Friday, December 5, 2008

Anonymous pamphlet found in bus shelter, part 4 of 5

The next morning, Dean awoke first and brought up two bowls of porridge from the elderly couple, who often made a large pot of the stuff for their tenants each morning. They were very laid back as landlords, preferring to let the tenants live their lives as they saw fit, but the couple still felt enough of a paternal instinct to make sure everyone went out into the day well fed.

Dean placed the bowls on the table, one in front of his chair and the other in front of Perlez’s. He walked over to his colleague’s bedroom door and then walked away, sitting down at the table and beginning to eat his breakfast.

As he was finishing, Perlez opened his door. He seemed less dishevelled than he had been last night, although his face was still quite obviously bruised in places. Without saying anything, he sat and began to eat. Dean noted the slowness in his walk, the way he seemed to be favouring his left leg. While Perlez’s head was down over the bowl, Dean stared at the marks on his colleague’s face, trying to fathom the meaning of a bruise, the significance of a cut. And whenever Perlez looked up, Dean looked away.

Perlez was the first to speak. “I’ve decided on what we should do.”

He continued eating, as if that were all Dean needed to know. Finally, Dean spoke up. “Yes, and--?”

“Oh,” Perlez said, “you want to know?”

“Yes,” Dean replied, ignoring the insult.

Perlez dropped his spoon into the empty bowl. It rattled like dropping a bolt into an engine. “We’ll use ether. We’ll knock out the wife while the husband is at work and operate on the child.”

“When should we do it?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll get the ether today. You’ll perform the operation.”

“Really?” Dean was flustered. “So soon? Should we monitor them, see when the best time is?”

“Tomorrow will be fine.”

“But what if he doesn’t go to work? Where does he even work? Are there others in the house we have to watch for? A maid? The landlords?”

“We’ll get it done.”

Dean almost fell into a sulk. “Is it really that easy? Is that all there is to it?”

Perlez got up and gathered together both bowls. “Go to work,” his voice sounded almost compassionate for a moment, the brittle anger of moments earlier dropping away. “Just forget about it until tomorrow.”

“Are you going to work?”

Perlez was already on his way out of the room with the empty bowls in his hands when Dean asked him this question. He paused before the door and shook his head, but did not speak.

Watching his colleague leave the room, Dean wanted to shout out so many questions. What happened last night? What happened to your face? What happened to you? But he couldn’t speak. The door shut and the room was empty, save for his presence, which barely seemed to register. When Perlez walked, his feet were driven by an urge to punch holes in the floor. His hands touched the furniture as if they had a will of their own, smearing graffiti patterns on the dust that lightly coated everything. The air seemed to move around him like a jumpy animal.

Dean’s presence was less severe. His feet glided across the floor. The chairs did not creak when he sat in them. He sank into his bed so that it appeared no one was sleeping in it at all. When Dean was in the room, it was empty.

He waited for a few minutes, assuming Perlez would return, but he didn’t. When he realized this, Dean went to the window and looked outside. He could see Perlez walking down the street, getting smaller and smaller until he eventually disappeared. Dean waited until he could no longer see his colleague and then he also left the room. But there was no one who saw him disappear.

***

Walking up the steps to the apartment, Perlez felt the bottle of ether rattling in his pocket. The chemist had not asked any questions, which was perhaps for the best, as he would have only received lies in response.

This was a strange sensation for Perlez, and it weighed heavily on him. Did these people not see his guilt-ridden face, his eyes burning like a stove? They seared. Was this sort of shame so common that people thought nothing of it as it walked past them on the street, movements deformed by the mass of secrets sloshing about their stomach, a salty sea that threw them off-balance?

His landlord had greeted him on the landing and he had said hello, spoken brightly and innocuously about the fine weather. But what did this man know about his tenants? And if he knew it all and still did not care? Such thoughts disturbed Perlez.

It was with dread that Perlez opened the door to the apartment. He did not want to think of Dean sitting there, waiting for him, watching the door, expecting Perlez to come in and set the world right. Even though Dean seemed convinced that he had made the transition into the world of the past, Perlez knew better. The man had simply collapsed inwardly--the delusions that had originally let loose from his mouth like ecstatic religious visions had become internalized, a church in the place of belief, structure in the place of spontaneity. Perlez almost began to miss those early days when Dean seemed to collapse, momentarily lose his identity and become lost in his own skin. At least, he had seemed more alive in such a state than he was now--wearied by the mission, wearied by the world. What did he see when he stared at Perlez? What did he do in the apartment when he was alone? Of course, if Dean had collapsed, then Perlez had exploded.

The apartment was empty when he entered. He kicked off his shoes and heard them clatter against the wall. But the bottle of ether still seemed louder, rubbing against the fabric of his coat, the contents swirling, a restless sea, the disquiet of slumber.

He sat at the table and waited. I can wait too, he thought, but minutes later, he was standing again, looking out the window. What is going on out there? What are they doing? Some people from the pub across the street sang a song together. It sounded ridiculous, but he liked the noise anyway. When Dean entered, Perlez was still staring out the window.

“Did you get it?” Dean asked.

“Yes,” Perlez replied. His voice still had that harsh edge. How can I dull this blade, he thought. Should I? He couldn’t even figure out the right question anymore.

“So, tomorrow is the day,” Dean declared awkwardly.

“Don’t talk about it,” Perlez said. He tried to control his voice, which made it sound only more cruel. “Don’t think about it. I don’t want to hear a thing about it until tomorrow. The plan is simple, and we will carry it out without a problem. Let’s just forget about it for today.”

“I’m fine with that.” Dean took off his coat and shoes and placed them neatly beside the door. He always folded his coat and put it on top of the shoes, which struck Perlez as one of the most irrational, senseless things he had ever seen. The sight of it always filled him with contempt for the man, and he could never quite understand why.

“Are you hungry?” Dean asked.

“Yes,” Perlez said. He took the ether out of his pocket, slammed it on the table, and walked out the door.

***

Stunned by the finality of Perlez’s response, Dean did not really know what to do with himself for a moment. He just stood there, limp and confused, a pointless man. After all that they had been through, where was the closeness? Did tribulation not bond people together? Or did it simply tie people together against their wills, and when it had passed, all that remained was a contemptuous unity?

After getting some bread and cheese from the kitchen downstairs, Dean sat back down and tried to eat, even though his stomach felt like it would crawl out through his throat. The impurities of this nineteenth century food did not help matters. He tried to avoid sentimental thoughts of the future, but it was hard to resist when imagining the flurry of dirty hands labouring over every morsel he put in mouth--hands of sweat, hands of dirt, hands of shit. People talked of the care of the personal touch, but what of the carelessness?

All he could do was sit at the table and stare at the bottle of ether. The bottle was glass, and the clear liquid could have been water. He almost wanted to drink it.

Staring at the bottle was just too overwhelming. It seemed like an intruder in the room that could not be acknowledged, but was still undoubtedly there. Feeling sick to his stomach, Dean left the room.

The sky was darkening as he left the inn, walking down the cobbled streets of the town. He so rarely wandered the town that he wasn’t quite sure where to go. What did the people do? What did Perlez do? He was probably in a pub somewhere, drinking and eating and laughing, maybe getting into a fight. Slowly, Perlez would turn into a thing of brutish physicality, all appetite and action. But what it suggested about the mission was more terrifying than anything else. For if the men of the future could so easily succumb to the violence of this epoch, then what exactly were they doing there? Who were they curing?

Dean looked into the pubs and taverns, never entering, but always watching from across the street. He passed the Harrow, which had its main window boarded up, but at the King’s Head, he could see Perlez eating alone at a table.

It was easy to watch without being observed. Perlez was so intent on his food that he did not even look up to see Dean across the street, staring in fascination and repulsion. There were chicken legs and potatoes and beans, with chunks of bread on the side. Perlez ate with a fork in one hand, swirling the beans into the mashed potatoes and then sticking a glob of food into his mouth. Sometimes a small piece fell back onto the plate before it could get in his mouth; the fork was piled so high that bits of food would be knocked off the fork by his lip, like someone riding on top of a train going under a low bridge. The difference was that Perlez always returned for whatever did not make it through the first time. The train never did.

In his other hand, he held a drumstick, which he would tear at with his teeth. The meat seemed tough, but he was not deterred. If anything, the stubbornness of this meat seemed to provoke his carnivorous instinct, and he practically attacked the dead animal, gnawing at it while his face betrayed neither pleasure nor happiness. This was not for culinary enjoyment; it was for survival. A job like any other, joylessly mandatory.

Dean realized how foolish he must have looked standing there. Perhaps people would just take him for a beggar engaging in the vicarious thrill of watching others eat. Perhaps they assumed he was simple-minded, just a fool standing on the street corner captivated by the sights and smells of the pub. He walked away, disquieted by the sight of Perlez eating and unable to watch anymore.

Back at the apartment, he put his shoes by the door and folded his coat neatly on top of them. The bottle of ether was still there. The apartment belonged to it now. Dean was the intruder.

He went into his room and shut the door, unable to face the thought of seeing Perlez again that night, the man’s face dripping with gravy, flecked with potato, like a beast fresh with viscera from the kill. In fact, he thought for a moment of taking a whiff of the ether--just a whiff--and letting it carry him off into a strange dream like life, but more vivid. He resisted this urge, and after an hour or so--during which Perlez did not return--he at last negotiated a truce with sleep.

***

The next morning, Perlez awoke to the sunlight clawing at his eyes. His head ached and his mouth seemed unusually dry. Another wretched day in a dead century, he thought. He sat up and his head gave another throb. He drank half the dirty water in his washbasin and the other half he used to soak his head. Gasping, he pulled his face out of the water. And then he dunked it back under, as if there were a hand behind his head pushing him under until he talked. But he had nothing to say, and didn’t know what he could say that would make a difference.

He wiped his face and caught his breath, feeling somehow refreshed by trying to drown himself. After dressing, he opened the door to his bedroom and saw Dean sitting at the table, eating a bowl of porridge. A bowl sat in front of his chair, still warm and steaming. Dean did not look up.

“Good morning,” Perlez said, sitting down. The ether bottle was between them.

“Good morning.” Dean looked up at his colleague and then quickly looked back down, as if fearing to provoke anger.

Usually, when people hunched over their food like Dean did, it was because they were ravenously hungry and needed to be closer to the food, if only to speed up its consumption by the removal of a few unnecessary centimetres of space. But Dean ate laboriously, slowly, measuring out each spoonful, staring down at the bowl between each swallow as if he had to contemplate whether or not he would continue with this act. The pair ate in silence, both finishing at the same time.

“When do we leave?” Dean asked.

“Now,” Perlez replied.

“Do you think he’ll be gone already?”

“Probably not, but we can just watch for him to leave.”

Dean just nodded at this, but did not say anything. He went into his room and retrieved the surgical kit. Perlez already had his shoes on, and had to wait for Dean to put his shoes and coat on. With the bottle of ether in Perlez’s coat pocket and the surgical kit in Dean’s, the two men left the apartment for the waking world outside.

Outside of the Hitler apartment, the two men waited. Perlez directed Dean to an alleyway where the man could wait unobtrusively, while he would simply walk around the block. It seemed less suspicious than two men waiting together, although both would have admitted that the people seemed to have little interest in them. Everyone who passed them were preoccupied with their jobs, their families, what to do after work that day, a stray word the wife had say on the way out the door, what could she have meant, “Don’t forget like last time,” what was the last time? Such people barely noticed the two sweating, anxious men wandering the streets, staring at each face as if it were an accuser.

Perlez began walking around the street, passing out of sight and going around the next street before coming full circle in front of the Hitler resident. On the third pass, Dean flagged him over.

“Alois left.”

Perlez didn’t say anything. He just looked Dean in the eyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the man--he had no choice but to trust him--it’s just that he worried about his resolve sometimes. But those eyes seemed so curiously calm, the calmest he had seen them in months. Like that time in the village after the falling out with Cuyler, when Perlez found Dean sitting outside the town. He sometimes forgot, but Perlez knew that Dean had a source of resolve that he could not tap, could not even begin to guess at the source.

They walked into the house without even pausing at the door. Perlez led the way inside, and once they shut the door, they paused to make sure they did not run into someone. The sound of two people talking could be heard from behind a door, so they moved quietly up the stairs to the top floor.

At the door, Perlez whispered to Dean, “Hold her down.” A light flared in Dean’s eyes, a sudden flash of disgust, perhaps, at the coldness of the phrase.

The two walked inside--did no one believe in locks yet? They would soon learn--and headed straight through the apartment, not even bothering to mask the sound of their steps.

“Alois?” a woman’s voice called, and the two headed towards it.

When they entered the bedroom, the woman was lying on her bed, propped up with a pillow. She did not scream, but simply looked at Perlez and Dean with confused eyes. When Perlez strode towards her and pushed the ether-soaked rag to her face, she finally gasped and grabbed his hands. Her feet started to kick and Dean threw himself on them. She struggled, but Perlez would not budge, and his grip seemed to hardened--one hand behind her head, the other tight to her face. After a while, she became limp and slumped back in her bed. Hesitantly, Perlez loosened his grip and laid her back down. She breathed slowly, and for a moment, it was the only sound that could be heard in the room.

“The child,” Perlez said, pointing at a cradle next to the bed.

Its eyes were shut, and somehow, it seemed to have slept through the whole incident without a cry. Occasionally, it let out a small grunt as it shifted, straining against its unformed body, which did not seem capable of meeting the demands of its tiny will. Delicately, Perlez put the rag in front of the child’s nose, fluttering it just above the nostrils. Its eyes flared open and then slowly shut again, but in that brief in-between moment, the child seemed enraged about being pulled from its blissful natural rest into an unnatural sleep made by man.

Dean pulled the surgical kit out of his coat--it was a small metal case, and someone from the era might have mistaken it for a flask on first glance. He opened it up and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. Everything inside was sterile, the knife, the suturing materials, the prosthetic testicle--all of it clean and ready. The prosthetic, in particular, was quite sophisticated, used by all the eunuchs in the future and designed for life-long implantation without any negative side effects.

As Dean operated, Perlez sat on the bed and watched the woman. She breathed steadily, but not very quickly. Had he given her too much? For a moment, that fear would grip him, but then she would breathe in slowly, as if merely sipping the air, tasting it hesitantly. He tried counting between her breaths, watching to see if somehow--though this defied reason--the breaths might actually be coming farther and farther apart. In his nervousness, he realized he was messing up the count.

“Oh no,” Dean said, and he was so startled that he did not shout out these words. They cowered from his mouth, beaten dogs, the wind taken out of them.

Perlez turned and saw Dean holding the prosthetic in his hand. His face betrayed total helplessness. He looked like he might cry.

“He has two,” Dean said. “He already has two.”

“What?” Perlez asked.

“Look,” Dean said, stepping back.

Perlez could see that his colleague spoke the truth. In her bed, the woman stirred, her eyes still shut. Her mouth opened slightly and a bubble of air escaped through her teeth.

“We need to leave,” Perlez declared, standing up. “Gather your things. Leave everything as it was. The mission is completed.”

Dean looked at his colleague, stunned, but he didn’t speak.

The two left the apartment quietly, careful not to displace a thing. The woman would likely remember what had happened, but what could she say? Two men had drugged her and then done nothing to her, done nothing to the apartment, done nothing to the child? For a few years, the question might nag at her: what had they done then? When her husband was not around and the children were at school, she might feel the weight of incident come crashing down on her, a sudden flash of horror that stole her breath. But she would always recover. Nothing, she could say to herself, nothing had happened. Twenty years from now, it would seem like a bad dream. In her final years, she might think of this moment and wonder, why was the dream so vivid? What had been the source of the anxiety that had caused such a peculiar vision? She could rationalize an answer that would give her some peace, but no one could say what it might be.

Perlez and Dean wandered down the street, hurrying back home to the apartment, neither man able to speak because of course once the words started, there was no stopping what needed to be said. It wasn’t until they were safely inside their own apartment that they began to speak again.

“What happened?” Dean asked.

“I don’t know.” Perlez put the ether in his room and came back out. “I think things might have changed.”

“Changed? How?”

“Or maybe we were always misinformed. We don’t know how accurate historical records are.”

Dean sat in his chair, still wearing his coat and shoes as if he might have to suddenly flee. “But what does this mean?”

“It means the mission is complete.”

“We don’t know that,” Dean countered in his quiet, wounded voice.

“We have to work with that assumption.”

“But what if he had two all along, and he still started the war? What if nothing changed, and the theory was simply wrong all along?”

Perlez breathed deeply and let out a sigh. His chest heaved with emotion and the sigh cracked. “There is nothing more we can do.”

“You’re right,” Dean said, face in his hands. “You’re right, you’re right.”

Perez’s voice grew weaker, softer. “I am.”

The two were silent a moment, Perlez staring out the window, Dean watching the wall.

“I suppose we should be leaving,” Perlez said suddenly.

“Yes, I suppose,” Dean agreed, though there was obviously regret in his tone. “Where will we go?”

Perlez didn’t respond to this right away. We? Was there any need to even stay together now that the mission had come to its end? He didn’t know how to respond. Was it better for the two to stay together in order to watch the other self-destruct in this foreign time, or would they at least have a chance if they split up and tried to forget the future that each represented to the other? Or would that only guarantee a lonelier death? Perlez felt so tired. The air in the past seemed heavier. Gravity seemed stronger.

Dean spoke again. “We can split up.”

“What?” Perlez turned to face his colleague.

“Maybe--” Dean’s voice grew more hesitant and confused as he spoke, nervous under the fiery eyes of his colleague, “--maybe that would be better. We don’t actually have to stay together now. It might make it easier.”

Perlez didn’t say anything, but he nodded. Dean watched anxiously, perhaps hoping that his colleague would say no, that is madness, who else do we have in this time but each other? What purpose is there to separation but death? Surely this would be nothing less than the embracing of self-destruction. But Perlez wouldn’t speak, and Dean could not tell if his words had wounded his colleague. Perlez simply walked into his bedroom, closed the door, and did not open it for the rest of the day.

At first, Dean was anxious, and hoped for Perlez to come out and say something to him. But he had accepted the moods of this man and simply tried to go about the day as if the closed door was just part of the wall, as if the room behind it did not even exist. Mostly, he just stared at the map, contemplating possible routes. Of course, he could not stay there in Braunau, much as he liked his job and the town. If the woman were to see him on the street, who knew what she might say or do? Although it was tempting to stay close and monitor the child’s development, the design of the mission had been clear: once the child had been operated upon, the men were to disappear from his life. They had only card to play, and once played, they were to leave the game without another word.

When Dean went to sleep, the door to Perlez’s room was still closed. He had heard nothing all day long. And when he woke up the next morning, the door was open, but Perlez was gone.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Post the next one! I need to know what happens. What did Perlez do to get all beaten up??? And where did he go???

Anonymous said...

I know. It's totally unfair how he leaves us wondering every single time. It's like Stephen King with "The Green Mile."

Anonymous said...

Wouldn't it be funny if I labelled this part 4 of 5 but only had 4 parts?

Resolution is a deeply overrated concept.

Anonymous said...

That'd be fricken hilarious. Post the resolution or suffer the consequences funny guy.

Anonymous said...

Not funny, Joe. You finish it, or I'll sick (or sic, hmmm?) Lilly on you!