Pain Killers (49 page)

“They let you live,” Mengele said, “with this?”

The Semitic doctor and the physically challenged Mexican-American froze. Mengele was growing more agitated. The doctor stroked his beard, sympathetic, the soul of rabbinic wisdom. “You really believe this, Mr. Goldstein?”

That was it. Mengele literally sputtered. “
I am not Goldstein!
They know,” he cried, pointing directly at Tina and me. Dr. Stern gave us an inquiring glance. Every head in the waiting room turned.

I held my hands up, funny guy. “Hey, we’re just the folks down the street. Have to go!”

“Good Samaritans,” Tina added, sighing with befuddled affection as we backed toward the door. “Last week he said he was Einstein…. The week before that, who was he, hon?”

“Henry Kissinger.”

Dr. Stern relaxed and stroked his beard.

“Josef Mengele,” I heard him say before we were out the door. “Wait’ll I tell my wife.”

Dr. Stern led him, with the help of the burly security, through a pair of double doors. That’s when we heard Mengele scream. “I am not Goldstein! I…No…I am not a—”

Silence.

As discreetly as possible, Tina and I turned and ambled back toward the exit. “They frown on disturbances in geriatrics,” I said.

Tina threw her arm over my shoulder. “Wonder what they use to knock out a ninety-seven-year-old? It’s kind of a small end for such a massive evil.”

“That’s why it’s perfect,” I said. “He wanted opera and we gave him a sitcom.”

Driving back to L.A., neither of us talked for the first hour. Then Tina mentioned the tapes. “Do we keep them?”

“I would have liked to burn them in his face, but now…I don’t know.”

We drove in silence another few miles. Then she spoke up again.

“The other thing, I found these notebooks, under the spare tire. I can’t read German, but there are equations, sketches of organs…stuff that looked like locations and dates. Even some photos.”

We’d gotten lost and ended up going east instead of south. When we cut back to L.A. on the 10, we passed the roadside dinosaurs at the Truckee Farm. The giant fake tyrannosaurus looked embarrassed to be standing there, along with the sullen, ratty triceratops.

“It’s funny,” I said, “Zell and the warden going to all that trouble to make bank off Mengele…. Meanwhile, now we’ve enough paraphernalia from hell to get rich for life.”

“Wait, baby, you’re not thinking…?” Tina bit her thumb, genuinely offended. “There is not enough money in the world…”

“Or enough drugs to kill the guilt.”

“Forget drugs.
Please.
” She stared out the window like there was something else she wanted to say. I knew her well enough to let it go.

“Well, I guess we have to decide whether we send the Mengele stuff to the AMA or the FBI. To tell you the truth, I don’t trust either of them.”

“I say nobody gets it except the Holocaust Museum. And they get it anonymously.”

“Much better idea.”

We drove in silence for a while. But there was too much I wanted to say.

“Tina…,” I began, then realized I didn’t have the words. I didn’t know whether to slap her, slap myself, buy us dinners, take a bite out of my own hand or ask her to remarry me on the spot.

She cast a glance in my direction, going from zero to a hundred radiant. “What?”

There was always something irrational about Tina’s affection—the occasions of its arrivals and departures. I felt the same sharp desire and protective urges that overwhelmed me the first time I saw her, sitting at the kitchen table where she’d lately served her husband his fatal bowl of Lucky Charms.

Tina snuck another sideways look. “Of course, we could put some stuff in a safe. In case we wanted to get rich later.”

Just when I thought I could trust her…

“I’m kidding, you asshole! If we made Holocaust money, what would we tell our children?”

“I don’t know, what do people who own shares in Halliburton tell
their
children? It’s a religious matter. Anyway, this is all abstract. Let me meet my future children, then I’ll worry about what the fuck to tell them.”

“You will,” she said.

“Will what?”

“Meet your future children.”

“What?…When?”

“Soon.”

“Not exactly. But I’m ready.”

“You’re ready?”

“Listen. You know me, man, I didn’t used to think I could have a normal life. Now, after all this insanity, the shit of history…I think I need to do this.
We
need to do this. When we fucked around in the trailer, I had a vision. Twins. Matching little Mannies.”

“Twins,” I repeated in spite of myself. “Mengele would be thrilled. But I still don’t…”

“What?”

I stared straight down the highway, behind a truck full of cattle, their faces at once dumb and weirdly serene on the way to slaughter. I reached across the seat, put my hand on one of her epic cheekbones.

“If those little fuckers are born with bull necks and swastikas on their backs, you’re going to have a lot of explaining.”

She smacked my hand away, but not unhappily. “Trust me, they’ll be yours. That’s the scary part.”

She was right about scary. I checked the rearview—a habit I imagined I could shake in two or three decades, when the kids I didn’t know if I’d ever really have were grown up and gone. I spun the wheel and veered to a squealing stop on the shoulder.

“If we do this, it’s for real,” I said. “No more bullshit, no more secrets.”

Tina ran her finger down my face and smiled. Our eyes found each other and had their own conversation. And yet…There was something tainting this romantic idyll: part of me still wondered if the woman I was ready to share my life with—again—had murdered Dinah Zell. There was still no explanation for what happened. Tina was, like myself, no stranger to insane jealousy. She might have gotten wind we were together on the plane. Might have come to the conclusion that something transpired between Harry Zell’s wife and me. After that it was a simple matter of execution: find the house, drug the housekeeper, surprise Dinah in her bedroom and—all the rest.

I didn’t believe it. I wanted to scour the inside of my brain with bleach and kill all these negative bacteria. But denial was a kind of relapse too. And an odd calm came with that thought. It was, I realized, the
not knowing
that would set me bolting upright at four in the morning for years to come. My true north was always the worst-case scenario within reason—or without it. But there was, here and now, one verifiable truth: I knew Tina had murdered. Once. And once upon a time I had made the conscious decision to let myself love her with that fact intact. So now I would simply live with not knowing who killed Dinah Zell. She had already mentioned, as it happened, that her first thought when she found the body was that
I
did it. Which was not all that implausible either. Even if I hadn’t ground-glassed-and-Drano’d a loved one out of existence, I was hardly model-citizen material myself. We were probably made for each other in hell. And here we were.

We were probably made for each other in hell. And here we were.

But still…What was the point of unconditional love if it wasn’t unconditional? For all we know, after creating the universe, God went into a fentanyl-and-gin blackout, saw the Holocaust when He came to and wanted to claw His eyes out. Like Oedipus. He couldn’t deal with the guilt. And we are made nervous, in his image. The consequences never seem to end.

This was the history of the world. Recovery and collapse, despair and relief. The dialectic of clean and dirty. Every time is worse than the time before. The bad thing comes, days and nights and days and nights get so unbelievably fucked up, unbelievably fast, but in the end—if there is an end—everybody’s best self just slogs forward, one stagger, one fall, one day, one
What the fuck just happened?
moment of oblivion and soul-broken joy at a time. All we have to do is not die.

Tina leaned across the seat and kissed me on the mouth. “Never again.”

“Right,” I said. “Until it happens again.”

JERRY STAHL is author of the narcotic memoir classic
Permanent Midnight; I, Fatty
(film rights optioned by Johnny Depp);
Perv—A Love Story;
and
Plainclothes Naked.
He has written extensively for film and television, and his much-anthologized fiction and journalism have appeared in
Esquire, Details, Playboy, Black Book, LA Weekly,
and
Tin House.
He lives in Los Angeles.

www.jerrystahl.com

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