We Live Inside You (15 page)

Amelia cleaned herself, ignoring the shifting in her own belly and the “love” that whipsawed around her brain.

She dried and put on her only perfume and spotted a few sores blooming on her skin. Nothing some foundation couldn’t cover up.

She slid on a short skirt and an old black t-shirt. It fit perfectly—the last few days’ fast had done right by her looks.

No underwear. None needed.

She would walk to the outskirts of the grove, where she guessed gun-sure soldiers and salivating business men were already setting up perimeter in anticipation of harvesting what she’d found.

There was an old redwood stump there which had refused to die. It was fifteen feet across and rimmed on all sides by new redwood trunks growing from its edges. The locals called these “fairy circles” and a few romantic visiting botanists had termed them “cathedrals.”

She would claim this cathedral as her own and would invite every last man to join her.

She licked her lips in anticipation. She was already wet. Her upper thighs tingled. Like peppermint. It
was
really nice.

Humanity needed a management tool. And she would give it to them.

With love.

You had the brilliant idea this morning, at dawn.

You rose to a noise from outside, a trashcan overturned by wind, spilling fetid food for early-rising dogs. In this moment—sleep a mucous haze over your dilated eyes, mouth tasting soured bacteria, hearing the clang of metal against concrete—the idea landed.

It was genius, the answer to every question you’d ever given up answering, the unifying concept that could surely explain God to the world in a way that we could all agree on.

This idea was too big. Maybe it’s the sheer processing speed required. Synaptic overload. That Ambien you took. Your brain couldn’t hold it. The further your eyes opened, the more this idea slipped away like the organs of a suddenly skinned man.

Then you were Awake—not in some grand spiritual sense, but the corporeal—and the brilliant idea was gone.

All that remains is this phantom feeling that you
knew
… something.

Tears come. They are extra-salty; you drank too much wine last night.

Skipping your morning habits, you shelve your shower and your half-conscious masturbation and instead sit at the kitchen table with a pad of paper, scrawling words like “stardust” and “sub-cellular.” But they’re never more than words.

You head outside; start knocking over trashcans. Perhaps there’s an auditory trigger? Each can produces a clang before fast-food bags tumble free and grease their way into the gutter.

Nothing.

The world needs this idea.

You drink, smoke, meditate.

You create Goldbergian devices—alarm clock/sewing machines that drive needles into the soft pads of your feet, causing you to wake suddenly.

Months pass. You can’t focus. Your job’s terminated.

Despondent, walking home, you barely notice the semi-truck running a red as you shuffle through the crosswalk.

The horn sounds. Headlights fill your vision.

The brilliant idea is there, glowing, closer, closer, almost within your grasp.

Then it hits you.

Minna knew that her fits were a blessing. She’d never stated this fact to anyone. Not her husband Jakob, nor her son Garin. Not even to her mother, who Minna knew viewed the writhing black-outs as a curse which might one day steal away her precious child.

At the funeral Minna had wondered if her mother might still be alive, had she understood the nature of the attacks. Perhaps the heart-crushing stress of caring for a tormented child would have been alleviated if Minna could have explained the glorious
glow
that she felt during the fits.

Her mother could only have seen the child, and later the young woman, in a state of extreme duress. Eyes rolled white. Teeth gnashing. Back arched in a contorted “U” that threatened to snap the spine and spread open her stretched-thin belly. She could never have known the sights, the glow, that Minna had experienced as her body bore its own assault.

Inside that state Minna had seen new worlds. Alien languages formed by numbers and angles and whorls, and images of a galaxy in which forces shifted gloriously. Minna had seen these images from so great a distance that all the chaos and movement had been reduced to simple truths, which she later learned to speak about and document to great effect at the Technical University in Darmstadt.

As a child she called these things she’d witnessed The Beauties. As a woman she relented and referred to them under the name which her male counter-parts at University used: Physics.

But in her heart, still: The Beauties.

And the things she witnessed during her fits served her well, or as well as they could. Her brilliance with the language of movement allowed her occasion to matriculate and complete a doctorate at Technical. Although she was forbidden from filling an academic post, the sheer value of her knowledge permitted her to work—always unofficially—alongside minds like Hemholtz and Muller. She aided Wuerzberg with his radar research at Telefunken.

She was afforded little to no wage for these efforts, but found the opportunity to test the ideas of Prandtl, or dissect the effects of flow velocity, too alluring.

It was her chance, in each of these studies, to speak the language of The Beauties outside of the blinding moments in which she’d envisioned them. It felt heretical to do anything else.

And now her talent with “physics” had brought her to Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains, as the primary member of an airborne weapons development group.

It was here that she’d had her most recent and terrible fit. Terrible because during her last attack the glow had abandoned her.

She’d seen nothing, knew nothing of the fit until it was over. And instead of coming to with an even more keen sense of how the world was, indeed, in exact order, she woke to the realization that something inside of her had broken.

She’d pleaded for her husband Jakob then, called out for him to lift her from the floor of her small house. Such was her agitation upon recovery—she had forgotten Jakob had perished three years before in France, when the war had not yet seemed real to her. She’d called out for her son Garin, too, who had been away working as a guard at the Maidanek camp for as long as Jakob had been dead and buried.

Minna was finally found there on the floor, soaked through from exertion, by a Nordhausen guard on night duty.

She’d asked to be shipped out of the mountains, to see a doctor better than Kuntzler, who she knew was fiercely held in the grip of alcohol at most hours, but due to “security reasons” she was never allowed to leave the factory grounds.

She knew too much about the weapons program to risk transporting. Kuntzler assigned her to two days of bed rest and left it at that.

Since the day of that empty, thieving fit she had been unable to move her left arm, and the left side of her face was nearly dead to the touch, its eyelid drooping so heavily it obscured and twisted her depth perception.

Worse, her thoughts and memories seemed to have been scattered to the periphery of her mind, and recalling the way to mouth a certain phrase or spell common words became a chore.

The men around her—the guards and fellow researchers and craftsmen of the Nordhausen munitions factory—now looked at her differently. She heard whispers and caught smirking glances.

As a woman she’d felt that her power at Nordhausen had always been in question; this new and damnable disability was sapping what little influence she’d once wielded.

The factory labor—hollow-faced Jews shipped over by Koch from Buchenwald—still regarded her with fear, and she cursed herself for finding comfort in that. After all, their fear was misplaced. She’d never harmed one of them. In fact, she’d quietly protested the banning of the Jews from the University back in’38, at risk to her own life. The unearthing of this fact had almost prevented her from receiving her development position at Nordhausen, but in the end the intellectual prowess and value of Minna Konig’s mind had proven too valuable to the Führer’s project.

Now Minna wondered how much more time she’d be allowed to complete her work. She’d been sequestered to the harsh terrain of the Harz Mountains for years now, toiling at Nordhausen to develop an un-manned flight craft that could accurately deliver bombs to the territory of their enemies.

The factory itself, aside from its attendant development offices, was a rough place. Parts of the weapon production and storage area were being built into the mountains themselves, and the laborers that toiled at this task were dying at a rate Minna found surreal. These dead men were carried out on carts, and were quickly replaced by new skeleton-thin workers.

About two months back a laborer had attempted to sabotage the massive steel press, one of the few machines too large to fit into the mountain-side tunnels. The normal punishment for this, for anything outside Nordhausen’s rule of law, would be to hang the man in the gallows beside the factory. These hangings took place daily, sometimes for what seemed like hours. But the soldier in charge of the man must have grown bored with the noose.

Minna heard the story later, how the saboteur had been forced at gunpoint to wedge the upper half of his body into the press. How after the machine had done its work the other men who attended to it were forced to scrape the remains away and return to work, sliding steel plates into the maw of the blood-slicked machine.

Minna avoided these parts of the factory as often as she could. Instead she stayed in the research office, toiling away for hours with her pad and pen. It was hard work for Minna but initially she’d reveled in the language of it. Angle of attack, curvature, mass, all of it rolling like honey on her tongue as she formulated trajectories and wingspans and frame designs. Even when Jakob had passed, she refused to acknowledge the reality of what she was creating.

The ends are not important
, she told herself.
The universe will work in exact order, as it always has.

She knew she was being seduced by a chance to speak The Beauties, and to do so with greater authority than she had been able to at University. But this was knowledge that she held in utmost restraint and it only crept into her mind on long nights when she could not find sleep. It was then, as the cold winds of the Harz Mountains howled against the small frame of her house, that she allowed her mind to be over-run with thoughts of Jakob, and the terrible way the men at Nordhausen treated their labor, and the effect that her love affair with her visions might one day have on the flesh of the unsuspecting.

She could only clear these terrible thoughts by whispering the name of her son.

Garin.

Garin, please come home.

They said that a miracle had saved Garin during the American’s attack on Maidanek. A bullet had glanced from his high cheekbone and proceeded to tear off a substantial portion of the left side of his skull. Somehow a field doctor had managed to escape with Garin’s unconscious body and had sealed shut the wound, suturing the flap of skin and hair that had been torn loose by the gunfire.

The piece of skull lost in the injury had never been recovered, but Garin still survived the trauma. He fought a fever that peaked at one hundred and five degrees, and his body staved off an infection that threatened to creep right up to the vulnerable soft concavity where Garin’s skull used to be.

Once he regained consciousness he managed to speak his mother’s name. Minna was well known among the higher ranking officers, who wanted to respect Garin’s apparent request.

Looking at him now, slumped forward in his wheelchair with a thin string of drool running from the right corner of his mouth to his shoulder, Minna guessed that they just wanted to be rid of him. And deep down she loathed herself for feeling the same way.

He’s finally here, but he’s never coming home.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You were supposed to be here to help me.

She looked at her dead arm, saw how loose and separate it was from what she felt was her body.

I need you now. You can’t need me.

She hated herself for thinking it.

Minna wondered if he was in there somewhere, thinking and struggling to speak just as she had done ever since her last fit. She hoped his mind might be healing, growing stronger.

Her eyelid was drooping less than it used to. Perhaps he was on the same slow road to recovery. In her brighter moments she believed that this was the truth and it allowed her to find her own words more easily. She’d discuss her job with him, she’d reminisce about Jakob. She even, for the first time in her life, tried to explain her vision of The Beauties to him, but gave up when her tongue couldn’t find a way around the ideas.

She settled for gently washing Garin’s wounds and combing his hair on the side opposite the injury. She’d tried to bathe him the week before but with one arm it had been too difficult to shift his body. On top of that, she’d noticed he’d become aroused when she’d tried to wash his groin. While Minna hadn’t been disturbed by it, Garin had emitted a low moan and started to cry. As best he could, he’d tried to shake his head from left to right.

No, Mom. No.

She respected his wishes but worried that her inability to completely clean him would let infection creep back in.

Her work at Nordhausen had slowed to a near standstill. She felt a strange relief at the fact—
This weapon won’t help anyone. It won’t help Garin.
—but knew how dangerous it was to be of no use to the men of Nordhausen and the Reich.

How long will it be until they bring in someone like Reinholtz to continue my work?

And the jokes at her expense were beginning to feel more like threats. She heard comments about the “worthlessness of the feeble-minded,” the curse of the “useless eaters” and “life unworthy of life.”

Minna tried to return to her work full force, although she could get none of the men at Nordhausen, not even Kuntzler, to help attend to Garin. He was a reminder that none of them could tolerate. But Minna knew that her weapons work was the only way to return to the status quo.

If I can get this craft to fly, if we can get a few dry runs to clear the right distance, then they’ll know I should remain here. Perhaps they’ll even increase my wage and I can bring in an outside doctor to help Garin heal.

She worked for two days straight, coming home only to feed Garin soup—chicken noodle was his favorite but she had to make do with a thin tomato puree—and to make sure he knew he wasn’t alone.

Minna prayed for another fit, something to strike her down so she could rise again and know exactly how to make the Nordhausen project a success. She focused on finding the right words and calculations until sweat dripped from her wrinkled forehead.

Her renewed efforts were working.