a
caress.
Two
weeks after she moved in, I shouted at the assistant director of the movie (he
had been instructing me on how to throw a wineskin with the proper degree of
adulation as the English actor-matador paraded in triumph around the bullring)
and was fired. After being hustled off the set, I vowed to get rid of Alise,
whom I blamed for all my troubles. But when I arrived home, she was nowhere to
be seen. I stumped over to Tom’s house and pounded on the door. It swung open,
and I peeked inside. Empty. Half a dozen notebooks were scattered on the floor.
Curiosity overrode my anger. I stepped in and picked up a notebook.
The
front cover was decorated with a hand-drawn swastika, and while it is not
uncommon to find swastikas on notebook covers—they make for entertaining
doodling—the sight of this one gave me a chill. I leafed through the pages,
noticing that though the entries were in English, there were occasional words
and phrases in German, these having question marks beside them; then I went
back and read the first entry.
The Führer had been
dead three days, and still no one had ventured into the office where he had
been exposed to the poisoned blooms, although a servant had crawled along the
ledge to the window and returned with the news that the corpse was stiffened in
its leather tunic, its cheeks bristling with a dead man’s growth, and strings
of desiccated blood were hanging from its chin. But as we well remembered his
habit of reviving the dead for a final bout of torture, we were afraid that he
might have set an igniter in his cells to ensure rebirth, and so we waited
while the wine in his goblet turned to vinegar and then to a murky gas that hid
him from our view. Nothing had changed. The garden of hydrophobic roses
fertilized with his blood continued to lash and slather, and the hieroglyphs of
his shadow selves could be seen patrolling the streets....
The
entry went on in like fashion for several pages, depicting a magical-seeming
Third Reich, ruled by a dead or moribund Hitler, policed by shadow men known
collectively as The Disciples, and populated by a terrified citizenry. All the
entries were similar in character, but in the margins were brief notations,
most having to do with either Tom’s or Alise’s physical state, and one passage
in particular caught my eye:
Alise’s control of
her endocrine system continues to outpace mine. Could this simply be a product
of male and female differences? It seems likely, since we have all else in
common.
Endocrine?
Didn’t that have something to do with glands and secretions? And if so,
couldn’t this be a clue to Alise’s seductive powers? I wished that old Mrs.
Adkins (General Science, fifth period) had been more persevering with me. I
picked up another notebook. No swastika on the cover, but on the foreleaf was
written: “Tom and Alise, ‘born’ 12 March 1944.” The entire notebook contained a
single entry, apparently autobiographical, and after checking out the window to
see if the twins were in sight, I sat down to read it.
Five
pages later I had become convinced that Tom was either seriously crazy or that
he and Alise were the subjects of an insane Nazi experiment.. .or both. The
word clone was not then in my vocabulary, but this was exactly what Tom
claimed that he and Alise were. They, he said, along with eighteen others, had
been grown from a single cell (donor unknown), part of an attempt to speed up
development of a true Master Race. A successful attempt, according to him, for
not only were the twenty possessed of supernormal physical and mental
abilities, but they were stronger and more handsome than the run of humanity:
this seemed to me wish fulfillment, pure and simple, and other elements of the
story—for example, the continuation of an exotic Third Reich past 1945—seemed
delusion. But upon reading further, learning that they had been sequestered in
a cave for almost twenty years, being educated by
caress.
Two
weeks after she moved in, I shouted at the assistant director of the movie (he
had been instructing me on how to throw a wineskin with the proper degree of
adulation as the English actor-matador paraded in triumph around the bullring)
and was fired. After being hustled off the set, I vowed to get rid of Alise,
whom I blamed for all my troubles. But when I arrived home, she was nowhere to
be seen. I stumped over to Tom’s house and pounded on the door. It swung open,
and I peeked inside. Empty. Half a dozen notebooks were scattered on the floor.
Curiosity overrode my anger. I stepped in and picked up a notebook.
The
front cover was decorated with a hand-drawn swastika, and while it is not
uncommon to find swastikas on notebook covers—they make for entertaining
doodling—the sight of this one gave me a chill. I leafed through the pages,
noticing that though the entries were in English, there were occasional words
and phrases in German, these having question marks beside them; then I went
back and read the first entry.
The Führer had been
dead three days, and still no one had ventured into the office where he had
been exposed to the poisoned blooms, although a servant had crawled along the
ledge to the window and returned with the news that the corpse was stiffened in
its leather tunic, its cheeks bristling with a dead man’s growth, and strings
of desiccated blood were hanging from its chin. But as we well remembered his
habit of reviving the dead for a final bout of torture, we were afraid that he
might have set an igniter in his cells to ensure rebirth, and so we waited
while the wine in his goblet turned to vinegar and then to a murky gas that hid
him from our view. Nothing had changed. The garden of hydrophobic roses
fertilized with his blood continued to lash and slather, and the hieroglyphs of
his shadow selves could be seen patrolling the streets....
The
entry went on in like fashion for several pages, depicting a magical-seeming
Third Reich, ruled by a dead or moribund Hitler, policed by shadow men known
collectively as The Disciples, and populated by a terrified citizenry. All the
entries were similar in character, but in the margins were brief notations,
most having to do with either Tom’s or Alise’s physical state, and one passage
in particular caught my eye:
Alise’s control of
her endocrine system continues to outpace mine. Could this simply be a product
of male and female differences? It seems likely, since we have all else in
common.
Endocrine?
Didn’t that have something to do with glands and secretions? And if so,
couldn’t this be a clue to Alise’s seductive powers? I wished that old Mrs.
Adkins (General Science, fifth period) had been more persevering with me. I
picked up another notebook. No swastika on the cover, but on the foreleaf was
written: “Tom and Alise, ‘born’ 12 March 1944.” The entire notebook contained a
single entry, apparently autobiographical, and after checking out the window to
see if the twins were in sight, I sat down to read it.
Five
pages later I had become convinced that Tom was either seriously crazy or that
he and Alise were the subjects of an insane Nazi experiment.. .or both. The
word clone was not then in my vocabulary, but this was exactly what Tom
claimed that he and Alise were. They, he said, along with eighteen others, had
been grown from a single cell (donor unknown), part of an attempt to speed up
development of a true Master Race. A successful attempt, according to him, for
not only were the twenty possessed of supernormal physical and mental
abilities, but they were stronger and more handsome than the run of humanity:
this seemed to me wish fulfillment, pure and simple, and other elements of the
story—for example, the continuation of an exotic Third Reich past 1945—seemed
delusion. But upon reading further, learning that they had been sequestered in
a cave for almost twenty years, being educated by
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