The Write Place

“The Scepter of the Wicked will not remain over the land allotted to the Righteous.  All the earth is the Lord’s and everything therein.  You have soiled Christ’s inheritance.  Christ will not let it stand, even if Jughashvili is the hammer,” said the man chained to the concrete wall.

“You have tormented me everyday since you survived the gas chambers.  What Übermensch would be a Jew and a Christian?” Adolf said.  He sat pouring over his maps as intense frustration seized him.  The fits were not new. In these latter days they were more and more his demeanor.

“You ask the wrong question, as usual.  You hear the artillery, the gunfire coming closer,” he replied.  The sound of weapons fire gave a resounding answer  to everything Adolf had believed.  Everything the supposed prophet had set in order was anything but what he had foretold.

“Steiner will set it in order,” Adolf retorted.
“Steiner will die if he has not already.  It is not the Soviets you resist anymore than a nail resists the hammer that strikes it.  It is the one who wields the hammer you resist.”
“Again with your talk of this king Jeremiah!  Where was your king at the Wolf’s Lair when I survived the attempt on my life by that Catholic cripple?  That weak Jewish sympathizer!” Adolf hissed.
“Giving you breath by his grace.  He has raised you as he raised Pharaoh, as a rally for his foes that he may press them as a cluster of grapes in the winepress of his wrath.  You had time to repent, and you still have not.”

Adolf picked up the Luger he had lying on his desk. With the shaking of a drug addled body he pointed it towards Jeremiah.

“Feel free to try, but aim for my nose, it itches and I can’t scratch it. It’s fiendishly semitic you can’t miss it, after all you’re an Aryan.  With you’re brown hair and eyes Herr Schickel-Gruber.”

With a pull of the trigger Adolf’s hand kicked back from the force of the gun.  The bullet struck Jeremiah in the nose.  The ear-piercing popping of the gun seemed surpassed by the pop that followed upon impact.  Clinking onto the floor fell a crumpled shard of metal.

“Really again?  Gas, pills….bullets.  At least you hit my nose,” Jeremiah said.  The bruising around his eyes and nose changed colors, dissipating into nothing.  In seconds, it was as if it had never been.
“Why do I keep you here?” asked Adolf.
“You tell me.  What is lost if you don’t?  These four years you have been trying to prove something. Or maybe more disprove,” Jeremiah said. Adolf struck the table.

“I will find a way.  I will find the formula to defeat you and your God.”
“You are still that scared little boy under his father’s boot, aiming the gun at the same God your father rebelled against.”
“And yet God gave me this world, it is his fault!”
“For planning to overcome it?  It happened….”
“Your right, it did!”
“Now what Adolf! Now what?  Become the monster?”
“Now I fix it, now I am made right. Now it is my world!” Adolf screamed.

“You’ve been saying that these fifty-six years. It hasn’t been true one day,” Joseph said.

“It will be!” Adolf said.
“You say that because it has to be, because the only alternative is the truth and you hate the truth,” Jeremiah said with a sigh. “It’s dead pants anyway, you won’t change your mind. You are a son of hell, just like your father.”

The gun struck the wall hard next to his head, falling with a rattle to the floor.  Adolf sat back down at his desk, exhausted body and soul.

“No way out.  Except the one.  The German Volk have failed me,” he said.

“You and your Jewish wife would still have time.  Adolf,” said Jeremiah. His chains clanged gently as he swayed.
“There is no time, I can only trust the Übermensch will come.”
“Glory doesn’t come through the hands of man, glory only comes in Christ Adolf.  Any hope for everlasting life is a road that leads to eternal death.”

“You with your Jewish nonsense again.  Your slave ethic of your Christ.  A stupid Jew who got himself killed.”

“Who gave up his life and took it up again. I have survived every attempt on your part to kill me and you still don’t believe?  Of course, he said such things would come.  For me and those who have not seen and have believed.  Those who know him after he took his throne.”
“And my pig whistles.”
“You’re the Hegelian reading the Gnostics, ancient pagans who couldn’t imagine the wonder weapons of our Christian age, “Jeremiah said.
“I am done with you,” Adolf said, rising from his seat. Artillery rounds rattled the bunker, no longer in the distance.

“It’s the same lie, just as I told you years ago.  Hidden knowledge, the right path, the right plan.  The same lie of the Hindus, the Muhammadans with their legalism, the homosexual shamans you say you hated. Writing the book of nature for yourself.”

Adolf stood from his chair and walked over to the luger, picking it up to stare at its black barrel. He rubbed his hands across it in a slow caress.
“You had your false prophet, your Goebbels and SS, the same Dragon behind it all just as Nero and every tyrant I’ve lived to see.  But Christ is over all. You should have kissed the Son, now he is angry with you and you will perish this day. Your 1000 years end in 12, Christ’s is forever.”
“You will eat those words,” said Adolf.
“Empty words of hot air as always. Stalin will get his someday, yours is coming soon, just like Judas it will be by your own hand. “
The dark, cold figure stood in the light of the bunker doorway.  With labored steps and the thump of boots he left the room.  The door closed behind him, shutting out the light.  Jeremiah felt the familiar disappointment of confronting an unrepentant heart.  Far from the first in his long life, he knew it would not be the last.  Hours passed, countless artillery shells rattled the walls before a shot rang out from in the bunker, then another, and another.  I wonder if I will have to make a run for it again or if Joseph will let me go this time, he thought to himself.