As Hitler turned his head back toward the other men, Daniel could see that they were enveloped by transparent mountain and valley views. The Bavarian Alps. Berghof. Hitler tapped a cane impatiently on the stone floor. There was a woman on the other side of the men, smiling, blinking into the sun, and fading out briefly with each blink. She carried a basket of food. It was a semi-formal sort of meeting, Daniel thought, a summer gathering outside in the fresh mountain air. Eva was laughing now, their dogs barking. It was a typical afternoon at home.
A couple introduced their young daughter to the führer. He smiled, put his palm against her cheek.
Hitler stopped, stood erect. He turned his head toward Daniel again, his nose wrinkling as if he’d smelled a bad smell. The führer’s pupils were like black beads, his face pale as a sheet. Around him the buildings were on fire, the blasted streets. A burn spot grew slowly on Hitler’s cheek, like a spot on a piece of film stuck over a hot projector bulb. The führer’s lips curled. He started to speak. The others leaned forward, mesmerized. The German cities had been bombed, but nein, he would not be visiting. He wore the same look he’d had when he’d ordered the generals to be hung on meat hooks in 1944. An expression of mild distaste. Something rotten had been hidden in the room. Alle meine Frauen Selbstmordversuch, he was thinking. All my women attempted suicide.
Hitler’s large pale-blue eyes were shining. Certain and cold.
Certainty is boring. Certainty means the mind is dead, Daniel thought at the fuehrer. But if Hitler heard him he did not react.
“I submit to fate,” Hitler said. Daniel couldn’t tell if that was directed at him personally. “Ich lege das Schicksal.”
He’d come from ordinary stock, and he’d grown up an ordinary man until history had given him his opportunity.
The führer’s eyes widened. Something brushed Daniel’s arms on both sides. He backed away, but they were all around him, running into him, packed so closely together he could not breathe, all the thin men in their blue-striped pajamas, all those Jewish Muselmänner, starved and exhausted, and Daniel could not tell if they were staring at Hitler or if they were staring at him. He squirmed back through the crowd trying desperately not to scream, because if he screamed the rest of the building would come down with the power of his distress. In the distance he saw the windows, and although every emaciated hand seemed to be upon him, every mouth whispering in his ear their truncated story of a life cut short, he managed to reach that singular view of an outside world.
The sky was a silver color streaked with gray. Their usual view of other parts of the building had changed. It was difficult to say how exactly, given that much of that wing had been in ruins ever since he had arrived in Ubo. Daniel tried to make sense of it, then realized that parts of the structure were simply gone. He peered down toward the base of the building and saw the flood waters swirling past, eating at the foundations.
“How are you feeling, Daniel?”
Lenin was standing beside him. The group of men Daniel had interacted with since his arrival had been relatively small, and even among those he would hardly have called any of them friends, although Falstaff had come closest, despite Daniel’s many misgivings. Lenin had probably been the one he had talked to least. “A bit better, I think. Still somewhat fuzzy.”
“Do those—” He pointed at the cylinders attached to Daniel’s scalp. “Does all that hurt?”
“Not exactly. But they make my head feel bigger… heavier. Although I wouldn’t think they’d weigh that much. But it feels as if my neck is likely to snap if I don’t balance things correctly. I feel like the Elephant Man, afraid to lie down normally, my head about to crush my spinal cord. John said he was going to go find something. I don’t know where.”
“How are they attached?” He reached to touch one of the cylinders.
Daniel pulled away. “Better not—I don’t know if it’s safe. I don’t know how—I assume they’re stuck to the scalp.”
“I don’t see any burn marks or—sorry—melted skin. But the truly strange thing is the way they go right through your hair. Your hair isn’t flattened, cut, messed up in any way. In fact it looks perfectly combed. Don’t you even get—what is it they call it?—‘bed head’? What are these things anyway?”
The state of his hair seemed a trivial concern, but it strangely disturbed him to think about it. “The cylinders appear to be part of the equipment transferring the scenarios into our heads. I don’t understand much about it, but I think they place them on our skulls, and they’re the devices that deliver the information. But they’re not supposed to be attached. They’re wireless.”
“Was that a result of the explosion?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t really hear the explosion—I just woke up to the results. Were you in one of the labs?”
“No—they didn’t take me this time. They took Walter, and I guess they took John—at least I didn’t see him around for awhile. I’m sure John will figure out something to help you.” He sounded less than convinced. “Or maybe the roaches will just remove them when they send us all home.”
Daniel was shocked. “You really believe we’re going home?”
“I had a dream I went home. And I have faith. You have to have faith, Daniel—it’s too hard to live without it. Didn’t you say you have family? You have to have faith you’re going to see them again.”
“We don’t even know for sure how much time has passed, do we? What if we’ve traveled through time? Our families may be dead.”
“Why would you even think that?”
Suddenly the God of Mayhem was standing there between them, reaching out to touch them from his devastated Boston. Daniel couldn’t even guess how far in the future they were. The God’s seemingly compassionate eyes peered down from the separations in the multicolored layers of cloth. He might kill either of them simply because he had an impulse. Daniel turned his head, brought it back, and the image broke into scattered pieces. How was he going to tell Lenin about any of this?
“I don’t know, Charles. I just have a feeling.”
“It’s okay, I get—I don’t know—notions, myself. Because of the scenarios, and I think just because of being so far away from home and in this strange, unfathomable place. But evil will lie to you, you know that, don’t you? And everything about this place is pure evil and of the devil.”
“We can agree on that.”
“So tell me, tell me about your family, and how you came here. Tell me what’s troubling you.”
Daniel told Lenin then about his wife, and Gordon, and Gordon’s congenital heart disease and what it had meant, and how it had worn them all down.
“It was constant worry, constant self-examination. Were we being too protective and ruining his quality of life, or were we not being protective enough and putting him at serious risk? Most of the time we were just exhausted, getting him ready for another surgery, trying to convince him that the clear liquids we were feeding him were for his own good and that he shouldn’t cheat. He was just a kid, so of course he blamed us for not giving him the foods he wanted, and we’d tell him to be brave about it when he whined and then later we’d feel so terrible because why should a kid be asked to be that brave?
“They kept telling us to ‘treat him normally,’ but how can watching your child for signs of heart failure, developmental delays, and giving him all these medicines—how can that be normal? And if he throws up his medicine do you give him some more, or are you going to create an overdose? Or if he gets upset and spits half of it out? Sometimes I’d just want to shake him when he pulled a stunt like that.