The Asylum of Dr. Caligari

by James Morrow

  “At some level our inmates understand they’re outcasts from respectable society.” Caligari indicated a patient dressed as a masked eighteenth-century highwayman. “It’s salutary for them to see that we asylum personnel choose to live here twenty-four hours a day, so unworthy do we find that same respectable society.”

  “It sounds as if I’m a prisoner.”

  “‘Prisoner’? Such an unsavory term. No, Mr. Wyndham, you are part of the therapeutic Gestalt that makes this institution so effective.”

  “If I’d known my situation came with shackles, I would have sought employment elsewhere.”

  “‘Shackles’? Oh, dear, another unsavory term.”

  “I prefer it to ‘therapeutic Gestalt.’ ”

  “You are free to resign whenever you wish, although Fräulein Wessels will be disappointed. Our arachnophiliac is already half in love with you.”

  Before I could ask Caligari to justify his presumptuous remark, Dr. Verguin came marching toward us, clipboard in hand, stethoscope riding on her bosom.

  “Good afternoon, Herr Doktor,” she said, greeting Caligari and pointedly ignoring me. “We’ve had a breakthrough with Jacques LeBlanc on ward seven. He is no longer a bicycle.”

  “I was just explaining to Mr. Wyndham our policy concerning extramural travel.”

  “Once the fighting starts, terrified soldiers from both the Entente and the Central Powers will be clamoring for the sanctuary only Träumenchen can provide,” said Dr. Verguin. “You’ll be grateful you’re living safely inside these walls. Already we’ve had to turn away a dozen young men feigning lunacy.”

  “A German corporal tried to gain entry by posing as a catatonic,” said Caligari. “Herr Röhrig dumped a bucket of ice water on his head, and that ended the charade.”

  “A French private insisted he was a bullfrog,” said Verguin. “Nurse Ianotti exposed his ruse by presenting him with a live horsefly and inviting him to swallow it.”

  “If you’re lucky, Mr. Wyndham, your native land will embrace isolationism,” said Caligari, “and no conscription officer will come looking for you.”

  “So you don’t think I would profit for experiencing—how did you phrase it?—the ‘aesthetic intensity’ of this war?”

  “I can’t imagine carnage becoming your preferred artistic medium.”

  “How could carnage become anyone’s preferred artistic medium?”

  “I think immediately of our former patient, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,” said Caligari. “Twenty-five years ago he went extravagantly insane in my home town of Turin. I personally arranged for his transport to Träumenchen. There wasn’t much we could do for him—he suffered from so many maladies: incurable sophistry, untreatable pomposity, inoperable honesty. I believe his essential problem was syphilis.”

  “What about mercury therapy?”

  “We tried that, of course. He died fourteen years ago, age fifty-five. For Nietzsche this impending cataclysm, this transcendently meaningless war, would have been a gift from the gods. Nothing is true, everything is permitted, morals are nefarious, pity is for weaklings, so let us turn our lives—and our deaths—into works of art.”

  Although I dared not put my intuition into words, I felt reasonably certain Caligari was actually talking about himself.

  The following morning, my brain buzzing with anxiety and anticipation, I entered my classroom at 8:00 a.m., a full hour before the students’ scheduled arrival, the better to prepare for our first meeting. Under my arm I carried the Bathers reproduction from my study, for I planned to have the class copy it using oil pastels. The room featured four worktables, three potter’s wheels, a lithography press, and a utility sink, plus a dozen easels arrayed along the back wall like a windbreak of metallic trees.

  As I set the Cézanne on the chalk rack, it occurred to me that my intended lesson lacked panache. A quick tour of the supply cabinet yielded enough flour and salt for a considerable quantity of modeling dough. I combined the materials in two large metal basins, then added water and began kneading the mixture to form the required artistic medium. Upon completing the second loaf, I washed my hands, then placed on each worktable a rubber mat, a set of modeling tools, and a mound of salt dough.

  The first pupil to arrive was Ilona Wessels, dressed in her customary yellow cotton blouse, a colorful madras bag hanging from her shoulder. Her current supervisor was the whey-faced Nurse Roussel, whose joyless presence had contributed copiously to the tedium of my recent meals in the refectory.

  “Guten Morgen, young Francis.”

  “Good morning, Ilona.”

  “I’ve never sculpted before,” she said, gesturing toward the nearest heap of dough. “Today I shall model your callow but intelligent face.”

  “I have a different lesson in mind.”

  “Ilona tells me I needn’t fetch her at noon,” said Nurse Roussel in an aggrieved tone. “She insists you’ll be escorting her to lunch.”

  I looked Ilona in the eye. She reciprocated with a wink.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  Nurse Roussel shuddered, then guided me toward the door. “May I tell you my opinion, Mr. Wyndham?” she said, stepping into the corridor. “It’s always a mistake to befriend a patient. Sentiment is fine, but science is better.”

  After her keeper was gone, Ilona sashayed toward me and laid a hand on my cheek. “This morning I learned something marvelous. Never have I hoarded so precious a secret.”

  “Pray tell.”

  “If I tell, it won’t be a secret. If you pray, it would be a waste of time.”

  Now a gnomish orderly named Mittendorff, another of my stupefying mealtime companions, arrived with my male students in train. As they approached their worktables, I noted how perfectly these lunatics matched the mental images I’d formed of them while observing their work. Pietro Barbieri, the pudgy and paranoid creator of the disquieting etchings, was an ambulatory collection of nervous gestures, his fat fingers trembling, his eyes darting about like wasps in a bottle. Ludwig Ruttluff, our muscular and handsome space traveler, repeatedly cast his gaze toward the ceiling, as if longing to return to the stars. Gaston Duchemin, our hollow-cheeked, wild-haired Grandmaster, arrived spouting moments from Paulsen versus Morphy—“move six finds Black sacrificing a pawn at king four to avoid a fork and facilitate rapid development”—a behavior for which Caligari had mercifully prepared me.

  “Who are you?” asked Gaston after the orderly had left the room.

  “My name is Mr. Wyndham, and I’ll be taking over this class,” I said, trying without success to speak in an authoritative tone.

  “Where is Herr Slevoght?” asked Pietro the paranoid. “Did you murder him?”

  “My predecessor went away to the war,” I explained.

  “Commander Ruttluff of Die Erste Galaxisbrigade, reporting for duty, sir,” said Ludwig, saluting me.

  “As you can see, today we’ll be making sculptures,” I told everyone.

  “Even as we sit here, the German Imperial Air Corps is arming dirigibles with bombs,” said Pietro. “Tonight we’ll all be blown to atoms.”

  “Please listen as I explain today’s assignment. Having seen your work in the museum, I know you all possess prolific imaginations. This morning you will wander through the uncharted sectors of your mind until you encounter a strange and mysterious bird or beast—and then you will render it in salt dough.”

  “On the largest Galilean satellite, the natives look like penises,” said Ludwig. “I’m going to sculpt the one-eyed king of Ganymede.”

  “No penises today, Ludwig,” I said. “Your pieces will be dry by tomorrow, and then I’ll have the cooks bake them in the kitchen ovens. They’ll be cool in time for Wednesday’s class, when you’ll color your creatures using tempera paint.”

  Before I knew it, Ludwig had left his worktable, dashed to the front of the room, and climbed atop a chair. “I shall be your model today.” He removed the sash from his trousers, causing them to slide down h
is legs and puddle around his shoes. “Upon doing justice to my manhood”—he toyed with the waistband of his drawers—“you will finance my expedition to Neptune by throwing coins at my feet.”

  “Surely you know that officers in Die Erste Galaxisbrigade must be paragons of decorum,” I told him. “They never pose naked.”

  “Move seventeen: Black snaps up the pawn at king’s bishop six, thus daring White to capture his queen,” said Gaston. “Paulsen, a notoriously slow player, thinks for an hour before taking the bait.”

  Much to my relief, Ludwig restored his trousers, then jumped off the chair and resumed his seat.

  At this juncture the tenor of the class changed abruptly, and the students began working with gravitas and an exemplary dedication to craft, pausing only occasionally to throw gobbets of dough at each other. When Ilona sneezed, Pietro accused her of spreading deadly microbes, but the matter went no further. When Gaston started screaming—“Morphy sacrificed his queen and won! He sacrificed his queen and won!”—everybody ignored him, and eventually he grew calm again.

  As the clock on the wall crept toward 11:30 a.m., I announced that we would now share our work.

  Pietro went first, standing before the class and holding up a kind of swollen centipede, its numerous legs extending from each side of its segmented body like oars on a trireme. “Last night the mad Russian monk Rasputin released millions of pikeworms into our plumbing, each no bigger than a flea. Drink from the faucets, and your stomach will be devoured from the inside out.”

  Next Gaston addressed his fellow students, showing them a winged bipedal crocodile. “In ancient Akkad, realm of Sargon the Great, the knights occupied the squares now reserved for the bishops’ pawns, and these creatures claimed the squares adjacent to the rooks. A dreadnacht could fly diagonally over three spaces, then abruptly change course and land two spaces to the left or right. The piece proved so terrifying that King Sargon made it illegal.”

  “The dominant life form on Callisto is the mellorope, a bird with multiple syrinxes,” said Ludwig, presenting a flamingo-like creature whose long neck resembled three flutes welded end to end. “When she sings, you would insist you were hearing a pipe organ.”

  “This is the egg from which my grandmother, the first Spider Queen, was hatched,” said Ilona, displaying an ovoid sculpture. The narrow end was breached by two spindly legs framing a head with four eyes and a daunting pair of fangs. “On reaching maturity, she wove a tapestry so beautiful it made stones weep. When the tapestry was eaten by moths, the kingdom mourned for a year.”

  “Ilona, why is your brain filled with spiders?” asked Ludwig.

  “She has a disease called arachnophilia,” said Pietro.

  “It’s not a disease,” I said.

  “Two days after I arrived here,” Ilona told the class, “Dr. Caligari hypnotized me, hoping my subconscious mind would offer clues to my fixation, but evidently I’m just as crazy below as above. And now we must all applaud our new painting master, for he is a worthy successor to Herr Slevoght.”

  The Spider Queen clapped vigorously, thereby eliciting from the other students puzzled frowns and bewildered faces. My self-confidence survived the rebuff. Earlier this morning the alluring Ilona had professed a desire to sculpt my callow but intelligent face, and I asked nothing more of the day.

  On the stroke of noon Herr Mittendorff returned to the classroom. To my utter astonishment, the students’ sculptures drew from him smiles of delight and peals of naïve but sincere laughter. “Mr. Wyndham, I have no idea what these creatures are supposed to be,” he exclaimed, “but I think they’re all wonderful!”

  Upon resuming his composure, the orderly announced that lunch would be delayed by an hour while the kitchen staff cleaned up following a grease fire. Before my male students departed, I instructed them to place their respective pikeworm, dreadnacht, and mellorope in a metal pan for eventual transport to the ovens.

  “Are you ready to hear my secret?” Ilona glided toward me and pressed her lips to my ear. “When Nurse Ianotti brought my breakfast, she told me Herr Direktor has left the asylum for the day, something about a conference with field marshals.” She picked up her grandmother’s egg and cradled it in her arms. “In other words, young Francis, we can go see Caligari’s painting right now and not worry that he will burst in on us.”

  “Aren’t I supposed to escort you to lunch?”

  “You heard Herr Mittendorff. There was a grease fire.”

  “I have a secret, too, Fräulein. Early yesterday morning I used the key you gave me. I sneaked into Caligari’s atelier and observed him finishing his painting.”

  “And what is the subject?”

  “I couldn’t see the front of the canvas. The angle was wrong. He brews his paints like potions.”

  “Natürlich—he is said to be a mystic.” She placed the egg in the metal pan. “How do you know he finished it?”

  “He told his cat.”

  I removed the Bathers reproduction from the chalkboard, securing it under my arm. Ilona and I descended to the ground floor and followed the tortuous corridor to my apartments. We paused in my study, so I could restore the Cézanne to the wall, then proceeded to the sitting room with its trapezium-paned casement window. Bending low, I retrieved the secret key from beneath the loose board.

  “Your canvas is blank,” noted Ilona, gesturing toward the easel.

  “It’s actually Herr Slevoght’s canvas. I haven’t found the time to paint anything yet.”

  “And what will you paint when you do find the time?”

  “Certainly not spiderwebs. I could never compete with you. Perhaps I’ll venture into Cubism.”

  “A question keeps visiting my mind,” said Ilona. “Can a person make a truly great painting that represents only itself?”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “I believe the answer is yes.” She drifted toward the shelves of art supplies, then removed a pig-bristle brush, a palette, a palette knife, and two paint tubes, one cadmium red, the other cobalt blue. “A picture of this sort would not look like a flower or a starry night or a spiderweb”—she set the materials on the worktable—“and yet it would not be a child’s scribble, either, or an Islamic arabesque, or a decoration on a Grecian urn.”

  “Nor would it be blotches of azure turpentine on a white shirt. Remind me to tell you about my encounter with Picasso. So what would your picture be?”

  “An apocalypse of pigment.” She seized the cadmium red tube. “A cataclysm of light. An eruption of primal—what is the word?—primal Dasein, sheer being, unalloyed Existenz.” Leaving the cap in place, she pretended to squirt a glob onto the palette, then did the same with the cobalt blue tube. “Such a painting would give you feelings you’d never felt before and thoughts that grow new capillaries in your brain.” Taking hold of the knife, she pantomimed mixing the red and blue globs into a purple lump. “None of the doctors around here know what I’m talking about. Even Herr Slevoght wouldn’t take my idea seriously.”

  “I take it seriously,” I said, and I meant it. Though apparently broken, this woman’s mind was a wonder to behold. Better a cracked vase than a flawless beaker.

  “Thank you, young Francis.”

  “During my training at the Pennsylvania Academy, I never heard of anything like your theory. Are you having second thoughts about seeing Ecstatic Wisdom? We could stay here and make paintings instead.”

  “ ‘Theory,’ such a marvelous word.” Ilona approached the blank canvas, brush in one hand, palette in the other, then loaded the bristles with the imaginary purple. “Together you and I shall create the Wessels-Wyndham theory of nonpictorial art.”

  “In the Armory Show, Kandinsky had an oil, The Garden of Love, that at first appeared to be entirely abstract,” I said. “But then the viewer realized it told the story of Adam, Eve, and the serpent.”

  “Ah, so the age of the nonpictorial has yet to arrive!” She leaned toward the easel and ran the dry brush across th
e canvas. “Our theory will usher it onto the stage of art history!”

  “Now it’s my turn to ask a question.”

  Ilona painted another phantom contour. “From this day forward I am a theory person, an explorer in search of non-pictorial epiphanies.” She simulated reloading her brush, then began tracing a third invisible line. “In case you’re wondering, the name of this painting is Violet Silence.”

  “Did Caligari learn anything from hypnotizing you?”

  She froze in midstroke. “Nothing about my spider fixation. He learned that I hated my father, something I already knew.”

  “You hated him?”

  “Yes, but not for the sordid reason you’re imagining.” She returned brush and palette to the worktable. “If Caligari had found a sex trauma lurking in my subconscious, you may be sure he would have informed me, and with great glee.”

  “Why did you hate your father?”

  “I won’t tell you that, young Francis. Not today. We have an appointment with Ecstatic Wisdom. I’m so happy we are making a theory together.”

  So we left my apartments and set about defying the master of Träumenchen. Cautiously we followed the zigzag passageway toward the museum. Streaming through the portholes, the sun decorated our path with iridescent lily pads. I held my breath and unlocked the door.

  Slipping into the gallery, Ilona at my side, I glanced at the elevator platform, making sure it was flush with the floor. The door closed behind us. Occluded by the crimson curtain, Ecstatic Wisdom was back on the west wall, keeping company with my students’ sculptures, etchings, watercolors, and oils.

  “On the count of three,” I said. Ilona and I each seized an edge of the curtain. “Remember, it’s nothing but pigment on canvas. Ready? One . . . two . . . three!”

  In perfect synchrony we unmasked Caligari’s magnum opus, then let the curtain drop to the floor. We stepped back several paces and beheld what the alleged magician had wrought.

  At once panoramic and intimate, wildly Expressionistic and excruciatingly detailed, the painting depicted a platoon of twenty beautiful young men, rifles in hand, tramping toward an offstage battlefield. Their olive uniforms evoked no particular army (certainly none known to me), but each soldier wore his regalia with shining pride. The new recruits’ faces were canted toward the viewer, and I immediately made eye contact with the first man in line. Against all logic, he moved his arm in a beckoning gesture (or so I imagined), even as I heard his voice in my head.