As he enveloped me in his embrace, a burning rage fell over me. It thrummed through me like an electric current. He cooed his unintelligible German platitudes at me, my anger growing inside me like a living thing, so naturally, I assumed that the vibration I was feeling was my building fury, nothing more.
It was only when he drew me tight to his chest that I realized the vibration was coming from him, not me, and that despite the fact it threatened to shake the fillings from this idiot woman’s teeth, the Führer here didn’t seem to notice.
That’s when I remembered my last moments on this earth.
Seeing my Elizabeth on the busy city street, child-plump and beautiful.
Calling her name despite myself, even though I knew it wouldn’t matter, that she’d made her choice.
The mad-eyed man in his pageboy cap and woolen overcoat, his smile manic, his mischief-glinting eyes locking on mine and never deviating.
His hand reaching for my chest.
Plunging inside.
Grasping tight my soul.
It wasn’t until the Führer screamed that I snapped back to reality, as unreal as that reality seemed. My hand was buried deep inside his chest, straight through his clothes though his body offered up no resistance, and there was no wound. His eyes were wide, his mouth an “O” of shock. My long, feminine, enameled nails grazed against something warm and round and alive, and instinctively, I grasped it. And just like that, the bunker office dropped away, as did the planet, and my own thoughts and memories to boot.
It was then that I discovered what hell truly was.
Touching that man’s blackened soul, atrophied from disuse, experiencing every moment that led him to my grasp. The choices he’d made. The lives he’d sacrificed. The delight he’d taken in the suffering of others.
Lilith never told me it would be like this. That I’d see what he’d seen. Do what he’d done. Feel what he’d felt.
She never warned me.
Never said.
She must have known I’d never do it if she had.
You know the worst of it, of watching in mute horror as this madman’s blasphemous existence unfurled before me? It was experiencing the sense of smug self-satisfaction he felt. The entitlement. The bitter, petulant insistence even now that this fate which had befallen me (him protested the part of me that held on tight to who I was, him not me but him) was Not My Fault, Not My Doing, Not The Life of Greatness I Deserved. These feelings weren’t my own, you understand, but his, overlaid atop my own revulsion at his every thought and deed.
That’s what I told myself. What I tell myself still, about that and every collection since.
But the fact is, in that moment, experiencing the sum total of your mark’s life’s arc, there’s scarcely a job where you don’t — if only for a single, horrible, illusory second — get the secondhand sense of certitude at your (their/our) incontrovertible rightness. And it’s that moment of every job that steals a little bit of who you are. Because our actions can’t all be justified, and Lord knows those of the folks I take sometimes fail to come within a country mile. But still, to a one, they’re all so goddamned certain. Something about that reaches cold hands into the core of you, into that tight-tied hidden bundle of convictions and true things that make you you, and that you’ve kept so secret and well-protected all these years, and shakes it, hard.
In that moment, you don’t know anything. You can’t know. You can’t believe. Because you know you’re just as likely to be misguided as were they.
After all, why the fuck else would you wind up with a gig as a Collector in the first place?
That head-trip’s a lot to take in on any job. And Adolf Hitler was far from any job. It didn’t leave me rattled, it left me shattered.
Annihilated.
When I finally tore free his soul, it was by accident. I’d simply crumpled to the floor with my hand still wrapped around it, and yanked it out as I fell. The swirling morass and piercing discord that was his soul’s corrupted light and song vanished like someone had flipped a switch.
I shook as if with seizure, so wracked with guilt was I when I was once more myself (or something like it, I thought, draped as I was in a strange woman’s flesh) it felt like a physical affliction. Snot and tears poured uncontrollably from me, from his lover’s face. My mouth was open in silent imitation of a scream; I think I would have wailed aloud had the horrors I’d just experienced not ripped the breath from my lungs.
For a time, I was outside myself — my new self, I corrected, my meat-self, my borrowed self — hovering above my fleshly vessel it seemed, driven half-mad by all I’d seen. I drifted in and out of consciousness for what felt like days, but by the clock must have been minutes. When I finally came around, I found myself guilt-stricken sobbing with my head on the floor, staring across its concrete sheen at the lifeless body of the man I’d been sent to kill.
I found my feet, shambled over to him and kicked him hard across the face. It didn’t help, so I kicked again, harder. That didn’t make me feel any better, either.
From somewhere a thousand miles away, I heard a voice like bourbon layered over honey. “Collector,” it said. “You’ve done well. Now we must bundle up his soul and go.”
Lilith. I ignored her, dropped to my knees and pummeled the lifeless body before me with my fists. They were delicate and ineffectual, and soon swelled with every blow, hurting me far more than it could ever hurt him.
He was gone. Dead. There was nothing more that I could take from him.
But then I heard his wife crying in the back of her own mind, forced to watch as I’d felled her beloved, and shrieking ever louder with each blow I (she/we) landed on his corpse, and I realized that wasn’t true.
I lurched toward the desk. Found the bottle with its amber pills. Dumped a handful into my hand, and tossed them into my mouth, Lilith shouting behind me all the while.
I bit down hard, chewing until my mouth was full of deadly paste that stank of bitter almonds. Then I swallowed it all down.
A stabbing pain in my gut doubled me over. I collapsed onto the surface of the desk, atop its mess of papers. Atop Hitler’s own gun.
By force of will, I made my meat-suit stand. Her vision swam. Her limbs trembled as the poison kicked in, made picking up the Walther hard, ade standing harder still. I fell to my knees, straddling the Third Reich’s dead Führer. Then, Lilith shrieking, I stuffed the barrel of his gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
“Guess I’ll see you both in hell,” I said.
Then I woke up, wracked with the pain of my first death experienced without the gauzy veil of blissfully numbing shock, in a barracks bunk in Guam.
“You mind a little company?”
The sun was full up by the time Lilith arrived. The sand was sun-warmed all around me, and my skin a darkening brown, but still my shivering had not abated. Just like at the flat in Berlin, I hadn’t heard her approach.
She didn’t wait for an answer, which is for the best, because there wasn’t any answer coming. Instead, she plopped down on the sand beside me in a white bikini made, it seemed, from spider-silk and happy thoughts. We sat in silence for a good long while — an hour, maybe more — our shoulders close enough to touch. Her skin was warm against my own. A small kindness, a simple comfort. In that hour, my shaking finally abated.