Hunted By Obergruppenführer John Smith

I spill sensitive secrets so the Nazi officer of my psyche moves to take me out

Have you seen The Man in the High Castle yet?¹ Do you know who Obergruppenführer John Smith is? If you haven’t and you don’t, this post and the world in which it takes place won’t make nearly as much sense to you. Let’s share a little taste, eh?

And no. There’s nothing wrong with your vision. That is a Nazi armband around his bicep, combined with the American flag. It’s the North American branch after the Axis won the war. With a little time and a little maneuvering and a little more blood, John Smith is destined to become the Reichsmarschall auf Nord Amerika.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag
Of the Axis Powers of America
And to the Republic for which it stands.
One nation, under rule.
Divided.
With liberty and justice for none.”

~from The Man in the High Castle trailer

Without fürther adieu, I give you the most contradictory, conflicted, and complicated character in the show—and the man who hunted me through one long, terrifying night:

The Obergruppenführer

October 27, 2020

I haven’t seen my best friend since that last time I went to the Red Lion where she worked as a karaoke DJ. We sang duets and cheered each other’s solos all night like we did when we were Be-Frie/St-Nds as kids.

Mari lives way off in the woods outside our old hometown now. After all those awful years entangled with Rich (the guy I secretly call Dick), she’s moved back in with her family.

Her father is no longer the Johnny Smith I knew as a teenager. He has become Obergruppenführer John Smith.

Their house is a huge, swanky number. Of course it is. He is a prestigious Nazi officer. When Mari wrote to me a few months ago, asking me to come visit her, all my hackles shot up. Because the way she asked…

To anybody else, it would have seemed like a cheery letter, but not to me. There were code words in there that only I would get. Iron Maiden. Bogus. Oh, industry. Hilary. Apollo. Goose. I know you by heart.

I know her writing by heart, too, and she doesn’t usually slant her cursive backwards, but each of those words were. Considering the lyrics in those songs from the Beaches Soundtrack—anthems of our friendship—and considering the fates of Hilary Whitney, Apollo Creed, and Nick “Goose” Bradshaw,² I knew what she was saying.

“I’m trapped in an iron maiden.
It is most heinous.
River in flames, cities on fire.
Yes, I’m a relic, trapped in the wire.
Hydrogen fuel, it burns so clean.
Throbs in the veins; a mother-lovin’ machine.
Joined at the hip: pain, hunger and I.
What have I done?
Where did I go wrong?
Whatever will become of me?
Death.
Death.
Death.
We get locked up in our own worlds
With secrets and feelings we’re afraid to share.
You’re the only one who will understand this message.
Please, get me out.”

So here I am. In the house of the Obergruppenführer himself. Mari is not here, but Mr. Smith tells me that she should be home tomorrow. I am welcome to spend the night. They have plenty of room.

Now I lie in the functional-but-comfortable bed provided for me, watching shadows of the trees slither across the closed blinds. The Obergruppenführer has floodlights around the house and they slowly scan back and forth…back and forth…

So does my mind as I pore over every coded word written by my childhood best friend.

At last, I throw back the covers and pad out into the hallway. I want to see her room. See what can be known by examining her intimate things. The house isn’t fully dark either. There are nightlights stationed at regular intervals, so of course he finds me. His smile is so friendly. So sweet.

I know enough about this man to remember that this is his most dangerous mood.

He invites me into his study “to chat.”

It’s…

NICE.

We drink tea. A lemon floats in each of our cups. I prefer cream, but I know it will only curdle if I try to pour some in so I paint a pleasant smile across my mouth, refusing to let my lips pucker. I add a little more sugar to my cup. He is more than happy to hand me the pretty porcelain bowl.

I finally convince him that I’m tired enough to go back to bed. He bids me goodnight. When I glance back toward the study, he’s standing in the doorway. Watching me. Still smiling. Except for his eyes.

He closes the door.

As I stagger down the hall on rubbery legs toward my prison cell—I mean, my guest bedroom, a hand snatches out from a darkened doorway and latches onto my wrist. I’m yanked inside and another door closes. A small palm presses over my mouth, muffling my squeak. “Shhh!” she says.

I don’t know her. This is not Mari’s little sister, Amy. I can’t stand that girl. Nazi to her marrow. She tattled to the Obergruppenführer that time Mari brought an outlawed blues record home and we danced to it. But this is not Amy. It’s a girl around my age. “I’m Nell,” she whispers, and my eyes fly open in recognition.

Nell has been Mari’s best friend since the two of them met in the Neutral Zone while Mari lived there with her mom.

“We have to get out of here,” Nell hisses. “Now! I’ve been trapped here since I came to find Mari three months ago. I’ve been putting on the good Reich Face, pretending that I hated being in the Neutral Zone and have longed to be here, but I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.”

“Where is Mari?” I whisper back.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her once since I’ve been here. They keep saying that she’s away doing outreach and that her trip keeps getting delayed. There’s always some perfect excuse. I keep smiling and telling them I don’t mind. That it’ll just give me more time to learn the ropes so maybe I can join an outreach mission soon.”

Outreach.

More like brainwashing.

A chunk of lead lodges heavily in my guts because I’m pretty sure I know what I’m seeing in Nell’s face.

“You think Mari is dead,” I say.

After a long stare, Nell lowers her eyes and nods. “I don’t want to believe that, but…”

I nod, too.

After putting on boots and my warmest clothes—quite the feat with my hands shaking so hard—I meet Nell in the hallway. We sneak down the stairs and out a side door, slipping alongside the shadowed edges of the house in painstaking increments as soon as the floodlights shift away.

An open expanse of snow-covered lawn stretches between the house and the woods that barricade the property. “There’s a break in the fence deep in the forest,” Nell says. “I’ve been making it big enough to squeeze through for weeks. But we have to get across the yard without anybody sounding the alarms. If he knows we’re trying to escape, he’ll call out the dogs and his guards.”

“I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about that,” I murmur.

“What? Why?”

My gaze is ensnared on the window above us. Inside, the Obergruppenführer has dressed all in black. Maneuverable clothing. No insignia. Nothing that could flutter or snag on a tree branch. A special pair of night-vision goggles rests on his forehead.

I know what those goggles mean. Having known this family all my life, I am perfectly aware that he only puts on this gear for covert missions when he has to personally handle sensitive issues because everybody else has failed. Or because he doesn’t want to have to file a report about it. This is what he wears for hunting Jews and Blacks and everybody else who need to be exterminated.

And he’s looking straight at me.

This time he forgoes the “nice” smile. What scrawls across his chiseled, handsome face is the nastiest, hungriest look anyone has ever smeared onto me.

When he grabs his rifle off the wall, I grab Nell’s hand. “We have to go. NOW.”

We book it across the lawn, heedless of the floodlights, floundering in the snow. We’ll be all too easy to track, even if we can reach the woods. Does that window in his study open? Does his rifle have the reach?

I know it does.

We’re no match for this professional hunter in the tangle of brush ahead, but it’s our only option. We crash through branches and stumble over logs, trying to be as quiet as we can. I glance back, catch a dark shadow moving amongst the trees. His footsteps are silent. Slithery. He breaks no branches as he maneuvers. The silhouette of his rifle lifts. A flash of moonlight catches the scope. I gasp and push Nell faster, darting behind a tree as—

---

I bolt up in bed, wheezing, sweating, hyperventilating as quietly as I can.

It takes me a second to convince myself that I’m in my home in Arkansas at the height of a pandemic, not in the dystopian alternate reality of the Nazi’s post-victory regime. It was just another night terror, just another night terror, just another night terror.

I’ve been having them every single night for the past eight months. They plague every nap, too, and with my brain injury, that means a full system reboot every afternoon. So twice daily, sometimes more, I’ve been bombarded by visions of my own demise.

At least this time it was only imminent and probable, not my last gasp as I plummet into oblivion.

At first I thought it was just pandemic stress. I’m sure that’s influencing my dreamscapes, but I’ve come to understand that the real culprit is something far deeper and older.

I haven’t had chronic nightmares like this in a really long time, and never to this extent. As a kid, I used to dream about being unable to outrun alien spaceships and tornados. After my freshman year of college, they changed. I started scaring the unholy living snot out of my roommates by bolting upright, screaming, “He’s gonna kill me! He’s gonna kill me!” I would never remember it in the morning—not the nightmare. Not even having one.

As I grew older and started living with the men I was dating or married to, I would scare the crap out of them, too, only I would wind up across the room, out of bed, having no idea how I had gotten there or what had just happened.

Before this dream about John Smith, I have only ever remembered the details of one murder-mare in my whole life. I was asleep in the barn-house attic bedroom of my first husband’s place when a classic hooded boogeyman came a-prowling. It had an abnormally large gaping hole for a mouth and yawning black holes for eyes. In the dream, I awakened to find it lurking outside our window on the roof of the porch, leering at me as it cut through the glass with its abnormally long fingernails.

What is it with windows at night?

Now as I lie in my bed with the covers pulled up to my chin, I know exactly why I’m dreaming about John Smith preparing to exterminate me.

Because I have become a security risk.

I’ve stopped keeping my big mouth shut.

The 3 Part Dream: Dance, Secrets, Demise

You know how most dreams have two or three different segments? In the opening of that nightmare before I tried to save Mari and got hunted by John Smith, I dreamed of the live Zoom show I was days away from dancing in—the only way we could do a Halloween show in 2020. That show stirred up all sorts of issues. Obviously, if it was embedded amongst my night terrors.

A few hours before bed, I’d done an emergency filming of my choreography in short stints because I simply could not get my battered brains to memorize the song, much less the moves for a live show. I’d planned to tack the clips together into as complete of a performance as I could manage.

That dance was such a lyric-specific piece that I couldn’t just groove to it in a pretty skirt. It was to Loreena McKinnett’s All Souls Night.³ I had important things I wanted to say with that dance—things in honor of all those souls who had been lost to the virus, and for those left behind, battling, mourning, suffering. It also honored the pieces of myself that have been lost—even died—and the way we go on with the dance, so to half-ass it?

I couldn’t do that.

I was terribly afraid that if I didn’t send the producers a pre-recorded video to play for the show, my brain would do what it kept doing in rehearsal.

Glitch-stare-stare-bwooow-bwooow-bwoooooooow—FULL SHUT DOWN.

That’s exactly what happened in the opening segment of that dream: I danced the show in real time, glitched, and then got onto Facebook Live, still in my costume, where I spoke openly about what had happened.

That cracked the tightly sealed lid. I went on to spill all the secrets I’ve been covering up for decades. Secrets that had started flooding down the length of my computer screen in file after drafted file, this time without the glitter-washed censorship that has been the hallmark of my dance career, too many relationships, my martial arts adventures—my whole life.

Go figure. In the weeks before that nightmare, I had started spilling some of those moldering beans on my blog. I had just finished uploading my series about being an artistic, cluelessly neurodivergent kid in one of those hush-hush rural towns in the northland sticks. Even though I do a lot of identity-shielding fictionalization in my memoirs, I got a lot of flack for that series. Even more flack than when I’d started writing about drunk drivers, traumatic brain injury, and disability.

“Oh, what the hell! I thought you were trying to make an online dance school. Now you’re trying to make money off your injuries?”

Um…it’s called multiple streams of income, thanks.

“Oh, my god! You’re still on about that brain injury thing?”

Um….

*looks at self in the mirror, glances down at neuropsych reports…busts a gut laughing*

Yeah. TBI is still just a little pertinent to my life.

In August of 2020, I was finally given an updated neuropsychological exam after three new brain traumas and seven years of asking to be re-tested. The exam confirmed what I’ve known since 2014 after that double-punch to the face, the chronic seizures it gave me, and a second rear-ending: that I no longer have Mild TBI. I have Moderate.

In 2020, I stopped censoring myself while discussing that.

I stopped trying to cover up the realities of living with a Hidden Injury in an international caliber career that’s all about ✨Show.✨

I stopped being silent about the fact that my experiences in the writing world haven’t been much different—not my years of being agented and working with a Big Five editor, and not the indie rigamarole, chasing 👍❤️👍 on Amazon and The Socials.

I also opened my big whoppin’ pie-hole about rapists, domestic violence, sexism, and death threats, so why wouldn’t I have nightmares about waking up to an obliterated “Friend” count because my dream-self said live on Fakebook, “And right now, if you’re one of the innumerable individuals rolling your eyes like always, if you’re over there thinking that I sound even ‘crazier’ than I ‘normally am’—DE-FUCKING-FRIEND ME. Because that is not friendship.”

Mic drop.

That’s when I wound up surrounded by the looming pines of my childhood hometown, knocking on John Smith’s door in search of my best friend.

From Amazon Prime’s The Man in the High Castle

The Obergruppenführer of My Psyche

They say that every major player in a dream is an aspect of ourselves, so what does it say that my inner bestie was trapped and sending up a coded message to me? That she had gone missing while living amongst our enemies, and that I had the awful feeling that they’d murdered her?

What does it say that my psyche dredged up the worst version of myself—the most self-serving, ruthless, cutthroat piece of me who would do anything to save the skin of my silenced and acceptable self, even at the price of millions of other lives?

What does it say that this part of me tasked with preserving the aspects of me deemed most valuable according to twisted, abusive, toxic societal brainwashing put on its night-stalking gear? That my inner Obergruppenführer pulled out its rifle to hunt my ass down for daring to dream about spilling the Party’s most tightly guarded secrets?

UP NEXT: That recurring death dream that plagued me for 9 months straight. Eventually, it would launch me out of silence and into pursuing my most important passion-projects like my hair was on fire.

If you want to be notified when I post it, and when I migrate all those old beans as well as these new ones over here to Substack:

© 2023 Hartebeast

---

An intro to this publication:

I take up the sword against imposter syndrome, stage fright, and my trusty, musty ole misfit complex:

1. The Man in the High Castle trailer - Amazon Prime’s series based on Phillip K. Dick’s award-winning novel, executive produced by Ridley Scott. So good!

2. Hilary Whitney
Apollo Creed
Goose

3. My dance to All Souls Night - and yes, I did have to use the pre-recorded version. But that means we now have this video, and I have a silhouette backdrop to make others. In honor of all those who were lost, hunted, and terrorized in the Holocaust, and for those who were lost or scarred fighting it…for those who are lost in woods like these…for those who were lost in this most recent pandemic and for all of us still dancing in its wake - this one’s for you.