Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

von Braun’s magnificent Aggregat 4. The A4 he called it. Goebbels liked to call it the V2. It was a vast, aluminum phallus, with elegant, swan-like contours… it laid on its side, densely packed with the plumbing of spaceflight like a tin of sardines. Its outer cladding was removed, and it laid bare, its tubular and bulbous entrails bulging everywhere. There were bundles of nerves, parallel rows of tendons, lymph, bladders, arteries and veins of all diameters and lengths. I mean, it was all metal and rubber, but it was like looking into a man’s bowels.

“So, there she laid, a dissected, like a clockwork dinosaur, but a dinosaur from some future version of Earth, tame for the moment, like you are right now. Nevertheless, one spoke in whispers around this Behemoth, this Leviathan, almost fearing it to awaken at any moment, angry and uncontrollable as in the book of Job.”

He stopped his monologue for a moment. Then he sat back and lit a cigarette. He exhaled the first smoke towards the ceiling at which my gaze was permanently affixed.

“In a way, I envy you, Nicolaus. You and Pyotr will exist in useful ways long after I’m gone.”

He moved the hose and a plunger mechanism. The pumping resumed.

“Did you know that ‘taxidermy’ comes from the Latin ‘to move flesh’? Did you know that?”

He was sewing something on me now using dark, thick thread and a needle the size of an orchestra baton. He even waved it about to what I just then recognized was music coming from a record player somewhere in the room.

“It’s good to speak German again with someone other than Kathe. She’s useful, even pretty, but not what you would call cultured. Did you know, she never went to gymnasium? No? You didn’t know that?”

He used scissors to cut some thread.

“The German language is the lubricant for inspired men of pure blood, of great artists and engineers. Wagner, after all, could have written operas in any language, but he chose…”

He paused, lost in a memory, as he did many more times during this procedure. The tall clock in the hallway chimed. Thirty minutes to go. Halina will have the last word in this conversation, though it was neither her nor my intention to be among the victims. With no capacity for speech, I could not tell him about the dead man switch in the wine bottle detonator, even if I wanted to.

Zugzwang.

“Anyway, where was I? Taxidermy. The most realistic result, when the skin drapes naturally and joints look naturalistic, is obtained by keeping the subject alive for as long as possible, and letting the body fall into the desired pose as it would if still alive. The human body has almost two square meters of skin, so I have a lot of work to do on you. No doubt you admired my work with Geronimo?”

I heard some snipping. He picked some tobacco off his tongue.

“Was Mengele right about you? Simply by measuring your head’s ratio or something, he declared you would become a faggot. An amazing man. And a more amazing surgeon.”

He did more sewing, pulling a knot in the coarse thread tight.

“You know, Mengele was Albrect Durer with a scalpel. Do you know Durer? Of course you do. You are cultured. I can tell.”

“A great artist. His medium skill was carving bas-relief in wood. It’s true. He cut wood with a knife, but with uncanny dexterity. Born in 1470, died in 1529, or something close to those dates. German of course…”

“Mengele taught me how to remove non-critical tissue leaving only muscles, tendons, veins, arteries, all of them still working. And without a drop of blood. Just like I’m doing now. I really wish you could see this. You would be amazed. And they call him the ‘Angel of Death.’ He was an angel. A very sweet guy really.”

Kathe laughed.

“I know. I have complained to Kathe about his fame. Perhaps when all the Jews are gone, I’ll be an angel too.”

Kathe frowned.

“Tut-tut, Kathe. You can be an angel too. You can be a third angel.”

Kathe smiled. Todtenhausen continued sewing and my flesh continued moving. The grandfather clock chimed melodically on a quarter past the hour.

Fifteen minutes remained.

“You have a beautiful body, Nicolaus. Well taken care of. I’d be attracted to you also if I were homosexual.”

Todtenhausen continued, unaware of the countdown. I myself was uncertain that the detonators would work, or if they had already been discovered.

“So, Werner wanted to park something spectacular in orbit for a thousand years. To celebrate the thousand-year Reich. I suggested it to be in revenge for the fall of the Reich instead. That was defeatist talk, so I didn’t push it. Instead, I counter-proposed something less ambitious, and something we would be alive to enjoy, such as Adolf’s hundredth birthday in April of 1989. A manmade shooting star everyone on the planet could witness. Wouldn’t that have been marvelous? There were other ideas.”

Todtenhausen set down his tools and smiled smugly to my otherwise paralyzed face.

“How naive we were. Someone at Die Kuppel, I forget his name, wanted to send excavators to the moon to carve Adolf’s initials in the rock or whatever the surface is made of. He wanted it large enough to be seen every night from Earth! Wouldn’t that have been grand?”

He handed a tool that looked like pliers to Kathe. She handed him the lit cigarette from the nearby ashtray, from which he took a drag, and handed it back. They had done this before. This was choreography.

“But of course, the Jews stopped all of that, and von Braun went to work in Jew America, taking his moon machine with him. That scheißkerl 32could see air, but he could not see cost benefit.”

“All he accomplished for each 90,000 Reichsmark rocket was to inconvenience a family of London bakers or tobacconists. And they were probably not even Jews. The Jews were in the financial district, not the grocery square where one has to actually perform a day’s work.”

He stabbed out