THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  “You all right?”

  “A bit under the weather,” I said, watching beads of colored light travel along the spiral ramps of the city, in and out among the cones. In a flash I saw all of life as no more than a glimmer of white burning weak in a black antarctic. It hit me then, coming over me like the pain of all my losses come back to me once and once only, and I knew an edit was coming. I didn’t want to turn around because I was irrationally certain of seeing Councillor Hensig appear in the plaster archway that lead into his consulting studio.

  Back on the street, passing by the library, I looked up at the sky, at clouds of hair oil going grey and angry, like me, and I thought of the way that mystery alters the way you look at things. It was like a movie; everything I saw, because it was not what it seemed, but concealed the mystery, became alive and related to me. It was a thrill. It eased the weariness of my increasingly sore body, my raw throat, my dully aching head, even as my mind floundered, trying to assemble what I knew into a story I could tell myself. I don’t know how to describe it, except by saying that I felt “alive under the sky,” something like that. Connected to the world at last.

  ***

  I wasn’t connected to the world. And the mystery didn’t exactly reconnect me. What it did, was that it made my disconnection into something, a mystery. I wasn’t just disconnected without portfolio now, I was formally, officially disconnected from the great realism of the black algae it all grew from.

  Still wrong. Not all wrong. But still basically wrong.

  Anyway, now I had to find the dummy. Not me, I mean the other dummy.

  Beyond the library with its avenue of porcine sphinxes and back into the fine mesh of streets under spiral ramps. The streets here were straight and narrow but the ground was curved; the tightly packed buildings here were no more than three stories high, but every street was a secret passage with a hidden entrance. You had to tug on a lantern hanging from a bracket in a wall, or on the right newspaper at the kiosk, or rap on the mailbox three times, or press down with your foot on the right discarded cigarette package, and then the passage would momentously open in space before you. The glass eaves dripped tepid slime like the roof of a cave. Flowers bloomed with black metal roars in every windowbox; their sour perfume glued itself to my sticky clothes as I went by. This was our utopia. Life was made beautiful here, according to a certain canon of beauty. It didn’t exactly work out here, either.

  I crossed the broad avenue of Calle Cavalcanti, where thousands of people rumbled up and down in silence beneath a massive, faintly luminous glass pane directly over the boulevard and emblazoned with Cavalcanti’s words:

  Io non pensava che lo cor giammai

  avesse di sospir’ tormento tanto,

  che dell’anima mia nascesse pianto

  mostrando per lo viso agli occhi morte.

  (I did not expect my heart

  could ever be so tormented,

  that my soul would be born crying,

  and unveil a face with dead eyes.)

  Did it ever occur to anyone to wonder what that was doing there? No—and not to me either, since I had my hands full shoving my way through this press of sullen people to get to the minute alleyways on the far side of the Calle. The pane was flanked by the city’s official banners which are always flown hanging rather than across the wind, a shroud on which was painted an elongated man in black with raised hands, tremulous as if he were being seen through a screen of water. What was there to explain? Everyone was a doctor, everyone was named Wilson, everyone was rushing somewhere on official business, everyone wore a high-crowned conical hat, everyone had on their “cool sunglasses,” everyone was conducting an important investigation, everyone was a patient, and below us all there was the cold heart of the city beating, driving us from behind and below, since everybody had that learned adults don’t love and there was nothing but black Spring before us all, nothing to draw us.

  I know this fractured account is not for everyone; the writing is broken up into inadequate title cards, alternated in as distinct actions rather than integrated with actions onscreen; actions and actions of writing are both only projected, everything is onscreen, including the words about the words and the readers reading them where doctors sit puffing ceramic cigarettes in the glare of conical flames standing doubled in metal sconces. But there’s no other way.

  Down the alleys, to a tiny park outlined in gold thread. Seated here like a lump of smoke, standing there like a heap of ashes still holding a human shape, upright asleep in the ashtray crate, people were dimly visible in the bland yellow haze of the few feeble lanterns. Dr. Wilson was sitting in his usual spot at one of the glass chess tables, each one with its own protective cone of misted glass. A lean young man with elven features and auburn hair, elegant, hollow-eyed and threadbare. He’d messed around with a patient. The Hypnotherapy Internal Affairs Division divided the affair and he was drummed out; they were of course very sensitive to anything like that. There was no birth or death here, that kind of thing, those goings-on go on in other places but never never never here—here there was birth and death, of course, but it was incessant and it went unnoticed, because it was as fast as words coming and going. I guessed the concern involved going too slowly and consciously about it. I paused for a drink at the water bubbler and locked eyes with him; he nodded and depressed Queen’s 2, all so rapidly that his opponent, a big man with the look of a retired Councillor about him, saw nothing.

  I went into the shadow-raked stone pavilion surrounding the abstract fountain, and lost myself for a moment in drowsy contemplation of the veils of water running down basalt crystals, breathing hothouse sogginess. Dr. Wilson sidestepped up to me from one of the inky subdivisions, dust thick on his shoulders and hair.

  “What’s up?” he asked me out of one corner of his mouth, “cool sunglasses” still on the distant chessboard.

  I hesitated, and he answered as if he’d read my thought.

  “That one is the doll, not me, if you’re wondering.”

  I could still see the effigy of Dr. Wilson sitting at the remote chess table.

  “I need your magic,” I told him.

  That real illusion, putting him in two places at once, both at my side and at the chess table, was throwing me. Dr. Humita Wilson meanwhile had come into the pavilion, settled herself on one of its broad benches, and shut her eyes in silence. A Turkish woman of creamy ash, still fragrant with incense, the sound and smoke of material. Or a doll. Dr. Olimpia Wilson. Or Dr. Hel Wilson. The patient he’d been caught messing around with.

  “I need your magic,” I told him again. “There’s an edit coming.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said.

  I heard a soft scraping noise over the silence of the fountain, and I knew she was cutting every answer into a pad of ashes with a glass stylus, matter without form, like this story, which is entirely told as of its first step.

  “You think that news is worth something to me?” he asked.

  “I want to know if anyone has come to you for a doll version of Councillor Hensig,” I asked. “Possibly without requiring hands or eyes. Almost certainly involving some kind of aperture in the throat, convenient for installing a voicebox.”

  I had been speaking to him diagonally, bishop-wise, but now I turned to face him. He did not turn, but remained in profile to me, the woman scraping there half blurred just beyond the black lenses of his “cool sunglasses,” a long thread of smoke sliding up into the air from the ashtray built into her bench’s stone armrest. He had no color in his face to drain, but the question sobered him. The bones of his face seemed to flex like a bodybuilder’s muscles in-between poses.

  “Earlier today,” I told him. “I saw Hensig’s body. The eyes were gone of course, but it seems the records regarding their having been incinerated might have been forged. The hands and the larynx had both been removed. Rather exactly. And the hands replaced with woo
den phonies.”

  There was a shred of stuffing on his lapel, and more shreds on his conical hat. I plucked the shred from his lapel. It stuck to my fingers. I rubbed my fingers until it came loose and floated down to the ground. My fever was starting to wear on me; I realized my legs were getting heavy, so I settled myself on the stone rim of the fountain. It was warm and damp. Dr. Wilson went on staring at the effigy of himself, framed in an archway, undetected, playing chess in the park. The scraping went on, recording second after second of silence.

  “Who’d you make the doll for?” I asked, even as all my vitality faded and my head sagged forward. I wondered if I should pick up some water from the fountain and splash my face with it. That water was too much like slobber.

  Dr. Wilson scraped his upper lip with his lower teeth, licked his lips, and then his jaw floated open, tilting a little up and down.

  “I need a name,” I said, pushing the words into his midsection. My head wouldn’t lift very far, it was as if I had a lead hat on.

  “And don’t say Dr. Wilson,” I snapped. My chin hit my chest. Now all I could see were his knocking knees and skittering feet. They were like marionette legs with no real weight on them. His hands, however, came down into my field of view, holding and unfolding a scroll with a list of names on it, and one name indicated by his thumb. It was the Night Coroner.

  That made sense, I thought. I might have nodded. The hands, which were an unnatural yellowish color, rolled the scroll up briskly and then tapped my shoulder with it. Dr. Humita set a brazier of hot coals down in front of me, and those hands pressed the tube of paper against them. Unable to say a word, I stared as the steady pressure of the paper blemished the red coal, so that it was necessary to rotate it, the leaf didn’t want to burn and gave off a chocolate smell that for no reason reminded me of autumn leaves. Yellow, waxy fingers turned the coal. Scraps of skin adhered to the coal, withered, then melted with an autumnal chocolate smell. I reached the apartment of the Night Coroner in time to see her hanging body, the rope suspended from a huge barbaric hook that seemed to burst through the wall into the room like the crazy head of a giant bird of prey. The Councillors and Doctors were preparing to cut the body down, but there had been a few last photographs to take. The slack features of the Night Coroner were unrecognizeable. I looked at them and my cold heart grew even colder. That surprised me. Not already as cold as possible—really? It can get colder?

  Much colder ... something told me... much colder...

  “Any note, Wilson?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” she said to me with sneer.

  “I am here because I have reason to think she was the one responsible for the mutilation of Hensig’s body, or at least involved in it.”

  “Is that so?” she said.

  It didn’t take long for me to see that it was a no-go with her, and that I should expect to be hauled out of the apartment any moment; I glanced around.

  “Look Wilson,” the officer told me, “You have your story, now get out.”

  “Sure sure,” I said. “Let me just make one note and then I’m gone.”

  I crossed to the small, three-sided desk tucked in an acute corner of the room and made some inconsequential jottings, my back turned to the others, while my eyes scanned the desk. No notes, no writings, but there was a volume of Cavalcanti with a bookmark in it. I flipped it open.

  “All right you let’s go —”

  Hands grabbed me by the shoulders and I was jostled out into the hall and down the stairs and out the door.

  ***

  By the time I got back to Lucky’s with my haul of information the night seemed as though it had been going on forever. There they all were, still drinking, still speculating. I’d had time to think en route; there was one detail missing, but if it turned up, the story would be pat: if it turned out the mutilation of Hensig’s body had been discovered by the Day Coroner. Then it would follow: she, former hypnotic subject of Hensig attempts, owing to some compulsion, or even to post-hypnotic suggestion, to reconstruct Hensig by appropriating the various hypnotic body parts for incorporation into a Hensig effigy which would then be able to re-hypnotize her. Perhaps she was trying to undo some hypnotic conditioning to which only Hensig had the key. However, the crime is discovered. She despairs of escaping detection and takes her own life.

  That was fine, except that it was trash. Trash. That story is trash, I told myself. She wouldn’t kill herself to avoid being brought up on charges of body mutilation. It would have meant the end of her career, but suicide? And when she hadn’t even been brought up on charges yet?

  What was behind my skepticism? “...there are three other people...”

  Who murdered her?

  My so-called “reporter’s instinct” told me this rigamarole was just bluffing. Real questions existed. That was all I knew. Years of experience had taught me the difference between the way a child thinks, with hope and speculation, and the way an adult thinks, with the resignation that comes when you realize that reality is what finds you. I knew that, as a reporter, my job was to assemble troubling facts into a reassuringly comprehensible fairy tale. I was going to do my job, because I was my job and only my job. No job, no Juan Ponce, or Tommaso Wilson, or whatever my real name turns out to be. Even my name was secondary to my job.

  “Look at what you are being told,” I said to myself. “’You-know-who’ is Hensig. She’s the speaker in the verse, and ‘there are three other people...’ It’s me and two others; Hensig’s former test subjects. Somebody put Hensig back together again, because he has to do the hypnosis. The Night Coroner—a beautiful woman—imagine, my noticing that!—was murdered. By you.”

  So then I had to decide who “you” were. I had a fairy tale to write. It needed a climax, and a proper setting. The city of glass cones and transparent histrionics on glass stages, sealed at the corners with cubic bonds, accelerated therapeutic and legal theatrics shallower and shallower, compressed into panes of glass with cubic bonds. Absolutist therapy in action; when the conditions are favorable you can see the nerve, the blazing spasms travelling along the spinal cord, tearing the base of the brain while the patient’s broken cries sink into the acoustic foam lining the interior of the capsule; this therapy is an end in itself; it happens because it can, and it can happen because relentless insect-like activity, painstaking over details but oblivious to the greater implications, assembles the circumstances to make it possible. The cone’s wending point is geometrically regulated, that is the case. The conical seashell of natural white, like a rolled-up ear, with the geometric symmetry of life and all its twists visible at once, but only from the outside—you would have to have eyes on stalks to see inside it, and cutting it open doesn’t reveal the inside, it only would transform the inside into the outside before you could see it—the shell has five widening turns, the city of cones has countless winding turns, centered on a tiny hilltop, but it is only smooth when seen from the tops of any of its towering cones; on the street, it is all asterisks.

  First asterisk, the corpse of the Night Coroner. There were three more asterisks. I was one, and the other two? I thought I knew. Weaving through crowds in “cool sunglasses” packed belly to belly in a conical cul de sac, I thought I knew both the Night Recorder and Dr. Humita Wilson were swinging by their necks, surrounded by the probities of officials in conical hats and “cool sunglasses.” I was hurrying to tell the others at Lucky’s before it was too late; there was no one else I could tell. The city editor made certain of that. No personal life, no prospects.

  A voice breathed a word in my ear and I was instantly lost. The die-straight streets began to wave like river weed and my way spiralled. The light and gloom of windows and doorways, passing streetcars and shop fronts, kiosks and parks, swam around me like images in a movie.

  But now, this is no movie.I am standing in Hensig’s apartment with every stick of furniture back in its place. The lace is on t
he tables and there are flowers in the bowls, but a narrow packing crate stands on end in the darkness of the old studio. The repugnance I felt for this place before is only amplified by this uncanny order and when I hear the wooden edge of the lid rasping quietly on the floor I want to throw myself through the window glass rather than turn to face the one who is coming up quietly behind me, preceded by a very faint draft of air.

  “Relax,” the voice says from the studio.

  “Relax,” the voice says from the doorway.

  “Relax,” the voice says from three steps behind me.

  “Listen to the sound of my voice,” the voice says in my ear, softer. “You hear only the sound of my voice.”

  A mirror is floating down off the wall. Somebody is between the mirror and myself. The mirror has been covering over some writing on the wall; that writing is at the center of everything that most terrifies me about this apartment. It’s the center of all my fear. It’s what I ransacked this apartment to find.

  “You are now completely relaxed,” the voice says.

  I am relaxed, against my will, in the center of all my pain.

  Icy fingers grip the back of my head and tilt it up easily, to show me the noose suspended from a hook in the plaster medallion centering the ceiling.

  Meanwhile the voice is speaking. A stream of unintelligible words. I can make out only one word among them, repeating.

  “Decide ... decide ... decide ...”

  The real decision is not what happens, but how it will happen. Was her choice resistance or surrender? None of us can help each other. Knowing now that I brought him back at his own suggestion is not going to help me handle the pain of losing, once and for all, the pain of all my losses. Without even that, I have to choose while smothering in my own choice’s emptiness.