The Caretaker

by Doon Arbus

  “Look,” he says with a solicitous expression calculated — though not entirely successfully — to reassure. “I mean no harm. I don’t know any of you well enough for that. But neither am I about to let you get out of here scot-free.” He allows the implicit threat to dangle a moment while he attends to the distraction of his borrowed clothes, which have turned adversarial, adhering to his person in undesirable ways, stunting his every move, thwarting his ability to breathe. Ridding himself of some of these impediments takes temporary precedence over his main objective. He cranes his neck from side to side, trying to relax the shirt collar’s stranglehold, which — although originally made to accommodate a much thicker neck than the one now protruding from it — has somehow contrived to shrink for the express purpose of tightening itself, as if in protest, around the interloper’s unfamiliar throat. When the fingers of both hands attempt to come to his rescue, they prove incapable of collaborating and keep working at cross-purposes, fumbling uselessly at the collar button as if the task demanded of them required skills far beyond their level of expertise. Rather than coaxing the recalcitrant button free of its restraining buttonhole as intended, his impatient fingers wind up detaching it from the shirt entirely. He stares in bemusement at the small forlorn object in his palm, a torn wisp of thread still clinging to it like the tail of a lost spermatozoa, and, after a hasty unsatisfactory survey of the room, deposits it for safekeeping in an empty silver ashtray on the desk. Dr. Morgan’s suit jacket is next. The caretaker seizes it by the lapels and struggles his way free, inadvertently pulling the sleeves inside out. The violence of his movements has caused a bit of shirt tail to come untucked, which now droops unnoticed between vest and belt as morosely as a dead dog’s tongue. Leaving the garish lining exposed, he folds the jacket with exquisite care and lays it over the back of the nearest armchair, smoothing out the wrinkles.

  His preoccupation with these distractions has broken the spell. The people in the room trade furtive, inquiring glances, probing for consensus. By turning away, however briefly, from his captive audience, by abandoning his post as the persistent fulcrum of their attention, the caretaker has relinquished his dominion and left behind a vacuum, which — despite his visitors’ hesitations, their perplexing ambivalence at the possibility of liberation, despite their atrophying capacity to initiate an action — sucks them in, burdening them with an opportunity they had been desperately seeking but now no longer appear eager to seize. All the same, there is a noticeable, if reluctant, drift toward the exit.

  The caretaker collapses into the waiting armchair, slumping into its depths with a great show of lassitude, and observes the receding human tide as it gradually begins to desert him. Some are sidling away as they say crabs do, others inch backwards. No one has the courage to simply turn and leave. “Abandoning me already?” he asks from his cushioned refuge, then adds, almost as an afterthought, “Well, in that case, you’ll probably be needing these.” He withdraws from his trouser pocket a set of about a dozen keys of disparate styles and sizes, which dangle from a ring hooked on his index finger. They produce intermittent notes of dull metallic music, clinking against one another as he keeps them swinging slowly to and fro in a deliberately tantalizing fashion, like someone toying with a mesmerized kitten.

  The departing visitors, looking as bewildered as sleepwalkers trapped in a collective dream, pause in their retreat and take a few moments to digest the implications of this unanticipated obstacle looming between them and the outside world. It is the man with the beard who finally takes command on their behalf, striding forward in his self-appointed leadership role to within a foot of the caretaker’s slouching seated figure and extending his upturned palm in a peremptory fashion. “Hand them over. Now,” he says, hoarse with suppressed indignation. The caretaker only smiles and slips the bunch of keys back inside his pocket, safely out of reach. “I don’t intend to deny myself the pleasure of escorting you out the way any decent host would,” he says, getting slowly, laboriously to his feet. Recent events have apparently sapped much of his strength. The two men stand there face to face, both breathing heavily, though for different reasons, so close to one another now that neither can make a move without retreating. The caretaker still wears his fixed, insolent smile, which — as the moments pass and the smile refuses to fade or change — ceases to be a human expression at all, but rather some hideous caricature of one, like the mocking grimace of a carnival mask, a look his opponent can only regard as deliberate provocation.

  They have arrived at an impasse, one that threatens to last forever, since both grow increasingly incapable of backing down the longer they refuse to do so. Only the unlikely intervention of the woman with the alligator bag manages to save them — not to mention the other occupants of the room — from what promises to be an endless state of suspension. Abandoning the seven paralyzed companions with whom she has been lingering in the neighborhood of the study door, she approaches the bearded man, her progress a little unsteady thanks to the delicate high heeled summer sandals she had unwisely chosen for the day’s outing, and lays her free hand in a strangely intimate, placating way on his forearm, gently tightening her grip, her long purple fingernails sinister as talons on his sleeve. She murmurs but a single word. “Don’t,” she says. This peculiar monosyllabic appeal to reason — or is it rather an appeal to gallantry? — nonetheless prevails upon him. He wilts under its pressure. The stubborn, outthrust chin sinks toward the chest, the shoulders sag and, with a single backward step, he yields the caretaker free passage.

  There follows almost immediately an unruly headlong progress down three flights of stairs, the caretaker in the lead, while the others — no longer allies in a common cause — jostle recklessly for position in his wake, as if salvation might well depend upon securing an advantageous place in line, regardless of whatever misfortune might befall one’s neighbors in the process. The building, unaccustomed to such abuse, trembles at the clattering of eighteen hard-soled shoes upon its unprotected stairs, which groan in protest, and at the brutishness of all these unfamiliar bodies barging through the stillness.

  The impatient visitors soon find themselves back in the long, narrow first floor gallery where their journey into the labyrinth of Dr. Morgan’s psyche had begun. From this reverse perspective, the room — although identical in all its particulars — now manifests itself as a mysteriously altered version of the one they had originally entered, resembling it only insofar as the dim, distorted, two-dimensional image in the mirror resembles the reality it allegedly reflects, or as much as the home of one’s childhood, however meticulously preserved, can be said to resemble the house one revisits on a nostalgic pilgrimage years later as a middle-aged adult. All the proportions have shifted; the relationships have changed. Nothing is different and yet nothing is the same.

  The curatorial decisions governing the organization of the room, which had at first struck the newcomers as so deliberately random and chaotic, suddenly look serenely inexorable, one thing impinging on the next as the inevitable rationale for the existence of its neighbors. Orphaned objects assembled here like so much scrap are orphans no longer. A child’s worn left shoe bereft of laces, a coil of hemp, a jewel-encrusted Russian Easter egg poised on end, a tarnished ladle with holes punched through its bowl in a star-shaped pattern (presumably to drain off liquid), a glass eye staring helplessly, relentlessly at nothing, an Indian arrowhead, a small framed pen and ink rendering of a dense forest choked with underbrush, the skeleton of an umbrella, a telephone receiver trailing its crimped cord, the displaced Roman nose of a lost marble statue, a fossilized crustacean, a stethoscope, a paper clip, a tortured tree branch, petrified and turned to stone — all members of some complex extended family with their own indispensable roles to play — commune with another across a wasteland of irrelevance, each an answer to the others’ prayers.

  Not that any of the departing visitors, in their eagerness to escape the building and regain the world they used t
o know, are paying much attention to their surroundings, nor — even if they happen to glance around in passing as they hasten by the central vitrine in pursuit of the receding figure of their soon to be ex-host — can they begin to account for the transformation in the nature of what they see. Still, it remains too palpable to be ignored. Nothing looks superfluous anymore, or inessential. It is as if, in that recent interval while the people were elsewhere and otherwise preoccupied and the room had been left deserted, an invisible network of intersecting pathways, like a map of veins and arteries, had sprung up in their absence, tracing the hidden connections among all things. The obvious mundane proposition that whatever change had taken place in here must logically have befallen the observers, rather than the observed, is instantly dismissed in favor of some act of magic, or metaphysics.

  At the far end of the room, where the sliding mahogany doors remain pulled shut, creating the brief illusion of a faded negative image in which darkness is beckoning at the end of a dim tunnel, the caretaker stands guard blocking the exit once again and warning of “one last piece of business to attend to.” Based on past experience, his followers might have expected something like this and, lacking the will to join forces in a physical assault upon their jailer, find themselves at this point too weary to protest. Instead, letting the frenzy for immediate liberation drain out of them, they emit a collective groan, which is enough to pass for what is known as patience.

  The caretaker centers himself on the vertical crack where the two doors meet and leans back against the glowering mahogany. A narrow, misdirected shaft of light, originally intended to dramatize the contents of a shadow box, slashes across his left cheek and lights up a corner of his eye. He raises a hand to his brow in a wilted salute to protect himself from the glare as he begins to speak.

  “I cannot in good conscience allow you to cheapen this experience by simply releasing you as if you were no better than a bunch of listless sightseers on some interminable world tour, dragged against your will from one legendary monument to the next, wondering all the while when you’d be allowed to stop marveling and go home, back to the impregnable oblivion you came from where nothing will intrude to remind you that you ever left. No,” he says in answer to an unasked question. “No, there must be consequences.” He scans their wan, averted faces, looking from one to the next, but they all avoid his gaze, as if that could deflect whatever new blow to the spirit he is about to inflict upon them. “That’s what scars are for,” he adds. “And amputations. They prevent you from denying the fact that something really happened, something that cannot be undone.”

  An involuntary groan escapes the little man in the safari jacket who is leaning his elbows on the edge of a vitrine as if, in the absence of its support, he would be incapable of remaining on his feet. “Can’t you just get on with it,” he whines under his breath. “I’d like to get out of here sometime before I die.” Everyone is struggling to endure. Even the woman with the braid, retreating still further behind the curtain of her vacuous smile, has lost a good deal of her impermeable serenity. The caretaker shifts his weight from one foot to the other, which liberates him from the intrusive spotlight, leaving it to spill across the dark wood behind his shoulder like a delinquent splash of paint.

  “Freedom will come soon enough,” he says reassuringly. “But freedom — like anything worth having — comes at a price. Haven’t religions been telling us for centuries — perhaps out of genuine conviction, perhaps just as a marketing ploy — that whatever enlightenment we may hope to attain depends upon our willingness to make the necessary sacrifice? Well, you’re going to be allowed to leave this place, but in order to get out of here you’re going to have to leave something behind. Call it an exit tax. Getting out should be at least as expensive as getting in, don’t you think? So come on, who’ll go first? Make me an offer.”

  In the absence of volunteers, he proffers some suggestions of his own: he would, for instance, be willing to take the alligator handbag and its contents off its lovely owner’s hands, or relieve the couple of their matching scarves, or liberate the perpetually smiling woman from her tyrannical braid, the thing — he ventures to say — that has held her captive for so many years, as if she, rather than her hair, were the appendage. A pair of custom cowboy boots might do, he adds, as would a false front tooth, a wedding ring or some other well-worn amulet, a hat that has been serving as a comforting disguise, perhaps some spectacles, possibly even a faded snapshot of the wife and kids. “But choose carefully,” he warns. “It must be something precious you can hardly live without if it’s going to mean anything at all. Giving it up has got to hurt a little — like ripping off a flap of skin. One day it could turn out to be enshrined as all that’s left of you. Make it count.”

  The tall woman with the spiky hair has already taken hold of one end of her scarf and ever so slowly, inexorably, almost in the manner of a striptease, is sliding it off from around her neck. Her companion stands beside her with his head tilted toward the ceiling, arms folded securely against his chest, and gazes down upon the state of things along the arc of his formidable nose. Observing the woman’s movements and recognizing what she is about to do, he reaches out to restrain her, but she escapes his attempt at intervention with a shudder and darts him a quick accusatory glance, as if he were to blame for everything. “No, I don’t want it anymore. It’s ruined. He’s ruined it,” she says.

  She steps forward and delivers her limp offering to the waiting caretaker, lays it somberly across his outstretched palms like a bereaved mother surrendering the lifeless body of an infant, and retreats back to her place among the others, who are beginning to weigh the implications of this capitulation on their own actions. Her partner, faced with what he can only regard as a pointed personal rebuke, evidently concludes he has no choice but to follow her example and, with an abrupt, violent gesture, pulls off his own identical length of brightly patterned silk, which he then folds — not once, but four times, reducing it to the size of a handkerchief square — and places on top of the vitrine, daring the caretaker to come and fetch it. Such are the hollow refusals, the petty acts of rebellion, to which the vanquished will resort in a futile attempt to prop up the sagging remnants of their dignity.

  The caretaker, having retrieved the second of his two prizes — a meaningless concession which costs him nothing — glances about in search of an appropriate repository for the booty and fastens upon a large red lacquered metal bin with a hinged lid, one of Dr. Morgan’s trophies, standing nearby against the wall, its glossy surface decorated in the Oriental style by a mountainous terrain peopled with tiny barely discernible figures, some of whom are armed with walking sticks and appear to be attempting to scale the heights, while others have paused and turned their backs to contemplate the daunting magnificence of the landscape. He raises the lid and deposits his plunder inside the container like someone lowering a bucket into the unplumbed depths of a well.

  A strangled, gurgling, throaty sound erupts within the cluster of trapped visitors, a sound that resolves itself into a word. “Why!” moans the girl of the mesmerizing stare, less as a question than as a kind of mantra of despair that she repeats at intervals, shaking her head while she struggles to free herself from the bangles encircling her wrist, twisting the bracelet off with a ferocity that leaves behind a red welt, the stubborn angry ghost of the thing she had been wearing. She has the silvery object in her hand now and is examining it, holding it at a distance as if it were something at once dangerous and utterly confounding that demanded careful study. “Why,” she says again, more plaintively this time. Her once lethal pale green eyes are glimmering like melting ice, their former potency diffused in a blur of accumulating liquid that keeps threatening to overflow, although not a single tear has fallen yet and possibly never will.

  The bearded man pushes his way through the crowd to prevent things going any further, waving his arms about in a peremptory fashion to command everyone’s attention. “St
op! Don’t do this,” he cries, addressing his comrades as the solitary voice of reason in the room. “Don’t you realize this lunatic is powerless to keep us here against our will or force us to give up anything at all unless we let him? His success depends entirely on our willingness to collaborate in his crime.” The caretaker stands languidly beside his waiting receptacle, observing the effect of this speech with the detached interest of a sports fan, who — to neutralize his stake in the outcome — has placed a large bet on the opposing team. The irate speaker continues his exhortation. “Come on, we’re not helpless,” he insists. “For god’s sake, we have a nine to one advantage. There’s nothing to prevent us walking out of here with everything we had when we came in, including our self-respect. If we all just resolve to stand together — if we all refuse to volunteer to become his victims . . .”

  A couple of voices weakly echo this proposition, but even so, pockets are being patted down; handbags have been opened, their contents probed for any suitable offering to substitute in place of whatever the most cherished possessions might actually be. “He wants a boot, does he?” snaps the man in the safari jacket in his querulous voice. “Fine. He’ll have it, then.” He bends over, propping his lower leg against the opposite knee for balance, grasps the boot by the heel, maneuvers it from side to side, works it free, and hurls it across the floor in the caretaker’s direction. When he resumes his upright stance — a bit lopsided now thanks to the inequality of a heavy cotton sock on one foot and the twin of his forfeited boot on the other — he looks oddly satisfied with himself, as if he had just successfully thwarted the authorities by swallowing the contraband. In the midst of this sudden flurry of activity, the girl — ducking her head to avoid any encounter with the others and holding her bangle bracelet between thumb and forefinger like someone disposing of a diseased rodent — makes her way to the open-mouthed canister, dangles the bracelet above it for a moment, and with the hint of a shrug, lets it go, promptly, decisively turning her back, as if all along she had been craving an excuse to be rid of it for good.