Come Back, Dr Caligari

by Donald Barthelme

  20 November

  We read signs as promises. Miss Mandible understands by my great height, by my resonant vowels, that I will one day carry her off to bed. Sue Ann interprets these same signs to mean that I am unique among her male acquaintances, therefore most desirable, therefore her special property as is everything that is Most Desirable. If neither of these propositions work out then life has broken faith with them.

  I myself, in my former existence, read the company motto (“Here to Help in Time of Need”) as a description of the duty of the adjuster, drastically mislocating the company’s deepest concerns. I believed that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love. Brenda, reading the same signs that have now misled Miss Mandible and Sue Ann Brownly, felt she had been promised that she would never be bored again. All of us, Miss Mandible, Sue Ann, myself, Brenda, Mr. Goodykind, still believe that the American flag betokens a kind of general righteousness.

  But I say, looking about me in this incubator of future citizens, that signs are signs, and that some of them are lies. This is the great discovery of my time here.

  23 November

  It may be that my experience as a child will save me after all. If only I can remain quietly in this classroom, making my notes while Napoleon plods through Russia in the droning voice of Harry Broan, reading aloud from our History text. All of the mysteries that perplexed me as an adult have their origins here, and one by one I am numbering them, exposing their roots.

  2 December

  Miss Mandible will refuse to permit me to remain ungrown. Her hands rest on my shoulders too warmly, and for too long.

  7 December

  It is the pledges that this place makes to me, pledges that cannot be redeemed, that confuse me later and make me feel I am not getting anywhere. Everything is presented as the result of some knowable process; if I wish to arrive at four I get there by way of two and two. If I wish to burn Moscow the route I must travel has already been marked out by another visitor. If, like Bobby Vanderbilt, I yearn for the wheel of the Lancia 2.4-liter coupé,1 have only to go through the appropriate process, that is, get the money. And if it is money itself that I desire, I have only to make it. All of these goals are equally beautiful in the sight of the Board of Estimate; the proof is all around us, in the no-nonsense ugliness of this steel and glass building, in the straightline matter-of-factness with which Miss Mandible handles some of our less reputable wars. Who points out that arrangements sometimes slip, that errors are made, that signs are misread? “They have confidence in their ability to take the right steps and to obtain correct answers.” I take the right steps, obtain correct answers, and my wife leaves me for another man.

  8 December

  My enlightenment is proceeding wonderfully.

  9 December

  Disaster once again. Tomorrow I am to be sent to a doctor, for observation. Sue Ann Brownly caught Miss Mandible and me in the cloakroom, during recess, and immediately threw a fit. For a moment I thought she was actually going to choke. She ran out of the room weeping, straight for the principal’s office, certain now which of us was Debbie, which Eddie, which Liz. I am sorry to be the cause of her disillusionment, but I know that she will recover. Miss Mandible is ruined but fulfilled. Although she will be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, she seems at peace; her promise has been kept. She knows now that everything she has been told about life, about America, is true.

  I have tried to convince the school authorities that I am a minor only in a very special sense, that I am in fact mostly to blame — but it does no good. They are as dense as ever. My contemporaries are astounded that I present myself as anything other than an innocent victim. Like the Old Guard marching through the Russian drifts, the class marches to the conclusion that truth is punishment.

  Bobby Vanderbilt has given me his copy of Sounds of Sebring, in farewell.

  Marie, Marie, Hold On Tight

  Henry Mackie, Edward Asher and Howard Ettle braved a rainstorm to demonstrate against the human condition on Wednesday, April 26 (and Marie, you should have used waterproof paint; the signs were a mess after half an hour). They began at St. John the Precursor on 69th Street at 1:30 p.m. picketing with signs bearing the slogans MAN DIES! THE BODY IS DISGUST! COGITO ERGO NOTHING! / ABANDON LOVE! and handing out announcements of Henry Mackie’s lecture at the Playmor Lanes the next evening. There was much interest among bystanders in the vicinity of the church. A man who said his name was William Rochester came up to give encouragement: “That’s the way!” he said. At about 1:50 a fat, richly dressed beadle emerged from the church to dispute our right to picket. He had dewlaps which shook unpleasantly and, I am sorry to say, did not look like a good man.

  “All right,” he said, “now move on, you have to move along, you can’t picket us!” He said that the church had never been picketed, that it could not be picketed without its permission, that it owned the sidewalk, and that he was going to call the police. Henry Mackie, Edward Asher and Howard Ettle had already obtained police permission for the demonstration through a fortunate bit of foresight; and we confirmed this by showing him our slip that we had obtained at Police Headquarters. The beadle was intensely irritated at this and stormed back inside the church to report to someone higher up. Henry Mackie said, “Well, get ready for the lightning bolt,” and Edward Asher and Howard Ettle laughed.

  Interest in the demonstration among walkers on 69th Street increased and a number of people accepted our leaflet and began to ask the pickets questions such as “What do you mean?” and “Were you young men raised in the church?” The pickets replied to these questions quietly but firmly and in as much detail as casual passersby could be expected to be interested in. Some of the walkers made taunting remarks — “Cogito ergo your ass” is one I remember — but the demeanor of the pickets was exemplary at all times, even later when things began, as Henry Mackie put it, “to get a little rough.” (Marie, you would have been proud of us.) People who care about the rights of pickets should realize that these rights are threatened mostly not by the police, who generally do not molest you if you go through the appropriate bureaucratic procedures such as getting a permit, but by individuals who come up to you and try to pull your sign out of your hands or, in one case, spit at you. The man who did the latter was, surprisingly, very well dressed. What could be happening within an individual like that? He didn’t even ask questions as to the nature or purpose of the demonstration, just spat and walked away. He didn’t say a word. We wondered about him.

  At about 2 P.M. a very high-up official in a black clerical suit emerged from the church and asked us if we had ever heard of Kierkegaard. It was raining on him just as it was on the pickets but he didn’t seem to mind. “This demonstration displays a Kierkegaardian spirit which I understand,” he said, and then requested that we transfer our operations to some other place. Henry Mackie had a very interesting discussion of about ten minutes’ duration with this official during which photographs were taken by the New York Post, Newsweek and CBS Television whom Henry Mackie had alerted prior to the demonstration. The photographers made the churchman a little nervous but you have to hand it to him, he maintained his phony attitude of polite interest almost to the last. He said several rather bromidic things like “The human condition is the given, it’s what we do with it that counts” and “The body is simply the temple wherein the soul dwells” which Henry Mackie countered with his famous question “Why does it have to be that way?” which has dumbfounded so many orthodox religionists and thinkers and with which he first won us (the other pickets) to his banner in the first place.

  “Why?” the churchman exclaimed. It was clear that he was radically taken aback. “Because it is that way. You have to deal with what is. With reality.”

  “But why does it have to be that way?” Henry Mackie repeated, which is the technique of the question, which used in this way is unanswerable. A blush of anger and frustrati
on crossed the churchman’s features (it probably didn’t register on your TV screen, Marie, but I was there, I saw it — it was beautiful).

  “The human condition is a fundamental datum,” the cleric stated. “It is immutable, fixed and changeless. To say otherwise…”

  “Precisely,” Henry Mackie said, “why it must be challenged.”

  “But,” the cleric said, “it is God’s will.”

  “Yes,” Henry Mackie said significantly.

  The churchman then retired into his church, muttering and shaking his head. The rain had damaged our signs somewhat but the slogans were still legible and we had extra signs cached in Edward Asher’s car anyway. A number of innocents crossed the picket line to worship including several who looked as if they might be from the FBI. The pickets had realized in laying their plans the danger that they might be taken for Communists. This eventuality was provided for by the mimeographed leaflets which carefully explained that the pickets were not Communists and cited Edward Asher’s and Howard Ettle’s Army service including Asher’s Commendation Ribbon. “We, as you, are law-abiding American citizens who support the Constitution and pay taxes,” the leaflet says. “We are simply opposed to the ruthless way in which the human condition has been imposed on organisms which have done nothing to deserve it and are unable to escape it. Why does it have to be that way?” The leaflet goes on to discuss, in simple language, the various unfortunate aspects of the human condition including death, unseemly and degrading bodily functions, limitations on human understanding, and the chimera of love. The leaflet concludes with the section headed “What Is To Be Done?” which Henry Mackie says is a famous revolutionary catchword and which outlines, in clear, simple language, Henry Mackie’s program for the reification of the human condition from the ground up.

  A Negro lady came up, took one of the leaflets, read it carefully and then said: “They look like Communists to me!” Edward Asher commented that no matter how clearly things were explained to the people, the people always wanted to believe you were a Communist. He said that when he demonstrated once in Miami against vivisection of helpless animals he was accused of being a Nazi Communist which was, he explained, a contradiction in terms. He said ladies were usually the worst.

  By then the large crowd that had gathered when the television men came had drifted away. The pickets therefore shifted the site of the demonstration to Rockefeller Plaza in Rockefeller Center via Edward Asher’s car. Here were many people loafing, digesting lunch etc. and we used the spare signs which had new messages including

  WHY ARE YOU STANDING

  WHERE YOU ARE STANDING?

  THE SOUL IS NOT!

  NO MORE

  ART

  CULTURE

  LOVE

  REMEMBER YOU ARE DUST!

  The rain had stopped and the flowers smelled marvelously fine. The pickets took up positions near a restaurant (I wish you’d been there, Marie, because it reminded me of something, something you said that night we went to Bloomingdale’s and bought your new cerise-colored bathing suit: “The color a new baby has,” you said, and the flowers were like that, some of them). People with cameras hanging around their necks took pictures of us as if they had never seen a demonstration before. The pickets remarked among themselves that it was funny to think of the tourists with pictures of us demonstrating in their scrapbooks in California, Iowa, Michigan, people we didn’t know and who didn’t know us or care anything about the demonstration or, for that matter, the human condition itself, in which they were so steeped that they couldn’t stand off and look at it and know it for what it was. “It’s a paradigmatic situation,” Henry Mackie said, “exemplifying the distance between the potential knowers holding a commonsense view of the world and what is to be known, which escapes them as they pursue their mundane existences.”

  At this time (2:45 P.M.) the demonstrators were approached by a group of youths between the ages I would say of sixteen and twenty-one. They were dressed in hood jackets, Tshirts, tight pants etc. and were very obviously delinquents from bad environments and broken homes where they had received no love. They ringed the pickets in a threatening manner. There were about seven of them. The leader (and Marie, he wasn’t the oldest; he was younger than some of them, tall, with a peculiar face, blank and intelligent at the same time) walked around looking at our signs with exaggerated curiosity. “What are you guys,” he said finally, “some kind of creeps or something?”

  Henry Mackie replied quietly that the pickets were American citizens pursuing their right to demonstrate peaceably under the Constitution.

  The leader looked at Henry Mackie. “You’re flits, you guys, huh?” he said. He then snatched a handful of leaflets out of Edward Asher’s hands, and when Edward Asher attempted to recover them, danced away out of reach while two others stood in Asher’s way. “What do you flits think you’re doin’?” he said. “What is this shit?”

  “You haven’t got any right…” Henry Mackie started to say, but the leader of the youths moved very close to him then.

  “What do you mean, you don’t believe in God?” he said. The other ones moved in closer too.

  “That is not the question,” Henry Mackie said. “Belief or nonbelief is not at issue. The situation remains the same whether you believe or not. The human condition is…”

  “Listen,” the leader said, “I thought all you guys went to church every day. Now you tell me that flits don’t believe in God. You putting me on?”

  Henry Mackie repeated that belief was not involved, and said that it was, rather, a question of man helpless in the grip of a definition of himself that he had not drawn, that could not be altered by human action, and that was in fundamental conflict with every human notion of what should obtain. The pickets were simply subjecting this state of affairs to a radical questioning, he said.

  “You’re putting me on,” the youth said, and attempted to kick Henry Mackie in the groin, but Mackie turned away in time. However the other youths then jumped the pickets, right in the middle of Rockefeller Center. Henry Mackie was thrown to the pavement and kicked repeatedly in the head, Edward Asher’s coat was ripped off his back and he sustained many blows in the kidneys and elsewhere, and Howard Ettle was given a broken rib by a youth called “Cutter” who shoved him against a wall and smashed him viciously even though bystanders tried to interfere (a few of them). All this happened in a very short space of time. The pickets’ signs were broken and smashed and their leaflets scattered everywhere. A policeman summoned by bystanders tried to catch the youths but they got away through the lobby of the Associated Press building and he returned empty-handed. Medical aid was summoned for the pickets. Photos were taken.

  “Senseless violence,” Edward Asher said later. “They didn’t understand that…”

  “On the contrary,” Henry Mackie said, “they understand everything better than anybody.”

  The next evening, at 8 P.M. Henry Mackie delivered his lecture in the upstairs meeting room at the Playmor Lanes, as had been announced in the leaflet. The crowd was very small but attentive and interested. Henry Mackie had his head bandaged in a white bandage. He delivered his lecture titled “What Is To Be Done?” with good diction and enunciation and in a strong voice. He was very eloquent. And eloquence, Henry Mackie says, is really all any of us can hope for.

  Up, Aloft in the Air

  Buck saw now that the situation between Nancy and himself was considerably more serious than he had imagined. She exhibited unmistakable signs of a leaning in his direction. The leaning was acute, sometimes he thought she would fall, sometimes he thought she would not fall, sometimes he didn’t care, and in every way tried to prove himself the man that he was. It meant dressing in unusual clothes and the breaking of old habits. But how could he shatter her dreams after all they had endured together? after all they had jointly seen and done since first identifying Cleveland as Cleveland? “Nancy,” he said, “I’m too old. I’m not nice. There is my son to consider, Peter.” Her hand tou
ched the area between her breasts where hung a decoration, dating he estimated from the World War I period — that famous period!

  The turbojet, their “ship,” landed on its wheels. Buck wondered about the wheels. Why didn’t they shear off when the aircraft landed so hard with a sound like thunder? Many had wondered before him. Wondering was part of the history of lighter-than-air-ness, you fool. It was Nancy herself, standing behind him in the exit line, who had suggested that they dance on the landing strip. “To establish rapport with the terrain,” she said with her distant coolness, made more intense by the hot glare of the Edward pie vendors and customs trees. They danced the comb, the meringue, the dolce far niente. It was glorious there on the strip, amid air rich with the incredible vitality of jet fuel and the sensate music of exhaust. Twilight was lowered onto the landing pattern, a twilight such as has never graced Cleveland before, or since. Then broken, heartless laughter and the hurried trip to the hotel.

  “I understand,” Nancy said. And looking at her dispassionately, Buck conjectured that she did understand, unscrupulous as that may sound. Probably, he considered, I convinced her against my will. The man from Southern Rhodesia cornered him in the dangerous hotel elevator. “Do you think you have the right to hold opinions which differ from those of President Kennedy?” he asked. “The President of your land?” But the party made up for all that, or most of it, in a curious way. The baby on the floor, Saul, seemed enjoyable, perhaps more than his wont. Or my wont, Buck thought, who knows? A Ray Charles record spun in the gigantic salad bowl. Buck danced the frisson with the painter’s wife Perpetua (although Nancy was alone, back at the hotel). “I am named,” Perpetua said, “after the famous typeface designed by the famous English designer, Eric Gill, in an earlier part of our century.” “Yes,” Buck said calmly, “I know that face.” She told him softly the history of her affair with her husband, Saul Senior. Sensuously, they covered the ground. And then two ruly police gentlemen entered the room, with the guests blanching, and lettuce and romaine and radishes too flying for the exits, which were choked with grass.