by Keith Korman
“Stand away from the door, Bolzen,” he ordered. The orderly moved obligingly to one side, wringing his hands and blinking stupidly. He had not forgotten his banishment.
“Well, what is it?”
“I have a message from Senior Physician Nekken.” Bolzen came to a full stop, waiting.
“Ja, what is the message?”
Orderly Bolzen clasped his hands in front of his pants as though repeating lessons from school. “Herr Senior Physician Nekken offers you his heartiest congratulations on the events of this morning. And” — here, the ape-man struggled to remember — “and regarding your personal request, he is at your disposal.” Obviously Bolzen hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was saying. “Is that all right, Herr Doktor?”
“Fine, Bolzen. Thank you. Offer Herr Nekken my sincere gratitude for his good wishes and cooperation.”
Orderly Bolzen bowed deeply and left, mumbling to himself, “… my sincerest gratitude for his operation. No, my sincerest …”
Numskull!
Neanderthal!
Knuckle-scraper!
Herr Doktor wanted to heave a brick down the hall at Bolzens retreating head. The mummy had gone back to the bed, the burnoose wrapped, her pale, elegant arms gone. Everything as before. He wondered what would happen if he smacked his own head against the wall, again and again until little spots of blood appeared, and then a few more and then a few more.
“May I come tomorrow?” he asked. The answer came. The heartless pause of long reproach.
“There’s always tomorrow,” he said.
But no more today.
He went back to the room across the way and drank a cup of tepid tea.
Why hadn’t he just told the big cretin to go away?
Leave us alone, Bolzen. That’s all he had to have said.
He knew the answer. Fear. Because when the girl shed her wrappings, she was no longer his safe, bedridden patient. If she walked and talked, if she spoke and showed him her face — so much more would be required of him. More than the simple knock on the door, the May I come in? The May I leave now? … The daily May I? and then home to bed himself.
Forget about home. Forget about bed. He really ought to send Emma a note saying he wasn’t coming. He really ought to do this, but he felt Mistress Sleeps soft fingers touching his brow…. Go on, she said, write Emma. And so as his eyes drooped he composed a wonderfully sensible letter to Emma, explaining everything. Especially how important his staying across the hall was right now. And toward the end of the letter, he imagined Emma’s strong, thin thighs as they warmed him in bed. He ended his note: “P.S. Darling, I’ll ravish you tomorrow.” And then he slept.
Twenty minutes into the next morning’s lecture, the hand began moving under the covers again. This time he had prepared. Early in the morning Zeik fixed up a sign, Do Not Disturb, which hung outside the door. Herr Doktor also tacked a rectangular piece of paper across the viewing slit, making them as insulated as possible.
He watched Fräulein Schanderein slip off the bed and face out the window. As he lectured, she unwrapped the strips of sheet from her head at the same slow pace, but now it seemed to take ages just to reach the same stage as yesterday His tongue grew thicker and thicker. If anyone — anyone — ignored his sign …
A deep shadow fell beneath the lip of her cowled hood. The shadow’s reflection stood out blackly in the window. Her thin white fingers pulled the cowl back. He glimpsed the pink curve of her ear and a lank mouse nest of hair. Indeed, it seemed a horrible tangled mess, limp and unwashed, hanging in greasy tendrils. Thick mats fell clean out of her scalp as she uncovered her head. He saw white skin through the patchy wisps — the ravages of half meals. Red and black scabs speckled her pate, surrounded by a freckling of dry flakes…. A long, stringy lock hung across her face. She seemed to lurk behind it, as behind a half-drawn veil. He must see about coaxing her into a bath — but how?
The window reflected her ghostly face. She was wilted and ravenous, cheeks sunken, the muscles around her mouth sallow and drawn. Her eyes gazed dully into the middle distance of the garden. He wondered that the blazing light of the blue sky didn’t sting her eyes. Perhaps an innate dullness shielded her even from the sun. She played with a twist of hair that hung across her face. Twirling it now one way, now the other. Then curling the last little end around her mouth.
She had been pretty once. But what a waste now. What a waste … Then by slow degrees he saw yet another face: as if by looking at the girl he had stepped through an unseen door and found himself on Lamplighter’s Street once more. No, not a face. A smell … the secret scent of her. Richer than all the perfumes ever sold with names like Night’s Close, Autumn Moon, Amber Chase. The scent of…
Nanny Sasha.
He closed his eyes. Nanny’s dark scent wreathed him like a cloud. And he smelled the sweet-scented nipple that hung above his face, a rich dilated nipple, swollen and tender and ready for him. He put his lips to it, swelling in his mouth, giving everything of itself….
The crazy girl had turned her face toward him. He gripped the chair’s arms, terribly afraid some force would drag him to the nape of her unwashed neck, inhaling deep and hard afraid that Fräulein too would smell like the cherished suckling of long ago.
Get a grip on yourself. Nanny Sasha was then. This was now. The girl and his treatment. Here and now … Only yesterday she had spoken: ‘Tell my father I’m the Queen of Sparta with a hot rear end.” And today she showed Herr Doktor her face. She had even left the letter on the corner of the bed. For him to read? He took it up now. What a pitiful excuse for a letter. A bland apology for not writing more frequently, with a scant word of hope for her speedy recovery tagged on the end. Written in a single pallid hand, signed: Love, Father & Mother.
Tell him she’s the Queen of Sparta with a hot rear end? Where the devil had she gotten that? All he knew was the urgency of her command. Tell him! Make him!
She stood at the window, twirling a strand of hair around her pinkie.
“Shall we send your father a message? A message from the Queen? I’d write whatever you say. We can try to make him understand —”
She stopped twining her hair around the spindle of her finger. Then began sawing her thigh with the heel of her hand. Rhythmically sawing back and forth without a second’s pause. A compulsive insane movement. A pointless, repetitive sawing that made her seem an idiot. Twiddling. He had seen enough of it from the Incurables in the day room.
Suddenly she repeated childishly over and over:
“You’ll never make him understand. You’ll never do it. Never do it. Never make him understand. Never do it! Never —” Sawing her thigh to beat the band, hopelessly twiddling.
Now ordering him in a high, shrewish voice, ‘‘Lecture me! Lecture me!” He picked up Leaman’s Anatomy from under the chair. Her twiddle went on. And though he lectured her for an hour, she was still going strong when he finally closed the book. Still twiddling alone in her room when he left the Burghölzli at the end of the day.
Chapter 3
The Letter
The winter deep of February surrounded him in a frozen silent hush. Broken only by the crackle of ice underfoot as he walked home from the tram stop. A few flakes of snow drifted down from a clear night sky. No moon, the stars glittered cruelly. He dawdled before his door, reluctant to enter. The thought of warmed-over dinner, of talking to anyone or sleeping, choked him. He thought of the hospital….
Did the girl twiddle in the dark and in her sleep? He crawled into bed beside the warm body of Emma. She barely stirred.
When Fräuleins twiddle didn’t cease after a few days, and when their conversation failed to proceed much further than “Queen of Sparta, you’ll never do it, lecture me!” Herr Doktor gave up — he gave up exhausted, incapable of any fresh reaction to her. Idiotic rantings weren’t communication, just complicated riddles, nasty taunts. He had opened box after box, only to find yet another box, this one with a mouth. While his own life slippe
d away. He liked her better mute.
Unknown to the girl, her most immediate problem was not her twiddle or the nonsense spewing from her wrapped head, but the fact that her room bill was unpaid. Her father had let it slip two months, with several hundred francs due on hospital room and board. Herr Doktor settled it himself, along with an additional two months.
So when Fräuleins spastic twiddle kept on, he finally began the letter to Herr Professor S. Freud of 19 Berggasse, Vienna, Austria. Avoided for so long in the vain hope of gaining ground with the girl, which he could tout and brag about. Now the letter he wrote struggled before him — torn up, or started again with a line lifted from another version. He lost count of the days…. But as the letter evolved, so did his picture of the Schanderein girl’s situation. A short conversation with Herr Tom Thumb accidentally sharpened his insight.
“Well! Well! Well! How wonderful to see you at last, Herr Doktor. Ah, but don’t fret — 1 can see what you’re going to ask me. Yes, yes, just the same. But I must say, Nurse Bosch has been quite liberal with the petroleum jelly. It fell off for a time — the dosage, I mean — and that caused some anxiety…. But over all a great comfort. I’ve got a little pot of it, you see. Get it filled when necessary…. But enough of me! What of you? We’ve heard all sorts of things down here” — he cast a dark glance about the room — “that is, those of us who listen….”
“What kind of things?”
Tom Thumb began to chuckle, his fat body quivering with delight. ‘That you got the little bitch to eat and shit and talk and show you her face. Wunderbar! What next, Herr Hofrat?” Then, conspiratorially, “But they also say you’re paying for her room. Tsk-tsk-tsk, paying for your patients. What a shame …”
The remark rolled around in his head like a bean rattling around in a gourd. That he got her to talk and shit and show him her face. He had done something after all. And so had she. Even if he did dole out money for her keep, in his gut he knew she paid deeply too. The letter began to write itself:
She is a highly intelligent nineteen-year-old: bound for the University Medical School at the time of her last attack,- now in a pronounced demented state. (Routine physical examination impossible,- details of recent case history enclosed.) All her acts can be likened to the tyrannical control she exercised over the immediate space of her room. Though mute for months, she made one command clear: So with my room, so with me.
The eternity gaining entry to her presence. The offering of the cowled sculptures. The attempted violation of her person. I see a common thread. First — she had the power to reject me. Next — I the power to reject her. And in the last — both of us defending against the outrage of her person,
To her command: So with my room, so with me, we added: So with Us.
Even as he wrote these lines the girl’s situation changed,- one morning he entered her room to find its familiar disorder completely gone, as if recently cleaned by the maids. Had he entered the wrong room? But no, there stood the books he brought her, in a neat row along her dresser. And the dresser itself dusted, the wood gleaming darkly. Automatically he looked to the wall by the door where the girl threw the plate of food during the meteoric passing of Nurse Simson. The brown stain no more … a shocking pale streak in its place, cleaner than the surrounding wall. Her shallow sink basin gleamed too.
She had made the bed, the covers turned down in proper girls’ school fashion. The pillow fluffed — but no girl. She had crawled un-derneath, wound in a sheet of her mummy wrappings, which bore the dirty marks of all her cleaning. He peered cautiously under the bed. Her hand still sawed her thigh in that furtive spastic twiddle. She had brought along the neurology text, free hand clutching it in her dark little cave.
Within ten days she began to parrot some of the ordinary things he said. So different from the harsh bitter caw when she croaked, ‘Tell him I’m the Queen!”
“May Î come in?” he would ask her. And she would mumble, “may i come in.”
Then he’d ask, “How are you?” And she’d answer, “how are you.” Speaking softly as if recalling the echoes of words long forgotten … Unnerving at first. Voices in room 401 — rising and falling while the thrum of the-hospital rumbled beyond their door.
She has begun talking. Ejaculating words. Expelling her insides. Is it any wonder bodily excretions of all kinds fascinate her? Though you might say I tolerate her behavior, the truth is I willingly participate. And since Î am not particularly revolted by her behavior, why should î pretend for the sake of social convention?
During his lectures she often went in his presence, half shielding herself with a scrap of blanket as she squatted, She even dabbed him with flecks of food and bits of dung. Often, at the close of his visits, bodily matter and the remains of dinner clung to him, to the chair, the room…. Yet each morning, when-he appeared in fresh attire ready for her daily assault, he found her place clean as well, dirt vanished as though a host of fairy elves had helped her through the task at night.
But there were limits. She once managed a bowel movement so quietly he failed to notice. Hovering over his chair for a moment, as if to sit where he usually sat. And his heart leaped. Ah! she wants to sit where I do …
But she returned to the bed. He had the vague notion of sitting luxuriously, showing her the great comfort of the chair. See, Fräulein, see how wonderful it is to sit here…. So he sat — only to slide in the warm dampness. A surge of giddy revulsion raced through him. She twiddled on the bed, her wrappings loosened, her free hand twirling a lock of hair, pulling it around the curve of her mouth. A strange coy gesture.
“I am really awed, Fräulein,” he said, aghast.
And she repeated, flat and hollow, “I am really awed fräulein.”
Was she heaping dirt on me in the ordinary sense of the word? Or was this feces play an offer of her finest parts? These first few weeks of February seemed so much cruder than the time of her wailing, gasping, and filling chamber pots. Cruder than the time of the fecal dolls. Indeed, those early days seem a golden time. Now, due to the state of my clothes, I leave the hospital by the back way. And often spend an hour searching for a carriage, since the drivers are reluctant to pick up a gentleman in such condition, and going on the tram is unthinkable.
As Fräulein ate more food her sickly pallor receded, though she remained thin in the flesh. She began to gorge herself. Orderly Zeik often ran to the kitchen to fetch her another portion. One day in the middle of February she languidly uncovered her arm. A dried red smear flashed at him. Burnt lightning on the bare whiteness of her skin. At first Herr Doktor panicked, thinking she had wounded herself somehow.
But in a moment better sense took hold, with a dull shock…. Under the covers her thighs were spread open, her twiddle hand going in between them. It came out smeared red. With a toss of her head the burnoose fell away,- she had smeared some on her face. Now she smeared more, around her mouth and eyes.
The regular meals, her recent gorging, had all taken effect. Now fatter, she had gained enough weight to start her menstrual blood flowing. Her first period since coming to the hospital: he made a note of it in her case file.
So with my room, so with me. Shall we now add: So with my blood?
On the second day of her period she included him. Her red-tipped fingers went to his face. She used quite a bit, going back between her legs again and again,- her fingers going around his eyes and over his eyebrows. Then last of all his mouth. At the very end she pushed her wet finger inside and ran it across his teeth.
He let her do it. First under a wave of disgust, then with a growing sense of amazement. He went to the mirror over the dresser for a look. A bloody-faced wild man stared out at him, a splattered savage with dripping teeth from where he plunged his fevered face into the pulsing stricken body of his kill. Here at last, the real face of the Stag King, needing only the twigs in his hair and a knife in his hand.
What was she doing to him? Her hand came again for a last touch, and he flinched. What final ou
trage? Rings of blood around his nostrils, where he inhaled his enemy’s last dying breath? But the hand stopped short of his face. She gripped his bow tie. She tugged at it, untying the knot. Leaving it limp around his throat.
And then he heard the oddest thing. She laughed, flat and shrill, “Heh-heh …” A pause. “Heh-heh …” Slightly evil. Wholly mirthless. But finally a human expression on her dull face. Pleasure in cruelty. His own hand fluttered to his limp bow, and he smiled weakly back at her.
The laughter ceased. Her face blank again. He caught a flicker of movement in the comer of his eye. The rectangle of stiff construction paper had slipped from the viewing slit.
Direktor Bleuler’s watery blue eyes gazed through the thick glass. Herr Doktor stared into the white-bearded face. No shock. No revulsion. Yet somehow sensing, as though reading the old man’s mind, Direktor Bleuler felt deeply ashamed for his young colleague. Disgraced that some sacred laws of intimacy had been transgressed, rules of conduct between doctor and patient, man and woman … But wholly fascinated, terribly drawn by the audacity, the subtle skill. How many years had the old man wished for an impossible patient to unravel bit by bit? Longing to do what his junior was doing in this very hospital? A lifetime.
And so they struck a silent bargain, the terms of which both men understood without speaking. That the younger man would never embarrass the elder by calling him a failure. And that the older man would say nothing of what went on inside the room. Nor stand in his way. Bleuler to keep his cloak of dignity, and Jung his naked patient. The white-bearded face nodded tightly once and vanished from the viewing slit.
Alone with her again, the smell of menstrual blood wrapped him like a damp towel. Terribly familiar, waking the souls of his primitive ancestors in the cells of his veins. Deeply personal, private. Making him Fräuleins possession. The heavy scent so like the warm air space under the bedsheets where he used to crawl to be near Nanny Sasha, the smell of her smooth, strong legs …