Angel of the Perverse

I sit across a table in a little German cafe from a man who never existed.

In the distance, someone emits a long, drawn-out animal shriek.

I scan the rain-filled darkness surrounding us. There is a door at the back of the stage with a sputtering neon "EXIT" sign over it.

I would very much like to use this door, but the chair won't let me.

"Don't look, little ferret." Count Ulrich von Bek says gently, mistaking my glance. "We prefer you not see us like this." Lenses of his old-fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles shimmering, he passes me a cup of coffee.

It is a crisp September day in a Germany where the passing shadows of women in summer hats and floral print dresses and men in suits and ties cast shadows upon the white lace café curtains as somewhere in those shadows a dragon disguised as a man screams and struggles, mask smashed underfoot into a million broken mirrors.

Ignoring the half-naked man with Zodiac's face who dangles spread-eagled high overhead in the darkness among the ropes and pulleys of the broken stage we sit upon, I study my coffee.

Wiping a spatter of blood from the edge of the fine China plate, the dying former Count of Mirenburg offers me thinly sliced cherry stollen with an awkward smile. His face reminds me of Johnny Winter's near the end. He wears what's clearly a German uniform despite his clipped upper class British accent.

Waving off his bloody hospitality, I gesture at the bullet-scarred helmet squatting toadlike upon the pristine white linen tablecloth. "I have older friends who lost their entire families to the camps. I don't break bread with that."

My host echoes my gesture, "I wore this helmet as a young man in the trenches after the Great War devoured my older brothers." He sets the blood defiled plate beside the battered stahlhelm, the steel helmet German soldiers wore into battle from 1916 on. "And this…" he indicates himself, "…is the uniform I wore the night the SS took me away for disobedience; to remind them that my service to Germany could not be erased by the third Reich no matter how many magic swords and Holy Grails they demanded of me."

A hoarse, baritone shriek stage left quickly rises into inhuman falsetto. Fresh blood from above spatters the snowy linen between us.

"I forgot you were one of the few who resisted," Embarrassed, I avoid eye contact. "And survived." There are scarlet poppies painted upon both cup and saucer. Harlequin in green and black diamond motley places a long, pale finger beside his nose and winks up at me from among them.

"None taken, dear. My Dachau sojourn… taught me a certain humility." The thin white Count nervously runs a long, pale hand over his sleek, close-cropped head, before leaning back in his chair to stare past the dangling man, "Scholl, Lichtenberg… Delp, their martyrdom all but forgotten in this new century – leaving me to speak for them at Nuremburg." Crimson eyes vague, he adds to himself. "Though collective memory fades, certain actions of the German people still have repercussions, even for those of us who… resisted." He nods at the violent ruckus downstage, "Including our Angel of the Perverse over there educating those who would hold him to his word that coerced consent is not true consent."

Von Bek takes a careful bite from a slice of cherry stollen with a gleaming silver fork, followed by a long, brooding sip of coffee as a Berlin that belongs to neither of us screams in agony and a long, sleek metal shape lands on the battered boards we act upon with a dull thud.

Bouncing, it tumbles end over end towards where we sit, abruptly pausing mid-air, dark surface and Union Jack stencil gleam oily in the footlights.

We both pretend to ignore it.

Above us, the man slowly writhes like an impaled snake, arms and legs brutally stretched by knotted ropes, head thrown back, teeth clenched, crimson eyes blank.

Zodiac's shrieks subside when one of the men restraining him administers a hypo.

Stigmata

"You and I," A single drop of blood from above. Von Bek carefully sets his undrinkable cup aside to lean toward me upon his elbows, "Are children of two centuries, or in my case, three. I was born in the 19th. My story ends…" The frail man, voice softening into German so that he sounds like he's singing at me, consults a worn gold pocket watch, "Just past the threshold of the 2000s. Schnäpse?" He puts the watch away with a brisk snap, indicating two tiny glasses and a bottle between us.

I shake my head, wanting to scream, "Get to the point!" Instead, I distract myself by staring at my reflection in the side of a silver pitcher in this game of Cosmic Chicken.

"If you insist." A slight tremor in his long, slender hand, von Bek fills one of the little tulip shaped glasses. "Prost!" he says, murmuring sotto voce, "I lie dying far from here. Who cares if an old man takes his pleasures where he can – or for that matter if an ancestor breaks the rules and speaks through him to settle an old debt?"

Leaning back in his chair with serpentine languor, Von Bek emits a dry chuckle. From behind the opaque surface of his scarlet eyes, the man who writhes slowly above us studies me. Sweat trickles down his narrow face as on the silver pitcher between us. "Oh, so many games being played as we come ever nearer the Conjunction of Worlds. The prize? The winner shapes reality to their will– the disappointed idealist Klosterheim and his puppets, die Fürer and this one's cousin, Paul von Minct also known as Gaynor the Damned. I speak of the Rose, of Begg, of Jerry, of von Bek's dear wife Oona, my bastard daughter - all players in the game of angels, who would balance the scales in their favor— using my soul to pin everything in place." His eyes are red kaleidoscopes.

"I don't give a flying fuck about your soul." I snap, nervously doodling diamond shapes in the condensation. A tall woman with a black bob and indigo eyes has taken Zodiac's head into her lap, murmuring something just out of my hearing. "How the fuck do I get out of here?"

"Sprechen sie Deutsch?" the man who is no longer von Bek whispers confidentially.

To storm Heaven's gates…

We lock eyes, diamonds forgotten. "What?"

"Do you speak the language of your ancestors?" The man who has borrowed von Bek downs the little glass. He places it upon the table, giving me a sly, expectant look. "Yes?"
"No."

He laughs, "Of course not! – it's not always good to be what one is. Correct?"

"Correct." I say, remembering as a child trying to reconcile the tidy elderly men and women on my mother's side of the family with the shrieking demagogues and uniformed ogres in history books and on the screen…

Eyes distant, the bleeding man studies the bottle with its intricately printed label, "Terrible things happen when a people's love of home, of community, are turned against the world by those who loudly proclaim, "This world, it is corrupt. I will make of it a Paradise in my image!"

"So?" I catch a glimpse of myself in his spectacles.

"So?" The bleeding man nervously puts the bottle down. "Storming Heaven's gates always ends in disaster, little ferret— do you care if we smoke?"

I shake my head. My silver reflection disappears in condensation and a swirl of poppies. Against the window a metallic green blowfly heavily beats itself to death against the glass, trapped.

The Crack of a Distant Whip

Tie and collar loosened, the bleeding man fumbles a battered silver cigar case from inside his worn poppy embroidered coat. It's silk lining is black on green diamonds.

A little squadron of nuns in cornettes, white winged headdresses, whispers past the café, followed by a gaggle of laughing schoolchildren, the littlest trotting to keep up. A Dachshund happily pants beside a woman with a tray of bread in her arms. A small black and white cat carefully preens its wings high upon a windowsill. A blind, legless beggar in a tattered uniform sells matches from a battered tray.

Lighting up single-handed with an art deco silver lighter, the former Count of Mirenburg who is also the bleeding man, turns his face into the late afternoon sunlight, eyes hooded, exhaling gray rings up at the bleeding man who looks back with blank red eyes. "Dreams of order. Dreams of peace… illusions all…" he murmurs, crimson eyes tracking sun-gilded dust motes in the air. "The Kaiser's war seemed an honest one by comparison…" He gestures out into surrounding rain filled darkness, "…for all the despair it was-has-did-will unleash, building empires bright and dark, all fall in the end." He suddenly grips my hands to the point of pain.

I resist, overturning my café chair.

Hissing, the little black and white cat takes flight. The beggar yells.

My host snaps the fingers of his free hand in my face. "And you shall set us free."

The EXIT sign blinks out as a huge black Mercedes-Benz Tourenwagen, red and black flags snapping in the wind, scatters the pedestrians, the stench of blood in its wake to the crack of a distant whip.

Breath hissing, the dangling man stiffens in his bonds. Zodiac scuttles away from his captors into the darkness somewhere between upright and on all fours.

The bomb... detonates.