by Keith Korman
A fine lady. Hah! Months he had waited for her to stop smearing shit over everything and everybody and dancing about like a spastic at the drop of a hat. How long before he brought her out in public without her exploding into a fit of verbal nonsense? Ja, for this was a fine lady’s dress, made for a fine lady. How many months passed before she could even do an impersonation of one? Whatever possessed him to buy the damn thing?
Because he thought he could cure a mad girl.
Cure her!
That was begging for trouble. Ja, ja, he should never have tried. Just stuck her in the dayroom, as Nekken and the rest wanted, Then crawling to the old Faker for advice! Ach! How low could you stoop …
The vision of this place and its people was slipping from his grasp. He felt the gales of wind in a bright light, gales of wind eating away the years.
He was going back again…,
Chapter 8
Shadows
Herr Doktor sat in his office on the fifth floor of the Burghölzli. The Vienna reply sat on the red leather surface of his desk. The dried coffee stain from Emma’s jealous fit marred one side of the white paper. Like the long-forgotten streak of decayed food that had once defiled the wall in Fräuleins cell. How long ago that seemed….
But Emma wasn’t the crazy one. The girl was. And his wife had better adjust to that fact, because he wasn’t going to stop now. Not for Emma.
Not for anyone.
Now that his playacting mayhem and his wild dances with the girl had become generally known, another spate of treachery had run through the halls like a virus of malice. A crude Star of David had appeared on Fräuleins door, scrawled in red lipstick. A sign meant to cow him, to daunt and intimidate … Naturally, they never caught the prankster. But what truly frightened him was how the powers of the place —- Bleuler and Nekken — remained so conveniently neutral, obliging Herr Doktor, Zeik, or Nurse Bosch to wipe off the malicious star every time they found it. “Well, this is an asylum, you know,” Nurse Bosch remarked sadly. ‘‘Everybody’s crazy….”
He turned to stare out his office window. The cold stung him. A clean blanket of March snow lay on the garden grounds in sloping drifts. The darting tracks of a hare cut across to a burrow in the bank near a vine-covered wall. How he wanted to drift out the window, find a safe burrow of his own, and sleep till spring. He leaned back tiredly in his chair. The Vienna reply seemed to hover over the desk, his lazy eyes seeing the letters blurred and hazy…. He set the paper down and let the haze gather over it as smoke from some Aladdin’s lamp. Like a genie, Fräulein emerged on the surface of his desk, wrapped in a filmy sheet —- lying across his blotter like a love slave. Salome. A single eye reproached him from the folds of her turban.
“Can’t I have a fantasy?” he asked.
But there came no answer. Instead she began to writhe like a serpent, her body undulating, showing him its seductive curves and voluptuous parts. He grew warm for her as she coiled on the red leather…. Her voice came for him, honeyed and melodious. A sweet voice gently urging him to take himself out of his trousers and show himself to her. Telling him she wanted to see him take it out, see him touch himself. And then to have him watch her too. Watch her while she touched all the dark and lovely places.
Her silky shadow spread over his face. It smelled like gardenias … jasmine and warm baths…. If he died now, it would really be all right. She parted herself, and he heard the words that ran down him like water … “What if the others see us?” she asked. “You and me and this?” Answering the question for him like the stroke of an omen: “Then they’ll see us. And then they’ll know.”
Herr Doktor lifted his head off the stained reply. Had he fallen asleep? A passage from the Vienna letter lay face-up on his desk:
What caused her trauma? The girl may have had years to build up a veritable house of cards around some dangerous misconception. While at the heart of her labyrinth she hides the sacred minotaur of an idea — Her Self — a monster of wrong thoughts, suspicions, and discord. Are you the one to lead that monster from its lair? What shadows of her past guard the dungeon ways you seek?
But oh, God, if Fräulein made up what she saw, or what she thought she saw, or what happened long ago, or what she simply wanted to happen … then there’d be no unraveling the madness. No end to the fantasies, insane creations, lies, and dreck. To cure her, impossible. Impossible!
A gust of wind sucked the window shut with a metal clang! He jumped up, shouting, “Ahhh!” Then, after a moment, sheepishly latched the window, rather glad no one had seen him lean from the chair like an electrocuted frog. He waited for his heart to settle down, with the nagging sensation something was wrong nearby. He looked under his desk, feeling foolish, Of course nothing but his own limbs, some dust, and a wastepaper basket. Still the anxiety gnawed at him. Like that crooked picture on the wall Was it always tilted, or had it slipped recently?
A print, almost invisible in the gloom. Àctaeon and His Hounds, Actaeon, the young prince who stumbled on Artemis bathing. Lest he brag of seeing the goddess naked, the huntress turned him into a stag and hunted him down with his own dogs. The print showed the créature, man above, stag below, with antlers growing from his head and a strip of fur that ran down his neck, blending into the broad, strong haunches of the animal. Four dogs clung to its flesh, tearing him apart. The engraver showed in lurid detail the snarling teeth and the ripped entrails of the stag-man. The print had been hanging on the wall when he first moved into the office. And he didn’t know if he liked it or not, … Perhaps that’s why he never took it down.
He glanced out the window. A moon had risen over the garden wall, casting white light across the snow. Did the moon rise early or late this time of year? He looked at his pocket watch, but to his dismay he saw it had stopped at seventeen minutes to seven. Seven this very night, or seven in the morning — who knew? Why didn’t he wind it every day, the way normal men were supposed to do?
Then he saw what was wrong.
A shadow fell across the floor in the hall. The shadow of a person standing quietly outside his door. Someone playing tricks.
“Who’s there?”
No one answered. The hair on his calves had risen. The malicious star artist, come to scrawl on his office door? Now, shrilly, “See here, who’s there?”
The shadow vanished. He cursed himself for being such a coward and poked his head out into the hall. Empty. Then he saw the shadow coming from behind one of the columns that flanked the turn in the corridor. He knew the form, the silhouette of folds and wrappings. A draped figure. The true goddess who chased him through his days, laid sleep upon his eyes, and caused his watch to stop. At his feet he found a book. The neurology text, given Fräulein ages ago, left out^ side his door. Well, she had supposedly been on her way to medical school, so why not give it to her? But until this very moment, Herr Doktor had not realized how much he hoped she had actually read the words.
Why bring the volume? As if to say, Someday I’ll be better, and when I’m better I’ll study neurology and learn to be a Fräulein Doktor….
“Neurology,” he said to the shadow. “Well, why not? After all, someday you’ll go back to your studies. It’s an open field at least. Indeed, I should know. Why not neurology?”
The shadow from the column wavered as if trembling in a draft. No, she had never read it. Only pawed it, smeared it with bodily matter, tearing out pages. He really ought to stop playing around with his life and try another field before it was too late. Would another hospital take him? Perhaps if he mastered a degree in surgery. Keep this book, though, keep it as a reminder of how he kidded himself for so long, hoping that if only he tried hard enough, listened closely enough, empathized enough, sacrificed enough …
The shadow wavered like a ribbon of smoke, threatening to disappear. But instead her voice came back at him.
“You don’t know anything,” the shadow said.
As though he’d never know anything. Ever. As if he was immeasurably stupi
d. And would remain so. Forever.
Her footsteps pattered off. He had half a mind to chase her down, yank her roughly by the arm, and yell, “What do you want from me?” Push her against the cold marble wall, rip away her sheets and turban, while he pried her thighs apart and took her. Shouting, “Is this what you want? Is it? Is it?”
The vision collapsed with a sigh. He was too tired to follow her. He clumped back to his seat, dropping the book on his desk. The cover flew open to a dog-eared page. She had made a streak across the white paper. Ja, he knew the place. Knew it chapter and verse. Knew the very lines she’d been reading. And now he knew why she had come up to his office that night. Why she brought him the book. Why she said he knew nothing. She was right. He didn’t know anything.
He bolted out of his office, running for the stairs. He had to see if his guess was right. He had all but forgotten her steamer trunk. Her damn trunk! Standing mutely outside her door for months, ignored like a dumb beast of burden. Once a week one of the maids wiped the dust off. Now he had to see if the trunk was still there. He almost tripped at the top of the stairs. Zeik stood like a soldier at attention, as if he’d been expecting Herr Doktor. The girl’s steamer trunk had vanished from the hall. Had she dragged the monster through the doorway alone? No, impossible! The trunk was huge. He’d tried to lift it once. À gang of four orderlies had lugged it up. God! she must have really wanted the thing inside to drag it those few bitter feet into her room. She was right, of course. He hadn’t known anything. At last he understood.
Chapter 9
The Patient Exists
She was a bee in a huge beehive. She even knew what kind of bee — a worn-out worker drone, worked to death and hiding in her cell. She felt the living stone hive above her and below her and on every side. The many-celled Beehölzli … the Burghive. Swarming with other bees, busy bees going in and out of rooms and up and down stairs, humming all together.
But she had been broken and no longer worked. So they put her in a cell alone. And wrapped her like a budding larva and sealed the door with wax. Just before they sealed the cell, the nurse bees wrapped her in a healing gauze from the spit in their mouths. The gauze softened the armor of her exoskeleton, and while she slept the black and yellow markings of her thorax began to fade…. She became soft mush, now splitting in two, with wriggling legs that thrashed about, with bones inside and flesh and blood. Soon she was not a bee any longer.
How sad not being a bee … When she felt her warm limbs and not the hard insect armor, she wept and shrank down in the covers of the bed. The blankets were stiff from overuse, from rubbing her skin day in and day out and never washing. Down below she smelled herself, not sweet beeswax and honey, but sour and goaty. And even farther away, her feet were cold….
In the dark room a shaft of white light fell through the viewing slit, like a shaft into an underground chamber. How she hated the electric light. It burned night and day from great opaque white glass globes that hung from the hall ceiling by iron rods, casting a steady, blinding glare…. She shut her eyes against its emptiness.
Her skin itched where she picked a scab on her elbow. She kept picking and picking, sometimes not even letting it crust over before she went at it again. The picking of her elbow had become a private thing, her own, and she wasn’t going to show the sore to anybody. Not even Herr Smarty Pants.
She also called him Herr Guten Morgen. And: Herr May I Come In? But his real name was Herr So Polite. Yet he certainly could be called Herr How Are You Fräulein. Or: Herr May Î Sit Down Fräulein, He had a lot of names. Though his latest and most recent name was Herr Smarty Pants, because he tried to be so smart all the time.
Herr Smarty Pants even thought he’d gotten her to talk. Wrong! Wrong! He hadn’t Rotten her. She could have talked anytime. Anytime she wanted — even the first day if she wanted.
She laughed under the covers, dry, choking laughter, waking up the sick bee in the next room. Another worn-out worker drone lived there,- she always heard him whimpering and trembling. Sometimes he rocked back and forth so his whole bed creaked. His constant babbling sounded to her like gurgling water over flat stones, so she named him the Gurgler.
“Shut up, you!” she hissed at the wall, then slapped it with the flat of her palm. “Shut up, Turd Mouth!”
Sometimes she called him that — Turd Mouth. If she ever went into his room, she would surely strangle him, choke him to death to stop his gurgling forever. Her hand thudded against the wall, and she hissed louder: “Shut up, or I’ll come in and eat your tongue!”
She laughed her dry, gagging laugh, challenging the Gurgling Turd to make one more tiny sound. Then strained hard … holding her breath, listening with all her might. But the whimpers faded to silent fear. Now nothing. Not a sob. Not a whimper.
Good. Let the Gurgler whimper to himself for a while. At last she could ignore the shaft of light from the hall, falling like a blinding weight through the viewing slit. Ignore everything: her own bed, the little room, the great stone Burghive outside…. Just rise above it all and float, float like a soap bubble in the air wafting in the darkness of the room, never touching, never landing, drifting and never breaking…
She had things to think about.
Such as: how long had she been there? Thirteen years at least in this same bed. Under these same sheets, smelling this same air. That would make her about six hundred years old when she first arrived.
No, six was very, very bad. Mustn’t think six. Or eight or ten or any of it. Not thirteen either.
She’d been here a week, then. A long week, or maybe a month.
It was a secret.
A safe secret from the tall one, Nek-Nek, who stared at her blandly through the waxy viewing slit. When his face came into view, she closed her eyes and went away. And with her eyes closed she rose from the bed like a ghost, right through the door, through his body and down the hall. And when she opened her eyes again, she was elsewhere! Sometimes outside the window, hanging from a drainpipe like a spider. Sometimes in Herr Smarty Pants’s office, watching him sleep at his desk. And very soon she was going to float into the Gurgler’s room next door while he sniveled in bed, to strangle him with her own hands until his thrashing stopped and his gurgle was gone.
Nek-Nek’s long, narrow face appeared in her viewing slit again and again. The deadskin face, she called it. And when it came she always closed her eyes. Floating away in the stale air of the room, drifting through him … Then waking up in some other part of the Burghöhzli, in some quiet place beyond the bee cell — with her back to the cool marble wall and her chilled feet on the cold, shiny floor. There she might stand like a statue of herself, blending into the surroundings as people passed by, never noticing, never sensing her presence, merely glancing briefly at the noble statue of the Queen and passing on.
Sometimes when Nek-Nek came in the dead of night, he trapped the safe bubble on the bed. Then she shrouded herself from sight, peeking through the folds of her covers, watching him stare down through the waxy slit of the bee cell. The deadskin face always stared a long, long time, and she always hid until the face was gone.
Then there were the books. At first she did not remember what the blockish things were supposed to be. They looked so familiar, so touchable, and she felt she ought to know all about them. Their in-sides and outsides, and what they did. For a moment, a name came to the tip of her tongue. Yes, it was … it was … A great vagueness lay upon her, a warm, wet fog that covered her and took away her brain…. She knew there were scratches and marks on the thing. And for a long time (twenty years?) she stared at it, stared at it right on the floor, waiting for it to speak. She pushed the dead block around with her foot, trying to get it to show itself, but for the longest time it stayed dead.
Then Smarty Pants gave it away, coming into the cell and saying, “I’ve brought you another — “
Book?
Book … Not right at all. She tried it out several times to see how it sounded: book … book … boo
k … until the feeling came over her of wanting to jump and shout and tear it apart. Then she closed her eyes and floated in the bubble through the winding tunnels of the Beehölzli. Up and down stairs, along the corridors and back into her cell again. When the bubble laid her gently down in bed, she opened her eyes and saw what made her vibrate so. It came into her mind as out of a clear blue sky, like Mother Mary in those stained-glass windows — the Book. Her Book. And she recalled the title …
The Exegesis of Aching Dottery
Her book from home, with green and blue marble swirls on the cover and gold paint along the edges of the pages. Even the binding was sewn with gold thread. Did Herr Smarty Pants have it sent?
The bubble came and took her away. She floated with her eyes closed. Ages and ages went by, during which the stars wheeled about and slowly went out blackly one by one at the rim of the universe. When at last the bubble let her down on the bed, she felt beaten and crushed. She knew the worst now. Herr Smarty Pants’s book didn’t come from home. It wasn’t titled The Exegesis of Aching Dottery, Not at all. It was called … Anatomy.