____twoism

...yes, bitch – yes, little bitch – poor helpless bitch you're coming can't stop yourself now I'll whip you again whip till you bleed....
Thus Pokler's whole front surface, eyes to knees: flooded with tonight's image of the delicious victim bound on her dungeon rack, filling the movie screen – close-ups of her twisted face, nipples under the silk gown amazingly erect, making lies of her announcements of pain – bitch! she loves it...and Leni no longer solemn wife, embittered source of strength, but Margherita Erdmann underneath him, on the bottom for a change, as Pokler drives in again, into her again, yes, bitch, yes...
Only later did he try to pin down the time. Perverse curiosity. Two weeks since her last period. He had come out of the Ufa theatre on the Friedrichstrasse that night with an erection, thinking like everybody else only about getting home, fucking somebody, fucking her into some submission...God, Erdmann was beautiful. How many other men, shuffling out again into depression Berlin, carried the same image back from Alpdrucken to some drab fat excuse for a bride? How many shadow-children would be fathered on Erdmann that night?
It was never a real possibility for Pokler that Leni might get pregnant. But looking back, he knew that had to be the night, Alpdrucken night, that Ilse was conceived. They fucked so seldom any more. It was not hard to pinpoint. That's how it happened. A film. How else? Isn't that what they made of my child, a film?
He sits tonight by his driftwood fire in the cellar of the onion-topped Nikolaikirche, listening to the sea. Stars hang among the spaces of the great Wheel, precarious to him as candles and good-night cigarettes. Cold gathers along the strand. Child phantoms – white whistling, tears never to come, range the wind behind the wall. Twists of faded crepe paper blow along the ground, scuttling over his old shoes. Dust, under a moon newly calved, twinkles like snow, and the Baltic crawls like its mother-glacier. His heart shrugs in its scarlet net, elastic, full of expectation. He's waiting for Ilse, for his movie-child, to return to Zwolfkinder, as she has every summer at this time.
Storks are asleep among two- and three-legged hores, rusted gear-work and splintered roof of the carousel, their heads jittering with air-currents and yellow Africa, dainty black snakes a hundred feet below meandering in the sunlight across the rocks and dry pans. Oversize crystals of salt lie graying, drifted in the cracks of the pavement, in the wrinkles of the dog with saucer eyes in front of the town hall, the beard of the goat on the bridge, the mouth of the troll below. Frieda the pig hunts a new place to nestle and snooze out of the wind. The plaster witch, wire mesh visible at her breasts and haunches, leans near the oven, her poke at corroded Hansel in perpetual arrest. Gretel's eyes lock wide open, never a blink, crystal-heavy lashes batting at the landings of guerilla winds from the sea.
If there is music for this it's windy strings and reed sections standing in bright shirt fronts and black ties all along the beach, a robed organist by the breakwater – itself broken, crusted with tides – whose languets and flues gather and shape the resonant spooks here, the candleflame memories, all trace, particle and wave, of the sixty thousand who passed, already listed for taking, once or twice this way. Did you ever go on holiday to Zwolfkinder? Did you hold your father's hand as you rode the train up from Lubeck, gaze at your knees or at the other children like you braided, ironed, smelling of bleach, boot-wax, caramel? Did small-change jingle in your purse as you swung around the Wheel, did you hide your face in his wool lapels or did you kneel up in the seat, looking over the water, trying to see Denmark? Were you frightened when the dwarf tried to hug you, was your frock scratchy in the warming afternoon, what did you say, what did you feel when boys ran by snatching each other's caps and too busy for you?
She must have always been a child on somebody's list. He only avoided thinking about it. But all the time she was carrying her disappearance in her drawn face, her reluctant walk, and if he hadn't needed her protection so much he might have seen in time how little she could protect anything, even their mean nest. He couldn't talk to her – it was arguing with his own ghost from ten years ago, the same idealism, the adolescent fury – items that had charmed him once – a woman with spirit! - but which he came to see as evidence of her single-mindedness, even, he could swear, some desire to be actually destroyed...
She went out to her street-theatre each time expecting not to come back, but he never really knew that. Leftists and Jews in the streets, all right, noisy, unpleasant to look at, but the police will keep them channeled, she's in no danger unless she wants to be...Later, after she left, he got a little drunk one forenoon, a little sentimental, and went out at last, his first and last time, hoping that somehow the pressures of Fate or crowd hydrodynamics might bring them together again. He found a street full of tan and green uniforms, truncheons, leather, placards fluttering unstable in all modes but longitudinal, scores of panicked civilians. A policeman aimed a blow at him, but Pokler dodged, and it hit an old man instead, some bearded old unreconstructed geezer of a Trotskyite...he saw the strands of steel cable under black rubber skin, a finicky smile on the policeman's face as he swung, his free hand grasping his opposite lapel in some feminine way, the leather glove of the hand with the truncheon unbuttoned at the wrist, and his eyes flinching at the last possible moment, as if the truncheon shared his nerves and might get hurt against the old man's skull. Pokler made it to a doorway, sick with fear. Other police came running as some dancers run, elbows close to sides, forearms thrusting out at an angle. They used firehoses to break up the crowd, finally. Women slid like dolls along the slick cobbles and on tram rails, the thick gush catching them by belly and head, its brute white vector dominating them. Any of them might have been Leni. Pokler shivered in his doorway and watched it. He couldn't go out in the street. Later he thought about its texture, the network of grooves between the paving stones. The only safety there was ant-scaled, down and running the streets of Ant City, bootsoles crashing overhead like black thunder, you and your crawling neighbours in traffic all silent, jostling, heading down the gray darkening streets...Pokler knew how to find safety among the indoor abscissas and ordinates of graphs: finding the points he needed not by running the curve itself, not up on high stone and vulnerability, but instead tracing patiently the xs and ys, P (atu), W (m/sec), T, (degrees K), moving always by safe right angles along the faint lines...
When he began to dream about the Rocket with some frequency, it would sometimes not be a literal rocket at all, but a street he knew was in a certain district of the city, a street in a certain small area of the grid that held something he thought he needed. The coordinates were clear in his mind, but the street eluded him. Over the years, as the Rocket neared its fullness, about to go operational, the coordinates switched from the Cartesian x and y of the laboratory to the polar azimuth and range of the weapon as deployed: once he knelt on the lavatory floor of his old rooming house in Munich, understanding that if he faced exactly along a certain compass-bearing his prayer would be heard: he'd be safe. He wore a robe of gold and orange brocade. It was the only light in the room. Afterward he ventured out into the house, knowing people slept in all the rooms, but feeling a sense of desertion. He went to switch on a light – but in the act of throwing the switch he knew the room had really been lit to begin with, and he had just turned everything out, everything...
The A4 operational-at-last hadn't crept up on him. Its coming true was no climax. That hadn't ever been the point.