Absolute Away — Lance Olsen
THIS NIGHT, THIS MAY
Months shy of three, woozy from sleep, Edie Metzger experiences the night of the burning not as a neat succession of events, but rather as a garble of flashes flying at her.
EDIE IN AMBER
From far inside a dream, she hears her parents’ low voices drifting up the hallway, then all at once close by, suffusing the room, lulling her heart, lamp light pouring in around their silhouettes as if love were some amber haze that physically clung to your skin. She feels her father’s enormous hands lifting her bundled in her flannel nightie (freckled with rosebuds, ruffled along hem) in her pink blanket from her crib, draping her over his shoulder, forearm supporting her rump, palm the back of her skull. She feels her mother’s heaven lips touch her forehead and next Edie is floating, footsteps clumping beneath her, cozy, content, carried inside her parents’ conversation as she floats in her father’s arms down the floating staircase, and next her world becomes the clanking of an U-Bahn carriage tearing through blackness, and this floating again, though now through a havoc of noisy bodies and frigid air and faces deformed by the weird shimmerings in Berlin’s Opernplatz, a name, a place, Edie won’t learn this evening or any other.
WRITTEN ON AIR
Traveling in her father’s arms is elation, a tram or bus ride a system of benevolent surprises. Traveling in his arms, anything is possible, and everything will always be all right. Maybe this evening her parents and she will cross gauzy borders into fairytales, step into the hut made of Christmas cookies and raspberry icing where her porcelain doll Eva with real blond hair has invited them to tea, cross magical deserts and mountain ranges into purple forests where bunnies and nymphs play dominos made from shortbread on the banks of a brook flowing with liquid moonlight.
THE LAW OF TRULY LARGE NUMBERS
Statistically so-called impossible events are sometimes referred to as miracles. This would be incorrect in any strict sense. Instead, it is more accurate to put it this way: with a sample size large enough, any outrageous thing you can imagine is likely to happen every now and then. A colossal, unfathomable number of events occur every second on earth. That means extremely unlikely ones also occur every second. Events called impossible aren’t thus impossible at all. They occur regularly, simply the result of those probabilities. John Edensor Littlewood, the British mathematician, proposed, in what has come to be known as Littlewood’s Law, that we should statistically expect one-in-a-million events to happen to us at a rate of about one per month.
In that sense miracles are relatively commonplace.
THIS ZEBRA, THIS GIRAFFE
It hasn’t occurred to Edie to question why her mother and father woke her long after she had fallen asleep, after her dinner and her bath and her bedtime story and her last kiss of the day, why they hoisted her out of that dream (in which she was snuggling on the cool parquet with their white cat Schaum, nothing transpiring except the wondrous softness of his fur, the steady pulse of his purr), because for Edie all time is this time, and maybe tonight they will sit around the table in Eva’s hut and sip tea amid a commotion of red balloons, speaking of large lollipops and pumpkins like princes and princesses do.
Maybe to reach the hut, they will get to sleep on a train and make new friends with fellow passengers, one of whom might be a polite zebra or slightly haughty giraffe wearing a monocle.
Edie would miss her cousins back in the city, of course, but she could soon crayon pretty pictures requesting the honor of their presence at her perpetual party—even if eventually, given the daunting abundance of them, she would need to find a considerably larger hut, perhaps one inside a gigantic hollowed-out candy cane with a door constructed from daffodils and windows from her favorite lullabies.
Maybe this evening will mark the beginning of a birthday in her honor that will last forever.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF AMAZEMENT
Only that isn’t what happens.
What happens is Edie’s father and mother pushing their way through this havoc of noisy bodies and frigid air and weirdly lit faces in the long wide square on the far side of Unter den Linden between the Opera House and Humboldt University, at the end of which hulks St. Hedwig’s Cathedral.
Edie doesn’t know the names of these buildings.
She has no idea where she is other than in her father’s arms, he every once in a while repositioning her weight from right to left shoulder, then left to right, because it is difficult to keep such massive love airborne.
Edie doesn’t understand she is inhabiting a moment called the middle of May within a number called 1933.
What she understands is how people are jostling her father and her, how her floating has turned into lurching, her coziness into vague unease, how her perspective has gone askew, the square tilted, the structures canted, how next they break into the open and there he is: a scrawny man in uniform behind a podium encircled by other men in uniform.
ELEVATION AS HOPE
Edie’s father sets her down among a jungle of legs and she immediately attempts scrabbling up again.
CANDY CANES AS SCHOOLING
Two hundred and sixty-three years earlier, staging the Nativity, the choirmaster at the Cologne Cathedral (his name lamentably lost), became irate at how loud and fidgety the children watching the performances had become, and so he set about devising a plan.
He hurried over to a local candy maker and asked the fellow to create sugar sticks to distract the youngsters.
But not just any sugar sticks.
The choirmaster requested that they be crooked into staffs reminiscent of those used by the shepherds who visited the infant Jesus, colored white for Christ’s purity, and laced with crimson to represent his spilled blood.
That way, even though the children might mistakenly believe they were enjoying themselves, they would in fact be learning an important lesson about the Lamb of God.
WORDS AS WEATHER
Edie doesn’t understand what the scrawny man’s words unleashed into the night mean. She simply feels them rumbling angrily through her body. They feel defiant. Majestic. He shakes his finger at the stars nobody can see above them as he increases the volume of himself.
ALL THE PRETTY FLAMES
None of this troubles Edie because the vibrations of that man’s words also massage her like her mother sometimes does when Edie has trouble falling asleep.
The scrawny man roars the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end and what Edie knows is her mother and father will be able to understand what he’s going on about because he is using the language of grownups, which in equal parts is made up of dullness, grayness, and eternity.
He roars you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the fire the evil spirit of the past—the UnGerman spirit—our country’s absolute future—the November Republic sinking to the ground—the phoenix triumphantly rising, and Edie manifests a goofy little smile because the phrases feel so good inside her … even though her attention has already begun to wander toward how pretty the flames are that now rise from the pyres, how the smoke churning makes her eyes smart and squinch like her mother grilling bratwurst in a skillet, which means those men have begun grilling books, haven’t they, which means everyone will soon be able to eat some, and isn’t that a lovely idea?
Edie can’t wait to discover what fairytales taste like.
EDIE METZGER’S MARVELOUSNESS ACKNOWLEDGED
She relishes the radiant heat on her face, the outburst of sparks, the reflections of the bonfires in the windows of the buildings encircling the square. Ash wafts down around her. The flakes remind her of the light snow that wafted down around her during her first visit to a winter market over the holidays (she still sees the candied almonds, the carved nutcrackers, the soft gingerbread, the endless rows of stalls and tents and colorful lights), which might have occurred last week, or maybe last year, or maybe before she was born, all time this time—which she assumes was held throughout the land to commemorate her marvelousness.
ELEVATION AS CONTINUED HOPE
Edie’s father sets Edie down among the forest of legs again and again she immediately attempts scrabbling up.
FIRE FROM HEAVEN AS ANVIL LIGHTNING
A miracle is an event described by those to whom it was told by people who did not see it, the American anarchist Elbert Hubbard submitted in 1909, while ninety-seven years later the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins pointed out that a belief in them would amount to a bizarre subversion of Occam’s Razor.
GLOBAL POSITIONING
If that is true, however, Edie wonders, back on his right shoulder, then where is Santa Claus?
She can’t see him anywhere.
And her presents?
HUMAN DAMPNESS
All she encounters in his place are gasoline fumes. Particulate haze. The oniony reek of human dampness.
All she encounters are the university students, their professors, the rectors, the curious bystanders crowding this place, many carrying torches, laughing, hooting, chanting, pointing, clapping each other on the back before this bottomless holiday.
THE DERIVATION OF BUTCHERS
Edie doesn’t know Moses’s parting of the Red Sea probably had less to do with amazement than with shallow water covering an underlying reef exposed during strong winds, nor that her given name derives from a combination of two Old English words—ead, meaning wealth or fortune, and gyð, meaning war, nor that her surname, Metzger, is a South German/Ashkenazic occupational name meaning butcher, a business the family has been involved in for six generations.
WHAT READING FEELS LIKE
Edie may be delighted by what she sees, or she may be frightened. She can’t quite make up her mind which emotion to experience, or whether there is a way to experience both at once.
THE MAN IN THE BROWN MACINTOSH
An indistinct drizzle commences. The drizzle turns to rain. The rain intensifies. Yet the gathering throngs are undeterred. Some break into song, some into the eerie incantations that have been passed out on sheets of paper.
Some begin bellowing, already drunk and slurry, footballers at a thrilling match.
Next to Edie and her parents stands a heavyset man in his thirties, hands in the pockets of his brown macintosh, eyebrows thick as small furry animals.
Edie wants to make his eyebrows her pets.
The man observes the growing fires. He is crying without sound, his face becoming older by the minute, as if he has already lived fifty lifetimes and just received news that he must live an infinite number more.
Edie notices her father noticing, turning, saying: Excuse me. I don’t mean to— Are you all right?
The man in the brown macintosh shrugs, replies without facing him: How can anyone possibly, possibly have thought you could ever have made a sane country out of these people?
O TANNENBAUM
If it becomes dark outside when daddy lights the candles on our Christmas tree, Edie wonders, then where is our Christmas tree now?
She raises her head off her father’s shoulder, scanning.
THE PROBLEM OF TIMELESSNESS
The way Edie imagines them, her parents have never been apart from each other. They have never been other than who and where they are. It is obvious to her there was never a period they didn’t know each other, didn’t love each other, weren’t her mother and father.
How could such a thing be even close to feasible?
Plainly they are two halves of the same devoted creature whose mission in life is to care for and extol their exquisite little princess with the enchanting doll named Eva.
HISTORY AS UTENSIL: 1
When the rumors started circulating through their apartment block, Edie’s parents agreed it was imperative to show up to witness the whole ludicrous display with their own eyes. They knew it would soon become an emblem for something they couldn’t have imagined five years ago.
Granted, all this nonsense would soon be over, this craziness, this barbarism, and life return to normal. It was undoubtedly only a matter of time before those idiots in power were thrown out on their ears.
We still live in a democracy, Edie’s mother proclaimed.
At the end of the day, Edie’s father said, the police and military are on our side, not theirs.
Tomorrow will be different, they believed. Tomorrow will be better. Germany, barely sixty years old, scarcely recovered from an unrelenting war and its punishing aftermath, is merely continuing to struggle through its growing pains.
For despots, knowledge is always a risk, Edie’s father told Edie’s mother this morning over breakfast before heading off to work deboning, trimming, tying, grinding, tenderizing, weighing, wrapping in newspaper, and pricing various kinds of meat. They want to erase that risk, reduce it to cinders and soot. We will all be watching. We will all remember what we see.
Some of us will be watching, Edie’s mother corrected, pouring coffee for them. Some of us will be participating. Some of us will be carrying the books for them.
Fewer than you think.
More than you hope.
Good people outnumber the bad in the world, Edie’s father said, testing the phrase in his mouth to see if it carried any real import for either of them.
You believe that?
What else is there to believe?
Lots of things, Edie’s mother said. She runneled cream cheese across a bagel for her husband, then one for herself. There are lots of other things you can believe.
Name one.
That there is no reason things should be easy to understand.
Edie’s father turned this over. After a short silence he said: Name another.
That people are neither good nor bad. That, at the end of the day, people are just people. And if enough of them start doing something, no matter how idiotic, no matter where or when, others will start imitating them. It’s exactly like monkeys, only with diplomas and taxes.
FABIAN: THE STORY OF A MORALIST
The man in the macintosh’s name is Erich Kästner. Edie doesn’t know he is the only author to show up tonight to see his own books go up in smoke. He will remain here until someone recognizes him and calls out his name, then he will pivot and disappear into the fuss.
Erich’s most well-known novel, Emil and the Detectives, will be spared.
All the others, including Fabian: The Story of a Moralist, his most recent, will be torn up and chucked into the flames.
While Emil and the Detectives is a children’s book reflecting Erich’s belief in the regenerative powers of youth, and unusual only in its ungeneric gritty realism, unsavory characters, and lack of moralizing, Fabian: The Story of a Moralist (Erich wanted the title to be Going to the Dogs; his publisher refused), is anything but. According to the authorities, it is a book that strays too far, describing contemporary Berlin as a madhouse rife with beggars and brothels, filth, vacuous sex, lesbian debauchery, elegant male actors seduced by stunning boys, unfaithful spouses, and suicide. It refers to Humboldt University as an institution for moronic children, to the city’s cathedral as the main fire station, and boasts short, acerbic passages like this: When an older man walked into the room for the purpose of enjoying himself, he found what he had expected, a naked, sixteen-year-old girl. Unfortunately, it was his daughter, which he had not expected.
Nearly as atrocious, Fabian deploys the moves from degenerate modernist film, rapid cuts and montages, to better capture the frenetic whirl of the Weimar Republic’s undoing, which is to say it embodies corruption in its very form.
Despite what Erich observes done to his work tonight, his fervent opposition to the Regime, his repeated interrogations by the Gestapo over the next few years, and his expulsion from the national writers’ guild for the culturally Bolshevist attitude in his writings, he will choose to remain in Germany, unlike so many other intellectuals, scientists, and artists who will choose to flee long before the burning of books turns into the burning of men, women, and children. Erich will remain in his broken country a broken man, an alcoholic passing his nights in bars and bordellos, his days producing inoffensive, apolitical writing on the grounds that he eventually wants to chronicle his country’s ruin from the inside out, even as he feels it important to stay close to his bedridden mother, to whom he pens a loving letter or postcard every day.
Decades later, he will win the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for his lasting contribution to children’s literature, discover himself nominated for the Nobel Prize four times, and have many streets in Germany—not to mention an asteroid—named after him.
Although never substantiated, rumors will refuse to cease circulating that Erich’s biological father was the family’s Jewish doctor, Emil Zimmermann.
All that, however, lies in his future.
Right now Erich Kästner is merely one more heavyset man with furry eyebrows, hunkering against the steady rain among the nearly seventy thousand gathered in and around Opernplatz, weeping quietly as the best parts of him are incinerated.
BEAUTIFUL BLUE ARYAN EYES
For a few seconds Edie forgets whether she is awake or—
She settles her cheek on her father’s shoulder and closes her eyes, assuming they are still open, and the scrawny man’s voice rumbling through her becomes a purring Schaum pillow becomes her first sweet bite of gingerbread amid snow wafting down in the winter market becomes a haughty monocled giraffe sitting across from her on the train becomes a barrel-chested man with shiny face and shiny hair and rows of shiny coins pinned to his chest stooping slightly to pay Edie homage.
What beautiful blue Aryan eyes your little girl has, he tells her parents.
A GARDEN FULL OF FLOWERS
Twenty-five years earlier, Hermann Minkowski, professor of mathematics at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, endured what he believed to be one of the laziest, least interested or interesting students he had ever had the misfortune to teach. The idler’s name was Albert Einstein. He skipped most of Minkowski’s lectures and, when he did on occasion turn up, he slumped in his seat, arms crossed, daydreaming, taking no notes, acutely unpassionate about the gunmetal monotone called mathematics.
In retrospect, despite his comportment, it became clear Einstein had been listening quite closely to the few lectures he did attend. In fact, many of his ideas about the conflation of space and time had their roots in them.
Einstein easily weathered Minkowski’s class and moved on. His professor found himself following with increasing attention and respect the reception of his former student’s ideas, especially those revolving around the special theory of relativity, which Einstein put forward in 1905. It was the sort of theory, both Einstein and Minkowski understood very well, that would soon have been put forward by someone else had Einstein not done so. That’s how science works. The fellow was simply lucky enough to be at the right place at the right thought, connect the dots faintly faster than other physicists swimming beside him in the same pool.
Still, Einstein’s ideas didn’t make much impact until 21 September 1908, three years later, when Minkowski delivered a lecture entitled “Space and Time” at the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians in Cologne. His goal, in part, was to draw attention to what Einstein had accomplished by representing his algebraic equations in terms of geometry through what has come to be known as the Minkowski Diagram.
And that made all the difference.
Less than a year later, Minkowski was walking to class one day after lunch, packed in various prickly layers of wool against the blue January bluster, when he noticed an ache near his navel.
He had a busy day ahead of him, so decided to pay the discomfort no heed.
By the time he had finished speaking, a low-grade nausea had joined the ache, and by the time his wife called him down to dinner that evening, he had become aware of a certain puffiness in his lower abdomen, which he chalked up to an annoying case of gas.
In the middle of the night his appendix burst.
By noon the next day Minkowski was dead at forty-four.
In his obituary for the professor, David Hilbert, mathematician at the University of Göttingen, wrote: Since my student years Minkowski was my best, most dependable friend who supported me with all the depth and loyalty that was so characteristic of him. Our science, which we loved above all else, brought us together. It seemed to us a garden full of flowers.
Einstein remained mute regarding his former teacher’s passing.
RED LIKE CHRISTMAS
Edie opens her eyes, assuming they are still closed. Her whole view is taken up with a lady’s lush fur coat fewer than seven centimeters from her nose. Reflexively, Edie reaches out to stroke it just above the surprised recipient’s left breast, understanding now why the lady seems so happy (she is barking along with the rest of the people, her clown face pancaked white, her distended lips red like Christmas): being devoured alive by such a fine, fluffy, well-mannered bear in slow motion must be glorious.
PERIMETER CHECK
Edith, her mother says, tugging the back of her blanket, no.
THE SECRET LIFE OF WARDROBES
With that Edie has a realization (it comes and goes in the span of a single twinkling): when these people jammed around her leave this place—that clown-faced lady, the beard followed by the squat man over there, the old woman defeated by obesity beside him, they will cease to exist.
How could they possibly exist if they are not part of Edie’s life?
No: those people will return to their homes, step up into their wardrobes, close the doors behind them, raise their arms to their sides, and turn into human T’s, just like that nice man Jesus did on the cross, only with better posture. They will merely stop being until they are once more needed to stray into Edie’s consciousness.
Only cats will continue to go about their business when Edie isn’t there to revel in them, because cats are cats and therefore perfect in every way and essential to the flawless unfolding of things.
THE DEAD MAKE A NOISE LIKE WINGS
Why is everybody waving at the sky, daddy? Edie whispers into her father’s ear through her grogginess, lifting her right arm to join them.
HISTORY AS UTENSIL: 2
Several weeks earlier, students in thirty-four university cities across Germany met with their professors and Nazi party officials to discuss which degenerate publications needed to leave for good.
Four days ago, the students in Berlin raided the libraries of the Institute of Sexual Research, founded in 1919 across the way in the Tiergarten by the Jewish homosexual physician Magnus Hirschfeld (who was by chance out of the country at the time), dragged most of its contents into the square, and started constructing the pyres, often with the help of the police.
More and more books from other libraries in the area were added, about twenty thousand in all, among them ones by Isaac Babel, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Conrad, John Dos Passos, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Theodore Dreiser, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Engels, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sigmund Freud, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Victor Hugo, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Helen Keller, D. H. Lawrence, Georg Lukács, Rosa Luxemburg, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Robert Musil, Vladimir Nabokov, Erich Maria Remarque, Upton Sinclair, Leo Tolstoy, Leon Trotsky, Oscar Wilde, and Arnold Zweig.
The Student Association then invited Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels to speak at the event, which he gladly did, surrounded by members of the Nazi Students’ League, brownshirts, SS, Hitler Youth groups, and inquisitive onlookers.
In the distance, a brass band played.
Goebbels wanted to hold the burning late at night rather than in broad daylight for two reasons. First, he appreciated that bonfires raging in darkness would create in the minds of his audience a subliminal connection to their great Nordic past, conjure mythic, primal images connoting the pure German mind cleansing the decadence rampant throughout the nation. Second, he recognized that holding such a spectacle after midnight would induce a wavery state in the spectators, an ecstatic reality part Walpurgisnacht, part spiritual ritual, and part folk festival.
NOT JUST THE HAND, BUT THE ARM
Because they are dolts, Edie’s father responds. Put your arm down, sweetheart.
SHUT OUT OF YOUR OWN LIFE
To imagine the Minkowski Diagram, think of two funnels of time, one tip balanced atop the other. Where those tips touch is your present. The bottom funnel is your absolute past, the top your absolute future. For any event to exist in your absolute past, every observer in the universe would have to be able to agree that it occurred. That is, the absolute past, your absolute past, is causal, verifiable, and therefore indisputable. It leads without doubt to your thin-waisted present. From there stems without doubt a large (though not infinite) number of possible absolute futures which are also causal, verifiable, and therefore indisputable. These kissing funnels represent zones in which time moves in a straight line and motion cannot, given the universe’s ordinances, exceed the speed of light.
To the left and right of those funnels of temporal certitude, however, lies what Minkowski called absolutes Anderswo—absolute elsewhere, absolute away, that territory which lies outside causality, predictability, and reason. In the absolute away, time isn’t time, chronology unthinkable, and the you of twenty years ago is as you take the breath you are currently taking hugging the you of thirty years from now.
Trains arrive in stations before they have departed. Virtual particles flash in and out of existence. Fact is replaced by probability.
This is the nation, in other words, where poetry was invented.
THE INGRID, THE HANS
People no longer needed in Edie’s life step into and close the doors of their wardrobes. This is obvious. And all those tiny men and women living inside the wooden radio box in her living room dwell in a mist of a nickel-hued static. They have very pleasant lives in there. Of this Edie is sure.
Yet she is also sure they must always carry tiny umbrellas above their tiny heads as they traverse their tiny days. Otherwise, the static would drench their clothes and turn them into soundwaves without form. Sometimes they sing pretty songs with each other. Sometimes they chatter in Edie’s living room late into the night. Edie listens to them going on and on as she meanders into sleep, hears her parents strike up conversations with them. That’s when they are allowed to scramble out of the radio box (so long as they remove their shoes first and agree to act like little ladies and gentlemen) and sit around the living room balanced on chair arms as if on horses, atop books in the bookcases as if on cliffs, hanging from lamp cords like marionettes.
Although hosting a tea party for her cousins inside a hollowed-out candy cane would be quite fine, no doubt, playing by herself is even finer, Edie comes to comprehend with a sparkle, because when she is alone those tiny beings can come inside her to tell stories and there is no difference between their thoughts and feelings and hers.
But when you play with your cousins you must share your toys, which means now and then Ingrid who smells like diapers grabs porcelain Eva out of Edie’s hands and Hans who smells like vinegar grabs Jaunty Schildkot Wobble Duck and then Edie has to push them away and every so often they fall backwards and bump their heads on the floor and detonate into tears, even though it is always the parquet’s fault and not Edie’s, naturally, and so Edie detonates into tears, too, because how could floors be so nasty, and that’s when mommy, dishtowel in her knobby red hands, comes rushing into the living room, pretending to be somebody else.
WRITTEN ON YEARNING
Early on the morning of 21 September 1995, a worshipper in a New Delhi temple pressed a spoonful of milk to the mouth of a statue of Ganesh as an offering. He was shocked to watch it vanish before his eyes.
Clearly, he concluded, the statue was alive, aware, and thirsty.
News of the miracle circled the globe.
Vehicles and pedestrian traffic around New Delhi temples gridlocked.
Six days later, a statue of the Virgin Mary in Singapore also drank milk from a spoon, and on 28 September locals offered a spoonful of alcohol to a Gandhi statue in Mumbai, which it sipped right up, causing an uncomfortable stir among his devotees.
A group of scientists appeared and started asking questions. They discovered, unsurprisingly, not a supernatural phenomenon, but rather another manifestation of physics. When liquid came into contact with a statue, surface tension drew it onto the statue’s exterior. Repeat the feeding motion long enough, and one will remark the liquid dribbling down the statue and pooling at its base.
After the beginning of October, no further reports of such wonders surfaced in India or elsewhere.
ESPRIT DE CORPS
When the bonfires commence showing signs of succumbing to the downpour, the Berlin Fire Brigade thoughtfully appears to help pour gasoline on the flames.
THE FATHER OF THE CHILD
Out of nowhere Edie comprehends she loves her father more than her mother. This recognition surprises her. All her emotions surprise her. They keep changing. They keep walking fast as they can and getting nowhere. Edie would, needless to say, never tell a soul about her discovery, especially not her mother, because that wouldn’t be polite, although it’s true, and every so often the truth isn’t polite, because the way his shoulder feels against her cheek just now, the warm spicey scent of him, because the strange and wonderful scratch of his face against her soft skin and brown blood stains on his apron as he steps through the door after work, hair tousled, grin aimed just at her bumbling to greet him, because she can sense his strength when he lifts her off the ground and she becomes giddy and weightless, and he will always protect her against the crocodiles that nest under beds and the teddy bears that growl in closets, because he feels so utterly different from her mother and Edie always wants to do what he says to please him because that grin, of course that grin, because he takes her to the park Sundays and once even to the zoo, where they fed peanuts to the crinkly elephants, whose bristly trunks felt like scouring-pads with delicate lips at the end, because Edie tries to laugh just like her mother laughs to impress him, tries set the table just like her mother sets the table, even though she hasn’t quite figured out how to reach that high yet, and so she sets the floor instead, but he’ll understand, even though she doesn’t know which way the silverware goes, and so it doesn’t matter, because once upon a time her father was a student at university studying the most wonderful ideas people have ever had and then there was a war and the bad people won and her father was the bravest soldier in the army and that’s why he can only see out of one eye because the other is sewn shut and sometimes he needs to take very long naps and sometimes cries out in the middle of them because, he says, the crocodiles are coming, the crocodiles are coming, but don’t be scared.
THE SKY IS EVERYWHERE LIKE HOLY WATER
One morning in March 2011, a devout woman cleaning a twelve-foot-tall statue of the crucified Jesus in a Catholic church in Mumbai noticed water seeping from its feet. Beside herself with joy, she spread word that a miracle was unfolding in the city’s midst.
The media once again exploded into action.
Parishioners commenced collecting the holy water.
The Church of Our Lady of Velankanni commenced promoting itself as a site of pilgrimage.
A few days later, Sanal Edamaruku, president of the Indian Rationalist Association, showed up with an engineer. They spent a few minutes examining the scene, after which Edamaruku went on national television to announce his findings to millions of viewers: the wall behind the statue was leaking—one could see algae growing on it. The source for the water emanating from Jesus’s feet was not a miracle, but a broken sewer line.
Edamaruku was charged with blasphemy by the authorities and forced to flee to Finland to avoid persecution and arrest.
WHERE ARE THE DOGGIE?
Because when thinking of her father Edie sometimes confuses the words you and me, and when a teacup splinters across the parquet it does so because it wants to learn what ecstasy feels like, but petting a doggie in the Tiergarten is best.
HOW THE WORLD SOMETIMES COLLECTS INSIDE YOU
What beautiful blue Aryan eyes your little girl has, the barrel-chested man with the shiny face and shiny hair and rows of shiny coins pinned to his chest tells Edie’s parents.
Grinning, he pats her on the head, then lifts her into his embrace to deliver upon her right cheek just beside her lips an appreciative kiss.
Edie instantly dislikes everything about him.
For one thing, his head is two sizes too big. For another, it is rectangular like an upended block of lard. And, for a third, his presence dries her mouth out and everything is moving too fast.
Behind him Edie can see body parts floating free from the bodies they are supposed to be attached to.
Broken teeth. Flaring nostrils.
Plump purple tongues.
Fists hovering like a charm of angry hummingbirds in the glimmery light.
MEMORY AS WIND
That’s when Edie begins to feel her parents’ emotions rushing through her: her mother’s shock; her father’s abrupt anger.
Those feelings are all mixed up with her own and remind her of something, although she can’t exactly call up what that something is.
She sees the rectangular-headed man’s face swooping in at her and grabbles through the fog that always veils her semi-memories when she believes she is near to catching up to one.
And at last she has it.
RELENTLESS BIRDS, RELENTLESS BLOOMS
Petting a doggie in the Tiergarten is best, only playing dress-up by herself on a stool in front of the mirror in her parents’ bedroom is better.
Every so often when she is a good little girl, her mother will let Edie pick out one of her prettiest dresses to wear, her fanciest pair of high heels, and Edie will shuffle-totter regally through the apartment, cheeks rouged with chalk dust and water, pink lipstick more or less in the vicinity of her mouth, pink hairbows at the ends of her gorgeous reddish-chestnut pigtails she is so proud of, her mother’s one thin pearl necklace dangling to her bellybutton.
Edie will drag her mother’s purse behind her from room to room, grasping fully at such moments what heaven will be like when she arrives at the gates with Schaum, who will walk upright beside her on his two hind legs, dressed to the nines in his crisp new tuxedo and top hat.
DESCENT AS INEVITABILITY
Her father—arms throbbing from his daughter’s weight, hands tingly—lowers Edie’s eighty centimeters and twelve kilograms to the cobblestones, and somehow she has overlooked the fact she is wearing her play shoes.
When did those appear?
What have her feet been doing when she wasn’t there?
DESCENT AS HOPELESSNESS
Immediately Edie feels unconditionally forlorn, severed from her father’s gravitational field, and envisions, on the far side of the leg forest mobbing her, a chain of people missing each other across the square, the country, the entire planet.
THE LAND WHERE POETRY WAS INVENTED
Drop a wineglass from chest height and watch it shatter. Gingerly dustpan up the shards. Pour them into a cardboard box. Close the box, shake it, open.
What do you suspect you will uncover inside?
The embodiment of chaos rearranged.
Because?
Because there are far more ways those shards can exist inside the box as non-wineglass than as wineglass.
Yet according to physics, there is nothing preventing you from opening the box to reveal a fully regenerated wineglass waiting for you inside. There is simply an immensely higher probability of finding a mess of splinters than splinters’ opposite. Nothing within the laws of physics says a wineglass won’t appear, only that that event is statistically highly unlikely to happen.
On the other hand, if a wineglass were to manifest, you would be unable to count its advent as any sort of miracle. It is anything but, merely run-of-the-mill statistics at work, no matter how astounding its manifestation might seem. All you would be obliged to do is cite Littlewood’s Law, repour your nightcap, and decide what you would like to read before bed.
WEATHER AS FORGETFULNESS
Edie can’t remember what the weather was like before her mother tucked her in after dinner—the still white sky, the vivid light, the fresh green chill in the air, moisture saturating her room, her pink blanket almost indiscernibly damp. She can’t remember how, as she lay in her crib on her back, looking up at the ceiling, she noticed for the first time anomalies across it suggesting birds, or, perhaps, it is that someone had painted the ceiling so meticulously she couldn’t tell the difference between it and mirage, for the more she studied the scene in the shadows up there, the more she could see it wasn’t the ceiling at all she was looking at, but rather the apartment’s attic through a large craggy hole, yes, and beyond the rafters into the open white sky itself. The birds—they were magpies, black heads, black tails, white breasts; she lumber-ran after them every week in the park with her father, she was sure—the birds perched on the edge of the roof, peering down at her with their beady eyes, long stiff tail feathers somehow alarming. Edie can’t remember how she had the feeling they were waiting for her to slip into sleep so they could swoop down to steal her breath, yet next she was snuggling on the cool parquet with Schaum, nothing transpiring except the wondrous softness of his fur, her parents’ low voices drifting up the hallway, then all at once close by.
THE TASTE OF FAIRYTALES
Standing on the spot where her father has lowered her against her will, Edie senses her face reddening, tears accumulating across the surface of her eyes, becomes aware of a whine at the back of her throat.
She surveys her environment, weighing the pros and cons of a tumble into tantrum, whether such a decision might result in her father lifting her out of her sadness once again.
In the middle of that computation, her mother’s knobby red hand comes to rest on the back of her neck, rubbing tenderly, and Edie closes her eyes for a second, lost in the there of it, reflecting: Isn’t apple strudel with lots of whipped cream simply delicious?
Is that what fairytales taste like?
SKIN HOVEL
The rectangular face swooping in at her for a kiss belongs to Hermann Göring.
While Hermann understands it is Goebbels’s flamboyance tonight, he has decided to attend anyway so he can revel sotto voco in the national blossoming.
Forty, IQ 138, 177 centimeters tall, well on his way to 135 kilos, instrumental in Adi’s procurement of the Chancellorship barely four months ago, Hermann is poised to become the second most powerful man in Germany.
Each of his cells is aware of this.
With every step he takes, security detail of five brownshirts encircling him, he luxuriates in this effervescent information.
Two and a half weeks ago he created the Gestapo. Tonight—proud, pleased, exhilarated—Hermann pushes through this one body, this undifferentiated volume, absorbing its energies and messages, inhaling the sour remnants of paper in the air, savoring the sparks flickering up from the conflagrations, his spine mercilessly military-plumb, the idea visiting him: We are reborn every day by the very fact that we have refused to die yet.
Six years from now Adi will declare Hermann his successor. A year after that he will name him Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches—Marshall of the Great German Empire, leader of all armed forces—not knowing, or perhaps not caring (or perhaps it is just the opposite), that Hermann Ritter von Epstein, Hermann’s fabulously wealthy godfather, was a Jew who had had a fifteen-year affair with Hermann’s mother, at one point going so far as to invite the Görings to live in one of his two small castles in Bavaria, Veldenstein, where Hermann grew up parading through the corridors dressed in the smart Boer uniform with which his father had gifted him.
Epstein also pulled strings to get Hermann into a good military academy, from which he graduated with distinction, and before long he was a decorated pilot flying sorties in World War I.
But now it is this event.
It is the repetition of this event throughout the country.
It is the German people everywhere beginning to feel something new entering reality, every mind an intention, every heart a wildfire.
Hermann was by his side when, surrounded by two thousand fledgling Nazis, Adi attempted a coup d’état in the botched Beer Hall Putsch.
Adi suffered a dislocated shoulder, was arrested for high treason, and sentenced to five years in prison, although he served only eight months, during which he composed most of Mein Kampf.
Hermann, on the other hand, was shot in the groin and fled to Innsbruck, where he became addicted to the morphine with which the doctors there treated his pain—a lifelong habit that led to him being institutionalized twice in a mental hospital in Sweden, where he spent his interminable days and fever-dream nights straitjacketed in a padded cell, half-thinking: Each of us dies many times in one life before one dies.
Now Hermann is pushing through this one body, this undifferentiated volume, feeling those around him falling deeper and deeper into the mystery.
None of them wants war, not these rank-and-file souls. Not yet. All they want is work, food, anger in the face of what their lives have become, and release.
All they want are bonfires.
Give us time. We will determine the policy. We will determine their fears and urges. We will educate them on what they need and how to get it.
Because it is always the same with dictatorships and democracies: explain to the rabble they are being threatened from within and without, denounce as unpatriotic those who would dare disagree, and people will be shrugging on their stupid uniforms and ill-fitting loyalty in the wink of a lie.
Five years.
Six, tops.
You can already see it, sense it, how tonight they have begun staring dead-eyed out of their allegiance to the flag—a concept they wouldn’t be able to define, obviously, if their headstones depended on it.
Because one day Hermann will insist: Education is dangerous. Every educated person is a future enemy.
Because Hermann has always been convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is the brightest person in any room he enters.
He is almost always correct.
Yet two years ago his first wife, astonishing frail Carin, who had left her husband and child for him, the woman whom Hermann loved unconditionally, loved spectacularly, loved forever, died of a heart attack four days before her forty-third birthday, Hermann at her bedside.
Her death eviscerated him.
Her death enraged him.
Her death became a tapeworm living in his bowels for the rest of his life.
In her honor he commissioned a massive lodge called Carinhall on 40,000 hectares of woodland an hour’s drive northeast of Berlin, where he dressed in medieval costumes for the hunting parties he hosted. He and his guests found their pleasure in stalking the endangered species with which he stocked the place, from bison to exotic animals collected from the Warsaw Zoo, in order to recreate mythic scenes from the Nibelungenlied. He bedecked his fingers with garish rings. He carried an elephant-ivory, platinum-tipped Reichmarschall baton encrusted with six hundred diamonds, and took great pride in designing his own outlandish martial uniforms, which he changed into and out of four or five times a day.
Chest outthrust, beaming, Hermann wore a red Roman toga and sandals to afternoon tea.
Only tonight it is this event.
It is the steady light rain, the smoke, the incantations, the urgencies, the blaze.
It is the potencies, the propulsions, the frantic protons—and then, mid-step, Hermann catches sight of her: that little girl in her father’s arms, mesmerized by the resplendence surging around her.
Veering, Hermann barges toward her.
Unlike Hitler’s vegetarian asceticism, which all Germans fetishize, Hermann adores extravagant cuisine and gaudy everything. He adores hyperbole as a way of being. He will come to own a ninety-foot motor yacht named after Carin and an armored train christened Asien. His sleeping car will feature a colossal bathtub, while other carriages will flaunt a photographer’s darkroom, a six-bed clinic with operating theater, and a barbershop. Two freight cars will bristle with rapid-fire anti-aircraft cannons, and two flat cars carry Hermann’s fleet of American, French, and German automobiles, including his six-wheel-drive Mercedes W31 Geländewagen convertible.
I am what I have always been, he will one day submit to an interviewer at Nuremberg—the last Renaissance man, if I may be allowed to say so.
Ever since his days parading through those corridors in the castle Veldenstein, Hermann has believed our stories amount to traces of ourselves we leave behind when we move on. No stories, no traces. No traces, you might as well never have existed.
Sometimes in the frightening insomniac hours he will bolt alert, believing Carin has just died a nightmare death beside him, and reach across the bed for her hand, staggeringly relieved to find it, clasp it, cherish its presence in the darkness, only a moment later to realize it belongs to a different wife.
Because that little girl is what tomorrow will look like.
Because in two years he will marry his second wife, Emmy Sonnemann, an actress who will come to be known as The First Lady of the Third Reich, a title that will chagrin Eva Braun—whom Emmy will openly detest—to no end. Emmy and Hermann will have one child, exquisite Edda, whom they will name after Mussolini’s daughter, a fact Edda will deny up to her death at eighty in Munich in 2018, having never ceased defending her papa’s legacy.
The things that happened to the Jews were horrible, she will maintain, but quite separate from my father.
Hermann’s speedy rise through the ranks of the Nazi party will be accompanied by his ever-expanding waistline, which in part will be due to a glandular defect, in part to sublime gluttony. Together with his obvious drug addiction, bizarre clothes, loud self-indulgence, and strident dandyism, this will make him an easy target for mockery. Ordinary citizens, along with the Nazi elite, will take sardonic glee in referring to him as Der dicke Hermann, Fat Hermann—even as he will come to show off with that distinctive smirk of his the more than four thousand pieces of priceless paintings, sculptures, jewelry, and furniture he will have looted from Jewish homes with the plan to someday turn Carinhall into a grand museum; even as next year he will engineer the bloodbath known as the Night of the Long Knives, during which he will sit in his Berlin villa at a large oak table on a gold-trimmed velvet chair, enjoying a good Cuban cigar, a glass of sherry, and a bit of Bach, while his SS hit squads assassinate more than eighty rivals in order to consolidate his power.
Hermann knows none of this as he closes the distance between himself and that girl, two meters, one, yet somehow he senses in her his own future daughter’s proximity and so has already come to revere her.
Only when captured by the Allies at the end of the war will Hermann be forced to detox and lose weight in preparation for his trial in Nuremberg, where, displaying his signature wit and charm, he will be the sole accused able to bring the court to laughter several times while running circles around his American prosecutor, Supreme Court Judge Robert H. Jackson, causing Jackson at one point to throw down his headphones and walk out of the courtroom.
(I am a man who is basically opposed to atrocities or ungentlemanly actions, Hermann will tell his interviewer in Nuremberg. In 1934, I promulgated a law against vivisection. You can see, therefore, that I disapprove of the experimentation on animals.)
Found guilty of conspiracy to wage war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, Hermann will be sentenced to hang—the means of execution afforded common criminals.
Outraged, he will demand death by firing squad.
The Allies will decline.
On 15 October 1946, two hours before he and ten other prominent Nazi military and political leaders will be scheduled to mount the thirteen steps to the gallows constructed in the prison gymnasium, Hermann, now fifty-three, will bite down on a cyanide capsule secreted in his cell. The ropes used for the hangings, it will come to light after the fact, will have been measured improperly, and hence have come up short to do their work effectively. Most of those sentenced will therefore die, not of a quick broken neck, but rather by strangulation lasting in some cases nearly half an hour, having first sustained bleeding head injuries by hitting the sides of the trapdoors that were cut too small.
How that capsule will have come into Hermann’s possession will remain a puzzle. Possibly it will have been passed along by one of the young, impressionable American guards with whom Hermann became friendly and for whom he cheerfully signed autographs. Possibly it will have been concealed all along in a jar of Nivea hand cream, which will have arrived in prison in the luggage with which Hermann will be traveling when arrested.
In any case, on that Tuesday night in mid-October he will lie on his back on the metal bed in his cell, blanket pulled neatly up to chest, arms visible atop the covers per penal requirements, and bite down.
Choking sounds will draw the guards over to the window in his cell door.
By the time they fumble in, Hermann’s heart will have stopped and the smell of bitter almonds will have permeated the small room.
His left eye will be squeezed shut, his right still open, as if winking a last little fuck-you at the world.
THE PERSISTENCE OF ASHES
Hermann doesn’t know any of this as he stands before Edie Metzger and her parents in the steady light rain falling on Opernplatz, in the haze of airborne particles that once were books and the chants that once were people. He doesn’t know that in thirteen years his corpse will be laid out haphazardly atop a trunk in the Nuremberg prison for the media to document, no one having bothered to close his right eye for him, nametag askew on his chest, before what is left of him will be incinerated without ceremony and scattered on the Isar River along with the ashes of the other executed Nazi officials.
PURITY AS SCENT
All Hermann knows is the sound of his own voice saying: What beautiful blue Aryan eyes your little girl has.
All he feels is the nearness of his future daughter, his own smirk crowded with satisfaction and admiration, his own hand reaching out, patting Edie—whose name he will never learn—on the head, his strong arms commencing to lift her for an appreciative kiss upon her right cheek just beside her lips, the scent of her purity whelming him.
THIS GRAMMAR OF NEGATION
She’s not Aryan, snaps her father.
WOLF DREAMS
Edie is not yet convinced our bodies must conform to the world and so lets out a reptilian hiss at the glistening face swooping in at her.
Then she bites.
THE LAW OF BUBBLES
I would do it all again, Sanal Edamaruku affirmed a year later in Helsinki. Miracles are like bubbles. You prick them and they’re gone.
HOW PERSPECTIVE ARISES
Edie doesn’t nibble. She doesn’t nip. She bites down hard on Hermann’s lower lip until she tastes blood—it only takes a second or two—then lets go, the recognition floating up into the center of her mind, gravely, fleetingly, that there are different ways of looking.
THE GLASS MOUNTAIN
Testimony, Hume pointed out, given innate human fallibility, is a kind of evidence very likely to be false. The evidence for miracles is testimony. Therefore, the evidence for miracles is very likely to be false. A generation earlier, the Irish rationalist John Toland noted that a belief in miracles tends to decrease as the degree of education—which is to say the ability to contemplate critically—increases. It is very observable, he remarks in his monograph, Christianity Not Mysterious, that the more ignorant and barbarous any People remain, you shall find ’em most abound with Tales of this nature. For Wittgenstein, the miraculous is a way of seeing rather than an event, while for the Swedish philosopher Celan Solen two generations later the miraculous is nothing more or less than a linguistic mistake, the remnants of a Christianity that has colonized our tongue without our being cognizant of the fact. By using words like miracle, we display just how little we are able to think for ourselves, how much the history of language is committed to thinking for us.
NO ESCAPING GRAVITY
Hermann yanks back as if electrocuted, realizing suddenly that everything means something else. It’s just never exactly clear what that something else is.
Glaring at Edie, he takes her in completely, his eyes glinting, his smirk expanding and dissolving briefly into a sneer, melting back into a smirk, and, as if nothing untoward has happened, vanishing.
He carefully passes Edie back into her shaken father’s arms, turns, and barges on into the night.
AT THE END OF THE AGE OF WONDER
Two of Hermann’s security detail stall three seconds, five, looking slack-faced from child to father to mother to child, assimilating, then hasten to catch up with their leader, who is already patting a little blond boy on the head several meters farther up the line of spectators.
CITY OF LUMINOUS FOG
A woman on a plane awakens from uneasy sleep as she senses the first loss of altitude. The engines drop in tone. Her ears pop. A mechanical rumble shudders through her body. She presses her forehead to the window. Everything outside is fog the color of metallic dawn light except for rain droplets beetling backwards across the plastic.
Eva Braun—short curly hair, bulbous nose, cheeks, and chin—is on her way from Munich to join Adi for a few days in Berlin. She is twenty-three years his junior. Nine months ago, she aimed her father’s pistol at her chest and fired, trying to hitch Adi’s attention, prove her devotion. That made them lovers. Two years from now, she will take an overdose of sleeping pills when he fails to make enough time for her in his life. That will make them inseparable. For forty hours at the end of April 1945, they will become husband and wife.
Currently, however, she has no recollection of the former and no premonition of the latter.
Nor is she conscious of the fact that the plane she is on is this minute passing over Opernplatz on its final descent south into Tempelhof. Eva doesn’t see the book burning has entered its coda, the rain down there started to ease up, the audience to disperse into the oily fumes of factories along the Spree.
She leans back in her seat, wraps herself tighter in her blanket, shuts her eyes in an effort to extend her dreams a few strangenesses more, while on the ground Edie tilts back her head to search for the source of that engine drone above her, and her father annoys her hair with his enormous palm, saying Good girl, sweetheart—you just took a bite out of the devil himself, and her mother breaks into a short-lived, light-hearted laugh beside him, a collection of Heinrich Heine’s poems turning into a brief gust of air pollution.
THE PARTY WITHIN HER
Anyone can catch a rubber ball and throw it back and scissor out snowflakes from sheets of folded white paper and explain what the pretty pictures in coloring books show, Edie realizes, searching the sky, but she can jump up and down in place and pedal a blue kiddie car at the zoo and walk up the stairs to her flat all by herself, so long as she holds on to the handrail, left foot, right foot, left foot, right, and her daddy thinks she’s a good girl and her mommy that she’s adorable, which surely means Schaum will be able to accompany her to the tea party in the gigantic hollowed-out candy cane in the forest where caramel bonbons and fruit-shaped marzipan grow on trees and sugar is good for you and birds sing in tiny human voices and sometimes you will be out in the garden, playing, and a very nice kangaroo with a cute buck-toothed baby in her pouch will stroll by and stop to chat for a spell because the weather will always be just right and the neighbors always friendly and that’s when Edie sees her thoughts forming before her like a party of teeny-weeny clowns, standing up, and trotting out of her consciousness onto Opernplatz in their big red floppy shoes, scattering through all that busyness, every one of them wearing the happiest of clown smiles on his face.
A MUSEUM OF INTERRUPTIONS
Edie must have slid back into her dreams again, because when she opens her eyes she discovers herself this time draped over her mother’s shoulder, not her father’s, floating through the dimly lit floating streets on her way somewhere else, all the commotion of tonight now in another place she has already begun to forget.
She isn’t aware that her parents have crossed Unter den Linden, are crooking down ever narrower, emptier, darker lanes, shortcutting to the Friedrichstraße station to avoid the crowds.
All she can sense is her heavy eyelids closing and Berlin tumbling away in the thin fragrance of her mother’s rose perfume mixed with soap on the collar of her fluffy coat, wondering if maybe she really loves her more after all, deciding she will have to consider this question at greater length some other time, and, with her next inhalation and exhalation, losing that plan altogether, her parents’ footfalls and voices welling into everything she knows, their hushed conversation about what they just witnessed irrelevant to her, the melody of their words her only world.
THE DERIVATION OF INCONSISTENCY
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Voltaire and Spinoza argued against miracles, the very idea of which the latter described as sheer absurdity. Their reasoning followed essentially the same lines. Surely, they contended, we can all agree that the will of God is identical to the will of Nature, because it is God in His flawlessness who created flawless Nature. Yet we must consequently also agree that by definition a miracle is a violation of those laws of Nature—that which God, whose will is inviolable and perfect, brought into being. Thus, the notion of a miracle is preposterous. Why would God contradict Himself by violating his own omnipotence and omniscience? For kicks? In order to entertain or impress us? Persecute us for reasons unknown? Confound us because He has nothing better to do with his eternity?
Shouldn’t His world as we find it be sufficient to satisfy us?
What on earth would humans need miracles for?
Because they would indicate a complete lack of forethought, power, or both on the deity’s part, claiming the presence of one would itself sine dubio amount to an act of blasphemy.
BERLIN AT 2:12 A.M.
This abrupt jolt, halt.
VALLEY OF THE UNRAVELING
The two slack-faced brownshirts from Hermann’s security detail are standing in front of them, blocking the sidewalk.
Everything is in shadow, everything in silence.
Moonlight blushes through the cloudy sky above and dissolves.
The ox on the left says: Back there. That shouldn’t have happened.
Edie’s father weighs the words, the scene in which he participates, replies: Get the fuck out of our way.
The ox on the right laughs the way an old dog clears its throat.
Look at that, Klaus, he says. The jewboy’s telling us what to do.
He’s giving us orders, says Klaus. Isn’t that amusing?
Everyone stands extremely still in the damp cold air shot through with the tang of oil, coal fumes, and tautness, calculating.
Edie’s father says quietly: I apologize. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m— It’s just—
It’s late, Klaus offers.
You’re tired, offers Uwe.
Yes, Edie’s father says, trying to feel marginally relieved.
Perfectly understandable, Klaus says. We might well feel the same in your shoes. It’s been a long night.
I’m sorry, Edie’s father says. It was stupid of me.
But you weren’t sorry before, Uwe says, were you. You were laughing at us back there.
No, Edie’s father says. We were—
Please, Edie’s mother says.
Klaus glances over at her.
Don’t talk to me, he tells her blankly.
Everyone stands extremely still a little longer, until Edie’s father says: You don’t have to do this.
Do what? Uwe asks. What do you think it is we don’t have to do? He turns to Klaus: What do you think he thinks it is we don’t have to do?
Please, Edie’s mother repeats.
Do you understand German? Klaus asks her.
We just want to go home, Edie’s father says.
To Palestine? Uwe asks. Excellent idea. Except I’m afraid it’s a little late for that. We gave you kikes plenty of time. We warned you. Didn’t we warn you? So, I’m interested: which are you—deaf, or dumb?
Listen, Edie’s father says.
The listening train’s already left the station, Klaus says.
I have some money.
Uwe grins.
Money? he says.
It’s not much, Edie’s father says, but—
Uwe turns to Klaus: He thinks we want his money. Isn’t that amusing? Jew to the end.
That’s amusing, Klaus says.
Klaus turns to Edie’s mother and says: Give us the girl.
Nobody moves.
Nobody moves some more.
After a moment too long, Edie’s father says: What?
Let me ask you something, says Uwe. What kind of parents are you yids anyway? What kind of manners do you teach your little monkeys?
HOW MOONLIGHT SURPRISES
To Edie’s father it feels as if someone is squeezing all the air out of him.
Everything slows down. Everything becomes restless and strained. He can’t determine anything to do that could make these next few minutes turn out well, so he stops thinking.
Klaus takes a step toward Edie still half-sleeping on her mother’s shoulder.
Everything slows down, then everything speeds up.
EPIPHANY, OR: A COMMUNAL FORM OF WEEPING
Edie’s father pulls back from the scene in which he participates and sees it with such unexpected clarity, the moon’s appearance and disappearance striking him as so magnificent, that it occurs to him he must be dying soon.
DEPARTURE AS METAPHOR
He launches his body at Klaus’s, unaware that another of the brownshirts has come up behind him to wait patiently for him to make just such a move.
The third brownshirt’s name is Egon. In nine years, a housewife named Arina will step out from a cupboard where she has been hiding when Egon is focused on incoming fire and ease a carving knife between his ribs during house-to-house combat in a city called Stalingrad. It will take Egon three minutes to beat Arina into another universe with his fists, twenty minutes for him to join her there.
Before Edie’s father can close the distance between Klaus and him by ten centimeters, Egon’s black billy club meets the side of his head.
The noise inside is incredible.
It arrives in the form of a bluewhite flash the breadth of the night sky.
Edie’s father’s intended trajectory crumples into itself, his blood spattering his wife’s face, the back of his daughter’s head.
Edie’s mother is somehow down on her hands and knees on the sidewalk beside her husband without understanding how she came to be there, dazed, mouth open and leaking fluids, thinking where is my baby where is my baby where is my—which is when she acquires another clout across the base of the skull.
THE DYNAMICS OF SPACETIME
Edie’s father collects and compresses all the residual energy he can locate within himself into a tight sphere, unexpectedly believing for the briefest glister that we are our choices, grits his teeth, shuts his eyes, and erupts, hurtling toward Uwe’s belly like a rugby player.
MISCARRIAGE AS FOOTWEAR
Egon’s jackboot lunges out of nowhere and cracks into his ribcage.
Edie’s father misplaces his ability to breathe.
His right cheek crushes into cobblestone.
THE DENTISTRY OF ABUSE
The night becomes one hundred percent noiseless except for his wife’s sobbing beside him as she spits up the blood gathering in her mouth where her two front teeth used to be.
WHAT DO ALLEYS CONTAIN?
Instead of a hiss or whimper, Edie remains mute and piercingly vigilant during her ride on Klaus’s shoulder.
He and his hulking friends move quickly down the street.
Edie doesn’t like any of them. They smell funny and they are mean and she hopes she is inhabiting another dream even though she is almost sure she isn’t and yet is positive her parents will retrieve her any second because they are her parents and she loves them both equally and where are they?
Klaus, Uwe, Egon, and Edie duck into an alley lined with trashcans and broken brown beer bottles.
ALL TOMORROW’S CARNIVALS
Edie doesn’t experience what comes next.
She doesn’t experience what she experiences.
These men don’t tell Edie to be quiet. They don’t say anything to her at all. Klaus simply swings her off his shoulder and tucks her under his arm like a sack of potatoes.
Edie wants to squeal for her parents, but is too surprised by this new perspective even to try.
Everything is askew.
Her face flushes with blood.
She opens her mouth, but all that gets out is a series of startled huffs.
Above her, Klaus is huffing, too. Edie tries to rotate to see what is going on. Try as she might, her muscles won’t cooperate. She can sense her forward momentum slowing. She can hear Klaus’s huff turn into a different sound altogether, the one Schaum makes when he is trying to cough up a hairball.
Then she is on the ground.
Klaus, Uwe, and Egon are bent double a few meters away, hands on knees, attempting to catch their breaths, dismayed, their violeting faces sweaty and bloated, their mouths open, tongue tips poking out.
That’s what they are doing, it comes to Edie: gasping for air.
Klaus goes down on all fours.
Uwe and Egon join him.
Edie observes as the oxygen molecules in the alley just beyond her rush into a shimmery sphere near one of the dented trash cans.
Wheezing, the men struggle toward it.
They fishflop on the ground for a minute or two.
And then they don’t.
Edie waits to see what will happen next.
Nothing happens next.
She waits, waiting.
Ever so tentatively, she rises to her feet and peers around to make sure the rest of the universe still exists.
It does.
Less tentatively, Edie Metzer waddles out of the alley and into the complicated city.
ALTERED CARBON, ALTERED HYDROGEN
The princess of everything doesn’t experience the sensation of the stucco wall flying toward her. The electric shattering. The brusque disconnection from her life. Instead, she experiences the color red more intensely than she ever has before. Redder than crimson. Redder than fear or fury. It is more a concentrated presence, a consummate ferocity, an oceanic abundance rising through every realm she used to recognize. A red sea presses against the windows of her bedroom, dribbles through the cracks, all at once splashes in, gushes over her crib, saturates her pink blanket, soaks her flannel nightie freckled with rosebuds, heaves out the door, along the hallway, picking up astonished Schaum in its rush, blasting through their front door and waterfalling down the stairs and out into the streets. Blocks away, it pours through the Friedrichstraße station. Reaches and swamps the park where her father and she played. Drowns the crinkly elephants in their cages at the zoo. Carries off the giant hollowed-out candy cane and her shrieking cousins. Soon it even bears off her memories of the winter market and the scent of her mother’s coat collar and rasp of her father’s face against her skin. It bears off everything—first Berlin, then Germany, then all of Europe, the planets, the galaxy, everything, and before long the only thing that remains of Edie Metzger is the hole where her name used to hover.
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Lance Olsen is author of more than 30 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novels My Red Heaven (Dzanc, 2020) and Skin Elegies (Dzanc, forthcoming November 2021). A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, two-time N.E.A. Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.