Playthings

by Alex Pheby

  ‘You underestimate the interest in scandal. Still, if you are content to write nothing else, then the matter is closed.’

  ‘Can you take me home, Anna? I feel I will die here.’

  ‘Dr. Rössler tells me you believe yourself to be pregnant. He tells me that you believe God has given you children.’

  ‘I have said no such thing! I want to be taken home.’

  ‘He says you believe yourself to be in a colony of the Monist Confederacy. That you are rotting away.’

  ‘I have only been here a matter of weeks. I have told him nothing. Please take me home.’

  Anna frowned and began to say something, to correct some false opinion of Schreber’s, but she seemed to think better of it, and the moment passed.

  ‘And what would you do at home, if I took you there?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What good would it do?’

  Schreber stood up abruptly, and while he did not intend to push the chair over it fell anyway, clattering against the table and knocking off a glass that was too close to one edge.

  ‘Why do you question me? Is it not enough for a man to wish to be in his own home, amongst those things he recognises, in charge of his own household? If I wish to return home, then why shouldn’t I?’

  He would have shouted—he intended to shout this all out—but there was something in his chest—pain—that made it impossible to muster the force and instead it came out like an insistent hiss. Schreber coughed and banged his fist on his chest but it made no difference.

  Now Anna stood up.

  ‘I will not be harangued!’

  ‘Don’t go, please! I am not well. I want to be among the people I love. These men… I am surrounded by dogs. I despise them! They treat me as if I were a fool… worse! A criminal or a child. I see you and now I realise that I must leave here. Is that too much to ask?’

  Anna turned her back on him but she did not leave.

  Schreber came over to her and gently turned her by the shoulders. Anna took a deep breath.

  ‘Your wife… if there is an obstacle…’

  ‘Sabine? How is she? If she is unwell, then we will hire more help.’

  ‘She is well. She is almost entirely recovered. That is not the issue.’

  ‘Send her here.’

  ‘I cannot dictate to your wife, Paul, nor even her daughter. No one can, as surely you must know.’

  ‘She must come! I demand it.’

  ‘Let go of me!’

  ‘No! Did you bring Mother’s clock here?’

  Anna lurched for the bell on the desk, but Schreber held her.

  ‘Did you bring her clock here? It is a very simple question.’

  She twisted free and stood straight.

  ‘You already know that I did, brother.’

  ‘I know nothing of the sort.’

  ‘I told you the first time I came here. You told me that I had forgotten the key. You became angry. I told you that all clock keys are the same. They are all the same!’

  She rubbed her shoulder and took slow steps back until she could open the door. When she turned away, finally, she looked just like she did as a girl—in her profile, at least.

  ‘But you hate glass!’ he hissed.

  ‘Goodbye, brother.’

  ‘I carry the glass things! Because you are frightened of them. It is for me to carry the clock! What if the glass were to break? Don’t you need me to carry the clock anymore?’

  She stood with her back to him in the open doorway. She did not look back.

  ‘Goodbye, brother. Take care,’ she said, and she left.

  Schreber stood in the empty room, with his hands reaching out, and it was only after Müller came in for him, and strapped him into the Bath chair, that he remembered the window.

  In the darkness of his cell, where a hand is not visible even when placed directly before the eyes, and Müller has still not arrived with the mattress, Schreber considers the accident that changed his father from a man of energy to a migrainous wreck. He is shown a series of disturbing anatomical diagrams, and recalls the degeneracy of some common boys.

  XXI

  He was so suddenly changed, Father, from the man who took two stairs for every one an ordinary man took—or even three—and who cartwheeled down the garden in his vest. Once, Paul had watched him break the ice on the lake with his fists before diving in.

  When he came up again he bellowed like an ox.

  But after the accident? His head was bowed and when he climbed the stairs back to bed in the afternoon he gripped the rail until his nails shone out white against his red skin and the veins popped and snaked on the backs of his hands. They moved beneath the skin, slipping under pressure from the movement of his blood, and from the strain of his muscles and ligaments. The internal excess of heat boiled over at the indentation on his temple. He would take one hand from the rail—stopping altogether, halfway up—and bring his leading foot down a step. The scar on his head, where hair no longer grew, was like a crescent moon.

  He could stop at any time, wherever he was, and he would hold perfectly still except for his lips, which trembled beneath his moustache. Those strong hands became tremorous, like dying birds, and hovered, fluttering, before landing where they fell.

  To believe the muttering statue they saw before them was the same man who had flipped and turned and sprinted from one part of the garden to the other, a man whose children ran behind, laughing to see the exuberance in their father, a man who was also so proper that he did not think twice of beating them for their own benefit—for those two things to be the same? The idea was ridiculous!

  If the children had stood around this statue and blasphemed Christ and God himself then it would not have been able to raise a hand to any of them, not even the youngest. The beating hand was clamped to its brow, and the other was required for support: holding a banister, or flat and splayed on a polished tabletop. Indeed, it was a matter of debate whether, during these spells, the statue could hear a thing, because it would not react—not to the whisperings of Mother or to the shouts of the children—and it was only after minutes, sometimes ten minutes at a time, that it would continue its progress to its room.

  Even then it was slow: slower than anyone in that house. Slower even than the twisted children whom he had treated, to whom he had lowered himself to attend. Each one of them was quicker, even young Hans, whose legs were bowed from the knee to the ankle, so that if he stood in the right way, the way Gustav told him, his bones made the segments of a circle the remainder of which could easily be drawn in the mind’s eye. Even that child could make the journey from top to bottom, creaking and complaining, crying, but it could be done in a fraction of the time it took that statue.

  Its eyes were tight shut, protecting against everything: light, sound, the movement of the air in a room, the smell of coffee boiling, strawberries—anything at all—they were intolerable. There were times when it put its hand across its mouth, barring the progress of even the air in and out. But it was never enough. The waft of the afternoon breeze was enough to set the nerves of its mind vibrating like a piano string, strung to such a high pitch that it was heard as pain throughout his body—in the bones and in the liver, scorching the bladder, evoking sympathetic responses in every organ. It did not stop there: the pain continued into the functions of the organs. There was pain in the purification of the liquors of the body, in the imagination that was generated in the mind, in the flow of blood around the body, in the receiving of visual perception. In all things where the representation of pain was possible, it came.

  As if by miracle, this man was transformed from the exemplar of health—as the embodiment of his own words—and made into this bent and bowed statue. He was made into disease.

  What of the man who wore the uniform, with brass buttons and a peaked cap? How could that ma
n be made into this? By a fallen ladder? Impossible! By a bang to the head? By a cut the length of a finger? A slight—so slight!—depression in the skull, not even a fracture: a swelling, that was gone in a week or less, stitched and cleaned and under gauze so quickly that it was barely noticed? Incredible!

  What could his father—who was so good, who knew the ways to be good and made them clear to all those people he met: to the crooked children in the Institute, to his own family, to everyone, through his words—what could he have done to deserve this punishment? The man who was the punisher, who decided on the best and most useful punishment, how could that man become the subject of punishment? There was no sense to it! No justice!

  On those times when he stopped halfway up the stairs, it amounted to nothing when Paul begged his father to come back down. He did not come.

  They all stood in the hall and wept for him.

  His wife, their mother—she wanted so much for her husband. She was once so delighted to see the plans for this house, the Institute, in which her husband was now imprisoned. She felt the excitement in her gut when the keystones were laid in place. She wept for joy on the first night they had slept here, the empty space around them ripe with becoming. Everything they had accounted for in their plans—so much space—room for a facility of world renown, a fit home for the man she believed her husband should be. The years that passed and the petty successes and failures of their ambition did nothing to dull her excitement, knowing as she did the essential worthiness of their cause, and that of the place itself. Now she wept, and when she passed the stairs, hoping to find her husband at his work but instead seeing him motionless halfway between flights, the tautness of his back stretching the fabric of his jacket and the air bristling with his pain, she wept, as did they all. As would anyone who had seen the head of their house reduced to that state. It was all made so much worse by remembering him as he was before: a man, strong and strict.

  Made weak by nothing.

  By an accident.

  By God.

  They were made angry too, despite their faith. If they would not admit it to themselves, the focus of this anger was God nonetheless.

  When his father died and was laid in the coffin, Paul returned from university. The object laid out in the chapel was nothing like the father he had known. It was not only because the absence of life had taken the bloom from the face—that aura, unappreciated during life, but which is so clearly gone on the event of death—that might have been expected. It was not simply that this ineffable aspect of his father was missing; it was more than that. The man was shrunken. His father had been drained. His weight, his muscularity, his colour—everything that had been him—was taken away.

  He was framed in wood and soft silk. His collar was buttoned high and tight. His lips were painted red and his eyes were lined with kohl, with the cheeks sunk in. It was very easy to imagine the skull. The jaw beneath the skin. The teeth. The hands were now nothing but raw bones, incapable of gripping anything, incapable of directing anything. If one were to pinch a wrist between forefinger and thumb there would be no effort required to move that wrist where one wished it to go, to make it do what one wished, regardless of its owner’s desires and intentions.

  Paul looked at him unblinking, as a man now—almost—but not a boy. He looked at him with a dispassionate eye. He took him for an object.

  The cadaver was poor in appearance. If it had been said of his father that he was a small man and very slight, of unimpressive physique and inadequate health, then there was nothing in the box that might have been used to refute that statement. If claims were made to his father’s brilliance and efficacy, and expectations given to a viewer of the contents of this box, his corpse would have raised an eyebrow, at least, and comments would have been made.

  His mother laid her hand on his shoulder and smoothed his jacket. She put her hand on his hip and guided him away quietly, but he did not come. He stood and would not be moved.

  He reached into the box, and his mother gasped. He took his father by the wrists, and lifted his arms.

  ‘Paul!’

  ‘He might sit up. If we tell him.’

  ‘Paul!’ Gustav stood between his brother and father, and the arms fell crooked against the chest.

  ‘Why don’t you tell him?’

  His mother leant over the coffin, and Paul thought for a moment that she would do the work, attend to her husband as a wife ought to.

  ‘Open his eyes!’ he said, but she refused. She pushed Paul away when he came forward again, and it took Gustav to return him to his seat.

  The box was lowered into the earth in the presence of hundreds. Those who had been unable to find space in the church were not dissuaded from attending the burial. They paid their respects. Men and women Paul had never seen: the parents of children who had been eased of their suffering. Readers of his father’s works who imagined themselves close, though they had never met. Some of them dared to touch Paul, thinking to offer him solace, but it had the opposite effect, setting off spasms in his muscles.

  His mother, after the funeral, with the ringing of the bells still in her ears, calmly took everything of his father’s—his shirts, his pictures, his books, his papers, his shoes, his favourite foods—took it all and piled it in the middle of the garden and set light to it. She rid herself of the connection, of the burden of her attachment to a man who was now dead. If Anna couldn’t understand, if Gustav dragged her back to the house, the taper in her hand still burning, and the girls wept to see it, Paul understood. The pile of things over which was draped the long blue coat with the brass buttons, the pile from which the eyes of his father watched from broken framed portraits, it might still have remained untouched. Gustav exceeded himself in his authority, wondering how he should take the place his father had guarded jealously, unprepared and over hard in the execution of the role, holding their mother’s arms behind her—even though she was not struggling—and on her face was serenity of the most plain kind, no hint of hysteria. Anna wore the emotion for all of them, shrieking at a pitch that would have shamed a banshee. If it had not been for Paul, who took the flame from his mother’s hand and laid it at the base of the pile, those objects—those bonds of which his mother wished to free herself—would have been saved. Instead the smoke crawled along the grass, keeping low and dense.

  Then the weeping of the girls, and the cracking of glass from the centre of the pyre, the leaking of water and sap from treated wood popping in the heat that built, his mother silent, her arms wrapped around herself, rocking a little from side to side. Here and there an orange flicker, like the lamps of boats out on the lake at night, seen from the far shore, obscured and revealed by the movement of waves. Slowly, from the top, darting jets of flame and then, after a while, fire everywhere, and then only fire and blackness, ever shrinking, until there was nothing but the coals that lie in the fireplace when the fire is exhausted.

  Like his mother, when the fire was over, he felt unburdened, knowing there was nothing remaining to keep him in this place, and that he could do nothing but prepare himself for the trial that was to come. He must make clear his case, set forth, by action, his plea for clemency in the eyes of God, to atone for the sins of his father and for his own failures as a man. Because hadn’t he failed? Even years later, wasn’t he a failure? Didn’t he adorn himself with robes and take the seat of a man who is given godly powers on earth? The power to decide, to know, to pass judgement on other men? Even on those other men who would judge too, abstracting himself from the world to apply the letter and word of the law. Blinding himself to the little facts of things: the coincidences and movements of objects through the world, the tides of men’s wishes and desires—their intentions. He set himself the task of separating the chaff until only the truth remained. Then, scientifically, objectively, perfectly, measured this truth against the word of the Law. When that was done he turned his back on the matter, letting the
others deal with the mess. The flood of matter that would need to be staunched, he left to others. The necks sliced, or the bodies caged. Just as the Inquisitors, the hated Catholics, had handed over the products of their courts to the secular wing so that they would not have to sully their office, their robes, with the blood of women and men, so his robes were unsullied, his office. Yet now, crouching in that cell, he knew that he was stained, as a man is always stained, and no office or garment could stand between him and his own judgement. It was not those small things of which he was accused, the deaths he had personally ordered, or the weeping, or the misery, but a much greater crime: a crime of the soul, to have lived when his father had died, when his brother had died, to have exceeded his proper authority.

  Flesh. A man, his needs and desires and thoughts and memories: nothing. A machine of skin and bone and blood. Clockwork, like the Mechanical Turk. A device of exceptional cleverness, of immense complexity, but a machine nonetheless. An empty shell, that worked through its routines like a metal bird, singing though it is nothing but cogs and wheels and bellows. Without animus, its only motivation the twisting of the key in its back. Once that was withdrawn? Once the breath of life was removed? There would be nothing, like those beautiful children he had seen born, but who could not be compelled to live. As those that could not have the desire for life shaken into them, no more could this crouching figure be compelled to go on. Indeed, why should he?

  He sat in the corner of his dark cell, in the darkest part of the night, without so much as a place to lie. The dust from the window frame gathered at the corners of his eyes, and he imagined himself in his father’s box. He lay there in that box, to all appearances dead, appearing to be dead, but not dead. Boxed and buried, but the nerves so enlivened by God’s presence that his consciousness survived in the corpse. He sat in the darkness deprived of all those things necessary to sustain existence, and he felt the closeness of the walnut and the silk, and felt the rotting of his own body, his devouring by insects, his putrefaction, and he longed to be dead, like his father was. Like his brother was. Like his children were.