THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  “I see someone who is becoming his best self,” the patient says. He nods at his own image then, acknowledging to himself the truth of his words. “I see someone in charge.”

  “And what is it that you mean when you say that?”

  He turns his gaze toward the therapist, his open face bright, resplendent. Even his complexion has cleared of its blemishes, his very hormones at a newfound equilibrium. “I mean that I know who I am now. All the many negative tendencies I first brought into this office? The aberrance, and despondency, the longing for submission? Why, that’s all gone now. Because I see how all those feelings were misplaced. Once I aimed my yearnings in the proper direction, I realized that anything I set my mind and heart upon, any woman, could be mine for the taking. I have actualized, once and for all. I have become a man.”

  “And you harbor none of your former impulses or desires whatsoever?”

  He smiles, eyetooth glistening. “I have new desires now.”

  “Excellent.” The therapist closes his notepad. “It appears that, as they say, our work here is done.”

  He escorts the boy to the entryway, or rather escorts the one who is a boy no longer, another success story to be added to the many who have walked through this very door. Successful conversion has been achieved.

  “I’ve learned so much from you,” the patient says, and thrusts out his hand to shake. “I really have.”

  “I see great things in your future, young man. I really do.”

  “Oh. One thing.” He reaches into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and emerges with a simple manila envelope. “I brought you this, as a gift for all that you’ve done for me. You can open it later. Consider it a token of my esteem.”

  “Why, I’m touched,” the therapist says, and takes the envelope, which is thick with what feels like cardboard stock. “That’s quite considerate of you.”

  “It’s the least I can do, Doctor. I would be nothing without your guiding hand.”

  Not long after the young man departs, the therapist retrieves a letter opener from his desk and uses it to slash the sealed mouth of the envelope the patient has given him. He carefully extracts the contents, which are comprised of two dozen or so matte photographs, square and rounded at the edges, shot and developed in saturated color. He turns on his desk lamp, and pushes his spectacles further up his nose to examine his reward.

  The first photograph is distorted, but when the therapist brings it to his face he can see it is of an eye, in extreme close-up and round with wonder. When he looks closer, however, he sees that the eye is wide not with awe but terror. He flips to the next photograph, and it is the top half of the prostitute’s familiar face, one eye still wide, yes, though the other is swollen shut, battered a putrid and grayish blue beneath her tear-streaked mascara. The next picture shows more of her form, stripped naked on her bed and bound with her own ripped black stockings, mouth stuffed with a pair of black panties. At the corner of her lips is a thin strand of blood trailing down her cheek and down to the rumpled and soiled sheets beneath.

  The next photograph: her bare back, hunched, skin drained of color. White.

  The next: her bare back, the flesh near her shoulder gashed wide by a hideous bite mark, punctuated by a deep and unmistakable rent at its edge from a single sharp tooth. Red and white.

  The next: the wound upon her peeled back gaping apart to expose her tender meat, blossoming open in a parted mouth of ligament and gore as if to deliver its own fatal kiss. Red, and white, and pink.

  In the blurred background: a vanity table, and in its stained mirror a glimpse of the photographer: the boy turned young man, the therapist’s now-former patient, his youthful face leering not at the prone woman before him but at his own reflection, at the camera lens and hence the therapist. The boy is naked himself and fully erect, his unsheathed cock scarlet red. Swollen and shined with engorgement, yes, but also slicked with blood, that and something more solid as well. Mucus, perhaps, or gristle. He is the very image of pride.

  By the time the therapist reaches the final horrifying photograph he is on his feet, his free hand at his mouth, where he bites down in shock and revulsion.

  He thrusts the obscene images away from his person, where they scatter across his desk blotter in an unholy fan of depravity. A moment later he finds himself racing out his office door to the bottom of the stairs, where the curved mahogany banister spirals its way up toward the topmost heights of the grand townhouse.

  “Are all the windows locked?” he cries out. “Are all the windows and doors locked and closed?”

  “Of course they are,” his wife calls down from above; it was still winter after all.

  “What is it?” His daughter leans over the highest railing, her shoulders bare, hair wet from the bath. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” the therapist shouts up with a little wave, thinking better of it. “It’s nothing,” and he heads back down the hall to his office.

  He locks the door behind him, and approaches the desk warily, as if the photographs might spring from their resting place to alarm him in some new and unforeseen manner. But no, they’re still there, splayed out where he had tossed them as if ridding himself of an unclean thing.

  The therapist resumes his place in his chair. He takes up the pictures, laying them out on the blotter before him, one at a time and with care, in a studied game of macabre solitaire. Something must be done at once.

  He reaches for the telephone and grasps the cold plastic receiver, though he’s unsure of who he might call exactly. The patient’s mother? Or the police? No, that won’t do. He’d be ruined for one, his methods discredited; he’d become a laughing stock among his colleagues. That won’t do at all.

  Who’s to say he even looked at the photographs, even knew of his patient’s transgressions in the first place? And what transgressions they are! Blasphemous, and spectacular.

  He plucks a photo from the assortment, carries it into the light of the desk lamp. The bite mark alone, how the boy had made his own opening inside of her… Who would think of ruining a woman in such a way, even a common whore such as this? The patient truly had tamed her, that much was certain, not just as he’d been instructed but further, harder, better. He was a master of perversity, and though this was his first, there were surely more to come.

  The therapist runs a finger over the surface of the photograph, and allows it to fall into his lap, where his member, unbidden, begins to stir and harden, its own separate kind of monster.

  SESSION ONE

  The first-time patient, a middle-aged woman, lies upon the couch, the room filled with the scent of fresh peonies from the bouquet that the therapist’s new wife uprooted from the garden this morning. He worries about his wife, so young and naïve, so unsuited to this increasingly dangerous world. She’s not so very much older than his daughter, who hasn’t once returned from abroad since she left for university last year, who never calls or writes or checks up on him either, the selfish ingrate. She hadn’t even attended the wedding.

  “It’s my daughter I’m most worried about,” the new patient is saying, and the therapist returns from his bitter reverie. “That’s really why I came here to see you. I’m concerned she might be forming an unwholesome attachment with a girl who lives on the next street over.”

  “Interesting.” The therapist jots a few notes on his pad. “What makes you say that?”

  “She and the other girl, they spend all their time together. It’s as if one can’t be without the other. I tried to put a stop to it—I ordered my daughter straight home from school, and forbade them from ever speaking again—but just this past Saturday I caught her sneaking back inside the house. In the dead of night! She wouldn’t tell me where she’d been, of course, but I knew. There was no question in my mind she was out doing heaven knows what with that girl. I’m telling you, it’s unnatural.”

  “We ca
n’t have your daughter disobeying you, that much is certain. And we can’t have her out on the streets at night.”

  “This used to be such a safe district, but now… Well. You know. They say there’s a murderer on the loose.”

  He grimaced. “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “It’s true. My sister, she does secretarial work for the constabulary? She says there’s been five women murdered in the district this past year alone. Ladies of the evening. So far.”

  “Is that so?”

  The woman nods. “The killings are savage, apparently. Just savage. And all with the same terrible bite mark…” She shudders, and for a moment the therapist’s eyes dart toward his desk drawer and the eleven manila envelopes locked inside, identical but for their contents. “I’m sorry, where was I?”

  “Your daughter. And the other girl…”

  “Oh yes. You can help us, doctor, can’t you?” Her eyes flood with hope. “I hear the most wonderful things about your work from the other mothers, I really do. I’ve even been told your methods are fail-safe.”

  The therapist smiles.

  The doctor’s office is odd-angled, with stark walls and a black and white zigzag carpet. His desk is positioned before the frame of a huge bay window, so he is an imperious shape stamped upon panels of grey—here in Holstenwall the view is either dull skies behind serrated trees or an enveloping mist which obscures the world.

  You see him as a flat, pancake-faced villain who unfurls from his leather chair to approach your seat. His tread is light, cat-like, but you imagine a flip-flap sound of paper soles slapping against the peculiar floor.

  He’s been speaking to Conrad, your husband, about your condition. You are used to people talking about you as if you are not truly present. They mistake your lack of engagement with absence, or idiocy.

  The doctor gently touches your right arm, pushes it upwards, and bends it at the elbow so it appears as if you are hailing him. He steps back and your arm remains in the position he has determined. You stare ahead and focus on the opalescent sheen of his waistcoat buttons. They are water wells in his chest. In each you can throw a coin and make a wish. Not that wishes come true.

  “This is classic waxy flexibility, one of the effects of Penelope’s depressive catatonia,” the doctor says.

  You cannot see Conrad’s face, but you picture his expression of helpless fear. He has heard these descriptions before—there have been many consultations since you became afflicted—and each medical term provokes an emotional flinch. He does not want a wife with a mental illness. This has always been his greatest horror: the withdrawal of the mind into an alien landscape that allows no trespass.

  Conrad’s whole life has been an exertion of rationality and scheduling as a defence against disorder. His joy emanates from numbers and equations that can be wrestled into submission. You bent yourself into the square box that he wanted because you hoped his calm, fixed certainty would solve your erratic interior life. And for a time it provided a barricade. You followed his regimes and agreed with his opinions, and for that you were rewarded. You seized upon every validation he offered for your correct behaviour as a stone in the bailiwick against the furies in your head. Your interests—hobbies, Conrad termed them—atrophied. Your existence revolved around the needs of others. Your martyrdom of self became a sick satisfaction.

  You woke up one grey, crepuscular morning to a hollow pain in your breast. The dusty artefact that beat within was merely a decoy to fool others. Yet life, with its barrage of tedious demands, kept happening. Ending it, turned out to be difficult. But you could decide not to accept its torture.

  Exerting the continuous minute control to shut down every reaction to the great monster of life becomes your distraction against the blizzard of torments in your mind. The vigilance required to be impassive against its constant assault keeps you occupied. You perch within your meat cage, acutely observing everything but denying it your reaction, and reimaging the world as you will.

  “You won’t reconsider electroconvulsive therapy?” The doctor asks Conrad. You imagine him wearing a top hat, cape, and twirling a cane in a pantomime display of power.

  Conrad will never agree. His late great-Aunt Jane had ECT when she was a young woman in this very institution, back in the bad old days of experimental psychiatry. He once described her to you as ‘more wraith than real.’ The stories she told him gave him nightmares as a child. As supremely logical as Conrad is, he is not immune to his personal boogyeman, which in this case is the image of a woman in a long white gown, strapped to a chair with a gag in her mouth, spasming uncontrollably. He understands that ECT is not administered in this fashion any more, but when the subject is brought up he re-hears his aunt’s ghostly voice whispering the horrors of her torturous confinement and logic is repelled.

  “No,” Conrad says, firm. “If Penny is to return to me I want it to be because of kindness.”

  An echo of a throb registers, but you stifle any response. Conrad was never cruel, and often loving. You remember the way he stroked your cheek after your first kiss—a wondering exploration. You constructed a flattering façade he never demanded; that he never peered around its cardboard edges to discover what propped it up was either due to his lazy credulity or a tribute to your talent at devising cut-outs.

  The doctor presses on your arm and you allow it to follow his guidance until your hand rests again in your lap. “We’ll take good care of her,” he assures Conrad.

  You hear Conrad stand and fuss with his coat. He feels guilty. In sickness and in health after all. You understand his dilemma and hate him for giving up at the same time. Anger has been gnawing inside you since you began your boycott. Or perhaps it was always present, but you were too busying covering up. Now, you use it as fuel to be precise in your negation.

  You listen to the men exchanging goodbyes. Conrad says he will visit every week.

  You wait, fearful, and yet... there is a thread of excitement at your surrender to the unknown.

  The doctor returns and hunkers before you so you and he are at eye level. His direct, powerful gaze magnified by his black-framed glasses is disconcerting.

  “I know you’re in there Penelope,” he says, softly. “You think you’re safe, and beyond reach.” He places his hand upon your limp forearm. “No one is beyond my influence.”

  His thick brows lower and his stare become a projection of will. “Stand,” he orders.

  You harness your resolution to prevent your muscles from even twitching. Your desire to do as he commands almost overwhelms your control. Instead, you fiercely do nothing.

  His mouth smiles but there is a lurking fury in his dark eyes at your resistance. “You’re a challenge,” he murmurs.

  He stands up brusquely and strides to the door to summon a nurse to fetch you. You note his confident authority, his framed credentials, his ordered desk, his lack of personal photographs. You wonder are these his defenses or a reflection of his singular vision. You begin a catalogue of observations. You plan to learn everything you can about him while giving him nothing in return. There are victories that are won through action, and those that come from stubborn patience. You aim to win the war.

  ***

  You discover that the doctor has a particular interest in patients with catatonia. Every morning you are all wheeled into the sun room—a large conservatory that faces onto a featureless lawn, hedged on all sides by the perpetual conifers. There is rarely sun, just dreary light. Among the mumblers and pacers you still women are pools of peace. There is Alice, Lisa, Gertrude, Margot, and Deirdre. The staff refer to your group as the six statues; that it also sounds like sick statues amuses them. The nurses like you because you are compliant, easy to steer, and never troublesome.

  One of them, a young woman called Natasha, is fond of plaiting your hair. She hums as she brushes your long locks, and her kind touch and deft movements are
a pleasure. She tries a variety of styles on you, and always shows you her handiwork in a mirror afterwards.

  “Is nice, yes?” She will say, but you do not respond.

  There are streaks of silver in your hair now that you no longer colour it. You notice a strange youthfulness to your slack features. Not smiling or frowning has a benefit, and you have been liberated from concern about your appearance. That has been a surprise relief. You put down a burden you were not aware you carried.

  Natasha sighs, pats your shoulder, and moves on to the next patient. Rosie is a big, broad woman, prone to quoting scripture, and one of the more agitated inmates. She always insists on the same hairstyle as you. She watches you with a hot, intent focus while Natasha fixes your hair. You see the danger in her gait and her habit of accidently knocking into your chair or dropping something on you. Once it was a hardback book that cut your temple. You sat, with blood slipping down your cheek, as she wailed her sorries to Nurse Sara.

  Somehow, she knows you are capable, but stubbornly refuse. You can’t figure out if she is envious of your fortitude or furious at your falsehood. There is no reason for her fixation on you, but none of you reside in the house of logic.

  There is piped music in the sun room which is meant to soothe jangled nerves, but its earnest blandness irritates you more than most things. It often works on Rosie if she’s responding well to her meds, so you appreciate it for that side-effect.

  A craft table sits in one corner of the room, with puppets, books, stuffed animals, and simple toys. A patient called Elena, an older woman with white hair but a child’s mentality, often acts out stories that she invents. They are a strange mish-mash of ordinary situations with fairy tale details. A plush pig rescues a ragamuffin doll from having to go to the dentist. They celebrate by eating as many sweets as they like until their teeth fall out. The dentist creates sets of dentures for them from acorns. Then they dance and sing in a circle in the forest. But a crafty squad of squirrels steal their teeth, and when the evil swans fly down to peck out their eyes no one can understand their screams. But the firemen arrive and give them ice cream to cheer them up, so they all end up happy.