Kathleen Spivack - Unspeakable Things

Well, never mind, that was not his affair. “I am a scientist,” he reminded himself sternly. “I am a scientist first and foremost.”

As the stars and planets circled New York City, the sky began to glow. The sounds of the city were hushed; only a jazz samba beating itself upon the waves of the night rose up to their ears and caressed their damp hair.

“Listen.” Anna raised her face to the night air, closing her eyes, as if memorizing the sensation.

The sky was beginning to lighten, almost imperceptibly. “We still have a few hours,” Felix murmured, pressing his face to her hair.

“My dear,” the Rat said gently.

“Yes, perhaps you are right.” Quickly, he ran into the kitchen and said something to the Tolstoi fingers. “The last waltz,” whispered Felix tenderly as he took her in his arms. “My beloved Countess, may I have this waltz?”

Once more he held the wineglass to her lips, that wine into which, unseen and quickly, he had slipped something else. “Mercy,” he thought. “And compassion. My Hippocratic oath.” He watched as her eyelids became heavier and heavier. Before she could sag totally in his arms, he led her back into the kitchen and helped her onto the shelf. Dreamily, Anna lay down, curled into a small shell of herself, becoming the size of a shrimp.

“Gently.” Felix held her hand as she eased herself into the large jar that awaited her. She found a comfortable position and adjusted herself.

“Easy, my beauty,” he crooned.

The Rat curved and curled herself into the large-bellied earthenware jar. It was the one Felix had used in former times for making pickles and sauerkraut: his biggest jar. The Rat had no difficulty finding her curvature in the jar. She closed her eyes. Felix watched until she was fully asleep. The Rat did not move, but imperceptibly, as by a force larger than herself, the rhythm of the spheres, she began to circle slowly inside the jar. Slowly. Felix watched her, breathing his love into the rotating enclosure her curved body made.

As Anna sank further and further into her trance, the jar began to glow, and a strong greenish light flared up from it. There was a heavy odor of sulfur, mixed with the sweetness of violets and all the other flowers the Rat had ever worn on her body. The scent of grass, the scent of clean clothes and sunlight, all this rose from her body also. But over all was a yellow-green wrinkling odor. The odor rose and gathered itself forcefully. Before Felix’s watching eyes, the handprints revealed themselves and shimmered as if phosphorescent.

The prints danced upon the Rat’s body. Felix watched as they grew stronger and brighter in outline, sizzling in their dervish dance. The Rat sank more and more peacefully into her drugged sleep. But the hands cried out in their shining presence. Their hot smell filled the room.

Hastily, Felix now began to empty the shelves in the kitchen, filling his large trunk. He ran back and forth as daybreak threatened. He would leave no trace of himself. Felix thought of Herbert, of David, of the whole group who wanted to stop his experiments. His escape had been planned. He had always been prepared for its eventuality. “Come, Schatzie,” Felix commanded. But Schatzie did not move. She snoozed as if drugged. Felix did not worry too much about her. He found his ticket and papers. He was almost whistling as he packed quickly. The photo of the Führer was the only one he took. The photographs of children, the little ones who had been his patients, they could stay on the walls. A museum. He had no time now.

Accidentally, Felix’s sleeve brushed against the counter, where a row of jars stood waiting to be packed. There was a crash as one slipped off onto the floor. “Ach, Dummkopf !” Felix muttered to himself. There was no time, no need to clean up the mess of broken glass and liquid on the kitchen floor. He was running out of space. He would not be back.

“We must be quick, eh, Schatzie?” Felix asked. The dog did not respond. Felix opened the refrigerator and emptied the jars into the trunk. Each jar had its place and was cushioned. Carefully, reverently, he placed the jar containing the Countess and the handprints in its special place in the trunk. Felix wrote a quick note to Helmut. Then he wrote another to Herbert and David, and placed it openly on his desk, where it would easily be seen. He left a special jar behind as well. He had already drugged Schatzie, who was sleeping soundly.

At six in the morning, the movers arrived, ready to take Felix to the dock, to the ship that would take him to his new destination.

Felix tapped the trunk. “Careful with that.” Inside, the future slept in its jars, circling head to tail, as if in mothers’ wombs. The Rat dreamed on, shrinking more and more into herself, circling head to feet, as if her body had been made for this moment. A greenish light came from the trunk, even as the men carried it carefully. The handprints sizzled and leaped with excitement, merging their hot will to live with all the other animate parts of beings that Felix had collected. A smell of phosphorus rose from the trunk as two strong men staggered under its weight.

“Jeez, man, what you got in there?”

“My personal effects, gentlemen. My worldly effects.” Felix planned to tip them well. He smiled as he walked, and with satisfaction, he inserted his monocle into his eye socket. He did not wake the sleeping Schatzie, but rolled her in a blanket and tucked her under his arm.

Before closing the door of the apartment behind him, Felix took one last look upward at the angelic faces of the many children he had served. They looked down at him out of the frames, into their future lives, their loves, their own children. “For Uncle Felix with love.” “This, too, has been part of my real life,” he thought. “This, too.”

He felt pride, even now, at this moment, holding his dog in a rug under his arm, and a small shabby suitcase in his other hand. As Felix stood at the top of the stairs and supervised the downward descent of the trunk, he thought again of the children and said good-bye to them in his heart. Too bad he did not have enough place for their sweet faces in their glass frames, but his trunk was already full, given over to the sacrament of glass jars holding new life.

“I will make many more children,” he thought. And he squared his shoulders with pride. A super-race of superchildren. “And most of them from me,” he thought. “So now, my new children,” he addressed the specimens within the trunk, “we go forward. Forward, into a new world.”

The vermilion cry of four stringed instruments screeching in unison illuminated his departure. “Don’t leave us. Don’t leave us here alone!”

“Sorry, my boys. I am truly sorry. But it’s auf Wiedersehen for now. Till we meet again.”

Felix closed the apartment door behind him, walking behind his trunk. There was the sound of a plucked string from the apartment he had left.

Was all the wine of the night before making him giddy? Or was it the sudden rush of early-morning air striking his face and body? Why was this precipitate departure filling him with such joy? It was freedom, freedom to end a life that had already become too entrapping. It was the freedom of picking up, packing up, and leaving. Soon there would be the usual troubles: papers, officials, the effort of finding a place to put down his trunk and suitcase. What if the Führer’s house and place for Felix were not already prepared? In a part of himself, he knew that might be possible. Only…only…“No, my Führer will not let me down,” he thought. Felix forced his thinking into more positive channels again. For he was leaving his worldly practice to devote himself full-time to the regeneration of life. Already, as he said good-bye to his New York surroundings, he was preparing himself for the work to come.