The Economy of Light

by Jack Dann

  I was Mengele, calm as death, as the everlasting.

  But I felt no vindication, no release. Only cold, as if I had been dropped into a sea of Onca’s numbing gruel.

  And then once again I felt the thud of a blunt object across the back of my head, and the radiant whiteness, fading, fading....

  * * * *

  I regained consciousness in the bedroom where I had found myself before. It was dark, but I could make out the outlines of objects in the room, objects I had seen but not noticed: the bric-a-brac in the bookshelves, the gilt-edged picture frames on the walls, the footposts of the bed, heavy window drapes, a large table covered with books. And I could make out the shape of someone in a stuffed chair across the room. I listened, but couldn’t even make out his—or her—breathing. Just the outside noises, which were damped, as if the world had been muffled. Then the pain closed over me, as if it had somehow been forgotten in my first seconds of waiting, but broke through, to make itself known. I first felt an aching in my arm, as if it were terribly bruised, and then—as someone just coming out of anesthesia from an operation and trying to sort out the different parts of his anatomy in order to reconstruct himself back to awareness—I realized that pain was shooting through my stomach, chest, head, my entire body. I groaned, and the shadow in the chair rose and walked over to my bed.

  It was Genaro.

  He parted the netting on the bed and picked up a syringe in a plastic container from my night table. He inserted the needle into the rubber top of a small glass bottle and drew a measured amount of the reddish liquid into the syringe.

  “Genaro, how long have you been here?” I asked. “And what the hell are you giving me?”

  “Medicine,” he said. And he injected me in the thigh. I hardly felt it. “You’ve been in bed for over a week. Are you feeling any better, Meester?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you have the diarrhea?”

  “No—I don’t know. How could I have been here for over a week. It’s been a day and a night, I think. What was that medication you gave me, and where were you before?”

  You always ask two things at once, Meester,” Genaro said. He expertly broke the disposable syringe needle and dropped it into a plastic lined garbage can beside the bed.

  “The medicine....”

  “You have been getting different kinds of medicine.”

  “What kinds?” I asked.

  “To make you well.”

  “Cut the bullshit, Genaro. What did you just give me?”

  “A medicine something like the one you inhaled before. Do you remember that?”

  “That was a hallucinogen, what the hell are you giving me that for?” I tried to sit up, but my head hurt so much I had to remain where I was.”

  “No,” Genaro said, “it will all make you better. Touch your face, go ahead, Meester. Do you see, the pimples are gone.”

  I felt for the lesions and, indeed, they seemed to have disappeared.

  “This drug,” Genaro continued, “it is very strong, which is why you feel the pain.”

  I could feel it working through my bloodstream, an injection of icy liquid freezing my arteries and veins. As I looked up at Genaro, I saw another face superimposed upon his, a ghostly, evanescent apparition, which disappeared and reappeared like the neon that was blinking on and off in that room in Manaus. As the drug began to turn my face and eyes cold, I could make out who Genaro really was.

  He was the Indian who had given me the drug.

  He was an old man. A young man.

  He had taken me to Mengele.

  I had killed Mengele. The remembrance and realization was a shock. But it was not true, not real. It was a set-up. It was too easy, too pat.

  “You are not Genaro,” I said.

  “I am, Meester. I am....”

  “You are the Indian.”

  “I am both. Only now you can see that.”

  “And Mengele, you know about that?”

  “You killed him, but he is not dead.”

  “Then it’s all hallucination.”

  “No,” Genaro said. “It’s real, but like a play.”

  “Was that Mengele, then, or you?”

  Genaro made the hnrung sound, then said, “It was not me.”

  “How do you know what happened?”

  “I see into you, just as the Doutor does.”

  “How?”

  “He will tell you that...tomorrow.”

  “Or next week, if you keep me drugged—”

  “Tomorrow we will leave this room and you will see this place.”

  “And Mengele.”

  “And Mengele,” he repeated. “But now you must sleep.”

  “Is this my dream?”

  “It is and it isn’t,” Genaro said. “We are all in it together. I will show you tomorrow.”

  “Will you stay here tonight?”

  He smiled, the old side of his face not as flexible as the young and thus grimacing, said, “Yes, Meester, I will stay and watch you lose the cancer.”

  I heard his words, but they seemed to hang in the darkness, frozen, just as I was, turned to glass by the injection of hallucinogens.

  CHAPTER NINE

  GEOMETRY

  Tomorrow....

  I awakened in a blaze of light. My head ached and throbbed with it. My eyes, blinded by retinal afterimages, were squeezed shut; but the light seemed to know no boundaries. It was outside and inside, and I was burning with it.

  “Come on, now, Meester, you have slept quite enough.”

  I opened my eyes, expecting to be looking into the sun, expecting Genaro to be beside me, tending me. Instead, I found Mengele sitting and smoking a cigarette in the stuffed chair across the room; the fragrant odor of Turkish tobacco suffused the air. Mengele was dressed in a tan linen suit, and he smiled at me, as if I were a source of great pride to him.

  Light streamed in through the windows, illuminating white tendrils of smoke that seemed to dance and swirl and curl in the air. The heavy brocade curtains were open, but the room itself was cool and shadowed. I blinked, still seeing afterimages, as if I had indeed been staring into bright light, as if I were still seeing the outlines of dreams. My skin burned, tingled. “Where is Genaro?”

  “He left some weeks ago,” Mengele said, speaking to me in German.

  I sat up in bed. I was wearing satin pajamas. Everything smelled fresh, clean, healthy. Perfumed. “He told me that he would wait....”

  He promised....

  Mengele nodded. “He waited to see that you were well. He administrated to you and sent the nurse away. Then, when you were out of danger, he came to me. He gave the dreams back to me, the dreams that made him double. Old like me and young like you.” He smiled again, as if enjoying the irony of calling me young.

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Long ago he was sick, and I helped him. Like he helped you.” Smiling through smoke. “Like we helped you. Now, thanks to my generosity, he is free. All debts paid, and so he has gone back to his heavy-fleshed wife and to your burned land.” Mengele stood up. “But you and I...we have each other’s poison, and we have Genaro’s poison. So what shall we do with all these poisonous nightmares? What shall we do?” He gave me a paternalistic look, tapped the carved wooden arm of the chair, and then stood up. He had the energy of a young man. “Now get dressed and meet me in the garden. You are no longer ill, except for the sickness in your soul. Are you hungry?”

  I took a deep breath and realized that my stomach didn’t hurt, my body didn’t ache—the headache had dissolved—and indeed I was suddenly famished. I nodded, and he bowed and left the room. A moment later a pregnant woman brought me a tray of food: bacon and eggs, manioc, and cubes of barely cooked meat. She set the tray on the bed and stepped back while I ate.

  She wore a rough skirt, but no blouse; her heavy breasts were splayed and painted with thick red circles and scallops. She had a wide, child-like face, and her heavy earlobes were pierced with wooden plugs;
balsa spokes radiated from her nasal septum, giving her the appearance of a heavy, pregnant cat.

  “Are you my nurse?” I asked in Portuguese, then in English and German; but she didn’t respond. She just stood near the bed and waited until I was finished; then she took the tray and left me to dress.

  I got out of bed and suddenly felt a rush of joy. I wasn’t dizzy. I felt weak, but not ill. I was going to live. I was on fire, but I was going to live.

  I gazed out the window at Mengele’s formal maze of a garden and saw Mengele below, patiently waiting for me.

  * * * *

  We walked a straight line through Mengele’s tropical gardens, which for all the wild, exotic growth were formal and studied: expansive lawns that directed the eye to stone steps, classically inspired fountains, huge sculpted topiaries, arbors and enclosures with geometer’s lines of miraculous tropical color—planned and limited explosions of shrub, vine, and flowers—pergolas, bowers, streams, ponds, and angel white temples. Surrounding all was rain forest, the ominous dark green walls that appeared to extend forever.

  Behind us was his neoclassical mansion of red brick, white marble, and hundreds of oblong windows, a house that would have suited Jane Austen’s England, but was a red welt here in this land of lush growth.

  “I told you it wouldn’t work,” Mengele said as we walked down a mown path toward an open Ionic temple.

  I had a fleeting thought that the temple was a doorway into a dangerous yet magical forest. “What wouldn’t work?” I asked.

  “Murdering me.”

  “So I see.” I studied his face, looking for Uncle Pepe, the younger, hard-faced Mengele.

  “Oh, I’m dead all right, just like Erwin Schrödinger’s cat.” Mengele kept a brisk pace, as if he had created this garden for marching rather than strolling. Do you know about that?”

  “Yes,” I said impatiently. But—”

  “In Schrödinger’s thought experiment, the cat is alive in one universe, dead in another. It all depends on the observer whether he sees a live cat or a dead one.”

  “Well, I guess I just picked the wrong universe.”

  “No,” my son, “you are between them. You have not made your choice yet.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Mengele made the hnrung, hnrung sound, the mocking sound of the dreamer.

  “Well...?” I asked.

  “Because I have made my choice.” He seemed pleased with himself. “It gives one a certain perspective and advantage.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You choose to live.”

  “You will know that soon enough, too,” Mengele said as he stepped between the columns of the temple, his feet clattering on the tiled stone floor.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “For a walk. Are you tired?”

  “A bit.”

  “Then I know just the place where we can rest,” and Mengele crossed the floor of the temple, stepped onto the lawn on the other side, and directed me to follow him into the rainforest. The demarcation between garden and forest could have been drawn with a straightedge; it certainly wasn’t natural. “It must take an army of gardeners to keep the rainforest from taking over,” I said.

  “No, the trees stop just there of their own accord.” Mengele gazed at me as if I was a child again, his expression gentle, his eyes guileless and clear as the empty sky above; and once again I noticed the gap between his front teeth and the mole on his left cheek. “I’ve learned to live in harmony with nature,” Mengele said.

  As we walked under a canopy of evenly spaced trees, the temperature dropped, the world darkened; and then we were in the rainforest. Everything was quiet, hushed, as if we had entered a cathedral. The light was soft and weak; shadows danced across the columns of trees. Mengele slowed his pace and appeared to relax. I felt a sudden, cold apprehension that something palpable had changed, or would change. Light flickered through branches; little black uakaris monkeys leaped through the foliage high above, shaking the fronds; parrots screeched; and, distracted, I almost stepped on a small, crimson snake that corkscrewed into the thick leaf mulch. Everything seemed to be in sudden movement; and just as suddenly we stepped into a large clearing. I could feel the heat of the late-morning sun on my face. The ground was cracked; half-charred tree stumps were everywhere. I could see a large thatch-roofed hut on the other side of the clearing, the soil seemingly fertile around it, for there were plenty of fruit trees: orange, lemon, plum, and mango; and coconut and cashew nut and breadfruit. I could also hear water in the distance, a great roaring; perhaps a waterfall. As we neared the hut, I saw that the walls were constructed of closely placed palings. There were no windows—that would certainly keep out the mosquitoes—only a door covered with thatch. A woman in her fifties was roasting manioc in an open shelter a few yards from the hut. She was naked from the waist up like my nurse, her body chalked and dyed to resemble the markings of a jaguar, her nose and lips festooned with palm splinters, She shook a square pan and raked the grains back and forth with a stick. “Whoooo,” she shouted, alerting whoever was in the hut, and grinned happily at Mengele. Mengele said something to her in her own tongue, which she seemed to find hysterically funny; and then he gestured to me to follow him into the hut. Someone inside the hut screamed, a strangled scream that chilled me.

  The woman smiled at Mengele and shook her head sharply as we went inside.

  It was dark and close and fetid: the smells of illness, perspiration, kerosene, smoke, and something else, something sweet and cloying. Several lanterns hung from support posts and cast a reddish light. A fire was burning, the resinous smoke rising. Beside the fire a woman was lying upon a pallet. A man leaned over her, drew noisily upon a hand-rolled cigarette, and blew the smoke into the woman’s face. As my eyes adjusted to the murky darkness, I could make out more and more details. The woman was white, blond, in her thirties, perhaps; but emaciated, ravaged. Her cheeks were sunken, and she was wheezing with every breath; her eyes stared blindly ahead.

  The man looked at Mengele, questioning. His dark features were flattened, his thick black hair combed over his forehead. He could have been thirty or sixty; I couldn’t tell. He wore a red and blue-checked shirt and white rumpled trousers.

  “Bom dia, doutor.”

  “It is going well, Báquiro?” Mengele asked.

  “This woman is very sick. She has too many darts inside her. All over. In her liver. In her stomach. In her head. Her eyes are nearly dead, so it is very hard to see the darts. Where they are.”

  Mengele nodded, then sat down on a pallet. I followed suit. “Báquiro, this is Stephen.”

  Báquiro nodded to me. “Aprendiz?” he asked Mengele.

  Mengele laughed, and I felt hot anger constricting my chest. “I’m not anybody’s apprentice.” I started to stand up, but Mengele gently tapped my knee. “Báquiro is very special, very talented. He is a brujo, a doctor who helps me. And he is also a great herbalist. He believes that spirits or demons or perhaps another brujo has shot invisible darts into his patient. Those darts made her ill and will kill her...or so Báquiro believes.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  “Are you asking if I believe in Báquiro’s invisible dart etiology?”

  Mengele just smiled at me.

  “I go back into her now,” Báquiro said, and he leaned close to her, looking into her dead eyes, as if to brush his lips against hers, a quiet foreplay. The image of a snake about to strike formed in my mind.

  “Her mother brought her here to me,” Mengele said. He chuckled. “The trek almost killed both of them.”

  “Why did you bring me here?” I asked.

  “To rest, of course, and to show you miracles.”

  “I thought you believed yourself to be a man of science.”

  “I have always been a man of science, Stephen. Then as now I believed in transformation.”

  “No, you believed in murder.”

  “I believed in healing,” Mengele said, “but I
was an agent of the state, the community...the volk.”

  “Curing by killing, is that it?”

  Mengele gazed at the brujo and his dying, blond patient.

  “I was a physician-biologist. I believed in National Socialism, which, in essence, was applied biology. I believed the volk was the vessel of God; I was nothing but one of its instruments.”

  “And now? Now that there is no volk to give you an excuse to murder?”

  Mengele smiled and shook his head, a slight, subtle movement. “You are right, Stephen, the volk is now history, and so I have moved on. I came here, to this place of ignorance, to do what I can. To cure whom I can.”

  “Just as you cured the Jews, just as you cured my brother and my mother?” The mephitic closeness of the hut seemed to dampen voice and emotion; I spoke to Mengele as if I was separated by a great distance, yet we could hear each other’s every whisper...every breath and heartbeat.

  “Much that happened was unfortunate,” Mengele said as he watched Báquiro, who was leaning over the sick woman as if giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “I was indeed trying to cure. Our mission was nothing less than the remaking of the German people and, in time, the people of the world. That was the mission of all doctors who were adherents of National Socialism. Our focus was revitalization and purification. But you were our misfortune. Our disease. The camps tested us all. Every killing went against the grain, but it had to be done; and we had to be hard. There was no choice. It was a war of racial hygiene. We were trying to save humanity.”

  “From me,” I said, goading him.

  “Yes, from all of you.”

  “You can’t still believe that.”

  “No,” Mengele said. “Of course not. It was a long time ago. The world has changed, we have changed.”

  “No, we haven’t changed.”

  “Ah, but yes we have, Stephen. I can still believe in my unfortunate past and live in the present. I cured you, after all.”