Third Shift: Pact (Silo #2C)(23)

The little-used cryochamber was a fraction of the size of the others and only one level deep. Standing inside the door, Donald could picture how the main deep freeze wrapped around this much smaller room. This was a mere bump along great walls that stretched nearly out of sight. And yet, it contained something far more precious. To him, anyway. There was danger in this room of square-jawed soldiers, but also glorious hope.

Donald picked his way through the pods and peeked in at the faces. It was difficult to remember being there with Thurman on his previous shift, hard to recall the exact spot, but he eventually found her. He checked the small screen and remembered thinking it didn’t matter what her name was, saw that there wasn’t one assigned. Just a number.

“Hey, Sis.”

His fingertips sang against the glass as he rubbed the frost away. He recalled their parents with sadness. He wondered how much Charlotte knew of this place and Thurman’s plans before she came here. He hoped nothing. He liked to think her less culpable than he.

Seeing her brought back memories of her visit to D.C. She had wasted a furlough on campaigning for Thurman and seeing her brother. Charlotte had given him a hard time when she found out he’d lived in D.C. for two years and hadn’t been to any of the museums. It didn’t matter how busy he was, she said. It was unforgivable. “They’re free,” she told him, as if that were reason enough.

So they had gone to the Air and Space Museum together. Donald remembered waiting to get in. He remembered a scale model of the solar system on the sidewalk outside the museum entrance. Although the inner planets were located just a few strides apart, Pluto was blocks away, down past the Hirshhorn, impossibly distant. Now, as he gazed at his sister’s frozen form, that day in his memory felt the same way. Impossibly distant. A tiny dot.

Later that afternoon, she had dragged him to the Holocaust Museum. Donald had been avoiding going since moving to Washington. Maybe it was the reason he avoided the Mall altogether. Everyone told him it was something he had to see. “You must go,” they said. “It’s important.” They used words like “powerful” and “haunting.” They said it would change his life. From the day he arrived in Washington, Donald was urged to visit. Every mouth was in unison. But the eyes above those mouths—the eyes warned him.

His sister had pulled him up the steps, his heart heavy with dread. The building had been constructed as a reminder, but Donald didn’t want to be reminded. He was on his meds by then to help him forget, to keep him from feeling as though the world might end at any moment. Such barbarisms as that building contained were buried in the past, he told himself, never to be unearthed nor repeated.

There were remnants of the Museum’s sixtieth anniversary still hanging, somber signs and banners. A new wing had been installed, cords and stakes holding up fledgling trees and the air scented with mulch. Donald peered through the frosted glass at his sister and remembered what mulch smelled like. He remembered seeing a group of tourists file out, dabbing at their eyes and shielding themselves from the sun. He had wanted to turn and run, but his sister had held his hand, and the man at the ticket booth had already smiled at him. At least it’d been late in the day, so they couldn’t stay long.

Donald rested his hands on the coffin-like pod and remembered the visit. There were scenes of torture and starvation. A room full of shoes beyond counting. Walls displayed naked bodies folded together, lifeless eyes wide open, ribs and genitals exposed, as mounds of people tumbled into a pit, into a hole scooped out of the earth. Donald couldn’t bear to look at it. He tried to focus on the bulldozer instead, to look at the man driving the machine, that serene face, a cigarette between pursed lips, a look of steady concentration. A job. There was no solace to be found anywhere in that scene. The man driving the bulldozer became the most horrific part.

Donald had shrunk away from those grisly exhibits, losing his sister in the darkness. Here was a museum of horrors never to be repeated. Mass burials performed with whatever the opposite of ceremony was. Apathy. That was the absence of ceremony. People calmly marched into showers.

He sought refuge in a new exhibit called Architects of Death, drawn to the blueprints, to the promise of the familiar and the ordered. He found instead a claustrophobic space wallpapered with schematics of slaughter. That exhibit had been no easier to stomach. There was a wall explaining the movement to deny the Holocaust, even after it had happened. Here were those who willed themselves not to forget, but to not know in the first place.

The array of blueprints was shown as evidence. That was the purpose of the room. Blueprints that had survived the frantic burnings and purges as the Russians closed in, Himmler’s signature on many of them. The layout of Auschwitz, the gas chambers, everything clearly labeled. Donald had hoped the plans would give him relief from what he saw elsewhere in the museum, but then he had learned that Jewish draftsmen had been forced to contribute. Their pens had inked in the very walls around them. They had been coerced into sketching the home of their future abuse.

Donald remembered fumbling for a bottle of pills as the small room spun around him. He remembered wondering how those people could’ve gone along with it, could have seen what they were drawing and not known. How could they not know? Not see what it was for?

Blinking tears away, he noticed where he was standing. The pods in their neat rows were alien to him, but the walls and floor and ceiling were familiar enough. Donald had helped design this place. It was here because of him. And when he’d tried to get out, to escape, they had brought him back screaming and kicking, a prisoner behind his own walls. And he still didn’t know what it was all for.