The Man Who Wasn’t There

This is the part they don't teach you in history class.

Berlin, April 30th, 1945. 15:23 hours.

The bombs stopped falling seventeen minutes ago. That's how you know it's over: the silence that rushes in like water filling lungs. The Russians are singing three streets away. "Katyusha." You can smell their cigarettes through sixty feet of earth and concrete.

Everyone knows how this story ends: the madman in his concrete womb, Walther P38 about to make its only argument that ever mattered. One bullet in the chamber, seven watching from the magazine. One glass ampule of prussic acid as insurance. He tested it on Blondi first, watched his German Shepherd convulse for ninety seconds before the stillness. Even his own death required a rehearsal. History prefers its monsters packaged neat: birth, rise, fall, bang. Case file #1945-04-30-1530, stamped in triplicate, sealed in lead, buried in archives that smell of dust. Never to be opened again.

Except.

Except...

Führerbunker. Forty feet down. Negative four floors if you're counting, which nobody is anymore.

The diesel generator has developed a stutter. Thrum-thrum-skip, thrum-thrum-skip. The lights pulse with it. In the flicker: concrete walls sweating condensation that tastes of iron. Maps showing an empire that stopped existing three days ago. Two glasses, untouched: one with cognac for Eva (Rémy Martin Louis XIII, she'd insisted on the best), one with his usual tepid water. Even now, at the end, he maintains the abstemious facade.

Eva took her capsule twenty-three minutes ago. Bitter almond smell still hanging in the air, mixing with her Chanel No. 5. She'd insisted on the lipstick. Victory Red, she'd called it, laughing at the irony. Her body's in the next room under a flag that won't exist by dinner.

The Führer sits alone. Left hand shaking. The tremor started in '42, gets worse when he's tired, and he's been tired since Stalingrad. His personal physician, Morell, calls it "temporary nervous exhaustion."

He's not alone.

There's a man sitting across from him who wasn't there seven seconds ago. Didn't enter. Simply arrived. Like a film splice nobody noticed, a continuity error in reality.

The man wears a suit that doesn't belong in 1945. The fabric moves wrong, seems to bend light around its edges. Charcoal gray, but sometimes it's black, sometimes it's the color of television static. His face—

Try to look at his face. Try harder. Your eyes keep sliding off, finding the wall behind him, the lamp, anything but. It's not hidden. It's just that looking at it is like trying to see the back of your own head without a mirror.

"Punctual as always, Herr Hitler." The voice doesn't come from the mouth you can't see. It comes from the air itself, from the concrete, from inside your own skull.

The Führer's hand twitches toward the Walther. "Security—"

"Dismissed them at 15:21. Günsche thinks you ordered it. Goebbels thinks Günsche ordered it. Everyone thinks someone else is in charge." The man produces a cigarette from nowhere. From the space between air molecules. It's already lit. The smoke smells wrong. Like electrical fire. Like blood on metal. Like the air one second after lightning. "We need privacy for what comes next."

"Who are you?"

"I've had so many names." The man exhales smoke that moves against the air currents, spiraling up when it should sink. "But you can call me what I am: a collector."

Above them, something massive collapses. The bunker shudders. Dust sifts from the ceiling, dances in the lamplight like snow. The cognac ripples in perfect circles once, twice, three times. Then backward. The ripples flow inward, the liquid becoming still before the shaking stops.

The Führer notices. His pupils dilate. The Pervitin he took an hour ago. Methamphetamine and cocaine, Morell's special blend. "Vitamultin," he calls it. The breakfast of champions and the dinner of the damned.

"That's not possible."

"No?" The man reaches into his jacket, the motion too smooth, like film played at the wrong speed. He produces a sphere, small as a child's marble, polished to mirror-perfection.

He sets the sphere on the table. It doesn't roll. It doesn't obey physics at all. Just sits there, humming at a frequency you feel in your bones.

The Führer can't look away from the sphere. In its surface, he sees himself reflected infinitely, but each reflection is different.

In one, he's younger, hair still dark, standing before an easel in Vienna. The Academy of Fine Arts acceptance letter is pinned to the wall behind him. His paintings sell. He marries the model, has three children who call him Papa. Dies at eighty-seven, remembered for his watercolors of churches.

In another, October 1918, the gas at Ypres doesn't just blind him temporarily. He drowns in his own lungs, one more corporal among millions. His name appears on no monuments.

Another: he's at Nuremberg, but in the dock. Rope around his neck. The floor drops. But he doesn't die. Just hangs there, kicking, for hours, days, the audience checking their watches, waiting for an ending that won't come.

Another: he's older, sitting in a Buenos Aires café, 1962. Gray-haired, soft-bellied, reading about the Eichmann trial. The waitress calls him Señor Müller. His hands shake as he turns the pages. A Mossad agent sits three tables away, pistol in his coat.

Another: he's in the trenches, 1916. The British soldier has him in his sights, finger on the trigger. This time, the soldier doesn't hesitate. The bullet takes him through the eye. World War One continues exactly as it did, minus one messenger.

Another: he's standing at a podium, but the crowd isn't cheering. They're laughing. Pointing. His words come out as circus music. His uniform is made of newspaper that's dissolving in the rain. He tries to scream but only balloons come out.

Another: there's a bullet hole in his temple that keeps bleeding, stops, heals, then opens again. He's pulling the trigger forever, the gun firing and unfiring, the blood flowing back into the wound, out again, a tide of ending and unending.

In the last reflection, he sees himself as he is right now, staring into a sphere, seeing himself staring into a sphere, seeing himself seeing himself, an infinite recursion of observation, each slightly delayed, so that when he blinks, the effect ripples outward through dimensions of maybe and never-was.

"What do you want?"

"The question is what do you want?" The man leans back. The chair creaks, but the sound comes a second too late, like dubbed film. "To die here, now, in exactly six minutes and thirty-seven seconds? Or to live?"

"The bunker is surrounded—"

"I'm not talking about the bunker." The man's cigarette ash falls upward, dissipating before it reaches the ceiling. "Every story has multiple drafts, Herr Hitler. The one where you die here... that's the final version. The one history keeps. Clean. Simple. Satisfying."

He taps the sphere. It rings like a bell, but the sound is colors. Blue, silver, the shade of bruises.

"But there are other drafts. Versions where you escape. Where you become someone else. Where you live to see the world forget your name."

"That's impossible."

"You keep using that word." The man stands. He's taller than the ceiling should allow, but the ceiling accommodates him, reality bending rather than breaking. "Touch it."

"No."

"Touch it and see what's possible."

The Führer's hand moves without permission. The tremor stops as his fingers extend, steady now, reaching for the sphere like a plant reaching for light. The moment skin meets surface—

CRACK.

The room shatters. Like a mirror hit with a hammer, each fragment showing a different scene. He sees himself pulling the trigger, brain matter painting a Rorschach test on the wall. He sees himself on a submarine, heading for Argentina, the captain's eyes full of disgust. He sees himself old, dying in a São Paulo hospital, the nurses not knowing who he was, not caring.

He sees himself in this same chair, having this same conversation, reaching for this same sphere, again and again and again and—

He jerks his hand back. The room snaps together, reality reasserting itself with an almost audible sigh.

"What are you?" Whispered. Hoarse.

The man smiles. You can't see it, but you can feel it, the way you feel someone watching you in the dark.

"I'm a bored god playing dice with your universe." He checks his watch, a Patek Philippe that won't be made for another forty years. "You have four minutes to decide."

"Decide what?"

"Whether to be history or escape it. Whether to end or continue."

The generator skips again. In the gap between beats, the Führer hears something else. His own voice, echoing from somewhere above, giving a speech that hasn't happened yet. Or happened yesterday. The words are backwards, in a language that might be German rotting into French, saying "I am Ernst Bauer" over and over until the syllables lose meaning.

"If I say yes?"

"You disappear. Completely. Adolf Hitler dies at 15:30, just like the history books say. But someone else... someone with no name, no past, no crimes walks out of here."

"And if I say no?"

The man gestures at the Walther. "Then you pull the trigger. The end."

"Why offer me this?"

"Because I want to see what Adolf Hitler does when he's not Adolf Hitler anymore. Because..." He pauses, and for a moment, just a moment, his face almost resolves into something recognizable. "Because every story deserves a chance to surprise its author."

The door rattles. Russian voices, getting closer.

"Decide."

"I—"

"Now."

The Führer looks at the gun. At the cyanide. At Eva's lipstick stain on the cognac glass. When did she drink from it?

"Yes."

The word comes out like a cough, like something expelled.

The man's grin widens. You can hear teeth clicking together.

"Then let's begin."