Stormfuhrer (6 page)

“
Really, it’s not for everyone.”

Farash was silent but began to nod.  Hayes knew that early on Farash had wanted to be an accountant, but after meeting a few and considering the long hours, changed his mind.  He wanted time with his family, a family he and his wife had not yet been able to produce.

2027

Karl had been lying on the now-wrinkled bedspread, staring at the high ceiling of the quiet hospital room.  The empty box stood propped up in a corner, blocking a closet door.

There was a “tap tap” at the wide door of the hospital room.  Rain was likewise tapping against the plexiglass window on this side of the metal grating.

A nurse walked in, tall, blonde, young, certainly enough to grab Karl’s attention as his eyes moved, gradually, to her face.  “Well, two visitors in as many years.  And on the same day?  This can’t be a coincidence. ”

“
I’m sorry?”  Karl was confused as the young nurse stepped over to Hayes and put a hand on his shoulder.  “Someone else to see you Mister Hayes.  She says she’s your aunt.”

A bent octogenarian female shuffled in behind an aluminum walker, the hump in her tiny upper back almost as high as the wisps of curly white hair that grew in clumps over a pink, spotty scalp.  She looked at the floor as she shuffled in.  She stopped and turned to face Karl as he sat up, about to stand.  “Don’t bother,” she murmured in a heavily foreign accent.  “I do not think I am here to see you, young man.”

Karl sat against the bed frame in the far corner and watched.

“
Mr. Hayes.”  The tall, blonde nurse rubbed his back.  His eyes moved slightly.  After more rubbing, the catatonic man lifted his head and seemed to listen, staring blankly at nothing but merely towards the grated window.  Karl almost jumped at the unexpected motion.  He stared hard at his former mentor.

“
Hello, Richard Hayes.  My name is Selma.”  Her accent was heavy.  She sounded Russian, but Karl couldn’t be sure.

“
Selma,“ Hayes repeated in almost a whisper, not looking at the speaker.  His voice was quiet and hollow from apparent disuse.

The nurse quietly shut the door behind her as she left the room.

Selma sat on the bed next to Karl as there was only one chair, the one in which Hayes sat, and leaned her forearms across the top of her metallic walker.  After a few moments, she looked at Karl.  “Who are you?” she asked, her somewhat bulbous eyes looked tiredly at his neck rather than at his face.

“
I was a student of Mr. Hayes.  I just came by to say hi.”

“
Very vell,” she said indifferently.  “You von’t believe anything you hear me say to this man.  Though it doesn’t matter if you do or you do not.  Perhaps you can write a book someday.  But for that you might have to take lots of notes,” the old woman paused then nodded, and her gaze fell back to Hayes.  “You don’t know me, do you?”

Hayes was not staring down at the woman’s shadow on the floor beside the bed.  His head was raised, leaning against the wall.

“Does he sleep in this bed?

“
I don’t think so,” Karl replied.  “When I first sat on it, it was covered with dust.”

“
He is a sad man.”

“
You’re his aunt?  Aren’t you too old . . .”

“
I am not really his aunt, but yes I am too old.  Too old for this earth.  I was born in Gorzow.”

“
My God!  I bet you have tons of stories, about the wars I mean.”  Karl was really into history.

“
I only have one story, my boy.  One life, one story.  That’s all you get in this life.  I was little when the wars ended.”  Karl was silenced by the tone of what sounded like a terse reprimand, but looked somewhat amused by her irritability.

“
So you like stories, young man?  I have something for you to read if you like to read stories.”  She reached into a side pocket of the walker and pulled out an old handwritten book, wrapped in a rag and tied together with some black yarn.  She handed it to Karl.  Karl unwrapped it carefully as it seemed on the verge of coming apart.

“
Can I?” 

She nodded.  Karl took time with the yarn and cloth and started to look through the pages.  It was all writing.  No pictures.  Some pages had come loose from the binding.  He was careful to make sure that these weren’t misplaced in the sequence of pages.  The journal was in English so he began reading while the woman leaned back on the bed, positioning her upper back against the wall.  She seemed overcome with fatigue, staring calmly at Richard Hayes and faintly shaking her head.  Richard Hayes, or what remained of him, lowered his head again to lie against his right arm, but his eyes remained half-opened, fixed now past both guests at the light-blue wall.

Karl started reading the journal from the beginning.

Fall 2022

Coach Mason, Principal, stood by the flagpole listening to Farash’s frenetic report one sunny Thursday afternoon.  “Aren’t you, sir, curious what Hayes is doing with all those big boxes?  Do you know his students work
inside
of them?  I couldn't believe it when I saw it with my own eyes!”  The large American flag attached to the metallic pole gave palpable pops and forts as the students piled out of the school and, by increments, into the dingy black and yellow buses.  Farash was attempting to convey his concerns dutifully.  He was also a little jealous of the computers.

Coach Mason looked straight ahead at the buses coming and going.  “Hayes.  Well, he’s a good teacher.  It’s likely he’s doing something new, probably an Internet thing.  If Hayes is one thing, Mr. Farash, he’s solid in the classroom. Maybe even the best teacher we’ve seen at this school in decades.  Did you look to see what his students were working on?  He wrote the grant for that by himself.”

Farash reflected then frowned.  No it was difficult to see what had been on the screen earlier that day.  But he would soon see what the students were learning in such an unorthodox manner.  He knew Hayes at least well enough to know that it was suspicious.  The exclamations of students, hidden away in their confining cubes, and the guilty grins on Hayes’ face when he looked out over the monolithic boxes told the tale, at least partially.  He liked Hayes--though Hayes wasn’t always the best mentor, rarely helpful when help was truly needed.  Mr. Farash had a duty to his career, to the students, to doing the right thing.  That's why he had approached Principal Mason.    The day was waning and students were becoming scarce in the parking lots and around the doorways.  Mason smiled and thanked Farash for “keeping an eye on things.”  Farash smiled and half-bowed, turning to walk to his little gas-conserving Chevrolet.

On screen, Daniel Mesa’s avatar opened his eyes to a blurry room, a hard bunk, a little metal whistle at his hand, and a bespectacled young doctor seated beside him on a rusty stool.  He looked about him, noticing a peeling wall and a door missing an upper panel.  “Habst du die Husten heute? . . . Do you have the coughs today?” the man was asking.  A nurse looked indifferently at the boy who lay swaddled in dank sheets that smelt of rancid cellars.  “Mein Kind.  Hustest du heute?”  My child, are you coughing today?  The doctor seemed friendly.  Daniel felt comforted by the young doctor's presence, and the woman’s.  He didn’t think his avatar had a cough. 

The man in the white coat took the boy’s wrist and watched at his own wristwatch the movement of the second hand.  It didn’t go far when the man dropped the boy’s hand and walked towards the door.  The nurse asked, “
Doktor Gross, haben sie die Medicamente für der Junge?
”  No translation kicked in.  Perhaps she was too far away.  The man in the white coat stopped, turned to look at the boy, and walked out the door with a clipboard in hand.  The nurse followed, shaking her head.  Then there was a partial silence.  Distant groans penetrated the walls, but Daniel had no idea who or what made those sounds, or where they came from.  The stench of the stale mattress and sheets began to intrude upon his own senses, somehow even reaching through the brown seven inside the cardboard box.  He looked down at his arms.  His hands were turned in, bent and shriveled, wrists yellowed.   His legs looked blue with cold and, somehow, very small.  He couldn’t move or feel them. 

The nurse returned with the “
Medicamente.
” He watched her jab the needle into his leg and press down to plunge the clear liquid into his unresponsive, deformed body.  “What is it?” he asked her.  She pretended not to hear him, removed the syringe, and quickly left the room.  Perhaps his avatar hadn't spoken.

A bell rang overhead, four dings, and Daniel woke up, so to speak, seated inside the dark box; he would never again be able to awaken the avatar.  Shaken, he took the headset from his head and placed it on top of the desk as the monitor slipped back into its horizontal position, now hidden away.  The gloves he placed in the side cavities beside his knees.  He left the box and approached his backpack resting against the back wall.  It was a bulging black mesh bag covered with skulls and the name of a band spray-painted in red.  He joined the other shuffling students as they emerging from their boxes and headed towards the doorway, grabbing their backpacks from the back wall as they left.  Most of them were silent and slant-eyed when they reached the bright hallway light, with a few giving low remarks like “insane . . .” and “Beast!”

A German nurse took a syringe and smashed the point into a wooden beam along the wall.  She was angry.  The avatar's counterpart almost collapsed into a crying fit, seated in the dark in her big cardboard box.

The Doktor
returned.  He was a bespectacled German, tall and old, carrying a wet towel into which he smeared the foul contents of his hands, tossing the towel into a metal canister on the floor in a corner.

“
Anke, das ist deiner kiste
,”
that is your box,
he said, pointing to a small box on a metal shelf of dark boxes and glass beakers.  She turned to the wall and reached for the box.  She opened it.  Inside were more syringes, some small vials of different-colored powers, one of a clear liquid.  She shut the box and squeezed her eyes shut.

“
Ein Problem
?” suggested the tall, graying doctor, putting a fatherly hand on her shoulder.

“
Nein.  Kein Problem
,”
No.  No problem
,
she responded, not knowing where the actual words derived but knowing that they were certainly a reflection of what she did say, or wanted to say, or thought.  She wasn’t sure.

Emerging from the
Provisorische Krankenhaus
, Karen stopped before one of the three large, makeshift tents inhabiting a square within the small network of administrative buildings.  The tents resided nowhere near the regular prison barracks but rather near the fence at the side of the camp.  It was starting to rain.  Karen clutched the dark box tightly under her arm, knowing that to turn around and walk the other way would be to commit herself to a similar camp, if not the same one, as an inmate.  A good German did what she was told.  Ask no questions, except to clarify and then do your job.  Otherwise, you are perhaps a collaborator, an enemy of the State, the worst scum residing at the bottom of the prisoner pile. 

She stood before the door of the large tent.  The avatar, Anke, was about to collapse. . .  From exhaustion?  Fear? . . . when a soldier opened the tent door on the left and motioned her in.

She followed into the tent, seeing several cots, two of which contained women.  One in the far cot was unconscious.  The woman in the closest cot was staring at her, wide-eyed, talking desperately in another language.  She sounded somewhat Russian.  Probably Lithuanian.  She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew.

She was to administer euthanasia to this dark and very beautiful woman, beautiful though extremely thin.  On any other woman, the features wrought by the emaciation would have been corpse-like.  Her belly showed her to be about five months pregnant.  The woman knew why Anke, Karen's avatar, was there.  She stared at the German nurse, backing up on her cot to its furthest corner, ready to strike with her feet.  Clutching the side of the tent nearest her head, she began to scream.  As if this were meant to save her life--hers and that of her half-Aryan child, proof that some guard or other functionary had ignored Hitler’s racial purity laws.

Karen knew her role in the game very well.  She hated it but thought it must have a purpose that she would eventually know.  She knew that she didn’t belong here, in this place, this time, this situation.  She was someone else, from somewhere else, younger.  She shook her head trying to remember.  The realism of the game was frightening at times.  You could get so lost in the game that even your own identity starts to retreat somewhere or blend into that of the avatar.  Nothing came to mind right now but the situation itself and a faint glimmer of that something else that nagged at you as you made your choices in each situation you found itself. 

She opened the box and took out a vial of clear liquid.  The soldier that had led her into the tent stood just inside the tent door and looked on.  The screaming of the woman had brought him back.  Karen stabbed the syringe into the vial and filled the syringe until it was about half full. “Negerkite mano kūdikis!“ the woman screamed.  Karen had no idea what she was saying, but she did know that though this woman probably suffered a fear greater than she had ever known, and though this small mound of child just beneath her skin was indeed human like herself, it had been growing in an overworked, malnourished mother for months in the camp and would probably die anyway.  Would certainly be swept away once the “aberration“ had been discovered by a higher official.  No, the indiscretion had already been discovered or she wouldn’t have been sent here.