KNOCKOUT MAUS


Big Carl Gruber was a cold fish, everyone agreed, including members of his own family. Emotions rarely crossed his slab face, and his actions, while sensible, never gave any hint that there were feelings animating them. There was a queer sense of disconnect about Carl; he moved his massive frame with a measured pace that never quickened as did that of his siblings when summoned to a good-smelling dinner. He was never in a hurry. His big blocky head, square jaw, barrel chest and thick arms, balanced atop a disproportionately smaller set of hips and legs, gave one the impression of a bison walking about on its hind legs. A shock of wheat colored hair sprouted from his scalp. His siblings, in contrast, were comparatively slender and dark-haired. Yes, Big Carl was a mystery. How had he come to be in this family?
Holidays served to further accentuate Carl’s divergence from the norm. On Christmas mornings his expression never changed as he slowly and methodically opened his gifts and carefully piled re-folded wrapping paper and ribbons off to one side, while his siblings ripped wildly into their packages, hooting and shouting and strewing shredded paper all over the room. In a family noted for extravagant gift giving, Carl chose offerings of breathtaking banality, such as a can-opener for his mother or a two-pack of printer ink for his brother Alfred. His father would usually receive some socks.
As a rule, Carl wore dull, monochromatic outfits (usually some shade of brown) on Christmas while everybody else flaunted the reddest, whitest, greenest and most glittery ensembles that they could find.
During Oktoberfest Carl could never be cajoled into taking more than a single pitcher of beer, and his hands didn’t twitch and tap to the beat of the Polka along with those of his beer-sodden father and brothers. He did not dance. He did not sing. He did not seem to be a Gruber family member in any way, shape, or form.
The root cause of these differences lay in Carl’s inability to experience or express emotions. His speech, though even and pleasant, was flat and colorless. Carl himself admitted that he didn’t really feel one way or the other about anything. He never felt anxious, scared, excited, ecstatic, elated, depressed, or bored. He seemed to be stuck in permanent emotional neutrality. His mother Olga often remarked that hugging Carl felt like hugging a lumpy sack of potatoes; there was absolutely no sensation of warmth or life to him. While locked in an embrace Carl would pat his mother’s back in a regular, monotonous rhythm like a circus seal, obviously performing a learned behavior with no spontaneous instinct behind it.
“I think he’s a space alien,” insisted his sister Gretchen, “definitely non-human.”
“No, no, no,” corrected Walter, his older brother. “Carl was switched at birth when the circus came through town. His real parents were in the freak-show.”
“Or maybe he’s like one of those genetically altered mice they use in the laboratory, where the scientists remove a gene to see what will happen, whether the mouse will grow only one eye, or whether it will refuse to eat,” theorized Alfred, Carl’s younger brother, “only in Carl’s case they removed the gene that enables a person to feel emotions.”
“Oh, you’re talking about a ‘knockout mouse’” chimed in Gustaf, Carl’s father, tapping the ashes out his pipe. “That’s the term for high-tech designer lab mice—and yes, they do “knock-out” a gene or two for experimental purposes, to see what happens. My scientist friend Uri tells me stories about the freaky stuff they do to mice up at the University. They’ve bred mice that blow up to the size of grapefruits because they’ve taken away the gene that tells them when to stop eating. Given enough food, they’ll burst their own stomachs and kill themselves. There are other ones that eat their own babies because they’ve eliminated the parental-love gene. So you think Carl here is missing a little something, eh? That could be, except that our Carl can’t be mistaken for a lab mouse. He’s too damn big! Right, Carl?”
The family had a good chuckle, looking expectantly at Carl.
Carl methodically tried on a number of expressions, some with a scrunched forehead, some with smile, some with a straight mouth, with eyes like slits or wide open, before settling on a face with slightly lidded eyes and a wry grin. “Whatever you say, Father,” he intoned coolly.
“I love you son,” declared Gustaf earnestly, tongue in cheek, putting his arm around Carl’s fleshy shoulders, “I don’t care what they say about you.”
There was a pause. Walter socked Carl on the shoulder affectionately, although hard enough to sting.
“I love you too, Dad,” replied Carl finally in a slow, flat voice, keeping the grin as he spoke. Each word was enunciated as if it were as separate sentence.
The group burst out laughing. After a moment Carl joined in with a queer staccato bark, which everyone knew was meant to be laughter but was so clearly not laughter that it was painfully funny. The metronomic bark went on a little too long and a little too loud and then stopped abruptly. This had his father and siblings in stitches, rolling about and holding their sides. His dour mother, trying to dry the dishes in the kitchen, let a sudden shriek of merriment escape from behind the hand she had clamped over her mouth in a vain effort to stifle herself. This involuntary outburst redoubled the general laughter, until tears ran down rosy cheeks and mucous bubbled in nostrils. It was just too much.
Carl was a good sport about the teasing. He was a genuinely good boy (at nearly nineteen now, not exactly a boy). Carl as a rule didn’t steal, lie, or lash out violently. Even as an infant he had been very calm. He had never been known to display any strong feelings in all of his growing years. Well, except one time when…but nobody in the family had mentioned that incident for about ten years. Yet, how could they forget?
The event in question occurred near the family vacation chalet in Eschenbach, a scenic town in the Black Forest, on a winter’s afternoon. Everyone had bundled up for a walk in the snow and to visit the war memorial and get some hot cocoa. While passing a frozen pond on the way, Carl’s father had started to venture out onto the translucent ice as a lark. He was in high spirits, feeling practically a child himself. His wife had become fearful for his safety and warned him sharply to come back. She thought maybe the ice would break; she had read an account of such a drowning just that morning.
Carl’s father, perhaps overly emboldened by brandy and beer, took exception to having his judgment questioned. He cursed and seized his wife by the sleeve of her parka and began hauling her bodily out onto the slick ice with him, disregarding her shouts and screams of fear. She tried in vain to dig in her heels into the snow and ice and was soon out on the ice with her husband, terrified and trembling.
Walter, Carl, Alfred and Gretchen stood in the snow like penguins, immobilized. Suddenly ten year-old Carl had thrown his head back and emitted an unearthly screaming howl, which rose to an earsplitting crescendo and then stopped. It was reminiscent of the sound that tomcats make when fighting, although with more raw power. It was so shrill that it rang in the ears. Both parents stopped to look over in amazed concern.
What they beheld was deeply disturbing. Carl had pulled off a mitten and was fiercely biting and gnawing at one of his own hands. Splotches of crimson already dotted the snow. He managed to inflict quite a bit of damage to himself before his brothers could stop him, and later had to undergo plastic surgery at a clinic. Parts of the thumb and back of his left hand had been bitten away. His father was very shaken by the incident, although the question of why Carl had done this was never adequately settled. The best theory was that the boy had been upset by the parental altercation and had acted out impulsively in a bizarre fashion. These things were not unheard of.
Since Carl had immediately resumed his usual impassive demeanor and never again deviated from it, the family had long ago buried the strange episode, although certainly there was a lingering psychological effect. There had formed a chasm between Carl and his family that was subtle yet unbridgeable. None would ever admit it, but each member of the family felt uncomfortable alone in a room with Carl.
Yet Carl was really much less trouble than his brothers. Walter got caught smoking cigarettes and fighting at school and Alfred stole liquor and tried to blame it on Walter. But Carl had only a few milder episodes on his rap-sheet.
On one Valentine’s Day Carl’s fifth-grade teacher Ms. Schmidt, as is the custom everywhere, had asked the children to make little paper Valentines for each other. Carl had drawn a name randomly from a box, and discovered that his valentine was to go to Erica, a winsome creature with long brown hair that sat behind him in the classroom. Carl had dutifully cut out stiff paper in the shape of a heart, colored it in with a red crayon, and wrote “I Love You, from Carl” on it before sealing up the gaily colored envelope bearing Erica’s name.
After Valentine’s Day Erica began to hang around near Carl at recess. After reading her valentine she had pocketed it furtively, red-faced. She hadn’t shared it with her friends. Carl eventually became dimly aware that Erica seemed to be expecting something from him. She would position herself in his path at recess time. He would say “Hi” to her, but could think of nothing else to add, so he would just continue walking past her to the playground. Daily Erica’s little frame seemed to droop and wilt a little more.
One day Ms. Schmidt noticed trails of moisture on Erica’s cheeks, and the story came out. The teacher contacted Carl’s father about the situation, and presented it as an amusing if regrettable childhood misunderstanding. Carl’s father immediately grasped the nature of the problem. He would have a talk with Carl about it.
“You’ve hurt her feelings, Carl. You should never say “I love you” to a girl unless you mean it. Now I don’t know what you’re going to do; by now the damage is done. She’ll get over it, but she’ll never forgive you, for sure. Be more careful in the future, son. You’ve got to think about other people’s feelings,” his father told him.
Other peoples’ feelings-- yes, father. But how was he to know what these feelings were, if he had none himself? How was he to avoid harming people inadvertently? From that moment on, Carl shouldered the responsibility of trying to perceive and respond to others’ feelings, based only on what he could educe from observation and logic. It became a daunting and exhausting daily challenge that felt akin to being a bull in a china shop with hardly space to turn around in. Carl was always on guard, lest he somehow squash someone. Erica’s silence and stony gaze reminded him all during secondary school of how easy that was to do.
Another sticky situation cropped up in the seventh grade when his friends Stephan and Todd began to talk strangely about a female classmate.
“Kimmy has big ones” noted his friend Stephan to his other friend Todd as they stood in a group on the schoolyard observing the other kids.
“Yeah she does. One time when she was having a sleepover with my sister,” replied Todd, “she came into the kitchen wearing a real thin pajama top and I saw her nips sticking up.”
“You lucky bastard,” Stephan exclaimed to Todd. “Let me know when she’s coming to your house again and then invite me and Carl over. Maybe we’ll get lucky and see Kimmy naked!”
“Sshhhh, not so loud, you dope” hissed Todd, hunching down and reddening. “What if she hears us?”
Carl’s mind was swirling with confusion. Nips? They’re talking about Kimmie’s breasts, aren’t they? Why? What about them? And why look at Kimmy naked? What was so interesting about that? Last he’d heard, girls were supposed to be “icky”—and he hadn’t understood that attitude too well either, but had along with it. Now, the rules had obviously changed. It must have something to do with sex, he decided. He knew about sex. He’d been getting erections from time to time, and he’d read the health textbook’s chapter on reproduction.
“Yeah, I’d like to see Kimmy naked too,” Carl remarked, instantly adapting, “and I want to look at her vagina.”
Stephan and Todd stared at Carl, impressed.
“Damn Carl, you’re one sick pervert!” laughed Stephan.
Todd cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted out to the girls “Hey Kimmy—Carl Gruber wants to see your vagina!”
Kimmy and two of her friends immediately stalked over. “What did you say?” asked Kimmy.
Todd and Stephan were flustered. “You tell her, Carl,” suggested Todd.
“I told him I wanted to see you vagina,” Carl said to Kimmy.
She gasped and reddened. Her two friends gaped in surprise. “You guys are in so much trouble!” said Kimmy. The girls ran to tell the yard duty about this outrage.
The three boys went off to play kickball in high spirits. Later Carl received a summons to the principal’s office and served some detention time, but his reputation around school was made from then on.
Sure, he’d like girls. There was nothing that Carl couldn’t fake. Already he could fake plenty of stuff, like how to seem enthusiastic when his mother made an elaborate dinner. Like how to pretend to be sad for Uncle Gunter, who had been a U-boat man and now seldom spoke more than two words in a day; how to act disappointed to lose at checkers with Alfred; how to laugh when his father told jokes; and how to act mad when boys heckled Gretchen. And so on and so forth.
The only problem was that Carl’s world had become a constant series of ever more complex challenges; the effort to respond correctly to the subtle emotional cues in his environment left Carl exhausted and drained at the end of his day. He was getting increasingly worn down from the strain. Life only got tougher as each school-year limped pass tediously. How long could he sustain this charade?
Now that Carl was twenty, he had a growing awareness that the best thing for him would be to leave home and travel far away. Somewhere where he could relax and be himself without hurting anyone. Maybe he could become a monk or a soldier. Being stranded on a desert isle might be nice; he could fish and swim and have the whole place to himself. But the most expedient plan that he could think of was to join Walter at the academy in Konigsberg, as his grades were probably high enough to get in. At the academy he could bury himself in his studies and be alone most of the time. Carl resolved to talk to his father about it at the next opportunity.
This opportunity presented itself a few days before Christmas. The family had convened at the Eschenbach vacation chalet, as was the custom, with Walter in from Konigsberg and Gretchen from Munich. The weather was crisp and cold; a fluffy coating of new snow blanketed the world and icicles extended from the eves. Everyone was cozy and warm inside and out and all was jolly until father began to hit the brandy a little too hard. Then he smashed a bottle against Olga’s jaw a little too hard after she tried to take it away from him. He’d knocked out one of his wife’s back molars and shattered another, and he’d done this right in front of everyone. There had been a lot of blood and shouting before Alfred and Gretchen bundled their mother into the car and took her off to the emergency clinic.
Walter stood white-faced and trembling with Carl outside the kitchen door. Inside their father slouched muttering at the table, which was laden with several bottles of brandy and his 9mm Luger. He was drinking straight brandy from a water tumbler and spinning the pistol on the table with his forefinger. The boys could hear the metallic scraping as it revolved. The radio played waltzes in the background. He was like some dangerous caged beast.
Walter peeked in and saw that there was an open box of cartridges on the table too. “We can’t go in there,” said Walter, grasping Carl’s arm. “There’s no telling what he’ll do next. We must call for help.”
“You go ahead and do that,” said Carl. “I’ll stay here and keep on eye on him.” Walter hurried off out of sight and Carl stepped into the kitchen.
Gustaf, disheveled and red-faced, regarded him warily. “Well, well, well. Are you crazy, boy? Aren’t you afraid I’ll shoot you?”
Gustaf picked up the Luger and waved it about lazily, pointing at nothing in particular, although the black hole of the muzzle twice traversed Carl’s face. “So here you are-- my big boy; my boy who feels nothing. My giant lab rat of a son. So, what do you want to say to me? I suppose you want to tell me what a bastard I am for getting drunk and hitting your mother. Go ahead and say it.”
Carl said “Father, you’re a bastard for getting drunk and hitting my mother.”
Gustaf laughed and took a drink from the tumbler, and set down the pistol. “God, you’re one queer bird, Carl. You don’t give a crap about what I did to your mother, do you? You really don’t care. I like that about you. Here—go ahead and have a seat.”
Gustaf pulled out a chair and Carl sat down to his right. Gustaf slid a bottle over to him.
“Have a drink.”
“No thanks.”
“C’mon, drink to our health. Have a drink with your father. I insist.”
Carl upended the bottle vertically and took a long, chugging draught of brandy. Gustaf’s eyebrows rose higher as the level of the amber fluid bubbled downwards into the neck of the bottle.
“Allright, allright, that’s enough. I didn’t know you were such a lush.”
Carl set the nearly emptied bottle down on the table. He was completely expressionless. No grimace, no cough, no tears in the eyes like you might expect from someone who’s just had a big jolt of 80-proof liquor, ruffled his composure. It was if he had just drained a glass of cranberry juice.
“Father, I want to go to the academy in Konigsberg with Walter,” he said.
“Sure, I don’t see why not,” replied Gustaf, mildly surprised. “Good luck with that. Knock yourself out.” He face grew somber. “Funny you should mention Konigsberg—I’ve been thinking a lot about that place lately. But Carl, did you know that I’m going blind? Yes, glaucoma. Too late to do anything about it, the doctor said. I let it go too long without detection. I didn’t realize anything was wrong until I had to take an eye test as part of the company physical last month—some new policy. I didn’t pass. It turns out I’ve got big fat blind spots in my vision, and I didn’t even know it. What do you think of that, eh?”
“That’s unfortunate,” said Carl.
Gustaf poured more brandy into his tumbler. “Yes, unfortunate. The company has taken me off the bridge. You can’t be a bridge operator unless your vision is good. I understand that; they don’t want some barge crashing into the span because their man is half-blind. I don’t know what they’ll have me do now. It’s possible they’ll retire me early. I’m not even sure I’ll be allowed to drive a car anymore. Nobody else knows about this yet—not even your mother.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” said Carl.
Gustaf took a long drink from the tumbler and picked up the pistol, turning it from side to side and examining it carefully. “This pistol came from Konigsberg, you know. It belonged to our neighbor Fritz; I took it from his house on afternoon. He’d left town anyway—this was 1945 and the Russians were coming so he got scared and ran. I wanted something for protection, and I had your mother to worry about too. Walter and Gretchen were stashed with Aunt Lottie in Hanover, thank God.”
“It seems to be a very nice gun,” said Carl.
“Well, it didn’t protect us. Those Russians were not nice fellows, you know. They were especially rude to ladies.”
Gustaf grinned widely, so wide it looked painful to Carl.
“There wasn’t much I was going to be able to do with this pistol or anything else to stop them. Five came to the house, all armed with machine guns. I still remember them quite well—bad smelling chaps, very dirty. One in particular stands out, a great big beefy fellow about your height and weight. He seemed just so delighted to be in our house, happy and smiling, pawing through everything and looking over at me as if daring me to react, to get angry, anything. I wouldn’t give him or any of those bastards the satisfaction. I kept my mouth shut, even when they roughed me up pretty bad. Watching what they did to your mother was a lot worse. Your mother made me proud—she never begged for mercy, she never screamed, and she only cried for a short time. She never talked about it afterward, for which I’m grateful. She’s always been stronger than me that way. We put the Russians behind us; or tried to, anyway.”
Carl sat silently in his chair, expressionless. “This is all new to me,” he said.
“I’m guessing that the others are pretty scared and called for officers,” said Gustaf. “So I want to tell you one more thing while I can.”
Gustaf put his left hand palm-down on the table, drawing attention to the discolored brown scar tissue on the back of his hand. He’d told the kids that the scar had been the result of a carpentry accident.
“See that scar? That was caused by a bullet from this pistol here, not by a jigsaw. I shot myself to avoid conscription into the German Army. Your mother and I had fled Konigsberg after our visit with the Russians and had gone west to get away from them. We managed to get through the enemy lines but then got stopped by a group of our own soldiers near Seelow. They wanted me to join them and help defend the road to Berlin, and it was clear that they weren’t taking no for an answer. To get out of it, I shot myself in the hand that night and said that I had been hit by a Russian sniper. They bought my story and sent me on to Berlin for medical care, where I hooked up with Olga again.”
“That must have been very painful,” said Carl.
“Not as painful as fighting the Bolsheviks for Hitler would have been. Now put your own left hand up on the table with mine, Carl.”
Carl put his left hand alongside his father’s, and both saw the nearly matching scar tissue from where Carl had bitten his hand so long ago.
“See how we are fated to be alike, Carl, right down to the scars we bear. And yet there is a difference. I am drowning in feelings, and you are not. I envy you for that. You will never feel guilty. You will never feel ashamed. You will never feel inadequate. You will never hate yourself. As for me, these things have become my life. They blot out all chances for happiness. They are crushing the life out of me. And now I will be arrested and taken to jail for being a drunk and a wife-beater. There is nowhere lower to fall. I tell you these things because I want someone to know my history. And I tell you because I want you to realize that this emotional numbness of yours is a blessing in disguise.”
“I don’t want to live, father,” said Carl. “Will you please shoot me?”
“What! How can you ask me that? You have everything to live for! What’s wrong, did something I say get to you? Are you feeling something at last? You’re wondering now if I’m your real father or if some big Russian is, aren’t you? Does that bother you so much?” Gustaf sprang to his feet in agitation.
“Does it bother you, father?” Carl asked coolly.
“Yes, Carl, yes it does, if you must know. God knows I tried not to let it, but it did and it does. It bothers me every day, and it bothers me every time I see you. It bothers me right now. Is that what you want to hear? At least with you honesty is possible, or at least I thought it was. Now live, damn you, live. It is I who must die. Take this pistol and shoot me right now, Carl. But you live, please live.”
Gustaf jammed the pistol into Carl’s hand. “Shoot me,” he commanded. “You can tell them it was self-defense.”
Carl lifted his big fist and fired nine deafening shots, emptying the pistol. Behind and to the side of his father the oven door took a terrible beating from the hail of bullets, and suddenly the mouth-watering odors of the big holiday ham that had been slow-roasting inside burst through the punctures and filled the room.
“Damn that smells good,” observed Carl.
Gustaf stood thunderstruck. “You better hope you didn’t ruin dinner, boy!” he said, and then began to laugh.
Carl joined in with his staccato barking noise, but then an odd thing happened. The barks became slightly irregular and just a smidge less mechanical, and trailed off rather than stopping abruptly. Not that either man noticed; both were now at the ham, tearing off chunks of the hot meat and blowing on their burnt fingers and stuffing their mouths as fast as they could. Their faces were slick with grease when members of the Eschenbach police force cautiously entered the kitchen and took Gustaf into custody.
“I’ll come to bail you out,” said Carl.
“No, Carl. Let me stay in. I’d rather just do the time. You look after your mother.”
“I will.”
Carl felt a strange pressure in his throat as his father was driven away. Was this an emotion, at last? Then he let loose a tremendous brandy-redolent belch. No, guess not. How about the film of moisture in his eyes? What was that from? Smoke?

THE END