“Now, my boys,” Felix said to them, “you see who is the master here.”
Anna lay back across the sofa, her life force almost spent.
“Wait!”
Felix rushed into the kitchen and flung open the refrigerator door. The fingers, thinking they were going to be fed, woke from their slothy green dream, circling peacefully, and sensing his presence, they began to drum impatiently on the glass. “We are here we are here it is Mozart!”
Felix could not stand them. “Stop this at once.” The little fingers stopped. “Boys, I have news for you.” cried Felix. “You are soon to be released.” The fingers did not understand, sensing only the vibrations of his voice upon the sides of their prison. “You are going to be permitted to help a beautiful woman. One of the last,” he added. “Prepare yourselves.”
The fingers waited.
“But before this happens,” commanded Felix, “I want you to play for me one last waltz.”
The finger joints turned to one another uncertainly.
“You hear me, boys? Today I shall be giving you your liberty. But the price is one last waltz. None of that dissonant stuff, either,” he warned them. “You know what I mean.” The fingers were silent in their green fluid. “Play for me now all the Strauss waltzes, and by tonight you will be free to rejoin the hands of the Tolstoi Quartet.” He leaned close to the jar. “And if you disobey your Uncle Felix, you will never see liberty again.”
The fingers turned to one another uncertainly and began to take up a jerky swimming motion.
“Yes, that’s the idea,” said Felix. His mood changed to slightly manic. “Play, my boys, play!”
The joints of the fingers swung into the most famous waltz—dah dah dah de dummm—and began turning in the jar in time to the music.
“Yes, that’s it. That’s it exactly!” cried Felix over his shoulder. He forgot to shut the refrigerator door as he ran into the next room, back to the Rat. She was waiting for him, her eyes trancelike, turned up, her entire body exposed to him and for him alone, to do whatever he wanted with it, her breath almost gone from her body.
“May I have this dance?”
Chapter 24 WHAT PASSED THERE
“Schatzie,” Felix murmured as he circled past the watching dog. “Do not think I have forgotten you. It is only that human must seek human, do you not think? It is the law of the species, is this not so?”
Felix scrutinized the Countess carefully. Perhaps he had put too much anesthetic in her wine. He didn’t think so, but he was worried. He lifted her eyelids; the pupils stared back at him, enlarged. But perhaps it was better that he had given her a large dose. He had practiced before on people who were almost dead. Enough of that, not to think. That was another life, before his desires were fulfilled.
If the Rat understood, she gave little sign; she just tightened her arms around Felix and held him close, ever so close. She smelled the odor of his cigar, the scruffy man smell of him, and her being was suffused with his odor. Her body assumed its own outlines now.
“Felix, shouldn’t we…,” the Rat slurred.
“We have all the time in the world.” His fingers caressed her. His organ swelled. The waltzes played on through the darkening afternoon.
The Rat sank into dreamlike lassitude. “Soon it will be time, my dear Doktor,” she managed to say. She tried to wake up.
Felix kissed her words back. “I am master here. You need not worry,” he crooned. Ta tah tah dee dum! Everything circled to the universal note of A. Twilight darkened the windows; the city throbbed beneath them. As they danced, they watched the shadows lengthen, darken. Even Schatzie was a shadow dog, watching them as they circled solemnly, holding each other and, in a free hand, a long-stemmed glass. “Music, music.” Felix sighed. “Yes.” The Rat was silent.
“How much time did they say I had?” asked Felix finally. Part of him did not even care. “Human warmth, my Helmut, human warmth…friendship, kinship, the closeness of a woman, the hump, the little Countess, imagine….”
The Rat did not seem to hear Felix, so absorbed was she in her own dream of closeness. Finally she murmured, “Not much time, I am afraid.”
Recalled to themselves, they smoothed their vulnerable, imperfect bodies. “Not much time.”
“You tell me, dearest Countess, when you are ready.” Felix kissed her long, drifting fingers.
“Yes…,” she signaled, her eyes closed. He kissed her eyelids. “Yes.” Her hand drifted over his narrow chest.
“I assume they will be coming for me soon. They know where I am, is it not true?”
“Yes.” Anna was in a swoon of decision, preparing to enter some other world.
“I am already packed. I have already foreseen this,” Felix said. “I have always known that someday, somehow, mankind would find a way of stopping me. My bags have been ready for a long time.”
Felix thought of his arrangements, the ticket long since bought, the letter sent to Helmut, giving emergency instructions. His laboratory could be dismantled in minutes. His large trunk, the one with the careful shelves prepared, each with its leather strap to hold in precious specimens, was ready to be sent to the address of a willing woman friend, a contact of Helmut’s in Venezuela. Felix looked forward to his new life there. He had heard many good things. It was rumored that the Führer himself planned to live in South America one day, had even had a grand villa built for him there. There was a room prepared for Felix. “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” he thought. He imagined the place prepared for him, the choice bedroom, the laboratory promised in the basement of this villa, with real shelves, not just a kitchen cupboard.
“I have all faith in you,” the Führer had said.
Music played from the open refrigerator. The afternoon passed from dusk to night. The contents of the apartment seemed to swirl in the milky, darkening light. It was as if they were enclosed in a jar, a jar containing elements of life: oxygen, a watery, permeated air that nourished them as they swirled slowly, counterclockwise, thrumming to the universal tone of A — A-live — as did the groups of cells where life or semilife was being formed. A city held them, and beyond that city a continent, a planet. They danced, supporting each other, like little stick figures in a larger enclosure. Their eyes were focused on their own private reveries.
“Is there anything you’d like, dear lady?” asked Felix. “I mean, before?”
“Nothing,” Anna replied. “I am at peace now.”
“Good. It is good to be at peace.”
For the first time, the Rat felt her body united within a larger universe of music. The grasp on her body and soul that she had endured, first because of her deformity, and then because of her experiences with the Mad Monk, now fell away from her consciousness. No longer was she the prisoner of a consciousness of her body; she finally became her body, inhabiting herself as if for the first time, from the inside outward. She forgot herself, her bent, tortured fishhook spine, and, in that forgetting, became beautiful. Dreamily, she opened her heavy-lidded eyes and regarded Felix. Turning her palms upward, Felix felt all his tenderness flowing toward the Rat.
“So this is love, this sensation….” Felix surprised himself. Then he corrected himself, for he truly loved Schatzie also. And the Führer. What love of woman could replace love of ideals? Though Felix knew he was soon to be the agent of destruction, or at least partial destruction, he also knew that he would be the agent of liberation for the Rat, too.