Pain Killers (9 page)

I stood outside for a vacant minute. It must have been three-something A.M. There were no signs of life in the conjugal unit. Tower-mounted vapor lights softened the forbidding architecture beyond. Their glow lent the retro buildings an insect-buzzy, Edward Hopper feel. I couldn’t tell if the buzzing came from insects or the electric fence. (I remembered how, when the camps were being liberated, some inmates were so delirious with happiness they ran for the fences. Their first act of freedom was electrocuting themselves.)

You hear a lot about prison rape on cable, but I didn’t hear any screams. Just the ones inside my own head.

I urinated—on my shoe, as it turned out—and thought how Mengele had spent his glory years in proximity to high-voltage fences, guards in uniforms, gun towers and inmates. And here he was again. One big difference from his Auschwitz time was that the Nazis kept their prisoners weak. In concentration camps, it was the powerful against the dying. In American prisons, the prisoners were bodybuilders. So it was, more often, the powerful against the buff.

As I zipped and went back inside, I still felt a little ashamed that I’d been too weak to just dive into the files and dig straight for the doctor. It was a shame I was used to. I had wanted, very badly, to find out from the file that this was a hoax, in which case I could be in and out of state supervision in record time. I had not wanted to admit the reality of what I’d signed on for. Whoever and whatever my quarry was, I was going to have to deal with it. And I didn’t
like
dealing with things. Which, oddly enough, was a good quality for a cop. But otherwise it made for a life based on avoidance. Every plan I’d ever had was shaped by whatever I wanted to avoid.
The Fear-Driven Life.
I did not have much in common with Pastor Rick Warren. Paranoia, for me, was not so much evidence of mental illness as a side effect of heightened consciousness.

Running a game on criminals is a bad idea under any circumstances. But doing it here made me so nervous I couldn’t make myself read about Mengele. I’d had to wait until his file showed up in my hands.

I stress-yawned and turned around. Now all possibility of avoidance was over. Back inside, I sat down at the sticky table and started making big X’s next to passages I thought I could use. In one interview, Mengele’s son announced that his father felt cheated out of the honor his work deserved. Dad believed this was because he didn’t use anesthesia. Small minds could not understand that this was science, not sadism. They did not know the miracles he’d discovered, the results he longed to give to the world. But the world, comprised as it was of very, very small minds, would rather suffer and die of deadly diseases than admit that Mengele had found the cure. Rolf, who grew up to be a political moderate, claimed to be horrified at his father’s deeds.

According to Mengele the younger, his father had lugged three boxes of lab notes from country to country. Dad’s last letter to his son, one sentence long, captures his loathsome tone-perfect note of self-pity and narcissism: “History has chosen me to judge, so as not to have to judge itself.”

There was more: Mengele suffered from a rare medical condition. Rare for a human, at least. Because of his lifelong habit of chewing his mustache, hair had settled in his intestines and created a growth called a bezoar. He underwent an operation in 1957, in Caracas, to remove what was, when you stripped away the niceties, a hairball.

Where did Zell get this stuff?

I felt unnamable emotions, staring at pictures of naked Gypsy twins: teenage girls whose hands had been amputated and resewn onto each other’s arms, holding lollipops. Shock and pain had blasted all expression off their faces. Then I realized what I was really staring at: their two thick bushes. I nearly passed out hating myself. Who was Herr Doktor kidding? Why were they naked?

Zell’s notes said that Mengele (with the help of IG Farben) had used the skin of actual women to create the seductive and easy-to-clean coating for his “field hygienic love partner.” A love doll. The specs were included. “Borghilda is flexible, elastic, anthropomorphic and capable of doing everything your special girl or devoted
mutti
waiting at home can do.” She bore the same full pubic forest as the unlucky Gypsies. But blond.

“We Germans wanted mature women. Real women. We did not want them to shave their nether hair. We did not infantilize. Unlike American men, who want their women with outsized breasts and hairless vaginas, so they can have Mommy on top and a little girl on the bottom. I made my Rhinemaiden, Borghilda, as nature intended.” I read on: He submerged babies in freezing water. He played Schubert’s
Serenade
on the violin.

He found a Hungarian pianist to accompany him and trained a guard dog to attack her when she hit a wrong note.

The music room was in Building Ten, beside the lab. What was harder to believe: that he transplanted hands? That he actually thought transplanted hands would be able to play the violin? Or that he had all the hands he wanted?

I lurched awake, soggy, gripped by some kind of death sneeze. Mengele’s documents lay scattered all around me. Somehow, during the night, a team of surgeons had entered the trailer and relocated a badly diseased, radioactive hog rectum in the cranial pouch where my brain used to be. From the coating on my tongue, it was clear they’d gone in through my mouth, shoved the thing north through my sinuses, then wedged it behind my own nonblue eyeballs. I could feel it, propped atop my cerebral cortex like roadkill on a stick. I wanted to stick my tongue out as far as it would go and bite it off.
Mengele dreams.

I needed to hit something. I slapped myself in the head, then banged the top of an antique Red Cross box. To my surprise the top popped open, revealing a pristine batch of metal syringes and sealed vials inside. I grabbed a vial and made out the logo—BAYER, 1919. Back then heroin was legal. Aspirin was the newfangled, not-to-be-trusted devil drug. More Discovery Channel fallout.

I squinted for a better view of the label, and there it was, in curlicued Calvin Coolidge–era lettering: MORPHINE SULPHATE.

I was surprised by the jolt this gave me. Just seeing the words. Until that moment I had not been thinking about drugs. But as soon as I saw them,
I needed them.
And not just because of the hangover. I’d had hangovers before. But nothing, nothing like the throbbing pork butt of death left in my head by the boxed wine and mildew party. I visualized my brain spooned from the skull, floating in a jar, bloodied with fresh tattoos of the woman I once thought was going to save me, naked. Every time I moved, my lungs were punctured by the flattened soup can of grief.

But this is the point: the pain was endurable until I saw the painkiller. That’s called being an addict. The craving began on sight. Out of nowhere, an option no normal person would have entertained suddenly made sense. (Normal people don’t look at abandoned, half-drunk cocktails in airport bars and think about knocking them back when no one’s watching, either. But ask an alkie if he’s ever had the urge. (If he answers no, he’s not an alkie.) If the feelings were bad enough, and there was a way to obliterate them, it was obliterate first and deal with the consequences later. If you’re a junkie, obliteration is your job. You have a hole to fill. Not to mention self-pity and ball-clenching fear to try to relieve.

I heard the distant crunch of tires on gravel. Then I watched my hands assemble the screw-in syringe like they’d gone to nursing school in 1910. Just holding the paraphernalia had my bowels churning. My fingers left grimy prints on the glass tube. I slid it into the metal holder like a shell into a cannon, worked the needle into the slot at the business end. And stared, amazed, at the rig in my hands.

The gravel crunch was getting closer.

I hadn’t shot up in years, but my veins were still tough as bark. Breathing slowly, I coaxed a blood register into the old-timey works. Still not sure I was going to do it. And then
BANG-BANG-BANG!

“Anybody home?”

Without thinking, I pressed the plunger.
Shit!

“Just getting up!” I croaked.

It took a few seconds for the century-old morphine to detonate. The rush came on with fluid warmth. Like my heart had wet itself.

By reflex, I broke down the rig and stashed the Red Cross box under the sink, where it looked like it belonged.

Rincin knocked again. “C’mon, bub, what are you doing in there?”

My voice came from far away.

“Gimme a minute there, Officer.”

“Sure thing. Mind if I pop in?”

“Wait!”

I forgot that to law enforcement, “Wait!” means
“Come on in!”
I watched the knob turn with dim fascination. Had I also forgotten to lock up after last night’s festivities? Did Rincin have a key? Panic flared and subsided. The drug was working. But I knew that the pain it killed would be resurrected later. Then that thought disappeared with a hiss and the door banged open. Rincin walked in and winked. Maybe I was just feeling the effects of the preservatives.

“I’m early,” said my new friend. “Gotta use the head. Two sips of joe and I gotta whiz so bad I could cry.” He paddled past me, jumped into the telephone booth toilet and grunted. “Hey, buddy? You forget?”

Something bounced off my chest. I groped for it and felt the crinkly plastic wrapping. The piss-test cup. My stomach plummeted.

I turned on the kitchen tap. Unleashed a dribble of fluid that tasted flammable. A drop got in my eye and stung, but I kept gulping. Rincin talked from the bathroom. The CO hadn’t bothered to close the door. His stream banked loudly off the metal bowl and he groaned like the lead in a bad porno, “Oh yeah, oh God…Fuck that is good. That is so fucking go-o-o-d.”

I tried not to think what the Model T morphine might do to my liver. I’d shot up shoe polish once and survived. What was one more toxic drop in Love Canal?

Rincin sighed loudly from the bathroom. “Man, oh Manischewitz!” His high-impact relief ebbed to a mere torrent. He stepped out of the toilet, hitching his balls in his khaki uniform. “You dressed, new fish? ’Cause we got to drop your UA off and get you to class.”

“How long does it take?”

“How long does what take?”

“The piss test.”

“Why, you worried?”

“Not unless they made beer illegal!”

This seemed like a Regular Guy thing to say. Rincin just stared.

“You got the Parkinson’s?” he asked, zipping up. “You got kind of a palsy thing going on.”

“Shaky night.”

“I used to get those. Boy howdy! Then I cut out the bug juice.”

I lurched by him to the bathroom. The black spore that grew on the mirror gave me a face full of blackheads. It was like being fourteen again, except for a haunted yellow tinge in the eye and the deep grooves that time and clean living had carved in both cheeks like initials in a tree. My daughter referred to the parentheses around my mouth as “puppet lines.”

At her age, I had no idea that one day I’d be sweating over clean pee. Getting busted at Quentin, on day one as drug counselor, there were bound to be repercussions.

“Idiot,”
I hissed at my smeary image.

“Talkin’ to me, Rupert?” Rincin’s voice came through more baffled than indignant.

“Singing,” I replied, before picking up the pee cup and peeling off the plastic.

Shaking off a century of dust, the post-rush opiate buzz kicked in. I was ready to give up, but in a moment of devil-may-care ingenuity, I spotted the little urine lakes Rincin left on the floor. Happily, the linoleum had deep divots, deep enough to scoop up a sample cup’s worth of pee.

“Okay, let’s do this,” I said, trying to smile as I came out of the bathroom

“Do what?” Rincin eyed my sample with something less than ardor. “Less you’re planning on goin’ Gandhi and drinkin’ that, I’d put a lid on.”

“Gandhi drank his pee?”

“Secret of successful nonviolence,” Rincin called over his shoulder. “Make sure you got piss breath when you negotiate, and sit close.”

He stepped out of the trailer while I weaved behind him.

“Did you just make that up?” I asked.

“History major. Humboldt Junior College. Speaking of which, you don’t think the Holocaust happened, do you?”

“Jury’s out.” I shrugged with no hesitation whatsoever. “What makes you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Rincin unlocked the driver’s side of a Crown Vic with CDC on the door. “I work with a guy, I like to know where he stands.”

“Who doesn’t?” I said inanely.

I wasn’t sure if our little exchange was cause for alarm. Or not. Just a couple of regular guys talking Holocaust. By now, the opiate blast had passed. Paranoia was back. Now cut with disorientation and dry mouth. I wondered vaguely if impaired judgment could be carried by bacteria.

“Get in.” Rincin slammed his door shut and patted the passenger seat. “You’re riding bitch.”

A trio of prisoners with rakes on their shoulders stepped by and peered in the car. Rincin shooed them away and squawked into his walkie-talkie. “The package is on the way. Ten-four.”

“The package?” The sensation of being set up damped the last embers of euphoria.

Rincin winked. “You gotta package, don’tcha? I bet you’re a regular Johnny Hog-leg.”

I didn’t take the bait. If that’s what it was. Instead, I looked at orange jumpsuits circling the yard in clumps of two or three. Half the convicts looked like they’d gotten off at the wrong bus stop. The other half looked like they’d kill the bus driver for a dime bag of anything. A few of them—pink cheeked and well scrubbed—gave off the impression that maybe they’d eaten their mothers.

“Apologies for the hog-leg remark.” Rincin lowered his head, genuinely contrite. “The quality of people around here, it lowers the real estate, conversationally speaking.”

He pulled into a dirt lot and sat with his hands clamped around the steering wheel. He stared straight ahead, at the back of North Block, the condemned unit.