Pain Killers by Jerry Stahl Page A

And when I’m on the outs, I intend to get ’em again.”
    “Then why are you here?”
    “Why you think? Addiction education’s gonna look real sweet to the parole board.”
    “When’s your hearing?”
    “Twenty twenty-nine.”
    “Well, don’t rush into anything….”
    Somebody let out a loud, whistling fart, after which Mengele stirred in his wheelchair and declared, “That’s the first intelligent thing I’ve heard all day.”
    This got some chuckles.
    “A fart joke, thank you.” I pretended to be offended. Superior. Trying for a tone I imagined a vain man might find infuriating to his vanity. “What took you down, Mr. Burgermeister? Bratwurst and beer?”
    Mengele stiffened. “It’s doctor.”
    “Of course it is,” I said. “And does the doctor have anything in his past that makes him want to blank himself out when he remembers it?”
    Mengele met my gaze steadily. “I have done nothing regrettable. I have had regrettable things done to me.”
    “Such as?”
    It was just him and me now. The room disappeared. I hadn’t expected to get this lovey-dovey until later on.
    “I have been denied recognition for my achievements! I have made extreme sacrifices.”
    “That sounds like resentment to me. You got a lot of resentments? No need to be ashamed. We all do. Problem is, resentment is like taking poison and hoping somebody else dies.”
    “You do not know what you are talking about.” He slammed a hand down on the arm of his wheelchair, startling Movern, who’d begun to doze.
    Rincin eased away from the door. One hand on his billy club. “Easy now, Doc.”
    Mengele regarded him with a raised peroxide eyebrow, upper lip curled in a sneer of infinite weariness. His accent was comprehensible—once I stopped trying to pick metal shards out of my ear. “No one in this country has a concept of how to run a prison. Do you know the resources you are wasting? The benefits being squandered?”
    “Hey, I get full dental,” Rincin chimed in. “Even paid for my daughters’ braces.”
    Mengele tensed. “Not those kind of benefits.”
    “See that,” Movern said, shaking his head. “Rincin always playing them head games.”
    Mengele ignored this and kept going, his voice a guttural mixture of pleading and contempt. He did not so much
speak
words as stab them and push them elegantly off of a balcony. “Your people can still be saved.”
    “See that? The doc know. He talkin’ about the Rapture.”
    Mengele laughed, a hacking half note followed by a cough. “The Rapture is nothing but a terrorist plot, run by Christ instead of bin Laden. And who is Jesus Christ? The illegitimate son of a Jewish bitch.”
    “Hey now,” said Reverend D, trying to get a word in.
    Cranky clamped his hands on his head like he was trying to keep his thoughts from flying out. “Wait wait wait! You ever see that
Twilight Zone
episode, where the aliens come down with their special book,
To Serve Man,
and all the earthlings are, like, scrambling their asses to get on that spaceship, except for this one dude, who comes running up behind them, and he’s screaming, ‘Turn around, fools! It’s a cookbook!
To Serve Man
!’ It’s like the messiah was a cannibal. Oh, shit! Maybe people think they’ve being Raptured up, and it turns out they’re just, like,
ingredients.
…”
    Movern shook his wide head back and forth, jiggling his Gary Coleman jowls. “Ho no! Ho
no
! Ho
no no no no no
!” He crossed his arms over his pigeon chest. “That is the second time my Lord been slandered in this room.”
    “Ha! I’ve read about your Lord in Revelation.” Mengele chewed his mustache and scoffed gleefully. “When the warrior Jesus returns, he will invite the righteous to heaven. He will hurl nonbelievers into
a lake of fire.
”
    “Tell it!” said the reverend, slapping skin with Roscoe, the professorial ex-Panther, who smiled mildly under his wire-rims. “Old man throwin’ down theory now. He goin’ all Christopher