understand.  I’m not who you think…”

“
Give me your knife.”  She quickly reached for the SS dagger hanging from his belt.  He held her wrist as she held the handle of the dagger, still in its sheath.  “You think I’m pretty?  Is that it?  Would it be better for me to cut off my face?  Would you leave me alone then?”  He dropped his hand from her wrist.  She slowly eased the dagger out of its sheath.  She then brought it quickly to his throat.  He looked at it.  The words across its gleaming blue surface read “
Meine Ehre Heist Treue.
” My honor is loyalty.

He loosened his coat and exposed his neck.  He moved towards her, towards the dagger.  She lowered it so that it was positioned near his chest.  Her other hand was covering the hilt, ready to push the blade past the layers of uniform.

“Kill me.  I deserve it.  Or at least kill the man you think I am.  The man I am when I’m not me . . . you'll be better off.” he stumbled on the words, not really knowing how to phrase what he needed to say in a way that might make sense.  She brought the knife back up to his throat.  In the helmet, Richard thought he could feel it pressed against his own Adam’s apple.  She stared into his eyes from the darkness.  Neither moved.  Her eyebrows narrowed, her cropped hair covered some of her face and part of her ears.  Even though her hair had been brutally shorn, she was nonetheless stunningly beautiful.  She seemed to see something in his eyes.  He hoped she saw Richard Hayes.

After several moments, the young woman dropped the dagger and ran off in the dark blanket, screaming.  Richard saw the flickering of watchtower searchlights bouncing across the camp in the direction of her shrieks.  There were yells coming from the nearest tower as she reached the ditch.  She jumped in and quickly climbed up the other side towards the fence.   She had almost traversed the two meters between ditch and electrified fence but was stopped by a mesh of barbed wire that covered the ground between like metal weeds woven into each other.  It caught her feet, her blanket left behind like the skin of some molting gray snake.

Richard began to run toward her when he heard a single gunshot.  It was the tight, steel-pounding, low and explosive sound of a Luger.  He stopped, still hidden in the shadow of the thin tree.  Then there were only the intermittent voices of soldiers running towards her body as it lay across the top of the wire mesh, just centimeters in front of the electrified fence, bloody and unconscious.  Richard watched from the corner of a barrack as they approached the inert body of the girl tangled in the thin mesh of wire.  He watched, unable to move his avatar from the shock he himself experienced.

As Mauer, Hayes walked towards the inert body of the girl.  Guards had rushed in and began to pick the body from the wire.  Hayes was surprised by this gesture as other attempted escapees had simply been left overnight, even for days, after such an event, as a warning to the other prisoners.  He watched as her motionless body was carried away on the shoulders of a guard like a side of butchered meat. 

He let the helmet fall to the floor, staring at the black screens of the three monitors he rarely used any more.  He was exhausted.

Richard Hayes couldn’t let his feelings for a dead woman in a video game take control of his life.  Was he really agonizing over a stream of binary data, zeros and ones made to look, sound and  . . . feel . . . yes, feel . . . human?  He left the game like one waking from one of those intensely emotional dreams that reproduces sensory experiences so vividly that for many seconds after waking up one wonders whether it was a dream at all and spends minutes trying to bring it back.   

He had been playing for 27 hours straight and hadn’t slept in days.  It was Sunday night, 9:47 PM.  Summer was over for the teachers though students had another week before having to return.  He had time enough to sleep and be ready for tomorrow, the first work day of the year.  Otherwise, he would end up passing out during a faculty meeting.  It was “training week,” not Richard’s favorite week of the year.  Still, he would have time here and there to prepare his room and his lessons for Monday.  He needed to get another set of refrigerator boxes, but these could wait.  This week he would make sure the units were all functional prior to the first wave of students that would be pouring into class the next week.

Carlos lay crashed on the couch with an arm hanging over the edge.  He was snoring loudly.  A roughly triangular pattern of of beer bottles stood on the table like bowling pins drunkenly arranged.  The TV was still on, announcing a post-game wrap-up.  Richard just made it to his futon before collapsing.  He couldn’t, however, fall asleep but rather stared in a half-conscious daze into the  wooden beams above his head.  He remained like this for most of the night.

Before long it was late Monday afternoon.  Training sessions were over for the day and Richard awoke with a start from a short nap in his comfortable rolling chair. He had dreamed of the woman caught in the wire.  He lay beside her in the stifling space of a third bunk in a barrack on the women’s side of the prison.  The barrack was empty of its usual, thin, hair-shorn female inhabitants.  There was much more space in the bunk than he remembered from the game.  The roof had been removed completely and the night sky faintly lit the rows of empty bunks around them.  They stared at each other and touched hands.  They were both wearing hospital gowns.  The camp guards were gone and they were alone in an empty barrack, in an empty camp.  He felt a wet stickiness and lifted her hand still in his.  He saw black roots wrapping around the flesh of her arm, growing from jagged scratches that she had made across her wrist.  She smiled at him.  He had never seen her smile before.  He remembered thinking that it was all over, and the thought brought peace.  She was happy to be there with him in these last moments.

CHAPTER 7

When Richard awoke the browser, he found himself once again in a hospital unit, this time in a small, isolated room.  Richard was seated across from a camp Doctor.  He was tall, graying from blonde, and his small pince-nez-type eyeglasses sat at the tip of his nose, apparently for reading.  Above these, the Doctor's eyes stared at Heinrich with narrowed lids.  “I want to make sure you are beginning your recovery with some chance of success.  Now, you are quite sure that you don’t remember the events of the 30 hours mentioned in your report, Herr Mauer?”

Richard was at a loss and needed a few moments to assess what the doctor was looking for.  He had entered the avatar in the midst of a conversation that had already begun taking place.  “Can I have a cigarette, please?”

The doctor handed Richard Hayes a flat beige box with the German eagle imprinted in red ink above the brand: “Regie 4.”   The tiny cigarettes were Austrian.  Richard took one and lit it from a box of matches that the aging doctor had taken from his lab coat.  As he lit the cigarette and inhaled, Richard noticed green folders on a desk, just outside the room.  Black and white photos of what appeared to be cancerous lesions and tumors spilled from their contents.  Some had formed on the arms or backs of patients while some looked like they had been taken out of bodies during autopsies.  The doctor noticed Richard’s glance.

“A fixation of my colleague’s, Doctor Rascher.” the man remarked. “He’s new here, and they say he has some interesting ideas with regard to curing cancer.  I wish I had the time to read more on his work.”

“
Perhaps he may have some ideas about my condition?” Richard prodded, wondering why he was in front of a doctor.  Richard threw him a wary glance but only saw compassion in the doctor’s eyes.  “You may actually be correct, Herr Mauer.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
Your blackouts usually last for several hours, some are days long, correct?  I would attribute it to your heavy drinking but it even happens when you've been sober.  A brain cancer might explain it.  I would call it amnesia, but there have been reports that your behavior changes during the periods you’ve described.  Perhaps it’s schizophrenia.”

“
So I have a . . .” Richard searched for the German word for tumor though he knew that the program would translate it for him if necessary, “a
Geschwulst
?”

“
We won’t know until we get x-rays, but even then it might not show up.  Your behavior is certainly erratic and you seem to be suffering from a crippling depression as well, probably an emotional reaction to your blackouts.”

Richard thought hard.  Heinrich, his alter ego, of course knew there was something wrong . . . if, as a game character, he could know anything.  But it didn’t make sense to program this into a game's character, this blackout scenario.  It was as if the game makers wanted to draw the user in, full time, so that no such disruptions in the flow of the character’s time and place could happen, forcing the player’s hand by creating a character on the other side that lives and breathes, changing things, when he or she is offline.  Clearly, you were to play the game and do nothing else with your life.

And here he was.  His ex-wife would have called it sick.  It was indeed a compulsion, he knew, one that offered a reality so life-like that one only regretted having to come back to this one.  It wasn’t just a diversion—it had become a necessity.  Perhaps being Heinrich full-time wasn’t so much of a stretch.  He could time his own sleeping habits to the the sleep patterns of his host well enough, perhaps, suppressing his host's personality permanently in a timed eternal sleep.  He’d have to retire early from teaching to make that happen, to live as Mauer full time.  There was just enough of the Teacher left in Richard Hayes to know that there was something very wrong with this scenario.

“
Herr Mauer?”  The doctor waved a hand in front of Heinrich’s face.  “Are you having one of your blackouts now?”

“
Nein,” replied Richard, bringing his mind back into the doctor’s gray examining room. He had walked into the room to examine the pictures almost without even realizing it.

The doctor wiped his glasses on his lab coat.  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Herr Mauer, but I’m afraid you are no longer fit for duty.  I’m sure this comes as no surprise.”

“No.  Not really.  It’s not just an illness though, is it doctor?”

“
How you do mean?”

“
It’s a death sentence.  They won’t send me back to Berlin to shuffle papers if I can’t keep my mind together, will they?  They’ll probably send me to the front as tank fodder.”

“
Oh, I’m sure it’s not so bad as that.  Besides, we are winning on all fronts.  You know, there are many things a man in your condition can do, like work in munitions.  For instance, epileptics . . . “

“
. . . are terminated, like the mentally ill, you know that,” Richard finished the doctor’s sentence.

The doctor was momentarily silent.  “Not . . . always.”

They talked for awhile about some of the possibilities open to a man in Richard’s, or rather Heinrich’s, condition.  Richard wondered if he was simply playing the part well or if the doctor knew Heinrich personally.  He couldn't remember speaking at any length with the doctor before, but the doctor seemed to be talking with him on a more personal level than one would expect.  Richard didn’t seem to pick up even the slightest clue that he himself had been saying anything out of character for Heinrich Mauer, anything to tip off the doctor that he was not who he claimed to be.  Or perhaps the doctor was making allowances for his mentally sick patient.  When at the point of complete helplessness, a man’s personality can change for the better, making him far more agreeable than he had been.  The biology of self-preservation might force him to want to please those in whose hands his life had been placed--once self-reliance becomes impossible.  This could explain, for the doctor, the lack of arrogance in Mauer's demeanor, as Richard spoke from the countenance of a brute.  Still, Richard wanted to try to stay in character as best as he could.  He also wanted some news about where Savina’s body had been taken.

“
Too bad about that nurse orderly.  I heard that she did a good job in the ward, for a Polish Jew, of course.  Did you know her?” Hayes asked.

“
Who?”

“
The dark-haired girl that tried to escape through the fence.”  He didn’t want to appear to show too much interest in revealing that he knew her name.

“
Oh, you're referring to Savina.  Yes, she has lost a lot of blood, but she should recover.  The bullet wound in her leg became infected, you know.”

Richard was shaken.  He asked as nonchalantly as he could, “She’s alive?”

“Oh, yes.”

“
Why’d she do it?  Wasn’t she treated okay, compared to some of the others?  Where is she now?”

“
Why do any of them do it?  Sometimes I wonder why we don’t.”

“
Don't?  Don’t do what?”

The doctor was hesitant.  Then he whispered, “Kill ourselves in this
gottverdammten
death factory.”

He thinks that she tried to commit suicide, Richard thought, and wondered why he hadn’t himself come to that conclusion.  Wasn’t it obvious?  She had run at an electrified fence, slowed only by meters of ditch and a wide mesh of barbed wire.  She had had no chance of escape.  This was indeed a death camp, and she was a prisoner wanting release.  And she was being abused, perhaps regularly, by this bastard Heinrich Mauer.  It certainly happened once--she had accused him of it, and it was clear that the man would have had other opportunities to attack her physically, despite losing his consciousness during the increasingly lengthy periods when Richard took control of the character’s . . . no, the
man’s . . .
body and mind.  But it couldn’t have been an attempt at suicide.  She was too strong; her will was far too resilient--he knew that just from their brief instances of contact.  This is why the idea of suicide hadn't come to him.  Perhaps she just wanted to end up here, in the camp’s infirmary.

She hated him as Heinrich;  She didn’t know him as simply Richard Hayes.  He hadn’t had the chance to really explain it to her, though he had made the one frail attempt.  Of course, she would think it nonsense if he tried again, as his attempt had perhaps revealed, especially coming from someone who appeared on the surface to be one of the worst of what the enemy could be.

Savina was alive.  He would have to stay here as long as he could and await her recovery.  He couldn’t be discharged from his current role now, not until he’d had a final chance to talk with her.  Sure she wouldn’t believe it.  But maybe as surreal as this place was, as incoherent as any of this chaotic veneer of order--or more appropriately, a framework of order for the sake of invoking chaos--actually was, just about anything could be believed, and the truth would certainly fall under the category of “just about anything.”

The doctor motioned Richard to his office, which was only a room away from the examining room.  He brought the green files with him.  He wanted to show Mauer pictures of normal brains and those with tumors that had resulted in acute amnesia.  Richard sat on the doctor’s desk as if it were
his
office, trying to recreate something of an arrogant demeanor
in an attempt to get into character
.  He lit another cigarette and offered one to the doctor who declined.  Hayes flipped through pictures.

He questioned the Nazi doctor, trying to stay as hypothetical as possible.  “Ever think about it, Doctor?  Killing yourself?” The doctor didn’t look up from his reading.  He wanted to show Mauer a page from a psychological journal that would help make more sense of the photographed images he was flipping through.  “I think about it all the time,” Richard threw in, so as to make the conversation about him, his illness, and thus lead the doctor away from the idea that this SS officer was asking about the health of a Jewish girl from Poland, a non-person in the eyes of the Reich.  The doctor seemed guarded and picked up a random file, appearing to look through it.

Richard had a thought that had come to him during the flow of conversation.  He really cared about Savina.  Even if she wasn’t real, in the sense of flesh and blood, she was more real than any woman whom Richard Hayes had met.  He loved her in the only bizarre, terrible way that he could, which didn’t make any more sense than the camp itself or this game, or anything.  He hadn’t fully realized it until he heard that she was still alive.  He thought for sure that she had died, but there had been a faint whisper in his mind that perhaps she hadn’t died, an inkling of a thought of which Richard himself hadn’t been fully aware, keeping him from surrendering to a feeling that would have been akin to the words of a prosecutor pronouncing his own death sentence.

Now that she was alive again, as if willed to life by his own self-sustaining need, his role in the game had to change.  He hated the options before him, but there was really only one choice to make, now that his feelings for her were clear.  If he got near her again, alone, what then?  The Internet connection could suddenly fail, as it had done on occasion, and there she would be, alone with the demon, Mauer.  He had to get Mauer as far from her as possible.  If he had to never see her again to spare her from the hands of a monster like Heinrich Mauer, then that was the final word.  But his life without her in it was a glass completely empty.

Finally, the tall, thin, middle-aged doctor dragged the stool close to where Richard was sitting on the doctor’s desk.   “You care for this girl,” he said, frowning, shaking his head. “I see that.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  I saw it at Buchenwald.  So, you want me to fix her so that you can again hurt this girl you care for, correct?  Or should I say, in the parlance of the Party, that she is non-human, like the rest, and ask you why you care so much for this . . . animal?”

Hayes had no idea that his questions had revealed so much.  He certainly didn’t think of her as non-human, though as a computer player she was certainly that.  But Mauer did.  A thought occurred to him once again . . . could she really be an avatar? 

“She has use,” he replied.

“
Indeed.  Perhaps more than her duties in the infirmary suggest?  Perhaps she can do more than clean bedpans and ladle soup to your . . . kapos . . . when they come in with strange infections from the brothel at the corner barrack.”

“
I’m not liking your tone, doctor.”  Hayes was pretending anger.  “Rewarding kapos with such privileges keeps them from thinking too much of what it is that they’re made to do here.  They are betrayers of their kind, but to keep them useful we can’t let them dwell on it.  We must supply diversions.  And we can’t run this camp with just the SS.  There aren’t nearly enough of us.” 

“
I don’t judge, Herr Mauer.  I only see my role here as . . . ironic.”  Hayes completely understood the doctor’s meaning.  Here was a man expected to heal those soon to be gassed anyway or worked to death.  Here was one of the men whose job it was to make the quick decisions upon each detainee’s arrival whether he or she was healthy enough for hard labor.  The others were gassed or sent to another camp where they would be gassed.  Those in the first category would likely die in a few months anyway.  The life expectancy for the average prisoner was only a few months.