Pain Killers (41 page)

I tried to
feel
myself.
Nothing.
Out of nowhere, I remembered getting Novocain for the first time, when I was nine. How much I loved it. For hours after I got home from the dentist I stood at the mirror shooting staples into my gums, blithely spitting out blood and bone chips. Now I was elsewhere Novocained. Who knew what travesty Mengele had implanted for the amusement of his audience?

Maybe I was wrong about Zell and his prison docs. Maybe they were a cover—what he was after now was torture porn. Nazi science on parade. With me as unwilling stand-in for all the unwilling victims whose gruesome and brutal demise would have—had Harry Zell been magically on hand to film it—supplied the kind of next-level cable viewing jaded viewers were smacking their lips for now that jailhouse sodomy and medical procedurals no longer packed the impact they used to.

I worked my wrists till the skin burned in my restraints. Tried to squeeze a word past Tina’s pressed-down palm. As far as I could tell she stood behind me. I rolled my eyes up to my forehead. I could just about catch the tip of her nose.

Thrilled as I was to find her up and functioning, it was disturbing in these circumstances. I could not imagine why she’d sign on for nurse duty with the doctor. But I knew her well enough to know she always had her reasons.

“At Auschwitz,” Mengele remarked, “I experimented endlessly on ways to advance the master race.” He chuckled like a man who practiced chuckling in front of a mirror. “Did all of the experiments achieve genetic perfection?
Nein!
But in science we have what we call the Law of Unintended Consequences. So, I confess to you, I discovered many, many secret methods for achieving cosmetic, eugenic and reproductive excellence by happy accident.”

Not so happy, I thought grimly from my trussed-chicken perch, for those who accidentally found themselves in Building Number Ten. Imagine being five, lying on a pallet, full of candy after starving for weeks, listening to Mengele play Puccini while he decided if he was in the mood for inducing gangrene or extracting eyeballs. I wondered again about the man at Mengele’s victim reunion in Jerusalem. Too ashamed to show his face after all those years. Not even to those—victims themselves—who would surely understand. At what depth of sadness could a human being no longer breathe? I didn’t realize I was crying until Tina dabbed my eyes.

I have never been brave on purpose. There was still some backwash of psychoactive swill sloshing around my system. Otherwise the shamefest of ending up as a naked lab monkey in the Joe Mengele show—the prospect of being his last victim—might have had me screaming like a little girl.

A piercing howl nearly blew me off the gurney. Followed by a doleful whimper and the enormous panting bulk of an Irish wolfhound being wheeled by on its flank. From my prone position, I could see that the trustee pushing the dog had traded prison blues for lime-green OR scrubs. The color nicely set off the CUT HERE tattooed on the back of his neck over a dotted line. Maybe he had the right idea.

When the dog yelped again I vomited in my mouth. Gulping back bile, I had a simple revelation: my pre–sex mutant existence was about to end. I wanted to rail and gnash my teeth. But how dare I obsess about
my
calamity and not the Mengele victims whose agonies preceded mine? The Holocaust lent their suffering dignity. Imbued it with inherent historical import and shattering profundity that spoke to all humanity. My death would have all the gravitas of a bum fight on YouTube. I was an idiot for ending up here. If my own life was any indication, it was no surprise that I would die idiotically. Ask any vulture; what’s past is protein.

Apparently, every step I’d ever taken had been leading here: to the rolling display table of a celebrated Nazi sadist. What did it matter if I’d been gelded, gifted with a uterus or had the head of my penis surgically removed, sewn on and replaced with a chicken beak? I was a prop in Josef Mengele’s pitch, rolled out to help him market himself as the go-to genital alteration, transplant and enhancement ace. Which, as far as I could tell, was how he intended to make a living until history decided to show up and offer him an apology.

I considered biting my tongue and spewing blood to get Tina’s hand off my face. I knew Tina wouldn’t let anything too extreme happen to me. But I really needed to double-check. I’d done too much reading. What wasn’t documented history was fevered speculation: Mengele did not just operate on the body. To establish the mental inferiority of the lower races, he went for brains. He’d wanted at them since 1934, when the Canadian Wilder Penfield claimed to have ended epilepsy by cauterizing the nerve cluster that controlled seizures. There were side effects—ex-epileptics smelled burnt toast—but what did Mengele care? If you could stop fits then you could cause them too. Heaven.

As I thrashed in my straps, I tried to reassure myself. Tina was the toughest person I knew. There was no way the doctor could have intimidated her into collaboration. Unless, say, he’d gone into her frontal lobe and cauterized the synapse that governed free will? There were rumors of death camp zombies. Physical restraint had unchained my paranoia. What if, since the last time I’d seen her, he’d had at her cerebellum, surgically made her a slave? It was no secret that the CIA adapted Nazi techniques, along with Korean, in developing its MK-ULTRA mind-control program. If Tina had been turned into the Manchurian Nurse—

Then suddenly—
sensation.
A sleeve brushed my member. That meant I still had one—unless he’d rewired my nerves so that I just thought it was mine and not some master race science project. Had that wolfhound been…whole?
Fuck
. This was the kind of hell you couldn’t pack for.

Mengele chose that moment to step around the gurney, give my bare foot a manly squeeze. His plastic gloves were splashed red. Besides that, the white lab coat and mike clipped under his collar made him look like a pharmacist in a TV commercial. He plucked a silver pen out of his lapel pocket with a studied flourish. He pulled it open until it was the length of a pointer. Then he poked at my exposed scrotum. When I juked, he nodded approvingly. “See how tender. Now look at this.” He poked again. This time the silver pointer made a small thud. I felt a spongy pressure, but no pain.

“The discovery that women are by nature attracted to testicular girth is a welcome break for the species. Sperm production is a volume business. But look at our other option.”

Again, he pointered me—but this time, for the life of me, I could not tell what he was poking. I had the wholly unique sensation of owning a body part I could not identify. I fought back nervous laughter.

“The procedure is simple.” Mengele seemed almost to be singing. No doubt he was on his own chemical diet. Again, he thrust the pointer somewhere I couldn’t see and felt with nervous uncertainty. He continued as though reading a cake recipe.

“Insert a small vibrating spring at the base of the prostate. Remove the two testicles and install a single, replaceable sperm tank, and it is possible to multiply the amount of vital essence twentyfold. More than ever the white race needs a bigger DNA delivery system. This was already priority number one during the Reich! Is it any different in America now, when the white race will soon be a minority in its own country?”

Sperm tank?
I pictured some kind of dispenser, like liquid soap pumps in public toilets. But where was it? How big? Would it set off airport metal detectors? I imagined skulking through life as some kind of prototype, a two-legged semen warehouse. It was more grotesque than tragic. A “News of the Weird” item. Which only made it more shameful.

“When I started my research,” Mengele hammered on, “the German birth rate had plummeted. It got so dire, the high command held ‘sperm summits.’ At the one I attended, in Munich, Himmler composed a directive requiring that whores who worked at the Kitty, the state bordello in Berlin, retrieve the used condoms from SS men and keep them on ice. Such high-grade race protein could not be wasted. At my suggestion, the condom drops were deposited into healthy Rhinemaidens, who were sent off for pampered pregnancies in
Liebensborn
—the baby factories Himmler set up to ensure that the cream of the species procreated.”

By way of indicating the clot in the species’ anti-cream, he clapped me on the ribs. “But of course, the last thing we want is more of this one…. The nation who understands the importance of genetic management is the nation that will prevail!”

“Fuck genetics—the money’s in cosmetics!”

In the silence that followed I held my breath. This was the unmistakable, bullying voice of Harry Zell.

“No!” Mengele finally replied. “No, no, no! It is not either-or!” he went on forcefully, slapping the pointer down on my ribs to punctuate every word. It was like being whipped with a car antenna.

“Sure it is,” said Zell, who’d apparently joined my medical practitioner at the operating table. He slapped me like a show pony under the sheet. “Look at the schlong on Rupert. Why don’t you do a transplant?” I writhed harder against the straps, the burn on my skin a welcome distraction from my bigger predicament. “You get
that
bit of surgery on film, you’ll put the whole penis extension racket out of business. Finally, every pinkie-dick in the country will know it’s possible to go from Mini Cooper to Hummer. All they need is the cash for the operation—and they come to a prison of their choice and pick out the big boys we line up for them. Nothing a convict can do if the state decides he needs to be separated from his genitalia. All we do is invent a sex crime jacket, and we got his johnson in our pocket. Nine states still have castration on the books. Who’s going to care if we take the dog and the pony?”

Mengele said nothing. I began to experience a throbbing ache that started in my perineum and radiated outward. My eyes met Tina’s just as Zell asked the obvious. He stepped in front of Mengele, meeting the bottle-blond old man’s perpetually entitled and indignant gaze. “You’ve done it before, right, Doc?”

Mengele slapped my thigh with his extendo-pen. It didn’t hurt anymore.

I’ve tried to say this already. I know. But find the language to describe not being able to see the damage some madman has just made between your legs—to describe not knowing, for that matter, whether you were man, woman or sideshow. Tina must have seen. But she wasn’t giving anything away. When I wrenched sideways I could see the shock-drunk faces of prison staff and civilians on hand. But what were they looking at? I felt like a nine-year-old Indian bride on her wedding day, eager but terrified to set eyes on the dread specter she was going to have to spend her life with.

“Come on, Doc,” Zell badgered. “Spill. How many?”

“Penile transplants? No more than a hundred,” Mengele replied acidly.

I could feel Zell looming. “Well
I’ve
never seen one, and I’ve seen everything. Plus,” said Zell, giving my shaft a friendly pat, “we’ve got a doozy on our hands.”

Mengele took time to work up his smarmiest sneer. “I’ve had a lifetime of medical experiments. Why should I share the final fruit of my research with you? Besides which, I have seen more impressive specimens.”

“Where, on Woden?” Zell laughed at his own joke until he coughed. “
Huacchh!
Goddamn it, I am giving you an opportunity here. To a guy with a dinghy a speedboat’s as good as a yacht.”

Zell made a meal of pulling out a Cohiba and sniffing it, then slipping it back in its little cigar coffin and sliding it back in his pocket. Seeing that Mengele was on the hook, he took a big breath and blew it out slow as he spoke. “Folks have seen everything there is to see about prison. Market’s saturated. Everybody’s lookin’ for new content. Can you imagine the money for
Lockdown, Auschwitz
? Well Harry Zell can. The networks would wet their drawers. Are you following? Prison docs are primo basic cable. Every network loves medical stuff. And Nazis are an evergreen. Harry Zell says why not marry ’em all?”

I craned my head up far enough to see him frame the words with his hands, as though picturing each one as he recited. “
Mengele: Death Camp Sex Monster or Medical Genius?
How hard would it be to find someone who wants a master race organ? Hell, I bet the warden here would like to trade up! You got two revenue streams—show business, for folks who want to want the procedure, and private party, for the guy who wants the goods.”

Of all people Davey piped up, though I couldn’t see where he was or if eating a prescription bottle had left any outward damage. “I’d say Major League, but not MVP. He’s no Ron Jeremy.”

“Howzabout you shut your ham trap? I’m tryin’ to talk to swastika Joe here.” Zell handled himself calmly, a man used to doing business in chaos. “What I’m saying, Doc, is we’ve got profit potential on two levels here: we make a bundle on the documentary of the procedure and make another bundle from the private party who wants to swing the Manny-bat. And by the way, Ron Jeremy is a Jew. If anybody wants to talk about Aryan supremacy in the schlong department.”

Davey’s voice quivered a little. “I was just sayin’, it’s not in the Hedgehog’s bracket.”

If the man had any concern that his son was so conversant with porn star equipment, he didn’t show it. “What it is,” Zell replied, “is the kind of cock a girl might want to take home to mother. Nothin’ ostentatious. Not everybody’s a showboat.”

I wanted to scream. Now I knew the main event was intact. But for how long? And what about that sperm tank? The one silver lining was that, so far, Davey did not seem inclined to shoot me.

Mengele’s pout was more reason to hate him. Could all genociders be this whiny? “There is something more than money. Is this something your people can comprehend? This is medical technology developed in the camp. On living subjects. If the public pays for it, then they are saying that they care less about the memory of those victims than they care about their own health and beauty. They are saying that I, Mengele, was justified in what I did. Because it can make them feel better.”

With a flick of the wrist, Mengele freed my elevated legs and brought the tent between them down.