“Speak,” he finally says.
“Please. I don’t understand any of this. Let me go. Don’t do this. Please don’t do this to me.”
“Julia was a wonderful woman. You should be proud I chose you to fill her shoes.” His eyes go soft and far away as he continues to stroke your hand. “My wife, my everything.”
But you’re Julia. You’re his wife. Aren’t you?
“Where is she?” you say, your voice trembling, both wanting and dreading the answer. “What happened to her?”
“She was sick,” he says, his mouth tight. “That’s all you need to know.”
“No, please. If I’m not really her, then who am I? Please tell me that much.”
“You were no one,” he says. “Now relax.”
Tension bleeds from your shoulders. You open your mouth, but he says, “Hush” and your voice disappears.
He turns on the projector and an image of you flashes on the screen. No, you scream silently. That isn’t me. He said she was sick, but what did that mean? Did she die? Did he hurt her? You need to know. You deserve to know.
“Your name is Julia Anne Allan,” he says, his voice honey-sweet and you feel as though you’re falling into a dark, endless hole. You don’t want to listen to him, but his voice is so soft, so steady, so sure.
“You were born on August fourteenth…”
***
You finish loading the dishwasher and head into the library, your favorite room in the house. On the very top shelf of one of the bookcases, a book is pulled halfway out—Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, your favorite.
You take it and sink into the corner chair, curling your legs beneath you. A bit of paper sticks out from the end of the book and you tug it free. A letter, folded in three, the edges slightly tattered, the folds feathered almost to splitting. You rest the book on your thigh and unfold the paper.
April 5, 2010
Dear Julia:
If you’re reading this, then everything is going according to our wishes. I chose you, you see, not him, and you agreed. Please don’t be afraid. This letter is nothing to be afraid of. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
There’s much I could tell you of you, of how we met, but it isn’t important to know that now. Suffice to say, you were in trouble and needed a friend, I needed a way to ensure that my life’s work would continue, and I didn’t want him to be alone. Fortuitous that we were similar in age, coloring, and build. Fortuitous that he could make alterations to correct the dissimilarities.
I know you thought I was joking at first. I know you didn’t think it would work, but if you’re reading this, then I’m hopeful it did. After all, Rebecca is my favorite book. You told me you’d never read it before.
I know it might be difficult, but you need to be patient and understanding. After I got sick, I taught him everything I knew, but when you condense years of learning into months, there are bound to be small missteps along the way. He won’t give up, and I have faith all shall be well in the end.
Though you might wish for more details of your former life, the three of us agreed that, should you ask, not telling you would be for the best. It would only upset you. I decided to write this letter—and he doesn’t know about it so you must keep it that way—in case you were afraid, but remember, you have nothing to be afraid of.
Truth be told, at first he wasn’t as keen on the idea as I’d hoped, but once I convinced him it was his idea, once I convinced him he loved you as much as he loved me, the rest of the pieces fell into place.
He is a good man. Remember that. He is a good man. I wouldn’t have put you in this situation, nor would you have put yourself here, if he were not.
Remember, you are Julia. You are his wife, the love of his life, the woman he’d do anything for. Even this. You are Julia, and there’s nothing to be afraid of. Now refold the letter, put it back in the book, and forget you ever read it.
Some villages are carefully planned by architects, so that the streets and buildings are in logical places, but most grow organically over centuries. Nobody knows if Holstenwall was deliberately designed by one man or by several, or whether it naturally accumulated and knotted itself into the bizarre tangle of angles that it now is.
If it was a product of a single mind, then that mind was utterly insane. If a team was responsible then the madness was contagious.
I also am mad. I have been told this.
And I believe it. How can I doubt it? I am a doctor myself, a doctor of the mind. I agree with the diagnosis.
Cures for madness are rarely successful. This is because madness is not a disease like a physical illness. Madness is the result of a mind waking up to the enormity of the universe and our inability to process it. Existence is too heavy a spiritual weight for our souls, too complex a sum. An abacus confronted with integral calculus is no better off than are we. The abacus prefers to be mad. To cure madness is to remedy reality, to disprove truth.
There are no curved lines in Holstenwall.
I am not referring to the people who come and go along its cobbled lanes, the hunchbacked old men and buxom young women. They are all curves, nothing but curves; but those curves are continually framed by angles as sharp as knives, by the spearing straight lines of street corners, rooms that have acquired unnatural perspectives, shafts of crosswise lamplight.
Without curves the only ellipses are…
Do you know how long I have lived in this village? I ask because I do not know, and none of my fellow inmates knows, and none of the attendants know. But I am sure I was not born here. I must have come from another place, somewhere more open and free.
Holstenwall has folded in upon itself. This is what I believe. Its existence is creased into a shape that only superficially resembles itself. As if it was frowning at its own reflection; and then frowning at the frown.
Most old things sag; but not this place. It collapses like a concertina and the streets get narrower, the buildings huddle tighter, the ceilings come down and the floors incline up. I do not sag.
But I am old, I feel old.
I have only indistinct memories of better days, of my patients, their rictus grins and convulsions. I was researching new medicines that could soothe tense nerves and make hysterics docile.
Some of those potions were fatally toxic and the docility became eternal, but how can I be blamed for that? I was an experimenter. I was doing my best for the sake of humanity.
Now I am dosed with my own most successful drugs.
My perceptions feel as if they are wrapped in thick bandages. My mind is sluggish and days and nights rush past almost before I am aware of them. Early sunlight enters the window and paints the western wall of my room. I blink and suddenly the angles have changed. It is no longer morning but late afternoon. Too much of my life has been lost in lacunae of this sort. I am excessively medicated and I lurk, always lurk, for there is nothing else I am capable of doing well.
There was a fellow inmate who really was swathed in bandages. From the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. He wrote on them with a pencil, a stream of gibberish that he pretended was a diary.
I never found out what he looked like. When he died and they unwrapped him, his skin came off too. He was left with no features. I was allowed to attend the autopsy out of my respect for my professional standing. It was a relief to note the curvature of his ribs. They were not like the streets and rooms of Holstenwall, not at all like chess moves.
Orthogonal trajectories collide inevitably at anguished interstices.
The irony, if it is one, concerns the fact he had written his diary in such a way that the letters straddled the bandages. When he was unwrapped, the words came apart and the result was even more senseless than it had been before. Gibberish squared. To restore his diary, his corpse would have to be wrapped again in exactly the same way, the top halves of all the letters coin
ciding with the detached bottom halves.
The bandages were burned in the yard in an iron barrel. The ends flapped above the flames as if begging to be read before they were consumed, but who could read such an accidental cipher?
I recall how grimy that fire was, how disease ridden.
Cipher, by a happy or perhaps unhappy coincidence, is my surname. I am aware of no one else in the village called thus. Anton Cipher. More proof I am not originally from the locality.
Out of respect, out of some fraternal feeling, they gave me the nicest cell in the asylum when I asked for it. At the summit of the building and with a window not beyond reach. I lurk often at it.
Directly below are the greenhouses.
Gardening is a therapeutic pastime for lunatics. Have you tasted a tomato grown by an asylum inmate? It is not quite like other tomatoes. There is a hint of warning in the flavour. Madness can happen to anyone, it seems to say. It can even happen to you.
Wipe your fingers on a napkin. They are always overripe…
I have not settled the question of whether it is the village angles that turn inhabitants insane, or whether already insane inhabitants are responsible for the angles, imposing the tangents of chaotic minds on the background fabric of reality. But what is reality?
When I lie on my hard bed I despise the moon.
On my back in pitch darkness I can sleep, but when the lunar light steals through the window, the actual shape of my confinement is visible at an hour when it should not be. A distant clock strikes twelve. Lunacy!
I stare at the terrible angle formed where two walls and the ceiling meet. My eyes are always drawn to it against my will.
The three lines intersect and there is depth in the fusion, as there should be, but I know what is coming next. That sudden reversal of perspective, the shift from concave to convex, so that I am no longer inside the room but outside it, staring at an exterior corner.
I am beyond the room where I know my own body is still housed. I have divorced myself from human geometry.
Locked out from myself, from the same self that is locked out from itself. This is why I will never get better.
Holstenwall did this to me. There were too many opportunities in the net of angles for dimensions to play lethal tricks. And they played them. We are the tricked ones. I was duped totally.
The dupe on dope.
This swelling communal madness must one day culminate in something spectacular. I do not wish to see what it will be. The pressure inside my skull is too great. Holstenwall has rejected me, but instead of expelling me into the sane lands beyond, it has trapped me in its heart. Because I cannot bear to exist here, I must be imprisoned here.
It is intolerable. I will bear it no longer. Indeed I have borne it no longer.
You will soon understand what I mean.
I have confessions to make. I once forced the rictus grins and convulsions of my patients into the service of learning. I shackled the unfortunates to a frame and used their mad heads loaded with paroxysmal expressions as beads in a gigantic abacus. Then I attempted to perform calculus on it. A jape, a conceit, a merry travesty.
I sewed a dog into a man, so that a real yapping horror would distract him from his imaginary terrors.
I watched an acrobat bound across the rooftops with a pole, vaulting from house to house. I shot him with a crossbow simply because he disturbed me. The arrow broke his pole in the middle of a huge leap and he kissed the cobbles with his viscera. Then I returned to my task of injecting acid into a patient. It was such a good shot that I felt no guilt at all. Not until now. Competence dissolves remorse.
I penned a pamphlet proving that tubas are superior to violins.
I took tantric advantage of my female patients.
I roamed the environs waking up somnambulists by slapping them with a large dead fish. The fish went rotten but I persisted. Common wisdom has it that to bring a sleepwalker to abrupt consciousness is to kill them. I can state that not all died. One even thought I was challenging him to a duel with my double cheek slap and he accepted.
I was committed to this facility before the chosen day could dawn on the field of honour. The pistols remain undischarged. I remain undischarged. The ribs of the fish were not curved.
The endless flipping between concave and convex, from inside to outside and back again. I can take no more.
There is only one remedy.
I am a privileged guest here. I know this. Nobody else has a window that can be jumped through. I run as fast as I can. Impact. Burst of shards like an exploding star’s scaffolding. Each fragment of falling glass is the same shape as a random snapshot of any location in Holstenwall.
The village is a broken pane of glass, or a series of broken panes arranged like a maze of mirrors, facing each other, facing away. It lurks and looks through itself at itself and sees us instead.
Come back, Doctor Caligari!
I fall through the roof of the greenhouse beneath.
The thunder that rumbles without rain in the mountains and is deflected without any diminution along the relentlessly acute, obtuse, reflex streets, prevents any of the attendants from hearing the sound of my accident. A sharp glassy crack of lightning.
Pains and panes. I sprawl among sparkles.
Jagged transparent blades, radiating from my mangled body. Yet I am at peace now, the befuddling potions draining away with my blood, leaving my dying mind a little clearer for a spell.
So now I wish to make this brief document. A hint of a life. I have no pen or pencil, no paper or even bandages to write on. Then I understand that a rapidly approaching demise permits only fragments on fragments. I shall improvise accordingly. My finger will be my pen.
My wounds will be my replenishing inkwells.
I will write on both sides of each shard of glass. Some careful person may later reconstruct the windows and see that they gaze onto a few corners of a life that is, or was, mine. Edge to edge, angle to angle, a jigsaw of blood words barely dry and splintered thoughts.
They say that madmen write in red ink. I have no choice. None.
SESSION ONE
The new patient sits on the couch and stares past the therapist at the long wall of bookshelves, the dimly lit office and all its many reference volumes still heavy with the smell of cigar smoke and pipe smoke and cigarette smoke, from when the therapist indulged in such vices. Only fifteen, the boy’s eyes are so alive with raw pain they’re almost aflame, and the therapist already knows it will be difficult to bring him through the length of the conversion process without breaking him irreparably. Behavior modification, if it is to be a lasting success, is an arduous endeavor, one that should never be rushed, and needs to be managed with the utmost delicacy. But it must be done, it will be done, he has done it for others thus afflicted so many times before, and the therapist swells with a pride born of duty. His training and experience, as always, will show him the way.
The patient’s mother is perched beside the boy. She tugs at her sleeve and hem, her lacquered nails dancing atop her lap, scratching at her starchy green dress. “Doctor, you have to help us,” she says, though her gaze remains upon her son. “I’ve been assured your methods are fail-safe.”
“You need to trust me,” he replies, and cleans his spectacles with a handkerchief. “No matter where the treatment may take us, if you truly want your son to be whole. Do you trust me?”
She nods her assent, and her eyes widen with limitless possibility, with hope. Now she has become the child.
“Excellent, excellent. In that case, we may begin. If you will.” He gestures toward the door. “We have a few matters to discuss, between gentlemen.”
Once the mother steps out, the therapist places his notepad on the desk and smiles, leans back in his chair and crosses his arms behind his head. “So,” he says. “Let’s talk about what happens at school.”<
br />
“What happens at…” The boy feigns confusion, but there’s no real effort in it.
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Because they tease you there, for being different. For being too...”
“Effeminate?”
The therapist nods. “Even your teachers are repelled by you, or so I’m told. And you are different from the other boys, are you not?”
“Not so different,” he mumbles, his head lowered in shame.
“We mustn’t have secrets, you and I.” The therapist leans forward in his seat, his eyes fixed on the patient so firmly that the boy doesn’t dare look away. “Not if we’re going to work together on your well-being. You have a choice, you see. One path is that of loneliness and deviance and despair, while the other is toward that of integration and opportunity. And you are standing at a crossroads. Do you want to be a sissy for the rest of your life? Or do you want to become a man?”
“I want…” The boy licks his bottom lip, a nervous tic. “I want to become a man.”
“Then I promise to do everything in my power to assist you. Do you want my help?”
“Yes,” the boy says. “I do.”
“Then tell me about your troubles. Specifically, what you think about when you fantasize.”
“When I…”
“When you masturbate. You do masturbate, don’t you?”
“I can’t talk about that. It’s too embarrassing.”
“No secrets, young man. Remember? Not if you want to get better.”
The patient coughs, twice, thrice. A somatization, perhaps? “I think about… other boys. Doing things to me.”
“These other boys… What exactly do you think about them doing to you?”
THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI Page 4
