Worlds Apart (10 page)

“It’s still not right.”

The Colonel sighed. “I am aware,
we
are aware of the lines we are… blurring, for lack of a better word. But if we can learn from this, perhaps we can prevent something like what happened here over the last several years from ever happening again.
Ever.”

Kurt felt exhausted. It was too
much,
all of this was too much. “What about me? What happens to me now?”

“I’m not entirely sure,
Obersturmführer
,” the Colonel answered.
“A trial?
An execution?
Perhaps you can make your future what you wish it to be, although I can’t say I see that as a distinct possibility. And incidentally, that
is
what you and your wife believed, what you apparently wrote to each other. You often spoke to others about the wishes she made at the wishing well, and about all the coins she tossed in, one after another.”

Kurt felt like sobbing – for all of his losses, for all the imaginary losses, for everyone’s losses. How could he have been the person the Colonel said he was? He had no means to reconcile what he’d been told with what he thought he knew about himself and his past. He must have been a degenerate, a callous inhuman monster, to have done all that he had allegedly done. His nightmares, had they been actual events? They must have been, and that was more frightening than anything.

“Put him under again,” he heard the Colonel say.

“No. Please, no!” Kurt shouted. He didn’t know what they would do to him next, what stories they would inject him with, but no more, NO MORE!

He felt the prick of a needle, and his back arched as he fought to prevent it, fought to preserve even a single shred of dignity or control over his existence.

“It should just be a minute, Colonel,” a voice stated, and Kurt could already feel the sleepiness clouding his brain.
Fighting it, fighting it.
But there was no point, for they had already won.

“There goes the sedative,” Kurt heard, and then he was almost out, his body calm, his breathing slowing.

The room was silent as the man on the table departed consciousness. Feet were shuffled as the Colonel’s team attended to chores ignored for the past hour.

The narrator, Elsa, cleared her throat. “How much more can we do to him?” she asked in a cautious voice.

“It could never be enough,” one of the others answered.

“But.
Isn’t he right, in a way? Aren’t we doing the same thing as they did?”

The Colonel fielded that one: “We’re the good guys, Elsa.”

“I know that. But still…”

On the table, the shackled body of the former
Lagerführer
was inert except for a single twitching eye. The welter of equipment in the room gleamed.

The Colonel looked away from Kurt, and took a long breath. “Perhaps you’re correct, Elsa. God forbid we’re the same as them. But the certainty that one is in the right… How do you know?”

And then quietly, “How do you know?”

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