It’s been a long time now since the two men have seen each other. Last time they spoke was during the move from Peenemünde down here to the Mittelwerke. Weissmann is probably dead by now. Even in Südwest, 20 years ago, before Enzian could even speak his language, he’d seen that: a love for the last explosion—the lifting and the scream that peaks past fear… . Why should Weissmann want to survive the war? Surely he’d have found something splendid enough to match his thirst. It could not have ended for him rationalized and meek as his hundred glass bureaus about the SS circuit—located in time and space always just to miss grandeur, only to be in its vacuum, to be tugged slightly along by its slipstream but finally left to lie still again in a few tarnished sequins of wake. Bürgerlichkeit played to Wagner, the brasses faint and mocking, the voices of the strings drifting in and out of phase… .

At night down here, very often lately, Enzian will wake for no reason. Was it really Him, pierced Jesus, who came to lean over you? The white faggot’s-dream body, the slender legs and soft gold European eyes… did you catch a glimpse of olive cock under the ragged loincloth, did you want to reach to lick at the sweat of his rough, his wooden bondage? Where is he, what part of our Zone tonight, damn him to the knob of that nervous imperial staff… .

There are few such islands of down and velvet for him to lie and dream on, not in these marble passages of power. Enzian has grown cold: not so much a fire dying away as a positive coming on of cold, a bitter taste growing across the palate of love’s first hopes… . It began when Weissmann brought him to Europe: a discovery that love, among these men, once past the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and losing. Demanded, in his own case, that he enter the service of the Rocket… . Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature: that was the first thing he was obliged by Weissmann to learn, his first step toward citizenship in the Zone. He was led to believe that by understanding the Rocket, he would come to understand truly his manhood… .

“I used to imagine, in some naïve way I have lost now, that all the excitement of those days was being put on for me, somehow, as a gift from Weissmann. He had carried me over his threshold and into his house, and this was the life he meant to bring me to, these manly pursuits, devotion to the Leader, political intrigue, secret re-arming in naughty defiance of the aging plutocracies all around us… they were growing impotent, but we were young and strong… to be that young and strong, at such a time in the life of a nation! I could not believe so many fair young men, the way the sweat and dust lay on their bodies as they lengthened the Autobahns day into ringing day: we drove among trumpeters, silk banners impeccably tailored as suits of clothes… the women seemed to move all docile, without color… I thought of them in ranks, down on all fours, having their breasts milked into pails of shining steel… .”