Magneto dreams.
In the dream, he is a young boy again – his father hugs him as the Nazi soldiers shoot them and their family. In that moment, Max can control the bullets. There are moments when you can make things happen. But most of the time you can’t.
Reality, Merle, Alaska:
Magneto was involved in a car accident. He lies on the icy ground, half conscious. Rabbi Rachel Sagan carefully tries to shake him awake. Does he know where he is? But he is still lost in memories, replying in German: “Ich… Ja… Papa nimmt uns über die Weichsel. ’s gibt einen Bauer in Radom, der uns verstecken wird… No, English,” he chides himself as he becomes more conscious.
Rachel tells him help will be coming soon. The car? he asks. There was a child in the car.
In the car sits a panicked, little girl, shouting for her unconscious father. She is stuck! And the fire is getting closer to the car.
Magneto crawls toward the car over Rachel’s protest that the car could blow up any time. He is painfully aware that, a few months ago, he could have made things happen. He could have saved the child with a thought. But now he is helpless. As helpless as he was when the jaws of the 20th century closed on his people. Now, as then, he is condemned to simply bear witness.
He addresses the girl and explains he cannot get to her. The fire is spreading. She must unfasten her seatbelt and climb out. Panicked, she replies that she is stuck!
Trying to fight his own panic, he orders her to look around to find something to cut herself loose. Is there anything sharp nearby? She finds a shard of glass from the broken wind screen. He urges her to use it, despite the pain when she cuts her fingers. She manages to cut through the belt and tells her unconscious father they can go now. Magneto tells her she must leave him behind. He would want her too.
As the firefighters arrive, he tells her there are people who will help him, but she has to climb. Afraid of the fire, she climbs out the window and Magneto drags her out and out of the way. The firefighters help the father.
Afterwards, when Magneto’s injured hand is bandaged, Rabbi Saan jokes that it smells like reindeer sausage in here. She just wanted to make sure he wasn’t too singed. He asks about the girl, Anna. She assures him that both the girl and her father are fine. Magneto is relieved but he couldn’t help, only shout encouragement.
Seemingly changing the subject, she asks if she told him how her grandmother Coralie came to Alaska. When she was just three years old, she was a detainee at GURS internment camp in France. And she would have surely died there, had Andree Salomon not rescued her and put her on a train to Lisbon, where the S.S Mouzhinow was waiting to take her to America. She arrived in New York on June 21st, 1941 where she was placed with a foster family who moved to Anchorage soon afterwards. On Purim, she’d always get maudlin drunk and tell them about her mother, her desperate hopeful smile as she entrusted her only daughter to a stranger and the sea. She knew she wouldn’t live to see her daughter thrive across the ocean. She sent her anyway. So many men strive for greatness because they can’t conceive of a world without them in it. It robs them of their joy.
Looking away, Magento replies that he needs to see how it ends. With the coming of Moshiach and the resurrection of the righteous, she replies. But she thinks he already had one of those covered.
Later, back at the Factory, Magneto is back in his hoverchair and helmet. Beast asks him how he is feeling. Slightly more humbled than he was this morning but none the worse for wear. He chides Beast to get some rest. Beast sighs that he has to sequence Magneto’s genome again. The degradation of his telomeres is accelerating at an alarming rate. Magneto tells him to sleep. He will be fine. Beast grimly replies that he won’t. Magneto takes off his helmet and assures him that, no matter what happens, no matter how it ends, he will be fine.
