THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  “Pauline, you’re a very nice lady,” she said. “I’ve got to get home.”

  Briskly she gathered her things. Her last words to Miss B were spoken on the doorstep with her son Alan asleep in her arms.

  “I’ll mail you a check to settle up for the rest of the month,” she said. “That’s fair, right? You’ll have to find someone to replace Alan.” She turned away before Miss B could answer.

  Miss B held the screen door open. She watched Roberta step nimbly from the walkway to the street where the Mustang was parked. Miss B moved forward, down the steps, and saw someone—a tall, broad-shouldered man—leaning against the car on the driver’s side. Roberta hoisted Alan into the back and tucked him in with his blanket. Then she climbed into the passenger’s seat. The man took the driver’s seat, and started the engine.

  “What happened after that?” I asked.

  “Not a thing,” said Miss B. “I never saw them again.”

  “Did you ever get a check in the mail?”

  “No, I did not,” she said. “But she left me that bottle of perfume, and it’s still here. You can have it, if you want. I don’t have any use for it.”

  “So, she gave me this,” I told Tubby. I pointed to the nightstand, to the bottle with an elegant S printed on its side.

  Tubby was in bed beside me, eyes half closed, with her hair spread in chestnut waves across the pillow. She turned to me with a wrinkled brow.

  “But what happened to the woman?” She asked. She reached up with one fist and rubbed the corner of her eye. The childlike gesture silenced me. We needed sleep, especially Tubby. She was singing a solo in the choir next day.

  “Oh,” I lied. “Nobody knows.”

  In fact I knew, and Miss B surely must have known. Roberta Granger went to prison for murdering her husband and her little boy while they slept. Frank Granger’s throat was slit with a butcher’s knife and their son Alan was smothered with a pillow. Roberta claimed to be under the influence of tranquilizers, and made mysterious references to a hypnotist who was never located during the trial.

  Tubby was such a good girl, in every respect. She didn’t need to know how the story ended. She wouldn’t know what to do with a story like that.

  I rolled over with my back to my best friend. As dawn crept across the windowsill I began to drift into quiet slumber. With my hand beneath my head I could detect just a hint of the perfume I’d dabbed on my wrist.

  In my dreams I saw a woman dressed in white standing beside an open door in a courtyard, beckoning. I drifted toward her and heard her speak as I lost consciousness.

  “Intoxicating—with a wicked little kick…”

  Willows wept afront the bleached facade of the former funerary parlor. Silent sentries, they flanked the grated portcullis maw of the twin-tunneled entry to a two-stomached system. Flickering pictureshow light emanated from dank concrete bowels half-full of patrons. Lost kernels—floorbound innocuous caltrops that delayed their destiny of devourment, at least by human mouths; rats and roaches were all too happy to pick up the slack in the haunted art-house Cinemausoleum.

  —Cecil Upson Custance

  The new nurse asked, “The man in solitary fancies himself a writer, eh?”

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “Mr. Custance has an active imagination.”

  “I’ve seen the stacks. Where do you send them? Has he ever had any of it published?”

  “No,” said the doctor. “I’ve never sent it anywhere.”

  “Where does it all go?” the nurse wondered aloud.

  The doctor took a drag of her cigarette. “I use it to heat my home.”

  ***

  I’ve tried to tell this story so many times. Looking back through the porthole twenty-seven years to that deep fall night in 1989, I realize that I have to start the telling even further back. The first thing that matters was that my parents had a Super 8 projector and they let me use it. I tore it apart out of curiosity. It sat broken and neglected, a charnel pile of sprockets. After weeks of darkness and silence I finally figured out how to put it back together again. If only the doctors could do the same for me.

  Springfield was a terrible Oregon town, especially for a precocious kid. The silver lining was that we lived across the Willamette River from the verdant mecca of Eugene, with its comic shops and candy stores and Masonic graveyard. Hard to believe that I’ve been in Salem nearly half-again as long as my mid-valley rearing.

  The film that made me learn to thread the projector by myself was a Star Wars digest sold out of a strip ad in Famous Monsters. Eight minutes of color and sound, two hundred feet of sheer escapism on a bright blue plastic reel. The local library had a neglected collection of early silent pictures available to loan; thus began my studies at the ripening age of eight.

  In high school I began to fancy myself a writer. My first ‘zine was Irrenanstalt. Of course we called them “student newspapers” in those days. Odd numbered issues used the English title Insane Asylum. By the time a year had gone by, I’d published eleven of them. I have vivid memories of thumbing a stack like a flipbook, watching the title shift back and forth from German to English like a zoetrope title card made for a blinking multilingual audience.

  As a teen I was hell bent on watching every old picture I could get my hands on. My other passions were smoking grass and playing Gamma World—not necessarily in that order. Needless to say, I pined for female companionship. Yet no young ladies were racing up the rope ladder to my door nor sneaking into my room above the garage with its blackened windows, tottering stacks of rolled up movie posters, and serpentine racks of dusty celluloid spools.

  This changed when I attended U of O for lack of any other options. I took a smattering of requirements and a yawn-inducing History of Film 101, which I felt I could have taught myself. By term’s end, the professor wondered in red pen, “If you are the better qualified, how is it that you staggered out the door with a C-minus?” I hated him and his reverence for Woody Allen. Still, his class was where I first met Genuine Jones.

  Gen had fled her wealthy family in upstate New York and chose Eugene for its distance from home and Autzen Stadium’s semi-annual summertime Dead shows. She wore cat-eye glasses and had grown up playing Axis & Allies with her father. I would have followed that girl into the abyss.

  When I “rose out” of school after a single term, Gen helped me forge my resume. I had already retired Irrenanstalt when I started writing film reviews in Eugene Weekly for five bucks a pop. Rent in Eugene was dirt-cheap in the eighties and the Goodwill bins still held ‘Twelve For a Dollar Thursday’, but I needed a job if I wanted to keep my upper glass girlfriend around. That History of Film class got exaggerated into a multi-year major, a fact that I continued to weave into conversations until I believed it myself.

  We sat sipping bottomless, flavorless black coffee at the Denny’s out on Glenwood Drive. “What will you do?” Gen asked, idly stirring a seventh sugar packet into her mug. She was already tired of paying my way.

  “I’ll find a gig, no problem,” I replied with utter overconfidence. I opened the newspaper and saw that the art-house theater in Eugene was hiring an assistant projectionist. My finger stabbed the classified listing with a sense of triumph. I was sweating in the booth for $3.35 an hour two weeks before my final grades came in the mail—and not in the booth at Denny’s.

  The theater was six thousand square feet. A church built in 1925, later a funeral home. By 1989 its facelift had sagged into a decrepit film palace on shadow-dappled West 13th Street. At first, Gen had been so impressed. She loved film as much as I did. Maybe more. Now I had a job in the industry so to speak, and she took me seriously enough to move out of the dorms. We found an attic apartment with arched roof, floors thickly painted blood red, and a claw foot tub with no shower: paradise for nineteen year old me.

  Gen received a small inheritance when her grandfather croaked an
d we invested in our dreams. Our debut game took advantage of her history degree. 1095: First Crusade was a pen and paper affair sold in a clear plastic bag. Its modest success allowed us to afford a boxed sequel, 1099: Siege of Antioch. In under a year, our Irrenanstalt Games brand was buzzing throughout the convention circuit.

  When sales tripled, we burned the midnight oil designing our first RPG, the dreamland exploration kit called Somnambulist. I wrote the rules; she illustrated them in pen and ink. We next started working on an indie comic project that she dreamed up called SylphQuest. It seemed for that brief moment that together we could do no wrong.

  The comic never made it to print. I burned through our money, treating myself and maybe one or two other college girls who I met when Gen was back east visiting family toward the end of her summer break.

  Orders for Somnambulist didn’t match sales and the returns killed us. A bigger publisher bought our I.P. for enough to cover the bankruptcy filing. Irrenanstalt wasn’t the only casualty. Our relationship crashed and burned at the same time. I moved my book and film library—box by backbreaking box down each creaking step into a narrow, lonely studio across the street. My new perspective gave me a perfect, heartrending view of Gen’s comings and goings. And her regular visits from Don.

  Don worked with me at the theater as an usher. He was a handsome guy who always had a smile on his face and never seemed to have an original thought in his head. But there was no doubt that he was giving Genuine tender-tender on the daily. She had already forbidden me from visiting, so instead I sat on my ratty couch with the sharp wood armrests showing through where the rotting foam bled out. That fall I worked, wrote, and stared out the window at the rain running down the side of the old house where I had so briefly experienced joy.

  The Cinemausoleum was on the same block as both our buildings. So I could also see her place from my work. I leaned against the grilled entryway of the theater, nervously smoking a joint inches from where the drizzle turned the pavement from light grey to dark. I remember staring up at her second-story window, seeking signs of life, movement, hope.

  The date was Friday, December 1. While I watched my reflection in her dark, peaked window, I had the feeling of other eyes upon me. I snapped from my spell and turned to see a rotund old man observing me. The black-clad elder’s wide face spread wider still. A Cheshire grin split across it revealing corncob rows of square, yellowed teeth. The man’s eyes darted through his wire rim spectacles toward Gen’s window then snapped back to seize my gaze. I glanced up and saw Gen’s silhouette gracing her sheer curtains.

  “There are spirits all around us,” said the old man with a heavy German accent. I felt a sense of déjà vu. I was trying to ascertain if Gen was home alone, while distractedly attending to this stranger without seeming rude.

  “Excuse me?” I asked. My gaze kept poking into the empty socket of window pain across the way. When I forced myself to look down the old man was no longer smiling. He simply stood with a five-dollar bill jutting from his round hand.

  “Oh,” I said. “Go on in. Wendy takes the money.”

  Wendy and Walter Monk owned the theater. No one was really sure if they were siblings or married. He wore a slick black ponytail and she wore leopard print tights and they both found it absolutely fabulous that they could move to such a quaint town and turn a funeral parlor into a movie house. Fucking Californians.

  The old man nodded gravely and crept inside. I could hear Wendy greeting him from the register with enthusiasm. “One ticket for Dr Caligari 3000, coming up!” she said in her bubbly avocado-fed voice.

  “Danke,” he replied.

  Ah yes, opening night for the latest work by that freakazoid from LA who did Café Flesh and Nightdreams. I hadn’t been able to see either since they were cult art pornos, barely distributed when I was still trading musty skin-mags with other desperate boys in junior high. This kind of film fare (like all film fare) called for something heavier than a joint. I took a final puff and stamped the roach out on the wall, dragging its ash in a jagged line; it left a black lightning bolt on the scabby stucco surface.

  The place looked like a mission, but I had seen enough glowing ghosts inside to know that God wasn’t looking our direction. Once I tried to explain the difference between a funeral home and a mausoleum to the Monks but they were such coked up dingbats that I quickly learned to just collect my check and keep my mouth shut.

  My collar was flipped up and my shoulders were shrugged from the damp cold as I stamped past the concessions stand. Wendy jammed the popcorn scoop into a fishbowl landscape of fluffy kernels. She then resumed straightening the stack of Red Vines in the glass display case until each box of rope was at a perfect ninety-degree angle. I pretended not to hear her say my name just as the lobby door swung shut behind me. In the big room, I exhaled my last hit into the dark, vacuous space above the theater seats. Its fragrance soon dissipated into the overarching old theater smell.

  The projection booth was my shrine, my sweat lodge. Its door was latched like an old fridge or a walk-in. I knew the room was lined with asbestos and I didn’t care. The important thing was that if the rods got too hot and the film caught fire, the only one to die would be me.

  I climbed inside and closed the door behind. The little chamber was already warm. I slowly caressed the ancient machines. We were still running an old changeover system built in the teens. Despite their age, the projectors were well-oiled engineering marvels. My eyes lingered on the assemblies as I gently lifted the dustcovers like a nightgown on bare thighs. My hands lovingly tightened the aperture mask, slowly rotated the focus on the great lenses.

  Cans containing the reels were stacked on the workbench. I popped the first one open and found a little baggy crammed in the center. A yellow Post-It note read, “They loved us in Toronto. These helped. Enjoy!” The Ziploc contained three mushroom caps, which I ate immediately.

  I flipped all the switches to fire up the system and began threading ribbon into the feed sprocket. I could see through the porthole that a few people were filing in and finding seats below, but the students were already on winter break. Business traditionally wouldn’t pick up again until mid-January, aside from a few seasonal showings of A Christmas Story. The days when we had lines around the block and around the clock for two weeks straight after Kiss of the Spider Woman won the Oscar were a bit before my time.

  Grit from the psilocybin clung to my teeth. I thought this must be what chewing cud is like as I exited the booth. My palate urgently needed a cleansing, fizzy drink. Just as I was about to stride into the lobby and pour a cold one, I heard her voice.

  “Thanks, Wendy,” Gen said.

  “Of course, dear,” Wendy answered. “You know your money’s no good here.”

  I hung back in the shadows as the door opened and she waltzed right past me. It takes time for the human eye to adjust in the dark. The rods and cones in mine were already tumbling like the astronauts in 2001, so I slipped through the swinging door and made for the soda fountain, choking back a tear.

  “Are you ok?” Wendy asked. She may have been a dingbat, but she did have a heart.

  “Fine,” I grumbled. A black waterfall foamed over the avalanche of ice in my waxy, red-striped Coke cup. I chugged it down and refilled. The lighting in the lobby seemed to be shifting in color. Best get back to the booth and start the film while I still remembered how.

  “Listen Cecil, if you ever want to talk…” Wendy was still in mid-sentence when I let the door swing shut behind me.

  Climbing back into the booth felt like entering a space capsule. A hundred times I’d gone in there and blasted off in one way or another, but this night everything was different: the angles and proportions were stretching, the light so bright. Hot air, hard to breathe. There was ventilation in the ceiling of the booth, but it was built sometime between World Wars and was more likely to let rain in than air out. I bolted out into the b
athroom to fill my lungs, splash cold water on my face.

  “You alright, partner?” Walter was pissing at the urinal and craning his neck around to give me a fatherly look that was more than a bit creepy considering we were in the men’s room and he had his junk out. I met his gaze in the mirror, then quickly averted.

  “Just overheating,” I said.

  “Well, time to get the show on the road, buddy,” he said as he shook and flushed. I didn’t need to be told twice.

  The cold water and my boss’s concern snapped me back into focus. I rolled the volume off the Clockwork Orange soundtrack cassette I’d been playing as background music. That somber symphony had been setting the vibe since before my pre-show ritual smoke break. I popped the tape in my pocket, dimmed the theater lights and let the good times roll.

  The sound of the projector was mechanical and alien. Everything in the booth was so much louder than normal. I climbed onto my high stool and tried to figure out where Gen was sitting so far down below. The patrons’ silhouettes loomed like death shrouds over the dark shapes of seat backs in a few spots.

  There she was. On the aisle, with Don rubbing her neck from the seat behind. I thought I was going to vomit. Just then the movie started getting interesting. The illusion of motion on the big screen distracted me into the director’s nightmare vision.

  I had been single for over a month; the topless woman in the bubble bath on screen was very… gifted. She was named after one of the Manson family girls. That gave me a giggle. But her delivery was pure, stilted off-Broadway beat poetry put through a filter of psychedelics and soft-core porn. I couldn’t tell if I was witnessing garbage or genius but to say I was enthralled was to put it lightly. By the time the woman was making out with a giant tongue, I was practically licking the thick porthole glass. Nearly missed the cue dot that meant time to switch reels and slam the douser. But psilocybin or no, I was a semi-professional.