THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  Your voices speak together, and you pronounce his death: “Now.”

  He clutches his chest, his face contorted in shock at the pain and his finality, Gasping, he drops to the floor. Deborah attempts to help him but the body is winding down and his spirit is already unspooling.

  The doctor steps forward, and he has one of the old devices that even you must respect. He has prepared. But so have you.

  He speaks the words that disrupt your connection, and you are scattered back.

  You fall upon the dais hearing the panic and the crush as people bolt away from death.

  A cool breeze from the bright, clean hallways rushes into the stuffy playhouse.

  Three of the statues have return to their inert position.

  You sit up slowly, careful with muscles unused to activity. Near you, Margot and Deirdre stir.

  Deborah kneels by the dead man, her hand on his chest, but her face is turned to you. She is riveted.

  The doctor raises a hand to stall you, to explain. “This was theatrical therapy,” he says, but his voice cracks. “To break the construct you have created. By playing a part you are forced to confront the role you have subsumed yourself into.”

  He has no idea. You witnessed the unreal world. All the old obsessions, the paranoia, the fears that proliferated in your mind are cut-out replicas of this world’s illusions. They have been knocked over and blown away by the whirlwind you experienced.

  You delight in your solid skeleton; the feel of your ligaments bending; the scrapes on your skin; how your lips moisten when you lick them; the clash of teeth.

  You help Margot and Deirdre stand, and there is a fleet, faint tingle of connection between you. You move to the doorway.

  The doctor dithers, but decides to step in front of you, determined to re-assert his control. But he still wears the greasepaint and the costume.

  You notice a flake of white sticking up from his cheek. You reach forward, pick at it, and peel.

  You strip back the mask in one long rind, exposing the emptiness. He shrieks as you roll him up into a tight coil.

  Under your scrutiny the persona collapses flat. You crush it in one hand and toss it into the air where it disintegrates.

  When you glance at Deborah she presses her forehead to the floor.

  You walk across the threshold.

  It is time the rebellious left the house.

  In psychoanalysis as in all matters of scientific inquiry, it is too often the case that our failures advance our knowledge better than our successes. We can only truly take a measure of light by the shadows which surround it.

  It is with this maxim in mind, gentlemen, that we begin our discussion of the case of a most unusual and shall we say enlightening patient of ours.

  We will call him Conrad.

  ***

  Conrad was a tall well-formed youth of sixteen when he first came to us. He complained of symptoms indicating anxiety and depression: which is to say, he was prone to bouts of melancholy and extraordinary lassitude. He was a vegetarian and loathed the touch of meat, much as he would recoil from human contact. His speech indicated a stutter.

  Conrad was reading in Vienna, and was referred to us by one of his tutors—an Austrian veteran who had consulted here for compulsive pederasty two years past and pronounced himself cured, prematurely in our regard. Because of that, we at first suspected that the tutor’s sexual attentions were a root of Conrad’s difficulties and our first meetings delving in this direction.

  Conrad claimed that his tutor had never touched him erotically, either with his consent or in an act of rape, and neither had he done to his tutor. Conrad described himself as asexual in orientation, expressing a loathing for the fluids and touch of man and woman alike.

  We inquired as to his relations with his father and this seemed to yield more. At first, Conrad claimed to never have met his father, who died in the fields when he was but an infant. But when we asked of his mother, Conrad said that his most vivid and earliest recollection of her was in a carriage, at the side of a tall and muscular gentleman with a bald head and a terrible scar across his jaw-line who waved to Conrad before they set out along a road through a thick wood. Was he his step-father? Or an uncle? Conrad was quiet for a moment and stammered that no: he was his father.

  “But you said your father died when you were young.”

  “An infant,” he said.

  “This does not sound like the memories of an infant.”

  “No,” said Conrad, and his stutter became terrible as he explained that he must have been five or six at youngest.

  “Was it a photograph you saw?” we inquired, and at that, he shook violently and held himself, drawing his feet from the floor and his knees to his chest. We administered a small dose of chloral hydrate and were able to calm Conrad sufficient that he might elucidate a response.

  It was not a photograph, gentlemen. It was, Conrad confessed, a dream.

  Although we did not apprehend it fully until many years later, the dream was to be the crux of Conrad’s neurosis, and was to become the sole engine of our inquiry.

  ***

  We should explain that these early interviews began many years ago, when Vienna—and the world itself, gentlemen—was a very different place. Can the elder among you recall it? A glorious city, founded on the finest music heard by the ears of man… of literature, and art, and architecture…

  Or so it was for us, in the bloom of our own youth, eyes wet with wonder.

  A digression, yes. But one illustrative of another maxim crucial to our discussion.

  When we think of the cleanest breath of springtime, the pleasant smell of wood- and pipe-smoke, a sunrise across a lake, the taste of a bright wine, the touch…

  We do not think of the breaths and tastes and sights of the last hour. It is all honed to ideal by time, just as is trauma and shame might accrete to form a neurosis.

  This formed our first hypothesis, as we delved deeper into Conrad’s childhood. He confessed a great love for his mother who he described in erotic detail: her long red hair that cascaded to her narrow, muscular waist; her skin, sun-browned, smooth as butter; her green eyes with a gaze as deep as the sea; her limbs and bosom, drawn to a platonic ideal of womanly loveliness. Yes, gentlemen, he used that term: a “platonic ideal.”

  Conrad remembered straddling her bare foot, clutching her knee as she bounced him. On a chill night that he recalled in sensual detail, she let him to her bed and held him in warm embrace until dawn. Likewise, he described her bathing of him, in icy spring-water on a mountainside, and holding his genitals when he complained they were too cold. Ah ha! you might conclude: An Oedipus complex! Conrad had developed an erotic fixation with his young mother, and this was the root of his regression.

  Indeed, this was a tempting hypothesis.

  But Conrad’s memories of his mother, and his childhood, were more complex than that. His mother dabbled in witchcraft, and on nights of a full moon she would lift him to her shoulders and they would fly above the treetops, across the sea to the deep jungles of not Africa, but a land that he named Tarethia. There, they spent a year and a month—he was very specific—eating great helpings of blood-fruit and hunting river-dragons with the Tarethian prince and his retinue.

  One night, after Tarethia’s Festival of the Equinox, Conrad’s mother kissed him on his forehead and set him in a sling, and with this, propelled him through the clouds and into the aether of space, so high he could look down upon the world… and he lit upon the surface of the Moon. There, after many adventures he learned the strange language of the impish people who dwelled in the humid lunar canyons.

  We must emphasize, that as Conrad related this he did not do so in the manner of the telling of a fanciful yarn. He insisted that this was memory, accreted over time in the usual manner. To convince us, he sang us a song in the gibbering language
of the moon-imps. When we expressed skepticism, we noted that his stutter worsened, and for an entire session he would only speak in the imp tongue. In the subsequent session Conrad retreated into silence. The one after that, he spoke but claimed forgetfulness when we attempted to interrogate his past.

  And now, gentlemen, I return us to the matter of our first maxim: that in failure, we advance furthest. For it was in this stage of Conrad’s treatment that we failed him. As reasoned men of science would, we concluded quickly that these memories were fantasies, whose roots were to be found in childhood trauma effectively masked by the strength of the delusion he carried.

  We engaged the services of a hypnotist well-recommended in our circles, who aided by an administration of sodium pentathol, assisted us in our endeavor to discover a measure of the truth, or at the least Conrad’s true recollections, to master a diagnosis. Who was the tall and strong man with the scar at his throat? Conrad’s father, truly? A lover of his mother’s? A schoolmaster, in whom young Conrad invested paternal authority? Was his scar a true mark, or was it a sublimation of Conrad’s Oedipal desire to slay competitors for his mother’s sexual attention? Where truly was Tarethia? Did Conrad travel to some place with his mother, or merely wish that he might? Was the moon a place of exile, perhaps? A school, or a work-house, or simply the home of a distant relative where his mother, worried at his erotic attachment to her—or simply as a widow without means to see to his healthful upbringing—sent young Conrad for the good of himself and of all?

  We were only able to conduct a single session, which in its early moments gave us reason for great optimism. Conrad arrived at our rooms exceedingly agitated, stuttering so badly that he could not make himself understood. He had bitten his nails to the bloody quick. First we administered the drug, and when it had taken hold such that he was able to breathe with regularity and sit still, the hypnotist was able to induce a hypnotic trance. Together, we led the patient through his fantasy, as he had described it in such detail.

  For what we hoped would be the first session, we did not intend to challenge him directly with our skepticism. Rather, we proceeded with the hope that in a more suggestible state, the barriers to recollection and reason would be rendered more permeable. We hoped, in our naïveté, that when we asked him to recall the moon imps, the prince of Tarethia, his mother’s touch as they flew above the treetops together, that he would divest himself of those barriers entirely… without our urging.

  Our hopes were dashed, on every front. In his trance, Conrad simply recalled those moments in greater and more convincing detail. He described the workings of vast banks of clockwork machinery which enabled pumps to draw water from the Moon’s watery core. He recited the 49 character Moon-imp alphabet by heart, and listed the seventeen articles of the Tarethian constitution, in Latin as they had been originally written.

  And then, our failure. We asked Conrad to tell us, the moment at which these dreams began.

  At that, his eyes slid open, and he looked not at us but at a space beyond, where a bell jar sat upon a low cabinet and beneath a silver looking glass that hung on the wall.

  “In Vienna,” he said, “is where this dream began.”

  ***

  We were unprepared for Conrad’s violent outburst. No sooner had he offered that answer, than he leapt from his chair, lifted the jar and used it to strike the hypnotist in the skull, rendering him unconscious and bleeding badly, and then beat us insensible with his fists and feet. When we had recovered ourselves, Conrad had long fled.

  Our hopes, as we said, were dashed. We of course informed the stadtpolizei, for fear that Conrad might harm others as he had us, and they investigated. By this we confirmed that Conrad not only fled our rooms, but also it seemed the city. We feared that he had taken his own life, but when days and weeks passed without recovery of his body, that fear abated—and finally, as we shall see, the fear of Conrad’s premature death was proven to be utterly unfounded.

  ***

  What, gentlemen, might we take from this failure, to treat a nervous young man in the grip of powerful delusion? How might this advance our knowledge and understanding?

  We believed that we knew then. Our first lesson was pragmatic: we took many more precautions when conducting experimental therapies, which yes, began with engaging the kind of physically imposing guardians such as are watching over this very gathering. We no longer underestimated the power of regressive delusion coupled with the brute strength of the youthful lunatic.

  We also engaged more strenuously with the work of others—principally, that of our esteemed colleague, absent this evening by political necessity, and who we were advised is best not mentioned by name.

  So be it. One may walk awhile in a house without considering its foundation, so long as one remembers to allow that foundation’s presence when making a repair.

  In the years after Conrad vanished, we did turn to that foundation: to the study and interpretation, if we may say, of dreams. For in our failure to apprehend Conrad’s true neurosis, and the genuine hazard of his delusion, we sought a remedy in deeper familiarity with the taxonomy of symbol and archetype. Are any of you old enough to remember the Wednesday Society? It has changed its name. But we were among the founding members.

  Our practice grew. We obtained a residency at the Steinhof when it was complete, some of the first there, and we remained there when the clouds of war darkened our land. It was here that the lessons of our failure in treating poor Conrad found their most productive application—for superficially at the least, his symptoms matched closely to those of shell-shocked soldiers tormented by terrible dreams drawn from the horrors of the trenches. Analysis of those nightmares according to Dr. F—pardon us—according to certain theories—proved clinically efficacious. We were not, it is true, as celebrated as some in this regard. But owing present circumstances that may be for the best.

  And in truth, gentlemen, celebrity would have been unearned. For as we discovered in the aftermath of our empire’s ignoble defeat, the lessons that Conrad had for us were woefully incomplete.

  ***

  Yes, sir, it is true—although we have digressed, the subject of our discussion remains the case of Conrad. He did not take his life and he managed to not only survive the War but emerge unscathed, at least by war. Did he even fight in it? For reasons that you shall see, it is impossible to say for certain.

  Conrad contacted us by mail, through a lawyer claiming to represent him, in a matter taking place in the German borough of Weißensee. He was to stand trial for two murders, and in a letter accompanying Conrad’s, his lawyer stated that he believed that our testimony could be useful in establishing a plea of insanity. We might certainly have simply provided testimony by return post—describing his violent escape from our care nearly 20 years earlier, his odd fixations—but we were persuaded to attend, our curiosity piqued by the less elegantly-composed letter composed and signed by Conrad himself. He begged for help, crediting us for far more assistance than we understood ourselves to have provided. We had, according to Conrad, been his savior. We had cured him. One sentence in particular struck us as curious: “You alone were able to help me awaken from this grey and dismal nightmare, so please now, Herr Doktor: Help the sleeper wake!”

  There was little time for preparation, as Conrad’s trial was to begin within the month and the authorities had conclusive eyewitness evidence of his culpability in one of the murders, and adequate circumstantial evidence in the second. If found guilty, Conrad would certainly hang.

  We were able to make some small plans. Mindful of the violent end to our last meeting, this time we engaged the services of our favored orderly from the Steinhof. Strong of arm and also quick of wit, handsome, in a way that is no longer the fashion here—he had in numerous interviews additionally assisted us as a stenographer. For the sake of his family and other matters of privacy, we will not identify him by his true name. Let us call him Fri
tz.

  We were not able to engage our hypnotist, who was not surprisingly unwilling to reacquaint himself with Conrad. This proved a small impediment but not serious, for in the ensuing years we had developed other treatments—and in any event it was not clear that there would be time for serious treatment.

  I do not know how Weißensee has fared these past few years, but when we stepped off the train we saw what seemed a restful, quiet town. Have you been there? I would wager many of you have, for it is not far from this hall—not even a day’s journey. It sits upon a beauteous lake. People might be merry there, still.

  They were not, not in those days, not that day. No one in Germany was much merry in the aftermath of defeat. And who could be merry in terror? For terror, we learned, is what arrived in Weißensee not long after Conrad. Terrible murders. An abduction. Rumors of a spectral figure haunting the docks… and the fairground, where Conrad had found employment.

  Yes gentlemen. Conrad had come to work at carnivals. He would foretell the future, with uncanny accuracy. Indeed, it was his prediction of the first of the murders that drew suspicion toward him. Had the investigators not obtained eyewitness evidence in the third murder, of a grandmother well-known in Weißensee, his lawyer might have argued that his arrest was a simple act to satiate a superstitious mob.

  As matters stood, a diagnosis of insanity was Conrad’s best chance, truly his only chance. And so it was that we were led to the jail, where Conrad rested under constant guard. It had been twenty years, but Conrad had aged well in some regards. He was still slender and tall, but more muscular, so his prison uniform fit too snugly in places and the trousers came only to his ankles. In other regards he was scarcely recognizable. His face seemed gaunt, with deep shadows beneath his eyes as though he had not slept for days—his lips pulled tight against his teeth…

  Yet for all that, Conrad’s expression seemed calm, unperturbed. His stammer, we were informed, was no longer in evidence. When he saw us, he stood from his bunk and smiled: an expression we seldom witnessed.