Hans-Peter was dry and clean now, lying in his bed, the blood beaten out of the clothes that lay on his shower floor.
Seeking a place for his mind to sleep, he wandered through older and older memory rooms to arrive at last at the walk-in freezer of his youth in Paraguay.
His parents were in the freezer and he could hear their voices through the door. They could not get out because the freezer door was secured with a chain Hans had tied in an excellent chain knot, the way his father had taught him to tie a chain, shaking the knot until the links jammed tight.
Lying in his bed in Miami, Hans-Peter gave voice to the images swarming on the ceiling. The voices of his father and his mother came out of his face, the mixture of their features.
Father: He is kidding, he is going to let us out. And then I’ll beat him until he shits.
Mother, calling through the door: Hans, dear. The joke is over, we will catch cold and you will have to wait on us with tissues and tea. Ha-ha.
Hans-Peter’s voice muffled now, his hand over his mouth as he repeated what he heard through the door, muffled pleadings all through the night, so long ago.
“Chug, chug, chug” Hans went, like the quivering hose from the car exhaust he taped to the air vent in the freezer.
When after four nights he opened the freezer door, his parents were seated and not in each other’s arms. They looked at him, their frozen eyeballs glinting. When he swung the ax they broke up in chunks.
The chunks stopped bouncing; the figures were still, like a mural on the ceiling above Hans-Peter’s warm bed in Miami.
He rolled over and slept like an abattoir cat.
Hans-Peter woke in complete darkness. He was hungry.
He padded to the refrigerator in the dark and opened the door, appearing suddenly in the dark room, white and naked in the refrigerator light.
Karla’s kidneys were in an ice bath on the bottom shelf, pink and perfect, perfused with a saline solution and ready for pickup by the organ vendor. Hans-Peter was letting the pair go for $20,000. He could have offered to take Karla home to Ukraine and harvested her kidneys there for about $200,000 had he not been tied up at the Escobar house.
Hans-Peter hated mealtimes and the ceremonies of the table but he was hungry. He wet one end of a kitchen towel and hung it in the handle of the refrigerator. He spread another towel on the floor.
Hans-Peter took a whole roast chicken in his two hands and said the blessing he carried in his heart, the one he was beaten for saying at the family table:
“Fuck this goddamned shit.”
Standing at the open refrigerator he bit into the chicken like he would bite an apple, tearing out chunks of flesh and bolting them with jerks of his head. He paused to imitate Cari Mora’s cockatoo: “What the fuck, Carmen?” And he bit and bit again. He took milk from the refrigerator, drank some and poured the rest over his head, milk streaming down his legs and running to the drain.
He wiped off his face and head with the towel and walked under the shower, singing:
“Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben; hätt mein’ Mutter Fleisch gekocht, so wär’ich länger blieben.”
He liked that so much, he sang it again in English:
“Sauerkraut and beets have driven me out; had Mother cooked meat, I’d have lingered about.”
Singing, singing, Hans-Peter put into his sterilizer his obsidian scalpels, so popular in Miami cosmetic surgery. He was careful with these delicate blades of volcanic glass. Ten times sharper than a razor, their thirty-angstrom edge can divide individual cells in half without tearing. You can cut yourself and not know it until the blood draws your attention.
From Hans-Peter’s mouth came the voice of Cari Mora: “Good chuletas at Publix. Good chuletas at Publix. Good chuletas at Publix.”
He wiped his hands on the wet kitchen towel. “There are the lunch trucks,” he said in Cari Mora’s voice. “I like Comidas Distinguidas best.”
And again the bird: “What the fuck, Carmen?”
He picked up his death-scream whistle and blew and blew and blew in the tile room with its floor sloping off to the drain, his liquid cremation machine sloshing end to end like a slow metronome.