by Ryan Schow
Is it completely senseless to think I define myself by this super creepy creeper? It is. We don’t choose our parents, but we never choose our creator either, do we?
Pity that.
Debugging the Traveler
1
The lab was cold, empty. Holland hovered over her body, looking at the future Raven with confused, contemplating eyes. What a wreck. What a poor, wasted wreck of a creature, he thought. Her eyes were shut; breathing was normal. She was still unconscious. Still but a whisper of a child. Ruined, but terribly fragile. Beaten and neglected. The horrible, beautiful contraption, the torture device jammed in her ears, they held his curiosity. He turned Raven’s head, looked closer. The wireless earbuds inside of her ears were unlike anything he’d seen before. They were self-powered. Screwed into flesh and bone. Leaning his ear close, he heard the faint, tinny sounds of rapid fire music being pumped straight into her head.
He cringed, stood back. Think heavy metal music on steroids. The jarring sounds of it—muted to his ears, the sound so small—oh how he understood its effects on Raven! How long had these things been in her ears?
Decades for sure.
With a magnifying glass, he tried to find a way to back the screws out of her head. There were no obvious markings. The screws required neither a Phillips head nor a flat head screwdriver, and an Alan wrench would not do either; for these screws, a tool from the future was most certainly required. With miniature tools from this time, Holland gently wiggled the small devices in her ears, trying to find a weakness. Nothing moved.
He checked her pulse: steady. Her eyes: shut.
“The hell with it,” he said. With a pair of pliers and a ton of grunting and yanking, he worked on the first earbud. The pliers gave and something cracked. Parts of the device shattered, tore loose: one of the screws, half the earbud’s main speaker housing. Blood drizzled from the wound, pooling in her ears and covering the rusted, once-white earbud. He got a hold of the broken half still fixed to her head and tried twisting and levering it loose. When he got a decent grip, he gave it a mighty yank. Really ripped that damn thing about. Future Raven’s head bounced around on the table and he cursed with vigor.
But nothing.
“God dammit!” he screamed, overhanding the pliers across the lab. The fit he threw, the way he really committed himself to it like he was some asshole little child not getting candy, or having his toys taken away, it sapped him of precious energy.
Seething, breathing heavy, spent, he returned to Raven and looked at the bloody mess he created. He swiped away flung spit from the sides of his mouth, straightened his tousled hair, took a second look, this time with his magnifying glass.
“That explains it,” he said to himself, fixing his white, blood speckled lab coat.
There were other things anchoring the tiny device to her head. Something was drilled not merely into her skull, but deep inside her ear—a metal, corkscrew-shaped anchor. He wiped his hand, retrieved his pliers again, clamped on the bud. Then with a surge of willpower and determination, he went after it hard. With no luck. Frustration led to sweating and cursing, and that led to drinking and then the use of outright, unapologetic force.
In a frantic, f-bomb laced frenzy, Holland jerked and yanked and twisted at the device with all of his might. It was coming out! Huffing and spitting and grunting, he wiggled it to and fro. When the ear device finally dislodged itself, it shot free with a set of alive-looking metallic legs and tentacles fighting to stay anchored in the bloody, ruined canals of her ears. With a final relentless and exhausting tug, he tore the entire thing out. It was tantamount to pulling a tree from the ground by its roots. Out it came, bringing with it chunks of her ear drum. Blood gushed from her ear, ran down her neck and onto the table. But only for a moment. She’s a healer, he thought.
Still.
The blood eventually coagulated, but the wound took its time closing. Fascinating, he thought. After an hour, there were still small divots in her head, but the skin was sealed shut. When he got his bearings back, and had a few more shots of whatever—one of his many vodkas—he wiped up the red mess on the table and turned her head over to do the other side.
The second earbud didn’t break; it came out a little easier. But not by much. For the next few hours, he drank and studied the mechanical earbuds, marveling at the insect-like tentacles. They were metal, jointed, sharp as razors. He put them in a glass jar, watched them wiggle and writhe about, tap-tap-tapping on the glass to the gunfire sounds of its own echoing music.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, unable to stop the quake of horror that shook him.
“Jesus Christ, what?” said the voice behind him.
Summer of ’24
1
After breakfast, I head to Holland’s secret underground lab and find him standing over a glass jar. He takes the Lord’s name in vain and I’m like, “Jesus Christ, what?”
“Nothing,” he says. “It’s just…your future self has got some serious problems.”
“No shit.”
“What can I do for you, Raven?”
“You can start by telling me what you know about travelers, since I know, based upon your reaction, you already know about them.”
“I know they exist, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I am.”
“We have bigger things to talk about right now,” he says, “like the condition of your body. The future you, I mean. Her body.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Good,” he says, walking to the steel gurney holding my future self. “I got these ear things out, but it was messy.” He must have just finished because bloody rags were everywhere, as were a handful of intimidating looking work tools. Did he know what he was doing before he did it? Probably not, by the looks of things. Future me remains unconscious. At least the devices were removed from her ears. One look at her head, though, and I can tell Holland reverted to brute force.
“Gosh damn, Holland, did you put your back into it?”
“Don’t criticize my methods,” he barks.
I don’t like the look in his eye. There’s a mean streak in the man, and I’m sure I’m only scraping the surface of it. Best to switch subjects, if only for the time it takes for the devil inside of him to shrink back down.
“Last night, you didn’t seem all that surprised you were standing in front of someone from the future,” I say.
“You’re talking about Alice, I assume,” he says.
“And future me, and maybe others.”
“You know other travelers?” he asks with cold humor in his voice, like he can’t believe a little girl like me can know much about much because I’m not a hundred years old like him.
“I’m not saying that,” I say, not wanting to tell him I know about Jake.
He wipes a bit of blood from his hand on a white towel, cleans a metal tool that looks a lot like a dentist’s plaque scraper, then turns to me with the shittiest look and says, “The hell you’re not.”
I’m not sure if my insinuation pissed him off, or if he’s irritated by the interruption. Regardless, for some reason, seeing him this annoyed, knowing I unnerved him, it makes me question his stability. Before seeing what I’ve become, I enjoyed angering Holland; now I see things differently. How every choice leads to me being worse than him.
Thank you future me. Thank you Alice.
A long time ago, I vowed to never forget this ass clown is really Josef Mengele: ender of lives, torturer of the weak, a doctor with so few morals and such an unquenchable thirst for the pain of others he should be exterminated on site and with extreme prejudice. Yet here were are. Conversing. Being all civilized and shit. The man cut peoples’ genitals off for Christ’s sake! He burned infants and gassed children! It’s hard not wanting to kill him.
I dream of his death all the time.
“What I’m saying is, I’ve been in your head long enough to know things up there are worse off than even I imagined.”
“
If you don’t like the landscape,” he snarls, “stay the fuck out.”
“Who’s got the trucker’s mouth now?”
“I don’t know much about the travelers. This is still new to me,” he says with a dismissive wave. Releasing my gaze, he goes back to his work on future me. The grinded down metal plates still cap my stumped limbs and my hidden eye.
Against my better judgement, I crawl inside Holland’s brain, pilot my way through the mire of his life until I see a bloody boy on his knees in a field of thigh-high grass and a woman in a pleated but stiff looking housedress. She has a cooking apron on and she’s standing over the boy. In her hands is a cylindrical bread roller. I’m seeing this in Holland’s mind and through his eyes as if these are my own experiences and not just his.
Mengele approaches the woman, the long grass brushing against his legs, the padded down reeds soft under his feet. My feet in his memories.
Walking through the large field, I realize I’m naked. He’s naked. Mengele, or whomever he is at this point. The woman, she looks up and startles. The bread pin in her hand, it’s splattered with the boy’s blood. On his knees, the boy’s eyes are rolling back in his head and his forehead is spattered red. She slides the weapon behind her back, but not enough to hide the stains on her bleached white apron. Behind her, in the background like some sumptuous watercolor, stands a modest country home.
It must be her home, Mengele’s mind is gathering. Because I am in his head, I know we are on the outskirts of the Bavarian village of Günzburg, in Germany.
“Wo sind ihre Kleidung?” the German woman asks. Where are your clothes?
The summer breeze washes erotically over my bare skin, testing the control of my loins, filling me with a sensation of freedom I have never known as a girl. This very male, very erogenous sensation saturates my teenage body with wanting for the sake of want. Mengele doesn’t pine for the woman, nor does he bend to the possibility of sex; he’s simply thrilled.
She turns and ferociously cracks the boy one last time on the head with the bread pin and he falls backward, the death blow too much for his pale, skinny body to bear. Looking up, she brushes the long, loose strands of hair from her face, levels him with a psychotic frown.
“Ist er tot?” my mouth in Mengele’s memory says after some silence, his German sounding quite fluent even though he is not German. Is he dead?
Wait, he’s not German? No. He has to be! But being in his mind, I realize his first language is not German. WTF?
“Wer sind sie?” the woman asks. Who are you?
“If he is dead,” he says in German, ignoring her question, “then I am him.”
“He’s surely dead,” the woman says, fastening her hair back into a bun. “But you are not him.”
“You’re his mother?” She nods, but not because she wants to. The woman can’t stop looking at Mengele’s privates. She’s angry that they are out. “Then you are Walburga Theresa Mengele, daughter of Joseph and Theresia Hupfauer, yes?” the mouth in the memory asks.
Her eyes shoot up to meet his/my humored gaze. She stands perfectly still, frozen by Mengele’s knowledge, by the flagrant manner in which he vomits out the facts of her genealogy, her eyes shooting open wide enough to give her away.
“Where is Karl?” he asks. Her husband.
Okay, I’m lost. Did he just say…Mengele?
“Karl is working.”
“It would seem then,” the memory goes, “that Karl Mengele & Sons now has but two sons rather than three. The twins are all that remain of your children, I presume?”
Walburga Mengele’s eyes fall to the dead boy in the field, her demeanor weary from the physical exertion of killing her eldest child. Sorrow makes its way into her features. I can see this with eyes that are not mine, eyes that feel like mine, but aren’t.
Who these eyes belong to at this point, I don’t know. They’re Mengele’s, but…who is he if he’s not Josef Mengele?
“Karl Jr. and Alois are better behaved than this one,” she says, pointing the bloody rolling pin down at her dead child. Because I am in his head, I now know Mengele is not Mengele, that the man standing before this grisly discovery of a mother murdering her child is not the original Josef Mengele. The original Josef Mengele is dead in a field of grass, clubbed to death and kicked from the world by the same woman who gave birth to him on March 16, thirteen years prior to this memory, in 1911.
It was at this point in the memory, in the summer of ’24, that this man whose name now remains unknown to me, took on the identity of Josef Mengele.
2
My mind skitters through his, plowing haphazardly through the years, instantly knowing every name he used before Enzo Holland: Josef Mengele, Fritz Hollman, Helmut Gregor, José Mengele, Dr. Green at the CIA when he was developing mind-controlled programming maps, Wolfgang Gerhard. By the time I flush myself out of the unflushed toilet bowl that is his head, I know a few pieces of the truth. Pieces I don’t want to know. Pieces I can hardly stomach, much less believe.
“You’re a traveler,” I say, breathless, “aren’t you?”
He turns and says, “Don’t be preposterous!”
“Josef Mengele’s mother killed her son in 1924. She clubbed him to death with a rolling pin in a field outside their home in Günzburg, Bavaria. You stood there with your junk out in the open and your eyes on Walburga only seconds after she killed her son, and you said you’d take Josef’s name from them both.”
At first he is speechless, then: “You sneaky little bitch.” The fires of reprisal burn instant in his eyes. He’s dying to hurt me for what I know. He wants to kill me. Never more so than in this minute, which means this has just become the juiciest morsel of information I have on him.
“When are you from?” I ask, brazen as I push the issue.
“How many times have I told you to stay out of my head?” he snarls through gnashing teeth. His cheeks glow red with seething, and his eyes bear a wicked shine. I know that look. I know exactly what that look means.
“You can’t kill me, Holland. Not on your best day or my worst. You’d do well to remember that.”
“Yes, but I can kill her,” he barks, pointing to future me.
“Like it matters now,” I reply almost like I’m bored. “She’s practically dead as it is. You’d be doing both of us a favor by putting her out of her misery.”
“Had you told me this yesterday,” he says, measuring his words carefully, “I would have ended her existence already.”
“Leave me with her,” I say.
He stays put, insolent. He wants to tell me it’s his lab and who am I to start giving orders, but I won’t let him.
“Leave me or I will kill you right now,” I say with more emotion than I realized. Our eyes lock. For an uncomfortable, breathless moment, I startle at how serious I am. He feels it, too. Whatever the nightmares I saw in his head, whatever I sensed, the start of his life as Josef was not the start of his life. Not even close. The man who wandered naked into the field was a man far older than he first let on. Now knowing he’s centuries old, trying to wrap my head around it, I have to say, he now scares me in ways I didn’t think possible.
“There are more of us here than you think,” he says on his way out of the lab, irritated. “In fact there are thousands.”
He means fellow travelers.
“We hold all positions of power and anonymity,” he practically spits as he’s saying this, “for we are many. Far more than your unsophisticated mind can fathom.”
“I’m sure,” I say, like his mood means nothing to me, even though it means everything. Already I’m forcing my focus away from him, and making myself return to the riddle that is the future me.
“This and every other time in history is littered with them, with us,” he says in the doorway, still going on. “It’s been the privilege of the affluent to control society, to shape it to our liking, to give life and to take it, to amass fortunes or enact mass genocide. We are the future, the past, the present. You�
��d best remember that next time you threaten me, little girl.”
This admission stops my mind; the revelation of what he just confessed sends chills spidering up my spine. To my sheer horror, this world has become an onion with a thousand layers. The more I peel back, the more Holland peels back for me, the more I don’t understand what role I’m to play now. And in it all, it’s hard not to feel despair, especially an utter sense of hopelessness for what lie ahead.
“We’ll talk about this later,” I say, the blood having drained sufficiently from my face.
“No,” he says, “we won’t. This is the last we’ll speak of—”
I level him with a stare so hot and damning he cringes. With my mind and an invisible hand, I slap him across the face so hard his entire body rocks sideways and he stumbles. Blood from his mouth and nose splatter against the white hallway wall, and his pomade hair comes wildly undone. He nearly falls before catching himself.
“Test me again, fake-Josef, and you’ll lose your f*cking teeth.”
Hand to his bloody nose, a string of crimson red saliva slashed across his pale cheek, he stands straight up, fixes his hair and says something in German that sounds so hateful and profane I feel iced to the core. His face is distorted, enraged, so pumped full of ferocity I’m seriously too intimidated to look at him. It’s like he switched personalities. I show him my back, feel him literally foaming at the mouth before leaving.
The moment I hear the elevator chime open and then close, my heart resumes its beating. Even though I can snatch the very life from him any time I want, it’s all the pent-up evil simmering inside his warped mind that makes me shudder with trepidation.
Imagine standing next to something so foul and cruel, then finding out he is a demon, responsible for so much death and terror, responsible for the end of hundreds of thousands of generations of people. Imagine he will not die on his own, that his reign of horror will never, ever end, and you are basking in his pitch black aura, and that’s how I feel right now, in this very moment. I try to shake it off, but holy cow, it’s like wiping hot tar off virgin skin.
