The Orchids

Langhof.”

“Quite all right, sir.”

“Well, I understand this area of research is quite a distance from hygiene.”

“Yes, sir,” Langhof said. He could feel his throat closing.

“But I hope you can understand the need for all our staff to have some knowledge of what we’re doing here.”

“Yes, sir,” Langhof said. He felt his hands squeeze together.

“You may return to your quarters, Doctor,” Kessler said.

“Thank you, sir,” Langhof said briskly. He began to move away quickly.

“You’re due in the laboratory in fifteen minutes, however,” Kessler warned.

“Yes, sir. I know,” Langhof said, almost running now.

Inside the building, Langhof stopped, drew in a long breath, then moved slowly down the hall. He entered his room, closed the door behind him, and sat down on his bunk. Staring at his boots, he could not connect himself to the world by means of any reliable image. It was as if everything had been swept up in a terrible wind and blown randomly, chaotically into the stratosphere. He could not feel his clothes over his shoulders or his boots on his feet. He could not feel the little breeze that wafted in from the small crack in the window. He could not hear the screams of the freezing vermin dying in the snow only a few meters away.

It was not clear to him what had happened. But now, at night when I can hear the sound of the macaw, I know what happened in the courtyard. I stand by the window and listen to the shrill cry of the jungle birds and they are transformed into the cries of the people slumped freezing in the snow. I hear the wailing and the moaning as I actually heard them, but in my imagination I can hear things now that I could not hear then. I can hear the slurping of the baby’s mouth. I can hear the crunching of the snow as the bodies topple over one by one, hour after hour. I can hear the scratch of Kessler’s pencil as he records the deaths. I can hear the slide of the bodies as the guards drag them from the courtyard and pile them onto the waiting lorries. I have magnified the world of sight and sound. I have learned to hear and see the smallest things, the rush of a final breath, the ant at work within a broken filling.

And so I know what happened to our hero in the courtyard. He walked out, following Kessler, in the same state of oblivion that had overtaken him months before, on the first night of his arrival. He turned the corner, saw the naked bodies, but did not see them. Instead he saw something else. He saw the actual physical face of that dread he had felt so long ago at the Institute. He saw the horror fully, and in a way that had not approached him before. He had extracted babies from the wombs of women and infected scores of people with disease. But he had always seen this as an inevitable circumstance of his being in the Camp. He had forgotten, conveniently forgotten, that in a sense he had already known the Camp, but had chosen to dismiss that knowledge. As his sensibility slowly emerged, his mind began to comb the scattered litter of his past. He believed that it was all there to be discovered within himself. If he could locate his person, he could locate the world.

There are times when I think of this and then go walking in the darkness beside the river. I see our hero slumped on his bed, his mind teeming with schemes of self-analysis, dreaming that by discovering himself he can discover the Camp. And I think that if it would not rouse the monkeys or cauterize my soul, I would heave my head back and laugh with such thunderous contempt that it would shake the drowsing vipers from their vines.

IN THE EARLY YEARS at El Caliz, before old age calcified my bones, I often wandered into the surrounding jungle. Across the river, the world was as it had been ten thousand years before, and from time to time I attempted that revery in nature that mystics and idiots are said to feel. I lay on the ground and dipped my face in the sweating soil. I swam naked in the streams. I wrapped my body in great, waxy leaves and baked it on the mud flats to the south. I put water lilies in my hair and rolled in the reeds of the delta. I drank cactus milk, sucked sugar cane, and chewed coffee beans. I waxed my hair with lemon juice and adorned myself with vines. I tried to lose myself in physical delight, join myself to the imagined rhythms of creation. While Dr. Ludtz obsessively cleaned his paltry arsenal or strung klieg lights about his cottage, I sank into the illusion that I could locate myself in nature by uniting with it, by shirking off my isolated humanness and becoming an instrument of immersion. But in doing this I only repeated the process that I had attempted once before in the Camp.

For Langhof, suddenly stricken with his own helplessness and venality, felt compelled to investigate the Camp by means of immersing himself within its horrors. He wanted to see the flames from the chimneys at noon and night, sunrise and sundown. He met the trains as they steamed their way up to the snow-covered platforms. He followed the huddled crowds to the mouth of the gas chambers and stood watching as they shuffled out of their clothes. He imagined himself as a kind of artist, observing the Camp from all angles, scribbling notes, conducting interviews. Somewhere in all of this he expected to find himself. The horror, of course, was unimaginable, but Langhof felt it his duty to record it with his senses. And so he monotonously and obsessively toured the Camp, barking commands from time to time so as not to rouse suspicion, and slapping his little riding crop against his boot, gently or viciously, depending upon who might be observing his activity. It was on one of his nightly journeys that he heard something move around the corner of one of the darkened barracks. He drew his pistol.

“Halt,” he commanded. “Halt. Don’t move.” He waited for a moment, then drew his flashlight from his pocket and beamed it toward the sound. One of the prisoners was standing with his back pressed against the barracks wall.

Langhof studied the small, bearded face, glowing in the yellow light. “What are you doing in the yard at this hour?” he asked.

The prisoner did not appear frightened. “Walking, the same as you,” he said.

“You are not permitted to be outside the barracks,” Langhof said.

The prisoner did not answer. He squinted into the light, but kept his hands pressed tightly to the wall.

“What are you doing out here?” Langhof repeated.

“You are Dr. Langhof,” the prisoner said.

Langhof stepped away slightly. “How do you know me?”

“You work in the medical compound,” the prisoner said. “So do I.”

“What is your name?”

“Ginzburg. Do you want my number?”

“Yes,” Langhof said, “I do.” He took out a pad and, as Ginzburg recited his number, Langhof pretended to write it down.

“Do you have it?” Ginzburg asked.

“Yes,” Langhof said. He replaced the pad in his uniform pocket. “You had better watch yourself, or you’ll end up being reported.” To his amazement, Langhof thought he saw a smile flicker across Ginzburg’s face. “Who do you work for?”

“The New Order,” Ginzburg said sardonically.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Langhof said. “Who is your superior in the medical compound?”

“Do you want to write it down?”

“Just tell me,” Langhof demanded.

“Dr. Kessler. He is your superior too, I believe,” Ginzburg said. He shielded his eyes from the light. “Could you put that flashlight away?”

Langhof turned the light off.

“Thank you, sir,” Ginzburg said.

Looking at the small figure before him, Langhof felt the absurdity of the pistol and dropped it back into his holster. “Get back to your quarters,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” the vermin said.

Langhof turned, began to walk away, then heard the prisoner following from behind. He turned around. “What are you doing?”

“Going to my quarters, as you ordered, Dr. Langhof.”

“Don’t joke with me,” Langhof said, “Get to your quarters.”

“I’m on my way, Doctor. I live in the medical compound, the same as you.”

“I haven’t seen you there.”

“That may be,” the prisoner said. “You may not have noticed me.” He smiled. “I suppose all the prisoners