The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  He gave me a look of neither damnation nor forgiveness, only regret.

  Von Lüth’s mjölnir still dangled from his belt. He drew himself erect enough to rip free of his captors, clicked together his heels with inviolable hardihood, unhooked the weapon, and executed the last, best sieg heil of his life, thrusting upward the mjölnir in honor of his Führer, before taking the hammer with both hands and with breathtaking gusto driving it into the center of his face.

  The impact was not too bad to witness; all is relative in these matters. It was, at least, fast, a pearlescent blur, a scrunch of bone, two black blurts of blood. Had only it stopped there. Von Lüth, blind but alive, dislodged the mjölnir from his dented face and fissured sinuses. It made a slurping sound; broken teeth and shards of bone shot out. It is his second blow, executed with the same mindful deliberation as the first, that haunts me. I cannot say if he died quickly from it, though once he’d fallen, the skittering of his heels continued. It was a genuine suicide, cancelling the counterfeit one of his Otto. Perhaps that was the reason for his big, bloody, broken smile.

  The Fifty-One adjudged it good payment, but was it, Reader? How could it be? I turned away—to flee, ever to flee—but there was nowhere left to scramble but to the sky, so I hoisted my body onto the sill and coiled. Men’s shadows threatened, so I pointed the gun at the ceiling and fired: blank, blank, bullet, blank, bullet. The shadows retracted. My nose was flattened against cold glass. I gasped at the pure silver of total fog.

  I cannot say that I recall squeezing my body through the open window, but I do recall the screams and shouts for how they drowned out the phantom excoriations of Rigby and Meixelsperger. Still, how pleasant it was, in a death long choked with uncertainty, to know exactly which aperture through which to wiggle, which handholds to relinquish, which world to leave behind.

  XVIII.

  THE GOGGLES DID NOT FIT, and it annoyed me. Because it had been twenty-four months since I’d felt any emotion at all, I mollycoddled my annoyance as one does a campfire. One, the elastic band had been set to dwarf diameter. Two, the goggles were made of metal and were too damn heavy; I thought they might rip the flesh from my temples. Three, the round orange-tinted lenses reminded me of Dr. Leather’s Isolator. Lying there amid strange red grass, I imagined that I could hear, rustling about the bamboo, my former tormentor still mocking my pitiful attempts at humanity:

  Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .

  Isolator or not, I was most assuredly isolated. Though U.S. Army Special Forces would not be officialized for another seven years, what else could I call my covert company of escorts? We’d skimmed the black waters of the bay before making our clandestine nighttime landfall, creeping for an hour past pumpkin fields and drowsy, tall-roofed temples, before they’d left me in the woodland with a bicycle, reiterating via hand signals our impending rendezvous.

  Bamboo is an earthly magic. With it you can fashion a knife sharp enough to kill a beast, a bridge over which to lug the carcass, a house inside which to drag it, a plate upon which to cut it, a table upon which to eat it, and implements with which to dine upon it. I had hours to wait, too long to resist the plant’s patient petition, and so gave in, reliving the past two years, most of it spent in a London jail. The Limeys didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. Hour to hour, day to day, month to month, MI6 Intelligence, unfamiliar with my mission, put to me thousands of questions regarding who I was, where I’d been, and how I’d made it out of Berlin. Whatever allegiance to America I’d held had expired; I gave them their answers.

  After performing my meteorite act from the Fliegende Hitler and landing in the deep, dark waters of the Schwielowsee southwest of Berlin, I’d floated for a time beneath swirling fog, before, on canine instinct, paddling through narrower straits until coming upon the Elbe River. I followed it north, all the way to Hamburg.

  The crowd at Tempelhof had been right to brood about the city’s destruction. The Allies’ aptly named Operation Gomorrah had peeled eight square miles of the city from the planet. Much of Hamburg still burned, and the river water inside my body cavities heated, evaporated, and generated about me a rainbow aura. I pretended that it protected me. I would not be stirred by the tarantula twists of fried corpses being chipped from cement with shovels. I walked, walked some more, and by the by came upon a band of Brits.

  MI6 was frustrated by how few details of strategic worth I could supply. I hung my worthless noggin, agreed, and only lifted it weeks later when a trio of American OSS agents arrived. I nearly sobbed Rigby’s name—my kind, tolerant teacher would console and advise me—but he wasn’t among them. I refused to answer questions until they divulged his whereabouts, and, to their credit, they were forthright: Allen Rigby was no longer with OSS. They paused for follow-up questions, pointedly ignoring my jutting rib, but I did not bother. Rigby had bet his career on Operation Weeping Willow, and J-1121 had botched it.

  Americans traveled light. When they left, they did not take me.

  It was from my holding pen that I followed the terminating saga of what the Germans called Götterdämmerung, or the Twilight of the Gods. On June 6, the same cursed date of that first assault at Belleau Wood, the Allies invaded Normandy, setting into motion the endgame. In July 1944, men better than I—Nazis, in fact; the traitorous sort Meixelsperger had loved—succeeded in exploding a suitcase bomb beneath a table at which Hitler sat. The suitcase had been nudged a few critical feet by ignorant shoes, Hitler had survived the blast, and the conspirators were herded and executed.

  Meanwhile, I, useless corpse, took six-hundred-foot dives from zeppelins and kept living.

  Von Lüth’s suicide proved to be a bellwether. In April 1945, after months spent roving about an underground bunker while Russians penetrated Berlin, Adolf Hitler shot himself, prideful of his slaughter of the subhumans until the end. Weeks later, Heinrich Himmler was caught trying to skip Germany, and while undergoing a British Army medical exam he chomped into the same kind of L-pill Rigby had given me in the C-53 Skytrooper. He died of cyanide poisoning, the same as millions of concentration-camp inmates, though let us not be dazzled by irony. Himmler died with a smile on his face. Why the smile? I wondered if it had to do with the rumor that, after giving the panicked order for Schloss Wewelsburg to be burned, he’d buried a chest of nine thousand Death’s-Head Rings in the forest near the castle.

  Some lonely nights I’d dare the darkness and ask myself if I still wanted one. The answers deserved the pillow-smotherings I gave them. The rings were out there, I knew, the same as were Nazi ideals, waiting for someone to dig them up and start the whole thing over. For now, at least, the Thousand-Year Reich dreamed of by von Lüth had been stunted at twelve. Try as I did to sneer at the memory of the hulking bumbler, the picturing of his eager, appled cheeks reliably turned me catatonic. Go on, Allies, toss my corpse wherever you like.

  Where they’d tossed me was in the red grass of Sakai, Japan, across the Bungo Channel at the southern edge of Honshū. One final mission, decreed the Americans, to make up for the one I’d bollixed, and then I’d be allowed to return home. Home? That gave me a rare laugh. I had no home, no people, no history, no future.

  Allied advertising had made the case that Japs, those kamikaze dog-eaters, were as alien as Martians. But so far I’d appreciated what I’d seen and heard: the green, vascular pillars of clacking bamboo; birds of exceptional trumpet; and across the valley, wooden cart wheels clucking beneath the pops and purrs of Japanese conversation. While I’d been dunked in doldrums, a brilliant blue morning had risen.

  From the city I heard a siren, different from those in Berlin but used for the same purpose. How long had I been lying there? I sat up, checked my pocket watch. Oh, yes—did I neglect to mention it? As begrudging recompense for a difficult job maladministered, the Americans had presented me an envelope containing not another Ahnenpass but rather the artifacts that truly identified me: the crumpled photo of Merle, Piano’s faded map of the Meuse-A
rgonne, the Barker’s Atlanta Constitution advertisement, and, of course, the Excelsior. But had some jokester agent winded it before handing it over?

  The watch, you see, was still ticking.

  The siren subsided, a false alarm. Army orders meant shit-all to me, but the Excelsior was Wilma Sue herself, tsking my sloth. For her sake, perhaps, I could try to reach my position in time. I stood, affixed my goggles, freed the bicycle from bamboo, and crept from the forest. My features were Aryan, not Japanese, and movement, even in the countryside, was risky. I pedaled quietly down a dirt path toward the city three kilometers north. On outlying trails I spotted other bicyclists, but no honking autos, no crashing tanks, no saber-rattling lines of men whose insignias were all that differentiated their methods of cruelty.

  War in Japan, thought I, had been overrated.

  Then a ship called the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb called Little Boy upon a city called Hiroshima. No class of goggles can shade one from such an event. Earth was gobbled up by the sun, a thousand-foot fireball of pure magnesium white. As the one person the U.S.A. knew to be invulnerable to gamma-ray radiation, I’d been ordered to be at Hiroshima city limits to observe up close the detonation of the so-called gadget, and I’d screwed it up. Apologies, Wilma Sue.

  So I wasn’t there to witness the tens of thousands vaporized into carbon dust, nor the one hundred thousand more splattered about in undifferentiated globs. I did get to see, however, the seismic wave that undulated outward from the bomb site at the speed of sound, a rolling, ink-black cloud that blew brick buildings to shrapnel and shaved grass from the ground. Bartholomew Finch, that feisty old dynamitier, would have been much impressed.

  No two-wheeler, no matter how well piloted, could survive the force. I was thrown twenty feet from the bike. When next I became aware, the blue sky above had gone the color of mud. I sat up, my flesh refracting heat in glistening waves, and witnessed the uppermost contortions of the sixty-thousand-foot mushroom cloud. Reference a history text, Reader. It was less a mushroom than it was a tree of orange bark, red branches, and leaves sizzling down like—how about that?—a weeping willow.

  Here, at last, was the Yggdrasil.

  It made bleak sense. Wasn’t the blight of utter annihilation the truest of all possible enlightenments? For a long while, I was still, again the obedient student before one of Abigail’s tutors, and through tinted goggles I studied the tree’s branches for buds of wisdom before they burned away. Like its gardener, Gød Almighty, Yggdrasil was a tease, using its own vines to smother itself into an inconclusivity. What it left behind was what Gød always left behind—Old Testament fire. Hiroshima was an inferno.

  It was a lesson comprised of lifetimes worth of shrieking and sobbing coming from all directions. The brown sky brightened to copper, and this noxious radiance allowed me to see the monster’s approach. It was at the bottom of the hill on which I sat, weaving its slow way up the trail. I stood, knees shaking but emboldened by longing. After all, I too was a monster, and at this low, lonely point near the end of the world, I was eager to meet a second of my wretched kind.

  The monster was charred black. That was all I could tell. I began to walk toward it so that I might shorten its arduous progress. I passed a cemetery of dislodged grave stones and climbed over an industrial smokestack that had blown onto the path. As I progressed, a strange rain began to fall, blotches of thick, obsidian fluid. Much later, the world would learn that, well, shucks—it was a radioactive precipitate of soot that would rot the innards of the thousands of thirsty survivors who drank it. We’re awful sorry about that.

  To the eyes, though, the rain had an odd beauty, as if the ink of traditional Sumi-e paintings had poured from an overhead bowl. Grass was black. Trees were black. Rooftops were black. The monster, black already, soaked it up and shone blacker. Closer now. It moved on hind legs like a human, and though it had a round thing like a head, there was no face. Even closer, a revision: it had a face, but its eye sockets were swollen shut, its nose was gone, and its lower jaw was missing, turning the bottom half of its head into a rapacious hole. The monster had no skin, no fingers, and no toes, but it did have a porcupine exoskeleton, unless those were shards of embedded glass, which they were.

  The monster, once upon a time a man, had no senses left and yet sensed me.

  It swayed in the apocalyptic rain.

  A wheeze fluted from its cauterized chest.

  Forget our winners and losers. Forget Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Truman. If the lil’ gadget had cracked open the Atomic Age, then this was the only offspring that counted, one fertilized by Yggdrasil cinder, a New Man nothing like the Übermensch the Germans had promised. He was not white, but black. He was not blond, but hairless. He was not tall, but shriveled. He was not strong, but diseased. Yet it was he, the Millennialist, who’d been birthed from total war, who would forevermore point humankind’s way with his fingerless nubs and symbolize, for me, America’s soul, incinerated in a mad dash for Progress.

  Far across the Pacific, snug in beds it believed unassailable, America had that morning contracted the Millennialist’s disease as well, and though it would take decades to notice the symptoms, each man, woman, and child had become my sibling in degeneration. Splitting atoms atop living subjects had been an experiment, hadn’t it? Not so different from the experiments upon the Mauthausen dissection tables? The results, as I read them, were conclusive to those looking through the right kind of goggles.

  America was sick.

  Our empire had begun to decay.

  PART EIGHT

  1946–1957

  It Happens That Your Hero Finds Better Living, Good Hygiene, And Mutual Annihilation In A Paint-By-Numbers Landscape.

  I.

  AMERICA WAS AN INDUSTRIAL TARN of gluey asphalt, and upward was the only feasible direction, were I to extract myself from its eternal black slurp. Just as with my Marine Corps unit twenty-seven years prior, I’d been shipped to Virginia, the site of a military base where they handed over—carefully, so that they did not have to touch me—four years of back wages and discharged me, dishonorably it seemed, though there was no red stamp to prove it. I bought a compass and set off northward, alternating between hitchhiking and plain old hiking.

  It was 1946, but it felt as though I were back with Dr. Whistler’s Pageant of Health along a medicine-show circuit. I traveled through Maryland orchards, sniffing for the funk of Lake Erie, though what I smelled instead was cooked flesh. Legions of apple trees concealed a twiglike lurker—the Millennialist, that reminder of humankind’s futility, his bottomless jester jaw japing. Loud though were the demands of the Fifty-One that I right more wrongs—fifty-two of them, fifty-three, up, up, up—the Millennialist’s desert gasp boomed louder. I hooked west to the scrapyards of Pennsylvania; the Millennialist shuffled there, too, his wide-open arms shimmering like steel. Every Ohio valley: he slunk, a garter snake through grass. Indiana’s ochre plains: he was a road sign driven into Earth’s heart. Illinois’s cropland grids: he advanced between stripes of soy, ashing poison.

  I kept well south of Chicago, that blinking lighthouse of regret, but Iowa’s ocean of corn, crackling like wind through the Millennialist’s crust, brought to mind Church, a regret almost as strong. I fixed my compass and hitched into the northwest sands of Wisconsin. That wasn’t north enough, so I jagged around the Duluth point of Lake Superior and into Minnesota’s iron range and northern bogs until I hit the Canadian border. Despite the soft footfalls scrunching from behind, I could not stomach another expatriatism. I’d died in America; I’d live here too.

  Up, up, up, this time not latitudinal but altitudinal, across the Dakota badlands and into Montana, where the Barker used to tell our audience he’d found me, living with bland parents in a small clay hut. Could I pretend he’d been right, that this was my second home? Miles before the logging truck I’d hitched reached the Rockies, I could see the mountains, a gray stripe like an incoming storm, and after being dropped off in Great Falls and surmo
unting my first foothill, I gazed past a mint valley, cerulean stream, and black firs to the snow-shouldered behemoths whose arched backs scraped the clouds. I thought of Otto Rahn as I began to climb.

  Those without breath go unaffected by altitude. I ascended through white hills of beargrass, acres of loose purple rock, and into peaks so burnt by cold that all flora had been flayed away. I shimmied rock steeples until there was nowhere left to climb, then stared into the blister-white sun for signs of Gød’s back, or backside, anything at which I might launch boulders.

  High atop Mount Cleveland I carved myself a cave and spent months attuned for the Millennialist’s cinder crunch—the sound of my conscience, you might say. Instead I found myself lulled by the clop-clop of elk, the cry of the falcon, the scritch of the stealthing mountain lion. They were straightforward, nonduplicitous sounds. I settled in, developed a crude stone chisel, and spent days sawing off the rib tip that jutted from my chest.

  Winter built a blizzard megalopolis of snow castles, and I froze, then unfroze digging myself out, then froze again under the next silver storm, and the next, and the next. Spring came, snow ceding half its claim to pink rock, and little green aliens extended their weed necks from crevices. Then came the comet flash of summer, the orange-and-red skirmish of autumn, and the first entombment of a second winter. I should have welcomed the return, and yet, there among the rock, I grew ever lonelier. Even though I did not voice it, I nonetheless heard it echo all about the top of the world. After I could take it no longer, I dug a tunnel from my grotto and began pushing through waist-high snow to lower altitudes.