I remember thinking how powerful they looked, how inhuman, moving along in straight-edged lines and columns, each glossy black polished boot smarting down against the street at the exact same moment, over and over and over again, like the common pulse in some terrible machine. They had identical faces the lot of them, eyes shadowed by stout-billed angular caps pulled down an inch onto their smooth creaseless foreheads as they marched through the streets and I swore to myself I could feel the walls rattle with the drumbeat of their stomping high steps. The children, loose and unsupervised in the meat of the working day, ran by their feet like stray dogs after a milk truck, yapping and bright eyed. The soldiers thundered past them, walked over them, stomped their boot heels into the yielding soft faces if some bystander wasn't quick enough to snatch the youngsters away. The farmers and traders and shop-keepers, the grocers and barbers and school teachers, all came to see. All came to stare.

Within the next month I realized that my initial suspicion that this militia was no human force indeed -- that they were monsters, man-hunters, mutants of humanity -- was correct. They wrenched from my very hands my job, my money, my future. The sidewalk I'd spent my boyhood zig-zagging down with my dearest Yosef skipping and rippling alongside me was no longer within my worthiness or bounds. I walked on the street like a donkey or a cow. And that hideous yellow badge they had me wear! Like a stamp of shame, something which I used to bear with such pride! Such integrity! The name Jew now rotted in my mouth each and every time I was forced to say it and stunk in the air it hung in each time the soldiers bellowed it at me as I shuffled past them with my eyes stuck to the cobble stone road. The star of David was a curse, a dirty nasty thing that send terrible shivers up and down my spine every time I saw it. If you had asked me then how to spell the word Jew I'd tell you: D-E-A-T-H.

And the man with the short mustache everybody murmured about behind cracked doors and paper-thin walls was just a distant thing in my mind, a strange fantasy of some far-off magical kingdom where like the eye of Satan himself Hitler sat in his skeleton throne atop of mountain of human ashes. I imagined that he watched, never weary, the procession of feeble grey-faced prisoners rolling on and on and on, all of Poland and all of Germany and all of Europe, oh, hell -- all the world -- as they lumbered into to that great fiery furnace of Hell and fell to dust.

The reality I found months later wasn't much different from the fantasy except that there was no fire at all: only rain, only mud, only night, only shadows. My parents were ripped away from me like my own two arms severed with a blunt knife, the soldiers dragging me off to work and letting me watch as they shuffled my creators like so many calves getting herded to the slaughter. Mama cried out and I can still hear it, and will swear to you even now that that single moment of sound was anything you'd ever need to know what the Holocaust was -- the ungodly scream of a mother torn away from her child by force and fury.

And once I found out I was different and dangerous and could defy Death himself I tried to save them too. I didn't. I couldn't.

But I need you to know I tried.

And now I am the one with the power. Now I, not the soldiers, am the one with the inhuman strength. It is my turn, and the turn of all those who have ever been held down in the world. I don't seek vengeance; I seek justice. I seek tolerance. And if that means I have to kill than by God I will; I would finish every man woman and child on this charred bitter hateful old earth if I thought for one minute it would bring back the days from Before. And this girl is innocent, and I know that; and she is mutant, and I know that too. And I am sorry. And I know when I touch her she will see all my pain and all my suffering, and I'm glad for that at least -- because perhaps then she will know and she too will understand why this must be done, why she must be sacrificed. If she saw the reality of what was to come -- if she felt that deep pinching pain of hunger, or the wet heaving clamor of ten boys piled on top of you as you sweated out your lifeblood in some two-bit bunk -- maybe then she'll see. Or maybe not. It doesn't really matter now.

The machine is my throne and the lady liberty herself my mountain, proud and tall, upon which I can watch the world turn. I hold down the X-Men without hurting them -- they seem surprised, as though they expected some kind of homicidal maniac in me, as though I haven't already learned what happens to a man when he takes a life without warrant -- and feel a swell of pity as I watch the Wolverine writhe in his binds.

His eyes, jet black and wild with hate, scour mine. "If you were really so noble, it'd be you up in that thing." And I can see his point but there must be someone to lead this new world; someone with experience. Someone who can avoid the pitfalls and corruptions of the old world. Someone who'd seen the Before. But I feel bad for him nonetheless and when I see the claws piercing through the tough hide of his knuckles I know; I know how much this girl means to him and I know what he'll do to save her.

He won't save her, though. He'll be too late.

It all goes wonderfully until I hear the clap of thunder boom as Sabretooth falls to his apparent death, that single minded brute. The Wolverine, raving and ravenous, rounds up the rest. They stand all together like some pitiful comic book superhero squad, silly and obscene in their tight black leather.

The girl is quietly crying, the life bleeding out of her. There's a stench that still makes brain electric, charred flesh, and I realize her hands have melded onto the machine and I remember the smoky burn of it myself. She looks at me, and her eyes are pure pain. I've seen those eyes before. "Please..."

The machine leaches everything from her, even the color from her hair. She'll be a white-haired martyr once this is through. Like an angel. My little angel of tolerance.

The Wolverine manages to get up the machine, which I had not figured he could. Don't they need somebody who can fly on that team? I reach up to stop him but there is nothing left of my power but then -- I think of that moment, so many many years ago -- see the fence rotten and bent and Mama's face twisted up with the mud slushy deep at my feet and the rain hard and cold against me and my clothes wet heavy on my arms and then the pulsing in my fingertips and the deep belly groan of giving steel and the power -- oh, the power -- as the soldiers rush to hold me back and can't can't can't because I'm TOO STRONG, I'm STRONGER THAN THEM.

The Wolverine freezes and lets out an impotent roar of dismay. Thank God. Thank God.

I haven't failed again.

I think of my mama's face and try to imagine what she would have looked like if I'd torn that fence down, if I wrestled through that crowd, if I let her pin me to her and cry into my hair. I try to think of what she would have said. How grateful she would have been. "Oh," she would have moaned, "My boy! My brave brave boy! Oh, how I love your face! Oh, how love your ears! Oh, how I love your nose! You feel so good against my hands, my son! It feels so good to hold you again!"

"Yes," I would've said, "Mama, it feels good to hold you too."

And it would have been.

FIN.